Why, start a fire, of course! Surely, only lunatics would use fire as a tool to promote the idea of reducing combustion to bring CO2 levels down to 350ppm. And yet, here we have it. From earth350.org where they write:
Australia Ignites For Climate Action…
If you haven’t yet seen the incredible photos out of Australia for 350 EARTH, you’re missing out.
First up is this gorgeous aerial, with the snaking highway behind it:
The design–which incorporates a windmill as a sign of clean energy alternatives–was made by Keith Chidzey.
The next photo is of a similar design, engulfed in flames.
The piece, which was photographed by acclaimed photographer Peter Solness, was designed to call attention to the issues of drought and wildfire in Australia.
While prolonged drought and bushfires a continuing crises in Australia, the problems (and their solutions) have never before been depicted so evocatively. Enormous thanks to Keith, Peter, and everyone else who helped create this beautiful piece.
==============================================================
Umm, the drought is over in Australia in case you 350.org folks haven’t noticed.
And I can’t help noticing how the second photo from above, doesn’t look that much different than this one:
I suppose it makes some sort of sense, as both events do tend to attract the same sort of firebugs filthy eco hippies artists people.
From the Wikipedia entry they say that for the 2010 event, “BLM issues 293 citations and 8 arrests.” BLM is the Bureau of Land Management.
I wonder if the earth350.org kooks got burn permits? I wonder if they restored the land to its previous state before torching it?
h/t to Ecotretas
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re: crosspatch says: December 1, 2010 at 11:00 pm
…Hippies tend not to build stuff like this and live to tell about it: [megavolt]
I wanna play with his toys!!! (thanks crosspatch, I am now suffering from a serious case of Van De Graff envy)
JEM says:
December 1, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Loads of gas, up to 125 years’ supply at 2002 consumption levels. We ship it to China in special boats. Yet another reason why Oz has the strongest economy in the world right now: coal, iron, sugar, and gas!
There is no such thing as “clean coal.” It’s a fiction repeated by know-nothings like Barack Obama. Coal contains a great deal of sulfur and trace amounts of toxic metals, like mercury. http://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/b1823/append.htm
The sulfur goes out the stack and the metals are concentrated in the ash. I know of no way to remove sulfur or trace elements other than burning. The sulfur can be scrubbed before before it leaves the stack at significant expense, but there is no way to reduce the trace metals.
Having said that, most eco-terrorists are actually talking about the CO2 released; that’s what they want to stop. It’s ridiculous and that’s why the Obama administration is spending millions on research.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/coal-oil-gas/4339171
Actually, fire DOES eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere. It goes like this:
CO2 is taken out of the air to make cellulose. One day the tree catches on fire. Much of the carbon taken out of the air is returned via CO2 … but not all. A good bit can remain as charcoal. Charcoal is very stable and can last for tens of thousands of years in the soil. So any time a forest burns, a considerable amount of carbon is converted to a very stable form that is kept out of the atmosphere for a very long time.
That is one of those “nice to know” facts that is probably of little value because there is no evidence that atmospheric CO2 is harmful anyway.
Parts of Australia have, within human time span, been hot, dry and arid. Present climate of the same type in the same area does not prove climate problems. Australia has the same problem as parts of SW America in that a dry region become popular to live because of the climate and too much water is drawn from groundwater supplies making the problem of hot/arid worse.
re post by: DCC says: December 2, 2010 at 12:42 am
Huh? DCC, I’m not saying anything here re practicality/cost, but there are a number of ways with varying degrees of success, both pre- and post-burning, for both sulfur and trace metals. Things like wet scrubbers and electrostatic precipitators popped to mind first for me, but they’re far from all that can be used.
Take a read here: http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/pollutioncontrols/overview_mercurycontrols.html
So essentially a group of concerned well meaning do-gooders who believe the imminent anthropogenic destruction of our planets climate and therefor nature as we supposedly know it, get it into their potheads that it is a terrificly hilariously good idea to, on the one case anthropogenically make changes to the soil and nature in such a large scale project that their puny tag becomes visible from a great length and a high altitude, and on the other case, acting like crazed solar worshipers of old hopping around burning stuff in great blazes of fire-tags and symbolically burning man (themselves?).
Are those 350 hippies former members of the KKK?
JEM:The only problem from the Oz perspective is they’ve got lots of coal and bugger-all natural gas, so far as I know, so it’d all have to be imported. Maybe I’m wrong.
sorry, you are wrong:-) we have Heaps! of natural gas, our bus fleets and taxis run on LNG as do a lot of dual fuel cars for years. we export far to much to china.
and we are now having prime Qld farmland invaded by a chinese owned Frakking for coal seam gas event:-(
I want to know why the DSE hasnt got this mob in court for destroying native veg, disturbing the land near waterways, and starting fires OUT of the fire season.
all of the above are being used on farmers in Aus daily to control and ruin their livelihood!
‘What’s the best way promote reducing CO2 causing combustion?’
Use Oxygen causing combustion. It works better.
Sorry, Anthony. I had to do the play on word thing.
Is it just me or does the three numeral look distinctly phallic? Makes sense I suppose since they are trying their best to shaft us all…
In order to create that fire design and get a photo, they would have needed an accelerant of some kind. Chidzey does like to play with fire to create his “Chidzart”:
http://blip.tv/file/1346112/
Fire is a powerful symbol in most religions. In Christianity for example, God manifests himself as a pillar of fire. This is just one more example of how the Belief in manmade climate whatever resembles a type of twisted religion.
Further, every dead tree now “decaying naturally” emits the same mass of CO2 (just a bit slower) that burning emits. Forest fires are a natural requirement of forests.
Actually, burning dead trees is better environmentally than allowing slow decomposition. Termites produce methane, 16X as potent a GHG as CO2 (albiet alledgely short lived).
Law of unintended ecowacko consequences at work.
I just couldn’t believe the Aussy who told me that all the wackos and nut-cases from California and Hawaii were moving to the Great DownUnder Continent and most of them were government administrators and educators. I guess I should have!
PS: Birth control pill failures seem to have an “environmental” aspect.
What’s the best way promote reducing CO2 causing combustion?
A delicious Barbecue!!
Is this Australia the one that exports millions of tons of coal each year principally to China and Japan?
******
DCC says:
December 2, 2010 at 12:42 am
The sulfur goes out the stack and the metals are concentrated in the ash. I know of no way to remove sulfur or trace elements other than burning. The sulfur can be scrubbed before before it leaves the stack at significant expense, but there is no way to reduce the trace metals.
******
That’s exactly what electrostatic precipitators do — sequester the fly-ash. The fly-ash & trace-metals are impounded in a dedicated land-fill that is lined with an impermeable barrier underneath to prevent water-leaching. True, the tiny amounts of mercury prb’ly are vaporized & escape, but big deal. Wet-scrubbers prb’ly remove even most of that.
When someone (or a government/culture) continue worrying about ever-tinier trace amounts of “substance X”, it’s called an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
According to BOM regarding Australian droughts:
So it seems as if the recent drought was part of a cycle and nothing out of the ordinary and in any case it’s mostly over while temperatures have got ‘hotter’ etc.
Ref – Spen says:
December 2, 2010 at 7:13 am
“Is this Australia the one that exports millions of tons of coal each year principally to China and Japan?”
________________________
No, that’s the Good Australia. This is the Bad Australia with all the idiots who want to live like it was 14,000BC.
Darren Parker
December 1, 2010 at 4:32 pm
I’m switching from electrical heating to a wood fire this winter because electricity is now too expensive.
###
In the Peoples Republic of Kalifornia, many cities have made wood fire heating illegal!
I’ve just had a brilliant idea..!
Instead of ‘burying’ CO2 – or whatever the latest hairbrained scheme is – why not have giant fans BLOWING it at all these stoopid wind turbines..? The fans could be powered by the clean coal power stations..
Oh – I feel a Nobel prize coming on….
I often wonder about the government here forcing the closure of coal plants in the US. I work in the sheetrock business, and the main ingredient is gypsum. Way back when they decided to eliminate the real pollution from coal burning (mostly sulfur compounds), the byproduct of scrubbing the gases is synthetic gypsum. Our company decided to try using it way back when, and found it worked great for sheetrock (plus back then the power companies used to pay us to take it since it cost them substantially to landfill it). It required a little bit of equipment rework because its a little denser than natural gypsum, but the purity is very high, and very consistent as well. Because of this flue gas scrubbing, pretty much the only thing that exits into the atmosphere is steam and CO2.
Not all of our plants use this resource yet, as most of the older ones are built on top of gypsum deposits that they either quarry or mine. But most of the new ones we have built, especially in the eastern US are built near power plants instead of gypsum deposits.
So if the brilliant eco people succeed in banning coal, we will lose this resource that is a byproduct of generating energy in the first place. Then we (and our competitors), will need to go back to mining, which uses even more energy to produce and eco people hate even more.
If you live out east, and have an office or home built in the last 15 years, you most likely have walls made from byproducts of burning coal.
A neighbour of mine grows a fine show of Namaqualand Daisies (Dimorphotheca sinuata) in his front garden. They are indigenous to the drier areas of the Western Cape and as it is much wetter here in coastal Natal, they are too fiddlesome for me to grow. Quite apart from the climate not being ideal as they hail from dry mountainous areas, one needs to give them a good burning in the winter if one wants the very best performance from them. The same is true of many other flowers hailing from both the western and eastern capes. Feinbos is the description for these types of plants. They have evolved long before man was around to set fires and there are all too many townsmen who do not apprehend that fire is a natural phenomenom. Every time that wildfire in Australia makes the news, I read that the police are looking for the arsonists and I wonder if there is no natural fire at the antipodes.
Just waiting for them to come back from Can-Con (cantcon?) announcing that “We have to destroy the environment in order to preserve it” or something like that…
Australian drought cycles are in tune with ocean oscillations (eg: the PDO).
Wind power is unsustainable with an EROEI of 0.29.
350 should get with the program: it is planetary mechanics which causes solar cycles (ie: Schwabe, Gleissberg, 370-yr, 2402-yr, etc.), which results in our climate cycles. CO2 is irrelevant.
Roy Martin says:
December 1, 2010 at 5:36 pm
Just to emphasize the natural variability of the climate in the Broken Hill area (NSW, Australia) where they lit the fires, have a look at this ‘dry arid’ area right now:-
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/12/01/3082076.htm?site=brokenhill
huh, we call those floods on the side of the planet.
someone tell george he can come film in my parts…plenty of desert and he won’t have to build large sets… the towns in the nevada desert already look like the apocalypse!
whoever posted up dr. megavolt, thanks! close to a rockstar as you get at burning man. haven’t seen him on the playa in several years, but then i quit going a few years back because it got too tame. I miss the days of the drive by shooting range – now it’s all safety-first, idiot and cop friendly – i call it the largest LE fundraiser in the nevada
so much for freedom and self expression. at least larry harvey and nevada LE are making a ton of money.