Guest ridiculing by David Middleton
I couldn’t make this sort of schist up if I was trying…
CLIMATE
It’s 2050 And This Is How We Stopped Climate Change
March 11, 20195:03 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
Dan Charles
When NPR interviewed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in February about her Green New Deal, she said that her goal was bigger than just passing some new laws. “What I hope we’re able to do is rediscover the power of public imagination,” she said.
Well, we’re unleashing our imagination and exploring a dream, a possible future in which we’re bringing global warming to a halt. It’s a world in which greenhouse emissions have ended.
So — what does this world look like?
Mass Electrification (Batteries Hold The Power)
(Editor’s note: Each story has two sections, the first reflecting the present and the second imagining the world of 2050.)
2019: I went looking for people who’ve mapped out this world without greenhouse emissions. I found them in Silicon Valley.
Sila Kiliccote is an engineer. The back deck of her house, high up in the hills, overlooks Cupertino. Apple’s circular headquarters is hidden in the morning mist. It’s a long way from Istanbul, in Turkey, where she grew up; a great place to conjure up future worlds.
“Maybe you’d like some coffee?” Kiliccote says.
Her coffee machine is powered by solar panels on the roof. So is her laptop and her Wi-Fi.
“Everything runs on electricity in this house,” she says.
[…]
I’m fairly certain that the coffee machine, laptops and Wi-Fi in my house also run on electricity. I’m paying 10-11¢/kWh for my electricity. I wonder what they’re paying in Silicon Valley?
“What I hope we’re able to do is rediscover the power of public imagination.”
–Alexandria Occasional-Cortex
I may be reading this incorrectly… I am not 100% fluent in moron-ese… But it appears that human imagination will defeat climate change. If human imagination can defeat climate change… Well then, the sky’s the limit! Let’s polish off plate tectonics and entropy while we’re at it.
Here are some other “highlights”…
“By 2025, battery technology got cheaper,” she says. Electric cars were no longer more expensive. “At that point there was a massive shift to electric vehicles, because they were quieter, and cleaner, and [required] less maintenance. No oil change! Yippee! You know?”
Heating and cooling in homes and office buildings have gone electric, too. Gas-burning furnaces have been replaced with electric-power like heat pumps.
“Electric-power like heat pumps”… Yes he, like, actually wrote that, you know… (Possibly the most difficult sentence I have ever written).
We needed more electricity to power all this right when we were shutting down power plants that burned coal and gas. It took a massive increase in power from solar and wind farms. They now cover millions of acres in the U.S., 10 times more land than they did in 2020. Huge electrical transmission lines share electricity between North and South America.
Ten times more land, my @$$! Just to replace 274 GW of coal-fired generation, it would require a solar farm the size of Washington State or wind farm the size of Georgia. And that’s just to replace our current coal-fired generation capacity.
‘The Footprint of Energy: Land Use of U.S. Electricity Production’
Presumably, these green dimwits will also want to replace natural gas and nuclear generation… Plus, since “electric-power like heat pumps” will be replacing natural gas for heating and cooking… and the fact that a 100% electric passenger vehicle fleet would double our electricity consumption…
Maybe the Borg hostile terraforming image wasn’t so far off the mark.
At least they seem to realize that we’ll still need cement and steel…
Some big cement and steel plants still are burning coal or natural gas, but they also have to install massive plants to capture carbon dioxide from their smokestacks and put it back underground.
“We just had to kind of bite the bullet and say, ‘OK, if you’re making cement or steel, you are capturing and sequestering that CO2,'” Benson says. “And in some cases we actually had to say, ‘We’re not going to make those things here anymore'” because it wasn’t economically feasible to capture the CO2 emissions from that factory.
So… Where does she think the steel and cement plants will relocate to? The Moon? Mars? The Asteroid Belt? Note to Ms. Benson: CO2 emitted anywhere on Earth is the same as CO2 emitted here.
Big, long-distance freight trucks were a problem, too. “They’re really heavy, and batteries are really heavy, and if you have to put a whole bunch of batteries on a truck it’s really inefficient,” Benson says.
In some areas, like this one, our picture of the future gets a little fuzzy. Different guides to this 2050 world show me slightly different things.
Some of my guides see “electric highways” with wires overhead, and trucks tapping into the electric power in those wires the same way trains do. Others see trucks running on hydrogen fuel; we make that hydrogen using solar or hydro power.
Like electric-power like heat pumps wasn’t “fuzzy” enough? Why not just power the trucks with pixie dust or unicorn flatulence?
It appears that aircraft still are burning jet fuel. When you buy a plane ticket, you’re also paying to cancel out that flight’s carbon emissions, capturing an equivalent amount of CO2 from the air. This makes air travel expensive. Fortunately, we now have much faster trains. Teleconferencing helps, too.
Fast trains can’t cross oceans, not even really fast trains. And you can’t teleconference the steel and cement you’re making elsewhere over here to build solar and wind farms. I don’t think the entire mound of babble ever mentioned shipping… as in the big ships that haul big cargo across oceans and up large rivers.
The insanely insane thing, is that all of the nonsense they imagined wasn’t even the tricky bit.
Sally Benson is absolutely convinced about one thing. The hardest part of this journey wasn’t finding technical solutions. They all existed, even back in 2019. The hardest part was navigating the social disruption.
“The transformations were so profound that it really needed to be a collective effort,” she says.
Entire industries died — like oil exploration and gas furnace manufacturing. Others rose to take their place, as the country rebuilt its electrical systems. People didn’t know what would happen and they were scared. The changes only moved ahead when people were convinced that they weren’t getting ignored and left behind. It was the political struggle of a generation.
Now, in 2050, there’s a tremendous sense of accomplishment.
Over my 38 year career in oil exploration, I don’t think I’ve ever seen “oil exploration and gas furnace manufacturing” used in the same sentence. I figure I have at least 12-15 more years of oil exploring before I even think of retiring. That takes us out to 2031-2034. Any bets as to whether or not we’re still exploring for oil then? Any doubts that gas furnace manufacturers will still be manufacturing gas furnaces in 2050?
More “highlights”…
The Urbanization Of Everything (A Desire Named Streetcars)[…]
How did we do it? By gradually reshaping our cities so that they look more like this neighborhood, with lots of people living close together, within walking distance of many of the things they need.Keesmaat can already see this city in her mind, and describe it. “The vast majority of streets have been pedestrianized; that’s how people get around, by walking down the street,” she says.
“What has happened to the sprawling suburbs?” I ask. “Are people living there? How are they getting around?”
“Some of the large homes haven’t changed at all,” Keesmaat says. They’ve just been turned into multifamily units.” Other free-standing houses that once lined suburban cul-de-sacs have disappeared; each one has been replaced with a building that contains five or six homes. With the local population booming, those neighborhoods also attracted shops and offices. Suburban sprawl morphed into urban density.
Cars have mostly disappeared. “There are cars, but people don’t own cars,” Keesmaat says. “Because a car is something that you use occasionally when you need it.” Streetcars and buses go practically everywhere in the city now, and you rarely have to wait more than a couple of minutes to catch one. Fast buses and trains connect towns. For other destinations, there’s car-sharing.
“2050? It’s a wonderful life!” says Daniel Hoornweg, another one of my guides to this zero-carbon world. He’s a professor of energy systems at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Years ago, he wrote a big report on cities and climate change for the World Bank.
Forced urbanization… Agenda 21… Maybe the black helicopter nonsense wasn’t quite as tin foil hat crazy as I thought it was. Let’s not leave out agriculture… Where’s the beef?
2050: The same way we stopped mining coal to generate electricity, we’ve stopped mining the soil to grow food.“It’s different now, in 2050,” Arango says with a smile.
In a world without climate change, this is what cattle grazing looks like, all over the tropics. Farmers aren’t letting cows wander across the landscape in search of something to eat. They’re treating their pasture like a valuable crop, which it really is.“This was critical, to change the mindset of cattle growers,” Arango says.
As a result, production is way up and “there is no need to cut the Amazon to do livestock production,” Arango says.Another critical change: Americans are eating a lot less beef now — per person, half what they ate in 2020. “That’s a really, really big deal,” Searchinger says.
Traveling the country, you now see alternatives to beef and dairy products everywhere. There are blended mushroom-beef burgers in fast food chains and non-dairy cheese on pizzas. They even taste pretty good, thanks to the creative genius of America’s finest food scientists.
If we won’t be “mining the soil to grow food,” where will it be coming from? Supermarkets?
If “blended mushroom-beef burgers” and “non-dairy cheese on pizzas” in 2050 “taste pretty good,” it won’t be due to anything that “America’s finest food scientists” did. It will be due to the fact that good chefs and fry cooks, particularly Cajun chefs and fry cooks, can make anything taste really good… not just pretty good.
As one of the most insanely idiotic articles I have ever read, this clearly earns five Billy Madison’s
“We’re unleashing our imagination and exploring a dream, a possible future in which we’re bringing global warming to a halt. It’s a world in which greenhouse emissions have ended.” – AOC, 2019
Reminds me of someone, now who was it? Oh yes, I remember:
“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal;” – Obama nomination victory speech, 2008
I have Millennial kids and I’m pretty sure AOCs Imagination quote originated with Sponge Bob Squarepants
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/imagination-spongebob
“I have a dream”?
The Socialist Insanity of a Green Utopia
https://youtu.be/b-s6Nr1-R-w
Socialism’s Slippery Slope
https://youtu.be/fJDD7WXByGY
min 31
Peter Schiff
I thought that quote was from the 1998 movie, ‘Deep Impact’ – Morgan Freeman. Am I right?
GReenhouse emissions have ended? Did all these people start wearing rebreather equipment, so that their personnel CO2 emissions would end, too?
An oldie:
“If you’ve ever considered wearing a gas mask to sequester your own CO2 emissions,
you might be a Green-neck.”
More likely because they shot all the spare people to stop their CO2 emissions. You know, people that do unimportant things, like engineers and real scientists.
I dream of nuclear war, ending all life on Earth. Only when everyone and everything is dead, can we have true peace and justice.
“Some of the large homes haven’t changed at all,” Keesmaat says. They’ve just been turned into multifamily units”
Sounds like the Russian and Chinese take overs. Normal houses were divided up to allow for a family for each room. (Except for the elite of course!)
Some quality of life 🙁
Roger, exactly. That sentence reminded me of a scene in Dr. Zhivago.
Regards,
Bob
Dr. Zhivago came to my mind also.
Coworkers around me were wondering why I was on the floor lmao for at least 20 minutes or so… until I showed them this fantasy from the leftist greens…
“Ten times more land, my @ur momisugly$$! Just to replace 274 GW of coal-fired generation, it would require a solar farm the size of Washington State or wind farm the size of Georgia. And that’s just to replace our current coal-fired generation capacity.”
Since wind turbines only produce 0 to 25% of their rated power on average, you would need at a least ten times more wind turbines or 10 Georgia’s of area.
And huge transmission lines between continents is just stupid. Why?
As wind and solar are simply not high density energy, they cannot suffice for real industrial purposes. It’s simply not reality to think so.
I up-scaled based on the average capacity factors of wind turbines and solar PV.
Reality is not and never has been in their tiny little minds!
This is the result of participation trophies.
A nightmare. NPR interviewed someone about a nightmare and tried to sell it as utopia.
It’s much simpler than that. Your nightmare is Watermelons’ utopia.
1984 and Soylent Green were supposed to be nightmares, not planning sessions.
~¿~
they were predictive programming planning session you know
Biggest laugh I’ve had in ages
Not even the IPCC is stupid enough to think that man made CO2 is the sole cause of climate change. So to stop climate change completely we will have to counter the natural changes.
So how about: “We stopped the potentially catastrophic cooling due to the solar minimum by raising CO2 to 2000 PPM.” That is a good deal more plausible than the above fantasy.
“So to stop climate change completely we will have to counter the natural changes.”
Stopping climate change is 1) Impossible, and 2) Extremely undesirable. A totally static climate means the moon no longer orbits the Earth (either it’s locked in place, or it’s gone), that the Earth no longer rotates, and that the Earth no longer revolves around the Sun. There is no “or” in there, at least ALL of those things would have to happen to “stop climate change”. It’s such a childish concept.
Stop. Stop. Stop. You’re going to give AOC a worse headache than her handovers did. Do you want the poor woman’s head to explode????
Well, if she’s not emitting CO2 anymore, all that gas has to somewhere.
(“Nature abhors a vacuum.”)
If nature abhors a vacuum, why are there so many greens?
We must stop the climate from changing. It is our destiny. I have seen a vision from Mother Nature commanding me to do so. First step is for you to give all your money to me…
“mushroom-beef burgers”?
Mushrooms grow on manure — no livestock, no manure.
I’m glad I’ll be gone in 2050 and won’t have to see how these morons destroy lives.
Mushrooms are a fungus and don’t need any climate manure to grow.
And the climate skeptic vision of America in 2050 is…?
What new infrastructure or improvements to the built environment will there be to improve peoples lives?
Build more coal plants might not do it???
Not one mention about what the CLIMATE will be like in 2050. How will we know that climate change has been defeated. Perhaps Griff, our resident climate expert could weigh in on this subject.
Build one or two coal fired plants in PNG and use transmission cables (Or whatever), or thousands of windmills and solar plants? For a start, PNG is earthquake prone, settled right on the Pacific Rim of Fire. It’s also heavily forested, so those will have to go for the expanse required for wind and solar.
Not “thinking again” Griff are you?
Thinking is not on Griff’s agenda, only writing.
I don’t think he even writes much. He has been issued a set of standard responses, “bullet points” if you will, and he only copies/pastes them, then alters a word or two to make it sound like he’s actually responding to the present post.
That’s the difference between leftists and sane people.
We don’t go around planning other people’s lives for them.
Why do you think anyone needs a “vision of America in 2050”? Go ahead, look at past visions, how many of them came anywhere close to reality? None.
Building more coal plants means cheap energy and more plant food in the air. All good.
Central planning is a disastrous way to attempt to cope with an essentially chaotic world.
Evolution copes with chaos by creating innumerable mutations, most of which die. A few are appropriate for the changing environment as it presents itself at the time. Those organisms get to breed and pass on their characteristics.
How does capitalism cope with chaos? Same way.
How does central planning cope with the chaos of changing conditions? It ossifies and dies.
“How does central planning cope with the chaos of changing conditions?”
For the most part it executes those who point out that the plan is failing.
Wait. Don’t tell me. I know this one. In fact, I have seen this one. Central Planning changes the data to fit their theory. Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Of course there was no hiatus of Global Warming™ from 1998-2018. There has never been a hiatus. Always and as predicted, the temperature has performed exactly in conformance with the theory…
commieBob good analogy.
A n illustration of central planning: In 1959(?) when only a few people heard about transistors, the Institute of Solid State Physics submitted a proposal to the Planning Commission for a massive investment in a technology of future, a transistor manufacturing. Six months later, the Commission reported that there was no demand whatsoever for transistors, proposal rejected.
We let industry take its natural course. In short, a bit cleaner, a bit better quality. A lot of additional jobs and hopefully brand new technologies. I expect fusion to still be ten years in the future and the majority of power to be provided by a mix of gas and novel nuclear technologies (yet to be specified as none of the current ideas have proven themselves commercially).
It’s not a sexy, sleek idea, but it’s a lot more practical and doesn’t rely on ignoring physics or science-fiction technology.
Climate skeptics lack the “idiot gene” that makes people think they can predict 30 years out. Without that gene, the question is just mindless drivel when someone hears it. Griff, you need to go back to the “idiot gene” sights where you all can imagine your hearts away. (I have a copy of John Lennon’s “Imagine” if that would help any……)
Sheri
Who is Gene?
And why is he an idiot?
No one knows why Gene is an idiot. It’s one of the great mysteries of the ages.
Grifter:
The past climate change, since 1950,
is roughly +0.1 degrees C. average warming
per decade, although there was
almost no warming since
the 2003 peak temperature, through 2018.
If that post-1950 trend continues,
the average temperature would be
approximately +0.3 degrees warmer
in 2050.
No one would even notice that
minor warming, unless lots of
bellowing, hysterical leftists, like you,
were claiming the end of the world
was coming !
Of course +0.3 degrees C.
in 30 years is not even close
to being an “existential threat”.
In addition, global warming
measured since 1975
was mainly in the northern half
of the Northern Hemisphere,
at night, during the six
coldest months of the year.
If that trend continues, Alaska
will have above average
global warming, and the few
people who live in that state,
will love it !
On the other hand, it could be cooler
in 31 years — our current interglacial
is most likely nearing an end, so
a very long term cooling trend
is another possibility.
Most important, however, is not to
make wild guesses
about the future climate.
The best we can do today
is to assume
the current trend
— mild, harmless warming,
will continue.
I know this is WAY OVER your head, Mr. Grifter,
but there is no logical reason to be hysterical
about climate change –we’ve already had
hundreds of years of warming since
the Maunder Minimum cold period
in the late 1600s — probably at least
+2 degrees C. warming since then
… and the warming has
been good news all the way !
The only global warming that is 100% bad news,
is the imaginary FUTURE warming in the
cloudy minds of hysterical leftists, who have
been predicting a global warming disaster
since the late 1950s !
Have a nice day, Mr. Grifter !
But please stay away
from my climate science blog,
or else you will risk
the possibility of posting
something sensible here,
and that would be disappointing,
not to mention everyone here
would suspect you hired
a ghost writer !
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
“And the climate skeptic vision of America in 2050 is…?”
I would call myself a “climate realist” rather than a “climate skeptic”…although I don’t mind being called a “climate skeptic” (a little skepticism never hurt anyone). America in 2050 looks like:
https://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2019/03/eia-aeo-2019-projections-versus-mab-yours-truly.html
Natural gas usage is essentially unchanged from 2017 (after peaking in the 2030-2040 period).
Coal use is down 85%.
Nuclear is down 65%.
Petroleum is down 36% (due to electrification of automobile and bus transport).
Renewable energy such as photovoltaics and wind has increased by more than a factor of 10.
P.S. Oh…and the global lower tropospheric temperature for the 5-year period ending in 2050 will be 0.3-0.6 degrees Celsius warmer than for the 5-year period ending in 2015.
I find your projections utterly fantastic, but we already have a track record on EIA’s projections, and they haven’t done so hot, either, so maybe you have as good a chance of being right as they do. But I’m going offer some thoughts on your thoughts anyway. Donald J. Trump may be merely the first to declare the emperor has no clothes I can’t believe I’m offering praise to DJT, twice in the same day!). Remember the story, it only took one voice to admit out loud that the emperor had no clothes, and soon everyone was saying it. Well, that may well be what is happening here. The tailors and the emperor’s advisors who are personally invested in the emperor not looking like the fool that he is are just now raising their voices trying to drown out the beginnings of the crowd murmuring, “The Emperor has no clothes!” but the crowd is more numerous than they are, and soon they will be drowned out.
Once that happens, the support for renewables will dry up, almost over night, and not just in the U.S., but world-wide! Probably first to go will be the feed-in tariffs voluntarily offered by the utility, soon distributed-generation will have a hard time getting on the grid unless it can demonstrate dispatchability and put itself under the control of the utility, turned on and turned off by the grid-operating utility. Next the fiat subsidies and feed-in regulations will go away (the DJT administration has already nixed a bunch of those), they were implemented by the stroke of a pen, they can be killed just as easy. The last to go will be the legislated feed-in tariffs, “renewable portfolio standards” and subsidies. So any renewable project less than 30% design phase will not happen, and many further along than that will never make it to completion, or will experience a remarkably shortened life. That means the amount of renewables, as a fixed quantity, not “market-share”, has just about peaked. It will continue to climb for the next five years maybe, then it will flat-line, and 10 to as little as 5 years after that, it will begin to drop off.
Coal is still the cheapest form of energy, even in building the plants if you can roll back that last layer of regulations, the ones that try to get mercury emissions to zero, even though the natural environment already boasts a level of mercury nearly as high as the previous minimums (I’m paraphrasing here, I would be interested to see actual numbers), and other ridiculously unobtainable claptrap. I mean there was no basis in health, safety or reality for any of the “War on Coal” regulations other than to kill coal, just undo the “Clean Coal” regulations. So by 2030 already, coal as a percentage of total production will be on the rise again.
Because about then the price of natural gas will start to creep back up. I’m not declaring “Peak Gas”, not even from the tight-fracs (once upon a time there were work-over rigs that did things to a declining well to bump its production back up again, is that still a thing?), but I do think demand will start to catch up with supply in about 10 years. Natural gas will continue to increase as a percentage of total production, maybe even astronomically, for at least another 10 years, but then it will flat-line and stay at a more or less constant percentage for quite some time, maybe even all the way to 2070. It might even exceed 50% of production before nuclear can get back on its feet.
The real surge, at least in the U. S., will be in nuclear. If the President elected in 2020 is a deregulation kind of guy/gal, the nuclear power plant permitting “industry” will take a huge hit. Who can tell me, if a utility decided today that they needed another power plant, how long before it could produce electricity if they choose nuclear? The AEC will be ordered to create a one-stop approval process, with a response due in 90 days whether it’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and once it is approved it’s approved. They won’t have to get an approval to start planning, then another approval of the selected site, then an approval of the design, then constant over-inspection of construction, then have to request another permit to fuel it, then another one to actually operate it. Giving a clear response up front will encourage innovation so the industry can finally get beyond Generation 2 in the designs. With that kind of process, they can probably even reach modular, maybe even portable!
So that’s my prediction! I shan’t build a web-site to post it, but it’s out here on WUWT for anyone to call up again any time they like! Even if WUWT is shut down for whatever reason(s), this will be preserved in somebody’s archive somewhere!
Molton Salt Thorium nuclear reactors are fail safe and scale-able to the size of town. Thus very few power transmission lines. Electricity could be generated without fossil fuels. Natural gas and coal can be used to produce gasoline inexpensively using electricity. With inexpensive electricity, salt water can be purified for use in agriculture.
Thorium is plentiful on the earth and uses waste Uranium to start the reaction which burns up virtually all the radioactive waste, thus solving the Uranium storage problem.
They are fail-safe with no moving parts, no necessity for cooling pumps, etc.
By declaring MST, I think you’re limiting innovation too much. But let’s DO say nuclear is expected to be part of the mix going forward, lift the regulations anywhere from a bit to a lot, simplify the permitting process, and let’s see what happens!
“Molten Salt Thorium nuclear reactors are fail safe and scale-able to the size of town”
Absolutely true. The technology was demonstrated by the US Government at Oak Ridge TN in the 1960s where a molten-salt reactor ran successfully for more than 4 years before being shut down by the Carter administration. The MSRE was fueled with uranium, but the same power-source can be fueled with cheap/safe/abundant Thorium that is bred (with neutrons) to produce U233 as the on-going fuel. High operating temperatures and low containment pressures make the cycle inherently safe and simple to shut off in the event of problems.
The Chinese, Indians, and Japanese are moving forward with Molten Salt Thorium reactors (also called “Lifters” for Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors) based on information declassified from US Defense research. How ironic is that?
My vision for “Life on Earth in 2050” is widespread, abundant, cheap, and reliable electricity generated from LFTR scalable thorium-fueled fission reactors.
Home heating and thermal-industrial processes are run on cheap, abundant natural gas and/or coal. Scrubbers remove most everything but H2O and CO2 from the exhaust. Nobody tries to bury CO2 – that’s just stupid/futile
Transportation continues to run 95% on liquid hydrocarbons (high energy-density) extracted from geologic reservoirs. Nobody grows food crops just to turn them into ethanol – that’s just immoral.
Solar panels and wind turbines are only installed where other, more reliable sources of electricity are too expensive (due to remote locations). Of course, some LFTR configurations can be small and cheap enough to power villages, so maybe solar/wind are largely gone, except stock ponds. Wind power still useful for sailboats and kites.
Happy plants thrive in 500 ppm CO2 air.
No one cares about global warming because the climate is colder than today, waiting for recovery from Solar Grand Minimum
Read that at first as Morton Salt.
When it rains, it pours. ^¿^
Wondering where we are going to put all the Canadians as the glaciers return
griff,
Why does anybody need a “vision of America in 2050” or any other random future date? It became what it is today not because of anybody’s “vision”, but because of the cumulative efforts of millions of free people pursuing their own interests over the last 200+ years. Our society is a an emergent property, not something that was created based on a plan or “vision”. As long as we remain a free republic, with government constrained by the US Constitution, this will not change. I suspect things will generally improve, but as always there will be bumps along the way. Nobody knows what the future has in store, and it’s a fools game to even try to predict it. All we can do is muddle along in our sub-optimal way and individually do the best we can with what we have.
Vision of America (re power):
After a restoration of sanity and good engineering:
1) Standardize the design for nuclear power plants and replace all coal burning plants with nuclear generators. (Save the coal for steel making).
2) Begin the construction of solar power satellites to eventually replace the nuclear reactors.
3) By this time most personal vehicles will probably be hybrid, with an ICE for long distances.
4) We’ve gotten rid of the bird-killers by this time, and solar is only used for remote outposts.
griff
Fracked gas will though. And coal.
I’m looking forward to spending my remaining days on the 27th floor of a government-owned building taking care of my grandchildren while my children commute by bicycle or public transportation so they can work from 7 am to 11 pm and earn $250 per month. /s Not far fetched from what’s actually going on in parts of the world. Next time you buy a “Made in _____” item, you may be paying someone $250/mo to work 16-hr days. Hope they can afford yellow rice.
The climate skeptic vision of America in 2050s is apocalyptic hellscape.
Or atleast that’s what climate alarmists keep telling me.
Miss Occasional-Cortex missed her calling. Should have been a Si-Fi writer for Hollywood.
The trouble is that her electorate believe every word she says.
YUP, and her promises of “everything FREE”, and you don’t have to work for it, will cause 15 to 30 million never-before-registered-voters ……. to “register” so they can vote for her.
AOC makes promises that are so inspiring the dead rise from the grave just to vote for her!!!
I wonder if all the drinks were FREE where she worked as a bartender? By the way a great job for someone with a cum laude from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences majoring in international relations and economics. We know what bars her fellow students work?
My favorite AOC moment:
https://www.facebook.com/theunityspot/videos/1860424880728156/
Not going to follow fb links.
Hey OC, Marx, Stalin and Mao and a dozen others like you, all had a vision.
The result – over 140 million dead via democide, or “death by government”.
The God’s drive mad those who would rule the world, it worse when they start out insane.
So AOC is pretty much declaring right now that no matter what happens by 2050 (which will be pretty much more of the same, regardless what we do), Gang Green (TM) is going to take credit for SAVING THE WORLD!!!!!!(TM). I thought we were all supposed to be dead in 11 years and 8 and a half months?
I love how she just assumes that the technology that they need, will be invented, and it will be cheaper than what we have now.
The world in 2050 according to AOC. (All good stuff.)
The world will end in 12 years. (Hmmm … 2019 + 12 = …)
Think she reached her “tripping” point 12 years ago?
Is ignorant the right word for describing those who are highly educated yet are still true believers in the fairy dust and unicorn farts? I think we need a more powerful word. Any ideas?
Swivel-eyed, spittle-flecked lunatics..?
Tofu Brains.
For those highly educated like that, there is a nice article by Nassim Taleb, ‘The Intellectual Yet Idiot’. Worth reading, a google should reveal it.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577
This?
How about batsh!t crazy busy body fu***ng @ur momisugly$$holes?
Why am I sure THEY will not be living five families to a house and eating wormburgers on a lightly toasted roachwing encrusted maggotbread bun?
I am glad they are tipping their hand at long last.
Big question in my mind is will they slink off quietly when they are told to p!$$ off, or will they need to be locked up?
The article doesn’t mention who gets to decide what family gets to share my house with me, or what happens to my wife and me when they tear down our house to build a six-plex. Oh, we’re OK, we don’t live on a cul-de-sac.
I guess I’m just highlighting one of those difficult social transformations.
Once you become sufficiently socially enlightened, you will realize that it never was your house, since you didn’t build it.
Therefore you have no say in who society (government in reality) decides should live with you.
I noticed they never mentioned cleaning up the streets of California’s cities
Where do you think they’ll be growing the mushrooms for the mushroom burgers?
BTW: you are replying to an old wireline guy 1962-2003. Deadhorse to Patagonia, Brunei to Aberdeen.
In 1964 Fairchild electronics used a new electric component package known as a Dual Inline Package Chip. They first went downhole in 1965.
That’s quite a history!
Memories. I think I still have a couple of dip clips. 8 and 16 pin. And a chip puller. But I also have an old nibbler tool for making my own chassis.
But the joy of trying to get a 40 pin DIP to go into it’s socket without any of the legs bending.
I’ve read of 64 pin DIPs, but thankfully I never had to deal with one of them.
more to Mark W
i did electronic assembly in the early 90s and the multiple legged chips were ok to insert as long as you were careful and gentle, soldering was stressy as you have to be very careful to stagger joints so as not to heat chips much. and you NEVER wanted to get em in wrong way round as desoldering was….OMG time.
I was pretty good at my job, loved it! but the new micro boards are impossible to work on without too much equipment
I stil repair older pcs and appliances for the hell of it;-)
solder wick uber alles.
They’re only writing about 2050, Dipchip. California streets won’t be cleaned up until at least 2280 ;o)
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Excellent point. Let’s fix some real, immediate problems before we attempt to control the World’s climate.
It’s just business as usual for those living the fantasies in their heads to ignore the difficult-but-possible-to-solve problems and jump right to the impossible-to-solve problems. They should start small by trying something simple, like balancing their checkbook, and work their way up from there.
We have always had idiots claiming all sorts of nonsense:
– Car companies and oil companies are hiding a carburetor that can get 200 MPG
– Perpetual motion machines demonstrated on the NBC Today show
What makes me nauseous is NPR is partially funded by taxpayers! NPR is amplifying this nonsense.
Plug all that into the climate models and what do we get? *drum roll*
0.01 degree centigrade of reduction in projected temperature by 2100! (At a guess)
What, now you don’t believe the models?
You don’t say! Fuzzy mindedness makes for fuzzy predictions. I’ve got news for these (sub)geniuses, we’ve had dairy-free cheese on pizza for decades, and most people reject it in favor of REAL cheese. They yaddah-yaddah the part where governments have to coerce the population into accepting less beef in their burgers, or turning over millions of acres of farmland into wind farms. If you squint real hard looking at this future, you can almost make the fascists disappear.
I will play griff’s little game. In 2050, 80% of electrical needs will be met by nuclear power. This frees up land used for useless wind and solar farms for pasturage, to meet the world’s growing need for 100% beef hamburgers.
I seem to recall certain hamburger chains were accused of putting filler in their product. That didn’t go over too well either.
In 2050, the Audubon Society disbands because of the wind turbines killing off all the birds. Disease and pestilence abounds due to the bats being eradicated by the same wind turbines. Weather radar is now completely useless. Livestock is only available to those that can afford the $25,000 per lb. price unless you have access to black market rat carcasses. Vegetation in the great outdoors has gone dormant due to the lack of CO2 and greenhouse managers become the new saviors of humanity.
Yes, Sarcasm.
Black market rat? No, that will be readily available as a source of protein, to replace the birds and bats we ate after the wind turbines killed them. Don’t ask about what the Fallout franchise calls “rare meat”.
Rare meat? = cannibalism? 😉
Hey, if it’s good enough for John Spartan…
The action in that movie was forgettable if not downright silly.
But the depiction of a fluff-in-the-head dystopia is scarily prophetic. I don’t think the screenwriters meant it, but that’s how it turned out.
It is POSSIBLE to reach global CO2 emissions levels that would satisfy the AGW prognosticators…and “SAVE THE WORLD BY 2050”.
But a workable plan would have to include total nuclear annihilation of 2/3 of the first world nations plus India and China. NOTHING ELSE WILL WORK.
But I don’t think we should do that. It’s bad for international trade.
If the US “goes” Carbon Zero…the global temperature rise would be reduced by only about 0.2 of a degree C by 2050 according to their own (wrong) numbers. In actuality the reduction would be unmeasurable.
AGW is not about climate…it’s a tool in a giant power grab…by evil people.
You exaggerate, sir. It wouldn’t have to be nuclear.
If you consider Bjorn Lomberg’s numerate writing on the subject, if every nation in the world lived up to its “Paris commitments,” the amount of temperature change would be (1) too small to accurately measure, (2) last for a period measured in WEEKS, and (3) not occur until 100 years in the future.
In actuality, since Bjorn ACCEPTS the AGW nonsense 100% and STILL arrives at that conclusion, the REAL effect (on TEMPERATURE) would be what we call “NIL.”
Unfortunately, if the “green” POLICIES are enacted, there WILL be a catastrophe which will be all too real, in economic and humanitarian terms.
The truly scary thing is that NPR takes this seriously.
The scary thing is that there are people who take NPR seriously.
That last bit sounds like a massive confiscation of property to me. Over my dead body.
Looking forward to that fast train to Hawaii.
The rails would rust with all that saltwater, Tim. They are not thinking things through.
No, you aren’t getting the whole “plan.”
The “fast train” just drops you at LA or San Francisco, and then they put you on the SAIL BOAT for the trip to Hawaii. THEN you can get on another “fast train” to get to your final destination on the “islands,” assuming you didn’t die of old age during the ocean voyage.
No, you are forgetting about the underwater train tubes.
*pshhh* That’s why you tunnel it. *geez* *eyeroll* duh!
(I don’t have to tell you /sarc do I?)
Cold fronts in the south can generate tornadoes.
We are currently getting several tornado warnings in Kentucky right now. I heard reports these storms are moving 50 to 60 mph and one report of 70 mph.
People in the east should keep their eyes open as this storm front moves to the east. There’s a lot of power in this storm.
Have you ever noticed that solutions to climate change are always harmful to people and usually harmful to the environment.
All the jobs at jiffy lube, coal mining and generation, oil workers, etc..
Many of the jobs in agriculture, food processing, transportation, etc.
And what will we do about the CO2 released when we open a bottle of beer.
Instead of vegetables and fruit my back yard will sprout solar panels producing dark spots only spiders, centipedes and other uglys will love.
But the green economy will produce new jobs they say. Of course, but that means you will have to move to where the jobs are. That means new housing, new infrastructure and massive relocations. How does that improve the environment or the human condition.
Oh wait, isn’t that what climate change is supposed to cause. Maybe.
Of course there will be winners. probably the ones pushing this agenda.
Solutions will cause massive hardship and upheaval.
Isn’t that what climate change is supposed to cause? Maybe.
The results are the same but one scenario is certain and the other is, well at best, a maybe and probably far in the future.
I don’t care about the 97%. I will bet against the odds. The returns could be fantastic.
After all, we have already made it through the first quarter year and the odds improve daily.
Also, it keeps my money in my pocket and my friends and neighbors will not have to move away to find work. Can you find a better bet? The worst outcome is no more expensive than the solution.
Also what the hell is wrong with warmer winters? Will anyone really notice a degree or two warmer on the few hottest days of the year?
I’d miss those nifty “bomb cyclones” like just hit and left roads closed and drifts everywhere! Come on, some of us like these cold weather events! Which is why I’m okay with all those different climates all over the world. “One World Climate” would just be wrong.
I laughed so hard, tears were running down face; the best laugh I’ve had in weeks.
My poor wife kept asking me in Japanese, “Are you OK?”
My goodness… Leftists have completely lost all capacity for logic, reason, and rational thought.
You can’t fix stupid.
Great comment!
I love the idea that imagination alone can fix things, Occasional Cortex really is the gift that keeps giving.
Actually if I imagine it I can have a faster than light personal spaceship to take anywhere I like in the universe and find out lots of interesting things, the slight problem of actually building such a thing clearly is no issue. Even so, I harbour a slight suspicion I stand a somewhat higher chance than any of OC’s green fantasies.
Just refurbish an old British Police Box.
Mr. Middleton,
Thank you for this rejoinder and roast of NPR.
I got in the habit of listening to NPR many decades ago and I never stopped. As you can imagine, the constant (near daily) barrage of climate advocacy pieces emanating from them comes close to driving me batty. Almost needless to say, I stopped monetary contributions to NPR and my local NPR station years ago.
NPR’s hypocrisy (and flat-out chutzpah) is boundless. In the same breath as claiming to be “non-partisan, objective journalism” they continuously broadcast what any sentient and rational person knows is nothing but climate propaganda. Why they continue to do so in the face of overwhelming evidence that climate science is, at best, pseudoscience and, at worst, outright fraud is beyond my comprehension.
It is a national disgrace and I again thank you for bringing this latest example to the fore.
Way back before Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the Sirius Patriot network of 24/7 Right Wing Radio… I also listened to NPR. It was more balanced back then, as was CNN.
During the run up to Desert Storm, the afternoon NPR talk show featured a steady stream of idiots claiming that the M1 Abrams tank, F-15 Eagles and Strike Eagles and all of our other high tech weapons wouldn’t function in the desert and that Saddam Hussein’s battle-hardened army would kick our @ur momisugly$$. Then one guy, named Tom Clancy, was interviewed. Clancy said our weapons systems would work extremely well, with deadly effect and that we would destroy the Iraqi armed forces in a matter of hours.
The author missed what I think is the best quote from the NPR fantasy…
“”And this is even if they are electric vehicles?” I ask.
“Even more if they’re electric vehicles!” Hoornweg says. Personal electric cars for everyone couldn’t solve the problem, he explains. First of all, electricity is precious. We can’t waste it powering everybody’s electric car.”
So, the government will tell you you can’t have personal vehicles, depriving you of liberty, or at least making prohibitively expensive. Massive disruption to industries to solve a vastly exaggerated problem to attain political and economic power over the people.
Note .. “electricity will be precious. We can’t waste it powering everybody’s electric car” Sorry Elon, even a Tesla future will be restricted ! Of course electricity will be precious…if you restrict it to unreliable intermittent sources !
People need cheap reliable electricity to run a modern society and industrial civilization. Look at Venezuela ! In the dark for a week.
electricity is precious. We can’t waste it powering everybody’s electric car.
Yeah, the quote there is what’s precious. Preciously stupid.
I had to leave a lot of material out… Otherwise, I would still be writing this post… 😉
Lenin famously asserted that liberty was so precious it had to be rationed.
You fail to understand the perniciousness of some in power. The will NOT ban private ownership of cars. They will simply make cars and fuel unaffordable, gradually over time, for 99% of the people. The last 1% will be themselves, who will have government provided (i.e., taxpayer paid) vehicles at their disposal, to perform ‘official’ government duties.
You don’t need the heavy hand of government to prohibit something when you can simply tax it to death.
trying to imagine usa gridlock now replaced with everyone on pushbikes like china used to be