I find it dismaying that the one thing that all of the plans for reducing global warming seem to have in common is the vast amount of building they will require including rebuilding much of the housing stock in the U. S., electric vehicles, and wind and solar power facilities. The amounts of rare earths that will be required for those last three are genuinely daunting.
The greenhouse gasses that will be emitted by producing the amount of cement that will be required for these plans will probably be more than they plan to save.
The blades of wind turbines have finite lifespans and at this point there is no practical way recycling them. Mostly they’re just thrown into landfills.
When your plan for saving the environment requires basic scientific breakthroughs, you don’t have a plan you have a wish. It’s the same as with reopening the economy. If your plan requires a safe, effective vaccine against SARS-Cov-2, you don’t have a plan.
One of the things that brings all this to mind is the public service-type television advertisement for Amazon that I’ve been seeing lately. You know what would really save the environment? Shutting down Netflix and Facebook, two of AWS’s best customers.
Speaking of idiots. Those who haven’t yet tumbled to the obvious…..
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/509002-more-willful-blindness-by-the-media-on-spying-by-obama-administration
John Solomon and Sara Carter had this two years ago from “sources.” As the drip drip of documents showing it all to be true continues will the bitter clingers on in media and blogsites continue the willful blindness?
Me, waiting to hear what will happen to all those methane emitting ruminants that will be surplus to requirements. And who will tell the various RiverKeepers that hydroelectric dams are a good thing and convince the Congressional leadership they must travel by train.
Hydroelectric dams produce a significant amount of greenhouse gases. There’s methane in them thar storage reservoirs.
Key to all their plans is effective nationalization of the world’s economies. Which is really the whole point of it. For when their predictions of doom and destruction prove laughably wrong, they will still have control of those economies. AOC’s first chief of staff freely admitted this during an interview shortly after she put out her Green New Deal plan.
In short: It’s scam that uses existential fear to gain its goals.
Global warming is real. It is happening. Unquestionably. I can personally document it using historical flowering times versus current times. How much of it is due to anthropogenic effects? Estimates of the effects range from minimal to catastrophic, showing how little we really know how much about it. And estimates about how much we can do to affect it are just as wild. IMO the best plan is to adapt to climate change. And not subsidize stupid things like high rises on barrier islands.
But of course pointing out these things, or even making any suggestions to do things differently than what they propose, means you want to gleefully doom future generations to various and sundry horrible deaths.
Is there some rule I dont know about which would require people to go ahead and make cement like crazy to do this all in the next few years? I dont think so. There also isn’t any requirement to not wait until cement, just to use an example, can be made more efficiently. So I will agree that if we choose the most extreme examples and dont what until efficiencies are improved things might not go well.
That probably in the second graph is worrying. It is probably (couldnt resist) wrong. I suspect it came from the same people who claimed a windmill could never generate enough energy to equal the energy used to make it. That has been debunked many times.
https://fullfact.org/online/wind-turbines-energy/
Steve
Every plan I’ve seen so far involves significant construction—rebuilding and reworking existing housing stock, creating new roadbeds for highspeed rail, more solar power, more wind power, and so on. And that will require cement which will produce greenhouse gases. These plans also include completion dates and a sense of urgency. Those preclude waiting for a fundamental breakthrough in cement production. The greenhouse gases are inherent in a method of production that hasn’t changed a lot in two millennium.
The “rule” merely involves understanding how things are actually done in the real world—their logistics, their infrastructure. Policy is easy when you don’t have any real knowledge about what you need to do to get things done. So, for example, if your plan involves more solar power, that necessarily means putting it somewhere. If it’s out in the middle of the desert or other undeveloped area, that means you’ll need roads to get the trucks carrying the various components, you’ll need foundations and mounting areas, you’ll need the trucks, the trucks will need materials the solar cells require rare earth elements, and so on and so on.
“There also isn’t any requirement to not wait until cement, just to use an example, can be made more efficiently.”
OK all you chemists out there. The first step in cement production is reducing calcium oxides. That mean C, and so it means CO2 off gasses. Not to mention the heating requirements. What reducing agent other than C did you have in mind? There are experimental processes using “germs” to create cement, but its in the infant stage and low volume. Your only hope is some sort of sequestration. Good luck.
And while you are at it, consider the other huge engineering material – steel. It is also produced initially by the reduction of oxides, iron oxides. Then the burning off of carbon saturated pig iron. More CO2.
It has nothing to do with efficiency. Its a chemical mass balance.
Lastly, do you know who 2 of the top three cement producers are? China and Iran. I’m sure they will heed Joe and AOC’s demands to curtail production.
Dave hit the nail on the head, save us from the idiots. Look on the bright side. Last year we had only 12 years. So now its 11. No god-like transformation of the cement or steel industries or laws of physics is in the offing. So party hardy…………
Thanks for the chemistry lesson, which i hope most of us knew or had some acquaintance with. Yes, cement produces CO2. The question remains, to which none of you have an answer, is how much is saved by running the wind turbine vs how much used in making it. I am seeing assumptions here and no data. As I pointed out before, it takes much less energy to produce a windmill than it generates, contrary to false info which has been spread.
Steve
OT- I know I may be the only one here who thinks that masks and social distancing along with some lockdowns has had any effect, but there is some interesting flu data coming out.
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/07/24/coronavirus-restrictions
Steve
I believe that masks and social distancing have effects at the margins but need compliance higher than we’ve been able to muster here for dramatic effect. Would Trump embracing those strategies help? Probably a little. Here in Chicago it’s not exactly a Trump-worshipping area. Getting people to observe social distancing is a hard slog.
That misses the point. Building and installing the wind turbine requires the production of greenhouse gasses now. Amortizing that against the savings over its lifetime is irrelevant now. Proponents are therefore making a “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” argument. I’m skeptical of those. Omelets have a nasty habit of never materializing.
What do their own models say about the effect of deliberately increasing greenhouse gas production which is what they are advocating?
So if I generate an extra ton of CO2 now and in turn generate a billion less tons of CO2 over the next 5 years this is bad because that ton is now?
“What do their own models say about the effect of deliberately increasing greenhouse gas production which is what they are advocating?”
Full life cycle analysis shows that wind power generates far less CO2 than coal or natural gas. Maybe less than nuclear, which is still pretty low. ( A single wind turbine uses about as much cement as 6 houses IIRC so it isn’t all that much.)
https://openei.org/apps/LCA/
Steve
So you generate an extra ton of CO2 per year for the next 10 years, hoping to reduce the production of CO2 by two tons per year for the next 10 years (life expectancy of the project). You need to reduce net production to zero in ten years.
“Full cycle'” analysis is almost never the full cycle but typically the part of the cycle the advocate wants to consider.
““Full cycle’†analysis is almost never the full cycle but typically the part of the cycle the advocate wants to consider.”
So we reach a common problem. Just decide there is no information source you trust, then make up whatever data is wanted. Meh. What I do know is that the denialists have been pretty consistently wrong. For years they claimed it was not possible to have wind power without 100% full power back up idling away and they have disproved that in Colorado. Prices have constantly dropped and power from alternate sources has become more efficient.
Steve
What expert has claimed millions of tons of CO2 saved over the productive life of a windmill? Anyone who doesn’t include the emissions from the backup power that both wind and solar require isn’t taking enough factors into account.
I’m not a “denialist” but I can tell the difference between what’s practical and blowing smoke. IMO the GND plans, including Biden’s, are blowing smoke.
https://www.saskwind.ca/blogbackend/2016/1/14/carbon-and-energy-payback-of-a-wind-turbine
You can directly read the Western Wind and Solar Integration study it cites.
Steve