6% IN 1974 TO 16% IN 2021 FOR THE PERCENTAGE OF ENERGY PRODUCTION FROM LOW CARBON SOURCES (including nuclear):
WE WILL NOT SAVE THE WORLD THAT WAY!
Most of the noisiest ecology is a lie sneakily fed by the fossil fuel industry. What else?
Worldwide, gas production is at its maximum. World oil production is at its maximum. World coal production is plateauing close to its maximum. This is the “renewable” ecology as we have it, after half a century of hilarious denial by corrupt fools pretending to be ecologically minded… When all they want is to haunt the halls of power, as profiteers in rags, kicking around nuclear energy, as their fossil fuel fellow travelers want them to do. We may as well laugh at it!
Yes, we have augmented the low carbon (renewable plus nuclear) percentage of energy production by ONLY ten percent in half a century: at this rate, it will take another 500 years to produce all energy from renewable sources. We don’t have 50 years. We actually have no years: over enormous zones of the planet, the ecology is dying, when not outright burning away.
Even assuming that all energy production is from low carbon sources, 500 years in the future, the CO2 density in the atmosphere will keep on rising, because energy production is only 72% of total CO2 production. Agriculture is at 11%, deforestation at 6%, metal and cement production and other industrial processes at 6%, waste, etc.
Now of course once there is enough CO2 in the atmosphere, it “hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years”, says NASA. During that time, temperatures will keep on rising. Moreover, rising temperatures may launch massive release of greenhouses gases from the melting permafrost and increased rotting from all the warm rains which should come as the whole planet turns into a hot wet jungle…
To stop the temperature rise one will have to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and go back down to 300 ppm before too much irreversible damage occurs: that will require huge amounts of energy, thus another energy source than fossil fuels….
Dominant ecological thinking in the last 40 years has been lying, stupid, and corrupt: its main axis has been anti-nuclear. And what did they want to replace nuclear by? Mostly Middle Age energy: wind and water.
And yet a miracle happened, through no fault of Middle Ages obsessed ecologists: solar photovoltaic. Yet it is still a fractionally baked miracle: 22% efficiency, needs the sun, and no storage…
The result has been the greatest ecological crisis in 66 million years. One can accuse the financial-oil industrial complex, but that’s like accusing a lion to behave like a lion. That’s pointless, as long as the lion is next to you all day, and all night long.
Ecological mobs got excited about stupid simplistic identities such as Hiroshima = Nuclear. Then politicians claiming to be ecologists accessed to some modicum of power. Like Hannibal in Capua, they enjoyed the fruits of their victory, by sinking in an orgy of hedonistic greed and grab. This is why the world ecological strategy has been wrong since 1980.
What was decided then by self-described progressive in ecological matters has been to shot down the nuclear option. Instead it should have been embraced, yet criticized and educated. Not all nuclear options are equivalent, and the best have been left undeveloped, especially Thorium, or inadequately financed, especially fusion. So we were left with a version of the nuclear industry which was basically built to make Plutonium, that is, bombs. Worse: even in that nuclear version, inadequate governmental support prevented it from being as efficient as it could be.
A theoretician of conspiracies, especially those alive and well lurking in the shadows, would tell you that this is too many coincidences in striking incompetence: a deliberate plot is in the work.
Around 1970, nuclear energy seemed poised to replace fossil fuels for electric generation. That did not happen.
As usual in conspiracy theory, one should suspect that those who profited from the crime are the suspects.
In this case, the fossil fuel industry.
Crime, which crime would bellow our friends, the cognitively challenged ecologists…. Surely nobody died. Stupid ecologists don’t even read the newspapers… Too busy probably doing Facebook among their circles of the ignorant.
Well, fossil fuels kill millions of people a year, worldwide, probably very much in excess of ten millions (10 millions is around the number suggest by the WHO). Let’s now look at the sort of graph the propaganda fossil fuel industry, disguised as fanatically anti-nuclear ecologists, is keen for the public not to appreciate… Because if the public knew and pondered this graph, the public would feel something strong has to be done, a four dimensional effort: solar-green hydrogen, new fission, Thorium, fusion. China, by the way is making huge efforts in all four (I rarely congratulate Xi and Al…. But this is very important…)
WE ARE (NEARLY) ALL FOSSIL FUELS, MORE THAN EVER:
How many people did the nuclear civilian industry kill in the West? Around zero. The incredible meltdown at Fukushima of three reactors crushed by gigantic fifteen story tall waves killed nobody (more people died from forced and useless evacuation!) The tsunami killed 20,000, but even pseudo-ecologists recognize the nuclear industry has nothing to do with it… Now Fukushima made both Japan and Germany quit the nuclear industry, so they claimed.
In 2015, nuclear reactors in the U.S. alone generated as much zero-carbon electricity as all the wind turbines on the planet combined. And these reactors use obsolete nuclear technology, and are very old…
Germany instead developed massively lignite, the dirtiest coal, already used by Neanderthals, killing thousands of Europeans.. If not dozens of thousands… Well, as I have argued, killing people is the ultimate (dark) ecology… So it makes sense, but in a perverse way, because this was not necessary…
***
Meanwhile, so much ice is melting that Earth’s crust is moving… Melting on the Greenland ice sheet is contributing to the sideways slip of Earth’s crust. Ice melt removes mass from Earth’s continents, a study published in Nature (and led by a woman) shows. Yes, an horizontal slip. Liberated from the overlying weight, land that was once covered by ice lifts up: that’s called orolift, and still affects Scandinavia. This vertical response is accompanied with the ground slipping horizontally
Between 2003 and 2018, ice melting from Greenland and from Arctic glaciers caused the ground to shift horizontally across much of the Northern Hemisphere, and by as much as 0.3 millimeters a year in much of Canada and the United States. In some areas, even far from the melting ice, the horizontal movement was greater than the vertical movement.
This is just the start. A worldwide temperature rise of 3 degrees centigrade (1.3 to 1.5 C so far) is quickly ahead. I personally predict 7 degrees rise centigrade by 2100 (from personal research focusing on small thermal inertia systems)… Except if emergency measures are taken (they will be).
Speaking of emergency, China, most craftily, is turning on the first large scale THORIUM nuclear reactor, the first Thorium reactor since 1969… China also has the foresight to equip its new coal plants presently much used to make solar panels for Bin Biden and his voters, in such a way that their coal furnaces can be replaced by Thorium reactors in the future….
Another note: giant efforts in wind power have been made. That’s stupid, to the extend it’s being done, neglecting the rest. A fundamental reason is that the wind can die, as it did in the North Sea in 2021, causing a worldwide natural gas and energy squeeze. In turn, that require to leave gigantic fossil fuels as backup (look at Germany!). But not just this. Under my own production, torrid heating is immediately ahead. What would that cause? The main terrestrial convection cells originate around the equator, where very hot and very wet air is lifted, and then, having nowhere else to go, head towards the poles, until it cools down and sink at the latitudes of the Mediterranean-desertic belt, then coming back towards the equator as “Trade Winds”. Closer to the poles, the Coriolis force caused by Earth’s rotation, shows up as “Westerlies”. In between, no winds…
Guess what? Each degree of planetary heating will bring the tropical belt north hundreds of kilometers, and thus, the no-wind belt… The giant off shore wind parks with their thousands of skyscraper turbines full of precious metals will become much more idle than expected… Soon, ladies and gentlemen, soon…
Patrice Ayme
P/S: Elon Musk, the top implementer of science fiction space and battery technology has turned decidedly pro-nuclear:
Musk added, as a closing thought:
“I’m also kind of pro-nuclear. And I’m sort of surprised by the public sentiment against nuclear. I’m not saying we should go build a whole bunch of new nuclear plants. But I don’t think we should shut down ones that are operating safely. They did this in Germany and had to create a whole bunch of coal power plants, and I don’t think that was the right decision, frankly.”
No, bad decision, except if what one wants is a world war preceded and accompanied with apocalyptic climate calamity: a 7 C rise in 80 years is simply unfathomable, but that’s what we will get… Absent cutting the crap about the present wind-solar-dams as all we need… Go jog down California’s empty reservoirs for edification…
Climate Calamity 