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.”
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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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It’s a shame that the Pope can’t see the pure evil driving what masquerades as benevolence.
This current news item is for the Pope…..
WSJ
Word from Caracas is that locals have taken to scouring city streets for plastic garbage bags full of rubbish and, when they find them, emptying the contents so that they can resell the bags.
This sounds absurd, but it is believable in a country where extreme poverty has spread like the plague. Human capital is fleeing. Oil production is plummeting, and the state-owned oil company is in default. The garbage bag, imported with dollars, is a thing of value.
If anything was more predictable than the mess created by Hugo Chávez’s Marxist Bolivarian Revolution, it is the pathetic effort by socialists to deny responsibility. The Socialist Party of Great Britain tweeted recently that Venezuela’s problem is that socialism has yet to be tried. It blamed the crisis on “a profit-driven capitalist economy under leftist state-control.” Even more preposterous is the claim by some academics that economic liberalism in the 1980s spawned the socialism that has destroyed the country.
Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) should have never abandoned the papacy, but should have served for life, in order to give the Catholic Church more time to choose a more worthy successor. As an Argentinian socialist, Pope Francis seems hell-bent on undoing all the work done by the great Pope John Paul II, who experienced all the ravages of two forms of socialism (Nazism and Communism) during his youth in Poland, and helped bring down the Iron Curtain during the 1980’s.
If Pope Francis believes that modern society needs “an immense supply of energy” (which is scientifically true), then fossil fuels must constitute the lion’s share, which have the highest energy density of all currently available technology except nuclear fission.
Contrary to Pope Francis’ misconceptions, fossil fuels can be made “clean”–natural gas produces very little pollution; in most Western countries, Diesel fuel is refined down to less than 15 ppm sulfur before it can be burned, with the sulfur captured as elemental sulfur or battery acid; and even coal-fired power plants can be fitted with baghouses to absorb ash and scrubbers to reduce sulfur oxide emissions.
If Pope Francis is worried about poverty, he should study how the use of fossil fuels has enabled machines to perform back-breaking labor formerly performed by people and animals, and enabled farmers to produce much more food per acre than subsistence farming, lifting millions of people out of poverty. He should then compare that to the number of people forced into poverty by climate change, which is close to zero.
Perhaps the Catholic could subsidize the generation of all electricity by rooftop solar at a premium of 30 cents/kWh. It would only cost $1Trillion per year. Then we cold have clean, cheap energy.
Oh! So the Church has better places to spend its money? That’s exactly the point. So do we all.
My own faith,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8
Pretend this is a friendly video rectangle thingie with an inviting triangle in it.