From the IEEE Spectrum Journal: A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy
It takes several lifetimes to put a new energy system into place, and wishful thinking can’t speed things along
By Vaclav Smil
In June 2004 the editor of an energy journal called to ask me to comment on a just-announced plan to build the world’s largest photovoltaic electric generating plant. Where would it be, I asked—Arizona? Spain? North Africa? No, it was to be spread among three locations in rural Bavaria, southeast of Nuremberg.
I said there must be some mistake. I grew up not far from that place, just across the border with the Czech Republic, and I will never forget those seemingly endless days of summer spent inside while it rained incessantly. Bavaria is like Seattle in the United States or Sichuan province in China. You don’t want to put a solar plant in Bavaria, but that is exactly where the Germans put it. The plant, with a peak output of 10 megawatts, went into operation in June 2005.
It happened for the best reason there is in politics: money. Welcome to the world of new renewable energies, where the subsidies rule—and consumers pay.
Without these subsidies, renewable energy plants other than hydroelectric and geothermal ones can’t yet compete with conventional generators. There are several reasons, starting with relatively low capacity factors—the most electricity a plant can actually produce divided by what it would produce if it could be run full time. The capacity factor of a typical nuclear power plant is more than 90 percent; for a coal-fired generating plant it’s about 65 to 70 percent. A photovoltaic installation can get close to 20 percent—in sunny Spain—and a wind turbine, well placed on dry land, from 25 to 30 percent. Put it offshore and it may even reach 40 percent. To convert to either of the latter two technologies, you must also figure in the need to string entirely new transmission lines to places where sun and wind abound, as well as the need to manage a more variable system load, due to the intermittent nature of the power.
All of these complications are well known, and all of them have been too lightly dismissed by alternative energy backers and the media. Most egregious of all is the boosters’ failure to recognize the time it takes to convert to any new source of energy, no matter how compelling the arguments for it may be.
An example is the 2008 plan promoted by former vice president Al Gore, which called for replacing all fossil-fueled generation in the United States in just a decade. Another is Google’s plan, announced in 2008 and abandoned in 2011, which envisaged cutting out coal generation by 2030. Trumping them all was a 2009 article in Scientific American by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil engineering at Stanford University, and Mark Delucchi, a researcher in transportation studies at the University of California, Davis. They proposed converting the energy economy of the entire world to renewable sources by 2030.
History and a consideration of the technical requirements show that the problem is much greater than these advocates have supposed.
Read the entire article here.
h/t to WUWT reader “the1pag”
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There is a modicum of realistic argument for installing a small solar array on individual houses. Without any subsidies a 5-6kWh installation will produce about 10,000 kWh a year. Depending on where you live that is roughly $1200-2400 a year. The plant costs around $35000, so it can pay for itself, and then some, over a life span of 20-30 years. The big plus from a energy policy standpoint is that the output almost exactly matches the airconditioning usage which is a plus for keeping the electric grid balanced. At least some states recognize this benefit and require the electric utility to utilize some percentage of solar or renewable energy in the portfolio. The homeowner can another $1000 or so a year by selling the solar energy credits to the utility. The ROI isn’t great, but on a par with a good quality bond fund and a heck of a lot better than Treasury bonds. It all depends on the exact detail of current and expected utility rates and the total installed cost, but I suspect most places south of Detroit get enough sunshine to make it work.
Philip Peake July 6, 2012 at 7:36 pm,
The “baby month” comes most often from “The Mythical Man Month” by Brooks. An excellent book on high tech management BTW. The short version – it is very difficult to speed up a late project by adding bodies. Best to get staffing levels as close to correct as you can from the start.
Jim, if you’re still there, I’d be interested in how much of your power usage is attributable to water heating, and how much could that be reduced by using a heat pump water heater. (Assuming you haven’t already done that.)
I looked at UzUrBrain’s link. (http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solarpan/solarpan.htm) A lot of good real-life information there, and apparently being kept current to provide a multi-year experience record. However, I think the basic installation is seriously dated, particularly as to panel efficiency (much less area now needed) and initial costs.
“Electrical Engineers tend to have a higher regard for mechanical engineers than civil engineers because, after all, “Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets.”
There’s also the fact that there are hierarchies of difficulty in classes. I wasn’t aware of any civil engineer at my school (though I’m sure there were some) that didn’t start as a Mechanical Engineer and decide it was just too hard/not for them and redirected into Civil. Similar, but not as dramatic, EE washouts tended to become Computer Science majors.
Perry-
Interesting story about the rescued Japanese nobori. As for the year 1966 and “Sunshine Water Heating Company”, that might have been advertising for roof-top solar water heaters. They were a common sight when I first travelled through Japan in 1970 and they are still a very common sight throughout the Japanese countryside (or were the last time I travelled in Japan).
IanM
A quick “ctrl-f” of all the comments above reveals no mention of EROEI, Energy Returned On Energy Invested. Yes, I am a broken record on this issue. But this IS THE ISSUE when it comes to alternative energy.
You would not expend 3 barrels of oil to find one barrel But that is precisely what wind power is all about.
Even if solar pv panels were given away, the energy required to manufacture and install the balance of the infrastructure needed for solar pv electric generation can never be recovered. So, why do these numbskull politicians keep trying to repeal the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
anticlimactic says: July 7, 2012 at 4:39 am
“It will be interesting to see if Canada succeeds in escaping these shackles, or whether the electorate votes for a return to a new dark age – in a literal sense!”
Canada has recently withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol – we adopted Kyoto under the kleptocracy of former PM Jean Chretien (big programs like Kyoto create more opportunities for big graft).
Ontario continues to embrace nonsensical wind and solar schemes and has become a have-not province, after 200 years of prosperity.
Quebec, which is hydro-rich, continues to beg for handouts based on its low CO2 footprint and it’s fifty-year tradition of economic parasitism – plus can change…
Alberta carries the entire country economically, based on the prosperity provided by the much-maligned Athabasca oilsands.
The scoundrels and imbeciles of the enviro movement continue their campaign to starve North American consumers of energy by opposing pipelines to distribute oil produced from the oilsands.
One result of the enviros’ campaign is more crude oil being shipped by rail, which is much more likely to increase the volume of spills.
Another result is much higher gasoline costs for those parts of the USA and Canada that have to import much more expensive crude from abroad. Saudi and Brent (UK) crude has recently been priced at $12-25 more per barrel than WTI (USA).
Gail Combs says:
July 6, 2012 at 9:46 pm
Gail, thank you for all of those references. Your long list contained a couple of entries I had not yet come across or read.
Your suggestion misses the point of my question, but perhaps that is my fault, because I did not make myself sufficiently clear.
I am not concerned about finding confirmation of the fact that human CO2 emissions cannot possibly be the culprit when it comes to global warming or that all such assertions are a hoax, part of a hoax and a fraud. My concern is based on the following observations. Given that,
1.) Anthropogenic CO2 emissions comprise a minuscule fraction of annual CO2 emissions from all sources;
2.) The subject of anthropogenic CO2 emissions has been examined well and for many years, by many reputable scientists, the result of those examinations being the conclusion that the minuscule fraction of total annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions cannot possibly be the driving force for global temperature trends, and that
3.) Prof. Vaclav Smil, the author of the lead-in article in this discussion thread nevertheless erroneously assumed anthropogenic CO2 emissions to be the culprit in his otherwise excellent analysis of futile and and varyingly expensive methods for the mitigation of the consequences of anthropogenic CO2 emissions through development of energy generation from alternative sources (on account of which wrongful assertion I cannot see for the life of me why he should be celebrated as a skeptic, as his key-assumption about the cause of global warming is fundamentally flawed), therefore
the question remains why it is that anyone should worry about something that cannot possibly be harmful for the simple reason that it is minuscule and totally insignificant, namely the wrongfully alleged controlling role of ill effects of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Vaclav Smil’s basic assumption is fundamentally flawed. It should not be accepted, used or promoted by anyone. Any solution for a non-existent problem is wrong, no matter how advantageous it may seem compared to other alternatives — all of which are logically wrong as well and have no justification.
What purpose does it serve to discuss the economic justification and accuracy of the cost estimates shown in Vavlav Smil’s analysis? All of the alternatives discussed are solutions for a non-existent problem!
@ur momisugly. Charles S. Opalek, PE on July 7, 2012 at 8:40 am
A quick “ctrl-f” of all the comments above reveals no mention of EROEI, Energy Returned On Energy Invested. Yes, I am a broken record on this issue. But this IS THE ISSUE when it comes to alternative energy.
—————-
It is because EROEI is immaterial. Economics is material. As an example, if EROEI was the criterion, no electric power plant would ever be built or run. At 33 percent efficiency, you burn 3 units of energy (natural gas) to yield one unit of energy (electricity).
There are far worse examples: burning diesel fuel in compression engines to turn an electric generator. One burns far more than 3 units of energy to produce one unit of electricity in these systems.
Economics is all that matters, provided that safety is not an issue.
Charles S. Opalek, PE says: July 7, 2012 at 8:40 am
A quick “ctrl-f” of all the comments above reveals no mention of EROEI, Energy Returned On Energy Invested. Yes, I am a broken record on this issue. But this IS THE ISSUE when it comes to alternative energy.
Absolutely correct Charles – I wrote in this issue in 2002 and 2003 and coined the term Negative on Net Energy (NONE) to describe the follies of grid-connected wind and solar power.
Hmm… with all these alternative energy knowledgeable type folks here, I wonder if I may float an idea that’s been bugging me for years? Basically, a big problem with energy efficient housing is limited ventilation. Ventilation is limited largely because it’s so inefficient to keep cooling/heating massive quantities of air from the temperature differentials in the air outside. My idea (which may, for all I know, already be in common use in modern housing) is to pipe air in through a slightly underground ductwork fitted with thermal fins so that by the time the ductwork rises to go up into the living area the outdoor air will have been significantly heated/cooled by the ground under the house (with that heat/lack-of-heat conducted away into the earth.) The .5 house-unit-per-hour(HUPH) air exchange could then be replaced by something more like a 1 or 2 HUPH deliberate air input without as great an impact on heating and cooling.
Are they already doing that sort of thing out there? If not, and if someone here makes a bazillion bux on it, can I get 1%?
:>
MJM
There is an assumption, sometimes stated and sometimes unstated, that Solar will get cheaper over time, and will eventually be as cheap as Coal/Gas/Nuclear,
“Without these subsidies, renewable energy plants other than hydroelectric and geothermal ones can’t yet compete with conventional generators.”
“The nuclear industry has grown on the back of direct and enormous R&D support. In the United States it received almost 54 percent of all federal research funds between 1948 and 2007.”
But it won’t. Ever.
There are several sources of improvement that make things cheaper over time. Improvements in the underlying design, improvements in manufacturing processes, and economies of scale, but there is one other that usually goes unstated, but is in the back of every green weenies mind, which is costs reductions in computers. The cost reductions in computers are possible, because you can reduce the size of a transistor in an integrated circuit, and it is not just as good, it is actually better. It uses less electrical power, and it can switch faster.
But this scaling down which works in integrated circuits does not work in anything else that I know of. So the improvements in cost and function that we see in computers, will never occur in wind turbines or solar cells.
There will be minor improvements in basic design, manufacturing process, and economies of scale, but no amount of Research and Development is going to make more than a few per cent improvement in functioning.
It does not make economic sense now, and it never will. Not in the 21st century, and not in the 31st century.
@ur momisugly Todd:
Exactly. Computer chip economics do not apply to solar cells. Cell efficiency is already some number around 20 or 30, I have not looked for a while. But it is never going to double then double again then double yet again. That would exceed 100 percent efficiency. Not going to happen.
kcrucible says:
July 7, 2012 at 8:25 am
“There’s also the fact that there are hierarchies of difficulty in classes. I wasn’t aware of any civil engineer at my school (though I’m sure there were some) that didn’t start as a Mechanical Engineer and decide it was just too hard/not for them and redirected into Civil. Similar, but not as dramatic, EE washouts tended to become Computer Science majors.”
To add to the meanness, there was Chemical Engineering for those who stalled out on “dynamic mechanics 201”. The pacifists might appreciate that Chem E’s (in general) can’t calculate the evil trajectory of that despised artillery shell (although on second thought, they might design a noxious load to be placed inside that projectile). And then there were the incentives for transferring to “Industrial Engineering”. Blessed memories.
Allan MacRae says:
July 7, 2012 at 4:01 am
Thank you for that. I understand that Murray Salby hopes to have a paper published in which he expounds his analysis of the relative importance or lack thereof, of the CO2 contributions from natural sources (96.5 percent of annual emissions) vs. CO2 contributions from anthropogenic sources (3.5 percent of annual emissions).
Thank you also for this:
The colours for the display of the global distribution of atmospheric CO2 cover a range of 12ppm (from 363ppm to 386ppm) cover the spectrum from a deep, cool blue to a vivid read. That, of course, produces a map that fits the purpose. It shows increasingly more alarming expanses of bright-red colour covering the globe as the years go by.
All that the map display illustrates is that global CO2 emissions are well-mixed, with local variation being rather insignificant, whereas overall global levels of CO2 increase inexorably to ever larger and ever more alarming red expanses.
That “evidence”, whatever it may portend, leaves me to wonder what the colour scheme for that map will change to for CO2 levels that will without a doubt grow to 400 ppm and beyond.
The human signature in all of that can, of course, not be detected. As of now no one has managed to devise a method by which a human signature in the geographical distribution of CO2 can be detected, except for one thing, but that is something that is so obvious that it will probably never be promoted as avidly as the increasingly ever more red expanse of CO2.
Why does no one show what really matters, the beneficial impact of CO2, the consequences of which could be shown in a similar animation which depicts, say, the geographic distribution of the annual changes and increases of the volume of the global flora?
Hey, I would write and post my own energy market post but the undertaking is more on the scale of a book or series of books along the lines of Dan Yergin’s The Quest (2011) and The Prize (2008). For now let’s just say that the capacity load factor numbers are misleading and that they cycle over time with market conditions, technical issues, and fuel cost swings. The load capacity of U.S. nuclear might be expected to go up from 60 percent in the 1980s to 89 percent in 2011 because of 1) decommissionings of the one-of-a-kind designs, 2) ratepayer-funded retrofits over the decades, and 3) timing of regulatory cycles for retrofits. That last issue of regulatory changes can also hit coal-fired generation capacity and make their capacity factors look low during more ratepayer-funded changes or plant conversions to combined cycle gas capacity. These regulatory and some would say political science-based changes of plants should not be construed as some technical factor of capacity load as if we are saying boiler plate coal plants are somehow becoming inefficient over time where once they made nuclear plants look pathetic for reliability. Beyond these factors we also have the don’t-ask-don’t-tell statistic of zero capacity utilization of permanent nuclear waste storage for spend fuel rods that pile up on site at these supposedly highly efficient nuclear generating stations. See NEI for some basic statistics and one long-term chart of capacity factor and EIA list of shutdowns.
http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/graphicsandcharts/performancestatistics/
http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_reactors/shutdown.html
John Slayton, I’m skeptical of your usage claims. In order for a 2kW array to meet your annual needs you’ve made other lifestyle changes. Your computers are probably quite low powered and most likely laptops. I’m guessing your TV is more along the lines of what Europeans would use, i.e. 42″ is considered large, and all of your lighting is CFL. I can tell you that the floods alone in my kitchen/great room burn ~500W. Aside from the size I’m confident that my house is significantly more efficient than yours as I have both GSHP for HVAC and base hot water (~120F boosted by a second electric water heater to 135F) and my house is ICF with triple pane windows. Where I do suffer is that I have my own well, so I have to raise all of my water myself. The low end of my usage with fair weather (no heating or cooling) is 1500kWh. The high end in the winter time is ~3300. Your system, assuming 100% utilization and perfect weather generates 720kWh/mo or not even half of my best case usage.
Sorry, I don’t buy it; at least not without some twisted feed-in tariff.
John, not an appreciable amount compared to what is used just for the A/C and other applicances; about this time each year the water heater can be/is turned off as a matter of fact since the water from the city has warmed to the point of no longer being ‘cold’ and I still use a little over 1 MWh of electricity during the months of July and August … if anything, I would like to chill the water coming from the tap! It’s not like having well-water where one sees water at say 50 deg F year round …
.
Solar energy subsidies come in at least two ugly forms — direct and hidden. The direct form that is generally provided by governments but is funded by taxpayers is bad enough. The hidden subsidy is the most pernicious because it is buried in the electric bill from the utility that serves its customers, and most of them have no idea how excessive it is. Here in NJ where I live, any excess power not used by the owner of the solar panel(s) can be fed into the grid at 4 to 6 times the retail market cost of the power produced by comercial conventional generation. This excessive charge is folded into the rate charged by the public electric utility. Without these extreme taxpayer and consumer-ripoff subsidies, simple uneconomics would kill most new solar energy projects here.
Walter H. Schneider says:
July 7, 2012 at 2:56 am
“How can anyone justify concerns about human CO2 emissions driving global temperatures when 96.5 percent of annual emissions are from natural sources?”
Short answer: The Warmists believe that nature is balanced on the edge of a knife. Nature just happens to sequester precisely as much as it puts out, and these quantities, how much it puts in and how much it takes out, are fixed and immutable. You can think of it like a fountain with a pump at the bottom which pushes the water up to fall back into the fountain. Assuming no evaporation or splashing outside of the fountain, the level of water in the basin stays the same. Then, humans come along and start pouring water into the fountain, and the level in the basin rises by the accumulated human input.
Longer answer: Even the warmists know this picture is incomplete. There is a drain in the fountain – some fraction of the incoming CO2 is sequester away at least semi-permanently. The Warmist contention is that the drain is small, and there is additional input from non-human sources which balances it out. So, to their thinking, it isn’t the 96.5% number, which is the ratio of all natural input to total human and natural input, upon which you should focus. It is the ratio of natural input which specifically counteracts the “drain” to human+counteracting natural which matters, and they contend this number is small.
There are several reasons, however, that this cannot be so. For one, the natural flows are quite variable, and more than an order of magnitude greater than human inputs. Thus, it takes only a small amount of natural variation to swamp the human contribution entirely. Such variability, with the tiny “drain” they envision, would create a highly variable atmospheric concentration, which runs counter to their claim that CO2 levels were uniform for thousands of years. This claim is founded on measurements taken from ice cores, based on a hypothesis about how CO2 gets trapped in the layers of ice. However, we have no way of validating this ice core hypothesis, as we have no other measurements which agree with it to check it against, no “control” experiment, if you will. The ice core measurements are assumed to be the best because they seem logically straightforward and, inter alia, support the scenario of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration due to humans.
There is also straightforward evidence which says it cannot be so. If we look at a plot of the time rate of change of CO2 concentration versus the global temperature anomaly metric with respect to a particular baseline, we see that they are effectively proportional to one another. This says that the direction of causality is temperature to CO2. Additionally, the only things you need to predict CO2 concentration are: starting concentration, temperature anomaly, and the scale factor and baseline offset – you just take the starting concentration and cumulatively sum the offset and scaled temperature anomaly. In other words, human inputs are extraneous and superfluous – their effect on overall concentration is negligible, and you do not need them to get a very good estimate of atmospheric CO2 concentration given temperature.
What this means is that the “small drain” hypothesis is wrong. The drain is large, and it readily sucks in the human inputs as well as much greater natural inputs than assumed. While the Warmist hypothesis could happen, that is not the Earth upon which we live, and humans have very little effect on overall CO2 concentration.
Walter H. Schneider says: July 7, 2012 at 9:58 am
“The human signature in all of that can, of course, not be detected.”
Certainly NOT in industrial areas Walter. But in deforested areas, perhaps it can.
See Murry Salby’s video at time 10:38 – the major global CO2 sources are apparently NOT in industrial areas – they are in equatorial areas where deforestation is occurring.
The greens’ agenda is to spread a falsehood – to blame big bad industry for killing the planet, when in fact more atmospheric CO2 is sourced in non-industrialized areas that are subject to deforestation.
Whether increased atmospheric CO2 is bad or good is yet another question, for which the correct answer may be quite different from the current fashionable fad.
Finally, North America, with its vast tracts of growing forests, is probably a net sink for CO2, not a net source.
P.S. Walter, I also agree with Bart above – I wrote on this subject in 2008.
I discovered then that dCO2/dt changes ~contemporaneously with temperature and atmospheric CO2 lags temperature by ~9 months.
Dennis Cox says:
July 6, 2012 at 6:57 pm
“It takes several lifetimes to put a new energy system into place”
Nah! It only took me a couple of weeks to install enough solar panels, batteries, inverters, and charge controllers to be able to tell the power company they can put their smart meter someplace the sun doesn’t shine. And for those who think a solar system won’t work in places where they get a lot of rain, all I can say is that ours does a good job of supplying enough power both to run the house, and charge the batteries during the day. And it does so rain or shine as long as the sun is up. We run on the batteries at night
“sustainable power” is only a question of scale. One home at a time works just fine. I don’t need to produce enough power to light the whole damn county. Just my own house.
=============================================
Good for you, Dennis. You made a decision and spent your own money and sweat to make your power system. No /sarc, here
However, I imagine government subsidies had nothing to do with defraying the costs (now invoke the /sarc). And the energy you consume in your own homestead does not begin to cover the energy required to produce and transport your solar panels, inverters and batteries (try running an aluminum smelter on solar power). And what about the other amenities we expect in our lives? Internet server farms, broadcast TV/radio, even the local grocery. And the square footage to solarize everyone living in high rises and cities? Fuggetabout it! There is some low hanging fruit that will work for the use of renewables, but the transformation of the entire energy system? Hmmmm. Ask Germany in about 8 years.
oeman50 says:
July 7, 2012 at 1:22 pm
“Ask Germany in about 8 years.”
I can tell you already what you will find. It follows the principle “Add insult to injury”. First, all electricity users get ripped off to the tune of 200 EUR/yr to pay for the solar installations of the do-gooders; and in 8 or 10 or 20 years they will very smugly point to the “success” of their visionary actions like they already do today, explaining to us that only through their contraptions the electricity price at the exchange drops (when wind or solar deliver abundantly) – which is of course meaningless to the end consumer as he pays a much bigger surplus for the cross subsidy as he could gain through these price drops.
Besides, Germany will do just fine; the loss in GDP through reduced growth through capital misallocation is manageable for us. Much worse, the German green cult has been exported to the rest of the EU, wind turbines in Ireland and Portugal, Solar in Spain, Italy and Greece, this continues right now even though these countries are already technically broke, and like in Germany, the local ratepayers get ripped off.
When you’re unemployed and on benefits or without income that stings a little harder… During the last EU summit a week ago a 120 bn “infrastructure” stimulus was decided; this will, as is SOP in the EU, go largely into wind + solar IN THE BROKE COUNTRIES. The madness continues. The first rule of holes comes to mind; but it seems to be unknown in Berlin and Brussels.
Bart says:
July 7, 2012 at 12:33 pm
Thanks for the good explanation of the variations and changing balances of the carbon cycle as reflected in atmospheric CO2 trends.
I understand that and have read extensively about it, exactly because it appears impossible that the minuscule human CO2 emissions (3.5 percent of annual emissions from all sources — man-made as well as natural) can be the driving force in climate change.
Nevertheless, and I hate to persist in pointing this out, it is absurd that in the face of such good and solid, logic reasoning there can be anyone, especially amongst climate scientists, who obstinately clings to a belief that defies all logic. They are the true deniers, and Vaclav Smil, the author of the lead-in article for this discussion thread, should not be assigned the honourable lable “skeptic”. He is, after all, a true denier (at best ill-informed) of the solidly reasonable conclusion that mankind is not to be blamed for climate change on account of CO2 emissions, but that the blame doubtlessly lies with Mother Nature, if blame must be laid on anyone’s shoulders.
However, blaming anyone is another ludicrous proposition, given that CO2 is a natural, ubiquitous fertilizer, the dearth of which has without a doubt frequently contributed to the famines that afflicted mankind throughout history.
It’s a good thing that we finally see higher levels of atmospheric CO2 level that have measurably and substantially increased agricultural production in modern times. The promotion of expensive schemes for the mitigation of a non-problem is more than somewhat irrational and no doubt outright inhuman.
Walter H. Schneider says:
July 7, 2012 at 2:05 pm
I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that, until atmospheric concentration either starts rising faster than human inputs or reverses course, the fact that humans have little effect on CO2 will not gain much traction. It’s just the reality of human nature: most people are superficial, scientists included, and though they may understand the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, they don’t think it applies to them. They feel that it’s too incredible a coincidence, when in fact, it is no more than a coin toss – emissions came up heads, and concentration indicates heads, too. Case closed (along with their minds).