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”.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Good article David!
Those EIA projections for renewables look to still be based on the Clean Power Plan. Not to overlook the tendency of EIA to depend upon nameplate capacity, not actual energy generation.
No CPP, no chance of wind and solar following EIA’s straight line growth projections.
Even with a CPP, it is doubtful that enough cities or counties would allow massive amounts of land to be converted into wind or solar farms; as they watch early adopters of installed wind and solar suffer huge energy and/or tax bills..
The only fever the planet is running lies in the fevered imaginations of addle-brained doomsters like McKibben and his brethren.
Utopia, wind and sun and water are free. Just lie back and ….
Now consider building a 4 MW generator on top of a 100 metre tower that on average only delivers 1.3 MW, and connecting 150 of them to a complex electricity grid. And then, build a 200 MW generator as backup for when the wind isn’t blowing. So double the investment – still free?Or, just use the reliable gas generator.
Measuring Language Stimulus with EEG
Is that Epilepsy or Climate Psychosis ??
Global Warming’ Not Scary Enough, Alarmists Rebrand It ‘Climate Crisis
Since the expressions “global warming” and “climate change” do not frighten people enough, activists are proposing a shift in language to “climate crisis” or “environmental collapse,” with the help of advertising consultants.
Neuroscience research suggests that “global warming” and “climate change” do not produce a powerful enough reaction in people, whereas “climate crisis” got “a 60 percent greater emotional response from listeners” according to a recent study.
Environmental lobbying has reportedly yielded a 15-point increase in the share of Americans who believe that climate change is a serious problem, but activists are looking for ways to boost that number still further by using more explosive language.
Enter SPARK Neuro, an advertising consulting firm that measures physiological data such as brain activity and palm sweat to quantify people’s emotional reactions to stimuli.
SPARK Neuro fixed electroencephalography (EEG) devices to the heads of 120 volunteers to gauge the electrical activity coming from their brains.
At the same time, a webcam monitored their facial expressions and sensors on their fingers recorded the sweat produced by heightened emotions.
The group, which was evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, listened to audio recordings of six different climate phrases.
“Global warming” and “climate change” performed the worst, beaten hands down by “climate crisis,” “environmental destruction,” “weather destabilization,” and “environmental collapse.”
https://climatechangedispatch.com/global-warming-rebrand-climate-crisis/
“… because they’re free,”
NASA has discovered that there is no such thing as a free launch.
I’m pretty sure a guy named Thermo Dynamics discovered that there is no such thing as a free launch.
Mr. Dynamics must be keeping his light under a lamp shade because a lot of people still don’t understand it and think they can get something for nothing. They even think that once a windmill is installed it is free energy in perpetuity.
Which is why they don’t come with a life-time warranty.
“In 2050…”, “…at least the 2060’s…”. BAU should be pushing us well into a 3 or 4 degree spike.
Hubris anyone?
Climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 = 1.28 °C
X axis = millions of years.
Data from…
Royer, D. L., R. A. Berner, I. P. Montanez, N. J. Tabor and D. J. Beerling. CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate. GSA Today, Vol. 14, No. 3. (2004), pp. 4-10
“Climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 = 1.28 °C”
Very unlikely, 1.28C is on the very edge of outlier territory. We already have close to that amount of warming now and CO2 increase is only up 43%.
Even a cold outlier like UAH is showing 0.13C/decade with atmospheric CO2 concentration increasing at only 2-3ppm pa.
The evidence strongly points to 2-4C.
Also evidence emerging that ECS varies over time.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018EF000889
Ignoring the PETM with its rate of CO2 increase 1/15th that of today. You think the next 50 years are going to look like past 50? BAU?
Man, are you in for some nasty surprises.
Almost all recent observation-based TCR’s have been less than 1.5 °C and ECS’s have been less than 2 °C.
TCR is what matters on a human scale.
“Loydo May 3, 2019 at 10:19 pm
Blah blah blah….You think the next 50 years are going to look like past 50? BAU?
Man, are you in for some nasty surprises.”
Please elaborate what surprises.
Close to a 1C rise from a 43% CO2 rise in 100 years, despite Scafetta’s best.
0.13C from our most recent decade is baked in.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/12/124002/meta
Throw in the further 0.5–1.1°C masked contribution because “removing aerosols induces a global mean surface heating…”.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017GL076079
Thats 1.6–2.2C in 110 years…with emmissions ceasing tomorrow. For good measure lets throw in a methane release and a dark blue Artic.
Sees your 1.28C left in a cloud of exhaust smoke. Bad luck.
You’re assuming all of the “1C rise from a 43% CO2 rise in 100 years” is due to CO2. Half of the rise occurred before carbon emissions intensified after 1960. Atmospheric CO2 was rising faster than emissions from 1800-1960.
The relationship is logarithmic. Even if the “1C rise from a 43% CO2 rise in 100 years”, it would still lead to a low sensitivity. A TCR of 1.5 C per doubling would yield 0.8 C of warming at 400 ppm, relative to 280 ppm.
The 1.28 C per doubling is based on >500 million years of CO2 and temperature estimates at comparable resolutions.
Scafetta didn’t make those sensitivity estimates. Otto, Aldrin, Lewis and others did.
Correction that is transient climate response.
This is equilibrium climate sensitivity:
Because Bill McKibben believes it, it must be true.
He of course has self appointed himself as one of the Bishops of Climate Change Religion.
To question him is to question the doctrine of the most Holy Climate Orthodox.
Only heretics do that.
Think I’ll add that to my truck as a bumper sticker.
Climate Heretic Onboard.
Frack on baby.
Classic John Belushi, nicely done 🙂
‘“Thirty or 50 years out, the world’s going to run on sun and wind, because they’re free,” McKibben says.’
Variable cost approaches zero. ‘Free.’
Fixed cost is extreme.
‘going to run on sun and wind, because they’re free’
Profoundly ignorant. And not afraid to display his ignorance. And Yale Environment 360 not afraid to publish.
Yes GE is now giving away wind turbines any day now.
And Chinese solar panels, those come from 6000 miles away and they cost less than the dirt they obscure from the sun.
McKibben = Moron.
The economic consequences of the US new Energy Dominance has not sunk in even to the Sage of Omaha Warren Buffett.
“Warren Buffett says no textbook could have predicted the strange economy we have today”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/03/buffett-no-textbook-predicted-the-strange-economy-we-have-today.html
Energy dominance has changed the entire equation of the US economy and growth. No longer do energy dollars flow out of the US economy to the Persian Gulf states when the US economy accelerates. In the past, that was a brake, a negative feedback. Now the energy dollars mostly stay in the US, creating a positive feedback loop.
The paradigm has shifted on energy and expert economists haven’t yet figured it out because they’re all still stuck in 2008. The year their Messiah won the White House.
You mean the Messiah, the One, Barry O’Bama ?
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Corp. controls the largest railroad network serving the entire Bakken area, and has huge investments in the companies that are fracking oil and shipping it and all its precursors in rail cars by the hundreds of thousands. Buffett benefited grandly from Barry’s fracking policy.
Could someone ask Bill to come and install my free solar panels.
I wonder how bill plans on manufacturing the solar panels and turbines without fossil fuels?
The one thing that is free is bad advice, on second thought that is wrong because the price to pay for following it can be horrendous.
“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”
And electricity is only one fifth of total energy needs.
The other 4/5 are mostly from fossil fuels… 😉
This is getting interesting: Bill McKibben sees ‘rays of hope’; Greta Thunberg sees CO².
I wonder what other alarmists can see.
Dead people. Not ghosts, but rather the billions that want to reduce the population by.
Odd that the cult of CAGW members know so little about the problem situation.
We just fight.
Nuclear – Fission Reactor Breakthrough
There is a liquid fuel, no water, no fuel rod, fission reactor design that is as cheap as coal, six times more fuel efficient than current pressure water reactors, requires 1/3 the amount of fuel as a PWR, operates at atmospheric pressure, and that has no catastrophic failure modes which was built and tested 50 years ago and then covered up.
Gold hat is the benefit that would occur from the proposed change.
Duh, rather than spend money on wind and sun gathering we could install the breakthrough liquid fuel fission reactor which produces almost CO2 free power.
This is like a stupid game where everyone has different facts in their white hat and no clue that there is a black hat of facts that explains why pressure water reactors are so expensive. Pressure water reactors (PWRs) have catastrophic failure modes and hence require containment buildings, explosive valves, and Olympic swimming pool sized water reserves on top of the reactor which makes them expensive and dangerous if any of the safety equipment fails.
Red hat is the emotions people have concerning the subject. People hate pressure water reactors for specific reasons. People have no clue there is a fail-safe, seal reactor, that has no catastrophic failure modes.
Wind and Sun – Reality vs Care Bear Engineering View
This is like a stupid game where everyone has different facts in their white hat and no clue that there is a black hat of facts that makes wind and sun fundamentally limited due to basic engineering regions.
Black hat is the fact that wind turbines must be located in windy high locations generally far from the loads which are in cities. Wind and sun are free. New power lines, substation upgrades, new substations are not free.
Wind and sun are variable power givers which is practically different than a power supply which provides power on demand.
Red hat is the emotions people have concerning the subject. Calling sun and wind gathering green does not change the fact that wind power varies as the cube of wind speed. Wind power can and does change as much as 30% in hour.
As electrical grids must always be balanced (power supplied = power used), as wind and sun vary, power sources must be turned on/off/on/off to balance the grid.
William, you keep saying this but until you can show one (just one, that’s not too much to ask) in commercial operation all you are doing is hyping vaporware.
It is incredible that McKibben, now 58 years old, has apparently never in his life—and despite (or perhaps because of?) graduating from Harvard University—learned the widespread truthfulness of the meaning of the phrase “there is no such thing as a free lunch.”
On second thought, we ARE talking about the Bill McKibben here. Nevermind.