Guest fake American Indian bashing by David Middleton
WARNING
This post is extremely political. If you are offended by hardball politics, stop reading here. Comments to the effect that you don’t like political posts or are offended political incorrectness and moderately insensitive language will be mercilessly ridiculed.
Fauxcahontas is truly a “stupid and futile gesture”…
A climate denier-in-chief sits in the White House today. But not for long
The next president must rejoin the Paris agreement and show the world that the United States is ready to lead on the international stage again
President Trump has now fulfilled his disastrous promise to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement. The agreement represents decades of work by both Democratic and Republican administrations to achieve a common goal: bringing every country of the world together to tackle the climate crisis, the existential threat of our time.
President Trump surprised no one with his decision to withdraw from the agreement. It is yet another reckless choice in line with his steps to rollback our bedrock environmental laws, which have cleaned up our water and our air for decades. But that doesn’t minimize the gravity of his latest move. Trump is not only ceding American leadership at a critical juncture in the fight against climate change, he’s also giving away American jobs in the clean energy economy of the future – walking away from the greatest economic opportunity of our time.
[…]
But instead of acting to protect American lives and creating good paying jobs, we have let Big Oil set our climate policy in Washington. These companies spent three decades deceiving the public about the climate crisis, spreading lies and misinformation through their lobbyists. With Donald Trump in the White House, they now have a climate denier in chief.
[…]
My Green Manufacturing Plan will jumpstart clean energy development right here in the United States by investing $2tn to grow clean energy at home and abroad, while creating millions of new, good paying, union jobs. And my Green Marshall Plan would directly assist countries abroad to buy American-made clean energy products, further expanding markets for green manufacturing.
[…]
The world is facing one of the biggest threats we have ever encountered. But Americans do not walk away from a fight. We lead. In November 2020, it won’t just be Donald Trump on the ballot but also the chance to renew America’s climate leadership for a safer, cleaner, more secure and more prosperous future.
The Grauniad
Notes to Liawatha
There are very few electoral votes in the UK
Writing an OpEd in the Grauniad is as dumb as Puto (Beto) campaigning in Mexico.
The Paris Agreement will have no affect on the weather
The energy industry isn’t a jobs program
Why do journalists, environmentalists and liberals (redundant, I know) confuse energy production with jobs programs? The only way an economy can successfully grow in a healthy, robust manner is through increasing productivity.
What is ‘Productivity’
Productivity is an economic measure of output per unit of input. Inputs include labor and capital, while output is typically measured in revenues and other gross domestic product (GDP) components such as business inventories. Productivity measures may be examined collectively (across the whole economy) or viewed industry by industry to examine trends in labor growth, wage levels and technological improvement.BREAKING DOWN ‘Productivity’
Investopedia
Productivity gains are vital to the economy, as they mean that more is being accomplished with less. Capital and labor are both scarce resources, so maximizing their impact is a core concern of modern business. Productivity enhancements come from technology advances, such as computers and the internet, supply chain and logistics improvements, and increased skill levels within the workforce.
That said, the oil & gas industry employs far more Americans than wind & solar power do:
The natural gas industry employs 625,369 Americans.
• Utilities employed 176,167.
• Mining and extraction employed 162,928.
• Construction employed 113,339.
The coal industry employs 197,418 Americans.
• Mining and extraction employed 55,905.
• Utilities employed 45,795.
• Wholesale trade employed 43,327.
The petroleum industry employs 799,531 Americans.
• Mining and extraction employs 308,681.
• Wholesale trade and distribution employs 170,945.
• Manufacturing employs 155,267.
The nuclear industry employs 72,146 Americans.
• Utilities employ 46,809.
• Professional services employ 14,374.
• Manufacturing employ 4,913.
2019 U.S. Energy and Employment Report
• Solar energy firms employed 242,000 employees who spent the majority of their time on solar.[3] An additional 93,000 employees spent less than half their time on solar-related work. The number of employees who spend the majority of their time on solar declined by 3.2 percent or more than 8,000 jobs in 2018.
• There were an additional 111,000 workers employed at wind energy firms across the nation in 2018, an increase of 3.5 percent or 3,700 jobs.
2019 U.S. Energy and Employment Report
The Energy and Employment Report lists “mining and extraction” for oil and gas as two separate groups. This doesn’t make sense because oil & gas are explored for, drilled and produced by the same people. The “mining and extraction” employees are probably redundant.
Regarding productivity, there is no comparison between “renewables” and real energy:
Energy production is from the 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. I did not include the natural gas “mining and extraction” employees because I think they are also counted among petroleum employees. If I count them, oil & gas productivity drops to 1,583 TOE/job.
“In November 2020, it won’t just be Donald Trump on the ballot but also the chance to renew America’s climate leadership for a safer, cleaner, more secure and more prosperous future.”
Anyone with at least two functioning brain cells knows that a vote for your treasonous energy schemes would be a vote against “a safer, cleaner, more secure and more prosperous future.”
She also wants to abolish the Electoral College.
“Fauxcahontas is truly a “stupid and futile gesture”…”
Actually, she perpetuated a FRAUD and was never held accountable.
She could be all three.
OK Boomer
That is the en-vogue retort from the young and dumb. Dumb from their 12-16 years of leftist indoctrination which has supplanted “feelings” for; logic, reasoning, deduction, basic intelligence, and scholarship.
Attributed to a rational person, this would have to be Fake News. Alas!: “Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy,” said a Thursday statement from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Travesty?
I would LOVE for the fake injun to be the democrat nominee! Though the election results of a Trump vrs Warren election would not rival Reagan’s 49 nine state landslide over Mondale, the results would certainly be the most one sided since then. The reactions to such a landslide for Trump would be the best entertainment imaginable.
Back in the 80’s I was stationed at Ft. Devens, MA for 5 1/2 years. This Hoosier gave up trying to understand the politics of Massachusetts even way back then when fat head Chappaquiddick Ted Kennedy was perpetually being reelected. I remember well being a color guard on the four man team to present the colors at a Bruins hockey game at the old Boston Gardens on Veterans day and hearing some of the uncouth and disrespectful BS coming from a few in the crowd in their thick Boston accent as we marched out on the ice. We drilled a lot for that event because performing the marching maneuvers required on ice while wearing jump boots is not exactly an easy thing to do. Went off without a hitch and we watched the game from the best box seats in the house.
I grew up in Western Connecticut… To this day, there are two accents that annoy the schist out of me: 1) Boston and 2) New York City.
When we were leaving the hockey game I rode the elevator down get to the place where we had parked without having to pass through the crowds existing the garden. We used fully functional M-14s in pristine condition for our ceremonial rifles. Because they were fully functional weapons we also carried our M 1911A1 side arms loaded for security as protection from having the rifles stolen. I had the rifle slinged and the sidearm in it’s holster. I remember there was a woman with her young son in that small elevator with me and she was scrunched back in the corner clutching her kid to her as if she was afraid one of those weapons would jump out and kill her. The ignorance of people never ceases to amaze me.
Lot’s of jobs is not the issue – in fact it is misleading entirely. There were plenty of jobs in the middle ages. I remember it well. Because of the lack of fossil fueled tractors we had to use oxen to plough the fields. Strangely enough, it took ages for one man oxen team to plough the field so we had to enlist half the population. Everybody was busy with their new jobs. Oh happy days!
Yep! The Peasants and Serfs had jobs but still lived miserable short lives and died in great numbers. Sounds exactly like what the likes of Warren wants to return to.
“Why do journalists, environmentalists and liberals (redundant, I know) confuse energy production with jobs programs? ”
You should probably use “fake” in front of environmentalist. People like Jim Steele and our own Mr Watts have probably planted more trees and rehabilitated more land than thousands of these self righteous “fake” environmentalists who think caring about the environment means telling other people how to live.
PS. My favorite line to the fakes is to compare water, gas & electric comsumption. I have 25+ years of data from my home and the fakes are not even close. I just make sure I do things as smart as I can to save money and I can do a ROI calculation in a heartbeat.
The word that comes to mind of her plans is Hooey.
Fauxcahontas is a natural climate denier-in-chief.
David, your analysis leaves out one important factor — not all energy is equal.
When petroleum is burned in a car, only about 20% of the chemical energy is used to actually propel the car. For electric cars, about 60% of the electrical energy is used to propel the vehicle. This is reflected in the “MPGe” of electric cars, which is about about 3x better than gas cars.
Similary, for electric generation, 100% of solar and wind are delivered as electricity. But only about 30% of chemical energy from fossil fuels are delivered as electricity. Once again, there is a 3x factor for the usefulness advantage of wind/solar vs oil/gas/coal
So for transportation and electric generation (the vast majority of oil/gas/coal use), the ‘productivity’ for solar and wind should be multiplied by 3 to be on equal footing for useful, delivered energy. This suddenly makes wind exactly competitive with oil/gas/coal.
If anyone else bothers to read your late post, you are going to catch a lot of flack.
First the battery in an EV does not produce energy. It’s merely a storage device. The energy is produced in a power plant, and you suffer inefficiencies in production, transmission losses, and conversion losses before you get that energy to your battery.
Secondly, 100% of solar and wind delivered as energy? LOL. You have energy losses throughout both systems. The best solar cells today have less than 25% efficiency. Then that output suffers losses in transmission and the dc to ac converters.
Most wind turbines can extract a maximum of about half the energy in the wind, but the average output is about a quarter of that. Then you get all the electrical losses involved in transmission and converters.
But the real problem is that neither wind nor solar are reliable. And for mobility, batteries must be used, which are more limiting than fossil fuels.
The only way wind and solar will ever become competitive with oil is for the price of oil to rise significantly.
jtom, I think you are missing that the energy units being used, MTOE, are units of energy available to use.
“The best solar cells today have less than 25% efficiency.”
That is a different issue. 1 MTOE of solar energy as listed in the table in the top post is already in the form electricity delivered to the grid. Yes, we needed 4+ MTOE of radiant energy into the solar panels, but since we are not paying for sunshine, that is immaterial.
“Most wind turbines can extract a maximum of about half the energy in the wind”
Same argument. 1 MTOE of wind energy is already electricity delivered to the grid. Yes, we needed 2+ MTOE of kinetic energy into the turbines, but since we are not paying for wind, that is immaterial.
“… and you suffer inefficiencies in production, transmission losses, and conversion losses before you get that energy to your battery.”
This part is the same for ALL sources of electricity (and all uses of electricity). You have to get the energy from the source to the customer. Wind generates energy directly as electricity; fossil fuels have the inefficient thermal conversion first. So 1 MTOE of fossil fuels is only ~ 1/3 MTOE electricity. (Also, there are inefficiencies involved with fossil fuels — energy to drill
and spills and evaporation and trucks to bring the gasoline to gas stations.)
“But the real problem is that neither wind nor solar are reliable. And for mobility, batteries must be used, which are more limiting than fossil fuels.”
Yes. I agree 100%. These issues do need to to be before out before wind and solar can become take over from fossil fuels.
Yes, we needed 4+ MTOE of radiant energy into the solar panels, but since we are not paying for sunshine, that is immaterial.
And we’re not paying for coal or oil (when it’s in the ground) either, so that’s immaterial too. The cost is in taking that “free” stuff (oil, coal, sunshine, wind, water, uranium, etc) and transforming it into useful energy to heat our homes, manufacture our goods, power our transportation, etc. And on that score, Solar and Wind are much more expensive than the fossil fuels (in part because Solar and wind are not very energy dense, it takes a lot of solar panels and wind mills to produce the same energy that’s packed in the smaller fossil fuel packages. and those panels and mills in turn use up a lot of land that could be better used for other purposes, not to mention the damage they do to wildlife, such as birds).
John, my point here is about energy and the analysis in the original post about productivity — as defined by energy output per job.
1 ton of oil equivalent (1 TOE) is a unit of energy — approximately 42 gigajoules or 11,630 kilowatt-hours. When fossil fuels are used to generate electricity, you need ~ 3 TOE of chemical energy to get 1 TOE of electrical energy. This means the productivity figure should be cut by ~ 1/3 when fossil fuels are used to generate electricity. Such a cut is not needed for nuclear or hydroelectric or wind or solar because they are producing their 1 TOE of energy directly as electricity.
There is a similar cut when fossil fuels are used for internal combustion engines.
This makes the true productivity — energy delivery per industry job — basically the same for wind as for fossil fuels.
True… But that’s more or less offset by capacity factor.
It’s almost impossible to directly compare oil to wind & solar… But natural gas still comes out way ahead when you calculate it as MWh delivered.
“When petroleum is burned in a car, only about 20% of the chemical energy is used to actually propel the car.”
That claim is often made, but I can’t find its source. In response to a commenter on another site who made that claim, I wrote:
Your CleanTechnica source at https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/10/electric-car-myth-buster-efficiency/ links its claim to the site of the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy. (I suspect it isn’t an unbiased source, based on its name and affiliation.) When I clicked on ITS link to the source of its claim, I got to this site, fuel economy.gov, at http://www.fueleconomy.gov/... wherein I found (note the asterisk):
Conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 17%–21% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels.*
But there is no asterisked footnote at the bottom of that page that gives a source for that claim. I clicked on all five links at the bottom of that page and found no source for that claim either. Its figures are less than 2/3 of Wikipedia’s estimate [“today’s average of 25-30%”—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-piston_engine], which, IIRC, in turn is based on an average of the current fleet of ICEs, which has an average age of 11 years. Current advanced ICE cars like Toyota’s with its just-out new engine get over 40 mpg, and Mazda’s forthcoming SkyActiv-x will get over 45 mpg (its compression ratio is 15:1). Mazda claims almost 50% fuel efficiency, IIRC. And it is working on a follow-on engine, the SkyActiv-3.
Roger,
Engine efficiency is limited theoretically by thermodynamics and limited further by engineering. If an amazing new engine is pushing 50% efficiency, why would you be surprised that run-of-the-mill efficiencies are half that?
Also, whatever the engine efficiency:
1) the transmission and drive train further sap efficiency
2) the top efficiency is only for optimal speed and load.
3) braking throws away energy, which cuts into actual performance.
“100% of solar and wind are delivered as electricity”
1) % of what?
2) but then don’t bother answering 1), it cannot be relevant
Sun rays are free. Or renewable. Renewable is synonym for free. (All other uses of that word are fundamental a hoax, a con, a fraud.)
It doesn’t matter which amount of sun rays over an area you convert; what does matter is the cost of recovering a final amount of electric energy in some format (f Hz t V format or CC t V format).
Every time I think of Elizabeth as President, all I can think of, is a class of third grade grammar school children left in charge of the reactor controls of a nuclear electric power plant
I think of her as America’s mother-in-law.
Next thing you’ll be telling me is you think of Nancy Pelosi as “the vampiric one” and Andrew “Fredo” Cuomo as the “lesser Cuomo”.
Which Cuomo is the real Fredo?
My bad, I meant Chris “Fredo” Cuomo is the lesser Cuomo . Though they both seem to be in a race to be the Fredo of that family.
I knew which one you meant… But the other brother has actually betrayed people a lot more than Chris. Fredo wasn’t just weak, he also betrayed the family. Maybe, they’re both Fredo?
” ‘Paris climate promises will reduce temperatures by just 0.05°C in 2100.’ (Bjorn Lomborg)”
0.05C
And how large are the error bars again?
Fubar Cogar!
https://images.app.goo.gl/HaffdjAeKqm695e2A