We’ve been having a field day, nay, a field year calling out politicians and regulators for their energy decisions. yet it’s easy to criticise and not so easy to offer solutions. I’ll be sharing mine in a 10-point plan, seeing as these are trendy right now, next Friday. What are your suggestions?
A few preliminary thoughts. Both process and substance are important. Regarding process: a sensible starting point might be a series of public discussions re the critical importance of focusing on SHARED values, vision and mission (current and future generations), mediated by professional discussion facilitators with input by nonpartisan professionals with domain expertise.. Guiding principles:
"My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."
Step 1). Invent a Time Machine Step 2) go back 300 years to the beginning of the industrial revolution and try to convince everyone alive back not to do what seems like a really good idea at the time. ie, build a society completely dependent on fossil fuels. (Sorry if this seems like I am being flippant or disrespectful- we have a predicament here, which can be defined as a problem without a solution).
To the best of my knowledge and beliefs, current US administration has no vision of energy mapping and fundamentals. US policies often contradict one another. International oil market fully realize that there’s hardly any spare capacity left within OPEC and allies and still insists on raising output. This is a dangerous game and no one realizes it in the WH.
I am not hopeful that a sensible plan could be put in place yet. It will require a big shift in the zeitgeist.
For example I recently had an argument with a coworker regarding batteries. He believes that there will be new and improved batteries that will eventually make battery powered commercial flights possible.
These sorts of beliefs are common among the electorate
Unfortunately we only have one periodic table and the chemists know those stuff. For every reactant atom in a battery you have 12 to 20 non reactant atoms. This is why batteries have low energy densities which is not good for air travel.
Right now I'm guessing recession will correct the current short term crisis.
Irina, you have made a strong case. My observations indicate that the primary goal of US is "full spectrum dominance" via force projection, which can happen only with the use of high-density fossil fuels for the armaments and bases. The way to go is to get private access to oil and resources in Russian Federation and use these resources to power the military to dominate Eurasia with the installation of bases all the way up to Beijing. NATO is an agency to acquire energy resources for force projection. However, this is Wilsonian doctrine (1917) followed by the current US administration and perhaps one of the reasons the Ukraine/Russia conflict is of primary importance to the US than anything else. This fossil-fuel power global dominance goal is in direct conflict with the climate change and renewable initiative, which are meant to fool starry-eyed electorate while transferring their tax dollars to fake wind/solar/battery projects and Wall Street companies. Any thoughts????
Sorry guys but the EU Commission President and genius Ursula von der Leyen knows way more than all of you put together. She's the same one who had a nice video lecturing EU citizens on the need to wash your hands thoroughly, scrub between your fingers and under your fingernails to stop the spread of Covid, an airborne virus. On the Energy supply catastrophe she said governments need to stay focused on “a massive investment in renewables”. “We have to make sure that we use this crisis to move forward and not to have a backsliding on the dirty fossil fuels".
Step 2) Solar hot water - the simplest solar - simply a box on a roof with a glass top and pipes filled with liquid running thru the box - in sunshine, the liquid gets HOT - voila, hot water. Very efficient, very inexpensive, very simple to build. We will use very little of energy/wealth generated in step 0 here. The buildout is essentially placing enough of these solar boxes on rooftops so that all hot water is generated this way.
Step 3) solar photovoltaic- this has its place BUT photovoltaic (PV) is complicated with a 3000 mile supply chain and massive open pit mines where huge diesel powered earth movers that rip the earth to get at the necessary rare earth minerals. A lot of diesel energy and a lot of runoff pollution- not to mention the shipping to a multi million dollar cleanroom PV manufacturing plant. Oh, and rare earth minerals are well named - they are RARE. As in limits. Oh, and there’s decay - PV panels last about 30 years. And location matters: Arizona good, Seattle not so good.
Comment 1). Baseload power. Think “Constant”. Current baseload is coal-fired power plants, oil or gas fired power plants, nuclear fission power plants, hydro dams. I veto coal/oil/gas for pollution, wars, sustainability (finite). I veto nuclear fission for bio-toxic waste that take 100,000 years to decay, also accidents, terrorism. Also uranium is finite. I veto hydro because we now are in wild drought/flood swings (see lake Powell and lake Mead in the US). Hydro can no longer really be counted on as constant. Also spawning fish were here first. So I vote for geothermal. It’s eternal- we just have to get better at drilling.
Comment 2). I don’t like windmills-at least the modern ones. The are aptly described as “Cuisinarts in the sky”. At the base of each windmill is a sad pile of dead birds. We can do better
Number one point - Ask your EU leaders to establish peace, negotiate, listen to Henry Kissinger's WEF speech. This is the elephant in the room before we can focus on peace-time initiatives such as energy and so on. Americans here love drama (love war) as it does not happen here....EU should take care of its citizens.
Not much that can be done in the short term, but lots that can sort out the long term structural issues in the next 10 years.
1) Stop digging the hole deeper. Immediately end renewable subsidies so that only projects that are economically viable move forward. Use the money saved to invest in technology that is actually feasible by the laws of thermodynamics instead.
2) Start fracking everywhere. Even the EU has plenty of good sites that could start up in a 2-5 year time horizon.
3) Decriminalize nuclear power and allow the innovators in the space to prototype and advance quickly.
4) Build out advanced nuclear ships that are essentially floating hydrogen/ammonia refineries which can be used to power ships or turbines and used as fertilizer.
5) Heavily medicate all the greens and hook them up to the metaverse so they get out of the way and let us do these things to make their lives better and reduce emissions and pollution at the same time.
A lot of interesting ideas here. Good discussion. No matter what we do, people need to eat and find a way to get to work each day until some of these ideas are ready for prime time. Why don’t we stop demonizing traditional energy sources, produce them as efficiently and cleanly as we can, as we look forward to the day these new ideas are ready to deploy.
1) REDUCE taxes for shale players if they reach certain levels of production
2) FORGET abt raising taxes for these companies
3) let the prices run. Nothing better than higher prices to cure high prices.
4) REDUCE taxes for those who save energy and/or TAX those who waste energy
These might give a temporary relief.
Today we are btw a rock and a hard place. There’s not enough clean energy neither enough fossil fuel. We have to save where it’s possible and incentivize fossil production (at least temporarily in the short run) because otherwise, prices will go even higher and many people will suffer more and more. Maybe that could help to soften the transition to clean.
Today, there’s no way back for fossil. There’s nothing that could be done to bring fossil back as society wants to continue heading towards clean energy. It’s hard to put money in a business that is abt to end in the future like fossil fuel and thus, prices naturally goes higher.
We sort of messed things up when decided to go clean when it’s not even close to being economically viable yet. We lost investments (and thus production) in fossil before what we expected.
Lets hope the transition finds its way quicker. Today, clean is not efficient. This video is very interesting. https://youtu.be/Jz75yScqPpQ
Irina, you are right, it's easy to criticise... when our leaders have proved so incompetent at managing energy. Some suggestions;
Exploite all easily accessible fossil fuels (FF) - shale gas for starters
Roll back all green subsidies (as far contractually possible) and immediately stop all future uncontracted ones
Cancel Net Zero targets
Actively discourage Evil Socialist Greed (ESG), perhaps going as far as to offer some incentive to invest in FF companies
Repeal the Climate Change Act
Confirm to oil and gas companies that long term investments will be safe
Limit Govt sponsored research into Climate Change
Start to educate the public on the benefits associated with fossil fuels and marginally more atmospheric CO2
Immediately cease any planned closures of coal fired power stations and look to bring back in service recently decommissioned plants - some labour education and training will be required as many staff have been lost.
The ideologues for all the technologies to work together. I don’t hold out any hope of that happening though.
At the moment the loudest voices are for shutting down anything to do with fossil fuels of any kind and building field upon field of “renewables”. Mind you, I don’t think any of those proponents understand what renewable means, nor that they would have to give up plastic clothing, cars, many household goods, cooking food etc etc.
OK EVs may turn out to be good, but not tomorrow.
Recognise that there is no silver bullet;
allow all the technologies to work together;
Do what we can do today and get the scientists working on what we can do next year, in 5 years, in 30 years.
Prioritise technologies on EROI, effect on the natural world, food production systems eg. land area used, land clearing or putting facilities on arable land should get negative marks.
It goes without saying that all this should include making electricity (and waste heat) via nuclear energy.
Also prioritise on the effects on national security / energy security (>90% of PV panels come from one supplier), In Australia all diesel on which our targets source of national income relies, come from outside, but we are the world’s 2cnd or third biggest supplier of U, but no nuclear power!!??
And so on.
So far, the only authorities capable of doing that seem to be autocratic ones like China or the Arab nations, where a plan that runs over a single term of democratic government is not a problem like it is in the US democrazy. (I’m Australian and our parliaments are elected for 3 year terms). So don’t hold your breath on getting anything done that will move us forward.
One more: pass a law that the grid has to be upgraded to handle the electricity BEFORE more windmills are erected. There are too many turbines that cannot be utilized in optimal wind conditions, but they keep on building more!
"How do we overcome the energy crisis?" - The best solutions always come from free and independent-minded individuals with no interference from governments or corporate-monopoly influence. Centralized planning is what got us in our situation. Centralized planning is a technocratic construct. I am a proponent of decentralized, more local independent actions without interference from governments.
Henry Ford had it right when he first came out with his cars. His vision was that the cars could run on alcohol and they were designed that way. There was no infrastructure of gas stations, but most of America was agriculturally based and homemade alcohol was prolific. At the time, kerosene for lamps was the Rockefeller stronghold - not gasoline. However, Rockefeller seized the opportunity by financing the protests which led to prohibition of alcohol. When alcohol was banned during the government's prohibition, then Rockefeller made gasoline the dominated fuel.
...and of course, Rockefeller along with other powerful and rich men also secretly planned (Nov 1910) how to control the U.S. money supply, and by 1913 their Federal Reserve Act was implemented by Congress.
Politicians need to back off theory a bit and state their goals.
Instead of pushing blindly for wind and solar as the solution, they should really start asking what they’re after.
They could list out things like reducing CO2 emissions as quick as possible, or energy independence, or lower economic impact, or more greenspace (wilderness). Then run these through industry experts and engineers and compare different solutions that exist today. Don’t leave anything out - nuclear, fracking, LNG, offshore wind, offshore oil.
They’ll probably be surprised by finding out how wasteful it is to convert NG to LNG and import from halfway across the globe, or import solar panels from China for a grid that’s not equipped to handle them. Maybe the could start to realize that nuclear power has very few drawbacks, or that fracking for NG can be done safely as a bridge solution, or that alternate solutions to EV’s, such as hybrid vehicles and hydrogen powered cars, can have some advantages.
I didn't expect all the negativity around nuclear power here, but there it is. If we are going to maintain the current population of the planet and have it possibly continue to grow (not that I am rooting for that but...), the future lies in moving toward more energy dense solutions, not more diffuse ones. The EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) for nuclear power is about 75 to 1. The next closest is hydro at about 35 to 1. Coal and gas plants are at about 30 to 1 and wind and solar are 4 or 5 to 1. As inputs become scarcer, a 75 to 1 return is far superior and sustainable compared to a 5 to 1 return.
Steam is all that is emitted from a nuclear fission plant, along with some radioactive, spent nuclear fuel rods which are stored in casks and monitored. The total amount of high level nuclear spent fuel in the U.S. after sixty years of production would fit on one football field stacked about thirty feet high. That's it. How big a problem is that really? And new nuclear technologies in development will be able to use these spent rods as fuel as they retain something like 70% of their energy generation potential.
Lets compare the carbon footprint per kilowatt hour generated. For coal it is 870 grams per kilowatt hour, gas is 464 grams, coal with carbon sequestration is 156 grams, solar panels produce 48 grams per kilowatt hour, wind produce 14 grams and nuclear just 12. This is considering the materials that go into producing the generating system and its operation.
Nuclear is without question the safest form of energy generation. Look at any study of deaths per terra-watt hour and nuclear is hands down the safest, even safer than wind and solar. Deaths per terr-watt hour from coal are 120, oil is 99.5, gas is 72, offshore wind is 8.5, onshore wind is 1.8, solar is- 0.2 and nuclear (including all deaths from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima) just 0.01. Hands down, not even comparable really, the safest form of electricity production that we have.
Nuclear is the most environmentally friendly. A solar array of similar generation capacity takes seventy-five times more land, a wind farm of similar capacity takes 360 times more land. Wind farms kill thousands of migratory birds annually. Commercial size solar arrays blanket desert floors and hillsides, robbing the use of that land area from the animals that might live there, desert tortoises for example. How environmentally friendly is that?
Nuclear has the highest capacity utilization factor by far at something like 94%, meaning that a 1 gigawatt plant can produce steadily at 94% of it's rated capacity - a.k.a. base load energy. These are the capacity utilization metrics for other forms of electricity production: natural gas - 57%, coal - 47%, hydro - 39%, wind - 35% and solar - 25%. Which means for example that if you want one gig of power to the grid from solar you need to install 4 gigs of generation capacity and then come up with some enormous kind of storage system. Now you are using WAY more land, 300x, and way more input materials. That solar array is going to last for maybe thirty years and have degraded performance in the second half. And then all those panels enter the waste stream and we dig up a bunch more minerals with diesel power, bake the silica at 2000 degrees Celsius in coal-fired furnaces several times in the manufacturing process, and start all over again. They are often called "replaceables" as opposed to renewable for that reason. A nuke plant can run for seventy-five years with regular maintenance.
I think all the negativity is misguided.
I am down for geothermal, but the technology isn't their yet. We have had fully operational nuclear for decades but it has suffered from lack of funding, scare-mongering and hyper regulation driving up costs. Had we invested the same amount into nuclear that we have into wind and solar over the last ten years we would have largely solved our carbon emission problem by now and could be looking at more ways to use electricity in the economy.
As for fuel consumption, cafe standards seem like a pretty simple way to reduce consumption that wouldn't require a complete rebuild of existing infrastructure, hugely mineral and carbon intensive. We had vehicles that could get 40 to 50 mpg fifty years ago.
A few preliminary thoughts. Both process and substance are important. Regarding process: a sensible starting point might be a series of public discussions re the critical importance of focusing on SHARED values, vision and mission (current and future generations), mediated by professional discussion facilitators with input by nonpartisan professionals with domain expertise.. Guiding principles:
"My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."
Step 1). Invent a Time Machine Step 2) go back 300 years to the beginning of the industrial revolution and try to convince everyone alive back not to do what seems like a really good idea at the time. ie, build a society completely dependent on fossil fuels. (Sorry if this seems like I am being flippant or disrespectful- we have a predicament here, which can be defined as a problem without a solution).
To the best of my knowledge and beliefs, current US administration has no vision of energy mapping and fundamentals. US policies often contradict one another. International oil market fully realize that there’s hardly any spare capacity left within OPEC and allies and still insists on raising output. This is a dangerous game and no one realizes it in the WH.
I am not hopeful that a sensible plan could be put in place yet. It will require a big shift in the zeitgeist.
For example I recently had an argument with a coworker regarding batteries. He believes that there will be new and improved batteries that will eventually make battery powered commercial flights possible.
These sorts of beliefs are common among the electorate
Unfortunately we only have one periodic table and the chemists know those stuff. For every reactant atom in a battery you have 12 to 20 non reactant atoms. This is why batteries have low energy densities which is not good for air travel.
Right now I'm guessing recession will correct the current short term crisis.
Irina, you have made a strong case. My observations indicate that the primary goal of US is "full spectrum dominance" via force projection, which can happen only with the use of high-density fossil fuels for the armaments and bases. The way to go is to get private access to oil and resources in Russian Federation and use these resources to power the military to dominate Eurasia with the installation of bases all the way up to Beijing. NATO is an agency to acquire energy resources for force projection. However, this is Wilsonian doctrine (1917) followed by the current US administration and perhaps one of the reasons the Ukraine/Russia conflict is of primary importance to the US than anything else. This fossil-fuel power global dominance goal is in direct conflict with the climate change and renewable initiative, which are meant to fool starry-eyed electorate while transferring their tax dollars to fake wind/solar/battery projects and Wall Street companies. Any thoughts????
Drill, baby, drill.
Sorry guys but the EU Commission President and genius Ursula von der Leyen knows way more than all of you put together. She's the same one who had a nice video lecturing EU citizens on the need to wash your hands thoroughly, scrub between your fingers and under your fingernails to stop the spread of Covid, an airborne virus. On the Energy supply catastrophe she said governments need to stay focused on “a massive investment in renewables”. “We have to make sure that we use this crisis to move forward and not to have a backsliding on the dirty fossil fuels".
Mine is shorter...
Get rid of the WEF and defund the UN.
That would solve a truckload of global energy problems.
The solution has been clear for decades. But, it does not fit the globalist narrative.
Irina, in all seriousness, here is my multi point plan:
Step 0) pump MORE oil&gas, lots more, with the excess designated for the steps/buildouts below:
Step 1) baseload power (see far below for comment about baseload power) my proposal is Geothermal.
We will use a lot of the excess energy (wealth) generated from step 0 to buildout the geothermal baseload power network
For a good article on geothermal, please see the Doomberg piece: https://doomberg.substack.com/p/chasing-an-energy-moonshot?r=d61rc&utm_medium=ios
Step 2) Solar hot water - the simplest solar - simply a box on a roof with a glass top and pipes filled with liquid running thru the box - in sunshine, the liquid gets HOT - voila, hot water. Very efficient, very inexpensive, very simple to build. We will use very little of energy/wealth generated in step 0 here. The buildout is essentially placing enough of these solar boxes on rooftops so that all hot water is generated this way.
Step 3) solar photovoltaic- this has its place BUT photovoltaic (PV) is complicated with a 3000 mile supply chain and massive open pit mines where huge diesel powered earth movers that rip the earth to get at the necessary rare earth minerals. A lot of diesel energy and a lot of runoff pollution- not to mention the shipping to a multi million dollar cleanroom PV manufacturing plant. Oh, and rare earth minerals are well named - they are RARE. As in limits. Oh, and there’s decay - PV panels last about 30 years. And location matters: Arizona good, Seattle not so good.
Comment 1). Baseload power. Think “Constant”. Current baseload is coal-fired power plants, oil or gas fired power plants, nuclear fission power plants, hydro dams. I veto coal/oil/gas for pollution, wars, sustainability (finite). I veto nuclear fission for bio-toxic waste that take 100,000 years to decay, also accidents, terrorism. Also uranium is finite. I veto hydro because we now are in wild drought/flood swings (see lake Powell and lake Mead in the US). Hydro can no longer really be counted on as constant. Also spawning fish were here first. So I vote for geothermal. It’s eternal- we just have to get better at drilling.
Comment 2). I don’t like windmills-at least the modern ones. The are aptly described as “Cuisinarts in the sky”. At the base of each windmill is a sad pile of dead birds. We can do better
Some maybes: tidal?
Number one point - Ask your EU leaders to establish peace, negotiate, listen to Henry Kissinger's WEF speech. This is the elephant in the room before we can focus on peace-time initiatives such as energy and so on. Americans here love drama (love war) as it does not happen here....EU should take care of its citizens.
Not much that can be done in the short term, but lots that can sort out the long term structural issues in the next 10 years.
1) Stop digging the hole deeper. Immediately end renewable subsidies so that only projects that are economically viable move forward. Use the money saved to invest in technology that is actually feasible by the laws of thermodynamics instead.
2) Start fracking everywhere. Even the EU has plenty of good sites that could start up in a 2-5 year time horizon.
3) Decriminalize nuclear power and allow the innovators in the space to prototype and advance quickly.
4) Build out advanced nuclear ships that are essentially floating hydrogen/ammonia refineries which can be used to power ships or turbines and used as fertilizer.
https://www.lucidcatalyst.com/hydrogen-report
5) Heavily medicate all the greens and hook them up to the metaverse so they get out of the way and let us do these things to make their lives better and reduce emissions and pollution at the same time.
A lot of interesting ideas here. Good discussion. No matter what we do, people need to eat and find a way to get to work each day until some of these ideas are ready for prime time. Why don’t we stop demonizing traditional energy sources, produce them as efficiently and cleanly as we can, as we look forward to the day these new ideas are ready to deploy.
Hi. Let me put some thoughts.
1) REDUCE taxes for shale players if they reach certain levels of production
2) FORGET abt raising taxes for these companies
3) let the prices run. Nothing better than higher prices to cure high prices.
4) REDUCE taxes for those who save energy and/or TAX those who waste energy
These might give a temporary relief.
Today we are btw a rock and a hard place. There’s not enough clean energy neither enough fossil fuel. We have to save where it’s possible and incentivize fossil production (at least temporarily in the short run) because otherwise, prices will go even higher and many people will suffer more and more. Maybe that could help to soften the transition to clean.
Today, there’s no way back for fossil. There’s nothing that could be done to bring fossil back as society wants to continue heading towards clean energy. It’s hard to put money in a business that is abt to end in the future like fossil fuel and thus, prices naturally goes higher.
We sort of messed things up when decided to go clean when it’s not even close to being economically viable yet. We lost investments (and thus production) in fossil before what we expected.
Lets hope the transition finds its way quicker. Today, clean is not efficient. This video is very interesting. https://youtu.be/Jz75yScqPpQ
Good luck for everyone
Irina, you are right, it's easy to criticise... when our leaders have proved so incompetent at managing energy. Some suggestions;
Exploite all easily accessible fossil fuels (FF) - shale gas for starters
Roll back all green subsidies (as far contractually possible) and immediately stop all future uncontracted ones
Cancel Net Zero targets
Actively discourage Evil Socialist Greed (ESG), perhaps going as far as to offer some incentive to invest in FF companies
Repeal the Climate Change Act
Confirm to oil and gas companies that long term investments will be safe
Limit Govt sponsored research into Climate Change
Start to educate the public on the benefits associated with fossil fuels and marginally more atmospheric CO2
Immediately cease any planned closures of coal fired power stations and look to bring back in service recently decommissioned plants - some labour education and training will be required as many staff have been lost.
Roll our more nuclear - probably SMR
The ideologues for all the technologies to work together. I don’t hold out any hope of that happening though.
At the moment the loudest voices are for shutting down anything to do with fossil fuels of any kind and building field upon field of “renewables”. Mind you, I don’t think any of those proponents understand what renewable means, nor that they would have to give up plastic clothing, cars, many household goods, cooking food etc etc.
OK EVs may turn out to be good, but not tomorrow.
Recognise that there is no silver bullet;
allow all the technologies to work together;
Do what we can do today and get the scientists working on what we can do next year, in 5 years, in 30 years.
Prioritise technologies on EROI, effect on the natural world, food production systems eg. land area used, land clearing or putting facilities on arable land should get negative marks.
It goes without saying that all this should include making electricity (and waste heat) via nuclear energy.
Also prioritise on the effects on national security / energy security (>90% of PV panels come from one supplier), In Australia all diesel on which our targets source of national income relies, come from outside, but we are the world’s 2cnd or third biggest supplier of U, but no nuclear power!!??
And so on.
So far, the only authorities capable of doing that seem to be autocratic ones like China or the Arab nations, where a plan that runs over a single term of democratic government is not a problem like it is in the US democrazy. (I’m Australian and our parliaments are elected for 3 year terms). So don’t hold your breath on getting anything done that will move us forward.
One more: pass a law that the grid has to be upgraded to handle the electricity BEFORE more windmills are erected. There are too many turbines that cannot be utilized in optimal wind conditions, but they keep on building more!
"How do we overcome the energy crisis?" - The best solutions always come from free and independent-minded individuals with no interference from governments or corporate-monopoly influence. Centralized planning is what got us in our situation. Centralized planning is a technocratic construct. I am a proponent of decentralized, more local independent actions without interference from governments.
Henry Ford had it right when he first came out with his cars. His vision was that the cars could run on alcohol and they were designed that way. There was no infrastructure of gas stations, but most of America was agriculturally based and homemade alcohol was prolific. At the time, kerosene for lamps was the Rockefeller stronghold - not gasoline. However, Rockefeller seized the opportunity by financing the protests which led to prohibition of alcohol. When alcohol was banned during the government's prohibition, then Rockefeller made gasoline the dominated fuel.
...and of course, Rockefeller along with other powerful and rich men also secretly planned (Nov 1910) how to control the U.S. money supply, and by 1913 their Federal Reserve Act was implemented by Congress.
Centralized dictated planning is not a solution…
5 Minute profound VIDEO - “Economics in One Image” - https://odysee.com/@corbettreport:0/economics-in-one-image:5
(see shownotes below video)
Yes, it is a tragedy and I think Eurasian land mass is the last frontier!
Politicians need to back off theory a bit and state their goals.
Instead of pushing blindly for wind and solar as the solution, they should really start asking what they’re after.
They could list out things like reducing CO2 emissions as quick as possible, or energy independence, or lower economic impact, or more greenspace (wilderness). Then run these through industry experts and engineers and compare different solutions that exist today. Don’t leave anything out - nuclear, fracking, LNG, offshore wind, offshore oil.
They’ll probably be surprised by finding out how wasteful it is to convert NG to LNG and import from halfway across the globe, or import solar panels from China for a grid that’s not equipped to handle them. Maybe the could start to realize that nuclear power has very few drawbacks, or that fracking for NG can be done safely as a bridge solution, or that alternate solutions to EV’s, such as hybrid vehicles and hydrogen powered cars, can have some advantages.
Wishful thinking, I know…
I didn't expect all the negativity around nuclear power here, but there it is. If we are going to maintain the current population of the planet and have it possibly continue to grow (not that I am rooting for that but...), the future lies in moving toward more energy dense solutions, not more diffuse ones. The EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) for nuclear power is about 75 to 1. The next closest is hydro at about 35 to 1. Coal and gas plants are at about 30 to 1 and wind and solar are 4 or 5 to 1. As inputs become scarcer, a 75 to 1 return is far superior and sustainable compared to a 5 to 1 return.
Steam is all that is emitted from a nuclear fission plant, along with some radioactive, spent nuclear fuel rods which are stored in casks and monitored. The total amount of high level nuclear spent fuel in the U.S. after sixty years of production would fit on one football field stacked about thirty feet high. That's it. How big a problem is that really? And new nuclear technologies in development will be able to use these spent rods as fuel as they retain something like 70% of their energy generation potential.
Lets compare the carbon footprint per kilowatt hour generated. For coal it is 870 grams per kilowatt hour, gas is 464 grams, coal with carbon sequestration is 156 grams, solar panels produce 48 grams per kilowatt hour, wind produce 14 grams and nuclear just 12. This is considering the materials that go into producing the generating system and its operation.
Nuclear is without question the safest form of energy generation. Look at any study of deaths per terra-watt hour and nuclear is hands down the safest, even safer than wind and solar. Deaths per terr-watt hour from coal are 120, oil is 99.5, gas is 72, offshore wind is 8.5, onshore wind is 1.8, solar is- 0.2 and nuclear (including all deaths from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima) just 0.01. Hands down, not even comparable really, the safest form of electricity production that we have.
Nuclear is the most environmentally friendly. A solar array of similar generation capacity takes seventy-five times more land, a wind farm of similar capacity takes 360 times more land. Wind farms kill thousands of migratory birds annually. Commercial size solar arrays blanket desert floors and hillsides, robbing the use of that land area from the animals that might live there, desert tortoises for example. How environmentally friendly is that?
Nuclear has the highest capacity utilization factor by far at something like 94%, meaning that a 1 gigawatt plant can produce steadily at 94% of it's rated capacity - a.k.a. base load energy. These are the capacity utilization metrics for other forms of electricity production: natural gas - 57%, coal - 47%, hydro - 39%, wind - 35% and solar - 25%. Which means for example that if you want one gig of power to the grid from solar you need to install 4 gigs of generation capacity and then come up with some enormous kind of storage system. Now you are using WAY more land, 300x, and way more input materials. That solar array is going to last for maybe thirty years and have degraded performance in the second half. And then all those panels enter the waste stream and we dig up a bunch more minerals with diesel power, bake the silica at 2000 degrees Celsius in coal-fired furnaces several times in the manufacturing process, and start all over again. They are often called "replaceables" as opposed to renewable for that reason. A nuke plant can run for seventy-five years with regular maintenance.
I think all the negativity is misguided.
I am down for geothermal, but the technology isn't their yet. We have had fully operational nuclear for decades but it has suffered from lack of funding, scare-mongering and hyper regulation driving up costs. Had we invested the same amount into nuclear that we have into wind and solar over the last ten years we would have largely solved our carbon emission problem by now and could be looking at more ways to use electricity in the economy.
As for fuel consumption, cafe standards seem like a pretty simple way to reduce consumption that wouldn't require a complete rebuild of existing infrastructure, hugely mineral and carbon intensive. We had vehicles that could get 40 to 50 mpg fifty years ago.