Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The objective has been set, now up to the engineers to deliver.
Climate change: Pope urges action on clean energy
9 June 2018
Pope Francis has said climate change is a challenge of “epochal proportions” and that the world must convert to clean fuel.
“Civilisation requires energy, but energy use must not destroy civilisation,” he said.
He was speaking to a group of oil company executives at the end of a two-day conference in the Vatican.
Modern society with its “massive movement of information, persons and things requires an immense supply of energy”, he told the gathering.
“But that energy should also be clean, by a reduction in the systematic use of fossil fuels,” he said.
“Our desire to ensure energy for all must not lead to the undesired effect of a spiral of extreme climate changes due to a catastrophic rise in global temperatures, harsher environments and increased levels of poverty.”
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44424572
The obvious response is you can have cheap, reliable energy or non-polluting energy, but not both.
But perhaps this is an opportunity. The Catholic Church has an awful lot of money, and the world is full of wildly implausible energy claims which few serious venture capitalists would consider, like E-cat cold fusion generators.
Skeptics like myself might think alternative energy ideas like Andrea Rossi’s E-cat claims are nonsense, but who knows? If Pope Francis wants the impossible, he needs to consider the extremely improbable, because just maybe somewhere out in the wilderness of wild ideas is an idea with real potential which we have all overlooked.
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Oil, gas and coal companies already deliver reliable, cheap and relatively clean power. Hydro and nuclear deliver all 3. So what, exactly, is Il Papa talking about? Wine from water? Infinite fish from an empty basket? Perhaps he should sit down, get educated, buy a clue and figure out what is really going on in the world. Right after he drives all the child molesters, rapists and thieves out of the Catholic Church.
OK – Pope Canute demands a miracle!
If he really expects a delivery – Good Luck!
Who better to ask for a miracle.
Ask who you like because neither will work.
Who cares what the leader of a worldwide cult of pedophiles thinks or says?
So all Catholics are pedophiles?
I suppose that next you will tell us that all blacks are criminals?
He is the leader of all the priests who work for him. The parishioners are just consumers. who are buying a lie of eternal life. They are the suckers who provide the funds for the pedophiles to live a comfortable life by delivering sermons to the great unwashed. The Catholic church has resisted attempts to clean out its pedophile priests ever since the scandal broke.
Of course not. But the Catholic Church hierarchy protected and promoted the pedophiles in its Mafiaesque organization.
Francis’ knee jerk reaction was to side with the bishops who sheltered known child rapists. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from protecting the molesting priests’ daddy rabbits. After his tour of Chile, the press got so bad, that the Potato finally gave in and threw his pedophilia-promoting partners under the bus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/world/americas/pope-sex-abuse-chile.html
Shameful. Disgusting.
Suffer the little children to be my victims.
Climate change is a challenge of epochal proportions and epochal spurious correlations.
https://chaamjamal.wordpress.com/2018/05/27/spurious-correlations-in-climate-science-2/
Few discoveries have improved the lives of more people than fossil fuels. The New Testament is all about lifting people up out of poverty and aiding the poor. Fossil fuels do just that.
Fusion will need ocean Deuterium extraction, and Helium3 from the Moon. Oil companies should diversify. It was the Penatgon’s Clementine that found Lunar ice and He3 (in Ilmenite) evidence.
We need a climate Jesus.
The worldly pope. Not in the job description.
What he has been advocating does the opposite. It makes energy way more expensive and way less reliable. It also makes access to energy among the poor less attainable. My apologizes if this has already been pointed out in comments and I didn’t read through them thoroughly enough.
My first thought….”they already do”….
Oil companies already produce cheap, reliable energy….clean is relative. It’s a heck of a lot cleaner than burning wood or the old coal plants. Our air is cleaner, our water cleaner and all of it is due to cheap, reliable energy. So what is the problem? It’s progress. Will we get to fusion? Even cold fusion? My hope is someday–if it can be dreamed…it can be done…maybe not in 5 years, but someday. Humans progressively grow–our societies, our structures, our foundations…in 50 years my hope is that this hype is viewed the same way we look at the ridiculous statements made in the 1900’s that science is all known, no reason to study to reach it further, we know it all. Bollocks.
If they are looking for zero emissions–heck even human beings don’t do that–neither does any other living creature on this planet–we all exhaust emissions from energy burn–be it a breath of CO2 or O2 and H2O or methane from the other end. In that context not one single living creature on this planet has zero emissions–so what exactly IS the standard they are going for? Oh right….for all of us to stop breathing their air…. /sarc
It’s quite the hoot to see rabidly anti-religion greenies falling all over themselves every time the first Communist pope, um, pontificates on matters beyond his ken.
h/t notrickszone.com
Competitive religion? The Orthodox Church Green Patriarch is trying to outdo the Pope! This has been going on since the Great Schism of 1054AD.
In 1448 Nicolas of Cusa got the two branches to sign an agreement on the nature of man. Apparently on their return to Kiev and Sophia some were imprisoned, the agreement repudiated. This was before Luther and the 100 years war that followed.
Strange that Laudato Si is missing any mention of Filioque, the key idea of that Council, that man’s creative progress is central, not mother earth.
Could it be that the current Vatican tactic is to re-unite the ancient schism? At the cost of human nature?
Is the Vatican trying to make a deal?
Trade deals are one thing, oil and tariffs another – but dealing in human nature sounds exactly like Prince Philip’s various church initiatives. It is well known the British Royals like to appear at Mt Athos – the Orthodox Seat – maybe even have a holiday residence.
Let’s see, the Queen’s Anglican Church, the Vatican, various Evangelist branches and now Orthodox – all re-united under Climate? Prince Philip’s Church of CO2? I knew it had nothing to do with science, is actually anti-science with religious zealotry mixed in, flagellants and all.
This unbelievably crazy climate scheme has hit an iceberg, as all titanics do – China. Confucianism , shown by Leibniz to have a point-by-point relation to Christianity, while itself not a religion, rather a form of natural law. China with its BRI has rediscovered its ancient cultural roots – even the Gang of Four could not erase Confucianism. Progress, poverty reduction, research, transport, space, nuclear energy, all exactly what the transatlantic used to do. After Leibniz’s work, no surprise it is so familiar.
Just a casual hypothesis, but it seems to me that every now and then, religions and governments under threat or in decline require a boost of passionate mysticism, which with its obscurantism, social missionizing and charismatic personalities, can provide a cheap and effective jolt. “Climate change” is the latest mystical movement to attempt such a revival.
There are many examples, but I like to compare the global warming craze to the late medieval “witch” craze. Out of the blue, it seemed that the Church and European monarchies lost their wits as they suddenly discovered an imminent crisis of “witches” who in addition to all sorts of spiritual perils, caused crop failures and shortages, wars, famines and diseases. It was all apparently irrational, but the targets and the process weren’t; the Church and cooperating secular governments weren’t going just after poor and crazy old women, as it’s commonly thought, but focused on propertied widows. Surviving records show what a massive “industry” witch-hunting grew into. It involved the entire Church establishment and all levels of government, universities, clergy, town administrations and armies. At its peak, the witch craze created tens of thousands of essentially non-productive work as promoters, investigators, prosecutors, policemen and jailors. The consensus-unified society found a common purpose and the trials, tortures and burnings provided sadistic entertainment. The craze petered out only after the authorities ran out of propertied “witches” and profitable agriculture and commerce re-emerged. Our image of the witch as the poor old woman living in the woods reflects the last, gasping stage of the process when all the wealthy women and heretics had been caught and only poorer villages and their clergy and administrators could profit from the meagre remains.
I’m sure that you can see many parallels to the current craze of going after the “malignant,” world-destroying demon –human-made carbon dioxide– and the underlying goal; energetic wealth-mining from its evil acolytes, the energy and manufacturing sectors and the general consumer.
Not out of the blue, rather deliberate intent starting with the World Council of Churches, followed by Prince Philip’s WWF Religion and Conservation Network, then Alliance of Religions and Conservation, at the “World Summit on Religion and Conservation,” held at the Windsor Castle, under the personal direction of Prince Philip and Martin Palmer. Palmer assumed the chairmanship of the ARC.
All of this a direct attack on the Judeo-Christian culture in the last 40 years. In the middle ages and up to Salem, the same pattern – an oligarchy and regime-change. Rome, the *** of Babylon is their model, no other regime tolerated. Terrorists are today’s “witches”, after all of a Wahab branch of the House of Saud.
Each religion would be granted a license, ala Emperor Constantine, to practice, with the Emperor claiming fervent adherence to each individually, including today Wahab, then Mithra, the antithesis of what we know.
Another reason for the constitutional separation of church and state.
Pres. Trump was right to dump the Paris religion….
Marx et al are only recent sidelines in this, and the cold war is over.
But we don’t need to look for unlikely conspiracies. These are nearly impossible to organize, direct, control and keep secret. The medieval witch craze provides a good example of a very human process where economic forces lead to sets of behaviours. Think of it as natural selection, where a variety of interests gravitated towards profitable philosophies and responses without conscious and guided collusion. Paganism still retained favour in rural areas (pagan=peasant) and presented a serious threat to Christianity not just theologically but financially, as assumed witches, warlocks, magicians, heretics and such competed in providing medical and spiritual services to the disadvantage of the Church bureaucracy and its co-dependent secular administrations. Once the witch-hunt became monetised through confiscations shared out among many parties, it took on a life of its own and in time became a systematised collaboration which only seems as a planned conspiracy in retrospect. Similarly, the global warming scam emerged circumstantially and organically as an evolved symbiotic relationship between scientific, state and economic “stake-holders,” creating something far scarier than a guided, secretive conspiracy: a near-universal consensus.
“Out of the blue” is another word for order oozing out of the mud – spontaneously, unknowably, the Austrian School von Hayek scam from the London School of Economics based on Mandevilles’s Fable of the Bees , or Private vice Public Good. This voodoo economics from Mandeville, of the Hell Fire Club of the British Isles, only “seems” like alchemy, right? Why then is this nuttiness taught at the LSE, with the Chicago Boys, the Thatcher IEA, an armlength list of nuts, parading around the world?
The entire AGW scam is the fulsome flatulence of deliberate, intended, calculated but not realizable dominance. The titanic hit a Chinese iceberg, at full steam. Time to get DiCaprio at work on the sequel.
I thought that “out of the blue” is just a vernacular idiomatic expression of something appearing unexpectedly and perhaps inexplicably, not a synonym for spontaneous or accidental order generation. But what do I know?
In my opinion looking for oil companies to provide a cheap, clean ‘total energy solution’ is extremely whishfull thinking.
Electricity generation is (currently) a low margin-low risk business, oil/gas production is high risk high reward.
In the past i have tried to bring the two together in one project but that failed miserably, the two industries are just to foreign from each other. In everything from corporate culture, risk appetite, value drivers, planning horizons, expected return on invested capital etc etc etc etc.
If a new energy system is indeed required it is probably best to start a new industry from scratch and let the dinosaurs go extinct. Trying to force existing utilities to take big technology risk or force oil companies to run a low margin business, is a bit like trying to get turkeys to vote for Christmas. They just don’t perceive it to be in their best interest. That is at least my experience.
Ps, just for the trolls,
utilities investing in 100+ % government guaranteed clean energy projects is not taking a technology risk!
Pope Francis is providing cast iron prof that the Papacy is really , really dumb. Why this Pope thinks that oil companies are experts at producing low carbon energy remains a mystery
The Case for the Good Reactor https://spark.adobe.com/page/1nzbgqE9xtUZF/
Perhaps the pope (at the request of PIK?) is trying to nudge oil companies into investing more in renewables, rather than inventing stuff themselves.
To really make a difference in reducing CO2 emissions he should urge politicians like Macron to stop shutting down nuclear power plants, and to undo shut-downs that have occurred. Such a request might actually tilt the political / technical balance in countries like France, Germany, America, and Japan, and maybe in the third world too (instead of adding coal plants), because it is practical and there wouldn’t be a lot of opposition to it. (Only about 25% of Greenies are adamantly opposed to nuclear power (per my SWAG), and their arguments weaken when analyzed.)
And/or, if he urged developing countries that are planning to build hundreds of coal plants to go nuclear instead, he could have a major effect. Or how about urging governments to invest in research on improving renewables (as Lomborg has advocated)? that again is a line of argument that could actually have an effect on governments. But no, he’s nailed his colors to the ineffectual and impossible agenda of the alarmist wing of warmism (PIK and green advocacy groups).
An incredible missed opportunity—instead he’s just indulged in virtue-signaling.
Sensible advice, but if you consider Pope Francis’ classic socialist worldview, his goal is to dismantle the free enterprise system and the liberties that go with it. Cheap energy in any form, even if it’s totally clean, is the enemy of that goal. It leads to an increase in wealth and living standards and decentralization, with demands for freedom from political and religious elites. No matter what energy sources or technologies are advanced, parties interested in the status quo will always concoct some alarming threats. If they can do it with CO2, they can do it with anything.
Hey Mr. Pope, have you seen this? –
http://www.moralcaseforfossilfuels.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/02-1.2.jpg
(I’m confused – why is a valid SSL cert needed for a jpg file?)
The Pope has fracking and nuclear to choose from as his best options, however neither are perfect. Perhaps the Catholic church can invest in aiding some of the poorest countries in acquiring their cleanest and cheapest options.
Cheap. Reliable. Clean.
Pick any two.
A new energy source is already here. Rossi is optimistic that he will start mass production of his LENR erectors by the end of the year.
I know many here (including Anthony)) are skeptical, but Parkhomov has duplicated Rossi’s results with Ni/H
“Hydrogen-saturated nickel weighing 1.2 g was used as fuel. The completion of the work is associated with a gradual reduction of excess heat release as a result of exhaustion of the energy resource of fuel. The reactor operated continuously for 225 days, generating 4200 MJ of thermal energy in excess of the consumed electricity (2.2 MeV per nickel atom). The maximum power of heat release is 1400 W at 380 W consumption (COP = 3,7), average 575 W at 355 W consumption (COP = 1,6).
Best wishes,
Alexander
ref: http://e-catworld.com/2018/06/10/alexander-parkhomov-reports-on-just-completed-225-day-test/
This video provides more details
https://youtu.be/43lakTKhbLw
“mass production of his LENR erectors by the end of the year.”
I believe the first time he said that was 2011.
From Rossi’s site on Jun 5th[2011]:
Q: Do you have a specific date in October when your reactor will be ready or are you just generally targeting October?
A: Last week of October.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/06/rossi-energy-catalyzer-low-energy.html
Rossi’s early reactors were not relivable or controllable.
The QX has been run on test for over a year now and can be switched on or off in seconds.
The low energy nuclear reaction, cold fusion, Fleishman-Pons and now Rossi work seem to be all bedevilled by experimental failures which may or may not indicate problems with the theories. I suspect that the issue will not be resolved by researchers and labs, but by advanced machine intelligence programs able to conduct highly reliable virtual experiments at a dizzying fraction of the time of their analogue counterparts…i.e., slow-thinking humans with their quirky lab equipment.
The problem with your theory is that while there a dozens of theories on LENR none has been generally accepted. So how would you program/task the AI computer?
He progress to date has been largely by intuition and Edisonian experiments. It is entirely different from conventional fission and fusion.
It’s not a theory, it’s a guess at how experiments will be conducted in the future quickly, cheaply and more efficiently. An AI program would digitally simulate physical experiments under good conditions with fully functioning equipment. Advanced AI would be able to include all important variables in such experiments. This would eliminate human error and equipment failure which plague real-world experiments. Whether theories are accepted or not is not relevant until they have been tested. A good simulation of an experiment, which advanced Ai should be able to conduct will be as nearly as good as a real-world experiment in a lab. I know very little about cold fusion and LENR. They might very well turn out to be sheer bunkum; my point us that AI-conducted simulations of lab experiments can validate or deep-six a theory quickly and with more certainty.
LENR is a bigger scam, except for the money, as climate catastrophism.
With all due respect Pappy….SHUT UP and clean your house you leftist pig! Yep, I said that.
There’s loads of clean energy 20 miles down but it’s hell to extract. Maybe he has influence down there.
Maybe he has influence down there.
It would appear the reverse is true with this particular Pontiff.
……..Thus spake the Pachamama Popey…………..
That’s just what oil companies have been doing for decades.