Guest essay by Eric Worrall
It must be Christmas; the climate grinches are trying to convince everyone to ditch the Christmas lights, and green intellectuals like Peter Ellerton of the University of Queensland are providing helpful hints on how to win the climate battle of the Christmas dinner table.
I’m a critical thinking expert. This is how you win any climate change debate like Greta Thunberg
The Conversation By Peter Ellerton
Posted Wed at 2:59pmAs bushfires rage and our cities lie shrouded in smoke, climate change is shaping as a likely topic of conversation at the family dinner table this Christmas.
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Back to the dinner table
We may not have Thunberg’s natural aptitude for staying on topic. But we can apply the lessons to our own conversations with friends and family.
Let’s say I’m having an argument with a cranky uncle about renewable electricity. I might argue that we should transition to wind and solar energy because it generates less carbon dioxide than burning fossil fuels.
My uncle might respond by saying I shouldn’t use any energy at all. Maybe he’ll say “then stop driving cars” or “don’t turn on your TV”.
But this response is not addressing the point at issue – that renewable energy generates less carbon than fossil fuels. It is talking about something else: that any use of power is bad. Really, it’s not so much about using power as how that power is generated.
Moving off the point at issue is a classic “strawman” attack, when the argument is misrepresented and argued from that point.
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If you need extra help, my colleagues and I have produced a paper to help analyse the rationality of climate denial claims. It also helps you find the point at issue, and stay on it.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-11/how-to-win-a-climate-change-debate/11787486
Back in 2014, Google engineers discovered to their horror that there is currently no viable path for replacing fossil fuel with renewable energy.
Other serious climate action advocates have made the same discovery, ranging from David Attenborough, who quietly advocates for a renewable Apollo project to solve currently insurmountable problems, to Bill Gates, who in 2015 set up a green tech fund to try to find a way to make renewables viable (though by 2019, Bill Gates had given up).
When Trump hating film maker Michael Moore decided to investigate why there was so little progress retiring fossil fuel, he thought he would find a big oil conspiracy, a network of corrupt oil executives blocking the rise of a new industry. Michael Moore did discover a dark swamp of lies and corporate greed, but not where he expected.
Former NASA GISS Chairman James Hansen’s renewable energy skepticism upset Naomi Oreskes so much Oreskes called James Hansen a “denier”. Hansen is no climate skeptic, he believes if we don’t stop global warming, the oceans will boil and render the Earth uninhabitable. Hansen is a hero and progenitor of the modern climate movement – his senate testimony in 1988 was a pivotal moment in the raising of public awareness of climate issues.
But even James Hansen believes renewable energy is not a viable solution to the rapid reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions he believes is needed to save the world from global warming.
Peter Ellerton, what do you call an expert on critical thinking who encourages readers to parrot green talking points on renewable energy, without addressing the substantial evidence that renewable energy is a false hope?
Number 12 looks just like you.
When people bring up wind and solar power I just ask a few questions. It usually goes like this:
Me: What do you do at night when the wind is blowing?
Them: Batteries.
Me: OK, assuming we have the battery technology to store an entire night’s worth of power for the whole grid (which we don’t presently), how do you recharge them?
Them: The next day, using the solar (and possibly wind) power.
Me: If you are pouring an entire night’s worth of power in the batteries, where is the power going to come from to power everything else?
Them: Obviously you will need some surplus capacity.
Me: How much?
Them: About one night’s worth, duh.
Me: OK, then about 150%, assuming high efficiency in charging of batteries (probably unrealistic), but what about times when it’s cloudy and windless the next day?
Them: How often does that happen?
Me: Often enough. If it happens during the Winter a lot of people will die.
Them: OK, then you just need more batteries – enough for the worst case scenario.
Me: But all those extra batteries will require even more surplus generating capacity so that you can be assured that you can recharge them quickly enough to avoid a shortfall if two long lulls in generation occur closely in time. So how much surplus will you actually need?
Them: I don’t know! I’m sure the experts have it all figured out.
Me: There’s the rub; I haven’t seen anybody address these issues. Everything I’ve seen says we will need to build millions of windmills and solar farms to replace all the thermal plants we currently. That by itself is a huge task that would take decades to complete. But then if we need 2x or 3x the battery storage, and 2x, 3x, or even 4x surplus generating capacity, is this scheme even possible? Remember, you have to maintain this system and replace components when they age out. If you can’t finish it before the first installations need to be replaced, you are doomed. And this doesn’t even take into account world wide growth in energy demand.
Yep. If this problem was solvable it would have been solved.
A critical thinking expert who cant think critically. Zzzzz
When the transition to RE was initially planned over a decade ago, the non-dispatchable and intermittency problems of wind and solar PV were noted and the need for dispatchable RE power was understood. Billions of dollars of subsidies were then donated by governments to anyone prepared to try and develop geo-thermal, solar thermal, wave and tidal power. Today, billions of dollars later, we have effectively proven that all of these other technologies are not possible. Thus we are left wind the intermittent RE souces and nothing else.
The harsh reality is that a transition to an all wind and solar PV power grid means that we are creating significant disruption to society. This disruption, mainly in the form of energy poverty and economic loss is driven by higher power prices and a more unstable grid with increasing outages and load shedding.
We may have not all realised the obvious, but the real debate within society is how much RE disruption are we willing to tolerate ?. Wealthy people are more tolerant of the price rises and are also more able to purchase expensive home generation or storage solutions to protect themselves against in impacts of outages. On the other hand, poorer people are more impacted by price rises and the offshoring of their more energy intensive blue collar jobs .
The political realisation of this RE versus disruption tolerance is now very evident in almost all elections across the developed world. As the level of disruption increases the level of resistance also increases. How this finally unfolds will be interesting. Most likely there will be a move towards nuclear energy but when this will ocuur is difficult to predict.
In the spirit of climate change, I used candles on my Christmas tree to avoid using electricity. My tree started on fire and burnt to ashes, besides burning part of my house. Did I save any carbon? Did I save the planet? LOL