Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Breitbart; Guterres actually demanded an end to coal, but since metallurgical coal is an essential ingredient in the processes for refining silicon and iron ore, Guterres has effectively demanded the end of solar panel and wind turbine construction.
Secretary-General urges countries to end ‘deadly addiction’ to coal
…
Ending a ‘deadly addiction’
Mr. Guterres underlined action in three areas to end what he called “the deadly addiction to coal.”
He called for countries to cancel all coal projects in the pipeline, particularly the 37 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) who are urged to do so by 2030.
The UN chief also appealed for ending international financing for coal and providing greater support to developing countries transitioning to renewable energy.
“I also ask all multilateral and public banks — as well as investors in commercial banks or pension funds — to shift their investments now in the new economy of renewable energy”, he added.
…
Read more: https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/03/1086132
There are ongoing attempts to find processes for refining iron ore which do not involve coal, such as substituting hydrogen in place of carbon, but these processes are still experimental. Refining iron ore using hydrogen is particularly problematic; any hydrogen contamination of the final product creates a brittle, mechanically unstable steel.
And of course, steel itself is an alloy of iron and carbon.
I guess it is possible UN Secretary General Guterres has no idea that coal has other uses than being burned for energy.
Guterres also called for public and private funding to be “aligned”, whatever that means.
You can’t fix stupid. And the UN is basically a bunch of corrupt stupid people.
They’re probably more corrupt than stupid, and some might argue that it’s easier to fix corruption.
A little rope will often take care of a lot of corruption.
Would de-funding stupid be considered a fix?
President Trump addressed the UN in New York twice, the transcript reveals that he strongly recommended that they rethink their tactics including stopping interference in the affairs of sovereign member nations.
He hinted that the US might defund the UN and remove them from their New York premises unless they got back to the original charter as soon as possible, and joked that UN HQ could be converted into a casino to return revenue to the US instead of the US pouring taxpayer’s monies in to support the UN.
be a good start!!
De-funding stupid solutions would indeed be a fix for problems they create.
If fanatics want to privately fund stupid activities they can go ahead as long as they do not damage the environment – whether social, natural or psychological. Demanding that I fund their Quixotic adventures is another matter.
The more this goes on, the more I think that Hanlon’s Razor has it backwards.
Any rational assessment of the actions of these people should easily conclude that they are acting out of malice, not stupidity. They know full well the consequences of their plans, that is why they are instituting them. They see themselves as being the supreme rulers over a shattered and devastated human population (greatly reduced).
There will not be renewable energy for the masses, it won’t work and can never work … for the masses. These people know this, but their plan is to remove the masses, that is not stupidity, that is malice.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution, she said.”
Christiana Figueres, 2015. Malicious intent indeed.
October 2015 just before the Paris Conference commenced late November into December 2015.
Malice indeed, but not to remove the masses, to subjugate them. They know that the only countries dumb enough to actually make any effort to do this are the successful capitalist democracies, By convincing them to self-destruct, the power vacuum is then available for dictatorial socialist control, which is the real goal.
Actually knowing how to do something seems to be disqualifying for socialist bureaucrats.
Actually knowing how to do something seems to be disqualifying for socialists, period.
With the notable exception of picking the pockets of those who do know how to do something.
AND for bureaucrats, period.
I guess it is possible UN Secretary General Guterres has no idea
that coal has other uses than being burned for energy.Fixed it for ya Eric. No thanks needed. 🙂
I disagree. I think he has plenty of ideas how to enrich himself at the expense of others.
Let him lead by example and be the first in line to go coal free. Fat chance. Dumber than a post comes to mind.
Dumber than a lump of coal!
Save the last piece of coal for his Christmas stocking.
Hey there Clyde…. let’s not go insulting the intelligence of coal
Or the usefulness
Actually coal is fairly smart! If a truck carrying coal were to lose part of its load going around a curve, such as the on-ramp to a freeway, much of the coal would scurry to the outside of the turn to get out of the way of vehicles following. It doesn’t take long before the rest of the coal uses the free energy from the wheels of subsequent vehicles to make its way to the edge of the road to stay out of the way. Never underestimate the IQ of a lump of coal! Or even a rock, for that matter.
Maybe he could remove all carbon from his body? He probably doesn’t realise that we are a carbon based life form!
Hey, quit insulting posts. I know a lot that are more useful than this idiot.
World mis-government means rule by ideologically-driven, scientific and technological ingoramuses. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Jordan Peterson points out the following:
Q: Who will lead the Marxist paradise.
A: Exactly the people you wouldn’t want to be leading it.
Or something like that.
That neatly sums it up,
As repeatedly demonstrated by history.
But actual observations of reality no longer rule.
What we see in operation is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the Iron Law of Oligopoly. A certain type of person will eventually take over every organization. Real world observations make it clear that is true.
What’s the antidote? Churn.
Things should not be allowed to stay static for long enough so the ‘wrong people’ can take over. Businesses have to be able to go bankrupt. The people at the top can’t be allowed to stay there for too long.
Capitalist economies with good churn work well and provide things like the American Dream and innovation and the closest thing to a workers’ paradise we’ve ever seen. On the other hand, economies where the same families stay rich for hundreds of years don’t do so well. Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism
Democracy gives us a chance to throw the bums out. There should be enough political appointments that, when a government is defeated, there is a thorough house cleaning at the top.
What’s wrong with Marxism? It has no churn. It is doomed to be taken over by the ‘wrong people’. Every time. And no, your version of the Marxist paradise would be no exception.
Very good point.
CommieBob:
Churn! An excellent idea to limit the tenure of those at the top.
But authoritarians [Marxist, fascist, socialist] will never voluntarily relinquish power.
However in a democracy we could (should!) have term limits for our dear leaders.
And don’t forget the bureaucracy! Best (bad!) example was Hoover’s FBI.
Of course the civil “servants” (aka deep state) are another problem as well. [servants is in scare quotes since a true servant could be fired
at-will, unlike our civil employees]
Thanks for the book link.
Three cheers, Jordan Peterson is on the mend and hopefully we’ll be seeing more of him soon. I watched an interview with him and Dave Rubin the other day. He has been missed.
The UN is full of bureaucrats and politicians. The chances of them knowing anything about anything is less than 0%. But, that is still higher than the chance that bureaucrats who aren’t accountable to the people will do anything that benefits somebody other than themselves.
Has anyone mentioned to this walking turd that commercial quantity hydrogen, ammonia, etc. is made by steam reforming methane and that it produces CO and CO2?
Save a bird, a bat, whack a wind turbine. Save a tree, a field of dreams, clear the Green Blight. Reject credit signalling, conserve. Donate to World Walrus Foundation. Repeat. Be merry and gay.
Being gay is so retro, get with the program comrade.Be trans!
I thought it was LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ
LGBTQWERTYUIOP.
Who knew how futuristic was the designer of the QWERTY key board?
ick … now I can’t even use my keyboard …
It’s the ‘P’ that they really want to add now.
As there are supposedly 51 different genders, we need an extra 25 new letters on the keyboard.
If there are 51 genders please can somebody name them. All that I am aware of are Male, Female and Hermaphrodite.
These are SEXES. Gender is a grammatical terminus technicus, and there’s three of them: masculinum, femininum, and neutrum. In German: “der, die, das”. None of this has any bearing on the biology or sexual preferences of living beings. Those who want to tell you otherwise are intentionally confusing you.
Nope,
Its whatever you FEEL like being at any particular time.
I identify as an attack helicopter!
So wind turbine rotors are useful.
The Law of Unintended Consequences can be a right bastard.
What is the trans word for that? Xitch? Bastax?
Sorry, not trans, gender-neutral. Errr, gender nonconforming? I’m confused.
Don’t worry, it will all change in 5 minutes, and you’ll still be in trouble with the progressives 😉
seen this?
I have ONE friend i sent it to..she thought it was GOOD they “were moving with the times”
facepalm!!
is MALE and FEMALE.
Anything else is OK. !
Lol. Just trying to lighten the mood.
No, Male and Female are sexes. Genders are feminine and masculine.
They will demand carbon capture for metallurgical coal use, thus requiring even MORE power.
Between charging all the batteries to back-up intermittent power and charging the EVs AND the carbon capture, you can see the electricity demand spiraling ever higher and out of touch with reality.
The world is waking up to the realities of EVs and their batteries. Hyundai has just recalled 80,000+ EVs due to a battery fault that could lead to fires. Who’d a thunk that?
I’m not sold on sitting on a few hundred kg of alkali metal.
It’s at least twice that!
Another scary thing to consider is, if you’re in a wreck and trapped in the car, requiring extrication: normal extrication procedures in EVs are unusable. Even simple things like cutting the posts to roll back the roof can be quite dangerous due to the power routing – and since every model differs we can’t know for sure. If you’re rolled over against something and we can only access the bottom of the vehicle (happens often enough), we can’t get to you. Can’t cut the bottom open like with a ICEV.
Hyrbids are bad enough. EVs are a nightmare for firefighters in a multitude of ways.
TonyG
Yikes! I drive a hybrid (2011 Sonata).
Can you share any links for further reading? Thx
Sorry, what I know about them is mostly from our ongoing training, such as extrication and fire control classes. The main problems are with extrication and with the high-power cabling, just like with EVs.
Just another “the ends justifies the means” useful idiot. Convincing the world it’s OK to trash successful economies to replace them with ones of their choosing is easy when you control the media.
Implicit in the demands from the ‘woke’ generation is that they consider themselves intellectually superior to the “deplorables” and that they have all the right answers — despite a dearth of evidence to support their fantasies.
Sand is not used, glass panels and silicon chips require quartzite, pure silicon yes but it extremely hard and has to be quarried by blasting, so more CO2. There is almost no pure silica sand left in the world.
Quartzite is simply sand that has undergone diagenesis. While rare, sand suitable for making silicon does exist. I know of a unit in north west Ohio that is probably suitable. Alternative sources can be quartz veins in metamorphic rocks, or even granitic pegmatites.
But, your point that it takes fossil fuels to mine, transport, dis-aggregate, beneficiate, and generally refine silicon ore is valid.
You can flush out impurities with air or gasses. It adds a cost dimension that is very small.
Usually, an initial beneficiation step is to use magnetic concentrators to remove iron-bearing minerals from a crushed aggregate.
Such is the nonsense one gets when people outsource all of their thinking to mere ideology.
Coal, gas, oil are also necessary for smelting and forming copper and aluminum, resins and adhesives, fiberglass, carbon fibers, and mineral fibers, insulation, concrete and cement as well as all the machines, mining, quarrying, and processing plants to produce those material. Lubricants, welding gases, service supplies and vehicle tires and expendable parts are all produced directly from, and by using fossil fuels. Your entire wind generator or solar panel farm will need to be replaced in about 25 years.
There are no fossil carbon-free energy sources. Suprise!
And BTW, most of the Tesla miles have been run on power from generators fueled by coal or gas with a 10-25% or greater charging and transmission loss.
You know how ignorant & uninformed the average person is; well 50% are worse …so they get the top jobs.
Thats why mankind is doomed, we’ve learned nothing from history.
EW, fun. The world cannot run without steel and silicon.
The UN skips a few steps. Steel is made two bulk ways. Either iron ore reduced by coke, then O2 blast furnaced to remove an engineered amount of the residual carbon, or sponge iron pellets reduced by methane (new bulk process) then refined by blast furnace to remove some of same. Both final processes require pure O2, produced by air liquefaction plants running only on electricity 24/7 and NOT produced by intermittent renewables.
Pure silicon for whatever use can be refined several ways. Sodium hydroxide hot seed crystal reactors powered by electricity was an old MOT method for quartz crystal radio frequency resonators, substituting in WW2 for Brazilian natural quartz crystals. There are several others. All require a steady stream of electricity, which NEVER comes from renewables.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the refinement is carried out in a Basic Oxygen furnace after pig iron has been produced from iron ore in a blast furnace.
Sponge iron is produced by reducing iron ore using a reducing gas produced from methane, which is known as direct reduction (See DRI/Midrex process) and then refined in an electric arc furnace.
You are omitting a not insignificant share of global steel output based on melting scrap in an electric arc furnace i.e. NOT via the blast furnace (which uses coke made from metallurgical coal to produce molten iron which is refined in a steelmaking furnace. ) Of course the power supply for the electric arc furnace needs to be reliable.
How about ending the deadly addiction to parasitic fools in useless time-wasting bonkers UN agencies?
We could solve almost all of the planets fake ‘problems’ in one go.
If you’re interested, see the link below re: a webinar by Dr. Steven Chu.
U.S. Secretary of Energy 2009-2013
Stanford University
Thursday, March 4, 2021
5:30 p.m. (Mountain Time)
Zoom Webinar
The Initiative on Energy and Natural Resources Law and Policy
You only have to supply an email address to register.
https://www.getches-wilkinsoncenter.cu.law/
“I guess it is possible UN Secretary General Guterres has no idea that coal has other uses than being burned for energy.”
He forgets too that “aspirin” was originally discovered in coal (Dead highly compress pants/trees and sunlight) by chance when chemists were looking for dyes. These people really do have no idea and are extremely dangerous.
Well he studied physics and electrical engineering at university so he must have some idea that the solar and wind unreliables the UN favours are just that.
damned headline got me LOL
UN is trying to Zuck the world up. Joey the Clown Biden and his demrat comrades are trying to Zuck the USA up more than it already has been Zucked. China is trying to Zuck the world….no time to pursue happiness….have to fight these Zuckers.
Does Guterres know co2 is a social benefit to society?
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/03/02/why-social-cost-of-carbon-is-most-useless-number-youve-never-heard-of/
The West will feel so virtuous once Africa, China and India are producing all the steel and concrete. Then we can impose sanctions on their exports, institute a 0-child-policy and go back to living in eco-friendly caves while saving our intermittent power generated by our last solar panels and wind turbines to occasionally heat up some algae, bugs or weeds. (no evil CO2-making fires!). Eventually we’ll die out and cease breathing out deadly CO2 altogether!
Just think of how fondly the UN will remember our righteous contribution to saving the earth!
.” Refining iron ore using hydrogen is particularly problematic; any hydrogen contamination of the final product creates a brittle, mechanically unstable steel.”
Well said hydrogen stuffs steel know that from welding class but thermite steel is interesting “solid electricity” to reduce the iron that should scare the commies shirtless
That is simply not going to happen. Or other nations will say yes and let the US close down coal, but will otherwise do nothing.
Take a look at the arrogance of this:
Xi Jinping Calls Out US As “Biggest Threat” To China’s Development & Security
The top U.S. diplomat said Washington would continue to compete, collaborate and be “adversarial,” if necessary, with China, “the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system – all the rules, values, and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/xi-jinping-calls-out-us-biggest-threat-chinas-development-security.
Trump wanted the United States to exist as a strong independent nation, one among many, but the US Intel Community (Biden) wants to run the world (as a Lefty progressive project no doubt). So they have not even sold their “agenda” here (without “fortifying” an election) but want to export it? Using US factories and jobs to buy favor no doubt.
I almost hope China and Russia tell these guys where to stick it and keep opening coal plants. God help the world when Lefties from the United States run it. (facepalm)