And I think we are about to find that out much faster than anyone would have believed on the day before last year’s election day.

So today we have California’s EPA that has so far as I know NO scientists of any knid on it’s panel deciding that the fuel industry must cut the carbon content of fuel by 10%; and that includes the carbon content of all the enterprise that goes into obtaining and distributing that fuel.
Present gasolines are essentially mixtures of saturated alkanes or paraffin series hydrocarbons; which can be represented as H2(CH2)n. I don’t believe there is much in the way of Ethylenes series of Acetylenes in gasoline, and they go out of their way to remove any trace of aromatic hydrocarbons; which are carcinogenic.

So the only way to reduce the carbon content, is to reduce (n) which means lower Octane ratings, and hence lower compression and therefore lower thermal efficiency engines.

Alcohols, which can be written in the form H2O(CH2)n are worse, since there isn’t any stored chemical energy available from that H2O part; and that is just the burning of the alcohol, and includes none of the energy to obtain the alcohol; or grow the feedstock material whatever that is.

It’s a pretty safe bet, that alcohols or any other oxygenated fuel is counterproductive if the aim is to reduce carbon.

Well those geniuses on the EPA board (I think one of them is actually a nurse; which is as close to being a scientist as anyone on the panel gets) are banking on some future hydrogen fuel component; but there we have a real problem. The nearest hydrogen mines are 93E6 miles away, and don’t meet OSHA working conditions. In addition the transportation costs are prohibitive.
Now when you talk getting hydrogen from lower yield hydrogen ores of which we have plenty; then you are really talking about massive energy losing processes; that can only increase the carbon content of the exercise.

Ah yes; there is that ever present renewable green solar energy which arrives on earth at an average rate of 168 Watts per square metre; according to the official NOAA Global Energy Budget.
Another 107 W/m^2 is refelcted giving an albedo of 31.3% of which only 28% is contributed by the surface reflection; the rest is clouds.
So much for the belief that the polar ice caps are a big deal in global energy balance. The 30 W/m^2 global average surface reflection comes mostly from the non polar regions.

So the solution to renewable green energy, is to commit LOTS of land area to the production of fuel; and wouldn’t you know it, the best lands for that would also be highly desirable for food production; which takes a lot of energy.

So I think the future generations are going to be scratching for energy; pretty much like we started out clambering around in fig trees to gather figs.

Oh there’s wonderful article in SCIENCE Vol 324 April 17/2009, on page 326

“Fusion’s Great Bright Hope” a Long Winding Road to Ignition.
The NIF combines 192 lasers to produce a 500 TerraWatt beam of Ultraviolte light (351nm). That is more than the total generating capacity of the United States.
It takes 25 nanoseconds for that beam power to travel the 305 metres from the source to the target; but then the blast only lasts 20 nanoseconds; so it has already shut off before it ever reaches the target.

The target is a thing of beauty. It’s a small Beryllium spherical shell filled with a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium; well they say Hydrogen isotopes’ but you can bet that no H is permitted.

If you thought that the Deuterium and Tritium was the fuel; well that wouldn’t be quite true. Actually the fuel is that little Beryllium spherical shell; which gets blown to smithereens when the laser gets there, and squishes the isotopes into near nothingness.
The Beryllium sphere is about the size of a peppercorn (thermonuclear dimensional unit) containing 150 micrograms of D&T which are cooled to 18 Kelvins. They say it forms a layer of ice on the inside of the Be sphere. How did that oxygen get in there?
When it goes bang, the temperature goes up to 100 million Kelvins.

Now get a picture of this little gem; well actually its the size of a ten storey building; and you have all that extremely precise optics sending the laser into the target chamber where the temperature of the Beryllium fuel pellet has to be 18 Kelvins or the D&T hithchikers won’t form an ice layer on the shell inside. The 100 miilion K, is what you were trying to get, so now you have to siphon off that thermal energy fromt he target chamber so you can clean up the mess, and then cool it down to 18 K again so you can stick another Beryllium fuel pellet in there, and fire the whole shebang again; maybe an hout later; who knows ?

Isn’t this just the most ingenious engine you ever heard of. You have to go from 1E8 Kelvins down to 18 Kelvins before you can put some more fuel in the engine to fire it off again.

Now if you are wondering why I say the Beryllium sphere is the real fuel; you just have to consider all the energy that it takes (from fossil fuel sources) to machine that thing and make it so uniform and symmetrical that it impldes uniformly. Lemme guess; you thought there was some place In Texas, or Alaska, where you could actually dig up those litle Beryllium spheres by the ton.

Guess where Beryllium sits on the scale of toxic nasty materials; well so much for the theory of cheap clean energy.

I might add that many years ago at a laser meeting (CLEO I think), the keynote speaker was one Charles H Townes; who knows a thing or two about lasers.

And he told those assembled there that if they thought laser implosion was a way to make thermonuclear energy; they were smoking something illegal. Oh he thought you could study high density high temperature plasmas with lasers; but the idea is to obtain energy.

So thermonuclear is the energy of the future and as they say; it always will be. And thank heaven for that, because if we had cheap clean energy in unlimited quantities; then we could really screw up this planet.

George

If you haven’t read it yet, go read Peter Huber in the City Journal: ‘Bound to Burn’.”

thanks, Kim, for recommending this excellent article – a MUST read! – taking Carbon truly personally!

here is the direct link:

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_carbon.html

“After another 2 years of non-global warming hopefully the people will take action and throw Obama’s policies out on their ass. If the Republicans won’t run on an anti-AGW platform then it’s time for an independent party, or a new tea party!”

I wished it was that simple!
The powers behind the AGW scare go beyond the current Administration.

Opposition is building though.

Maybe it is time to start a new political party!
Make it an Atlantic Party because most of the Europeans are fed up too with their political establishment and the EU.

RESPONSE: I recognize you are being sarcastic, but your sarcasm is misplaced. There is a world of difference between spending money on educating our children and on attempting to reduce global warming. First, the benefits of spending on education to society are real and time tested, whereas one cannot be certain that spending on the latter will produce commensurate benefits. More importantly, the IPCC scenarios assume “business-as-usual”, which implies that past and present trends in education (and spending on education, as well as other critical determinants of economic development) will necessarily persist into the future. Therefore, were society to decide that it would no longer fund education then one of the basic premises built into the scenarios would be violated which means that the future levels of human welfare assumed in the IPCC scenarios would no longer be valid. And your descendants may indeed be worse-off (and earn less than you). So if you care about your descendants not being worse-off than you, worry about whether they get an education, but don’t worry as much about global warming.

In plain words why does Nicholas Stern expect anyone to take him seriously on a subject he has no expertise in, whilst on a subject he is supposed to be have expertise in, he was a part of the same ridiculous cabal that allowed the economies of the world to go into global melt down.

Get real CP- Lord Stern understands what you clearly do not!
Unlike you he has a real grasp of the financial implicarions predicated by sooner-than-expected crocadilic arctic migrational tendencies!
BTW- isn’t he a total [snip]

I should add that we’ll be out of drinking water if we ‘let’ the glaciers come back. How are we going to drink water if the Great Lakes are covered by glaciers, again? We need to sacrifice for future generations.

Past man did not sacrifice for us and let the wooly mammoth go extinct do to man-made climate change. They did a disservice to us, let’s not do the same.”

Invest in Ice futures! The processing of glacial ice for drinking water is the next great industry! Yaks and Musk Oxen breeding would be good idea too, as we’ll need some way to transport all that ice/water after the oil reserves become buried under continent-sized glaciers.

Cold Play,

If Britain is in such good economic shape, why did a gentleman justly castigate the PM(?) for bankrupting the nation??

Primarily you mentioned the banks being in good shape. Where did you get that idea??
paul james (08:57:11) :

Cold Play (06:23:03) :

And my point is?

……..and thus our banking system in the UK has required no government help

My goodness Old Boy what have you been smoking ? Do the Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland debacles not ring a bell ? Not even a tiny one ?

Does the upcoming need for the UK Government to seek loans from the IMF mean nothing.

There’s jingoism and there’s plain untruth. No help because the UK economy has been well managed my eye !

END of Attack on Poor me and less of the old boy?

OOPS a Daisy! Guys I don’t think my post was properly read as the irony seems to have been lost on you, my fault for sure.

In plain words why does Nicholas Stern expect anyone to take him seriously on a subject he has no expertise in, whilst on a subject he is supposed to be have expertise in, he was a part of the same ridiculous cabal that allowed the economies of the world to go into global melt down.

Silly me, global melt down global warming I get it.

Please notice I said economies. Economies do not act rationally no matter how you try to pull them in any direction.

i really like this approach!

why should we pay for the school of our children, if they will earn more money than we do anyway?

why care for their health, when medical improvements can fix it in the future?

why build a house today, when houses will be much better and cheaper in 20 years?”

Sod,

It is your responsibility to take care of your children but it is your duty to protect the freedom of man and the American Dream (for what it’s worth today.

Any government control over CO2 Emissions is a threat to freedom.

Any cent spend on the AGW Hoax a loss of capital.

Surprisingly and quite in line with this, the NY Times recently posted:

Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet

The old wealth-is-bad IPAT theory may have made intuitive sense, but it didn’t jibe with the data that has been analyzed since that first Earth Day. By the 1990s, researchers realized that graphs of environmental impact didn’t produce a simple upward-sloping line as countries got richer. The line more often rose, flattened out and then reversed so that it sloped downward, forming the shape of a dome or an inverted U — what’s called a Kuznets curve….

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station….

Of course, even if rich countries’ greenhouse impact declines, there will still be an increase in carbon emissions from China, India and other countries ascending the Kuznets curve. While that prospect has environmentalists lobbying for global restrictions on greenhouse gases, some economists fear that a global treaty could ultimately hurt the atmosphere by slowing economic growth, thereby lengthening the time it takes for poor countries to reach the turning point on the curve.”

Katherine (10:42:21) :

Al Gore’s Call Center Gang will drive the NYT Editor crazy and what follows is what happened with the publication from Harold Amber at the Huffington Post.

You know, that may be the saddest irony of all…that these types of socialistic endeavors never equalize people by bringing up the less affluent but by rather bringing everyone down to the same level, which will invariably lead to an overall reduction in wealth for all. The cap-and-tax program is exactly that…a way to extract wealth and redistribute it through “watermelon” politics (“watermelon” because those that propose such travesties are ‘green’ on the outside but ‘red’ on the inside).

Anybody who thinks that the history of energy development has been a process of carbon elimination, just isn’t thinking straight.
We started off getting our energy by clambering around in fig trees to gather figs for their processable hydrocarbon molecules. The monkeys were better at getting the higher figs than we were, so we let them get figs; then we smashed their brains with a rock, and ate them after they had already processed the figs. And when a lightning strike set fire to the straw fields, and burned up some antelopes, we found out that they were a pretty good source of hydrocarbons too, so we stored the fire in a pot in a cave, so we could light off the grassland, when we wanted another springbok steak.

Basically we have sought carbon, and hydrogen anywhere we could find them in usable form. Most of the hydrogen already got burned up by Mother Nature to make the oceans to grow fish in which was another good source of hydrocarbons.

The world will be still burning carbon long after the Al Gore species has become a rare archeological specimen find.

So enjoy urth day, and say something Shakespearian while you are at it.

George

Pamela Gray:

Looking out my office window to the West, the entire horizon is the Rocky Mountains… currently looking a lot less “rocky” and a lot more “snowy”. Usually by this time of year there is more gray than white. Calgary had a record year for snowfall, which is not something to celebrate unless you’re an avid skier, and the mountain areas are still reporting unusually high snow pack. Of course, the glaciers out there are still growing, but it’s funny that the most recent official word on them is several years old, and they most likely get counted as “shrinking”… funny how 1998 did that.

All that horizon full of white has to go somewhere, and over the next 6-8 weeks it will be washing in this direction. There have been years in the past that our rivers have crested at dangerously high levels after snowy winters, but we may be looking at records. And of course, because of the way we chose sites for cities, everything is built on a river somewhere.

In 2005 Calgary had an exceptionally wet June, on top of the already saturated ground from spring melt. The end result was flooding, and a LOT of it. Our main dam, which holds our drinking water, got a very scary crack down the middle after it started overflowing even with the gates wide open, and nobody is actually certain that it can survive another flood year. If it goes, the city’s most affluent area and the downtown core will take massive damage.

And back on topic, ALL generations are morally obligated to leave the world, if not better, then also not worse for future generations. Once again, it comes down to the question of… define better! I agree with commenters who point out that dismantling our very way of life is NOT leaving a better world. And if the kids I know who are part of the current generation is any indication, they won’t be smart enough to fix anything themselves.

CodeTech (08:32:19) :

Why don’t you keep a long story short,
Invite the Lady for a date!

If you accept the Stern report conclusion that climate change may have an economic impact up to 35% reduction output, do you also accept his conclusion that avoiding the worst of climate change would cost about 1% of our economic output?

Is such a price worth paying for environmental and heritage reasons – i.e. preventing major ecosystem changes (or disruption if you’d rather) and the loss of significant human heritage if many of our major coastal cities eventually (as in centuries in the future) become submerged (depending on whether sea walls etc can save them)?”

No, not a single cent.
CO2 has ZERO impact so why spending money to compensate for non existing threats?

Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet

The old wealth-is-bad IPAT theory may have made intuitive sense, but it didn’t jibe with the data that has been analyzed since that first Earth Day. By the 1990s, researchers realized that graphs of environmental impact didn’t produce a simple upward-sloping line as countries got richer. The line more often rose, flattened out and then reversed so that it sloped downward, forming the shape of a dome or an inverted U — what’s called a Kuznets curve….

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station….

Of course, even if rich countries’ greenhouse impact declines, there will still be an increase in carbon emissions from China, India and other countries ascending the Kuznets curve. While that prospect has environmentalists lobbying for global restrictions on greenhouse gases, some economists fear that a global treaty could ultimately hurt the atmosphere by slowing economic growth, thereby lengthening the time it takes for poor countries to reach the turning point on the curve.