Guest ridiculing by David Middleton
I only had to read one sentence of Elizabeth (Fake Mass Extinction) Kolbert’s interview of Bill McKibben to know that it would be rife with material worthy of ridicule…
Yale Environment 360
“Thirty or 50 years out, the world’s going to run on sun and wind, because they’re free,” McKibben says.
That’s funny right there in these occasionally United States!
Sorry to step on your “ray of hope” Bill, but…
In 2050, fossil fuels and nuclear power will still be generating over 2/3’s of our electricity according the the US Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook for 2019. Renewables, including Bill’s “free” wind and solar power will be generating less than 1/3 of our electricity and that 1/3 includes hydroelectric and geothermal.
According the the EIA, the Sun will be generating 48% of 31% and wind will be providing 25% of 31% of our electricity… That’s just 23% of our electricity. Unfortunately for Bill’s “ray of hope,” energy doesn’t end with electricity. There are a few other categories.
US crude oil and natural gas liquids production will still be booming…
And the US will be exporting large volumes of natural gas to foreign nations who still haven’t caught on to the “free” solar and wind power.
While the EIA’s forecasts don’t always come to fruition (they totally missed the shale revolution)… I’d go with the EIA, IEA, OPEC or any other organization that can do math over someone who can’t do math and has never had a real job.
Unless American voters stupidly elect a president who favors energy impotence over energy dominance… Bill’s “rays of hope” don’t look very hopeful.
Bill
But now that power is showing itself. Even in the last few weeks, just to watch Extinction Rebellion and [16-year-old Swedish activist] Greta Thunberg’s followers around the world shutting down schools, and the remarkable young people from the Green New Deal fanning out across this country – those things to me are signs that the fever the planet is running is producing in quantity antibodies to fight back.
Then Bill closed off where he began…
Bill
Thirty years or 50 years out, the world’s going to run on sun and wind, because they’re free. The fossil fuel industry can’t keep its business model together more than a few more decades. I think they know that, and I think that’s all they’re playing for now.
Like Bill McKibben even knows what a business model is… Even Gorebal Witless Global Witness gets it, sort of…
What is the basic business model of the oil industry? Invest capital into oil and gas fields to maintain and increase production.
Saudi Arabia will still be producing over 10 million barrels of oil per day until at least the 2060’s…
With a relatively minor contribution from probable reserves and proved reserve replacement, Aramco can produce 12 million bbl/d until at least 2060. Abdulbaqi & Saleri (2004). Peak Ghawar: A Peak Oiler’s Nightmare
Unless little Greta can convince the world that freezing and starving in the dark are good things… There are no rays of hope for the Bill McKibbens of the world.
I was surprised that Bill didn’t babble something about divestment. Maybe someone explained it to him. You can only divest an asset, if there’s a willing investor. Fossil fuel divestment is “really futile and stupid gesture”.
I’m still waiting for the “too cheap to meter” nuclear I was promised.
Amen, brother. I heard it 60 years ago.
John,
That was from a speech by Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, at the Founder Day Dinner of the National Association of Science Writers, 16 September 1954. It was an appropriate place to let ones imagination run wild.
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/12/23/the-end-of-the-nuclear-power-industry/
Perhaps he was looking at the technological progress in the past 15 years, since 1939, and imagining that continuing over the next 15 years. There were hopes of that, based on the massive government and corporate support for R&D, and the methods developed during WWII to speed up progress.
It didn’t happen, of course. But we’re better off, imo, having some people who dream of great things. They are the engines of tech progress.
Well, what DID happen was the Internet, something unseen in 1954 and only anticipated by a few. Orwell and Huxley comes to mind.
But a global neural system (imho) was the greatest achievement of the last century.
I was involved with the development of the MIME protocol which led to the webish interface we are all so familiar with. That is just the tip of the iceberg, ah glacier.
As in anything of great import, it is also a two edged sword. For example, we currently have the likes of Bill McKibben and Greta Thunberg to deal with. There will always be more.
I believe we are at a crossroads, where those who control the social news outlets have become convinced that they now know the way forward (as many before them have done) and can confidently control information to prevent differing opinions being discussed.
The only hope is that sites like WUWT may continue to spread knowledge and lead the rest of us out of the darkest corners of humanity.
SO! because the oil, coal and gas will not be running out soon.
The wind electrical generator and the solar panel makers will still be able to make them 24/7..365.
Electomobile powered Helicopters fly medics to rescue fallen injured teenage mountain bikers.
Only to near foothills, the batteries weigh some ~ 1300 lbs, 600 kg.
Aren’t Oil and Gas are free too, isn’t it the extraction and conversion to useful energy that costs money?
Yes, and also the government taxes and royalties will make them unfree. If cars become electric, the revenue (in the Canadian system) to maintain the roads, for example, would have to be moved to whatever is powering vehicles, presumably to solar and wind generated electricity dispensed at not very fast charge stations.
Then the taxes would be gathered at the charging stations. Even Home Chargers would be programmed to collect the taxes during charging or chargers would be individually metered
No, you would have something similar to what is used in New Zealand, called road user charges (RUCs. And will be applied to EV’s when the fleet breaches 5% of vehicles IIRC). On diesel you pay based on your odometer reading annually IIRC. Heavier diesel powered vehicles actually have a sealed odometer placed in the hub of an axle which includes trailers too. Petrol, you pay on every litre of fuel you buy as well as an annual registration fee. So, Govn’t have that revenue stream covered.
I also found out the maximum Australian Govn’t subsidy for domestic solar is AU$4,175.00. That’s a big chunk of someone else’s taxes.
in Victoria until the last weeks they also handed out CASH of 2,500$ for people installing soalr panels. tell me thats not a scam and funded by our huge power costs!
I should have said New South Wales. Each state has different subsidies. But its the same in principal. Some person who does not own a roof, cannot install solar and subsidises those that have and do.
The taxes will already have been moved by then.
Here in BC the mayors of the ‘region’ around Vancouver all attend a ‘Mayor’s Council on Regional Transportation’. Part of its ‘regional’ transportation plan is the planned levying of a ‘Mobility Tax’ which is ‘road pricing’ by any other name. You pay by the mile ( I mean kilometer) to move around in your vehicle or to use a parking space ( not move around ). The favoured method of metering the use of the road( not the fuel) is by GPS. By law each vehicle will be required to have a GPS tracker installed which will record all movements and time stamp them. The data will sent to government computers automatically and a ‘mobility’ charge for each moment of the day will be generated and charged to your account. The computer can change the cost per km based on the roadway’s location and the time of day.
Fuel tax is yesterday.
And like the income tax, the government is able to get more information about YOUR business and travel. How long before total control is reached? The only thing left will be the elimination of CASH.
Freedom? I think NOT!
Big Brother. I think so.
Absolutely true Drake.
And, regarding my mobility pricing post, what if you say f*** you to installing that GPS tracking computer? Sorry bud, here in BC the lefties legislated government run auto insurance ONLY decades ago. Subsequently, both left and right governments plundered the insurance corp so that rates have risen dramatically to cover previous sins.
But I degress. So go ahead and resist installing that GPS tracker or pull the wires off. However, be sure that having the tracker installed and active will be a precondition of your auto insurance coverage.
Sneaky lefties, always looking for multifunctinal levers.
Exactly. The sun and the wind are free. It’s harvesting the energy that costs money. So by the same token, coal is free.
Your to smart for your own good, thanks for the laugh!
Berndt: You have it exactly right, fossil fuels are free- and much much more energy rich than wind and solar. Crippling ourselves with dumb energy is NOT the answer we need.
I’ll never understand why people don’t realize that coal and oil are just as “free” as any other energy source. The cost is always in paying people to convert the “free” stuff into something usable and delivering it to a point if sale.
An old college (1976-1980) buddy of mine used to say, “The only reason why we don’t have solar power is because the energy industry hasn’t figured out how to put a meter on the Sun.” He was a flaming left-wing liberal back then. Now he’s a MAGA hat wearing Tea Party conservative… Real jobs do that to people… 😎
“If you aren’t a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you aren’t a conservative at 40, you have no brain.”
No one’s accused me of being heartless, but I managed to skip the first part. Saved me a lot of time, angst, and soul-searching.
Oil, gas and coal are sort of free to the land owner if you don’t consider the purchase price of their land. But production companies do have to pay the land owner for what they extract and, of course, governments at all levels tax it as well. But even so, the high energy density makes it less expensive as a source of energy than wind and solar. Of course if the liberals can add enough cost to fossil fuels (and/or subsidies to wind/solar) they can make renewables appear to be competitive. Just an illusion, but one the warmists are desperate to create.
All true Rick, but I assume that Solar and Wind farms require the same expense of leasing land, and likely a lot more land, to install their solar panels and windmill forests. I’m not sure what taxes that might entail, but any profitable business will have taxes, and lots of them.
So…..Just what exactly is coal, petroleum and natural gas other than concentrated sunlight stored chemically beneath the crust of the planet?And it is all going to be replaced by ‘harvesting’ solar energy on an ongoing real-time basis. Ain’t gonna happen.
I always get a kick out of claims that biofuels can yield 100’s of gallons per acre.
A typical oil reservoir in the Gulf of Mexico has 1,000 to 1,500 barrels of oil per acre*foot and typical reservoirs are 50-100′ thick with 30-50% recovery factors and many, if not most, fields have multiple stacked reservoirs.
All food is free too. Cows are free, and fruit is free. It’s the cost to maintain them in healthy conditions, collect and process them, and get them into a shop in town in convenient and saleable packaging.
Timber for houses is free. It’s right there, int that huge tree. The pioneers simply cut it down themselves and shaped it into a house. Now days someone else cuts it down and cuts it into nice sized panels and delivers it to the work site. For some reason, that costs money.
The future of energy is solar, biofuel and geothermal.
First the solar power will be caught by chlorophyll.
Then the chlorophyll will make the biomass (a fuel).
Finally the geothermal power will concentrate the fuel into forms that are economic to extract.
Yep – oil and coal won’t stand a chance against this scenario.
(oh wait . . . )
I assume you are being sarcastic.
He did leave out the “let it cook for a million years or so” part.
Noooo, what gave you that impression?
(/sarc)
I always find it particularly despicable when liars call other people liars.
David
“And the US will be exporting large volumes of natural gas to foreign nations who still haven’t caught on (to) ?the “free” solar and wind power.”
Great post.
Bill is 58 and with luck will remain functional for another 20 years, maybe 30 if very lucky. He may see 2050.
He may see the percent changes, or something similar but I won’t.
If governments do decide to do something about CO2 emissions that will have to involve a ramp up in nuclear.
Give them 10 years to make the decision.
Another 10 years to get regulations and incentives in place.
Another 10 years to “grow” the ability to construct facilities.
Another 10 years to make a significant contribution.
Bill’s panic will set in by the time he is 65, about 7 years.
Then he can put pencil to paper and prove to himself that wind and solar are not going to do the job.
Others have already done this (many times) but Bill needs to do it for himself. He could do this now, in an afternoon. Being a reality denier, expect him to use up the entire 7 years.
Bill McK in 7yrs will realize as others like him will, that his life has been a woeful eggs-in-one-basket waste and moreover he has cut a wide swath through other peoples resources. I’m paying (for me) sky-high taxes because of his and other like wastrels’ ugly work.
A late-life crisis isn’t resolvable. Remember, he has broken down into tears on a few occasions from the stress of frustration, and here he has “hope”.
https://www.countercurrents.org/mckibben151209.htm
The fall will be hard, the lesson too late. The terrible “Climate Blues” an epidemic of clinical depression several years ago terminated the careers of a number of climate scientists, occasioned by ~ 2 decades of the “Dreaded Pause” that sewed doubt in their minds about global warming science and the fear that their studies and careers were for nought. A new wave of this seems unavoidable, but this time it will carry with it the guilt of the enormous harm it has done to millions of the poorest
people.
Good analysis.
I’m surprised that he’s only 58 as he looks much older; perhaps his diet is poor.
His poor diet? Oh I’m sure he’s eating his crunchy quinona-dura fruit ganola and caramel-vanilla- soyamilk orgasmic lattes, locust burgers and other progressive muck.
Hey, pencil and paper can be expensive don’t you know. We could crowd source on here and buy him a $4 calculator …..
….. but then we’d have to teach him how to use it, I guess.
Bill’s “rays of hope” are as visible as Greta’s Co2-molecules.
The stone age didn’t end because it ran out of stones.
The oil age won’t end because it runs out of oil.
As always, we need to take the income/pension/investments from these people and move them solely into wind and solar.
Only fair, isn’t it?
And the cleavage won’t end because we ran out of cleav.
I could go on…
David
” Maybe someone explained it to him. You can only divest an asset, if there’s (a) ? willing investor”
Too bad it takes 5 hours for my comments to go through…..sigh…..
(Your comments keeps showing up in the trash bin, have e-mailed about it to the bosses) SUNMOD
Thanks for letting me know so I don’t waste my time..
(It turns out you have problems moderating yourself, which is why you were in the Trash bin, I think you should try harder from now on since you have been PLACED into Moderation twice, control yourself and no more waste of MY time, then all will be ok) SUNMOD
Marcus is my official proofreader… We need to expedite his comments… 😎
He also has gone off the rails with some wild comments…so he gets moderation. He’s been in moderation twice for such behavior.
Sounds like he needs a proofreader too… 😉
The sun and wind may be free, but the materials and labor to harvest them are not. And the current materials to harvest the sun and wind are not good for the environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_UdqZdFr-w
Author: “While the EIA’s forecasts don’t always come to fruition….”. EIA is a wind and solar activist. They did a cost analysis comparing EV’s to ICE gasoline, diesel & compressed natural gas vehicles. They didn’t state the cost basis in the paper but it turned out to be $100/bbl crude, $12 MCF natural gas and $0.12 kwh electricity. EV’s won, surprise? Talk about putting a (heavy/phony/fake) thumb on the scale.
$100/bbl crude, $12/mcf natural gas *and* $0.12/kWh electricity would be awesome… 😉
Getting your full-mode robber-baron on, I see. 😀
😎
Bill McKibben is a typical passionate climate change doomster. Full of rhetoric and hyperbole but no substance.
Here is a debate with Alex Epstein in 2012.
“Bill McKibben and Alex Epstein square off on fossil fuels — do they make the planet a worse place to live or a better place to live?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_a9RP0J7PA
It’s a long debate but it contains everything you want to know about climate change alarmism.
McKibben knows he is losing the debate and resorts to espousing about climate change Armageddon. Epstein concentrates on the facts and puts it to McKibben that McKibben’s climate policies would kill millions of people in poor countries.
See what you think.
Good video, Bill McKibben comes across as an idiot, a flummoxed one.
In the above quote, does the word “they” refer to McKibben and Epstein or to fossil fuels?? Just asking.
LOL. “They” obviously refer to fossil fuels though I’m sure an argument can be made for “they” to be refereeing to the weepy one and his fellow travelers.
So what they’re good at is closing things down and stopping progress. Not in creating things or getting things going. And he sees that as good.
They’re not even good at that.
Dave
This a great animation of “Hydraulic Fracturing (fracking)”, is it accurate ?
Very accurate and not overly simplified. The only issue I noticed was the assertion that individual shale wells could produce for 20-40 years.
Apart from the horizontal drilling and multi-stage completions, conventional wells are drilled and completed the same way, more or less. In the Gulf of Mexico, most wells are directionally drilled from common surface locations, often prodduction latforms or subsea templates, although few are horizontal. And frac’ing is on a much smaller scale. Sand control is usually more important than inducing permeability. Many of the Cenozoic “rocks” of the Gulf are poorly consolidated and sand will flow into the well unless the completion has a gravel pack or employs some other sand control procedure.
Dave
“often prod(d)uction (P)latforms ” ….
Sorry, couldn’t resist..lol ! (you won’t see this for 5 hours anyways)
Thanks, it was interesting..
Like to see him try that at a busy truck stop fuel island.
Can anyone honestly say that Wimpy Bill would prevent them from filling up their tank at any gas station?
For people stomping things down and stopping progress we learned a new term: Daesh.
Does Bill McKibben have the credentials to publicly debate Dr. Mariana Alves-Pereira regarding the cumulative and irreversible harm to the nervous system and the vestibular system caused by low frequency noise and infrasound radiation from industrial wind turbines?
Good afternoon David Middleton
I always like your articles though I don’t often comment.
You may want to alert Bill McKibben to the developments in the eastern Mediterranean in regards to Israel and Cyprus building natural gas pipelines from from their off shore fields. The EU may get a new supplier.
No more of Italy and Greece being at the end of line when Russia’s supplies get untimely.
Isn’t Exxon involved?
It is going to be a fun future.
michael
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2019/04/18/israels-natural-gas-discoveries-are-bridging-political-divides-and-are-forging-economic-ties/#b22d
Let alone
https://www.google.com/search?q=turkey+greek+drilling+Cyprus&oq=turkey+greek+drilling+Cyprus&aqs=chrome.
The met office has used a deduction of 0.2 c on CET to cater for the UHI factor some of which has been applied since 1974. There’s has been a major study going on there for some 18 months to ascertain if they should change this amount.
The population has increased by some 25% since 1974 with massive urbanisation And the current uhi factor seems low. The met office generally use data from the composite 1910 temperature records. These do not allow for uhi unlike CET.
Tonyb
Until development of grid scale electrical storage, mining/farming/flight/ocean travel/ using only electricity, no matter how many PV panels and wind generators are installed there will still be a need for fossil fuels unless a new and different form of energy is found. All the virtue signaling taking place today in cities claiming “zero carbon” by 2020 up to 2050 is not going to happen. I’m still waiting on the plans these cities have to make their fantasy claims come true. Has anyone seen any of those plans yet?
Hope is not a plan.
The wind and sun are free, no question there. It just costs a lot in terms of investment in hardware, infrastructure and operating costs to turn them into electricity and put it into the grid. When they’re available, whether they’re needed or not!
Oil and gas and coal are free too. It just takes investment and work and money (and modest royalties to landowners and/or governments) to find them and get them out of the ground. And they are easy to store, too!
Wind and Solar may be free but so are gas, coal and oil. All you have to do with any of the sources is to gather them up and convert them into useable energy or electricity. The cost is the final all-up cost of the process which in the case of coal, oil and gas is cheap and in the case of wind and solar, is expensive.
Whenever I want the true scoop on all things about science in general, and climate change in particular, my first thought is I better find the nearest Harvard English major. Who fills that role, Bill McKibben, nincompoop.
Sun and wind may be free, but the meter hooked up to measure electricity input/output to calculate consumption and taxes sure won’t be free. The infrastructure required sure won’t be free either.
Heard on radio today
Show me a factory that makes solar panels
Or factory that builds wind turbines
And uses 100% renewable power to build them
A growing mass of cells whose function is defective and is destroying the very body it lives in is called “cancer”, Bill. Not “antibodies”.
It’s called ‘deluded young souls’ aka ‘useful idiots’.