Climate Change Stuck on Fossil Fuel
In 2019 we were again told the world would end in 12 years and we must spend whatever it takes to prevent that from happening.
If you believe that global warming is the equivalent of a giant meteor hurtling toward Earth, then you should get your personal affairs in order or at a minimum, build a deep underground bunker to increase your chances of survival.
If, on the other hand, you don’t think of global warming as impending Armageddon for the earth and the creatures inhabiting it, you may consider doing something besides building a bunker.
Before going any further, if your gurus on the subject of global warming – climate change – are people like Al Gore, Greta Thunberg or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and a disciple of any of them – and you believe the “yet to be right” computer models generated regularly by the UN’s IPCC, I invite you to save yourself some angst and stop reading.
If on the other hand you’d like to seriously consider some of the alternatives to thinking about how to address global warming, read on.
For openers, there are not more, actually fewer wildfires today than before anyone kept track of that number. Hot days are not more than anytime past. Since the 1920’s there are fewer deaths due to hurricanes, tornadoes, storms, high and low temperatures, droughts, etc. If you look at the averages for our weather-related incidents, you will find the numbers fluctuate significantly in various locales but overall there’s been fewer extremes of any and all weather related happenings. Also understand these declines do not fit alarmist narratives so we’ll continue to receive the rhetoric that everything bad that happens if the result of global warming.
But let’s assume the predictions that the earth’s temperature will increase 1 or 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, and that such a rise will have dire consequences for extreme weather events including the flooding of coastal areas and islands if that does happen.
In looking at the way people lived 150 years ago compared to present day, we know that the commercial manufacture of electricity and the combustion engine made the world smaller and more comfortable for everyone. Just those two technologies made it possible for other advancements in learning, travel, and communications. In the 1800’s 90% of people lived on farms. Today it’s 1%.
In 1910, just 14% of Americans aged 25 and older had completed high school. Today that number 90+%.
In 1940, 3.8% of women and 5% of men in the US had college degrees. Today those numbers are 39.1% and 36.6%, respectively.
As educational achievement has advanced, so has the pace of innovation and change.
Those advancements were fueled by the development and production of fossil fuels.
As the world around each of us has changed and is constantly changing, we have adapted to higher and higher levels of civilization. We realize that human beings are quite smart in their ability to change and adapt.
We also realize that the current track to fixing the emissions problem is at best ill-conceived because it ignores the human ability to adapt. It assumes the solution to global warming to be the elimination of the use of fossil fuels. Having settled on that solution, virtually all western countries are spending vast amounts of cash and other resources to research and develop alternative energy sources, especially solar and wind.
There are different projections of the cost of the US getting to zero percent of fossil fuel emissions, but those projections put the cost of net zero at between $5,000 and $11,000 per person per year. Our political leaders don’t seem to realize that, that reaching net zero by 2050 is highly improbable, and two, that most people would be either unable or willing to fork over that kind of money, and three, that people are unlikely to vote for the net zero advocates.
We’ve dealt with the consequences of burning fossil fuels before. For example. In the 1950’s-60’s, Los Angeles was plagued with some awful air pollution and smog. The solution was not to disallow the use of vehicles with combustion engines. What happened was the invention and development of a relatively inexpensive technology called the catalytic converter. Most days now the air in and around Los Angelos is clear and healthy.
The point is simple. Rather than “going home with the same person we went to the dance with” namely, fossil fuels, and disallowing the combustion engine on our streets and highways, and closing power plants using fossil fuels, we could be spending half of what is currently being spent and further research to further develop the existing technologies to capture the greenhouse gases – the CO2 – being emitted. We already have scrubbers and other technologies to capture the CO2. Why not put our money into reducing even more or maybe eliminating emissions rather than eliminating the fuel that has provided the “music” for the dance? It may sound like a dream, but CO2 can actually be used to fuel our cars and planes.
At this point there’s too many unknown variables in trying to replace all fossil fuels by 2050 – at whatever extreme cost.
Our great minds and engineers can continue experimenting and developing enough ‘green’ energy to at some point play a major role in our growing energy needs.
Meantime let’s determine how we can reduce or eliminate fossil fuel emissions without throwing the baby out….
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Have a great and prosperous week.
Hug somebody.
References:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/volcano-carbon-emissions/
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/07/30/co2-drives-global-warming/
SPIDER Bites
This week’s trivia question – one for horse racing fans: How many furlongs in a mile? The answer to last week’s what country did the US buy Florida from: Spain. In 1819, after years of negotiations, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams achieved a diplomatic coup with the signing of the Florida Purchase Treaty, which officially put Florida into U.S. hands at no cost beyond the U.S. assumption of some $5 million of claims by U.S. citizens against Spain.
AI comes to farming. Carbon Robotics is now shipping its LaserWeeder to farms around the United States; the machine uses the power of lasers and robotics to rid fields of weeds.
A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a group of transgender plaintiffs asking the state of Tennessee to allow them to change the sex on their birth certificates.
The EU’s auditing agency issued a 63-page report last week warning the EU’s climate change goals are unaffordable. We could use an auditing agency like that here.
Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest district in Maryland, closed it Board meeting to the public out of “safety concerns.” The Board was taking up a policy that bans parents from opting their children out of its gender and sexuality curriculum.
Ford lost $34,000 per EV sold last year. But the company is staying on the push from the Biden administration to hasten the transition to electric vehicles – while laying off another 1,000 workers, mostly engineers, last week.
After ‘learning’ from their 27-yer-old teacher, her class of 3rd grade students in Austin, TX refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at their school. Why do these people who obviously hate the US stay here?
The Supreme Court on Thursday invalidated race-conscious admissions policies used by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion: “The entire point of the Equal Protection Clause is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating them differently because they are from a city or from a rural area, or because they play the violin poorly or well.” Nine states, including Florida, had already prohibited any consideration of race in admissions to their public colleges and universities.
SCOTUS also nixed President’s Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, saying the executive branch could not rewrite the law. Everyone knew that except apparently the president.
Transportation Secretary Buttigieg told CNN on Friday Air traffic control in the United States is understaffed by about 3,000 positions. He indicated no plan to fix the problem. Meanwhile, the airlines are blaming the FAA for the flight delays and cancelations.
Here’s the next thing in the computer future. Microsoft has developed what they’re calling AIM – Analog Iterative Machine – which uses light photons, not transistors, to navigate more quickly and efficiently through large amounts of data. It’s currently being licensed to financial institutions. Start saying goodbye to the binary ones and zeros.
