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
Mr. Green Genes wondered about the Flannery conversation with Anne Summers. Me too. I bet it was all about things warming up. Phew!
http://www.annsummers.com/?SL_ClassKey=1
TRM says:
March 17, 2014 at 2:03 pm
” 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 :)”
Do you mind if I have a go?
I think we are all agreed that CO2 doesn’t have the catastrophic effects we are told it has, so, the drive to cut CO2 emissions must have a different motive than to stop the “warming”.
We are probably all agreed that Many Climatologists are in on the scam and will argue black is white to convince us.
Fossil Fuel will eventually run out or become too difficult to remove from the ground, some new extraction techniques will be developed but ultimately it will become exhausted.
Civilisation requires power, electricity for heating, lighting and to run the infrastructure and generally make life liveable and realistically the only sensible option to supply us with that power is nuclear. Problem with nuclear is that generally people are not too happy with having it anywhere near them, in the past when nuclear plants have been proposed, 30,000 hippies turn up with placards and banners and beards, not very happy about the Nuke plant, demanding enquiries and investigations, holding sit-ins, occupations and generally delaying everything.
The problem became how to convince people to accept the only realistic option for power supply in the 21st and 22nd century.
Solution, come up with something worse to scare people with. i.e. Global Warming, later revised to Climate Change because the climate didn’t really play ball, Scare enough people and we get the Nuclear power, plus, there is a nice little earner of green taxes as a bonus with few complaints from taxpayers because we are going to save our grandchildrens future world.
When Chernobyl melted down in 1986, Europe panicked, Italy, faced with mass protests from it’s people, closed their 4 existing nuclear plants and passed laws banning the building of future nuclear plants, Italy was Nuke free by the will of it’s people. In 2008, Italy announced the repeal of the laws and the building of up to 10 new nuclear plants, the people this time were celebrating in the streets at the news that Italia was going to help save the world from Climate Change, the much scarier bogey man. What a turnaround in 22 years.
Shortly afterwards, the Japanese Fukashima’d the whole thing up again, Italy has returned to a moratorium on nuclear power, Germany has since abandoned nuclear, and gone back to coal. The solution is once more in trouble.
The global warming window is closing as the pause continues, but an ice age is still climate change and we still have finite fossil fuel and an insatiable appetite for electricity. Maybe they will decide soon that CO2 is not that bad after all, but, something else is worse and we still need that Nuclear power.
Conspiracy theory maybe (probably), but, it has the added appeal that if true, Greenpeace and FotW have been taken for suckers too 🙂
Australia has heaps of coal, mainly brown coal. But in Ballina they are burning sugar cane refuse, but get no subsidies like solar panels. I have always thought right back when Al started his ranting, that this global warming scare was a crock. If anything we were likely to enter a severe cooling period, that would admittedly strain our energy resources. And damage crops etc.
Which is basically more frightening and a threat, another glacial period. Not a cosy 2 C increase in heat. I nearly choked on my wine when I was told that he had won the Nobel prize and the Academy award. It is now becoming a political crisis and unfortunately our pollies well some, not green are trying to cut the carbon tax, but it is held up in the Senate before it can be made law. But come July 1st we’ll have some new senators, that will pass it.
I don’t think the French would bother buying or borrowing another car, they would just go to the scrap yard for a second set of number plates.
Is it true that Chinese cabbies and bus drivers have to be instrument rated? Having been there with visibility under 1/4 mile, I would think so.