Month: October 2021

No Planet B. No, Really. Physicist Says Humans May be It for Intelligent Life in the Galaxy.

Guardian:

Humans might be the only intelligent beings in our galaxy, so destroying our civilisation could be a galactic disaster, Prof Brian Cox has warned leaders in the run-up to Cop26.

Speaking at the launch of his new BBC Two series Universe, the physicist and presenter said that having spoken to the scientists around the world advising the show, he thought that humans and sentient life on Earth “might be a remarkable, naturally occurring phenomenon” and that was something that “world leaders might need to know”.

In Universe, Cox explores the idea of the so-called “Goldilocks” theory, which suggests that our planet’s location in relation to the Sun and the unique events over billions of years that created Earth made it “just right” for meaningful life to bloom and evolve.

“What we’ve discovered – I think it’s a reasonable working assumption – is that there are very few civilisations per galaxy,” said Cox.

When asked how important that discovery was for politicians dealing with the climate crisis, Cox said: “I think sometimes that perspective is necessary.

“I would say if our civilisation doesn’t persist, for whatever reason, and it might be an external event or it might be our own action, nuclear war, whatever it is we decide to inflict on ourselves, it is possible that whoever presses that button eliminates meaning in a galaxy for ever.

“And I think that’s something I would think world leaders might need to know. It might actually be quite an important act.”

He went on: “The more I learn about biology … the more astonished I am we exist at all”, adding that while astronomers said there were about 20bn Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy, “so we might expect life to be everywhere”, “almost every biologist I speak to says, ‘Yes, but all it will be is slime at best.’ We live in a violent universe and the idea you can have planets which are stable enough to have an unbroken chain of life might be quite restrictive.”

Continue reading “No Planet B. No, Really. Physicist Says Humans May be It for Intelligent Life in the Galaxy.”

To Whom it May Concern: Voters Overwhelmingly Support Clean Energy Policies

New Research today from Yale and George Mason University.
Turns out people like clean energy and don’t want the planet to become uninhabitable.

Yale Program on Climate Change Communication:

Global Warming and Clean Energy as Government Priorities

  • 60% of registered voters say global warming should be a high or very high priority for the president and Congress.
  • 69% of registered voters say developing sources of clean energy should be a high or very high priority for the president and Congress.

Global Warming and Energy Policies

Majorities of registered voters support a range of policies to reduce carbon pollution and promote clean energy. These include:

  • 86% support providing tax incentives or rebates to homeowners, landlords, and businesses to make existing buildings more energy efficient.
  • 81% support funding more research into renewable energy sources.
  • 81% support providing tax rebates to people who purchase energy-efficient vehicles or solar panels.
  • 79% support providing tax incentives or rebates to homeowners, landlords, and businesses to purchase appliances that can be powered without burning fossil fuels.
  • 75% support setting aside 30% of America’s lands and waters for conservation by 2030.
  • 75% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
  • 74% support requiring publicly traded corporations to disclose how much carbon pollution they produce
  • 70% support transitioning the U.S. economy (including electric utilities, transportation, buildings, and industry) from fossil fuels to 100% clean energy by 2050.
  • 70% support increasing federal funding to low-income communities and communities of color who are disproportionally harmed by air and water pollution.
  • 69% support requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a tax on the carbon pollution they produce, and using that revenue to reduce other taxes (such as the federal income tax) by an equal amount (i.e., a revenue-neutral carbon tax).
  • 66% support requiring electric utilities to produce 100% of their electricity from renewable energy sources by the year 2035.
Continue reading “To Whom it May Concern: Voters Overwhelmingly Support Clean Energy Policies”

Gas Prices will Spike? How High?

Just like computer chips, fossil gas is slow getting ramped up after the COVID plunge.
The longer term market response is that clean energy becomes more competitive.

The short term market response is that generators in the US, China and Europe are using more coal.

Wall Street Journal:

Americans got a stark warning from the government this week: Expect higher heating bills this winter.

According to the Energy Information Administration, nearly half of U.S. households that warm their homes with mainly natural gas can expect to spend an average of 30% more on their bills compared with last year. The agency added that bills would be 50% higher if the winter is 10% colder than average and 22% higher if the winter is 10% warmer than average.

The forecast rise in costs, according to the report, will result in an average natural-gas home-heating bill of $746 from Oct. 1 to March 31, compared with about $573 during the same period last year.

The forecast is part of the EIA’s winter fuels outlook, which projects that U.S. households will spend more on energy this winter than they have in several years. The agency attributed its forecast to rising energy prices—natural-gas futures have this year reached a seven-year high—and the likelihood of a more frigid winter than what most of the country saw last year.

The looming increase, on top of rising prices for many consumer goods and commodities, is likely to cause stress for Americans at many income levels. Economists warn that the larger utility bills are most likely to affect those households still hobbled by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wall Street Journal:

Will the U.S. run out of gas this winter?

The answer is almost certainly “no,” but the rest of the world might not be so fortunate. Now that the U.S. has become a major liquefied natural gas exporter, it can play a big role in making sure other countries have enough. Or it can keep some of that gas at home if domestic natural gas prices, already at their highest since the 2014 polar vortex, spike further. 

Continue reading “Gas Prices will Spike? How High?”

UnManufacturing: Tesla Co-Founder Turns to Lithium Recycling

When you hear the bogus “but Lithium mining” nonsense, remember that we mine literally a 100,000 times as much coal as we do Lithium, so that even a 20-40x expansion is still going to be minor by comparison (add in fracking, drilling, etc)

And Lithium, unlike coal, is recyclable.

ARPA to Hold Low Energy Nuclear Workshop

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E):

Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Workshop

October 21-22, 2021

The objective of this workshop is to explore compelling R&D opportunities in Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) [1], in support of developing metrics for a potential ARPA-E R&D program in LENR. Despite a large body of empirical evidence for LENR that has been reported internationally over the past 30+ years in both published and unpublished materials, as well as multiple books, there still does not exist a widely accepted, on-demand, repeatable LENR experiment nor a sound theoretical basis. This has led to a stalemate where adequate funding is not accessible to establish irrefutable evidence and understanding of LENR, and lack of the latter precludes the field from accessing adequate funding. Building on and leveraging the most promising recent developments in LENR research, ARPA-E envisions a potential two-phase approach toward breaking this stalemate:

  1. 1. Support targeted R&D toward establishing at least one on-demand, repeatable LENR experiment with diagnostic evidence that is convincing to the wider scientific community (focus of this workshop);
  2. 2. If phase 1 above is successful (metrics to be determined), support a broader range of R&D activities (to be defined later) toward better understanding of LENR and its potential for scale-up toward disruptive energy applications, thus setting up LENR for broader and more systematic support by both the public and private sectors.

Disclaimer:

For the presentations included or linked on this website, the views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States Government or any agency thereof, or its contractors or subcontractors. The organization names used on this site or in the linked presentations are the trademarks of their respective holders. Reference or depiction herein to any specific organization, device, product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof or its contractors or subcontractors.

[1] For the purposes of this workshop, LENR is defined as a not-yet-understood process (or class of processes) characterized by system energy outputs characteristic of nuclear physics (typically >> 1 keV/amu/reaction) and energy inputs characteristic of chemistry (~eV/atom)

Wiki:

Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature. It would contrast starkly with the “hot” fusion that is known to take place naturally within stars and artificially in hydrogen bombs and prototype fusion reactors under immense pressure and at temperatures of millions of degrees, and be distinguished from muon-catalyzed fusion. There is currently no accepted theoretical model that would allow cold fusion to occur.

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Manchin’s Home State Hammered by Climate Change

New York Times:

FARMINGTON, W.Va. — In Senator Joe Manchin’s hometown, a flood-prone hamlet of about 200 homes that hugs a curve on a shallow creek, the rain is getting worse.

Those storms swell the river, called Buffalo Creek, inundating homes along its banks. They burst the streams that spill down the hills on either side of this former coal-mining town, pushing water into basements. They saturate the ground, seeping into Farmington’s aging pipes and overwhelming its sewage treatment system.

Climate change is warming the air, allowing it to hold more moisture, which causes more frequent and intense rainfall. And no state in the contiguous United States is more exposed to flood damage than West Virginia, according to data released last week.

From the porch of his riverfront house, Jim Hall, who is married to Mr. Manchin’s cousin, recounted how rescue workers got him and his wife out of their house with a rope during a flood in 2017. He described helping his neighbors, Mr. Manchin’s sister and brother-in-law, clear out their basement when a storm would come. He calls local officials when he smells raw sewage in the river.

“These last few years here in West Virginia, we’ve had unbelievable amounts of rain,” Mr. Hall said. “We’ve seriously considered not staying.”

Mr. Manchin, a Democrat whose vote is crucial to passing his party’s climate legislation, is opposed to its most important provision that would compel utilities to stop burning oil, coal and gas and instead use solar, wind and nuclear energy, which do not emit the carbon dioxide that is heating the planet. Last week, the senator made his opposition clear to the Biden administration, which is now scrambling to come up with alternatives he would accept.

Mr. Manchin has rejected any plan to move the country away from fossil fuels because he said it would harm West Virginia, a top producer of coal and gas. Mr. Manchin’s own finances are tied to coal: he founded a family coal brokerage that paid him half a million dollars in dividends last year.

But when it comes to climate, there’s also an economic toll from inaction.

The new data shows that Mr. Manchin’s constituents stand to suffer disproportionately as climate change intensifies. Unlike those in other flood-exposed states, most residents in mountainous West Virginia have little room to relocate from the waterways that increasingly threaten their safety.

Adding to the problem, West Virginia officials have struggled to better protect residents, despite a surge of federal money, experts say. They point to a reluctance among state officials to even talk about climate change, and to housing that is not built for the challenge, leaving West Virginia less able than other parts of the country to adapt.

The measure that Mr. Manchin opposes, a clean electricity program, may be the last chance for Congress to reduce planet-warming emissions before the effects of climate change become catastrophic.

A clean electricity program would reward utilities that switch from burning oil, gas and coal to using wind, solar and nuclear energy, and penalize those that don’t. It is designed to get 80 percent of the country’s electricity from clean sources by 2030, up from 40 percent now.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Manchin, Sam Runyon, said the senator “has long acknowledged the impacts of climate change in West Virginia. That is why he’s worked hard to find a path forward on important climate legislation that maintains American leadership in energy innovation and critical energy reliability.”

Others say that by blocking efforts to reduce coal and gas use, Mr. Manchin risks hurting his state.

Without Biden Plan, Clean Energy Will Be Dominated by China

PV-Tech:

China has started building work on the first 100GW phase of a solar and wind buildout that is likely to see hundreds of gigawatts deployed in the country’s desert regions.

Speaking via video link at a United Nations Biodiversity Conference today (12 October), Chinese President Xi Jinping said construction on the initial phase, which will have an estimated capacity of 100GW, recently started in a “smooth fashion”.

While the location and construction timeline of the projects, nor the total expected capacity or the number of subsequent phases, were not revealed, the scheme will represent a notable chunk of China’s ambition of reaching more than 1,200GW of installed solar and wind capacity by 2030.

Note: Total US generating capacity is about 1100 GW.

Mike O’Boyle in The Hill:

Even as COVID-19 was ravaging the world economy, clean energy technologies continued to thrive in 2020. Renewable electricity construction shattered records and accounted for 90 percent of the entire global power sector’s expansion, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Electric vehicles did the same, increasing sales 43 percent year over year.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, industry support can be paired with industry regulation to super-charge domestic clean energy manufacturing and create millions of American jobs. That is the American Jobs Plan’s vision — beating China and Europe to the clean energy future by pushing businesses to innovate while incentivizing them to capture this opportunity.

China’s policies will continue to support the domestic manufacturing of solar panels and batteries, which are key components of the clean energy economy. Though China emitsmore planet-warming pollution than any other country, President Xi has also set goals to build more wind and solar power in the next nine years than today’s entire U.S. grid has online.

European countries have cornered the international market on another emerging renewable technology: offshore wind. Proactive government support to build transmission lines, hold competitive auctions, and expand port infrastructure have allowed European companies to manufacture over 80 percent of the world’s offshore wind turbines and develop and own the majority of projects. Meanwhile, the technology now competes subsidy-free in European electricity markets and employs 110,000 Europeans. Because they command the market, virtually all major offshore wind turbine manufacturers reside in Europe — meaning any U.S. offshore wind farm built in the near-term will have to rely on European manufacturing.

The American Jobs Plan is a national strategy to bring these jobs back home. Pairing a national clean electricity standard, which requires utilities to buy clean power, with high-road labor standards and domestic manufacturing support, will expand the middle class by creating jobs that pay wages higher than the national average while reducing air pollution and enhancing environmental justice. 

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