Submitted by Viv Forbes, Rosewood Qld Australia
A month ago an arsonist lit a bush-fire that spread into the Morwell open cut coal mine in Victoria. Residents of the nearby town lived for weeks in choking polluted air.
This fire is a clear demonstration of what causes most air pollution – the open-air combustion of complex carbon-bearing products such as coal, oil, grass, sugar cane, cow dung, trees, wood, paper, urban rubbish, plastic bags, rubber tyres or other organic material.
Asian smogs have a few special features – yellow dust from the massive Gobi Desert, fine ash and toxic fumes from dozens of volcanoes in Indonesia, funeral pyres along the Ganges, smoky mosquito fires and forest-clearing fires, millions of wood and dung cooking fires, hundreds of out-of-control coal-seam fires in China and India, and obsolete “back-yard” boilers and furnaces from the Mao era. In large Asian cities, pollution is multiplied by unburnt fuel and particulates spewing from old engines in millions of cars, trucks and motorbikes that clog the roads.
The fumes from open fires and dirty engines often contain soot, fine ash, unburnt hydrocarbons and oxides of sulphur and nitrogen. This is the pollution everyone can see and smell. Notice that NONE of this real pollution is caused by invisible, life supporting, non-toxic carbon dioxide which, along with nitrogen and water vapour, are the main exhaust gases from well-designed boilers burning clean coal in modern power stations with the latest pollution controls.
The western world has gone through its “city smog” phase of development. Places like London (“the Big Smoke”) and Pittsburgh (“Steel City”) solved their pea soups many decades ago by outlawing the burning of dirty coal in open fires and stoves, by cleaning up industrial smelters and by providing urban heat, light and energy using piped coal gas and modern magic – pollution-free electricity from distant coal-fired power stations with modern pollution controls.
“Clean coal by Wire” using clean washed coal in modern out-of-town power stations will work the same magic in Asian cities today.
Disclosure: Viv Forbes is a non-executive director and shareholder in an Australian coal exploration company, but these opinions were held and stated long before that association. This does not alter the truth about the causes of real air pollution.
If you would like to read more see:
Locals Cough in the Morwell Smog:
The World has thousands of natural and accidental coal fires:
http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-oldest-underground-fire-has-been-burning-fo-1539049759
Is Coal Dirty?
http://carbon-sense.com/2012/07/14/is-coal-dirty/
Coal Combustion & the Grand Carbon Cycle:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/coal-combustion.pdf
AUDIO: 12 March: ABC Big Ideas: Tim Flannery
In his first major public appearance since the government abolished the Climate Commission, Tim Flannery joined Anne Summers in conversation about the climate and other challenges to our environment.
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Would the conversation include frilly lingerie?
(This might not mean much to those who aren’t from Britain.)
Warmists who scream about dirty coal should go and live in rural India for a year while burning dung to cook their raw chicken and shrimps. People will burn whatever is available to cook with and that is that my friends. There are always the forests if they can’t get coal.
An interesting thread, but it lacks one critical ingredient–a conspiracy-theory “ideation”. So I’m gonna be a good-sport and give it a shot.
So, like, I’m thinkin’ all this relentless pursuit of the coal industry, by the lefty-puke hive-bozos, just has to have an ulterior motive–I mean, you know, if the greenwashed hive-masters really cared about the environment, and thought carbon was an environmental threat, then they wouldn’t tool around in CO2-spewing yachts, private-planes, and limos–right? And the low-rent, cannon-fodder social-incompetents, whom the hive employs in its agit-prop street-theater productions and as blog wrecker-bots, would bite the carbon-piggie hand of the “The Corpulent One”, and others of his ilk, that feeds their loser, privileged-white-dork, loud-mouth pie-holes, if the environment and not their pie-holes was these parasites’ real concern. Again, right? But they don’t!! Ergo: all this putative environmental concern about coal (and carbon, generally) is really just a carefully controlled and calculated load of flim-flam and humbug, that our betters and their sell-out flunkies are pushing for some “non-environmental” end. Are you following me?
And since the enduring end-point of all the hive’s incessant, endless duplicities, plots, false-flags, scare-mongering, bait-and-switches, intrigues, carbon-porker porkies, B. S., “communication strategies”, useful-fibs, fake-hysterics, and name-calling is always to serve one, unwavering goal–advancement of the hive’s make-a-greenwashed-buck/make-a-green-gulag agenda–we can reasonably conclude that that is also the objective behind the “War on Coal” business. Make sense?
So here’s the money-shot “ideation”: So the way I imagine it, the hive is hopin’ to shut down the coal industry, run the tacky mine-owners off the land, and zero-out the value of the relevant coal-deposits. At which point our betters will be in an enviable position to swoop in and buy up all those un-mined coal assets for a “song”. And then…and then…UNDERGROUND COAL GASIFICATION!!! (Goggle: “wiki underground coal gasification”). And no worries about any “environmental” objections to this “new technology” either, because when the eco-politburo decides something and unleashes its hive-minders and chekists to enforce its decision, then the good-comrades know it’s time to STFU and toe the party-lline. Pretty slick, huh?
bushbunny says:
March 17, 2014 at 12:10 am
Lewis and Clark wrote about the burning coal seams across Montana, North and South Dakota and Idaho. Of course, those also had been been burning looooooooong before they were written about in 1803-4.
If China simply adopted US emissions standards from the 1970s, it would be A WHOLE LOT better.
Energy consumption in the northeast is up ~20%+ this year due to the cold. Most of that energy was supplied by coal. The greenies would be in serious trouble right now were it not for coal.
mike says:
March 17, 2014 at 6:18 am
“its hive-minders and chekists to enforce its decision, then the good-comrades know it’s time to STFU and toe the party-lline. Pretty slick, huh?”
So you think calling the greens a movement is ridiculous?
I was in Beijing and a few other large cities in China a week ago. I stayed right next to the Bird’s Nest in the Olympic Park. The first day the smog was terrible, with poor visibility. The next 2 days were blue skies and absolutely clear. In the city of Guiyang, the air quality was a combination of fog, high humidity, drizzle, perhaps some haze (hard to tell) and temp’s in the 40’s; like eco-nirvana Vancouver BC back in the 1960’s.
China’s big cities have one clear claim to a much-sought-after Green credential- they have by far the largest number of Electric Vehicles* of any city in the world. I have also never seen so many Mercedes, BMW, Bentley, Range Rovers on the road in any other city I have visited or lived. The urban economy in China is creating many, many millionaires through skyrocketing real estate prices. An acquaintance living in China said his purchased apartment in Beijing has quintupled in value over the last 6 years.
*By electric vehicle, I mean an adult-sized tricycle outfitted with a small flatbed for delivering packages, food, etc, where the driver has the option of either pedaling or running the small DC motor off an old car battery to drive the rear axle. There are millions of these zero-emission EV’s in China’s major cities.
In western Colorado there are a few coal seam fires, some have been burning for decades, and they get re-ignited by lightening. Attempts to extinguish them have been futile. There must be hundreds. if not thousands, around the world. With all the ‘carbon pollution’ mother nature produces, how can we puny humans compete for climate control?
We’ll all die anyways. See analysis and predictions straight from Marx-Lenin inspired work: http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-submission-2.pdf
This work was supported by NASA, see the Acknowledgements below:
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Profs. Matthias Ruth, Victor Yakovenko, Herman Daly, Takemasa Miyoshi,
Jim Carton, Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, Ning Zeng, Drs. Robert Cahalan and Steve Penny, and
Ms. Erin Lynch for many useful discussions. Study of the \Equitable Society” scenarios (i.e., with
Workers and Non-Workers), in particular, the scenario presented in section 5.2.5, was suggested
by V. Yakovenko.
This work was partially funded through NASA/GSFC grant NNX12AD03A, known as \Col-
laborative Earth System Science Research Between NASA/GSFC and UMCP”.
A new publication is coming soon in the journal Ecological Economics, see
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists
“There are millions of these zero-emission EV’s in China’s major cities.”
EV’s are NOT zero-emission. They just move the emissions somewhere else. Most Chinese EV’s are ultimately coal-powered.
It’s possible that most AGW proponents sincerely believe in settled science around human induced events from earth-scale to molecular level, from the roof of the global greenhouse into the depths of the deepest oceans, with 95% certainty and 97% consensus among scientists.
Now, it shouldn’t be too hard to convince them of the benefits of magical, clean energy by wire. Or that’s at least what energy corporations seem to have banked on.
http://listverse.com/2013/08/15/10-natural-eternal-flames-youve-never-heard-of/
The above link is to a site showing 10 places with burning coal or nat gas some over 2000 years. Very interesting.
“The French only abide by laws that they consider just. i.e. laws that do not affect them personally.”
Namely, this was not a law, but a decree, by a capricious coalition of totalitarian reds and fanatic greens, based on pseudo-science.
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted trying to reduce CO2 because the AGW advocates and their absolutely stupid, greedy, power mad politician buddies have labeled it a “pollutant”. These resources should have been spent to clean up the real pollution mentioned in this article. Gore, Mann, Pachauri, Phil Jones, Hansen and the other perpetrators of this, the biggest and costliest hoax in the history of mankind, should be held personally accountable. A trial for crimes against humanity would be appropriate.
@DirkH
Yr: “So you think calling greens a movement is ridiculous?”
A little uncertain about your last, DrikH. Thinkin’ it might be some sort of inside-joke and I’m not gettin’ it. But I’ll play the doofus, straight-man and take your inquiry on literally.
I propose to consider the matter by means of an Einstein-model thought experiment:
An academic, up for tenure at some public university Climate Science Department, at a department meeting urges the attendees: “Hey, guys! You know, if we were to stop jetting around to all those boondoggle, waste-of-time eco-confabs of ours and just held our geek-ball, boring hive-swarms through video-conferencing, then we’d spare Gaia, and the kids, and the polar bears tons and tons of CO2 “pollution” and we’d also finally be able to say to our headless-chicken, “denier” detractors that we’ve GOTTEN OUR SNOUTS OUT OF THE TROUGH AND NOW LEAD FROM THE FRONT BY INSPIRING, CARBON-AUSTERE PERSONAL EXAMPLE!!!!–THAT WE NOW PRACTICE WHAT WE PREACH!!!!!”
1. “Movement” response from the attendees: “Right on, Bro! We’re with you! It’s not about our taxpayer rip-off, good-deal troughs, perks and gravy trains, but about doing what’s right and setting the example! Your tenure is not only a “lock” but you’ll probably end up Department Head with great ideas like that!”
2. “Hive” response: “Hey pal! Not only are you not “tenure” material, but you need to see a shrink, big-time! Somebody call the chekists on this dangerous, counter-revolutionary crazy!!”
So, yeah, I think calling greens a “movement” is ridiculous.
Re Bushbunny: The Thames was not polluted by burning of coal – at least not to any noticeable extent. It was polluted by the raw sewage fed into the river from the Southern and Northern Outfalls. These were constructed to collect London’s sewage, stop it being deposited straight into the Thames where the people lived, and deposit it there well down river. Just one problem – they forgot the Thames is tidal. So the sewage was released into the river, and the flood tide brought it back up – one smelt it, saw it – noticeable were the Thames trout floating on the surface seen when crossing the river on the Woolwich Free Ferry. See, for a map and photos of the construction: http://www.hevac-heritage.org/electronic_books/sewage_pumping/1-INTERCEPTING_SEWER_SYSTEM.pdf
I believe that eventually – after the river had been declared “dead” in the 1950s – the treatment facilities at the ends of the Sewers were improved so that only clean water entered the Thames. In addition, industries were not allowed to put toxic effluent into the river. So now it has been transformed. But due to fixing the sewage problem – not carbon dioxide.
Thanks, Viv. An interesting article.
Yes, this is pollution. Burning gasoline in a modern engine produces mostly CO2 and H2O. It is the unintended CO that could kill you. I think CO is a pollutant, CO2 is not; it is plant food, we need more.
Apart from that, not even the IPCC declares to know how much the additional CO2 would warm the Earth.
Answer for Unmentionable
There is still hope for a low-cost highly abundance source of energy. The discovery was made by two researchers by the name’s of Martin Fleishmann and Stanly Pons in 1989. Some referred to it as Cold Fusion and is also called Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, (LENR). I prefer to call it the Fleishmann and Pons Effect. NASA has been doing research on this for some years along with SPARWAR the US Navy research on the subject. Andrea Rossi an Italian researcher has developed a device which was recently patented and sold to a US company located in North Carolina. See what Peter Hagelstein, MIT, has to say on the subject
Unmentionable says:
March 17, 2014 at 12:59 am
It’s been quite a sad sort of laugh watching AGW fanboys/girls struggling with the certitude that coal use is not going away. It’s such an jarring sacrilegious stumbling-block to their ideologically edifice that they can’t even get their head around the unadorned basis, that 7.2 billion people plus low-cost high abundance means vast quantities of coal are going to be used for as far as we can envision, unless a low cost practical super energy source is discovered that we don’t yet know about.
Learn for your self:
http://www.coldfusionnow.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zgmdo4C1VQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97ps7fTWOA8
John
“he calls their lack of access to horticulture ‘criminal'”
You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her . . . . **ducks and runs for cover** ;-p
” Crispin in Waterloo, -18C says: March 17, 2014 at 2:11 am
I have been involved up to my nose for years in the development of ultra-low emission coal burning stoves for the multitudes of poor people in Asia who are unlikely to use anything else in the next few decades. ”
Great stuff and so practical. Hey is there a page for that project? I’d love to check out the details. Like you say there isn’t much else for them to use and they will use whatever is available. 5500? OMG that is unbelievable. How do people and animals breath that? With a fork and spoon?
mike says:
March 17, 2014 at 8:53 am
“So, yeah, I think calling greens a “movement” is ridiculous.”
Thanks. I wanted to make sure I don’t mistakenly think you’re deluded.
” mike says: March 17, 2014 at 6:18 am
An interesting thread, but it lacks one critical ingredient–a conspiracy-theory “ideation”. So I’m gonna be a good-sport and give it a shot. ”
Me next! Love your angle and it just might be the case so here goes mine. A lot shorter 🙂
Keep CO2 at some artificially decided low level (pre-industrial 270 PPM) and when the next ice age kicks in it will drop below the 150 PPM level meaning all plants above the oceans will die followed by all the animals that rely on the plants and all the animals that rely on the animals that rely on the plants. Scavengers could survive the longest but still only a few years.
The humans that had access to fish could survive but society would destroy itself and civilization would be over. That would leave those who planned this to emerge and rule the survivors and reseed the planet with the seed stock they carefully stashed away.
” John McClintock says: March 17, 2014 at 12:35 pm ”
The whole CF/LENR has been mired for a long time but it appears to be emerging from the abyss it was in for 2 decades. Dr. Peter Hagelstein, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT spoke recently on a Serious Science episode on the history of Cold Fusion from the scientific community’s standpoint. Very much worth listening to. He and Professor Schwartz have been putting on theory and demos of LENR for 2 or 3 years now at MIT.
Yes, I have been following LENR for a few months now and have become interested in a young fellows work that has been posting open source on the internet. The guy’s name is Justin Church and his website is http://www.jdcproducts.com. I became interest because I have built hydrogen generator and they are available off the shelve now. In looking for a hydrogen purification system, Justin came up with the idea of using a Catalytic Converter and discovered that feeding the hydrogen gas through the Catalytic Converter it started to produce heat, no flame or heat involved, so what caused this reaction?
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Even/odd plate numbers. I live in the US so I don’t know how the French equivalent of our BMV works but is there anything to prevent someone from getting two plates for the same car? Will a black-market rise for even/odd numbered plates? Perhaps there’s room for an entrepreneur to develop “quick-change” plate connectors?