Cobb

What the Anti-Climate-Deniers Deny

It has been just over 10 years since I learned supply and demand of energy at the global level. Some time later, I had the opportunity to spend several hours at a seminar held on the campus of
Caltech at a presentation by Koonin himself. I imagine that some things have changed since then, but I am convinced that they are marginal. So in light of some interest in the matter of Trump's dismissal of 'The Paris Agreement'. So from some Facebook provocation I have responded as follows:

Cobb: 

It's not campaign season, so 'Go Trump' is ridiculous. I'm a climate change skeptic in the way that I think 'March for Science' is foolishness. What will be will be and people will adjust to the new economic conditions. What I cannot stand is the posing and the presumption that (among other things) that ordinary people should 'go green'.

All of you are going to go as green as your overlords demand, and yet you will still suffer from the inevitable economic dislocations.

If any of the political divas had an ounce of economic wisdom, then they'd be worth hearing out. But there is no such thing as a Scientific Consensus ETF, that is guaranteed to make money. That's because all of these climatologists failed real world statistics, just as they failed to predict the election of Trump. Intellectual fools at best, charlatans by the dozen. Appeals to authority.

As well, I'm comfortable with the East Anglia scandal being as large and long-lived as 'Bush Lied'.

 

Responder:

So ocean acidification doesn't exist? Or isn't man made? Carbon particles are not at historically insane levels? What I don't get about the "climate change ain't all that" crowd is the blasé nature with which they can say "the consensus isn't strong enough to justify action". 99% of the deniers are tied to the fossil fuel industry. How is that lost on people? Who is putting out replicable stats that is independently funded? I have yet to see an answer to this question. No snark, no offense. Just legitimately haven't heard one independent institute/thinktank/researcher who isn't in some way tied to fossil fuel $$$. It blows my mind the degree to which they can leverage a few well positioned stool pigeons and stall so much more in the way of solid science. Serious question: Is NASA a liberal stool pigeon with a climate science denial axe to grind?

 

Cobb: 

You don't distinguish between the inevitability of climate change and the capability of those who analyze to lead. This is a categorical error. It's precisely like saying all 1.2 billion in the Catholic Church is are idiots, but completely incapable of getting .01 of that to join or contribute to their own cause. You keep saying Exxon is wrong, but you can't fuel 1% of Exxon's market. Plus, you can't predict one iota of what Exxon will do when the oil runs out.

I think that's the legacy of the environmental movement, who were all Malthusians in the first place. Swerd is right. Conference junkets make no economic change. The 'scientific consensus' has no market presence because they simply expect to have their vanguard established by political fiat. The Bolsheviks co-opted science too. They wanted the state to own all of the tractors where previously there were only oxen.

Responder:

The role us plebes have is to vote for people who would make climate change a centerpiece of their political agenda. Beyond that, those of us with the disposable income can shift their consumption patterns to something more responsible (which generally costs more money). For the rest of us, the only real role we have is to tamp down on the ill-informed idea that climate change science is ambiguous, thereby increasing the market for climate change-aware politicians to capture resources + media space + votes. Exxon will lead from behind until they figure out how to make money, and their stonewalling may cost them their place as significant providers of energy. And that is exactly as it should be - why is Panasonic and Tesla leading on batteries, and not Exxon? Because they chose to be blind to the future of energy demand. So, let them now be forced to pay licensing fees to companies who hold the patents, be they solar/storage/hydrogen etc. But all of this is a complete digression - why crap on the consensus science in favor of climate change? Anytime I quiz anyone on this, I get crickets. Again, can you point me to a source that isn't in the pockets of fossil fuel industry? If not, then why be a stool pigeon and carry the water of a dead/legacy industry? Just to be chic and contrarian? I sincerely want to know what motivates people to crap on the vast scientific consensus behind climate awareness. So far, I got nothing but trolling (or dogmatic repubs who also believe Trump had the largest inaugural crowd in history, etc etc etc). Hey, I like dem lulz as much as the next btard. But c'mon now. Let's call a spade a spade.

And so finally:

What you are doing is essentially calling for moderate (adj) Muslims to moderate (v) radical Muslims, because they're all Muslims.

 

It doesn't work. It's not a thing that is within the responsible power of middle class individuals even as a collective. I think there is a myth in the middle class understanding of democracy that the aggregation of will into corporate power, and I use that word purposefully, will create corporate responsibility. It's like saying "If every shareholder with voting shares would just... then we can overrule and control the operations of..."

 

The problem you should understand is that there is no recourse in democracy. Once a government has got X amount of power, then corresponding disinvestment in voting does not result in a corresponding diminution in government authority. It only took some small fraction of American voters to turn over the whole over the government apparatus to Trump, as it did with Obama. The ratchet does not slide back gracefully, and in that regard Trump is the best you can get, which is the radical at the top undermining the system he runs.

 

The problem is even worse for a global endeavor which attempts to get some global consensus of its middle class participants to aggregate their power under some entity superseding the power of nations. The more wishful thinking of 'changing the world' voters proxy onto supranational organizations the more dangerously and inevitably irresponsible those organizations become.

 

In short. Responsive democracy does not scale. Exxon and the collective oil industry is that supranational, and it will not be responsive no matter what democratic means are attempted.

 

Why you hear crickets is simple. You are asking people who don't understand how the planet actually uses energy. The planet cannot and will not survive on alternatives to oil. THAT is the denial of scientific research. And here are the findings. http://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/files/Koonin_UCSB_0307.pdf

 

The bottom line is that the second and third world want what the first world has. Emergent populations want cars, trucks, planes, trains, automobiles, air conditioners, dishwashers, radios, televisions, computers, networks, cell phones, nightlife. Low energy per capita = Rural. High energy per capita = Cities. If you want the planet to save energy, you have to force people to stay down on the farm. Force. Not market. Force. Not vote. Force.

 

That means force India. That means force China. That means force South Asia. That means force Brazil. All of those billions want more energy. Western environmentalist politics are entirely incapable of dealing with that reality. All they can do is whine about what their domestic political opponents do to ignore their agenda. Booo hoo, you're 'anti-science'. And what has this complaint availed them? Who among you would even bother to say as much to Putin?

 

So I conclude that all of the green political activism is trying to create a set of beasts through democratic means that would by some (never admitted) fiat, force compliance in governments to compel overburdensome taxation. They will fail. But they also will keep trying, and if on some measure they succeed, then the nature of those beasts will be no more responsive than the supranational beasts who now provide the supply for the growing energy demands of the planet.

 

The only thing big enough to change that is war.

 

The Global Climate Hooha

So let me tell you what I really think.

I think that to ask any political question about the subject matter of 'global climate change' is ridiculous in the first place, and asking for trouble in the second place. I shall first recount some of my own blather on the matter I recently posted to Facebook. 

I agree that American politics on the matter of climate change is ridiculous, pointless and mental masturbation. The only aspect of it that actually does have any credibility is the extent to which some fraction of the populous is compelled to defend scientific research. I have sympathy with that - however the 'science clique' has resorted to demogoguery of the worst kind, and that's the thing that annoys me. So I always make a point to raise matters of scientific study that do not support the popular scientistic consensus. 

Of course I also enjoy mocking Progressives on this particular matter because it is the rise of the BRICs that will, should the entire 'carbon theory' prove correct, be responsible for what warming there would be. So how will Progressives convince Indians and Chinese to *not* want first world transportation systems? And how would global anything be enforced without empire? I think these are questions they are too dainty to address - that they would rather pick on Americans than deal with the actual environmental intransigence of the global populations.

Tangentially, if science is so smart, how come they are so often hapless do-gooders? I mean how have they not figured out how to get along with each other, form a cabal and have their way with everything? Hmm. Maybe it's because they're just dreaming and have delusions of grandeur. Or perhaps they simply don't believe in actual reality as much as political reality. After all, you cannot make money betting against reality in reality-based markets. So where is the reality-based market on the delivery of cotton in China? Everywhere.  It's as old as China itself.  Well, anyway, back to the topic at hand. 

When I get really serious about questions of climate change, the most important question I have deals with how the world's food is produced and distributed, because truly the only thing that is going to make an important difference is whether or not what is good farmland and good fishery today is going to be good tomorrow. And indeed nobody's livlihood depends more on weather than farmers. Am I right? So take JR Simplot for egregious example. They are the world's king of potatoes. And if I had a metric I would do as Paolo Bacigalupi has done in his excellent 'The Windup Girl' and begin to measure total world food production in terms of calories and then divide that by how many people are in the world. Who grows how many calories and who eats how many calories, now what's the price of calories? How we know this about gasoline and oil and don't know it for food shows how unimportant the food problem is. Today.

So when do the weather watchers, who are also money minders, at JR Simplot say. Hmm. We may have to relocate out of Idaho because the climate has changed and Idaho just don't mean potatoes any more. Do the global warmists think JR Simplot are a bunch of dumb micks who will just die out in a potato blight? They surely think that the dudes at BP are bloody geniuses who will exploit the last drop of oil where ever on the globe it may be. So I think that sort of thinking should be applied to all of the seed bankers and mega-agriculturalists on the globe. Which is to say, they will figure out how to feed us all because it's in their interests, and furthermore the weather is not going to creep up on these guys. I am trying to imagine which group of eggheads has more access to more satellite time, feeds, maps and data - the scientists at Monsanto or the grad students at East Anglia? Duh.

So now you know my drift. I am much more interested in food scarcity as reflected in the business of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the likes of Duke & Duke. Nobody ever, ever, ever puts these two things together when talk about 'global climate change' is discussed. That's because they are politicizing the 'science' and ignoring the economics. Yeah I said 'they', and I don't bother to find out who they are. 

Here's the nut. Whatever the hockey stick is with climate change, farmers will move production, swap crops and otherwise be quicker than the weather or the climate. Say what you like about El Nino or the Ozone Hole, neither Katrina nor Sandy made one whit of difference to Iowa. When hurricanes get as far west as Ohio, maybe we can all take a hint. And what about you and me? You and I will eat whatever. Hell, if we can miss Twinkies and put up with non-alcholic beer, we really have no worries.

Now let me speak my other piece. 

That is about the BRICs. Well, I'll just underscore the fact that so long as people on Earth will want automobiles for their personal transportation, then we'll keep using fossil fuels for cars. And we'll keep burning coal for electricity because we all want nightlife. And nobody in these environmental movements will, in the next 40 years (because they're all the same and they haven't done a damned thing about Sudan or Tibet - all they do is move to Seattle and take trips to Alaska to wash oily ducks) will suggest we go to war in order to stop the Chinese from polluting the planet, or the Russians or the Indians or anyplace else that horrendously polluted. Hell we don't even stop Mexico, and have you been to Ciudad Juarez? Holy crud! 

So. Show me where agribusiness is losing the war against weather on a crop by crop basis with regard to the cost of global calorie provision, and I'll tell you exactly what I care about global climate change. 

 

UPDATE:

Interesting Link: USDA Global Agricultural Report

Kirk Sorensen's Thorium Future

All I want is for Kirk Sorensen to have a long conversation with Elon Musk. But then again, I can't imagine how it couldn't have already happened - which is why Flibe must exist. I can't wait for the IPO.  

This is the future. I'm optimistic. This is the best energy talk since Koonin.

Infinite Universal Convergence

If the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory holds, then there are essentially infinite universes. In fact, there would a very huge sort of infinities of universes. If it's based upon the idea that every possibility of every quantum particle interaction instantiates itself in another universe, that's zillions created in every fraction of a second. It can only make sense that these universes overlap, otherwise I'm creating a universes outside of this universe, each a universe away just by typing. So if the universes overlap that means there is interference from every universe impinging on every other universe at once. 

Taking the example of the Moravec thought experiment. If it's a one in a million chance that you don't die from the electric chair, then in one universe you are alive but in a million others you are dead. (technically speaking 999,999 vs 1). So you're never really dead, you are mostly dead with the accumulated weight and energy of 999,999 universes keeping you dead. It is the momentum of the accumulated likely universes that keeps time flowing in one direction and preserves causality. And so it makes sense to say that the momentum of the zillions of likely universes converge reality into a single path objects in which can only escape that overwhelming force at the quantum level.

I think of it as what happens if the Washington Monument toppled over and fell flat on top of you. Well, it's a fact that there is a .50 bullethole in one face of it that was never repaired. When the monument falls, that part of you that fits in the bullethole is not dead, and was never touched.

Steam!

This is something that I have never experienced in my life until this moment.

Where I grew up, it didn't matter which side of the tracks you lived on, all the trains that passed through were slow. I never saw any train go more than 20 mph. I understood that they had fast ones in Japan and Europe, but I believed that perhaps the fastest train ever in America went maybe 50 or at best 60 miles per hour.

One day at lunch in 1989, I was working in the San Fernando Valley at Rockwell. Just like in 'Office Space', we went to one of those cheesy fern burger joints. This one was called Fuddruckers. Just as we were leaving to go back to the office, a freight train sped by. It made a horrific sound, louder than I'd ever heard any train, and it was going 70 miles an hour, for sure. I could not believe my ears or eyes. I was sure that it was just about to wreck. But it passed by without incident. For me it was a Black Swan moment.

Looking at the Union Pacific 844 rolling as fast as it does is only half as exciting as seeing the machinery pushing the drive wheels. These are called valve gear, and it turns out that there are more than a dozen designs of them.

I find it very difficult to believe that there are any kids in highschool today who will learn how to design, build, maintain or repair valve gear. The knowledge is being destroyed through neglect. More likely, they will grow up believing as I did, that steam technology was primitive and incapable of doing what is currently the engineering fashion.

But there it is. Coal fired speed and power. I understand the romance now - the connection to Jazz music. The inspiration of my grandfather's generation. I look back the Steam Age with awe and respect.

Poor vs Poor

When you give to the poor in America, are you really giving to the poor?

Nocera Approaches Dyson's Utopia

Freeman Dyson, many years ago, said the most simple and radical thing I've ever heard. It was the biggest idea. The second biggest idea I heard, also many years ago came from Nicolas Negroponte. He predicted the downfall of broadcast television. His explanation was simple. Everything is going to go digital because Moore's Law will make digital cheaper, and since video is digitally bulky, it's going to be easier to send it through cables than over the air. The content will follow the cheapest path. To be more comprehensive, he said that the phone companies and the broadcast companies would switch places because it was ironic to him that voice was going over wires and video was going over the air. It hasn't finished happening, but the simple beautiful truth of it is becoming manifest.

Freeman Dyson's idea was even larger. He said the way to go is to personalize energy distribution. Most of our energy is lost because it is centrally generated and hierarchically distributed. If you could find smaller energy sources and distribute them equally, it would alleviate the need for pipelines, high tension wire, truck and train transportation of energy. We'd save huge amounts. Moreover we could start living at a more reasonably human rather than sardine scale. 

Dan Nocera has obviated a couple of basic assumptions about energy production and seems to be on the way to demonstrating how fuel cells can power all of our needs. Most excellent 

Here's long version.

Monday Fragments

Bloom Energy
Here's the common sense thing that I've been waiting. There are three megatrends that I hope my kids will follow - they are the most significant things for the 21C in my opinion. The first, which seems to be coming sooner rather than later is Dyson's Utopia, which will be fueled by the Bloom Box and it's like - distributed & decentralized power generation, rather than hierarchical and centralized. The other two are instantaneous voice language translation and biogen, but we can talk about that later.

Apparently the Bloom Box can generate 5KW. That's enough for five normal homes or two with as many HD screens and computers as mine. Looks good for industrial customers, Google has several, but I can't find out what the cost is per unit. If it's not car-price financable, you'll likely only see housing developers buy 'em. Anyway, that's the place to look - where self contained power is a necessity. I think this is one of those leapfrog technologies like cell phones in Africa.

The Coming Pension Wars

Last week, the Pew Center on the States reported that “at the end of fiscal year 2008, there was a $1 trillion gap between the $2.35 trillion states and participating localities had set aside to pay for employees’ retirement benefits and the $3.35 trillion price tag of those promises.”

I'm thinking lifeboat scenarios. Let granny drown. Bill Wilson talks more than I am willing to think on the subject. My mind isn't really made up on the cruel end of the spectrum, but this is the same thing that's going on with Greece. Workers in Germany who are 62 will be subsidizing Greek retirees who are 54 years old. Yes that's right, you retire in Greece at 54. Socialists!

McIntyre vs Briffa: TKO

This is better than Lefkowitz vs Bernal.

Briffa is now a name that will go down in history, with Al Gore as one of the greatest perpetrators of fraud in the modern world. Steve McIntyre will go down in history, rather like the man who finally stopped Senator Joe McCarthy by saying: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" We'll probably forget McIntyre's name as we've forgotten the name of Joseph Nye Welch. We'll probably remember Al Gore. That's fair, the takedown has had many contributors, but baby it's over. The swastika has been blown off the Reichstag.  

This is one of those huge monstrous collapses. It's a scandal inside of a fraud leaked by a hack. It's like Eliot Spitzer wrapped up inside of The Chicago Black Sox with a Piltdown Man on the side. It's like Enron on top of OJ in the middle of Iran-Contra. 

Now that the actual source code that generated the hockey stick has been audited and outed by none other than Eric Raymond, all that's left is the fun of watching the suckers bail. Everybody who has been.. excuse me, every FOOL who has been measuring their carbon footprint is now going to have to explain that they've been practicing voodoo economics. Oh the unwinding! 

People are going to be able to Google "osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro" for a long time and get the goods on what Briffa did. 

But I'm going to put up the most intricate detailed history of skepticism I've seen right here for the permanent record. Check this out:

Download Skeptical Real Climate Science

God, I'm glad I'm not a phony.

Twelve Trees

Global warming is a fraud.

Once upon a time, I might have been convinced that there was something to the IPCC conclusions about the infamous hockey stick of temperatures, but I've always been skeptical of the Green Movement. Well it turns out that this hockey stick has as its originating dataset, 12 trees.

Twelve trees whose growth rings were the basis of the conclusions that have shaken the world were selected by a dude named Briffa and another dude named McIntyre has called him on it. But it took years. Huh what? I mean to say quite plainly that the 'overwhelming majority of scientists' made their conclusion on the basis of a report whose original data was not made available for scientific review. The big bloody secret was that it was twelve measly trees. 

So it's official. That thing I've been distrusting for all of these years is just another scientific animism. A 'scientific' sounding idea that people who don't understand the science take as the whole truth and nothing but the truth, when in fact they are merely taking it on the authority of scientists. Of course that's what I'm doing right now, except I'm being very specific. McIntyre said Briffa was mistaken, and Briffa admitted that there were only 12 trees.

So McIntyre looked at all of the conditions under which the 12 trees were selected, and took a larger data set from the area. Guess what he found? No evidence for global warming. The twelve trees nullified geological testimony. They misrepresented the truth. The truth is that the planet is fine. 

Not long ago, I overheard some talk that all of the temperature variations that the Greenies have been talking about are explicable as epiphenomenon of El Nino. And I've published this claim that carbon dioxide is hardly poison, but that clouds and water vapor are the the big ballers of climate change - kind of back to what I learned as a kid. And of course the late Michael Crichton's State of Fear was all over these activists.

So now all you have to do is mention what should become common knowledge in a matter of days. The Yamal Dataset was faulty. The hockey stick was a myth. The 'scientific consensus' was false.

The Current of Wisdom

I'm truly enjoying riffing as I will from here on out, on Steven Berlin Johnson. He understands why. On page 47 he introduces one of those charts I think everybody needs to know like Maslow's Pyramid. He calls it The Long Zoom of Culture. It looks like this.

You might remember, if you were a geek like me, the old saying about how stupid people talk about themselves, ordinary people talk about other people and intelligent people talk about ideas. A presumably intelligent person would share this idea with you. I've heard it several times and find it impossible to resist the temptation to talk about myself hearing the idea several times. Paradoxical, that.

Nevertheless it's a good start. The question becomes, what ideas are worth talking about when you finally sit down with your brainy mates and not talk about yourselves and other people? Well, I like this long zoom because as you may know I got into the Long Now a year or so ago transitioning off politics at Cobb.

At that same time, I started reading Iain M. Banks' Culture novels and began looking at the sorts of social contexts from which scientific discovery might take its clues. Banks happens to be all the way out there at energy flows. Specifically, what happens to society if, relatively speaking, infinite energy and mindpower is at human disposal?  I concluded that it becomes pleasure-seeking, which is to say fairly unhinged from the disciplines we have generated throughout history on Earth. 

This also dovetails to the question I had not long ago about the cultural predisposition of what is considered a good solution to any social or personal problem. In that post, The Dirty Clothes Cycle, I asked what to do when my clothes, for lack of space, lie putrefying in the washing machine for hours:

Which solution to this problem I select depends upon my cultural favoritism. I might admire chemists and demand the detergent. Or I might admire carpenters and expand my closet. Or I might admire self-improvement and increase the throughput. Or I might admire child labor and make my kids do it. Or I might admire a revolutionary pose and rant against all parts of the the clothing cycle at once. ... Or I might dig on Christian charity and give more to the Salvation Army.

All of that supports my theory, inspired by Charlie Levy, inventor of the Xerox Documentor, that brains are a cheap commodity. But complicating that is the premise of Outliers. There is a deep sociological component to the successful individual. The right place, the right time, the right combination of luck and persistence; all the genius is not all you. People forget that their stomach doesn't work without microbes; our minds don't work in a vacuum either.

So just in case you're a researcher wondering if I understand, let me repeat the Sun God Theory. God is in the middle of the Sun and He communicates to other stars via electromagnetic propagations beyond our spectrum - nevertheless these forces act on our minds, they are part of a substrate of information that travels faster than light. Synchronicity (plate of shrimp) is remote entanglement. 

Brains being a cheap commodity are therefore to be herded like cattle and directed from grazing to grazing. We just haven't mastered the greater methods, and all that paradigm is shifting in our information revolution. A nice Lorite Interrogator would be useful now that I think of it, because it enables conservatism without the benefit of an actual social network of people. Everybody needs a Club of Honest Whigs, but only a few of us can afford the time. I certainly can't but it's been what I've been wishing for forever. 

I'm going to have to just leave this as a riff. It's too loaded to complete, and I haven't finished the book. My point is that I recognize the substrate of progress. I am only too aware of those forces that disrupt the links in the chain from the energy flows to the microbiologicals.

The Happer Report on Climate Change

Tells Al Gore and the IPCC where to put their hockey stick.
Download ClimateChangeNot

If You Build It...

If you can stand the music of Shovelman you might find something of interest among the odd, whimsical and clever devices to be found at the Maker Faire. Their theme 'Remaking America' is more fanciful than likely but who could possibly be against whimsy?

I am not and will not stand against whimsy, but does this leach over into foolishness? I think it depends entirely on the intent of the inventors, which I started to consider when I looked at the steam powered scooter. Putting myself into the shoes of a steampunk mechanical engineer, I immediately thought how cool it might be to rev up my scooter and have nothing but safe and harmless steam come out. I'm sure you could pull a lot of greenie chicks with that move, unlike some slick dude in Chevy v8 even whose hair represents unsustainable dependence on foreign oil. But then on second thought, what's my steam deally using to create the heat?  Well, I obviously couldn't burn coal, or fuel oil, or gasoline - maybe propane?

Yeah propane! Surely the accumulated bourgie biases against the hickness of propane can't survive an onslaught of enlightened conservationism. Well, my bet is that they'd collide and the end products of the reaction will be obscurity and mumbling. After all, propane has been a clean burning, cheap fuel for decades as any redneck or blackneck camper or upscale cabin owner knows.

But there's not only propane, there's also methane aka natural gas. Both can be compressed or liquified for easier transportation, and of course the technology for doing so it old, boring and reliable. And there's nothing sexy or sophisticated about it, well, not like steampunk scooters. So you'd have to hide your canister of CNG behind some facade to make the chicks think that the whole thing is run just on steam alone. Might as well add some patchouli oil to make your steam fragrant and claim that the air that goes in is dirtier than the air that comes out. That's the line that always kills 'em. To choose between methane and propane, well. That would be a commercial and scientific decision, something that has to make sense of markets and the dynamics of combustion. In other words, the rationality of making a truly rational choice for the heat source of your green steam would have to rely on dealing significantly with physical and economic reality. Exit whimsy.

Of course there aren't going to be any mass production of these clever devices. I find it unlikely that the Maker Faire is a real showcase for emerging technologies that would actually change America. Unfortunately for the clever dudes and dudettes around that way, there are other people with similar knowledge who are employed in organizations that tend to master markets as well as science. They are 'trapped' in the industrial complex of America engaged in this thing called 'business'.

Growing up as I did on the Left, it was a very hard lesson to learn that there was a difference between products and technologies. A product, you see, has to arrange and prioritize the assemblages of technologies in response to or anticipation of demand in markets. Unlike a Faire, where you pay to be an exhibitor of cool technology, a market pays you. Unlike punks and geeks, the market is not impressed that something can be done with technology. The market always selfishly asks, what's in it for me?

But markets can be twisted, and given enough disposable income and idiotic memes, people can be persuaded to demand all sorts of whimsical devices which are thus transformed into profitable products. Sometimes a better, more rational and efficient product comes along, and sometimes you're stuck with AT&T or Oldsmobile and you can't easily get out of your commitment. This is called buyer's remorse, something teenagers and wealthy weirdos basically don't understand. And so niche markets are maintained and everybody's happy.  We know that teenagers with disposable income and showoffs with bank help to maintain the myth that 'if you build it, they will come', and it's a nice myth to have. But really, try to remind your kids exactly what a Faire is.

The Other Plasma Burn

Cringley notes that we are on the verge of commercialization of plasma furnaces that can do 100 tons a day. I do like this idea very much:

Eric and Andrew Day propose going back to burning our trash, but instead of using open-air incinerators or even high-temperature Basic Oxygen furnaces, they like the idea of burning our crap in electric plasma furnaces at temperatures in excess of 15,000 degrees Celsius. Take everything that would have gone to the landfill, add to it, if you like, everything that would have been recycled, and even leave in the really bad stuff like medical waste, toxic waste, heavy metals, and radioactive waste. Grind it all up into little chunks, some of which could be in a chemical or water slurry, and pump it into the plasma furnace.

Plasma furnaces have been around for decades and are already used for disposing of medical waste in Japan. Most such furnaces are fairly small, though the Days have found one manufacturer that can make a plasma furnace capable of burning 100 tons of trash per day.

The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms. The manufacturer of the plasma furnace (it's in this week's links) says the syngas can be burned to generate more power than the furnace uses, making it self-sufficient. The Days go much further in their claims, but then they want to make the BIG BUCKS. They say the furnace can be optimized to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Moreover there are other downstream apps for byproducts. Plasma destroys most molecules down to their elemental components except for the heaviest elements which become molten slag. However..

If you were to blow compressed air through a stream of this molten material, you'd end up with rock wool. Rock wool has the appearance of gray cotton candy. It''s light and wispy, and according to Dr. Circeo, it has the potential to revolutionize the plasma waste treatment industry. Rock wool is a very efficient insulation material, twice as effective as fiberglass. It's also lighter than water, but very absorbent. Because of this, it could potentially be used to help contain and clean oil spills in the ocean. Cleanup crews could spread rock wool over and around an oil spill. The rock wool would float on the water while soaking up the oil, making collection a relatively easy process. Hydroponic growing systems can also use rock wool -- farmers can plant seeds in slabs or blocks of it.

Currently rock wool is produced by mining rocks, melting them down and then streaming the molten material onto spinning machines. The spinning machines fling strands of molten material in the air. Today, the price of rock wool is over a dollar a pound. Since rock wool would be a byproduct of the plasma gasification process, it could be sold for as little as 10 cents a pound. The price of insulation would decrease, efficiencies in energy-saving techniques would increase and plasma gasification plants would have another substantial source of income apart from selling electricity back to the grid.

Not bad.

The Energy Efficiency of Nuclear Power

As one of the legs of the stool holding up the theory of 'warsocialism' the author, Jay Hanson, claims:

No alternative – even nuclear [5] – has the potential to replace more than a tiny fraction of the power presently generated by fossil fuels.

It has taken me about an hour this morning to follow a debate on the credibility of the study cited by Hanson. I have been convinced by information found here and most significantly here, that the "Storm-Smith" hypothesis is not credible and over-estimates by many times the energy costs of nuclear power, even taking into consideration the energy used in the construction of the plant, the milling and mining of uranium ore, and the full decommissioning of the plant. In addition, nuclear power can be produced from thorium as well which is three to four times as plentiful as uranium.

From the second site: (emphasis mine)

It is worth noting that the widely quoted paper by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith (SLS), which gives a rather pessimistic assessment of the Energy Lifecycle of Nuclear Power, assumes a far larger energy cost to construct and decommission a Nuclear Power plant (240 Peta-Joules versus 8 Peta-Joules(PJ)). The difference is that Vattenfall actually measured their energy inputs whereas Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Smith employed various theoretical relationships between dollar costs and energy consumed. This paper also grossly over-estimates the energy cost of mining low-grade Ores and also that the efficiency of extraction of Uranium from reserves would fall dramatically at ore concentrations below 0.05%. Employing their calculations predicts that the energy cost of extracting the Olympic Dam mine's yearly production of 4600 tonnes of Uranium would require energy equivalent to almost 2 one-GigaWatt power plants running for a full year (2 GigaWat-years). You can follow this calculation here. This is larger than the entire electricity production of South Australia and an order of magnitude more than the measured energy inputs.

I am therefore convinced that Jay Hanson's pessimism on the potential for nuclear energy to provide is based on faulty research. That in fact nuclear energy can efficiently provide a far greater share of American electric generation. This is not a fundamental problem in physics as claimed, merely a political and economic one.

The Oil Bull

The price of gasoline is beginning to be a pain in my butt. I'm paying $4.17/gallon and I'm commuting 120 miles every day in a car that gets 17 miles per gallon. I'm not freaking out, but I'm beginning to shop smarter for gas. I hate it when life makes me scrimp, but that's just me. So how long am I going to have to deal with this? Where is the silver lining? Well, here's a theory that I like:

The collapse of the price of oil.

    But what happens if a global recession drops demand by 5%? Then prices can fall in half or even more, as they did in 1999. Note that the Asian Contagion recession was limited in global terms; the world's largest economies, the U.S. and Europe, were growing robustly even as southeast Asian economies suffered currency and credit contractions.

         Even this limited downturn caused oil to drop from over $35/barrel to under $15/barrel. That begs the question: what would happen to oil prices if the major global economies actually shrink rather than grow?

         I know, I know, recessions have been officially banned by the Federal Reserve and the other central banks. Uh, right. But let's say the Fed can't stop the U.S. sliding into recession, and the rest of the world declines behind it.

The whole thing sounds a bit hinky to me - a little wishful thinking thrown in for good measure. However, this is not the first time I've heard this theory. The other time? Just last week, listening to Richard A. Muller.

Muller certainly understands that the bulk of the uptick in the price of oil has everything to do with demand in Asia, China & India specifically. So what happens if China has a civil war? I happen to be one of those people who believes that China will have a civil war as their rich get richer and their middle-class inevitably connects with the rest of the world. China is still largely functionally illiterate. But my point is that a lot of things can and probably will go wrong in China. Their economy cannot sustain its current rate of growth. I think they're going to throw a piston. When that happens, watch out.

Aside from that, if we are to have a global recession, Americans will not starve. We'll just forgo some of our back-to-school and Christmas shopping, have another school shooting and buy more weed. But nobody's going to starve. If that's the total cost of kicking off a global recession that lowers the price of gasoline, I think a lot of Americans would be on board.

The other side of this though, is money that is being (or not being) sunken into the extraction of oil from shale. So is the smart money in Canada or not? That's the question, and it's tied to stuff way beyond the horizon. I think there are a number of oil bears who are having a field day as their Peak Oil Scenario is psychologically gaining traction because of woes at the pump, but oil bulls, we haven't heard from.

In the long term, I think it is much more likely that some economic or war event will affect the demand for oil long before the Peak Oil doomsday scenario plays itself out. Last month, demand for gasoline decreased 3% in the US. I sure as hell ain't gonna be driving 120 miles a day much longer.

Nuke Notes 1

From Dennis Prager this morning, Gwenyth Cravens speaks up about nuclear energy. As a proponent, I am beginning to take notes. I am surprised to learn new things about this fascinating option.

Firstly there have only been 59 deaths from Chernobyl.

Secondly, all of America's nuclear waste (and we do practically no recycling) since the beginning is 50,000 tons. That could be stored in a volume the size of a big box retail store. In comparison, we dispose of 160,000 tons of batteries every year.

German Economic Fakery Behind Renewable Power

I desperately tried to find something worth watching on TV last night as I downloaded new stuff for my XBox whose video input dominates the tube. I landed on a PBS science show, Nova I think. Since my kids, going to Southern California public schools are inundated with environmental information some of which is actually useful, I do my part to give them some perspective. Incidently, I gave Sprite a copy of the latest Imprimis on nuclear energy and she sternly told me that she's not concerned with global warming, just air pollution. Excuse me.So I figure it would be worth watching.

Well it turns out that Germany has this deal in which they guarantee to fix the price of electricity generated from solar for twenty years. As a homeowner you buy electricity for .20/kWH and you can sell it back to the grid for .50/kWH. Not a bad scam.

I now recognize how vulnerable children are to the promises of science and environmentalism - it is because they have no concept of economies and the extent to which this small interesting tidbit of capability fits into the realms of possibility. And while this Nova program showed very reasonable soundbites about how renewables are never going to handle much more than peak demand (Duh solar power doesnt' work at night), it was fascinating how quickly they went over to Germany saying that one man is making a difference and got that country to get 20% of their power from renewables, 'and it could go as high as 30%'. Then after that breathless prose they explain the details of the 20 year deal with the government.

The first word out of his mouth was anti-nuclear. Anti-fossil I can understand, and actually have some sympathy for. But the politics of energy are pretty interesting. So now I have decided to forget about healthcare completely. It's all about the energy, baby. I'm the pro-nuke guy.

World Coal Production

1999 production of top 10 countries (in 1000 tonnes)

Country	Total	Percent to Total
China	1030000	23.72
United States of America	997090	22.96
India	314415	7.24
Australia	304000	7
Russian Federation	249400	5.74
South Africa	223510	5.15
Germany	201782	4.65
Poland	171000	3.94
Ukraine	82229	1.89
Korea (Democratic People's Rep.)	81500	1.88
World Total	4343151	84.15

Source: http://www.mapsofworld.com

More Juice for the 21C

Roland Piquepaille writes:

"Today, about 90 percent of the world's electricity is created through an indirect and inefficient conversion of heat. It is estimated that two thirds of the heat used by thermoelectric converters are wasted and released. But now, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have found a new way to convert this wasted heat into electricity by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles. So far, this method of creating electricity creation is in its very early stage, but if it can scale up to mass production it may lead to a new and inexpensive source of energy."

Peak Oil Researchers

Use the following names to talk about 'Peak Oil'

• Paul K. Hubbert
• John Felmy
• Paul Roberts
• Chris Skrebowski
• Joseph J. Romm

(from Warren Olney)

Gasoline prices are rising again, with one survey claiming a national record of $1.77 per gallon. Despite predictions of $3 a gallon before the end of this summer, even by today’s standards, the energy that drives the world’s economy is dirt cheap. Yet, recent books called Out of Gas and The End of Oil are solemn reminders that that will inevitably come to an end. The question is, how soon? New research predicts that supply may stop meeting demand sooner rather than later, with drastic consequences for civilization and planet Earth. Are those the fantasies of Chicken Little, or does the world face massive economic depression and even “energy wars" in the next 30 years? Warren Olney leads a spirited debate among energy reporters, economists, energy trade representatives and a Clinton White House Energy Department official.

Demand Side Bidding

It has been many years since I built some information systems for a power company. But Abiola reminded me with some terms I haven't heard in a while -Baseload, Intermediate and Peak. These are standard classifications of power generators that get their own P&L.

I happen to know that power generators who buy oil or natural gas watch those commodity futures years in advance and plan ahead. The ratio of baseload to intermediate to peak determines the price of power to customers. So it makes sense to me that any customer that is not buying long term power contracts is likely to get screwed. Peakers, in the case of the utility I was working for, were generally small generators that were not always online. They don't get as much maintenance and tend to be flaky. Consequently, the power they generate cost a lot more per MW.

If and when I start working again, I'll have the nerve to crank up my professional software and work out some models. These days I can't stand to look at the software. This Demand Side Bidding sounds interesting.