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
I think AOC’s GND is a litmus test for mild retardation. I’m floored at the amount of people that buy into this ex-bartender’s impossible dreams.
I think AOC can claim credit for her GND about like she claimed credit for the term papers she turned in during her college years… have someone insert the USB, find and open the document, insert her name in the appropriate places on the cover sheet and the header/footers, then save and send (my step-daughter just completed a masters a couple years ago, that’s how she “turned in” all homework, except she did her own work before the save and send part). The true author might have conversed with her all of 10 minutes to get a sense of how she speaks, and away they went. About the only difference is, AOC paid for this one with some of that $1,000,000 in missing campaign contributions, instead of with her daddy’s money.
Remember the old slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”? I can assure you nothing went to waste in this transaction. And since truth is a 100% defense against libel accusations, I’m not the least bit worried.
But she’s absolutely correct in all this. I have good news for the survival of mankind!
I have recently perfected the kind of high speed rail that we will be using in 2050 to cross oceans. The inaugural crossing will be announced soon and AOC and others at the forefront of the battle against climate change will be honored guests on this ceremonial and history making trip/flight which has been calculated to culminate at an unrevealed spot on the island of Oahu.
The engineering in use is, of course, still secret but I can reveal that it involves the train being able to break what we now call the “speed of inertial levitation” and is almost 100% safe now that we have factored in the remote possibility of water landing/floatation.
Leaders of the climate protection movement, contact us soon for your free passage.
What do you mean, why does this ticket say, “One Way”?
The alternative to cows roaming the landscape in search of food is usually known as intensive farming, even factory farming: it is usually considered a bad thing in terms of animal welfare and of the environment. I fancy the author knows nothing about this.
And as for “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”, they pretty do that now! Alfalfa anyone?
The changes the greens are talking about will need to be forced on the population. In order to do that, a dictatorship will be required, with the greens in charge. Their crazy ideas and projections are only a smoke screen for the gullible, technically uneducated and uniformed.
One thing is certain. Central control will fail, at the cost of billions of lives, because it always ends that way. The real goal is power and control of whatever is left at the end.
Most of these plans will founder on the problem of not enough money. If one simply assigns all, and I mean all, savings in the economies of North America to building out this renewable utopia, it will take a good 80 years I figure. If one simply tries to force people to live sparingly to free-up savings, then the economy will shrink, and with it the supply of savings.
I’m also with Menicholas about this vision being a nightmare. People often say that “socialism sounds great until…” Socialism, even the idea sort, doesn’t sound good. What sort of satisfaction is there to a life without challenge, planned from beginning to end, and being run by other people?
Socialists/Communists always show THEIR way of life as utopia, then reality happens……..
Even my liberal millennial daughter laughed at the silliness of these ideas–especially the part about sharing homes and cars. I don’t think this vision of the future is going to appeal to most.
This is why the left lusts after gun control/confiscation so badly. A population without a way to fight back will be slaves.
We all have to realize that all politicians are fat pigs at the self made trough endlessly feeding at the expense of the general population.
There should be a working French guillotine in every Senate, Parliament, city hall, etc., any place politicians,especially self appointed (anointed?) ones (UN, EU) do their business, just to remind the politicians who really is in charge, and it’s not the politicians. They are supposed to work FOR us.
“rediscover the power of public imagination.”
You can’t rediscover something that hasn’t existed before. The closest thing to this is called Group Think and it’s not very imaginative.
The individuals that had imagination that changed things for the better were: Newton; Faraday, Watt; Tesla; etc. etc. It’s not that many people.
Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge.
Most people that I know have very little to no imagination, regardless of their knowledge.
The urbans who have dropped ~30k+ into solar and batteries are the worst of all. Sila Kiliccote may be a wealthy and clever engineer, but she probably does not drink and wash with her own captured rainwater. She probably uses water pumped from distant watersheds, then treated, then pumped uphill to her house… and flushes down into the Cupertino Sanitary District where the wastewater is treated again.
The “See? It works for me!” people are NOT prepared to illuminate one or a few streetlights that would be their community share. Their tiny utopia does not include any power, heating or cooling for schools and other buildings, especially hospitals, that typically demand far greater energy than their property could provide.
Their willful disregard of the total aggregate energy necessary to sustain modern civilization is completely opaque to them. As long as AOC and journalists looking for sound bites cherry-pick these engineering-challenged engineers, the lie will grow bigger.
“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.”
Something that the Utopia designers are either unaware of, or don’t want to talk about, is that there is a direct correlation between urban density and the crime rate. Probably, largely a result of anonymity and gang activity. The annual FBI Uniform Crime Report documents how crime (and especially homicide, which is one of the best reported crimes) is primarily an urban problem with just a few of the largest cities contributing to the majority of the murders. What comes to mind is the stereotype of inner-city people who can’t afford air conditioning sitting on the front steps of their apartment in the Summer evening, drinking beer, and getting into arguments with their neighbors.
When I do my weekly grocery shopping, I buy more than I could easily put into a backpack and haul home. Carrying several bags into the house from the car isn’t an issue. However, what this ‘vision’ means is that people will have to make multiple walking trips to the neighborhood grocery store, perhaps every other day, of every day if it is a large family. That may not be possible for the elderly! Everyone will probably need their own shopping carts or a service to collect them outside their dwellings. Prices will probably go up for food because of the loss of economy of scale and competition with all the neighborhood Mom & Pops. Some grocery stores are now providing online shopping, but they would have to expand that to delivering as well. Ace Hardware may survive, but Lowe’s and Home Depot will probably go out of business when people can’t haul home 4’x8′ sheets of plywood and all the paint buckets for home remodeling. Yes, it will be a different world. But not as enjoyable as these dreamers envision!
What strikes me is the shear hubris of these social planners. They think that they know what others will want. They also think that they are smart enough to design a system that will be better than what has evolved. But, as I remark above, they have overlooked a lot of things. “The Devil is in the details!”
I know that it’s a conspiracy theory to believe that “climate crusaders are really just communists in disguise” but dang-it if they both don’t really love government planned economies.
History is repeating itself from the late 60’s-early 70’s.
Who here is old enough to remember “The Age of Aquarius” song, and New Age hippy-ism?
(Okay, no fair Willis, I know you were there.)
The Hair musical made the song popular. Which is what I remeber as an adolescent from that time.
I’m referring explicitly to what the WikiPedia entry refers to about that pop-culture period.
“The expression Age of Aquarius in popular culture usually refers to the heyday of the hippie and New Age movements in the 1960s and 1970s. “
We are entering this new era of New Age-ism, dependent on the un-informed stupidity of a few ignorant 20-soemthings.
From a cultural stand-point, what this AOC Idiocy Phenomenon is about is a cultural movement of New Age-ism, version 2019. Now 50 years forward from the last era of this gibberish, hippy movement.
In the late 60’s-early 870’s the anti-War (Vietnam War) became the New Age-ism’s focal point. That was the un-educated (or poorly college educated) 20-somethings. Meanwhile the educated 25-65 year olds were busy putting men on the Moon with Apollo.
Today, the “anti-War” movement has adopted Climate Change as their anti-war. Just as stupid a movement, becasue it uses emotion and “feelings” to drive real-world policies that have real world consequences, especially for the poorest or most vulnerable.
Yes, we got out of Vietnam quickly as soon as we had our POWs back, but then what happened to the South Vietnamese we left behind? Or the Cambodians? just a few years later. Those decisions had catastrophic outcomes for those vulnerable populations.
Joel O’Bryan
I couldn’t find an icon for a raised hand! However, count me in.
We’re entering the Age of A-carious?
> trucks running on hydrogen fuel
This cannot possibly refer to anything real. Even other energiewende crackpots admit there isn’t any storage solution good enough for actual transport use (http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/consumer/hydrogen/basics/storage.htm).
And it’s utterly improbable there will be such a solution any time soon, seeing how this didn’t go anywhere (despite much effort) back in Cold War era, when “nuclear energy” was spelled clean and loud, while the commissars were commonly kept on leashes and mostly not allowed to interfere with R&D doing its job. So the prospects are bad even compared to fusion (which is only 10 years away for last 50 years or so).
So it seems that after projectively expelling arguments against an earlier New Ice Age scare (digested and made into stupid), Team Watermelon now regurgitates the looniest things they could copy-paste from old Popular Mechanics and suchlike.
And as for “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”, they pretty do that now! Alfalfa anyone?
Sorry, don’t know how that got there.
The only way to run a long-haul truck off of hydrogen is to carry it in liquid form, and I personally do not want to be anywhere near a truck fueled by liquid hydrogen.
“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.
Sorry, Sila. If we are going to make your dream world a reality, you are going to have to give up this house way up in the hills, and your beautiful deck looking over the valley. You and your family are being relocated to a living room in an old suburban home in San Jose. The rest of the house will be occupied by four other families, with 10 illegal immigrants living in the garage. Ahhh Utopia!
Here is NOAA’s weather prediction for winter 2018-19. It was published October 2018. Not exactly a long term prediction like looking out 30 years. It could not have been more wrong. Their modeling accuracy is worse than expected.
https://youtu.be/pqhlgovftLY
People living close together, in harmony, in government designed and managed apartments was the investment made by the old USSR and can now be seen on Google Earth as run down and mostly vacant surrounded by places where town used to be. These socialists who think they know what is best for our lives should never be allowed to have power. One word describes them, disaster.
Every time I contemplate climate change, computer models, and consensus, I’m reminded of this science fiction short story by Ben Bova from 1971, that concludes with this observation .
“Son if a bitch,” he said with unaccustomed vehemence. The computer was right after all.”
https://archive.org/stream/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v041n02_1971-08_PDF/Fantasy__Science_Fiction_v041n02_1971-08_PDF#page/n3/mode/2up
Hey everyone quit criticising: this is easy in a 2050 world with a global population of 5million! Er…
Does anyone else think that the real motivation of the climate-change lobby is a complete government takeover of the energy industry. By definition this is a move toward socialism, which is the clear goal of the Green New Deal. And to, of course, reduce the human vermin by a factor of or more10 or more to reach this nirvana.
“No oil change! Yippee! You know?”
just replace old worn-out smart phone batteries or simply buy a completely new e-car battery! You know?
“Electric-power like heat pumps!”
the heat pump in the backyard has the advantage that the spring in the backyard comes 2 months later.
And winter comes 2 months earlier. In the backyard.
The state of emergency is unrolling to adultery bevore our very eyes.
I really don’t know what else you would expect from National Proletariat Radio David!
“Now, in 2050, there’s a tremendous sense of accomplishment.”
Meanwhile on the weather channel which no longer has any viewers, there hasn’t been a hurricane since 2044 nor a tornado since 2042. There are no floods anymore nor any droughts nor wildfires. The temperature is always perfect and rain is plentiful but not overwhelming. The seas are clam, the polar bears are everywhere, the glaciers are back, civil wars have stopped, the poor are rich and the rich are less rich, the seas are full of fish and coral, Greenpeace is now the world government and WUWT has been apologizing for 15 years about how wrong they were.