New Alaska Coal Fired Power Plant

 Maybe it's only an example of how things work now but the Feds are giving the University of Alaska-Fairbanks $9 million to fund the research into the development of a coal-fired power house with an integrated CCS system and pipeline project to move the liquid CO2. 

Analyzing this sort of transaction reveals an interesting sequence of events in US technological progress. 

First of all, in defiance of the tenets of capitalism the federal government determines what research, from the many possible, are within its domain. Theoretically, if society was genuinely interested in "clean" energy production without the externality of the production of undesirable gases, that demand would be an incentive for private entities to finance and carry out the research, development and installation of the necessary facilities. Apparently this is not the case. Historically, the private national railroad system was financially encouraged by the federal government. It wasn't a given that the postal system should be a government monopoly but so it is, although now in an abbreviated form. The telephone network could have easily been a national project but it's not, even though both the post office and the telephone system were substantially designed by the same person, Theodore Newton Vail. The Interstate Highway System, encouraged by Eisenhower as a necessity for national defense, is a federal project carried out by private contractors. Electrical power and automobile production have been heavily regulated by the federal government but remain in the hands of corporations, although one could make the case that the tax and regulatory position of the government makes it a co-owner.

The federal government, through its bureaucracies, steers research that takes place in academia. In the case of CAGW the research financed by government and the population through taxes already assumes that climate change produced by fossil fuels is a fact. If this is true, what more research into its validity is needed? Of course, there isn't any. The only research needed now is in the most effective way to replace reliable fossil fuels with renewables. 

Perhaps one could make the case that showering funds on research into renewable energy among a host of academic institutions is most likely to produce the technology needed. This would be a new approach to previous efforts. An example would be the Manhattan Project, a concerted effort by the defense department itself to develop an atomic bomb. While sequestering CO2 is different than blowing people to smithereens, it seems to have a similar existential role. 

Since academia is to be the focus of the CAGW issue, what is its function? There are 2 divisions of the function. One is research into the physics of the problem itself, which is delineated in research from over 100 years ago by Swedish savant Svante Herrenius, who, among others, promoted the connection between CO2 and a warming climate. No further research seems to have changed anything in his analysis. The second function would be the design of the equipment needed to address the problem. This is an engineering task, using established physics,chemistry and materials science to create that equipment. Companies that make similar equipment hire educated engineers to design it, then they build it. It's no longer the role of academia. 

Portions of society may feel that awarding millions of dollars to research universities to solve engineering problems makes sense. It doesn't because that's not the role of universities, which is primarily education and secondarily research. It isn't applications engineering. An expensive mistake is being made in the attempted elimination of fossil fuels.    

2220 Megawatts of Reliable Power Going Away

Xcel Energy is shutting down one of its existing coal-fired generators at the Sherco Generating Station in Becker, MN on the last day of the year. According to the schedule, all three will be history by 2030, replaced in the future by 3250 acres covered with a million solar panels now under construction. They will feed power into an array of batteries capable of storing 10 megawatts of power every 100 hours on a 10 acre site.

The switch from coal-fired electricity to its solar replacement doesn't seem to have generated much controversy since the move is meant to arrest the by-product, increased atmospheric CO2, which is deemed to be the cause of the ongoing climate crisis.  

 

Missile Cancer

 

 

malmstrom.af.mil 

After over 70 years of maintaining the operational capability of the ICBMs on the northern plains of the US, the Air Force is investigating the possibility that personnel assigned to the task may have an increased incident of cancer. Thought to be due to their proximity to radioactive materials, the Air Force is surveying missile silos and related sights for fissile materials that could be the source. So far nothing has been discovered except PCB contamination. 

The investigation is taking place at the three sites where underground missile silos are located: near Malmstrom AFB in Montana, Minot AFB in North Dakota, and F. E. Warren AFB in Wyoming.

The procedures required in maintaining nuclear weapons are, of course, very detailed and rigorous. It seems unlikely that personnel would be exposed to a greater level of radioactivity than workers at civilian nuclear generating stations but who knows?  

More Discouragement For CO2 Pipeline Profiteers Update

 South Dakota is a place with a rural outlook on life. While one of the leading manufacturers of immense arena scoreboards, Daktronics, is located in small city Brookings and Ellsworth Air Force Base protects the country from its position northwest of Rapid City, most of the rest of the state is dedicated to agriculture. The people are hard-working and self-reliant by necessity. They are happy to adopt technological improvements that increase crop yields and make farming more successful. The corn they grow is not only feed for the premium beef enjoyed by Americans but also the feed stock for the ethanol plants fermenting the corn into a required gasoline additive.

Part of the ethanol production process also involves the production of gaseous CO2, as it does with any fermentation. Presently almost all of this benign gas is exhausted into the atmosphere. According to some researchers this CO2 is a major component of AGW, climate change, all  421 parts per million in the skies above. While there's controversy over the reality and importance of this belief, academic research says it is so and government implements and subsidizes programs advocated by academe and business as remedies.

Companies enthralled with the subsidized opportunity to obtain the CO2 from ethanol plants and moving it to a spot where it can be sequestered far beneath the surface are running into trouble because the thousands of miles of pipelines required to do this aren't permitted by South Dakota regulators and are unpopular with landowners. Navigator Heartland Greenway LLC's application for building CO2 pipelines in that state failed to get regulatory approval. The sane people in North Dakota have rejected the plans of Summit Carbon Solutions for a similar project. 

Don't expect these CO2 pirates to give up easily. There are ways to get things done when big bucks are involved. Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska are targets as well.

-----------------------------------------------

Summit Carbon Solutions has announced that they've acquired 80% of the needed North Dakota easements for their 2000 mile project tying 32 ethanol plants to an underground storage site northwest of Bismarck, ND.

 

 

Summit's project appears to be limited to the movement of the liquified C02 from the ethanol plant to its ultimate destination, the deep permanent storage site in North Dakota. Originally scheduled for operation in 2024 the legalities of the land easements might have caused a delay. There's also been no mention of the facilities needed at each plant for compressing the CO2 gas into a liquid form, if construction has already taken place, who was or is responsible for it and how the liquid CO2 will be staged through the pipeline system. 

Brightline West Won't Produce 400,000 Tons of CO2

 

applevalley.org

The machinery is in place for the construction of Brightline West, a high-speed train running down the right-of-way of I-15 between Rancho Cucamonga, CA and Las Vegas, NV. This article in the Orange County Register takes a skeptical view of the project from a variety of angles, particularly the financing, which is typical, private entities cash the checks initially, the public pays for failures later. 

Meant to replace the substantial automobile traffic between SoCal and Sin City, the electric-powered private railroad won't produce the 400,000 tons of CO2 annually that moving the same number of people by car would. This is because the juice used to propel the train would be generated by "renewable" fossil fuel free means. In addition to the required track infrastructure, that of the renewable energy sources will need to be built as well. Travel time one way is supposed to be a little over 2 hours but there's no guarantee that travelers will foresake their cars, even EVs, to ride the Brightline West.

There's already a privately owned Brightline train running between Orlando and Miami with 5 stops in between. Currently a round trip ticket between the 2 costs $208 for the economy version and $298 for the luxury voyage of about 7 hours both ways.  Unlike the planned California trains the Florida Brightlines are powered by Siemens Charger SCB-40 diesel electric engines.     

 

 

The University Man

". . .the truly individualist and entrepreneurial scene today is the university. Having long enjoyed a bureaucratic haven from the individualist anarchy of commerce, the university man is becoming aggressively non-conformist. His intense book training makes this easy for him. But he has previously held back out of an instinctive sense of his authentic role. Today sparked by private grants from the big collective foundations the professor is able to function as a figure of private initiative and as an employee of labor. Today, in a word, the professor is about to assume the individualist role relinquished by the business community. Private enterprise having whirled itself in a new collective way with long-term goals. It is prepared to use its vast funds to subsidize the very individualism which it has outgrown."

Marshall McLuhan, Explorations, 1967, Something Else Press, Inc. New York

_________________________________________________

When he wrote these words McLuhan hadn't experienced the still growing feminism of academia, which has added another dimension to the changing relationship between the business community and higher education.   

Glauconite

 Sadly, glauconite is found in some of the areas where offshore wind turbine installations have been planned in the northeastern US. It turns out the substance makes it impossible to correctly install the pilings that support the giant wind turbines that are to eventually supply the renewable energy for portions of New England. The presence of the mineral has made some parts of existing leases unusable for that purpose. Three of the 19 leases, Empire Wind, Sunrise Wind and Beacon Wind. all contain areas of glauconite. Equinor, a state-owned international energy firm headquartered in Stavanger, Norway, holds the leases on Empire Wind and Beacon Wind. Sunrise Wind is a project of Ørsted, the world's largest developer of offshore wind turbine installations in terms of numbers. They are located in Denmark.

Fisherman's associations and government agencies have had reservations about turbine siting in the area for a number of reasons. The glauconite issue has led to a smaller number of proposed turbines in the known affected areas but the details of the investigations made by the companies themselves have not been released.

Originally, Empire Wind was to supply 2.1 GW of power from 130 turbines and supply electricity to a million homes. Beacon Wind's production was planned to be 1230 MW and Sunrise 924 MW. Of course that's when the wind is blowing with sufficient intensity.

German Greens Retreat Before Farmer Wrath

The German federal budget is in a pickle with farmers over €60 million earmarked for Covid purposes. Not having spent the funds for their original purpose the government had planned on using some of them for continuing the subsidies on farmers' diesel fuel and tax breaks for equipment purchases. The German constitutional court decreed that the government couldn't make this move, leaving them with an immense hole in their budget and an inability to continue the subsidies and tax breaks.

 yahoo.com 

Unhappy farmers have converged on Berlin, tying up the streets with farm equipment. 

There's been an attempt in Germany and many other places in Europe to tie agriculture to the existential climate crisis, including aspects of this example. There have been farmer protests in the Netherlands, Poland, Italy and other countries. In as much as food is the most basic and essential need of every  organism, that realization may have an impact on at least part of the multi-faceted existential climate crisis.  

How Smart Is Your Dog?

 

youtube.com 

The close bond between humans and canines is very much reinforced by the fact that dogs are considered to be more intelligent than other common domestic animals like cats, guinea pigs, canaries and betas. This is probably true but what does it mean?

Dogs seem to have a large range of intelligence across the specie. Some appear bright, others less so. How is this determined? Ordinarily, a dog that can be trained to follow commands is thought to be more intelligent than one that ignores instruction. A dog that delivers the paper or hunts down an escaped convict is more intelligent than one that spends most of its time on the couch. Of course, nowadays few dogs even have the opportunity to fetch a newspaper but if they did would it be evidence of intelligence? Most dog owners would think so. But they might be wrong.

Dogs that are easily trained to do simple tasks might not be as clever as dogs that refuse. Perhaps following the instructions of a master isn't indicative of the sophisticated thinking that humans see as intelligence. A dog that walks away and lays down after its owner throws a ball across the lawn has his own priorities that don't include chasing balls. He may know through experience that later there will be a strange substance in his dish that he's come to recognize as food even if he fails to retrieve the ball. Would that make him stupid?

If there's even a germ of reality in this analysis it could be extended to other common animals, humans for instance. Infant males and females are trained from birth to do some things and refrain from others. If they quickly adopt those standards they're considered more intelligent than others that need a longer toilet training regimen or take their time learning to read. While parents and neighbors are happy to see children adopt the routines of their culture, it might not mean all that much in the intelligence of later life, however it might be described. If it's described as being able to follow orders and conform to established standards then some bright people are being held to the same standards as pets. A case could be made that the educational system is just that, a mechanism for training rather than education. A production of uniformity rather than a development of the unique assets of each individual. 

Harvard Economics

  new york post 

COP 28, What Was The Result?

Today, Wednesday, December 13, 2023, is the last scheduled day of the COP 28 convention of climate Cassandras in Dubai. There is some dissatisfaction among the attendees that an immediate end to the use of fossil fuels and a transfer of wealth to the developing global south didn't take place.

UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres said: "Many vulnerable countries are drowning in debt and at risk of drowning in rising seas. It is time for a surge in finance, including for adaptation, loss and damage and reform of the international financial architecture.”

 

 

 polityka.pl

While many financial numbers related to contributions were enumerated in the talks, there didn't seem to be any details on how these funds would be applied to the problem of climate change or how whatever success in preventing floods, droughts and wild fires was to be measured.

US government figures at the COP 28 included special climate guy John Kerry and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as:

Alice Albright, CEO, Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)

Rostin Behnam, Chairman, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)

Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, Department of State (DoS)

Deanne Criswell, Administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

Enoh Ebong, Director, United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA)

Amos Hochstein, Senior Advisor for Energy and Investment, White House

Jennifer Klein, Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Gender Policy Council (GPC)

Reta Jo Lewis, Chair, Export-Import Bank (EXIM)

Brenda Mallory, Chair, White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)

Scott Nathan, CEO, U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC)

C. William Nelson, Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

John Podesta, Senior Advisor to the President for Clean Energy Innovation and Implementation, White House

Samantha Power, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

Michael Regan, Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Richard Spinrad, Administrator, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Thomas James Vilsack, Secretary, Department of Agriculture (USDA)

Shalanda Young, Director, Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

Ali Zaidi, National Climate Advisor, White House

 

Many US universities sent delegations to the COP 28 meetings. The University of Minnesota was represented by 14 delegates. The University of Pennsylvania sent 24 delegates. Sixteen students and a faculty adviser from the University of Michigan attended the affair. Over a dozen Harvard faculty members made the trip to Dubai.

They, and many others, are committed to the abandonment of fossil fuels before the earth becomes uninhabitable.

The disappointment of the COP 28 representatives was probably inevitable in that it isn't possible for the confab to force the biggest users of fossil fuels to destroy their own economies on the basis of dubious science. 

Overlapping the COP 28 was the Egyptian Defense Expo outside of Cairo. It had roughly half the attendance of the Dubai celebration and the products exhibited were based on scientifically proven principles. 

 

World's First Generation 4 Nuclear Plant Goes On-line in China

Shidaowan, a new nuclear reactor over 20 years in development and construction has begun producing power in eastern China's Shandong province.

 

 

photo: Weibo/CPNN 

The significance of this event is that the design uses helium gas to cool the reactor rather than water and if the concept works it will enable similar reactors to be built in places without the water resources that have been required in previous designs. In addition, designers state that melt-downs can't occur in the Shidaowan plant.   

Using Averages To Predict The Future

The first paragraph in an article from physics.org:

 "Researchers from institutions including the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created a new method for statistically analyzing climate models that projects future conditions with more fidelity."

 ___________________________________

 

 "We don't judge models individually," said Elias Massoud, a computational ecohydrologist at ORNL. "Instead, we see how they can be put together, using their combined information to get projections of the future." 

A federal agency combines predictions of the future to arrive at a more accurate prediction than that of any one individual prediction. This will increase the "fidelity" of their own predictions. Since no one can currently assure us of the details of the climate future, that fidelity can't be measured at this time, regardless of the methodology used.

Certainly if a very large number of predictions are included in the study, perhaps all possible outcomes, a small number of them may be accurate. Those can't be determined until future conditions become present, or even better, past conditions. The ORNL study is a Bayesian one, using posterior data in a statistical format to arrive at an outcome. If it was that simple we could all be rich.  

A Few Words From Marshall McLuhan

   Any innovation threatens the equilibrium of existing organization. In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so that they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses. When one is found, it is assigned to a group for neutralizing and immunizing treatment. It is comical, therefore, when anybody applies to a big corporation with a new idea hat would result in a great "increase of production and sales." Such an increase would be disaster for the existing management. They would have to make way for new management. Therefore, no new idea ever starts from within a big operation. It must assail the organization from outside, through some small but competing organization. In the same way, the outering or extension of our bodies and senses in a "new invention" compels the whole of our bodies and senses to shift into new positions in order to maintain equilibrium. A new "closure" is effected in all our organs and senses, both private and public, by any new invention. Sight and sound assume new postures, as do all the other faculties. With the telegraph, the entire method, both of gathering and of presenting news, was revolutionized. Naturally, the effects on language and on literary style and subject matter were spectacular.

   In the same year, 1844, then, that men were playing chess and lotteries on the first American telegraph, Soren Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread. The Age of Anxiety had begun. For with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting. To put one's nerves outside, and one's physical organs inside the nervous system or the brain, is to initiate a situation-if not a concept-of dread.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, 1998, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 251-252.    

What Plato Thought About Education

"Shall we simply allow our children to listen  to any stories that anyone happens to make up, and so to receive into their minds ideas often the very opposite of those we shall think they ought to have when they are grown up? No, certainly not. It seems, then, our first business will be to supervise the making of fables and legends, rejecting all which are unsatisfactory; and we shall induce nurses and mothers to tell their children only those which we have approved, and to think more of molding their souls with these stories  than they now do of rubbing their limbs to make them strong and shapely."

Plato, Republic, 377, English trans., by F. M. Cornford (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1941) p. 67