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Post by aquaduct on Jan 15, 2022 9:27:17 GMT -5
...and peer reviewed to boot! I took the Majorminor's truck thread (Steve, your cut of $0 is in the mail) from the other day and decided to clean it up and try to get it published on one of my favorite sites and, as of this morning it has been. Leftist Regulatory PolicyWorked with an editor who was great and cut it down a bit, helped fill in with one of the major linked references, and worked with me on the pseudonym. He left out the link to the F450 King Ranch, which I kind of liked, but overall it gets to the point and is tight and well supported. So cool. |
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Post by Marshall on Jan 15, 2022 9:33:32 GMT -5
P.M. Lark?
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Post by aquaduct on Jan 15, 2022 9:41:24 GMT -5
I originally suggested Pieces of Malarkey, a band name I've had for 15 or so years. But they want a realistic sounding person's name. So they editted it down. |
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Post by epaul on Jan 15, 2022 13:23:49 GMT -5
Congratulations!
Well written. Who knows what may follow.
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Post by Marshall on Jan 15, 2022 13:35:50 GMT -5
Congratulations! Well written. Who knows what malarkey may follow. Fixed it for ya. |
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Post by james on Jan 15, 2022 13:37:04 GMT -5
Do the giddy heights of Gateway Pundit beckon?
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Post by aquaduct on Jan 15, 2022 14:24:34 GMT -5
Do the giddy heights of Gateway Pundit beckon? Who knows. Better than Wonkette.com or rightwingwatch. |
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Post by billhammond on Jan 15, 2022 15:57:51 GMT -5
Good piece, Peter, with a Shakespearean close, no less. One question I had:
"The numbers I've seen from people who've done the calculations say as little as 5% of the energy that went into making electricity actually ends up doing useful work."
First of all, that attribution of your source is weak, at best, but beyond that, are we in agreement that "work" means applications that move things, or pressure things, as opposed to motionless life essentials such as lighting, heating, battery charging and on and on?
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Dub
Administrator
I'm gettin' so the past is the only thing I can remember.
Posts: 19,903 
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Post by Dub on Jan 15, 2022 16:47:20 GMT -5
Good job, Peter. Well done.
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Post by james on Jan 15, 2022 17:12:28 GMT -5
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Post by aquaduct on Jan 15, 2022 18:22:16 GMT -5
Yeah, yeah, heard all that bullshit a decade ago in California's endangerment finding. The legal and encyclopedic definitions don't hold any authority over the actual science definition whic I laid out in the piece. Skeptical Science should come out of his mom's basement and learn what real science is. |
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Post by aquaduct on Jan 15, 2022 18:48:34 GMT -5
Good piece, Peter, with a Shakespearean close, no less. One question I had: "The numbers I've seen from people who've done the calculations say as little as 5% of the energy that went into making electricity actually ends up doing useful work." First of all, that attribution of your source is weak, at best, but beyond that, are we in agreement that "work" means applications that move things, or pressure things, as opposed to motionless life essentials such as lighting, heating, battery charging and on and on? Thank you very much, Bill. This outfit is a for-profit site so brevity and to the point is key as is references to key points. The word limit is 1200 words and I covered the math and physics as well as the political development. I'm not an expert in power plants but Jeff worked as an engineer with an electrical utility in Green Bay and we've chatted a lot over the years about it so the statement is kind of a throw away. Don't agree, I'm not going to argue about it. The real focus is the corrupt regulatory process which I believe is a unique viewpoint. I've seen plenty elsewhere about why the COP26 projections are massively flawed as well as the inability of electrical infrastructure to possibly ever handle the increasing load. This is simply the story of legislating the physically impossible. The only twinge I have about it is they removed the end reference which tied the opening to the end. That was that if the light duty F150, F250, and F350 get jacked up, there's always the F450 which is a medium duty truck with a GVWR rating of 14,000 lbs. F450 King Ranch |
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Post by james on Jan 15, 2022 18:49:22 GMT -5
American Thinker is well known to be a source of ignorant, cynical disinformation, conspiracy theories, bigotry and lies.
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Post by aquaduct on Jan 15, 2022 18:52:46 GMT -5
American Thinker is well known to be a source of ignorant, cynical disinformation, conspiracy theories, bigotry and lies. And you aren't? |
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Post by billhammond on Jan 15, 2022 19:08:10 GMT -5
Good piece, Peter, with a Shakespearean close, no less. One question I had: "The numbers I've seen from people who've done the calculations say as little as 5% of the energy that went into making electricity actually ends up doing useful work." First of all, that attribution of your source is weak, at best, but beyond that, are we in agreement that "work" means applications that move things, or pressure things, as opposed to motionless life essentials such as lighting, heating, battery charging and on and on? Thank you very much, Bill. This outfit is a for-profit site so brevity and to the point is key as is references to key points. The word limit is 1200 words and I covered the math and physics as well as the political development. I'm not an expert in power plants but Jeff worked as an engineer with an electrical utility in Green Bay and we've chatted a lot over the years about it so the statement is kind of a throw away. Don't agree, I'm not going to argue about it. The real focus is the corrupt regulatory process which I believe is a unique viewpoint. I've seen plenty elsewhere about why the COP26 projections are massively flawed as well as the inability of electrical infrastructure to possibly ever handle the increasing load. This is simply the story of legislating the physically impossible. The only twinge I have about it is they removed the end reference which tied the opening to the end. That was that if the light duty F150, F250, and F350 get jacked up, there's always the F450 which is a medium duty truck with a GVWR rating of 14,000 lbs. F450 King RanchWell, that is all well and good, but you didn't answer my question, which I will rephrase: Are you/Jeff/whomever saying that 95% percent of the energy it takes to generate electricity does nothing to light, heat or recharge its users? |
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Post by aquaduct on Jan 15, 2022 19:11:31 GMT -5
Thank you very much, Bill. This outfit is a for-profit site so brevity and to the point is key as is references to key points. The word limit is 1200 words and I covered the math and physics as well as the political development. I'm not an expert in power plants but Jeff worked as an engineer with an electrical utility in Green Bay and we've chatted a lot over the years about it so the statement is kind of a throw away. Don't agree, I'm not going to argue about it. The real focus is the corrupt regulatory process which I believe is a unique viewpoint. I've seen plenty elsewhere about why the COP26 projections are massively flawed as well as the inability of electrical infrastructure to possibly ever handle the increasing load. This is simply the story of legislating the physically impossible. The only twinge I have about it is they removed the end reference which tied the opening to the end. That was that if the light duty F150, F250, and F350 get jacked up, there's always the F450 which is a medium duty truck with a GVWR rating of 14,000 lbs. F450 King RanchWell, that is all well and good, but you didn't answer my question, which I will rephrase: Are you/Jeff/whomever saying that 95% percent of the energy it takes to generate electricity does nothing to light, heat or recharge its users? Yes. It's mostly loss. |
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Post by Village Idiot on Jan 15, 2022 19:13:26 GMT -5
That's great, Peter. Congratulations on that!
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Post by billhammond on Jan 15, 2022 19:23:54 GMT -5
Well, that is all well and good, but you didn't answer my question, which I will rephrase: Are you/Jeff/whomever saying that 95% percent of the energy it takes to generate electricity does nothing to light, heat or recharge its users? Yes. It's mostly loss. Mostly and 95 percent are hardly the same thing. |
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Post by aquaduct on Jan 15, 2022 19:52:57 GMT -5
Mostly and 95 percent are hardly the same thing. OK, what I do know is that a diesel engine is at best a little more than 40% thermally efficient. Take away another 5% to drive accesories and you're down to 35% of the energy going in to the engine making it to the drive shaft. So 100 joules in the fuel becomes 35 joules hitting the drivetrain which still has loses before moving the car. Now say that 35 joules hits the wires (this is where my expertise is limited so I may be a couple joules off) and the wires have resistance which is additive for the length of the wire. Then it's got to go through transformers and voltage drops and switching stations and all kinds of stuff I'm not real familiar with and then it runs through a charging system and plugs where it sits in a battery, which is also lossy, naturally dissipating over time. Having done a fair amount of do-it-yourself electrical work accidentally releasing the magic smoke from the box, I can safely guess that the actual number is probably somewhere between 5% and 25%. But the actual number isn't really germaine to the point of the piece which is that electric cars won't save us, as cool as they may be. |
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Post by TKennedy on Jan 15, 2022 20:37:24 GMT -5
I have been reading a little about this. This came up in Scientific American. August 2019 issue.
A Crazy-Sounding Climate Fix
We should convert methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas, into CO2 By Rob Jackson and Pep Canadell
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere blew past 415 parts per million this past May. The last time levels were this high, two or three million years ago, the oceans rose tens of meters, something likely to happen again as Earth’s ice melts over the next 1,000 years.
To replace bad news with action, we need hope—a vision for restoring the atmosphere. Think about the Endangered Species Act: it does not stop at saving plants and animals from extinc- tion; it helps them recover. When we see gray whales breaching on their way to Alaska every spring, grizzly bears ambling across a Yellowstone meadow, bald eagles and peregrine falcons riding updrafts, we are celebrating a planet restored. Our goal for the atmosphere should be the same.
Rob Jackson chairs Stanford University’s Earth system science department and the Global Carbon Project.
Pep Canadell
is a staff scientist
at CSIRO in Australia and executive director of the Global Carbon Project.
As leaders of the Global Carbon Project, we have spent our careers working to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. Today we are making what may at first seem like a counterintuitive pro- posal: we want to increase carbon dioxide emissions temporar- ily to cleanse the atmosphere of a much more powerful green- house gas.
Stick with us here.
We are not saying increasing CO2 is a good thing in and of itself. The gas that concerns us is methane, which leaks from wells and pipelines; bubbles up when organic matter rots in
landfills and rice paddies; emerges from the digestive systems of cattle and from the manure piles they leave behind; and more. The good news about methane is that it remains in the atmo- sphere for a far shorter time than CO2 does. The bad news is that methane is vastly more efficient at trapping heat—more than 80 times more, in the first 20 years after its release—which makes it, pound for pound, a bigger problem than carbon.
We want to remove methane from the air and then use porous materials called zeolites to turn it into carbon dioxide. Zeolites can trap copper, iron and other metals that can act as catalysts to replace methane’s four hydrogen atoms with two oxygens. Because a methane molecule holds more energy than carbon dioxide, the reaction typically runs to completion if you can jump-start it. Furthermore, by releasing the carbon dioxide back into the air instead of capturing it, you make the process less expensive and lengthen the life of the zeolites.
Researchers around the world are already studying zeolites and other materials to convert methane to methanol, a valuable feedstock for the chemical industry. Making methanol is a halfway point in our reaction, tacking one oxygen atom onto each meth- ane molecule. No one seems to have considered finishing the job by making carbon dioxide in the same way because carbon diox- ide is not valuable like methanol. We should consider it now.
Another surprise about our proposal is that you could restore the atmosphere by removing “only” three billion met- ric tons of methane. Doing so would generate a few months’ worth of industrial carbon dioxide emissions but eliminate up to one sixth of overall warming. That is a good trade by any measure.
What we propose will not be easy to accomplish. Methane is uncommon: whereas the atmosphere cur- rently holds more than 400 molecules of carbon dioxide for every million molecules of air, methane accounts for only two or so out of a million. That makes pulling it from the atmosphere harder than keeping it from enter- ing in the first place. We will need other things to work as well. To give companies, governments and individu- als financial incentives to do this, there has to be a price on carbon or a policy mandate to pay for removing methane. We also need research on the large arrays needed to capture methane from air. And of course, we need to fix methane leaks and limit emissions from oth- er human sources. But we cannot eliminate those emis- sions entirely, so we would have to continue removing
methane from the atmosphere indefinitely.
Restoration of all the gases in the atmosphere to preindustri-
al levels may seem unlikely today, but we believe it will occur eventually. Such a goal provides a positive framework for change at a time when climate action is sorely needed. Stabilizing glob- al warming at 1.5 or two degrees Celsius is not enough. We need the planet to recover.
JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
10 Scientific American, August 2019
Illustration by Francesco Ciccolella
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