Climate models

[John Clark]

In the current issue of Science News is a article about clouds and it confirms that clouds are the single biggest unknown in climate models. Everybody agrees that clouds warm things through the greenhouse effect at night and cool things by reflecting sunlight during the day, and everybody agrees that the cooling effect is larger than the heating effect, but they disagree about just how much larger and on if we will have more clouds in the future or less. And a recently discovered fact complicates things further, clouds made of ice crystals and water droplets reflect light about equally but the ice crystal clouds have a stronger greenhouse effect than water clouds. As a result of all this confusion and uncertainty are rampant.

Back in 2007 the United Nations issued a report on climate change, it said that by 2100 things would be between 2 and 4.5 degrees warmer than now, a rather large amount of uncertainty; but after spending millions of dollars and 7 years of hard work they just issued a new report, and their uncertainty has actually INCREASED.  Now they say between 1.5 and 4.5.  The article also notes somewhat apologetically (Science News is a honest magazine but always leans toward the environmentalist view) that after 3 decades of increasing temperatures since 1998 the worldwide temperature has been roughly constant, and no climate model in 1998 predicted this. They conclude by saying "scientists say they need at least 20 to 30 years to determine if clouds respond to global warming the way simulations predict".

I have to say all this doesn't exactly give me confidence that I should bet my life on the fact that although they make lousy 17 year predictions climate models make wonderful 100 year predictions.

  John K Clark

[LizR]

Yes, exactly, if we assume that there will be no bad consequences if continue to pump out pollution, we are indeed betting out lives - and those of our children and their children on that assumption. If we try to keep CO2 levels down to somewhere around where they have been between, say, 1960 and 1999 (a period during which they increased by around 20%, I think), then we at least know roughly what to expect - a similar climate to what we had during that period, which isn't perfect but it's better than any runaway feedback situation (ice age or overheated greenhouse). That will give us time to control this damn planet better than we have managed so far, and my children (and preferably me) will go to the stars rather than relapsing into a medieval world.

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[meekerdb]

I see that John Baez (Joan's cousin) has gotten interested in the problems of climate change and sustainability:

http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week319.html

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/balsillie/

http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 3/29/2014 10:31 AM, John Clark wrote:
> In the current issue of Science News is a article about clouds and it confirms that
> clouds are the single biggest unknown in climate models. Everybody agrees that clouds
> warm things through the greenhouse effect at night and cool things by reflecting
> sunlight during the day, and everybody agrees that the cooling effect is larger than the
> heating effect, but they disagree about just how much larger and on if we will have more
> clouds in the future or less. And a recently discovered fact complicates things further,
> clouds made of ice crystals and water droplets reflect light about equally but the ice
> crystal clouds have a stronger greenhouse effect than water clouds. As a result of all
> this confusion and uncertainty are rampant.
>
> Back in 2007 the United Nations issued a report on climate change, it said that by 2100
> things would be between 2 and 4.5 degrees warmer than now, a rather large amount of
> uncertainty; but after spending millions of dollars and 7 years of hard work they just
> issued a new report, and their uncertainty has actually INCREASED. Now they say between
> 1.5 and 4.5.

Doesn't exactly comport with the theory that it's all an environmentalist conspiracy, does it.

> The article also notes somewhat apologetically (Science News is a honest magazine but
> always leans toward the environmentalist view) that after 3 decades of increasing
> temperatures since 1998 the worldwide temperature has been roughly constant, and no
> climate model in 1998 predicted this.

But GCMs with constant net insolation energy gain still predict hiatus periods in surface
warming:

Is the climate warming or cooling?
David R. Easterling and Michael F. Wehner
Received 18 February 2009; revised 25 March 2009; accepted 30 March 2009; published 25
April 2009.

Numerous websites, blogs and articles in the media
have claimed that the climate is no longer warming, and is
now cooling. Here we show that periods of no trend or even
cooling of the globally averaged surface air temperature are
found in the last 34 years of the observed record, and in
climate model simulations of the 20th and 21st century
forced with increasing greenhouse gases. We show that the
climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce
periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged
surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight
cooling in the presence of longer-term warming.
Geophys. Res. Lett.,36, L08706,doi:10.1029/2009GL037810.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.library.ucsb.edu:2048/doi/10.1029/2009GL037810/pdf

Model-based evidence of deep-ocean heat uptake during surface-temperature hiatus periods
Gerald A. Meehl, Julie M. Arblaster, John T. Fasullo, Aixue Hu & Kevin E. Trenberth

There have been decades, such as 2000–2009, when the observed globally averaged
surface-temperature time series shows little increase or even a slightly negative trend1
(a hiatus period). However, the observed energy imbalance at the top-of-atmosphere for
this recent decade indicates that a net energy flux into the climate system of about 1 W 
m−2 (refs 2, 3) should be producing warming somewhere in the system4, 5. Here we analyse
twenty-first-century climate-model simulations that maintain a consistent radiative
imbalance at the top-of-atmosphere of about 1 W m−2 as observed for the past decade. Eight
decades with a slightly negative global mean surface-temperature trend show that the ocean
above 300 m takes up significantly less heat whereas the ocean below 300 m takes up
significantly more, compared with non-hiatus decades. The model provides a plausible
depiction of processes in the climate system causing the hiatus periods, and indicates
that a hiatus period is a relatively common climate phenomenon and may be linked to La
Niña-like conditions.

http://www.nature.com.proxy.library.ucsb.edu:2048/nclimate/journal/v1/n7/pdf/nclimate1229.pdf

Brent

[John Clark]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 7:44 PM, LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, exactly, if we assume that there will be no bad consequences if continue to pump out pollution, we are indeed betting out lives

You're assuming that the safe and conservative thing to do is to immediately and radically cut the amount of carbon injected into the atmosphere, but it's entirely possible and I would even say probable that would be the dangerous and radical thing to do. Coal is much vilified and I don't like the pollution it causes anymore than you do, but the world is not simple and the fact remains that without coal half a billion people in China would not have been lifted out of grinding poverty since 2000; one of the most encouraging developments in this century. Cut out that energy source and they and many many more would slip back into poverty and we would have to face all the social turmoil (like war) that would entail. The fact remains that there is simply no way to keep 7 billion large mammals of the same species alive, much less happy, on this planet without using lots of energy; and the environmentalists ludicrous solution of windmills and moonbeams just doesn't cut the mustard.      

> and those of our children and their children on that assumption.

Let our grandchildren fight their own wars! In the USA during the Vietnam war the constant mantra was we must fight now so our grandchildren don't have to. Well the USA lost that war, but would it have been any better off today if it had won? I don't see how.

I feel that my children's children's happiness is no more important than my own; and I know that my children's children will have very powerful new tools to deal with problems that I do not have.  

> If we try to keep CO2 levels down to somewhere around where they have been between, say, 1960 and 1999

Any reduction in CO2 emission levels made today would take decades to show up as less CO2 in the atmosphere, and longer than that to show up as cooler temperatures if it ever did. 
 

> then we at least know roughly what to expect

If you believe the climate models, and I don't see why you would, and if we obeyed the multitrillion dollar Kyoto Protocol, which seems to be what you're suggesting, then what you'd expect is a 0.11 to 0.21 degrees Celsius reduction in temperature in the year 2100 over what it would have been without the protocol. So I say let our grandchildren find a better solution when they have access to a much much better toolkit and when they may actually know what is important and what is not.

 John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 1:11 AM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

>> Back in 2007 the United Nations issued a report on climate change, it said that by 2100 things would be between 2 and 4.5 degrees warmer than now, a rather large amount of uncertainty; but after spending millions of dollars and 7 years of hard work they just issued a new report, and their uncertainty has actually INCREASED. Now they say between 1.5 and 4.5.

> Doesn't exactly comport with the theory that it's all an environmentalist conspiracy, does it.

I know of no such environmental conspiracy, it takes brains to be a successful conspirator. As Napoleon said "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence".

  John K Clark

[spudb...@aol.com]

The economist Tol, from the Netherlands, resigned a few days ago, objecting to the latest IPCC update "exaggerating the negative impacts of GW."  He is merely an economist and not a climate scientist, but I suspect he has nothing to lose telling the truth. If IPCC/UN was talking ground truth, they'd be pushing cleantech at the top of the list, they are not, so its government(?) UN(?) control that they seem to be after. To me this is harmful to the middle class in the world, but I am a distinct minority in this assessment.

[LizR]

On 31 March 2014 04:18, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 7:44 PM, LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, exactly, if we assume that there will be no bad consequences if continue to pump out pollution, we are indeed betting out lives

You're assuming that the safe and conservative thing to do is to immediately and radically cut the amount of carbon injected into the atmosphere

Since you have made the incorrect assumption that I am assuming this, I guess there is no point in reading the rest of your post.
 

[LizR]

Or as Arthur C Clarke said,

"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

[LizR]

Oh, OK, almost said :-) (But he should have!)

What he actually said was something like

"We can design a system that is proof against accident and stupidity, but not one that is proof against deliberate malice."

But I prefer my version TBH.

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2014 8:19 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 7:44 PM, LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> Yes, exactly, if we assume that there will be no bad consequences if continue to pump out pollution, we are indeed betting out lives

 

You're assuming that the safe and conservative thing to do is to immediately and radically cut the amount of carbon injected into the atmosphere, but it's entirely possible and I would even say probable that would be the dangerous and radical thing to do. Coal is much vilified and I don't like the pollution it causes anymore than you do, but the world is not simple and the fact remains that without coal half a billion people in China would not have been lifted out of grinding poverty since 2000; one of the most encouraging developments in this century. Cut out that energy source and they and many many more would slip back into poverty and we would have to face all the social turmoil (like war) that would entail. The fact remains that there is simply no way to keep 7 billion large mammals of the same species alive, much less happy, on this planet without using lots of energy; and the environmentalists ludicrous solution of windmills and moonbeams just doesn't cut the mustard.   

A prescription of full speed ahead, burn it all up, as fast as we possibly can is a 100% guarantee of complete disastrous sudden onset collapse – as the entire world hits the resource depletion wall all at once at peak consumption rates --  in which many billions of people will certainly die horrible deaths. What you are advocating will result in the mass death of billions of humans and the certain extinction of a huge number of species  – for an extra ten or fifteen years of continuing to burn fossil energy as rapidly as the world can extract it.

It seems fairly obvious to me, that you are ill equipped to mentally  deal with the impending collapse in recoverable supplies – across all forms of carbon energy being drilled for or mined – and so you live in a pretend world of make believe eternally available reserves of fossil energy. It must be comforting to live in this make believe world of cornucopian availability of fossil energy; but it is a fictional world model that exists in your brain for sure – and in the brains of all the cornucopian fools who like you participate in this delusional wishful thinking idea that the world is not in fact running out of marginally recoverable fossil energy reserves.

Fortunately wiser people than yourself are advocating that we begin to transition away from these fossil supplies while we still have a marginally recoverable supply of fossil energy to use as cushions during the transition period so that we can have in place other energy production systems -- based on harvesting the solar flux directly or indirectly – available and already in place for when these fossil energy reserves enter into inexorable decline – as in fact they are or will soon be.

Those, who continue to delude themselves, with this absurd notion that fossil energy will always be available (or at least will be available for a very long period of time – more than a hundred years say) are deluded fools and the useful tools of the fossil energy billionaires, who are driven by narrow economic self-interest to defend the future value of their carbon reserves (consequences be damned)

Yes, I am calling the “brilliant” John Clark… a (pompous) fool… a self-deluded idiot, living in a mind infected by magical thinking. In the real world fossil energy reserves have either already peaked or will soon be peaking – and this includes recoverable coal as well as recoverable oil & gas.

Yours truly,

Chris de Morsella

  

> and those of our children and their children on that assumption.

 

Let our grandchildren fight their own wars! In the USA during the Vietnam war the constant mantra was we must fight now so our grandchildren don't have to. Well the USA lost that war, but would it have been any better off today if it had won? I don't see how.

 

I feel that my children's children's happiness is no more important than my own; and I know that my children's children will have very powerful new tools to deal with problems that I do not have.  

> If we try to keep CO2 levels down to somewhere around where they have been between, say, 1960 and 1999

 

Any reduction in CO2 emission levels made today would take decades to show up as less CO2 in the atmosphere, and longer than that to show up as cooler temperatures if it ever did. 
 

> then we at least know roughly what to expect

 

If you believe the climate models, and I don't see why you would, and if we obeyed the multitrillion dollar Kyoto Protocol, which seems to be what you're suggesting, then what you'd expect is a 0.11 to 0.21 degrees Celsius reduction in temperature in the year 2100 over what it would have been without the protocol. So I say let our grandchildren find a better solution when they have access to a much much better toolkit and when they may actually know what is important and what is not.

 John K Clark

 

 

--

[ghi...@gmail.com]

 John K Claras.ae

after dispossession John, cooperating in  new ways o shit tdown their little  throats won't hardly be felt at all. They'll be comfortably numb mate...so do it all you like....they'll already be used to it.

 

[John Clark]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> A prescription of full speed ahead, burn it all up, as fast as we possibly can is a 100% guarantee of complete disastrous sudden onset collapse

So now you're claiming that even though computer climate models made terrible 17 year predictions we know with complete certainty that those same models make 100% absolutely perfect 100 year predictions. I have to ask, how do you know this? Did that revelation come to you in a dream?

 

> you live in a pretend world of make believe eternally available reserves of fossil energy.

Nothing is eternal including the sun, but there is enough Thorium just in the Earth's crust to supply us with energy for about as long as the sun shines.

> when these fossil energy reserves enter into inexorable decline – as in fact they are or will soon be.

So we're already in the era of inexorable fossil fuel production decline, and yet oddly oil production in the USA is the highest it's been in 24 years and because it uses more advanced technology it now produces more oil than Saudi Arabia. And given this inexorable decline it's also a bit odd that in 2012 oil production increased in the USA by 760,000 barrels a day, the largest yearly increase since records about oil production started in 1859. And it's even stranger that natural gas production in 2012 was THE LARGEST IT HAS EVER BEEN. If that's inexorable decline I'm all for it.

> Fortunately wiser people than yourself are advocating that we begin to transition away from these fossil supplies

These wiser people (environmentalists) are indeed in favor of a transition away from fossil fuel and nuclear energy, but they are also strongly against  a transition TOWARD anything to replace it. Anything with the capacity to replace these missing energy sources would of necessity have to be large, and they could not remain theoretical but would actually have to be built. And renewable or non-renewable these "wiser people" are rabidly against any energy source that is larger than a tiny pilot plant, and some think even that is too big and all future energy sources should remain strictly on paper till the end of time.

 > Those, who continue to delude themselves, with this absurd notion that fossil energy will always be available (or at least will be available for a very long period of time – more than a hundred years say) are deluded fools

In a time of fast technological advancement such as ours making great sacrifices now to solve problems that you think might become serious more than about 15 years in the future is just dumb; it would be like demanding that the Wright brothers solve the problem of airport congestion before they finished construction of their first airplane.   

>I am calling the “brilliant” John Clark… a (pompous) fool… a self-deluded idiot, living in a mind infected by magical thinking.

It doesn't matter if John Clark is a pompous self deluded infected idiot (and a fool too!) if what John Clark said in the above is true. And it is.

 Yours truly,

John K Clark

[Platonist Guitar Cowboy]

Nope. For this, John Clark has to prove or at least plausibly argue that fossil fuel, pollution etc. is the only viable energy option for the future, which he has not.

His indifference to various kinds of leakage and seepage of fluids, solids, and gas is a lifestyle choice. I for one don't judge other people's sexual preferences, no matter my difference in taste. If someone likes to sleep, live, and breathe their own uhm... "outputs" as aesthetic lifestyle choice, then how can anybody argue with taste? Prohibition will fall, so John can indulge his fetish. Doesn't bother me.

But quoting uncertainty in climate science: wow, major news John. Really? Climate science is complex? Predictions can be faulty with larger variance than thought? My mind is blown. Thanks for enlightening us, John... PGC

 

 Yours truly,

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> John Clark has to prove or at least plausibly argue that fossil fuel, pollution etc. is the only viable energy option for the future, which he has not.

And I have not proven that because I have not said it nor do I believe it; and that's why I like Thorium.

> His indifference to various kinds of leakage and seepage of fluids, solids, and gas is a lifestyle choice.

And despite all this leakage and seepage the human race is healthier and more numerous than it has ever been.

> But quoting uncertainty in climate science: wow, major news John. Really?

Apparently it is major news to some, including some on this very list who think climate models are 100% perfect.

> Climate science is complex? Predictions can be faulty with larger variance than thought? My mind is blown. Thanks for enlightening us, John.

You are entirely welcome.

 John K Clark

 

[LizR]

Yeah I like thorium too. I realise it isn't the universal panacea but seems like a good bet if handled carefully. But we need to get those suckers up and running asap because if oil production is still increasing, that isn't good news for the environment. And it will peak at some point, then decline (I mean a relatively near point - all energy production in the universe will peak and decline eventually of course).

[LizR]

Just out

http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/index.shtml

[Platonist Guitar Cowboy]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 11:38 PM, LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yeah I like thorium too. I realise it isn't the universal panacea but seems like a good bet if handled carefully. But we need to get those suckers up and running asap because if oil production is still increasing, that isn't good news for the environment. And it will peak at some point, then decline (I mean a relatively near point - all energy production in the universe will peak and decline eventually of course).

John suggests above that cautionary measures concerning sustainability, in his words wherein "problems that you think might become serious more than about 15 years in the future is just dumb" is the blind position of people he labels "environmentalists" in blanket fashion. Energy is perpetually this problem. Now and in hundreds of hypothetical years. Therefore no, I don't think people looking at climate and sustainability problems long term are ideological idiots by default.

This contradicts research and developing technology in the first place (how many years do you think we need for mature designs and regulatory frameworks for thorium, John? Fourteen?), that he bemoans is not being done at large enough scale. I think this very attitude and contradiction is part of acceptance problem of this technology and other candidates.

At least small moves are being made in China. My blind spot in advocating it concerns costs, which is all we seem to care about. I'd like some references/links to papers targeting costs, other than an old 1980s rag report I found, that would have potential to push wider acceptance, as the nuclear industry is obviously too invested in their methods and sources.

Yes, proponents cite low cost of thorium itself through availability, efficiency, safety in worst case, less pressure and complexity of containment; but I find it hard to tally the costs of new materials required for higher temperatures, the increased corrosion point, the gas distribution system and tritium collection, what kinds of regulation would impose which kinds of costs, costs of separating the various nuclear fission products, and nuclear reprocessing.

Yes, long term toxicity of waste is lessened, but we still have a waste problem long term. What about that?

I could hide behind "lack of research" for much of this, but I don't know simply.

Perhaps John could genuinely enlighten us here.

Then it would be easier to make the case for "less wishful thinking/euphoria" around this tech. ISTM somebody needs balls and contrary to our performance fetishes, we'd have to learn and make mistakes (incur losses systematically).

It's time (not that I'm optimistic here) that society task government and dominant market forces with these tasks seriously: You have your hands on the dominant levers, well then own up to that: from oil giants to google, they owe. Externalized costs for your success. Experiment wisely and widely, sky's no limit. Pragmatism in absence of local clarity. We can dream, no? PGC

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2014 8:48 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> A prescription of full speed ahead, burn it all up, as fast as we possibly can is a 100% guarantee of complete disastrous sudden onset collapse

So now you're claiming that even though computer climate models made terrible 17 year predictions we know with complete certainty that those same models make 100% absolutely perfect 100 year predictions. I have to ask, how do you know this? Did that revelation come to you in a dream?

 

You seem to have trouble with reading comprehension John. I am not even speaking to the issue of climate change, as you allege. Instead I am referring to the certainty that at the current global rates of consumption of fossil energy supplies that we as a global civilization are going to run into the wall of depleting reserves just as the growth in demand is peaking (China, India, the other mid income countries demand is growing very rapidly). Perhaps if you could improve your reading comprehension you would not go put your foot in your mouth as you just have managed to do.

 

> you live in a pretend world of make believe eternally available reserves of fossil energy.

Nothing is eternal including the sun, but there is enough Thorium just in the Earth's crust to supply us with energy for about as long as the sun shines.

There is something around fifty million tons of pure gold dissolved in the world’s oceans… doesn’t mean it is recoverable. Most of the Thorium in the earth’s crust is not recoverable…. And yet you speak of it as if it were. Why John? Isn’t that dishonest.

But sure there do seem to be large Thorium bearing ores – often found along with rare earth elements. And we have gone over this before. Of all the breeder types I favor the LFTR – so there is at least one thing in the universe we agree on.

But how does one build out an entirely new – green field because nothing is there for LFTR – energy infrastructure amidst rapidly falling supplies (as the world will soon face) The struggle over who gets what out of a diminishing available quantity of vital fossil energy (especially liquids) is going to become intense.

Solar and wind and all other replacement energy systems face this same conundrum… so it is not just a problem for LFTR; however it is also true that -- unlike for the case of LFTR --  both wind &  solar (both CSP & PV) have achieved efficiencies of scale and have well developed supply chains, large scale production facilities and so forth.

LFTR – has at best some old blueprints and data from the old Oak Ridge experimental reactor. And that is it. Don’t get me wrong I am not opposed to LFTR and think that it definitely has a role (as a supplier of a component of the base load) – just trying to put it in perspective.

 

Global liquid petroleum has peaked and is in decline

 

> when these fossil energy reserves enter into inexorable decline – as in fact they are or will soon be.

 

So we're already in the era of inexorable fossil fuel production decline, and yet oddly oil production in the USA is the highest it's been in 24 years and because it uses more advanced technology it now produces more oil than Saudi Arabia. And given this inexorable decline it's also a bit odd that in 2012 oil production increased in the USA by 760,000 barrels a day, the largest yearly increase since records about oil production started in 1859. And it's even stranger that natural gas production in 2012 was THE LARGEST IT HAS EVER BEEN. If that's inexorable decline I'm all for it.

 

That is what happens when you throw a trillion dollars of capital squeezing oil out of rock. This little boomlet is already plaid out John and depletion is setting in and it is very rapid – don’t believe me look at the depletion rates for the Eagle-Ford shale formation in Texas, which has the longest history and hence most complete data picture for the long term behavior of fracked shale formations. You really should stop getting your “facts” from the press releases of the Oil&Gas sector.

 

Some facts that directly contradict what you are saying. Right now US natural gas reserves are far below the five year moving average for reserves at this time of year -- 926 Bcf below the 5-yr moving average to be exact  [Source for facts: http://ir.eia.gov/ngs/ngs.html The natural gas supply situation in the US is in fact very tight right now – our national reserve supply is only half of what it was last year for example.  So where is all that gas you are talking about?

 

According to this article in Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-20/wildcatters-rush-spindletop-in-return-to-east-texas-oil.html) Wildcatters are packing up and leaving the Bakken heading for East Texas. If this is true, and considering the very rapid collapse in capital investment into unconventional oil – read  below— it certainly seems plausible,  then one must ask why? The Bakken formation in SD was supposed to be the massive formation that was going to turn the US into the Saudi Arabia of shale.  

 

“ Chesapeake Energy, the second largest U.S. based oil and gas company, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell off its oilfield services unit which does the majority of the company’s oil and gas exploration, hydraulic fracking and drilling. Stung with high costs and mired in more than $20 billion in debt on its U.S. shale operations, the company continues to sell off billions in its assets base as it struggles to right itself. Its actions follow a developing trend of cutbacks, spin- offs, divestures and write downs for oil and gas majors operating in U.S. shale formations. In the last 10 days, British Petroleum, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell have all announced they will be spending less on oil and gas exploration in the U.S. Allen Brooks, Managing Director of Parks Paton Hoepfl & Brown, an independent Houston, Texas based investment banking firm, stated yesterday, “Chevron is the latest major oil company to implicitly declare that the oil industry has entered a new era – one marked by higher costs and more disciplined capital investment programs,”.

 

[further down in the article]

 

“In 2011 Shell earned roughly $28 billion in its upstream and downstream operations only to see this fall to below $20 billion in 2013. New Shell Oil CEO Ben Van Beurden recently told shareholders it was bad policy to spend an estimated $80 billion in capital on its North American portfolio and still lose money. Chevron has been cutting back on its level of drilling in the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale while lowering its 2014 annual corporate production forecast by 6.1%. Early this month, British Petroleum CEO Bob Dudley announced all of BP’s U.S. operations would be formed into a separate business entity which, among other things, opens up the possibility of the sale of the new shale gas unit in the future. ExxonMobil spent $25 billion in 2010 to acquire XTO Energy Inc. forming it’s U.S shale gas operations. However industry analysts continue to report ExxonMobil’s XTO investment diluted its profits and isn't making up for the company's problems in increasing oil-and-gas production.”

 

As you will clearly see John – assuming you even read the paragraphs above – the oil majors are pulling back in a very big way from the shale play – after losing huge sums of money on it.

 

As they say money talks bull shit walks – and the money is talking big time John – the supposed gas boom is going bust – the smart money is trying to get out as fast as it can. Why? Doesn’t it make you curious why the oil majors have seen their profit margins collapse and are almost in unison trying to divest, sell off and otherwise get rid of these liabilities.

 

> Fortunately wiser people than yourself are advocating that we begin to transition away from these fossil supplies

 

These wiser people (environmentalists) are indeed in favor of a transition away from fossil fuel and nuclear energy, but they are also strongly against  a transition TOWARD anything to replace it. Anything with the capacity to replace these missing energy sources would of necessity have to be large, and they could not remain theoretical but would actually have to be built. And renewable or non-renewable these "wiser people" are rabidly against any energy source that is larger than a tiny pilot plant, and some think even that is too big and all future energy sources should remain strictly on paper till the end of time.

Wrong. Again your poor reading comprehension is showing itself. The future will be a mix of energy supplies with fossil energy largely being phased out over time – driven by economics and energy scarcity. It will be replaced increasingly by other sources – solar PV, CSP, wind etc.

That is if we manage to not follow the idiotic advice of folks such as yourself who advocate unrestrained energy and resource consumption for as long as we can get away with it and for as fast as we can possibly ramp up the rates of extraction…. Only to run straight into the resource depletion wall with nothing in place to mitigate the collapse.

 

 > Those, who continue to delude themselves, with this absurd notion that fossil energy will always be available (or at least will be available for a very long period of time – more than a hundred years say) are deluded fools

 

In a time of fast technological advancement such as ours making great sacrifices now to solve problems that you think might become serious more than about 15 years in the future is just dumb; it would be like demanding that the Wright brothers solve the problem of airport congestion before they finished construction of their first airplane.   

Ah yes the magical thinking continues… I have heard the same sorry song & dance over and over --- the no worries someone will invent something show. Maybe, but then maybe not. You are proposing betting the future of our earth on a maybe/maybe not proposition. Not something I find all that an intelligent course of action.

>I am calling the “brilliant” John Clark… a (pompous) fool… a self-deluded idiot, living in a mind infected by magical thinking.

It doesn't matter if John Clark is a pompous self deluded infected idiot (and a fool too!) if what John Clark said in the above is true. And it is.

What have you said here that is “true” John. You have put out opinions and vague unreferenced “facts” of dubious provenance. Perhaps in your world of magical thinking this amounts to truth.. so I can understand how you would think the way you do.

Yours Truly

Chris de Morsella

 Yours truly,

John K Clark

 

--

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 5:38 PM, LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yeah I like thorium too. I realise it isn't the universal panacea but seems like a good bet if handled carefully.

It's a bit off topic but all my life I've heard people say X is NOT a panacea but never once heard anyone say Y IS a panacea. For something to be meaningful contrasts is needed, If absolutely nothing in the observable universe is a panacea the word would be as useless as if everything was a panacea.

> if oil production is still increasing,

It is.

 

> that isn't good news for the environment.

If increasing oil production keeps 7 billion large mammals (who happen to be my favorite animal)  happier healthier and more prosperous than if oil were not increasing I would say increasing oil production is very good news for the human race. Does that mean that some other animals in the environment that aren't on my top ten list will suffer as a result? Probably. 

> And it will peak at some point,

Yes but in general making plans to solve problems that won't show up for more than 15 years usually turns into a farce, it does so for 2 reasons:

1) The problem you foresee has little relation to the problem you eventually end up facing.

2) Do to advancing technology the solution you propose has rapidly become ridiculous.  

 

> the universe will peak and decline eventually of course

And that is why I'm not going to worry about that now.

  John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 11:50 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2014 8:48 AM

To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

> There is something around fifty million tons of pure gold dissolved in the world’s oceans

That's nice but Uranium is far far more common than Gold and  Thorium is much more common than Uranium, in fact it's almost twice as common as Tin. And Thorium is easier to extract from its ore than Uranium. And at best a (non-breeder) Uranium reactor only uses .7% of its fuel (and usually less than that) because it can only get energy from the rare U235 isotope; but natural Thorium has only one isotope and a Thorium reactor can use 100% of it.
 

> Most of the Thorium in the earth’s crust is not recoverable…. And yet you speak of it as if it were. Why John? Isn’t that dishonest.

 High quality ore that can approach 50% Thorium and if at random you picked one cubic meter of rock anywhere in the Earth's crust you would find about 12 grams of Thorium in it. if placed in a liquid Thorium reactor 12 grams would produce the energy equivalent of 37 tons of coal, enough to power one person's western middle class lifestyle for about a decade. One ton of Thorium contains as much energy as 3 million tons of coal so you'd need 2 thousand tons of Thorium to equal coal. The U.S.Geological Survey's latest estimate says that one company, Thorium Energy Inc, has  915,000 tons of thorium reserves in Idaho and Montana. That alone could replace coal for about 450 years, and that's just from the claims that one company has in 2 states. And Norway has as much Thorium as the entire USA,  and Australia about twice as much, and India has about 3 times as much. And we've already discovered Thorium deposits on the Moon and Mars.

It would only take 2000 tons of Thorium to equal the energy in 6 billion tons of coal that the world uses each year. There is 120 TRILLION tons of Thorium in the earth's crust and if the world needs 10 times as much energy as we get from just coal then we will run out of Thorium in the crust of this planet in 6 billion years.

 > Global liquid petroleum has peaked and is in decline

That is certainly true in any universe uncontaminated by facts.

  John K Clark

 

[meekerdb]

On 4/1/2014 10:56 AM, John Clark wrote:

> Most of the Thorium in the earth’s crust is not recoverable…. And yet you speak of it as if it were. Why John? Isn’t that dishonest.

 High quality ore that can approach 50% Thorium and if at random you picked one cubic meter of rock anywhere in the Earth's crust you would find about 12 grams of Thorium in it. if placed in a liquid Thorium reactor 12 grams would produce the energy equivalent of 37 tons of coal, enough to power one person's western middle class lifestyle for about a decade. One ton of Thorium contains as much energy as 3 million tons of coal so you'd need 2 thousand tons of Thorium to equal coal. The U.S.Geological Survey's latest estimate says that one company, Thorium Energy Inc, has  915,000 tons of thorium reserves in Idaho and Montana.

And it's not just thorium in the ground.  In Southern CA there are huge mounds of thorium rich tailings from the mining of rare earth elements for magnets.

Brent

[spudb...@aol.com]

People are too afraid of nuclear power, to even consider thorium232-->uranium233. I don't think the market is there for fission anymore. It was too slow in adapting better safety measures, waste disposal, reactor configuration, and even marketing. Stolid engineers can do the job but not if they are not directed and funded. Because solar and wind are robust, prolific, cheaper, less fear-making, we must go that route, in order to keep civilization running. The only thing it now lacks is storage tech, be it hydroelectric pumped power, liquid air storage, batteries, fuel cells, molten salts, or even using railroad trains. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>

[LizR]

On 2 April 2014 06:31, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 5:38 PM, LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yeah I like thorium too. I realise it isn't the universal panacea but seems like a good bet if handled carefully.

It's a bit off topic but all my life I've heard people say X is NOT a panacea but never once heard anyone say Y IS a panacea. For something to be meaningful contrasts is needed, If absolutely nothing in the observable universe is a panacea the word would be as useless as if everything was a panacea.

The term is a little dated with the invention of antibiotics etc. It's basically the same as "cure-all".

> if oil production is still increasing,

It is.

 

> that isn't good news for the environment.

If increasing oil production keeps 7 billion large mammals (who happen to be my favorite animal)  happier healthier and more prosperous than if oil were not increasing I would say increasing oil production is very good news for the human race. Does that mean that some other animals in the environment that aren't on my top ten list will suffer as a result? Probably. 

That isn't the point. The point is that increasing pollution is bad for humanity. Since you're replying to a straw man I won't bother with the rest of your post.

[Chris de Morsella]

> There is something around fifty million tons of pure gold dissolved in the world’s oceans

>>That's nice but Uranium is far far more common than Gold and  Thorium is much more common than Uranium, in fact it's almost twice as common as Tin. And Thorium is easier to extract from its ore than Uranium. And at best a (non-breeder) Uranium reactor only uses .7% of its fuel (and usually less than that) because it can only get energy from the rare U235 isotope; but natural Thorium has only one isotope and a Thorium reactor can use 100% of it.

My point remains valid and salient. Whenever anyone speaks of some resource reserve figure in practice what they are (or should be) referring to is the recoverable reserve figures. The quantity of some resource in the earth's crust may be interesting, but it is irrelevant in a discussion of reserves. Only the much smaller amount of Thorium or Uranium that is actually recoverable (and that means not only technically recoverable, but also energetically (the EROI has to be significantly greater than one)  as well as economically recoverable.

No one is ever going to "recover" the dispersed Thorium in your garden's dirt; so to count is as a Thorium reserve is incorrect -- the same being true of any physical resource.

 

> Most of the Thorium in the earth’s crust is not recoverable…. And yet you speak of it as if it were. Why John? Isn’t that dishonest.

>> High quality ore that can approach 50% Thorium and if at random you picked one cubic meter of rock anywhere in the Earth's crust you would find about 12 grams of Thorium in it. if placed in a liquid Thorium reactor 12 grams would produce the energy equivalent of 37 tons of coal, enough to power one person's western middle class lifestyle for about a decade. 

 

I know as well as you do that Thorium id relatively plentiful supply -- it exists in other mine tailing -- REE mines for example. I have a question for you. If LFTR is so great then why has it not been pursued -- anywhere by anyone. I know about the experimental LFTR reactor in Oak Ridge that was shut down four decades ago or so. 

Why has LFTR development essentially stopped for forty years?

>>One ton of Thorium contains as much energy as 3 million tons of coal so you'd need 2 thousand tons of Thorium to equal coal. The U.S.Geological Survey's latest estimate says that one company, Thorium Energy Inc, has  915,000 tons of thorium reserves in Idaho and Montana. That alone could replace coal for about 450 years, and that's just from the claims that one company has in 2 states. And Norway has as much Thorium as the entire USA,  and Australia about twice as much, and India has about 3 times as much. And we've already discovered Thorium deposits on the Moon and Mars.

>>It would only take 2000 tons of Thorium to equal the energy in 6 billion tons of coal that the world uses each year. There is 120 TRILLION tons of Thorium in the earth's crust and if the world needs 10 times as much energy as we get from just coal then we will run out of Thorium in the crust of this planet in 6 billion years.

Again only a very small fraction of the Thorium dispersed throughout the earth's crust is recoverable and can be counted as a reserve. Which was my point in bringing up the large quantities of gold dissolved in the world's oceans. Just because something is there does not mean it is recoverable.

 > Global liquid petroleum has peaked and is in decline

That is certainly true in any universe uncontaminated by facts.

LOL -- whose facts  -- the highly selective ones (that may even have been borrowed from the fiction of some dubious source)  used by John Clark's or the facts compiled by the various energy reporting agencies around the world that are based on reported production figures. Peak liquid petroleum has already happened, and conventional oil (as it is called in the industry) is already in decline around the world. 

This fact has been masked by the rapid rise in unconventional oil -- e.g.. shale oil & gas + tar sands, which you are lumping in together with conventional oil. 

As I have pointed out -- and backed what I said up with facts and references (something you do not do) -- there is a lot of evidence that the oil majors are very sharply pulling back from the non-conventional oil plays, in which they have invested huge sums of capital for what is proving to be very little return. 

Unconventional oil is not a replacement for conventional oil and within a few more years will begin to decline itself and then the rates of overall global supplies for liquids and gas will drop off at a very high rate of depletion.

Oil fields can be kept producing near peak, using tertiary recovery techniques such as steam injection for example, but once these have squeezed out the last bit of oil that is there to squeeze the rate of depletion is shockingly high.

As evidence -- look at just how far the production rate has dropped off for the Cantarell field off the Yucatan -- it is the third biggest oil field ever discovered. Production from that super giant field has plunged by 80% from it's peak in 2004. Similar dynamics are at play in the world's big oil fields.

Attached a graph showing Cantarell's decline.

Chris de Morsella

  John K Clark

 

[LizR]

On 2 April 2014 12:10, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Why has LFTR development essentially stopped for forty years?

Apparently they can't be used to make bombs.
 

[meekerdb]

That was part of the reason.  But the story is that when Hyman Rickover was put in charge of the atomic submarine program he went to Oak Ridge to be briefed on the thorium power reactor that was there.  He was famously abrasive and he started telling the director Alvin Weinberg how to run the reactor research and Weinberg had him thrown out of the lab.  Rickover then turned to Westinghouse who would take orders from whoever supplied the money.  Westinghouse had a LWR design and that then became the de facto standard.

Brent

[LizR]

Either way, it doesn't look like there's anything intrinsically wrong with thorium reactors, and quite a few points in their favour - but once a lot of effort has been sunk into getting one method of power generation up and running, people are naturally reluctant to start again from scratch (or nearly so), and possibly have to pay similar up-front costs to get a new design working. (I believe something similar is supposed to have happened with the internal combustion engine using petrol rather than alcohol (I think it was) - or is that an urban myth?)

[meekerdb]

On 4/1/2014 6:43 PM, LizR wrote:

On 2 April 2014 14:13, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

On 4/1/2014 4:20 PM, LizR wrote:

On 2 April 2014 12:10, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Why has LFTR development essentially stopped for forty years?

Apparently they can't be used to make bombs.

That was part of the reason.  But the story is that when Hyman Rickover was put in charge of the atomic submarine program he went to Oak Ridge to be briefed on the thorium power reactor that was there.  He was famously abrasive and he started telling the director Alvin Weinberg how to run the reactor research and Weinberg had him thrown out of the lab.  Rickover then turned to Westinghouse who would take orders from whoever supplied the money.  Westinghouse had a LWR design and that then became the de facto standard.

Either way, it doesn't look like there's anything intrinsically wrong with thorium reactors, and quite a few points in their favour - but once a lot of effort has been sunk into getting one method of power generation up and running, people are naturally reluctant to start again from scratch (or nearly so), and possibly have to pay similar up-front costs to get a new design working.

Right.  The reactor at Oak Ridge was not a power plant.  To make a power plant that takes advantage of the LFTR features will take a lot of engineering.  And another problem is government regulation.  The Nuclear Regulatory Agency just has a blank page "reserved for thorium liquid salt reactors".  Nobody is going to allow a LFTR be built near them unless it meets government regulatory standards - but the standards don't exist.  So the only way LFTRs will get built is either the government develops them (the way they did LWR) or they are developed in some other country where regulation is non-existent.  One company formed to develop LFTRs is proposing to develop them in Brazil.

(I believe something similar is supposed to have happened with the internal combustion engine using petrol rather than alcohol (I think it was) - or is that an urban myth?)

I hadn't heard that.  There's virtually no difference between and IC engine running on gasoline vs ethanol or methanol.  Engines are converted to run on ethanol for racing by just changing the fuel/air mixture.

Brent

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2014 4:21 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

On 2 April 2014 12:10, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

Why has LFTR development essentially stopped for forty years?

 

Apparently they can't be used to make bombs.

 

Sure there is that, and no doubt that was why – at the height of the cold war to put it in context – LFTR was dropped. That explains the then, but it does not explain the essentially complete absence of any LFTR R&D anywhere. I’ve read more than most on LFTR, and as far as breeders go it seems to me to be the way to go for a number of reasons, including that the fuel re-processing can be accomplished chemically rather than needing to spin it out by centrifuge as is needed for uranium (same element, different isotopes). LFTR power stations could have onsite fuel re-processing and thus contain these deadly materials in a relatively few well secured sites.

However even with LFTR you do still have a waste problem – as has been pointed out. Much less of a problem than you do with single pass nuclear power in use today, but a serious long term cost and potential risk – that requires extremely long term mitigation, containment solutions. What is the current day cost of that amortized future cost? What do we need to set aside up front baked into the price that is charged, in order to adequately fund a containment project with a duration measured in millennia.

But beyond all of this, there is the problem of logistics in the current and moving forward increasingly stark reality of fossil energy depletion, which is breathing down the worlds neck despite what folks like John would have us believe. The production collapse of Cantarell (one of the largest oil fields ever discovered) in just a few short years should be an eye opener to anyone with eyes. Ghawar the biggest field ever discovered has also peaked and is now being squeezed – just like Cantarell with steam injection and other tertiary recovery techniques. Now on to Shale Oil – it is a mirage. The oil majors have all discovered this harsh lesson – at great cost to their shareholders, and they are all heading for the exit trying to offload their unconventional oil holdings. Perhaps the major oil companies in the world know something that John Clark has not been made privy to (or that he willfully ignores), but a massive collapse in capital expenditure is now underway in the shale oil and shale gas sectors. Why, why are all the insiders stumbling over each other on their rush to get out of their shale plays. Could it be because after burning huge sums of capital -- some of the Majors like Shell dropped more than forty or fifty billion dollars (I forget which) – they are discovering that the reality of Shale is that it has very low rates of marginal return and is a capital expenditure sinkhole. They are also discovering that fracked wells (for both gas & the oil like kerogen) begin to reseal after just a few years, and need to be re-fracked (a significant cost in both energy, water and money). The insiders know this. Just follow the money, the sharp dry up of new capital speaks volumes. Fracked fields also have shorter periods of peak production and begin entering depletion sooner than traditional oil & gas fields. Furthermore when these formations do go into depletion their rates of depletion are higher than those of traditional oil & gas fields. This is a key factor, because the initial rush of hundreds of billions of dollars of capital into the fracked shale (both gas & oil) plays was justified using well production assumptions drawn from statistics gathered for traditional oil and gas fields.

 

For example the typical decline curve for Bakken shale oil wells (it is the biggest shale play) is a decline of 69% in the 1rst year; 39% - 2nd; 26% - 3rd; 27% - 4rth; 33% - 5th. After just five years the fracked well produces 1/20th its rate when first fracked. Numbers like these are what is driving the capital flight from this sector.

 

Now back to LFTR – keeping this context of collapsing marginal supply of energy clearly in mind. How does the entire LFTR logistical chain from mine; to refine; to power; to repository ever get built. It could have been built even ten years ago perhaps, but now the era of energy scarcity is about to hit.

 

Accept for a moment the most widely stated (perhaps optimistic) figure I have heard of… that oil has entered an era of 5% depletion rates. Compound that decline for ten years and try to imagine the word working on the much smaller rate of energy production that remains. In a regime of shrinking energy supplies the GDP will also shrink. A shrinking GDP is also known as a depression.

 

Only the government could ever assemble the needed capital and resources, but the government will be stretched thin as well and more concerned with the next energy war than LFTR.

 

There is no LFTR, nothing, except a few back of the napkin ideas. It takes rivers of billions of dollars to build a large scale energy infrastructure, and I have to ask where is all that going to come from when everyone will be belt tightening?

 

Chris

 

 

 

[Alberto G. Corona]

Threads like this have no relation with questions about what this list is about: the ultimate reality.

Well...wait... Why questions like this are discussed here? My guess is that yes, indeed. This is a question about the ultimate reality. GW is a question of belief, about where we go, one of the most fundamental questions after "where we come from" and "what we are".

And the people´s mind unconsciously and naturally direct these questions to this list. 

That is a bit irritating for me but at last it brings invaluable information about what is my main interest: people and what they believe. 

In my thesis about the religious instinct GW match perfectly with what is a primitive religion. I mean primitive in the sense that it demand sacrifices almost as expensive as the supposed benefits it brings. In this sense, the structure of GW is close of the one of the Aztec religion: For the Aztecs the world would end if there were no human sacrifices. The benefits were a solid war machine in defense of the empire and security for the citizens.  

This war machine and solid commitment of the people comes from the very high price that people pay in their sacrifices. This is an investment in the continuity of the society and culture. The investment works as follows: if each citizen does not defend from disorder and the disorder break the structure, his investment will dissipate into nothingness.

If two men fall in a island, to collaborate, one consciously but also unconsciously demand sacrifices from the other in order to build trust. That is the religious instinct. They end up having  common goals about what to do to be saved. If both agree to look for resources in the island, one demand to the other some result, or the signs of effort in the task if it has not been sucessful. Many tasks in a culture do not produce direct and visible products. Then signs of pain and sacrifices are demanded in a group to create mutual trust. These sacrifice becomes with time ritualized presented, codified and shared in a formal religion.

GW is a religion in his infancy. It demand eco-sacrifices:  slow down industrialization of poor countries and so on. I would say that also demand human sacrifices if we count the promotion of abortion and the forced abortions in many third countries that the UN is promoting in the name of the Mother Earth.  The supposed benefits are a World Government of enlightened people that will solve all our problems.

From the said about Aztecs, it is absolutely mandatory for the GW believers that everyone without exception believe in GW. For this purpose GW must be undisputable and "deniers" must be prosecuted.  The world is warming? this is because GW. The world stay the same? This is because GW. It is coling? that is predicted by GW. Every country must implement anti-babe anti-familly policies to stop population growth: feminism, homosexualism, 

abortion, destroying the history of the western countries in order to create supranational structures governed by enlightened people  etc. 

What is said for the individuals apply now for the countries. Third world  Countries that adopt the UN Agenda are strongly subsidized (Their elites, i mean). That happens with China, for example with his one child policy.  The deniers are attacked by the propaganda. etc

This is not centralized conspiracy. It is religion. Once a idea is set in the mind of some powerful people and they invest on it, the the rest of the ideas and processes start to work and accommodate themselves for the common goal. People do not conspire. People´s interests do with no much intelligence neither effort. It is simply natural.

--
Alberto.

[smi...@zonnet.nl]

It is the belief that the scentists can be trusted to do the research
they are supposed to do in a scientifically responsible way, vs. the
belief in the conspiracy theory that the entire scientific field has
been hijacked by ultra left wing environmental pressure groups.

Saibal

Citeren "Alberto G. Corona" <agoc...@gmail.com>:

>> *From:* everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:
>> everyth...@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *LizR
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 01, 2014 4:21 PM
>>
>> *To:* everyth...@googlegroups.com
>> *Subject:* Re: Climate models

>>
>>
>>
>> On 2 April 2014 12:10, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> Why has LFTR development essentially stopped for forty years?
>>
>>
>>
>> Apparently they can't be used to make bombs.
>>
>>
>>

>> Sure there is that, and no doubt that was why - at the height of the cold
>> war to put it in context - LFTR was dropped. That explains the then, but it

>> does not explain the essentially complete absence of any LFTR R&D anywhere.
>> I've read more than most on LFTR, and as far as breeders go it seems to me
>> to be the way to go for a number of reasons, including that the fuel
>> re-processing can be accomplished chemically rather than needing to spin it
>> out by centrifuge as is needed for uranium (same element, different
>> isotopes). LFTR power stations could have onsite fuel re-processing and
>> thus contain these deadly materials in a relatively few well secured sites.
>>

>> However even with LFTR you do still have a waste problem - as has been

>> pointed out. Much less of a problem than you do with single pass nuclear

>> power in use today, but a serious long term cost and potential risk - that

>> requires extremely long term mitigation, containment solutions. What is the
>> current day cost of that amortized future cost? What do we need to set
>> aside up front baked into the price that is charged, in order to adequately
>> fund a containment project with a duration measured in millennia.
>>
>> But beyond all of this, there is the problem of logistics in the current
>> and moving forward increasingly stark reality of fossil energy depletion,
>> which is breathing down the worlds neck despite what folks like John would
>> have us believe. The production collapse of Cantarell (one of the largest
>> oil fields ever discovered) in just a few short years should be an eye
>> opener to anyone with eyes. Ghawar the biggest field ever discovered has

>> also peaked and is now being squeezed - just like Cantarell with steam
>> injection and other tertiary recovery techniques. Now on to Shale Oil - it
>> is a mirage. The oil majors have all discovered this harsh lesson - at

>> great cost to their shareholders, and they are all heading for the exit
>> trying to offload their unconventional oil holdings. Perhaps the major oil
>> companies in the world know something that John Clark has not been made
>> privy to (or that he willfully ignores), but a massive collapse in capital
>> expenditure is now underway in the shale oil and shale gas sectors. Why,
>> why are all the insiders stumbling over each other on their rush to get out
>> of their shale plays. Could it be because after burning huge sums of
>> capital -- some of the Majors like Shell dropped more than forty or fifty

>> billion dollars (I forget which) - they are discovering that the reality of

>> Shale is that it has very low rates of marginal return and is a capital
>> expenditure sinkhole. They are also discovering that fracked wells (for
>> both gas & the oil like kerogen) begin to reseal after just a few years,
>> and need to be re-fracked (a significant cost in both energy, water and
>> money). The insiders know this. Just follow the money, the sharp dry up of
>> new capital speaks volumes. Fracked fields also have shorter periods of
>> peak production and begin entering depletion sooner than traditional oil &
>> gas fields. Furthermore when these formations do go into depletion their
>> rates of depletion are higher than those of traditional oil & gas fields.
>> This is a key factor, because the initial rush of hundreds of billions of
>> dollars of capital into the fracked shale (both gas & oil) plays was
>> justified using well production assumptions drawn from statistics gathered
>> for traditional oil and gas fields.
>>
>>
>>
>> For example the typical decline curve for Bakken shale oil wells (it is
>> the biggest shale play) is a decline of 69% in the 1rst year; 39% - 2nd;
>> 26% - 3rd; 27% - 4rth; 33% - 5th. After just five years the fracked well
>> produces 1/20th its rate when first fracked. Numbers like these are what is
>> driving the capital flight from this sector.
>>
>>
>>

>> Now back to LFTR - keeping this context of collapsing marginal supply of

>> energy clearly in mind. How does the entire LFTR logistical chain from
>> mine; to refine; to power; to repository ever get built. It could have been
>> built even ten years ago perhaps, but now the era of energy scarcity is
>> about to hit.
>>
>>
>>
>> Accept for a moment the most widely stated (perhaps optimistic) figure I

>> have heard of... that oil has entered an era of 5% depletion rates. Compound

[Chris de Morsella]

-----Original Message-----
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of smi...@zonnet.nl

It is the belief that the scentists can be trusted to do the research they
are supposed to do in a scientifically responsible way, vs. the belief in
the conspiracy theory that the entire scientific field has been hijacked by
ultra left wing environmental pressure groups.

Saibal

A conspiracy theory that has become spread through massive funding by the
big holders of fossil carbon reserves -- seeking to protect the future
valuation of those reserves, which has a large impact on the current
valuation of their carbon holdings. An eminently rational (if cynical)
motive, for these narrow carbon interests, but one that has sowed confusion
and doubt, using the same "junk science" (and "left wing hijacked science")
accusations that were perfected by Big Tobacco in the preceding decades. It
worked then for Big Tobacco and this same strategy of sowing falsehoods, is
working now for the big carbon interests.

Chris

[LizR]

On 3 April 2014 05:56, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of smi...@zonnet.nl

It is the belief that the scentists can be trusted to do the research they
are supposed to do in a scientifically responsible way, vs. the belief in
the conspiracy theory that the entire scientific field has been hijacked by
ultra left wing environmental pressure groups.

Saibal

A conspiracy theory that has become spread through massive funding by the
big holders of fossil carbon reserves -- seeking to protect the future
valuation of those reserves, which has a large impact on the current
valuation of their carbon holdings. An eminently rational (if cynical)
motive, for these narrow carbon interests, but one that has sowed confusion
and doubt, using the same "junk science" (and "left wing hijacked science")
accusations that were perfected by Big Tobacco in the preceding decades. It
worked then for Big Tobacco and this same strategy of sowing falsehoods,  is
working now for the big carbon interests.

Exactly. It's even been making some headway in the interests of denying evolution, for God (as it were) knows what reason.

[ghi...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 10:03:13 AM UTC+1, Alberto G.Corona wrote:

Threads like this have no relation with questions about what this list is about: the ultimate reality.

Well...wait... Why questions like this are discussed here? My guess is that yes, indeed. This is a question about the ultimate reality. GW is a question of belief, about where we go, one of the most fundamental questions after "where we come from" and "what we are".

And the people´s mind unconsciously and naturally direct these questions to this list. 

That is a bit irritating for me but at last it brings invaluable information about what is my main interest: people and what they believe. 

In my thesis about the religious instinct GW match perfectly with what is a primitive religion. I mean primitive in the sense that it demand sacrifices almost as expensive as the supposed benefits it brings. In this sense, the structure of GW is close of the one of the Aztec religion: For the Aztecs the world would end if there were no human sacrifices. The benefits were a solid war machine in defense of the empire and security for the citizens.  

This war machine and solid commitment of the people comes from the very high price that people pay in their sacrifices. This is an investment in the continuity of the society and culture. The investment works as follows: if each citizen does not defend from disorder and the disorder break the structure, his investment will dissipate into nothingness.

If two men fall in a island, to collaborate, one consciously but also unconsciously demand sacrifices from the other in order to build trust. That is the religious instinct. They end up having  common goals about what to do to be saved. If both agree to look for resources in the island, one demand to the other some result, or the signs of effort in the task if it has not been sucessful. Many tasks in a culture do not produce direct and visible products. Then signs of pain and sacrifices are demanded in a group to create mutual trust. These sacrifice becomes with time ritualized presented, codified and shared in a formal religion.

GW is a religion in his infancy. It demand eco-sacrifices:  slow down industrialization of poor countries and so on. I would say that also demand human sacrifices if we count the promotion of abortion and the forced abortions in many third countries that the UN is promoting in the name of the Mother Earth.  The supposed benefits are a World Government of enlightened people that will solve all our problems.

From the said about Aztecs, it is absolutely mandatory for the GW believers that everyone without exception believe in GW. For this purpose GW must be undisputable and "deniers" must be prosecuted.  The world is warming? this is because GW. The world stay the same? This is because GW. It is coling? that is predicted by GW. Every country must implement anti-babe anti-familly policies to stop population growth: feminism, homosexualism, 

abortion, destroying the history of the western countries in order to create supranational structures governed by enlightened people  etc. 

What is said for the individuals apply now for the countries. Third world  Countries that adopt the UN Agenda are strongly subsidized (Their elites, i mean). That happens with China, for example with his one child policy.  The deniers are attacked by the propaganda. etc

This is not centralized conspiracy. It is religion. Once a idea is set in the mind of some powerful people and they invest on it, the the rest of the ideas and processes start to work and accommodate themselves for the common goal. People do not conspire. People´s interests do with no much intelligence neither effort. It is simply natural.

 

The sort of additional details  that will most speak to the value of this thesis,  pertain to any distinctiveness you attach to the two "belief" and "thesis", mer. lost clearly stated in terms of one-another. Given you can supply that, the most valuable next kind of detail, would be the concrete steps you took to ensure whatever distinction the first additional details supplied, were derived as robustly as possible, so as to eliminate or minimize the single property on which, in fact, the value of your thesis full-spectrum depends from a pile of shit to a work of fuck-me-you-are-a-genius, that property being 'belief', its definition being whatever you said it was.

 

[spudb...@aol.com]

We still have to possess the technology in place to replace carbon with clean. Please note that New Delhi, or Auckland is not yet electrified, say to 20%.  You cannot do a kidney transplant without a replacement kidney.   

-----Original Message-----
From: LizR <liz...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Apr 2, 2014 5:03 pm
Subject: Re: Climate models

[LizR]

On 3 April 2014 12:17, <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

We still have to possess the technology in place to replace carbon with clean. Please note that New Delhi, or Auckland is not yet electrified, say to 20%.  You cannot do a kidney transplant without a replacement kidney.   

Auckland isn't electrified??? (How am I managing to write this post?!)

[ghi...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 3:05:49 PM UTC+1, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote:

It is the belief that the scentists can be trusted to do the research
they are supposed to do in a scientifically responsible way, vs. the
belief in the conspiracy theory that the entire scientific field has
been hijacked by ultra left wing environmental pressure groups.

Saibal

 

The distinction is more minimal. It's entirely allowable and reasonable to hold the belief you mention above, contingent on the measure of its holding also being reasonable...and consistent across all of science, or else some reasonable explanation why some sciences are so grossly corrupted, it's safer to rely on lobbies with an *actual* and *known* and not denied at that level - just not bothered with - at all, motive that *explicitly* corresponds to that precise definition of corruption being, for whatever arse-ended personal reason, directly in the opposite direction at Science.

 

I mean, come on. What the hell is the point of dismissing one domain for a range of suspected traits, by supported another one exhibiting the same range at a much higher standard of confirmation?

[ghi...@gmail.com]

Hi john, this looks like one instance of a more general theme supporting your whole position or a large chunk of it.

 

So it seems reasonable to look for the sense your theme is consistent beyond climate science.

 

So for my first stab at shedding some light on this, how about we look at the hypothetical of an object spotted out beyond pluto somewhere, that is too remote to do more than attach some best-approximation - some of which little better than vague - to some key properties. We know it's big, like...between 1/2 a mile and 10 miles. We know it's fast, between, like, 20000mph and 70000mph. We know its trajectory such that, there's a 99% chance it will cross Earth's path, but the best our best models can currently say is there is a 15% probability of Earth being at the same position along its path, when the object happens to cross it.

 

So, all of that basically deriving from models, all of them being the best we currently can say, based on our best efforts in the scientific tradition, including - intrinsically so - best efforts to minimize typical subjective, value-based corruptions typical across basically the entirety of non-science.

 

So, trying to order all your reasons why you'd treat this situation just the same, with just he same principle - or that this would be completely different and of course it would be a no brainer to go with whatever our best guess is, from science, because....in this case a 15% chance of a catastrophe, even if it's not even 15%...like even 1% dude...it's a real threat the way that other stuff just isn't....a 1/2 mile rock hitting the earth at 20000 miles with a 1% chance, is worse than 6C average rise. For Sure. Enough, to hold diamametrically opposite views.

 

Is that your view, or would you do the same? Or do you just need more information John? Like is it just impossible to provide an answer? Like, in the same way you've judged the level of expertise in climate science you needed for allthe judgements you've made. That standard? As high as that?

 

[LizR]

On Tuesday, April 1, 2014 6:31:46 PM UTC+1, John Clark wrote:

Yes but in general making plans to solve problems that won't show up for more than 15 years usually turns into a farce, it does so for 2 reasons:

1) The problem you foresee has little relation to the problem you eventually end up facing.

2) Do to advancing technology the solution you propose has rapidly become ridiculous.  

This is often true of human scale problems, but I can't see it necessarily applies to global ones. It's possible some breakthrough like nuclear fusion or nanotechnology will render proposed solutions to climate change obsolete, but I wouldn't bet my life on anyone developing either of those within 15 years. And in the meantime glaciers, permafrost and arctic/antarctic ice continue to melt, and the amount of CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere continues to rise, and every year the problem becomes that much less tractable.

Putting your faith in yet to be developed technology may conceivably work for some things (examples please?) but for fixing something that's wrong with the biosphere it seems just a little over-optimistic.

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2014 5:13 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

On 3 April 2014 12:17, <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

We still have to possess the technology in place to replace carbon with clean. Please note that New Delhi, or Auckland is not yet electrified, say to 20%.  You cannot do a kidney transplant without a replacement kidney.   

 

Auckland isn't electrified??? (How am I managing to write this post?!)

 

Given that everyone knows Auckland is not yet electrified to 20%; I always just assumed you pedaled a bike-generator in order to surf the web and stuff J

[John Clark]

Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
 

> No one is ever going to "recover" the dispersed Thorium in your garden's dirt
 

They could but no one will bother doing anything like that until ores of much much higher concentrations are used up, and at current consumption rates that won't happen for about a billion years.  
 

> Only the much smaller amount of Thorium or Uranium that is actually recoverable  and that means not only technically recoverable, but also energetically

 
As I say nobody would bother but even with today's primitive technology do you have any evidence that it would take more energy than what 37 tons of coal could provide to extract 12 grams of Thorium from one cubic meter of randomly selected dirt?

 

> Again only a very small fraction of the Thorium dispersed throughout the earth's crust is recoverable and can be counted as a reserve. Which was my point in bringing up the large quantities of gold dissolved in the world's oceans.

 

And Thorium is 2000 times as common as Gold and is in fact almost as common as lead. And if that little one troy ounce Gold coin in your pocket were  made of Thorium instead of Gold it could produce as much energy as 114 tons of coal.

 

> My point remains valid and salient. Whenever anyone speaks of some resource reserve figure in practice what they are (or should be) referring to is the recoverable reserve figures. The quantity of some resource in the earth's crust may be interesting, but it is irrelevant in a discussion of reserves.

 

So let's review:

* Thorium is a element that is TWICE as common as TIN.
* Some natural ores are 50% Thorium.
* One POUND of Thorium can provide as much energy as 1,362 TONS of coal.
* The best argument Chris de Morsella can come up with against the use of Thorium is that there just isn't enough of it.

 

> If LFTR is so great then why has it not been pursued

 

Four reasons:
 
1) in the early days military applications were considered much more important than civilian power plants, and small pressurized water Uranium reactors worked pretty well in submarines so Admiral Rickover decreed that's where virtually all reactor developmental money should go.
 
2) By their very nature uranium reactors create copious amounts of Plutonium but Thorium reactors do not. In the early days this was considered a huge advantage Uranium reactors had over Thorium reactors, but today not so much.
 
3) The culture of fission reactor design is far more conservative and resistant to change than any other area of science or technology.
 
4) LFTR's aren’t just theoretical but could actually work, so environmentalists feel duty bound to oppose it with every fiber of their being.  

 
> Peak liquid petroleum has already happened
 

BULLSHIT.

 
> and conventional oil (as it is called in the industry) is already in decline around the world.
This fact has been masked by the rapid rise in unconventional oil
 

Then to avoid obsolescence the term "conventional oil" will need to be revised.

 

> As evidence -- look at just how far the production rate has dropped off for the Cantarell field off the Yucatan -- it is the third biggest oil field ever discovered. Production from that super giant field has plunged by 80% from it's peak in 2004.

 

The Cantarell oil field is not only the third biggest it is also the most technologically primitive in the world, the reason is easy to understand. If you're a Mexican farmer and oil is discovered on your land you don't own a drop of it, the government owns it all and government bureaucrats have little expertise in the science of oil drilling; and those experts who do have such ability work for no government and prefer to apply their trade in places like the USA where they can get a nice share of the profits. For this reason the USA has not the largest but the most technologically advanced oil fields in the world, and is why the USA has experienced such a huge increase in oil and natural gas production in the last few years. 
 
  John K Clark     
 
 
 

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2014 2:03 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

On 3 April 2014 05:56, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

It is but a small step from a world wherein science is tarred and feathered with pejorative connotations – e.g. the “junk science” meme… To a brave (old) world where science is junked and the darkness of ignorance returns under the rule by fiat, backed up with force and rooted in dogma.

[LizR]

On 3 April 2014 17:01, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2014 5:13 PM

To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

On 3 April 2014 12:17, <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:

We still have to possess the technology in place to replace carbon with clean. Please note that New Delhi, or Auckland is not yet electrified, say to 20%.  You cannot do a kidney transplant without a replacement kidney.   

 

Auckland isn't electrified??? (How am I managing to write this post?!)

 

Given that everyone knows Auckland is not yet electrified to 20%; I always just assumed you pedaled a bike-generator in order to surf the web and stuff J

I thought that was just a weight-loss regime!

 

[Bruno Marchal]

That is why I don't think politics is possible as long as prohibition continue. It has been used as a sort of Trojan horse for bandits, and they will sell you what they want.

Stopping prohibition will not be enough. We must separate politics from money. We should vote on ideas and not humans. We should find a way to prevent democracies against propaganda, if not corporatism.

The green should be ally with the antiprohibitionists. I do think that "prohibition" is the deep reason of possible climate perturbation, and economy. 

Like the abandon of rationality in the "spiritual" is the deep reason of why the non-sensical prohibition has seem conceivable today.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Platonist Guitar Cowboy]

They're trying to find that jet that got lost on the Indian Ocean somewhere. But most of the objects the satellites zoom in on are just... trash. Ocean garbage is creating so many false positives, that it impedes finding a missing plane.

You don't even have to be "green" to understand that it's not productive or rational to keep having mountains of redundant material and poison keep accumulating and multiplying around us. The "discussion" in the total black white form displayed occasionally in this thread, is a U.S. phenomenon.

Everybody else has moved on from yes/no to the how-question and its economic, political, regulatory traps/subtleties, which, with prohibition background, are complex/insane enough.

For instance, people I know involved in monitoring plant species to assess efficacy of local measures to help biodiversity do its thing, are often trapped in some political game of stakeholders. Scientists: "It would be good to reseed those plots properly with local species now." Green Politics/Money: "Don't do it now! Wait until next year, so we have more 'devastation leverage' in our data. Otherwise, no contract."

So yes, prohibition/politics are very much intertwined with the question and hinder simple scientific common sense; even by the "green political conspirators". PGC  

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark

 

Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
 

> No one is ever going to "recover" the dispersed Thorium in your garden's dirt
 

They could but no one will bother doing anything like that until ores of much much higher concentrations are used up, and at current consumption rates that won't happen for about a billion years.  

 

I am amazed how much certainty you have about a back of the napkin idea that does not exist. Not a single LFTR unit is operating, nor are there any blueprints to build one. There is no Thorium mining, refining industrial scale sector and all the other impediments that exist between John Clark’s certainty and actual reality.

So forgive me if I take your billion year certainty with a billion grains of salt.

 

> Only the much smaller amount of Thorium or Uranium that is actually recoverable  and that means not only technically recoverable, but also energetically

 
>>As I say nobody would bother but even with today's primitive technology do you have any evidence that it would take more energy than what 37 tons of coal could provide to extract 12 grams of Thorium from one cubic meter of randomly selected dirt?

 

You are the one making the claim; it is up to you to show how it can be done.

 

> Again only a very small fraction of the Thorium dispersed throughout the earth's crust is recoverable and can be counted as a reserve. Which was my point in bringing up the large quantities of gold dissolved in the world's oceans.

 
And Thorium is 2000 times as common as Gold and is in fact almost as common as lead. And if that little one troy ounce Gold coin in your pocket were  made of Thorium instead of Gold it could produce as much energy as 114 tons of coal.

 

I get it you love Thorium, but love of Thorium does not make it a reality. Breeder reactors – including LFTR – are not easy things to build and they push materials to the limit.

I am not even especially opposed to LFTR – and have stated many times that out of all the breeder types – and I have looked at the Gen IV reference design proposals for various types – so it is kind of funny you arguing with me about this.

My skepticism that LFTR can take off is because it has to go from absolute zero – there is no Thorium sector to speak of; there is no Thorium mining sector, or refining capacity. There are no LFTR reactors (or even blueprints for that matter). There is nothing, except the wishes of the small cadre of thorium enthusiasts.

How does all of this industrial scale activity occur in a regime of shrinking energy supplies – wherein multiple constituent sectors will all be clamoring that they need as much available energy as they can get.

Guess which sector will get its claims satisfied – hint it won’t be the Thorium sector – more like the military industrial complex and the funding of increasingly nasty energy wars to control the world’s last big oil and gas reserves.

 

> My point remains valid and salient. Whenever anyone speaks of some resource reserve figure in practice what they are (or should be) referring to is the recoverable reserve figures. The quantity of some resource in the earth's crust may be interesting, but it is irrelevant in a discussion of reserves.

 

So let's review:

* Thorium is a element that is TWICE as common as TIN.
* Some natural ores are 50% Thorium.
* One POUND of Thorium can provide as much energy as 1,362 TONS of coal.
* The best argument Chris de Morsella can come up with against the use of Thorium is that there just isn't enough of it.

 

Bull shit John. I have given you many different arguments and just gave you others in this very email. Stop lying and framing my position – you are a dishonest actor John CLark!

Where are the LFTR reactors? Where are the LFTR blueprints? Where is the entire logistical chain that would be needed in order for an LFTR sector to exist?

 

 

> If LFTR is so great then why has it not been pursued

 
Four reasons:
 
1) in the early days military applications were considered much more important than civilian power plants, and small pressurized water Uranium reactors worked pretty well in submarines so Admiral Rickover decreed that's where virtually all reactor developmental money should go.

 

Yes… we all heard that.

 
2) By their very nature uranium reactors create copious amounts of Plutonium but Thorium reactors do not. In the early days this was considered a huge advantage Uranium reactors had over Thorium reactors, but today not so much.

 

I have stated this myself many times. Not new news.

 
3) The culture of fission reactor design is far more conservative and resistant to change than any other area of science or technology.

 

 
4) LFTR's aren’t just theoretical but could actually work, so environmentalists feel duty bound to oppose it with every fiber of their being.  

 

Again – distorting the positions of those you feel the need to demonize. As I have in fact repeatedly stated I am not especially opposed to LFTR development.

You are a very dishonest interlocutor John; you consistently frame other people’s positions in manners that set them up as being irrational and extreme – this kind of tactic is evidence of a dishonest nature.

 
> Peak liquid petroleum has already happened
 
BULLSHIT.

 

BULLSHIT to your BULLSHIT!!!

You don’t know what you are speaking about John. The statistics do not lie. Globally peak liquid petroleum has peaked and you can shout BULLSHIT a million times into the wind, but all you produce is more of that John Clark hot air.

 
> and conventional oil (as it is called in the industry) is already in decline around the world.
This fact has been masked by the rapid rise in unconventional oil

 

 
>>Then to avoid obsolescence the term "conventional oil" will need to be revised.

 

The rise in non-conventional oil is a bubble that is already coming apart at the wheels. As I have shown all the oil majors are pulling out of this sector as fast as they can – trying to offload their unconventional oil operations to any sucker wiling to buy it off of them. They have all been badly burned by all the sunk capital they have invested in this bubble. And have all felt the negative consequences of this poor investment on their profit margins.

 

 

> As evidence -- look at just how far the production rate has dropped off for the Cantarell field off the Yucatan -- it is the third biggest oil field ever discovered. Production from that super giant field has plunged by 80% from it's peak in 2004.

 
The Cantarell oil field is not only the third biggest it is also the most technologically primitive in the world, the reason is easy to understand. If you're a Mexican farmer and oil is discovered on your land you don't own a drop of it, the government owns it all and government bureaucrats have little expertise in the science of oil drilling; and those experts who do have such ability work for no government and prefer to apply their trade in places like the USA where they can get a nice share of the profits. For this reason the USA has not the largest but the most technologically advanced oil fields in the world, and is why the USA has experienced such a huge increase in oil and natural gas production in the last few years. 

 

BULLSHIT John PEMEX is not some dirt poor Mexican farmer it is a very big vertically integrated oil company, one of the largest in the world. The same depletion story is occurring in Ghawar as well (though the Saudis are doing their best to hide this fact).

 

John you are an information poor energy prognosticator; a magical thinking conrucopeanist who wants to believe. Have a happy flat earth.

Chris de Morsella

 
  John K Clark     
 
 
 

 

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2014 11:56 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

 

On 02 Apr 2014, at 23:03, LizR wrote:

I agree – the prohibition is the funding pipeline that enables the imposition of rule by the global criminal crime families… as well as promotes the regime of criminality and terror and police state response that these crime families (organized crime families embedded within institutions) require in order to leverage their power into global control.

 

Chris

 

Bruno

 

 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

 

 

[Chris de Morsella]

This article from Bloomberg delves into some detail on how the unconventional oil sector is actually based on unreliable numbers -- with reserve estimates and production curves that have proven to have been wildly overstated -- to the point of criminal conspiracy to defraud investors (I would argue)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-03/old-math-casts-doubt-on-accuracy-of-oil-reserve-estimates.html

Old Math Casts Doubt on Accuracy of Oil Reserve Estimates

Jan Arps is the most influential oilman you’ve never heard of.

In 1945, Arps, then a 33-year-old petroleum engineer for British-American Oil Producing Co., published a formula to predict how much crude a well will produce and when it will run dry. The Arps method has become one of the most widely used measures in the industry. Companies rely on it to predict the profitability of drilling, secure loans and report reserves to regulators. When Representative Ed Royce, a California Republican, said at a March 26 hearing in Washington that the U.S. should start exporting its oil to undermine Russian influence, his forecast of “increasing U.S. energy production” can be traced back to Arps.

The problem is the Arps equation has been twisted to apply to shale technology, which didn’t exist when Arps died in 1976. John Lee, a University of Houston engineering professor and an authority on estimating reserves, said billions of barrels of untapped shale oil in the U.S. are counted by companies relying on limited drilling history and tweaks to Arps’s formula that exaggerate future production. That casts doubt on how close the U.S. will get to energy independence, a goal that’s nearer than at any time since 1985, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Photographer: Ken James/Bloomberg

To replace the Arps calculation, researchers are testing new formulas with names worthy... Read More

“Things could turn out more pessimistic than people project,” said Lee. “The long-term production of some of those oil-rich wells may be overstated.”

Calculate Reserves

Lee’s criticisms have opened a rift in the industry about how to measure the stores of crude trapped within rock formations thousands of feet below the earth’s surface. In a newsletter published this year by Houston-based Ryder Scott Co., which helps drillers calculate reserves, Lee called for an industry conference to address what he said are inconsistent approaches. The Arps method is particularly open to abuse, he said.

U.S. oil production has increased 40 percent since the end of 2011 as drillers target layers of oil-bearing rock such as the Bakken shale in North Dakota, the Eagle Ford in Texas, and the Mississippi Lime in Kansas andOklahoma, according to the EIA. The U.S. is on track to become the world’s largest oil producer by next year, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. A report from London-based consultants Wood Mackenzie said that by 2020 the Bakken’s output alone will be 1.7 million barrels a day, from 1.1 million now.

Photographer: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg

U.S. oil production has increased 40 percent since the end of 2011 as drillers target... Read More

U.S. crude benchmark West Texas Intermediate fell 41 cents to $99.21 a barrel at 10:10 a.m London time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It has risen 0.8 percent this year.

Inherently Uncertain

Predicting the future is an inherently uncertain business, and Arps’s method works as well as any other, said Scott Wilson, a senior vice president in Ryder Scott’s Denver office.

“No one method does it right every time,” Wilson said. “Arps is just a tool. If you blame Arps because a forecast turns out to be wrong, that’s like blaming the gun for shooting somebody. As far as Arps being old, the wheel was invented a long time ago too but it still comes in handy.”

Rising reserve estimates gives the U.S. a false sense of security, said Tad Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

“We have deceived ourselves into thinking that since we have an infinite resource, we don’t need to worry,” Patzek said. “We are stumbling like blind people into a future which is not as pretty as we think.”

The Arps formula is only as good as the assumptions a company puts into it, Patzek said. Estimates can be inflated when Arps is based on limited drilling history for data or on a few high-performing wells to predict performance across a wide swath of acreage. Forecasts can also be skewed higher by assuming slower production declines than Arps observed.

Reserves Cut

In November 2012, SandRidge Energy Inc. cut its reserve predictions to the equivalent of 422,000 barrels per well from 456,000. Five months later, the estimate was cut again, to 369,000 barrels, company records show. Oklahoma City-based SandRidge has since made an adjustment upward to 380,000 barrels per well.

The early, more optimistic forecasts were based on a small number of high-performing wells, which led the company to overestimate performance for its other acreage, said Duane Grubert, SandRidge’s executive vice president for investor relations and strategy. The company now has more than 1,100 wells and has improved its drilling. It is confident that current estimates are reliable, Grubert said.

“Nobody knew that until we actually ground-truthed the field by drilling it,” Grubert said. “What we came up was, hmm, that initial estimate was a little high.”

Future Production

SM Energy Co., a Denver-based producer, suffered a similar setback this year when its wells in the Eagle Ford shale in Texas fell short of forecasts. The company on Feb. 18 cut its prediction in one area to the equivalent of 475,000 barrels per well from 602,000. Estimating future production from early data is a challenge for the industry, said Brent Collins, a spokesman for SM Energy.

“This is especially true when you are trying to estimate an average from a limited number of wells,” Collins said.

Both SandRidge and SM Energy use variations of the Arps method, company records show.

Tapping shale formations differs from the drilling in Arps’ day, said Dean Rietz, an executive vice president in charge of reservoir simulation at Ryder Scott. The first commercial shale well was drilled in 2004, 59 years after Arps published his method.

Gas Pockets

In 1945, oil production meant drilling straight down to hit pockets of oil and gas that had become trapped after migrating upward from deep layers of rock. Today’s drilling targets those deep layers, boring through thousands of feet of the earth’s crust, then turning sideways to chew for a mile or more through layers that are harder and less porous than a granite countertop. The rock is shattered by a high-pressure jet of water, sand, and chemicals to create a network of small cracks to allow the oil and gas to escape. The largest fissures are narrower than the width of a paper clip. The smallest are thousands of times thinner than a human hair.

On a graph, these fractured wells appear to follow a different trajectory of decline than the conventional wells Arps studied, said Lee.

To replace the Arps calculation, researchers are testing new formulas with names worthy of indie bands: Stretched Exponential, which Lee helped develop; the Duong Method, devised by Anh Duong, principal reservoir engineer for ConocoPhillips; and Simple Scaling Theory, which the University of Texas’s Patzek worked on.

Rietz has made a well simulation model to predict production.

“Come back to me in 10 years, and I’ll tell you how reliable it was,” he said.

[John Clark]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 12:25 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Not a single LFTR unit is operating

That's true today but wasn't always the case,  the last operating thorium reactor on this planet, the MSRE at Oak Ridge  was shut down in 1969. Of course after 40 years of doing nothing and not spending a dime a lot of R&D would be required before we could switch over to a Thorium based economy, but it would be trivial compared with what would be required to make a practical fusion reactor.

> nor are there any blueprints to build one.

BULLSHIT.

> There is no Thorium mining, refining

Oh for heavens sake! There is no Uranium shortage and Thorium is 4 times as abundant and easier to separate from it's ore than Uranium is, and we can only get energy from .7% of the Uranium but  we can use 100% of the Thorium! So do you REALLY want to say we shouldn't consider Thorium because we can't get enough of it?? 

>>As I say nobody would bother but even with today's primitive technology do you have any evidence that it would take more energy than what 37 tons of coal could provide to extract 12 grams of Thorium from one cubic meter of randomly selected dirt?

> You are the one making the claim; it is up to you to show how it can be done.

You are the one making the claim that extracting 12 grams of Thorium from one meter of dirt would take more energy than the Thorium could produce, so it is up to you to show it's true; although nobody would be dumb enough to bother with such dirt when there is ore that contains 50% Thorium available. 

>>> My point remains valid and salient. Whenever anyone speaks of some resource reserve figure in practice what they are (or should be) referring to is the recoverable reserve figures. The quantity of some resource in the earth's crust may be interesting, but it is irrelevant in a discussion of reserves.

 

>> So let's review * Thorium is a element that is TWICE as common as TIN. * Some natural ores are 50% Thorium. * One POUND of Thorium can provide as much energy as 1,362 TONS of coal. * The best argument Chris de Morsella can come up with against the use of Thorium is that there just isn't enough of it.

 

> Bull shit John. I have given you many different arguments

Many? You have only given 2 basic arguments. The first one is that we won't be able to find enough Thorium to meet our needs and that argument is downright imbecilic. Your second argument is that nobody has ever made a large number of Thorium reactors and that is true, but from that you conclude  nobody ever could and that does not follow at all.  And then you say you like Thorium after all which contradicts everything you said before. 

>> The Cantarell oil field is not only the third biggest it is also the most technologically primitive in the world, the reason is easy to understand. If you're a Mexican farmer and oil is discovered on your land you don't own a drop of it, the government owns it all and government bureaucrats have little expertise in the science of oil drilling; and those experts who do have such ability work for no government and prefer to apply their trade in places like the USA where they can get a nice share of the profits. For this reason the USA has not the largest but the most technologically advanced oil fields in the world, and is why the USA has experienced such a huge increase in oil and natural gas production in the last few years. 

 

> BULLSHIT John  BULLSHIT to your BULLSHIT!!!

Copycat.

 

> PEMEX is not some dirt poor Mexican farmer

PEMEX is not dirt poor but judging from the way they operate their oil fields they are as dumb as dirt, the technology is medieval compared with what's going on in the USA.

 John K Clark

[Chris de Morsella]

---

From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, April 3, 2014 7:32 PM
Subject: Re: Climate models

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 12:25 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Not a single LFTR unit is operating

>>That's true today but wasn't always the case,  the last operating thorium reactor on this planet, the MSRE at Oak Ridge  was shut down in 1969. Of course after 40 years of doing nothing and not spending a dime a lot of R&D would be required before we could switch over to a Thorium based economy, but it would be trivial compared with what would be required to make a practical fusion reactor.

I have cited that reactor multiple times -- so it is not news to me. That is all you have for LFTR -- a single research reactor that operated for a few years some forty years ago. 

Solar PV is here today -- and is being produced at industrial scales of production as we speak; there is no contest between what technology is ramped up and ready... and it is not LFTR.

> nor are there any blueprints to build one.

BULLSHIT.

Okay then loudmouth where are these actual blueprints? 

Real, project ready blueprints. Not some back of the napkin calculations or the ancient dust covered material from the single example of a small research scale LFTR that was operated for a few years some forty years ago at Oak Ridge.

> There is no Thorium mining, refining

>> Oh for heavens sake! There is no Uranium shortage and Thorium is 4 times as abundant and easier to separate from it's ore than Uranium is, and we can only get energy from .7% of the Uranium but  we can use 100% of the Thorium! So do you REALLY want to say we shouldn't consider Thorium because we can't get enough of it??  

Wrong again the world is facing a recoverable uranium peak that will be reached within a decade or two (at current extraction rates, if nuclear is ramped up peak uranium will be reached that much sooner). Uranium reserves -- like most other reserve figures have been highly overstated by the mine operators and reserve owners -- the motive to do so is clear. A physicist friend of mine (who works at CERN -- has written extensively about the issue of future uranium supply)

>>As I say nobody would bother but even with today's primitive technology do you have any evidence that it would take more energy than what 37 tons of coal could provide to extract 12 grams of Thorium from one cubic meter of randomly selected dirt?

> You are the one making the claim; it is up to you to show how it can be done.

>> You are the one making the claim that extracting 12 grams of Thorium from one meter of dirt would take more energy than the Thorium could produce, so it is up to you to show it's true; although nobody would be dumb enough to bother with such dirt when there is ore that contains 50% Thorium available.  

Whatever. I do not inhabit the same magical thinking universe you seem to live in. I see the practical technological limits that constrain what can actually be accomplished. 

>>> My point remains valid and salient. Whenever anyone speaks of some resource reserve figure in practice what they are (or should be) referring to is the recoverable reserve figures. The quantity of some resource in the earth's crust may be interesting, but it is irrelevant in a discussion of reserves.

 

>> So let's review * Thorium is a element that is TWICE as common as TIN. * Some natural ores are 50% Thorium. * One POUND of Thorium can provide as much energy as 1,362 TONS of coal. * The best argument Chris de Morsella can come up with against the use of Thorium is that there just isn't enough of it.

 

> Bull shit John. I have given you many different arguments

>> Many? You have only given 2 basic arguments. The first one is that we won't be able to find enough Thorium to meet our needs and that argument is downright imbecilic. Your second argument is that nobody has ever made a large number of Thorium reactors and that is true, but from that you conclude  nobody ever could and that does not follow at all.  And then you say you like Thorium after all which contradicts everything you said before. 

Nobody has made more than a single small scale research LFTR reactor let alone a large number.  You are smoking crack -- as we say in the software business. I never said there was not recoverable Thorium either -- so stop trying to frame me as having taken that position. What I have said and continue to say is that there is no existing extraction infrastructure and that it would take a lot of work and fossil energy to ramp such an infrastructure up.

You really do not understand the logistics very well, typical of magical thinking.

>> The Cantarell oil field is not only the third biggest it is also the most technologically primitive in the world, the reason is easy to understand. If you're a Mexican farmer and oil is discovered on your land you don't own a drop of it, the government owns it all and government bureaucrats have little expertise in the science of oil drilling; and those experts who do have such ability work for no government and prefer to apply their trade in places like the USA where they can get a nice share of the profits. For this reason the USA has not the largest but the most technologically advanced oil fields in the world, and is why the USA has experienced such a huge increase in oil and natural gas production in the last few years. 

 

> BULLSHIT John  BULLSHIT to your BULLSHIT!!!

Copycat.

 

> PEMEX is not some dirt poor Mexican farmer

PEMEX is not dirt poor but judging from the way they operate their oil fields they are as dumb as dirt, the technology is medieval compared with what's going on in the USA.

And you know this how?

Chris de Morsella

 John K Clark

[LizR]

On 4 April 2014 04:46, Platonist Guitar Cowboy <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:

You don't even have to be "green" to understand that it's not productive or rational to keep having mountains of redundant material and poison keep accumulating and multiplying around us. The "discussion" in the total black white form displayed occasionally in this thread, is a U.S. phenomenon.

Sadly this does seem to be the case. Every time I see a knee-jerk reaction on this issue it's always some (North) American who thinks the lefties are out to get him, and the world would be fine if we all had free markets and guns. It's ironic that the USA, which was so terrified of COmmunist inflitration and propaganda, has done such a good job of brainwashing its own citizens into believing the exact opposite - beliefs which may yet spell the end of humanity.

[LizR]

On 4 April 2014 08:16, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

This article from Bloomberg delves into some detail on how the unconventional oil sector is actually based on unreliable numbers -- with reserve estimates and production curves that have proven to have been wildly overstated -- to the point of criminal conspiracy to defraud investors (I would argue)

Not to mention the rest of us.

[Bruno Marchal]

On 03 Apr 2014, at 17:46, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:

They're trying to find that jet that got lost on the Indian Ocean somewhere. But most of the objects the satellites zoom in on are just... trash. Ocean garbage is creating so many false positives, that it impedes finding a missing plane.

You don't even have to be "green" to understand that it's not productive or rational to keep having mountains of redundant material and poison keep accumulating and multiplying around us. The "discussion" in the total black white form displayed occasionally in this thread, is a U.S. phenomenon.

Everybody else has moved on from yes/no to the how-question and its economic, political, regulatory traps/subtleties, which, with prohibition background, are complex/insane enough.

For instance, people I know involved in monitoring plant species to assess efficacy of local measures to help biodiversity do its thing, are often trapped in some political game of stakeholders. Scientists: "It would be good to reseed those plots properly with local species now." Green Politics/Money: "Don't do it now! Wait until next year, so we have more 'devastation leverage' in our data. Otherwise, no contract."

So yes, prohibition/politics are very much intertwined with the question and hinder simple scientific common sense; even by the "green political conspirators". PGC  

If we tolerate lies in politics, like we did with cannabis, lies can only spread, and we loss power, and can no more trust the politicians, and eventually larger and larger layer of the society.

After the watergate americans voted for a capping (limitation) of money that we can give for electoral campaign, but this has just been removed (yesterday!). That is not good news.

Yes, I think the "climate problem" is only a symptom of a bigger and deeper problem, about the very working of the democracies, and its perversion by the grey money, the fear selling, if not the catastrophes merchandising. Some banks invests in catastrophes, bankruptcy, etc.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Telmo Menezes]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 8:55 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 02 Apr 2014, at 23:03, LizR wrote:

On 3 April 2014 05:56, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of smi...@zonnet.nl

It is the belief that the scentists can be trusted to do the research they
are supposed to do in a scientifically responsible way, vs. the belief in
the conspiracy theory that the entire scientific field has been hijacked by
ultra left wing environmental pressure groups.

Saibal

A conspiracy theory that has become spread through massive funding by the
big holders of fossil carbon reserves -- seeking to protect the future
valuation of those reserves, which has a large impact on the current
valuation of their carbon holdings. An eminently rational (if cynical)
motive, for these narrow carbon interests, but one that has sowed confusion
and doubt, using the same "junk science" (and "left wing hijacked science")
accusations that were perfected by Big Tobacco in the preceding decades. It
worked then for Big Tobacco and this same strategy of sowing falsehoods,  is
working now for the big carbon interests.

Exactly. It's even been making some headway in the interests of denying evolution, for God (as it were) knows what reason.

That is why I don't think politics is possible as long as prohibition continue. It has been used as a sort of Trojan horse for bandits, and they will sell you what they want.

Stopping prohibition will not be enough. We must separate politics from money.

Agreed, but I think there's a subtly here -- politics in necessarily about money, because money is the fundamental tool that we have to manage resources, unless someone figures out a way to make communism work. There's nothing fundamentally good or evil about money, it's just a neutral tool that can be used both ways.

I see the problem as more one of managing incentives. People react to incentives. I strongly believe that the pollution problem could be mitigated quickly if the free market had the incentive to do so. Carbon credits are a horrible idea, because they reinforce bad behaviours without creating the incentives that can actually solve the problem.

If an objective cost can be calculated for the damage that certain companies cause to the environment, then let's charge them for this and re-distribute this money directly to the people, with no special rules or distinctions. Just a simple division. None of this money should ever fall under the control of politicians. Then the companies have an incentive to solve the problem, and less people have an incentive to lie.

This should be purely handed by the police and the courts, in the same way that they are used to place a cost on other undesirable behaviours. If instead this money falls under the control of politicians, we now have two problems.

Best,

Telmo.

 

We should vote on ideas and not humans. We should find a way to prevent democracies against propaganda, if not corporatism.

The green should be ally with the antiprohibitionists. I do think that "prohibition" is the deep reason of possible climate perturbation, and economy. 

Like the abandon of rationality in the "spiritual" is the deep reason of why the non-sensical prohibition has seem conceivable today.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Stephen Paul King]

This article is packed full of falsehoods that a simple bit of research could correct. 

read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale

As to its main point, all predictions are based on models. Models are never the "real thing". Duh! So some "expert" has a wrong model. Big News! LOL. What is the point of making a big deal about this if not to spread uncertainty and doubt. Good job being an unpaid hack for oil future short sellers.

[John Clark]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Solar PV is here today 

Solar PV has been here for 60 years and THOUSANDS of  times more money has been spent developing it than has been spent on LFTR R&D, and yet solar PV is still just a rounding error in our total energy budget. 

> I see the practical technological limits that constrain what can actually be accomplished. 

Apparently not.

>> Oh for heavens sake! There is no Uranium shortage and Thorium is 4 times as abundant and easier to separate from it's ore than Uranium is, and we can only get energy from .7% of the Uranium but  we can use 100% of the Thorium! So do you REALLY want to say we shouldn't consider Thorium because we can't get enough of it??  

> Wrong again

I want to know if I really understand you correctly, are you saying that a major problem (or even a minor problem) with using Thorium for energy is that there isn't enough of it? Is that really your position?
 

> the world is facing a recoverable uranium peak that will be reached within a decade or two (at current extraction rates, if nuclear is ramped up peak uranium will be reached that much sooner).

Uranium prices are the lowest they've been in  8 years. I found a chart for the last 5 years:



And so I would like to make a public bet with you and see if you're willing to put your money where your mouth is. You say the shit will hit the fan within a decade or two, so if before April 4 2024 there is widespread reactor shutdowns because of Uranium shortages (and not due to temper tantrums from environmentalists) then, assuming I'm still alive, I will send you $1000; if there are not widespread reactor shutdowns because of Uranium shortages before April 4 2024 then, assuming you're still alive, you only needs to send me $100. So do we have a bet? Come on I'm giving you 10 to 1 odds!

>> You are the one making the claim that extracting 12 grams of Thorium from one meter of dirt would take more energy than the Thorium could produce, so it is up to you to show it's true; although nobody would be dumb enough to bother with such dirt when there is ore that contains 50% Thorium available.  

> Whatever.

Yes, whatever.  

> I do not inhabit the same magical thinking universe you seem to live in.

How nice for you, therefore by accepting my bet you can make an easy $1000.

John K Clark

[Chris de Morsella]

It’s what you get when you have rule by the gangster psychopaths controlling the global corridors of power. As Bruno has pointed out it is the drug prohibition that has given these transnational crime families a real leg up in penetrating then controlling institution after institution. But then hasn’t the whole of human written history been, by and large characterized by rule by psychopaths.

One can also say that without the sheep there would be no wolves; it is the ease with which us humans are corralled into social herds; the predictable human nature and habit of obedience to authority that makes it possible for psychopaths to infiltrate organizations and take power over them (from within) and then leverage that organizational power to control vast human herds.

 

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2014 12:57 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

> Solar PV is here today 

 

Solar PV has been here for 60 years and THOUSANDS of  times more money has been spent developing it than has been spent on LFTR R&D, and yet solar PV is still just a rounding error in our total energy budget. 

 

Haha – if you call the almost 150 GW of currently installed solar PV capacity a rounding error that is your prerogative. 150GW is however a significant amount of energy production capacity no matter how much you desire to minimize its importance. The global installed capacity of solar PV has also been doubling every two or so years for quite a while now and is projected to surpass 300GW of globally installed PV capacity by 2017.

Just a rounding number?

In your world maybe.

Compare this capacity with the current capacity of LFTR which is 0 watts.

 

> I see the practical technological limits that constrain what can actually be accomplished. 

 

Apparently not.

 

 

 

 

>> Oh for heavens sake! There is no Uranium shortage and Thorium is 4 times as abundant and easier to separate from it's ore than Uranium is, and we can only get energy from .7% of the Uranium but  we can use 100% of the Thorium! So do you REALLY want to say we shouldn't consider Thorium because we can't get enough of it??  

 

> Wrong again

 

I want to know if I really understand you correctly, are you saying that a major problem (or even a minor problem) with using Thorium for energy is that there isn't enough of it? Is that really your position?

 

No it is not my position and never has been – though I take issue with your reserve figures. The big issues with LFTR are that it simply does not exist and in order to bring it into existence would require a large scale concerted multi-decadal effort. The entire sector – not just the reactor units themselves, but the entire logistical supply chain – has to be built out from nothing.

This has always been my position, but you choose instead to frame my position as being other than what it is for your own argumentative purposes.

 

> the world is facing a recoverable uranium peak that will be reached within a decade or two (at current extraction rates, if nuclear is ramped up peak uranium will be reached that much sooner).

Uranium prices are the lowest they've been in  8 years. I found a chart for the last 5 years:

So? That is a temporary effect of the highly successful ex-Soviet bombs to reactor fuel program that the US and post-USSR Russia negotiated in the 1990s. Give it another ten years.

And so I would like to make a public bet with you and see if you're willing to put your money where your mouth is. You say the shit will hit the fan within a decade or two, so if before April 4 2024 there is widespread reactor shutdowns because of Uranium shortages (and not due to temper tantrums from environmentalists) then, assuming I'm still alive, I will send you $1000; if there are not widespread reactor shutdowns because of Uranium shortages before April 4 2024 then, assuming you're still alive, you only needs to send me $100. So do we have a bet? Come on I'm giving you 10 to 1 odds!

At current rates of nuclear power production the current reserves will last longer than ten years – but they will not if nuclear power is ramped up as an energy generation source. When the world begins to hit peak uranium very much depends on whether more reactors are built or not.

>> You are the one making the claim that extracting 12 grams of Thorium from one meter of dirt would take more energy than the Thorium could produce, so it is up to you to show it's true; although nobody would be dumb enough to bother with such dirt when there is ore that contains 50% Thorium available.  

 

> Whatever.

 

Yes, whatever.  

Yeah whater

> I do not inhabit the same magical thinking universe you seem to live in.

 

How nice for you, therefore by accepting my bet you can make an easy $1000.

Nice polemic… what assurances do I even have that you would actually pay. It is mere bluster on your end. As I said – and it is just common sense the date we hit peak uranium very much depends on how many operating nuclear power plants exist in the world. If nuclear power is ramped way up – as the pro nuclear folks would have us do – then we will hit that wall sooner. If, instead, as seems likely nuclear continues to get phased out then we will not hit the uranium supply peak until a later point in time. Can you follow this simple reasoning?

Chris de Morsella

John K Clark

 

[Stephen Paul King]

Hear, Hear! Sadly, we (collectively speaking) keep buying the smooth talk and shiny baubles they promise and keep electing them. To oppose it we must think for ourselves. Form opinions from facts we collect and examine them to our best ability and collaborate with each other. It's hard work, very hard. Most people simply would rather be blissfully ignorant...

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[spudb...@aol.com]

By solar and wind its isn't.

-----Original Message-----
From: LizR <liz...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Apr 2, 2014 8:13 pm
Subject: Re: Climate models

[Stephen Paul King]

Hey Chris,

   About a uranium shortage. Come scrape up a few yards of dirt near where I live and you'lll find lots and lots of uranium. We have a huge problem with the radon gas that the stuff generates... What have you been reading?

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[Chris de Morsella]

Hey Stephen – try refining it from your dirt. Your garden dirt is not ore quality; it is not a feasible supply. Do you believe the minuscule quantities of uranium in your garden’s dirt should be counted as part of global uranium reserves?

Why exactly?

By your count the garden dirt argument – taken to the absurd – why not include all the uranium in the solar system, our entire galaxy –  after all who knows maybe someday with some technology will it all may be recoverable…. What have you been reading?

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2014 3:33 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

Hey Chris,

 

   About a uranium shortage. Come scrape up a few yards of dirt near where I live and you'lll find lots and lots of uranium. We have a huge problem with the radon gas that the stuff generates... What have you been reading?

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 3:56 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

> Solar PV is here today 

 

Solar PV has been here for 60 years and THOUSANDS of  times more money has been spent developing it than has been spent on LFTR R&D, and yet solar PV is still just a rounding error in our total energy budget. 

 

> I see the practical technological limits that constrain what can actually be accomplished. 

 

Apparently not.

 

 

>> Oh for heavens sake! There is no Uranium shortage and Thorium is 4 times as abundant and easier to separate from it's ore than Uranium is, and we can only get energy from .7% of the Uranium but  we can use 100% of the Thorium! So do you REALLY want to say we shouldn't consider Thorium because we can't get enough of it??  

 

> Wrong again

 

I want to know if I really understand you correctly, are you saying that a major problem (or even a minor problem) with using Thorium for energy is that there isn't enough of it? Is that really your position?
 

> the world is facing a recoverable uranium peak that will be reached within a decade or two (at current extraction rates, if nuclear is ramped up peak uranium will be reached that much sooner).

Uranium prices are the lowest they've been in  8 years. I found a chart for the last 5 years:

And so I would like to make a public bet with you and see if you're willing to put your money where your mouth is. You say the shit will hit the fan within a decade or two, so if before April 4 2024 there is widespread reactor shutdowns because of Uranium shortages (and not due to temper tantrums from environmentalists) then, assuming I'm still alive, I will send you $1000; if there are not widespread reactor shutdowns because of Uranium shortages before April 4 2024 then, assuming you're still alive, you only needs to send me $100. So do we have a bet? Come on I'm giving you 10 to 1 odds!

>> You are the one making the claim that extracting 12 grams of Thorium from one meter of dirt would take more energy than the Thorium could produce, so it is up to you to show it's true; although nobody would be dumb enough to bother with such dirt when there is ore that contains 50% Thorium available.  

 

> Whatever.

 

Yes, whatever.  

> I do not inhabit the same magical thinking universe you seem to live in.

 

How nice for you, therefore by accepting my bet you can make an easy $1000.

John K Clark

 

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[Chris de Morsella]

I have long held a similar view. The proceeds from any disincentive tax – say a carbon tax paid for at the pump or added to a utility bill to cover that electricity’s carbon content, but also a tax on alcohol, cigarette or other drugs…. Whatever is being levied against  – should all go into a general fund that gets disbursed evenly amongst all citizens, without any interdiction on this fund, whatsoever, by the greedy lobby-beholden hands of politicians and preferably in some spread out manner – say by paying out the annual dividend, on a person’s birthday.

However this approach does not address the need to mandate certain standards. For example catalytic converters for cars. It can get into a grey area, where in some cases a mandated approach is more effective than one driven by cost disincentives.

Chris

 

 

This should be purely handed by the police and the courts, in the same way that they are used to place a cost on other undesirable behaviours. If instead this money falls under the control of politicians, we now have two problems.

 

Best,

Telmo.

 

We should vote on ideas and not humans. We should find a way to prevent democracies against propaganda, if not corporatism.

 

The green should be ally with the antiprohibitionists. I do think that "prohibition" is the deep reason of possible climate perturbation, and economy. 

Like the abandon of rationality in the "spiritual" is the deep reason of why the non-sensical prohibition has seem conceivable today.

 

 

Bruno

 

 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

 

 

 

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[Stephen Paul King]

Here is the thing. You are complete discounting future technological advancements in your analysis. 50 years ago, no one considered shale to be a source ore for hydrocarbons. Soon enough we will be syphoning hydrogen off Jupiter. Why the panic over resources? Lean forward man! Think forward. No challenge was ever overcome by fearful people.

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King

 

Here is the thing. You are complete discounting future technological advancements in your analysis. 50 years ago, no one considered shale to be a source ore for hydrocarbons. Soon enough we will be syphoning hydrogen off Jupiter. Why the panic over resources? Lean forward man! Think forward. No challenge was ever overcome by fearful people.

 

Here is the thing you are betting the destiny of planet earth that these hypothetical future technologies will become realized in time for the human race to cheat destiny again and again. That is putting a lot of faith in these hypothetical future technologies you seem to be counting on.

Don’t get me wrong I am actually one who wishes we already had permanent settlements on the Moon, L2, choice NEOs, and Mars; I see and understand the incredible resource potential of up there.

Think of the solar capacity…. Alone. Even at earth orbital the solar flux is around 1400 w/m2; in the micro-gravity and almost constant insolation of high geosynchronous orbit it even begins to look attractive.

But – we are not there. We are here. On earth, with the technology we do have and facing imminent critical energy supply peaks that will suck the oxygen out of any grand ideas as we burn the last of what we have in global conflict. Is this a sure outcome; I certainly hope not, but given how politics operate globally and looking at the military focused strategy the US has chosen to face this… well let’s just say it leads me to conclude that the odds are high that as a species we are going to blow it.

It’s too bad, and I wish it were otherwise. It is how I see things – given my understanding of the nature of human mass behavior.

Cheers,

Chris

 

P.S. I am still waiting for 2001 to happen and it is 2014. Point being that some things – like getting from earth to orbit for example – remain stubbornly difficult and have remained at the very limit of what we can do with technology (in spite of forty years of technological advancement from the days of the Apollo program) Same with fusion, always just fifty years away…. Maybe someday, but where will the next ITER get its funding from?

In a world swallowed up by the existential need for industrial nations to secure their flow of petroleum supplies, and likely going to war (how many more wars for “Freedom” do you see in the near future?) to do so…. There is not going to be a whole lot left for every single other human activity.

Do not underestimate how terribly blind the logic of power can be, constrained by the deadly calculus of the psychopathic mindset – that knows that this is what they would do if they were in the other guys shoes… so they do it… because they know he is surely doing it as well.

Power when it is not tempered by wisdom is the most dangerous poison in the universe… and in us humans, it all so easily blinds us to all that is good.

We live in a world ruled by power; this is the fundamental problem – IMO.

 

[Stephen Paul King]

read this paper please and ponder its implications if applied universally.

http://ajae.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/02/24/ajae.aau001.abstract

[Stephen Paul King]

We live in a world ruled by power; this is the fundamental problem – IMO.

No, no problem is without a solution. Find the solution that keeps the current equilibria in place. Our world is a chaotic and complex system. One does not harness such a beast. One learns to ride it.

[Stephen Paul King]

"are betting the destiny of planet earth that these hypothetical future technologies will become realized in time for the human race to cheat destiny again and again"

Say again? What models are you trusting?

[meekerdb]

Here's the Mountain Pass rare earth mine in Southern California: 35.48°N 115.53°W  It produced cerium, lanthanium neodymium, and europium for rare earth magnets until the Chinese undercut the market.  It has huge piles of tailings rich in thorium and radium which are at present just a waste product that is hard to get rid of because it's slightly radioactive. 

Availabililty of thorium is not a problem.  Designing and building the powerplants is.

Brent

On 4/4/2014 3:51 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote:

>
> Hey Stephen – try refining it from your dirt. Your garden dirt is not
> ore quality; it is not a feasible supply. Do you believe the
> minuscule quantities of uranium in your garden’s dirt should be
> counted as part of global uranium reserves?
>
> Why exactly?
>
> By your count the garden dirt argument – taken to the absurd – why
> not include all the uranium in the solar system, our entire galaxy –
> after all who knows maybe someday with some technology will it all
> may be recoverable…. What have you been reading?
>
>
>

> *From:*everyth...@googlegroups.com
> [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Stephen Paul
> King *Sent:* Friday, April 04, 2014 3:33 PM *To:*
> everyth...@googlegroups.com *Subject:* Re: Climate models

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>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Kindest Regards,
>
> Stephen Paul King
>
> Senior Researcher
>
> Mobile: (864) 567-3099
>

> Step...@provensecure.com <mailto:Step...@provensecure.com>
>
> http://www.provensecure.us/

>
>
>
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[Chris de Morsella]

Oh come on now – a climate change denier are you? For real?

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2014 7:09 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

We live in a world ruled by power; this is the fundamental problem – IMO.

 

>>No, no problem is without a solution. Find the solution that keeps the current equilibria in place. Our world is a chaotic and complex system. One does not harness such a beast. One learns to ride it.

 

And humans are riding the planet right over the cliff. We are burning through all the treasures of this planet as fast as we possibly can. I fail to see the wisdom in this mad rush to use everything up. Perhaps you can enlighten me about the wisdom in this course our civilization is on?

There are many quantifiable metrics: top soil loss, organic matter loss in soil, rates of desertification, deforestation, bio-diversity collapse, rates of species extinction, collapse of oceanic eco-systems. Look at the real physically quantifiable metrics that we can measure about our world and about our effect on it and what it’s constraints are upon us.

I fail to see how you get all optimistic about our situation and see it as even remotely being describable as keeping current equilibria in place. Our species has had an incredibly disruptive effect on this planet; let us at least be honest about who we are. We truly are an invasive species… and we have succeeded in invading almost every niche of this planet’s land surface and now with factory fishing we are proving we can kill the sea as well.

 

 

 

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King

 

"are betting the destiny of planet earth that these hypothetical future technologies will become realized in time for the human race to cheat destiny again and again"

 

Say again? What models are you trusting?

 

I am trusting physically quantifiable data and am not assuming future hypothetical ways & means as you seem to be doing. What models are you trusting?

[Stephen Paul King]

Dear Brent,

   Good question. A leading question in response. How is it that we (generically speaking) are leaving such designs and building up to inefficient systems to perform? 

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Stephen Paul King

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Mobile: (864) 567-3099

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[Stephen Paul King]

Again. One does not harness such a beast. One learns to ride it.

[Chris de Morsella]

Br

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2014 7:15 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

Here's the Mountain Pass rare earth mine in Southern California: 35.48°N 115.53°W  It produced cerium, lanthanium neodymium, and europium for rare earth magnets until the Chinese undercut the market.  It has huge piles of tailings rich in thorium and radium which are at present just a waste product that is hard to get rid of because it's slightly radioactive. 

Availabililty of thorium is not a problem.  Designing and building the powerplants is.

 

Exactly, and never disputed that there are ready reserves of Thorium; what I did find absurd is including the highly entropized (if I can spin it that way) Thorium in common garden dirt as counting towards some future reserve. Again agreed, there is no existing LFTR design. I have read proposals that seem reasonable, but before proposals of that nature can become transfigured into blueprint quality specifications a massive engineering and quality control operation has to happen. Engineers cost money, and so do engineers in test. Lots of money I might add.

LFTR seems less exotic than some of the Gen IV breeders that rely on exotic coolants such as molten lead, and for this reason more doable. How many tens of billions of upstream money will be needed however is something I have not heard anyone address. And how many years as well.

How much to produce a detailed LFTR specification? That is one I which assumptions have been verified and tested. Not a back of the envelope specification, but a real blueprint.

 

·         How much more to build a pilot scale facility and verify that the designs and the plant resulting from those designs meets specifications?

·         How much ramp up will be needed in upstream supply capacities over the entire chain of production and assembly of LFTR plants. From Thorium mining & refining to the purity levels required; to the reactor and re-processor facilities & all the many sub-assemblies that these complex engineered structures contain; to the waste management, separation & sequestration facilities (not everything is burned up in an LFTR). Perhaps some existing infrastructure can be leveraged, but I am certain that there exist wide gaps that would need to build capacity if LFTR reactors were ever to be built out at scale.

·         How much more time then to build the first commercial model and to test it and ensure its operational readiness?

·         Then How much more energy, capital and time before the LFTR sector became net energy positive?

·         I am sure there are other points I missed.

 

Chris

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[Stephen Paul King]

ones that I built for myself.  The data is hard to get...

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2014 8:54 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

ones that I built for myself.  The data is hard to get...

 

That may be interesting in itself, but how is it germane?

[Chris de Morsella]

I prefer to stay out of the way of beasts such as that.

[Chris de Morsella]

>>By solar and wind its isn't.

 

Current global installed solar PV capacity is greater than 150 GW; in two years or so this is expected to surpass 300GW of installed capacity. The installed capacity base for Solar PV has been doubling every two years or so for quite some time now and so far does not show signs of slowing down this breakneck rate of growth in capacity.

These are quantified values, what you said above what actual content does that contain beyond the polemic content it certainly does contain?

Chris

 

 

[Stephen Paul King]

This data is interesting: http://www.indeed.com/salary/Green-Growth-Ventures-LLC.html

[Stephen Paul King]

back trace from: Merrill Lynch Information Technology Intranet & future trading

http://www.ite.poly.edu/presentations/MLcase.pdf page 11. 

"Merrill Lynch is the most active trading firm on the New York Stock Exchange,

with a 1995 market share of 11.7%."

I rest my case.

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2014 10:30 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

back trace from: Merrill Lynch Information Technology Intranet & future trading

http://www.ite.poly.edu/presentations/MLcase.pdf page 11. 

"Merrill Lynch is the most active trading firm on the New York Stock Exchange,

with a 1995 market share of 11.7%."

 

I rest my case.

 

Forgive me, but I fail to see what case it is that you are hereby resting.

[John Clark]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

 Solar PV has been here for 60 years and THOUSANDS of  times more money has been spent developing it than has been spent on LFTR R&D, and yet solar PV is still just a rounding error in our total energy budget. 

 

Haha – if you call the almost 150 GW of currently installed solar PV capacity a rounding error

I do indeed call 1.5*10^11 watt-hours a rounding error! Human technology uses 1.5*10^17 watt-hours worldwide, so by your own figures photovoltaics provides .0001% of that, assuming that the weather is always cloudless and it never gets dark at night. And it wouldn't be even that big if governments didn't bribe people with tax breaks to do things that would otherwise make no economic sense.

> solar PV has also been doubling every two or so years for quite a while now and is projected to surpass 300GW of globally installed PV capacity by 2017.

Big deal, then by 2017 PV would supply .0002% of our worldwide energy needs,  assuming that the weather is always cloudless and it never gets dark at night. And it's easy to see why you picked 2017, Germany has been more aggressive in pushing photovoltaics with tax breaks and it got the highest electrical bills in Europe as a reward, but even the Germans are getting fed up with this nonsense and will pull the plug on solar subsidies in 2018, so expect a crash then.
 

> Compare this capacity with the current capacity of LFTR which is 0 watts.

And by a curious coincidence zero is also the amount of money spent on LFTR R&D over the last 40 years.
 

>> I want to know if I really understand you correctly, are you saying that a major problem (or even a minor problem) with using Thorium for energy is that there isn't enough of it? Is that really your position?

 

> No it is not my position and never has been

Good, then let's stop all this idiotic talk about recoverable Thorium reserves.

> The big issues with LFTR are that it simply does not exist

True. 

> and in order to bring it into existence would require a large scale concerted multi-decadal effort.

A keen grasp of the obvious. A changeover of the way human civilization is powered from fossil fuel to ANYTHING elsewould require a large scale concerted multi-decade effort.

>>> the world is facing a recoverable uranium peak that will be reached within a decade or two (at current extraction rates, if nuclear is ramped up peak uranium will be reached that much sooner).

>> Uranium prices are the lowest they've been in  8 years.

> So?

So Economics 101 would say there is a contradiction between "a recoverable uranium peak will be reached within a decade or two" and "Uranium prices are the lowest they've been in 8 years".

>>> I do not inhabit the same magical thinking universe you seem to live in.

 

>> How nice for you, therefore by accepting my bet you can make an easy $1000.

> Nice polemic… what assurances do I even have that you would actually pay.

The same assurance that I have that you would actually pay.

  John K Clark

 

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2014 9:32 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

 Solar PV has been here for 60 years and THOUSANDS of  times more money has been spent developing it than has been spent on LFTR R&D, and yet solar PV is still just a rounding error in our total energy budget. 

 

Haha – if you call the almost 150 GW of currently installed solar PV capacity a rounding error

 

I do indeed call 1.5*10^11 watt-hours a rounding error! Human technology uses 1.5*10^17 watt-hours worldwide, so by your own figures photovoltaics provides .0001% of that, assuming that the weather is always cloudless and it never gets dark at night. And it wouldn't be even that big if governments didn't bribe people with tax breaks to do things that would otherwise make no economic sense.

 

Haha John you really don’t get energy metrics do you. By looking at your above calculation it is clear that you do not understand the what the term “Capacity” actually measures. Capacity DOES NOT measure total annual output, but rather the “capacity” of the unit to produce. Thus a 1GW Capacity nuclear power plant for example does not generate 1GW of electric power in the course of a year.

A second ratio called “Capacity Factor” multiplied by the number of hours in a year is applied to the Capacity to get a rough yardstick of how much power the unit will actually generate over the course of a year. To use the nuclear power plant example. Typically nuclear power plants operate at 80% capacity so 1 GW * 8670 (hours in a year) * 80% = Annual expected output = 6936 GW hours / year

 

Now to help you understand how off your numbers where let’s do the same exercise for Solar PV capacity = 150GW The most widely used capacity factor for solar PV is 20%, which is to say that if you have a 1Kw solar panel on average (24X7X365) it will be producing 200 watts. Please understand that this is the smoothed out average rate of production and a 20% capacity factor takes into account the fact that the sun don’t shine at night and it is cloudy sometimes. That is why it is just 20% and not the 80% capacity factor for a nuclear power plant.

Shall we do the math now. 150GW * 8670 (hours/year) * 20% (capacity factor) = 260TW of annual electric output. This yields: 0.0017. A number that is 2,000 times larger than the number you erroneously produced.

And this is the number after the 20% capacity factor has been applied – so no coming back with the sun don’t shine at night rebuttal (becauce that has already been factored in)

Now that I have helped you understand how Solar PV contribution to our total energy needs is actually 2000 times greater than what you believed it to be will you reconsider your position.

I doubt it because in you it seems to be ideologically driven – and thus is not open to being changed by reason.

 

> solar PV has also been doubling every two or so years for quite a while now and is projected to surpass 300GW of globally installed PV capacity by 2017.

 

Big deal, then by 2017 PV would supply .0002% of our worldwide energy needs,  assuming that the weather is always cloudless and it never gets dark at night. And it's easy to see why you picked 2017, Germany has been more aggressive in pushing photovoltaics with tax breaks and it got the highest electrical bills in Europe as a reward, but even the Germans are getting fed up with this nonsense and will pull the plug on solar subsidies in 2018, so expect a crash then.

 

Again terribly off the mark math. The actual figure is 0.4% of total global energy consumption.

John keep doubling that every 2.5 years –  of course multiply it by 2,000 times to correct for your bad math based on your self-manifested poor grasp of energy terms. Project ahead by fifteen years, which is five doublings and we get 12.8% -- of ALL energy needs by 2033

Then things really start mushrooming. Another 2.5 years and that becomes more than a quarter of all energy production.

The real question is how long can the doubling every 2.5 years (and it has actually been growing at a faster rate than that, but I am being conservative) – how long can this rate of geometric growth last. Well so far it has been doing that for four or five decades and there are no signs of it slowing down.

 

 

 

> Compare this capacity with the current capacity of LFTR which is 0 watts.

 

And by a curious coincidence zero is also the amount of money spent on LFTR R&D over the last 40 years.

 

Yes I know. It is a dead technology. For whatever reason.

 

>> I want to know if I really understand you correctly, are you saying that a major problem (or even a minor problem) with using Thorium for energy is that there isn't enough of it? Is that really your position?

 

> No it is not my position and never has been

 

Good, then let's stop all this idiotic talk about recoverable Thorium reserves.

 

Only if you stop the idiotic talk of counting the Thorium in your garden dirt as being part of some hypothetical future Thorium reserve.

 

> The big issues with LFTR are that it simply does not exist

 

True. 

> and in order to bring it into existence would require a large scale concerted multi-decadal effort.

 

A keen grasp of the obvious. A changeover of the way human civilization is powered from fossil fuel to ANYTHING elsewould require a large scale concerted multi-decade effort.

Brilliant deduction Sherlock

 

 

 

>>> the world is facing a recoverable uranium peak that will be reached within a decade or two (at current extraction rates, if nuclear is ramped up peak uranium will be reached that much sooner).

>> Uranium prices are the lowest they've been in  8 years.

> So?

So Economics 101 would say there is a contradiction between "a recoverable uranium peak will be reached within a decade or two" and "Uranium prices are the lowest they've been in 8 years".

 

How many new nuclear power plants have come online? How many have been brought off line. Have more power plants come on line or has the total number of producing power plants decreased? Perhaps you should take economics 101 John. Look around at the age of the world’s nuclear power plants most of them are either already operating past their engineered operational life or are nearing that. The situation for nuclear is looking very much like it is in its sunset. Economics 101 will help you understand  how this impacts current market prices for uranium; I suggest you take it.

 

 

>>> I do not inhabit the same magical thinking universe you seem to live in.

 

>> How nice for you, therefore by accepting my bet you can make an easy $1000.

> Nice polemic… what assurances do I even have that you would actually pay.

The same assurance that I have that you would actually pay.

  John K Clark

 

 

--

[Bruno Marchal]

On 04 Apr 2014, at 19:32, Telmo Menezes wrote:

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 8:55 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 02 Apr 2014, at 23:03, LizR wrote:

On 3 April 2014 05:56, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of smi...@zonnet.nl

It is the belief that the scentists can be trusted to do the research they
are supposed to do in a scientifically responsible way, vs. the belief in
the conspiracy theory that the entire scientific field has been hijacked by
ultra left wing environmental pressure groups.

Saibal

A conspiracy theory that has become spread through massive funding by the
big holders of fossil carbon reserves -- seeking to protect the future
valuation of those reserves, which has a large impact on the current
valuation of their carbon holdings. An eminently rational (if cynical)
motive, for these narrow carbon interests, but one that has sowed confusion
and doubt, using the same "junk science" (and "left wing hijacked science")
accusations that were perfected by Big Tobacco in the preceding decades. It
worked then for Big Tobacco and this same strategy of sowing falsehoods,  is
working now for the big carbon interests.

Exactly. It's even been making some headway in the interests of denying evolution, for God (as it were) knows what reason.

That is why I don't think politics is possible as long as prohibition continue. It has been used as a sort of Trojan horse for bandits, and they will sell you what they want.

Stopping prohibition will not be enough. We must separate politics from money.

Agreed, but I think there's a subtly here -- politics in necessarily about money, because money is the fundamental tool that we have to manage resources, unless someone figures out a way to make communism work. There's nothing fundamentally good or evil about money, it's just a neutral tool that can be used both ways.

I agree, the problem is black money only, and grey money. But I still believe that lobbying should be without money. If not you get big pharma, and big tobacco, voting for you. Electoral campaign should be payed with taxes, and be minimal, and equal for all party/politicians. 

I see the problem as more one of managing incentives. People react to incentives. I strongly believe that the pollution problem could be mitigated quickly if the free market had the incentive to do so. Carbon credits are a horrible idea, because they reinforce bad behaviours without creating the incentives that can actually solve the problem.

If an objective cost can be calculated for the damage that certain companies cause to the environment, then let's charge them for this and re-distribute this money directly to the people, with no special rules or distinctions. Just a simple division. None of this money should ever fall under the control of politicians. Then the companies have an incentive to solve the problem, and less people have an incentive to lie.

I am not sure that this is really realist, especially if the problem are big, mundial, and unaffordable by most companies responsible. Then if you have the (black) money, you can dilute the responsibility efficaciously.

But again, my point was concerned with the "origin" of bad dishonest politics and its maintenance by special corporate interests.

If a politicians can be proved to have lied on technical matter should be fired. Perhaps.

This should be purely handed by the police and the courts, in the same way that they are used to place a cost on other undesirable behaviours. If instead this money falls under the control of politicians, we now have two problems.

OK.

Bruno

Best,

Telmo.

 

We should vote on ideas and not humans. We should find a way to prevent democracies against propaganda, if not corporatism.

The green should be ally with the antiprohibitionists. I do think that "prohibition" is the deep reason of possible climate perturbation, and economy. 

Like the abandon of rationality in the "spiritual" is the deep reason of why the non-sensical prohibition has seem conceivable today.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Stephen Paul King]

Dear Friends,

   Is there a single objective definition of "damage to the environment"?

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[John Clark]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Shall we do the math now .

Yes lets.

 

> 150GW * 8670 (hours/year)

Actually 24 times 365 is 8760 not 8670; and if you want to get technical a year is a little more than 365 days so it's really 8766 hours, but never mind.

> Typically nuclear power plants operate at 80% capacity so 1 GW * 8670 (hours in a year) * 80% = Annual expected output = 6936 GW hours / year

OK, Gigawatt is a unit of power and Gigawatt-hour is a unit of energy, and so the plant produces .8
Gigawatts of power and .8 Gigawatt-hours of energy every hour or 7008 (not 6936) Gigawatt-hours of energy every year.

  * 20% (capacity factor) = 260TW of annual electric output. This yields: 0.0017. A number that is 2,000 times larger than the number you erroneously produced.

What the hell? You're confusing the difference between power and energy, they are not the same thing and if you insist on multiplying the capacity of your solar cells by a factor of 8670  (or even a 8760 ) then I can multiply what's needed to run human technology by that same 8670 factor and the percentages would remain the same.

The Watt is a unit of power and the watt-hour is a unit of energy.  So if a 1.5* 10^11 watt solar instillation runs at 20% capacity as you say then on average it produces 3 *10^10 watts of power and in one hour it produces 3 *10^10 watt hours of energy. But the POWER required to operate human technology on this planet is the equivalent of 1.5*10^17 watts,  and to operate it for one hour you'd need 1.5*10^17 watt-hours of ENERGY and to operate it for one year you'd need 8760 times as much energy.

Therefore I was incorrect when I said photovoltaics provides .0001%  of what is needed  to run the world, the true figure is less than that because I didn't take into account the 20% capacity figure that you mentioned;  so photovoltaics actually provide .00002% of the power needed to run human technology, or to put it another way, photovoltaics provide .00002% of the energy needed to run things for one hour, or 00002% of the energy needed to run things for one day, or .00002% of the energy needed to run things for one second, or ....

When you think about it this very low figure really shouldn't be a big surprise because I would guess that of all the large machines you have ever seen in your life (with your own eyes and not on YouTube) photovoltaic powered ones comprise about .00002% of them.

>>  let's stop all this idiotic talk about recoverable Thorium reserves.

 

> Only if you stop the idiotic talk of counting the Thorium in your garden dirt as being part of some hypothetical future Thorium reserve.

As I've said several times nobody is going to bother with the Thorium in your garden dirt until ores of much much greater Thorium concentration have run out, and at current energy consumption that won't happen for over a billion years. And when dealing with technology a billion years in advance of ours it would be ridiculous to say what sort of ore is recoverable and what sort is not.

>>> and in order to bring it [LFTR} into existence would require a large scale concerted multi-decadal effort.

>> A keen grasp of the obvious. A changeover of the way human civilization is powered from fossil fuel to ANYTHING elsewould require a large scale concerted multi-decade effort.

> Brilliant deduction Sherlock

I believe the expression you were looking for is "No Shit Sherlock".

  John K Clark

[Chris de Morsella]

Good question. There are so many metrics.

A given environments bio-diversity for example (although bio-diversity ranges widely from place to place – a single valley in a bio-diversity hot spot in some place like Costa Rica can have a greater variety of species than an entire region of arboreal forest for example) But if one has good base line measurements of bio-diversity over time and can graph a collapse in this for some region then that is a pretty good indicator that something very disruptive of the ecosystem is happening.

Biomass is another good metric – the estimated annual production of total biomass per unit area will often also collapse when an ecosystem gets into serious trouble. A related yardstick that is pretty good is the organic matter content in top soil; good healthy soil is full of living things and organic matter.

A damaged environment typically is one that is rapidly losing its topsoil – for land environmental niches only and not oceanic ecosystems, of course . Denuded land also loses its ability for water retention. An area that is in ecological trouble  is often losing bio-diversity, and the ability to support a biomass without the addition of chemical inputs… and is also often characterized by the presence of invasive species.

I am sure there are other important measurements – for example water quality, rates of mutation, sperm count, disease and parasite statistics and many other metrics I have missed.

Chris

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2014 10:18 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

Dear Friends,

[Stephen Paul King]

What do all these have in common? Boil it down to the essence. 

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2014 10:48 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

 

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

 

> Shall we do the math now .

 

Yes lets.

 

> 150GW * 8670 (hours/year)

 

Actually 24 times 365 is 8760 not 8670; and if you want to get technical a year is a little more than 365 days so it's really 8766 hours, but never mind.

 

Okay… get picky about very small details dude, but  that does not alter the fact that your result was off by a factor of two thousand times!

> Typically nuclear power plants operate at 80% capacity so 1 GW * 8670 (hours in a year) * 80% = Annual expected output = 6936 GW hours / year

>>OK, Gigawatt is a unit of power and Gigawatt-hour is a unit of energy, and so the plant produces .8
Gigawatts of power and .8 Gigawatt-hours of energy every hour or 7008 (not 6936) Gigawatt-hours of energy every year.

 

You are so very picky for someone whose calculations produced results that were wrong by a factor of two thousand times. A GW of capacity is the nameplate measurement of capacity to produce power; a GW-hour is a measurement of actual output. You multiply the capacity by a capacity factor, which for big thermo-electric plants (both nuclear and coal) is around 80% and then multiply that by the number of hours in a year to get the estimated annual output.

 

 

  * 20% (capacity factor) = 260TW of annual electric output. This yields: 0.0017. A number that is 2,000 times larger than the number you erroneously produced.

 

What the hell? You're confusing the difference between power and energy, they are not the same thing and if you insist on multiplying the capacity of your solar cells by a factor of 8670  (or even a 8760 ) then I can multiply what's needed to run human technology by that same 8670 factor and the percentages would remain the same.

You really don’t get it do you. Are you dense or just argumentative?

Capacity measures the nameplate potential to produce power – a solar panel with a 1kw capacity can produce a kilowatt of power if the sun is shining on it at full flux. Actual annual electric output is a very different, but related metric. You get that by multiplying the capacity by the number of hours in a year and then applying a capacity factor adjustment to the result. The sun does not shine at night so right there solar PV capacity factor goes down to 50%. It also Is not always sunny and so it goes down even more. In the end what you have left – and the average figure that is most widely accepted (it does of course vary from place to place – some areas are better for solar than others)  is 20%

I did my calculations correctly; you were off by 2000 times dude. The 8670 = 365*24 – that is the number of hours in a year. To get annual electric output from a measure of a energy systems capacity this is what you do…. Does not matter if it is solar, wind, nuclear, coal, gas or whatever, dude – and now I really am beginning to question your intelligence John. This is basic math dude.

You can certainly multiply a figure that is representing the annual total amount of energy consumed in a year expressed in terms of watt hours by any number that pops out of your brain, but to what end? The annual energy produced is already a measure of annual energy produced so multiplying that figure by the number of hours in a year is stupid. Are you stupid John?

On the one hand there is a measure of capacity and on the other hand there is a measure of annual output. In order to compare these numbers an annual output number needs to be computed from the capacity number; otherwise it is comparing apples and oranges. Please don’t be so dense; this is simple.

The Watt is a unit of power and the watt-hour is a unit of energy.  So if a 1.5* 10^11 watt solar instillation runs at 20% capacity as you say then on average it produces 3 *10^10 watts of power and in one hour it produces 3 *10^10 watt hours of energy. But the POWER required to operate human technology on this planet is the equivalent of 1.5*10^17 watts,  and to operate it for one hour you'd need 1.5*10^17 watt-hours of ENERGY and to operate it for one year you'd need 8760 times as much energy.

Therefore I was incorrect when I said photovoltaics provides .0001%  of what is needed  to run the world, the true figure is less than that because I didn't take into account the 20% capacity figure that you mentioned;  so photovoltaics actually provide .00002% of the power needed to run human technology, or to put it another way, photovoltaics provide .00002% of the energy needed to run things for one hour, or 00002% of the energy needed to run things for one day, or .00002% of the energy needed to run things for one second, or ....

When you think about it this very low figure really shouldn't be a big surprise because I would guess that of all the large machines you have ever seen in your life (with your own eyes and not on YouTube) photovoltaic powered ones comprise about .00002% of them.

 

John you really don’t get it do you? Amazing!

 

>>  let's stop all this idiotic talk about recoverable Thorium reserves.

 

> Only if you stop the idiotic talk of counting the Thorium in your garden dirt as being part of some hypothetical future Thorium reserve.

 

As I've said several times nobody is going to bother with the Thorium in your garden dirt until ores of much much greater Thorium concentration have run out, and at current energy consumption that won't happen for over a billion years. And when dealing with technology a billion years in advance of ours it would be ridiculous to say what sort of ore is recoverable and what sort is not.

Nobody is going to resurface planet earth – ever. Get real dude.

>>> and in order to bring it [LFTR} into existence would require a large scale concerted multi-decadal effort.

>> A keen grasp of the obvious. A changeover of the way human civilization is powered from fossil fuel to ANYTHING elsewould require a large scale concerted multi-decade effort.

> Brilliant deduction Sherlock

I believe the expression you were looking for is "No Shit Sherlock".

You said it.

  John K Clark

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King

 

What do all these have in common? Boil it down to the essence. 

 

If it were that easy J

An ecosystem is an emergent phenomena… a whole that is more than and cannot be understood just by looking at its parts. Just as there are thousands upon thousands of different pathways by which a single organism can become ill so it is with ecosystems. Just as it is hard – without a careful medical examination – to know if an individual is healthy or not… thus it is with ecosystems.

Complex multi-variant, multi-systemic, co-effective systems are not simple single dimensional problem domains. Just like a person requires a thorough medical exam (and even that is no guarantee, often diseases – or systemic ill health -- are missed by medical exams) – so it is with the complex inter-acting web of life that we represent with the term ecosystem. There are many orthogonal dimensions of complexity, of resource and energy flows in and through an ecosystem, which in some ways acts like in its locale as a dysentropy engine, exploiting for the most part the solar flux as the energy gradient, but also using chemical gradients in rock and cold deep water gas seeps, the hot smokers where life gets right up to the edge of those very hot mineral saturated  vents and makes a living.

Each single organism – at least large ones – which would be anything bigger than the smallest microscopic flea really -- should also be understood as a kind of ecosystem itself (for example: By census – Not mass -- 90% of the living microorganisms, including human cells -- in a typical human do not have human DNA … or that for example there are fifty types (or so.. whose counting) of micro-organism species that have specialized in making a living on human tooth enamel alone… and we have not even gotten to the gum line yet! )

It is a highly dynamic web of life – even within a single animal or plant. We barely begin to get it and it is only by understanding the dynamic whole system of systems that we can understand the emergent phenomena.

One thing that as I have come to understand that my own living being is a community of organisms, some parasitical no doubt, but as science is increasingly discovering many that have ancient and important roles in the meta-entity that is the emergent animal. I used to see a monkey and see a monkey, now I see a monkey community and have come around to the understanding that the ecosystem does not stop at the level of the individual organism, but that we are sieves most intimately bathed and connected to our environments… that the ecosystem extends right on into the individual organism at the scale of the cell and the even much smaller scale of the bacterium or virus.

The ecosystem is the organisms in it and like a rivers extends into ever smaller tributaries and streams, into little creeks and trickles of water the ecosystem extends right on into you… it is alive now in your gut (and all throughout your body) and it is helping keep you alive. We are discovering organisms that do nothing in terms of digesting food in our gut for example that eat off our table so to speak, but that we now are finding are active participating agents working with our body’s immune system at the gut interface – which is where the digested food enters the body, which also makes it the prime vector for disease organisms as well and is hence the front line of our immune system. These microorganisms signal to our body’s immune system the presence and perhaps even type of pathogen from the other side of the gut barrier – on the inside of the tube. This is active cooperation between species at the cellular level and it seems to me like there si a lot of this going on all the time in every kind of life form.

Where does the ecosystem begin and were does it end?

Chris

[Stephen Paul King]

Hi Chris,

 Given the complexity that you have pointed out, is it a legitimate expectation to assume that it is even possible to define regulations that are not disruptive and themselves harmful? My point is that we should be very careful in our thinking about environmental issues to be sure that our understanding is in line with facts. Sometimes regulations and policies can cause more harm then good.

[Chris de Morsella]

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Paul King
Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2014 5:46 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Climate models

 

Hi Chris,

 

 Given the complexity that you have pointed out, is it a legitimate expectation to assume that it is even possible to define regulations that are not disruptive and themselves harmful? My point is that we should be very careful in our thinking about environmental issues to be sure that our understanding is in line with facts. Sometimes regulations and policies can cause more harm then good.

 

Hi Stephen ~ I agree with that, but on the other hand when the barn is on fire, is not the time to debate what to do; sometimes immediate springing into action is what is required…. Not talk about whether action is needed and what action, but immediate action. A person who is choking to death needs there to be someone around who can perform the Heimlich maneuver, not a reasoned debate about whether or not they are choking to death.

[LizR]

On 5 April 2014 09:43, Stephen Paul King <Step...@provensecure.com> wrote:

Hear, Hear! Sadly, we (collectively speaking) keep buying the smooth talk and shiny baubles they promise and keep electing them.

Trouble is they only give us a few choices (or only two if you don't have proportional representation). So it's a bit like "Green Eggs and Ham"...

 

To oppose it we must think for ourselves. Form opinions from facts we collect and examine them to our best ability and collaborate with each other. It's hard work, very hard. Most people simply would rather be blissfully ignorant...

Certainly it's hard work to overthrow tyrants (and even harder to install something better!)

[LizR]

On 7 April 2014 05:18, Stephen Paul King <Step...@provensecure.com> wrote:

Dear Friends,

   Is there a single objective definition of "damage to the environment"?

Given the complexity of the environment, I very much doubt it. There are some proxies for it, of course, e.g. rate of species extinctions, amount of ice cap melting, proportion of rainforest cut down, amount of plastic floating in the ocean, amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, etc... All of these are certainly part of the damage to the environment, but they can't be said to constitute a "single objective definition". And of course our environmental damage goes back thousands of years. We don't necessarily know what constitutes a natural pre-human environment, and it may not be something we'd want in any case. Personally I doubt it. (What we do want is an environment that won't kill most of us, which is what we've had in the recent historical past, i.e. one that supports agriculture and keeps some of the sea locked up in ice, but not so much that the ice caps start covering half the planet. A human-friendly environment, in other words - which is what we appear to be in danger of throwing away.)

Of course if we were stupid enough to wait around for a "single objective definition" before we tried to do anything about preventing environmental destruction, by the time we get one we wouldn't have much of an environment to apply it to.

[LizR]

On 7 April 2014 05:47, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

What the hell? You're confusing the difference between power and energy, they are not the same thing and if you insist on multiplying the capacity of your solar cells by a factor of 8670  (or even a 8760 ) then I can multiply what's needed to run human technology by that same 8670 factor and the percentages would remain the same.

Sadly this happened in a school physics exam my son sat a few months back. If physics teachers can't get this one right, what chance have the rest of us?

[LizR]

On 7 April 2014 12:45, Stephen Paul King <Step...@provensecure.com> wrote:

Hi Chris,

 Given the complexity that you have pointed out, is it a legitimate expectation to assume that it is even possible to define regulations that are not disruptive and themselves harmful? My point is that we should be very careful in our thinking about environmental issues to be sure that our understanding is in line with facts. Sometimes regulations and policies can cause more harm then good.

Hence our best bet is to produce energy and food in ways which cause as little disruption as possible to the environment we still have.

[Stephen Paul King]

Dear Liz,

   My concern is that almost all of the discussion of "environmental damage" seems to assume that Humanity is somehow a foreign present in the environment, as if we are invaders form space. AFAIK, humans are part of the Earth just as much as rainforests and ants. Why are human activities focused upon in ways that seem to be completely motivated toward some goal of control and "management"? 

   I don't like to be treated as a child that needs to be told what to do and when "for my own good". Why is it that those in the Green movement, like Chris, seem so bound and determined to do exactly that? At the rate we are going, it looks like we will be back to a techo-feudalism where a few elite humans control most of the land and resources and the rest of us will be allowed to live out our lives according to strict "sustainability" laws.

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[Stephen Paul King]

Hi Liz,

 Why is there no interest in developing tech to get us off the planet? Why is there a retreat into a bunker mentality?

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