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
Oh, jeesh, the battery stuff again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they can run your little phones & computer notebooks for a short time before needing recharging & a bigger one can turn your car starter motor for a few moments….
NPR is so simple-minded. For a simple-minded audience I guess.
“By 2025, battery technology got cheaper,…”
but by then they were no longer needed because Mr. Fusion had also gotten cheaper…
AOC is a “performance artist”, invented in the image of some real performance art, maybe like “Lady Gaga does politics”, only without Lady Gaga’s talent.
It’s time to start ignoring this moron. Enough of her.
That would be like ignoring a slow motion train wreck.
Large homes still exist, they’ve just been turned into multi-family units.
Once again the leftist assumes that once everyone is properly educated, they will want only what the socialist wants them to want.
In their world, people voluntarily give up big homes, big cars, and just willingly walk wherever they need to go. Why? Because the socialist believes that’s how everyone should live.
Of course those who don’t agree have to be re-educated until they do.
Yeah. Lara’s Theme was playing in my head when I read that.
jtorn
Ditto! I’m sure that Dr. Zhivago would not approve of the future vision!
“…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.” Wow Trump has even intruded in on this fairy tale. With millions spent on Madison Avenue message spin doctors the Climate Totes are losing the battle. Their product isn’t good enough. And now they are going to sell us on mushroom tofu burgers for our rousing tailgate parties and backyard cookouts.
BTW, it wasnt lost on me the conversion of big single family houses to multifamily units. This is precisely what the Bolsheviks dreamed up a hundred years ago. In fact this is unmistakeably a brave old world vision.
“Not even wrong” would be an apt appraisal, would it not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
It’s so dumb… I don’t think it rises to “not even wrong.”
“Not even wrong” is one, maybe two Billy Madison’s. This doozie was at least five Billy Madison’s… 😉
I’m not sure how you managed to wade through that. I’m dummer for even reading your carefully filtered version.
The question is, how does David manage to avoid getting dumber from reading this stuff?
“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.?
Forced urbanization represents a reversal of policy. I’m old enough to remember municipalities enforcing maximum density rules. Oh wait, they still do.
Is NPR in ABCCBSNBCMSNBCCNNNPRPBSNYTWaPoLAT? Yes, yes it is.
I think of the difference between a fantasy painting of a bridge and an architectural drawing, where the architectural drawing is the real world and the fantasy bridge described here is the painting. You may have a pretty picture, but if you check with an architect he’ll advise you to hold off ordering materials.
It does not look or sound to me like a pretty picture.
It sounds like a deliberate dystopian nightmare.
Jammed into tiny spaces, eating soylent green if we can get it, ride a bike for 45 minutes to turn on a light,
no traveling, no economy, and everything people have now is confiscated, because aint no one giving up their STUFF willingly.
These people are insane.
This future is a horrific nightmare.
like heat pumps
Not much heat to pump when it’s -20. Geothermal heat pumps are great but take decades to pay for the investment.
Hat tip: Willie Wonka
Come with me
And you’ll be
In a world of pure imagination
Take a look
And you’ll see
Into your imagination
We’ll begin
With a spin
Traveling in
The world of my creation
What we’ll see
Will defy
Explanation
If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world?
There’s nothing to it
There is no
Life I know
To compare with pure imagination
Living there
You’ll be free
If you truly wish to be
If you want to see magic lands
Close your eyes and you will see one
Want to be a dreamer, be one
Anytime you please and please save me one
Come with me
And you’ll be
In a world of pure imagination
Take a look
And you’ll see
Into your imagination
There is no
Place to go
To compare with your imagination
So go there
To be free
If you truly wish to be
Living there
You’ll be free
If you truly wish to be
Comrade Kaprugina, err AOC: “There was living space for thirteen families! In this one house!”
Thirteen “families” using a single bathroom. Yeah, except AOC.
Fortunately, a vision of the future was already laid out for us back in the 60’s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyinD6ZDqeg
Hard to say what the chief energy source(s) might be, but likely nuclear of some sort. Hopefully by then, all remaining long-since abandoned, rusting and crumbling folly-driven eyesores involving wind and solar would have been cleared from the landscape. CO2 as a friend to mankind and to all life will have long since been accepted as fact, and the period of time of roughly 3 decades, from the 90’s to early 20s would be viewed as a dark age, when mankind went crazy, setting himself back, instead of moving forward. And another thing, the earth will probably have cooled significantly by then, possibly to LIA conditions. But due to technological advancements, and through the use of fossil fuels, mankind will have gained both in wealth and knowledge, meaning adaptation to a cooler world would not be all that difficult.
Here is my mental picture of what they have in mind:
https://youtu.be/geol8k3rsLM
I only have 1 rhetorical question:
WHAT TO DO ABOUT ASIA?
Sorry, but it really is “the problem”, if you are an anti-CO₂-ist. China, India, Japan, Korea, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc. More CO₂ emissions predicted as their economies and prosperities continue to nearly exponentially scale upward. It’ll not be mushroom burgers that’ll “fix” their appetite for coal and oil, folks. It won’t be unicorn horn batteries and massive thorium molten salt nuclear plants to charge ’em.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT ASIA?
Its just about the only question that matters. (I could add AFRICA to that, but not realistically. Africa will remain stubbornly poor, and ironically relatively low CO₂ producing.)
Just saying,
GoatGuy ✓
Well, Africa will become rich quickly if they finally get rid of those dictators and socialism.
But yes, if AOC and her band really cared about “saving the Earth” she should advocate for declaring nuclear war against half the world. Much more effective than empty virtue signaling. If you truly believed that the world only has 12 years left, then that should be your moral duty.
But just be careful, China and India might start fighting back.
They never talk about what they would do when the batteries expire ? !! Batteries go flat and are usually thrown away. These humungously huge car batteries would need to be buried in the earth by the MILLION or sent to the third world to kill a few more Indians etc. to get the precious metals out. These people are completely clueless !! Imagine the “crashes” from flying cars as the batteries fail! Oh God it will be dangerous for those poor souls left walking on the earth as these things plummet to the ground !! Somebody drown Musk!
“What I hope we’re able to do is rediscover the power of public imagination.”
–Alexandria Occasional-Cortex
AOC psychobabble.
I see ole Beto (Richard Francis O’Rourke) is getting in the presidential race. AOC will have her male counterpart in Beto. They are both completely delusional.
And… If you ever listened to “Puto” (my wife, who’s Mexican, calls him that) speak, you’d know he sounds like even more of a moron than Ayock (how AOC would sound if it was a word).
Beto is guero (if you come from “The Valley” you know those words rhyme)! I grew up in a small town (which is now an indistinguishable suburb) just south of Houston. There were enough Latinos that I knew that word, but I have been wracking my brain for months trying to think of it. When I first heard the nickname that Richard Francis O’Rourke had chosen for himself, I was sure I was misremembering, because nobody wanted to be called that! At least not where I came from. I’m pretty sure I know what “puto” means. If I’m right, I can’t translate it to English on here.
I grew up in East San Jose, and I could imagine someone with Chicano friends getting nicknamed “Berto”, from Roberto. Getting to “Beto” seems a stretch too far.
Well, you could build a solar farm the size of Washington State, but if you put it IN Washington State, you won’t get much power from it.
Notice that the only practical places to build these unicorn dreams are in the South (east and west), for solar, and, primarily, the midwest for wind. I can’t speak for the fine people in the red-states of the midwest, but I can pretty much guarantee you that if Southern lands are taken to generate power for Northern states, they’re going to freeze their backsides off in the winter!
“Some of the large homes haven’t changed at all,” Keesmaat says. They’ve just been turned into multifamily units.”
Anyone ever seen Doctor Zhivago?
My wife and I have a large home on a large lot about 8 miles east of downtown Dallas. We have no children, 10 dogs and more firearms than we can both shoot at the same time. I can guarantee that any attempts to turn our large home into a multifamily unit will result in a lot of changes to our large home and to those attempting to perform the conversion.
“We have no children, 10 dogs and more firearms than we can both shoot at the same time.” Two cats here. For the record, all of my firearms and ammo got sweep overboard in the Great Michigan hurricane of aught eight.
🙂 tonight i have 5 large dogs
tonight or in the next 2 days I will have..maybe 13 dogs;-)
on 10acres
my small home will just hold me n the mutts
oddly, no one seems to want to stay more than a few nights here;-) lol
ps to the other Paul-ever seen the youtube bowyer clips on amazing bows made with polypipe?
That anybody would think of this shows the true goal of the green left mediated via climate change-totalitarianism. How they want us to live is reminiscent of Ayn Rand’s “We the Living”. Insecure people just need to exert control over others to try and gain an ego.
“No oil change! Yippee! You know?”
What is it with these electric car people and no oil changes? Are they really so stupid/busy/incapable/forgetful/ignorant/etc that they can’t manage to get the oil changed in car? How do they remember to eat? If that restaurant app dies, they starve? This is one of the most ridiculous comments I hear.
You will need to replace the batteries in the electric car long before the IC engine wears out.
And the battery costs more.
Hmmm … what lubricates the bearings and other moving parts on an electric car? Vegetable oil?
“…In some areas, like this one, our picture of the future gets a little fuzzy….”
Truer words, never spoken.
“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.
Her coffee machine is powered by solar panels on the roof. So is her laptop and her Wi-Fi.”
So if there is morning mist, how is she getting solar power for here coffee machine?
What happens in the winter when she needs to get up before the sun does?
“So if there is morning mist, how is she getting solar power for here coffee machine?”
This question shows a lack of knowledge; easily fixed.
Santa Clara Valley
It’s 2050 and science moved on and the general public saw the waste of advocacy crusades while also learning about climate cycles of various length.
What’s real in all this is that to the extent they get power, they want to make changes: cut back on the burning of fossil fuels, at whatever cost to the poor and others; refuse to build nuclear; build more crowded, transit-friendly communities because less impact something something. I’m beginning to think the golden age of transit has actually come and gone; witness the high-speed rail in California. People like their cars; they might car pool if that works; they are looking forward to self-driving (private) cars that can platoon, run closer together without crashes, etc.
AOC is apparently a college grad who knows virtually nothing about how energy and industry work today, so any comments she makes about transitioning to something else are uninformed. What interests me is how this is all inspired by the boomers, and now people read even fewer books than the boomers did; some things are taken on faith. They don’t want to go back to nature in any meaningful sense. They think old-fashioned technology has wrecked things, and they are determined to apply (selectively chosen) new technology, even if it wrecks things in a different way. We are supposed to change ourselves, really change human nature or demonstrate there is no such thing, so as to adapt ourselves to “our” technology. Physics and engineering have made great progress; why not even more progress, and now some progress in the science of human beings? There is something seductive here that is very powerful. This is where I think political philosophy (ahem, in which I was trained) is of some help in clarifying the issues.