Month: December 2024

More Light than Heat from Clean Energy

I’ve been saving the Sankey Diagram below for the right post. Stumbled across my friend Karin Kirk’s two year old post this morning.

Karin Kirk in Yale Climate Connections:

Traditional electricity generation has a thermodynamics problem: Burning fuel to generate electricity creates waste heat that siphons off most of the energy. By the time electricity reaches your outlet, around two-thirds of the original energy has been lost in the process.

This is true only for “thermal generation” of electricity, which includes coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Renewables like wind, solar, and hydroelectricity don’t need to convert heat into motion, so they don’t lose energy.

The problem of major energy losses also bedevils internal combustion engines. In a gasoline-powered vehicle, around 80% of the energy in the gas tank never reaches the wheels. (For details, see an earlier post comparing the efficiency of electric vehicles and internal combustion engines.)

Fossil-fueled power plants are more efficient than a car’s engine, but they still grapple with the same obstacle. In both cases, converting energy from one form to another leaves only a fraction of the original energy left over to accomplish the intended task.

Continue reading “More Light than Heat from Clean Energy”

Century Old Cartoon Relevant Again

From Facebook:
Temple Daily Telegraph (1930): The Anti-Vaxxers

Everyone here will be familiar with the pattern.

Bulwark:

DONALD TRUMP’S ANNOUNCEMENT last month of Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as his nominee to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health further intensified the controversy—and alarm—about what the second Trump administration will mean for American science and medicine. Consider the nominees for the most prominent federal health posts: Bhattacharya at the NIH, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, former Florida Congressman Dr. David Weldon at the CDC, Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Marty Makary at the FDA, and former Fox News personality Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as surgeon general. This is, unmistakably, a takeover of the public health establishment by COVID-19 contrarians—or, if you prefer, by COVID cranks.

Unlike RFK Jr., a longtime, all-around conspiracy theorist with no medical background, Bhattacharya is an actual physician. He also has a Ph.D. in economics, and a track record of reputable scholarship focusing on policy questions related to public health. But there is no question that Bhattacharya owes his nomination to one thing: his emergence early in the COVID pandemic as a vocal critic of the public health consensus that favored social distancing to mitigate the spread of the virus. Bhattacharya was one of the three co-authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” an October 2020 statement that called for “focused protection” for the elderly and other vulnerable groups while letting the virus spread through the rest of the population until herd immunity was reached.

At the time, most scientists thought it was a terrible idea. Among them was then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins; a few days after the statement was posted, he emailed National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, referring to Bhattacharya and his colleagues as “fringe epidemiologists” and suggesting “a quick and devastating published take down” of the statement. Bhattacharya, who later obtained that email via the Freedom of Information Act, told a congressional subcommittee in March 2023 that he and his colleagues were “targeted for censorship” and “targeted for suppression by federal officials” because their arguments were a threat to the establishment’s “illusion” of scientific consensus.

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More Shredding: Billy Bob Thornton’s Tired Viral Rant

Above, Billy Bob Thornton’s viral anti clean energy rant shredded

Below:Heather Mirletz is an Energy researcher at Colorado School of Mines andThe National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL):

Energy out/energy in ratio for solar panels is 20:1, and getting better.
Energy out/energy in ratio for fossil fuels is 15:1 and getting worse.
Bogus Oil/gas industry talking points shredded by actual data.

The Weekend Wonk: Nancy Maclean on Climate and Democracy in Chains

I’ve been telling anyone who will listen for the last 7 years or so, read “Democracy in Chains”.

Obviously enough people did not, because the nightmare scenario outlined in the book has come to pass, the culmination of 50 years of patient work by a cadre of true believing conservative activists and billionaires.
Draws the clear connection between the fight for Democracy and the fight for a livable planet.

Americans have been so arrogant, ignorant, and entitled, that they believed that the banking regulations that kept us from being robbed, the health practices that kept us from dying or being crippled, the labor laws that give us a weekend off and overtime, the international agreements that have shaped an extraordinary period without global war, the environmental laws that protect our air and water, and the norms and behaviors that kept our democracy strong – were all some kind of unchangeable natural order.

They did not understand that people fought and died for these things, and that they could be chipped away by a greedy few acting for their own benefit.

University of Wisconsin, Department of History:

Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.

Texas, California, Leading Battery Revolution

E&E News:

The power went out during a California heat wave in 2020. Two years later, only a last-minute intervention by state officials prevented rolling blackouts. But last week, as temperatures soared past 100 degrees, the state didn’t have to hit the emergency button.

The state’s fortunes shifted due to a massive battery boom. 

“The bulk power grid is currently stable and energy supply is sufficient to meet demand,” Anne Gonzales, a spokesperson for the California Independent System Operator, said Monday.

California has long relied on a mix of renewables and natural gas to keep the power flowing and air conditioners humming. On a typical day, solar generation surges in the daytime and natural gas picks up the slack after sunset.

The state ran into challenges during previous heat waves because it did not have enough power to meet demand. It was especially acute in the evening, when temperatures were hot, power demand was high and solar facilities had stopped producing.

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What Hope Is.

Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat

by Caitlin Seida

Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.

It’s what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.

It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such
diseases as
optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across
your path
and 
bites you in the ass.

Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It’s a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.

Fukushima Cleanup Quietly Continues

Wall Street Journal video report above – pressure builds for Japan to build up its nuclear industry as power demands for AI and Data Centers ramp up, and climate concerned citizens and politicians demand more carbon free power. But questions of economics, and safety, in one of the world’s most active earthquake zones, persist.

AP:

 A robot that has spent months inside the ruins of a nuclear reactor at the tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi plant delivered a tiny sample of melted nuclear fuel on Thursday, in what plant officials said was a step toward beginning the cleanup of hundreds of tons of melted fuel debris.

The sample, the size of a grain of rice, was placed into a secure container, marking the end of the mission, according to Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, which manages the plant. It is being transported to a glove box for size and weight measurements before being sent to outside laboratories for detailed analyses over the coming months.

Plant chief Akira Ono has said it will provide key data to plan a decommissioning strategy, develop necessary technology and robots and learn how the accident had developed.

The first sample alone is not enough and additional small-scale sampling missions will be necessary in order to obtain more data, TEPCO spokesperson Kenichi Takahara told reporters Thursday. “It may take time, but we will steadily tackle decommissioning,” Takahara said.

Despite multiple probes in the years since the 2011 disaster that wrecked the. plant and forced thousands of nearby residents to leave their homes, much about the site’s highly radioactive interior remains a mystery.

Continue reading “Fukushima Cleanup Quietly Continues”