Reposted from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
MAY 18, 2021
By Paul Homewood
Could somebody please tell me which planet McGrath And Harrabin are on?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57149059
Do the pair really think that the rest of the world is going to pay the slightest notice of this edict from the IEA?
Still, credit where it’s due: at least Harrabin is now actually admitting that the alternatives to gas are horribly expensive, as well as highly impractical.
Meanwhile in other news, Germany is making it totally clear that it intends to carry on using coal power until 2038, and Russian gas for much longer:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday (15 May) rejected calls to bring forward the country’s exit date for coal in power generation, currently set at 2038.
“Those affected need some reliability on the path to climate neutrality,” said Merkel. “I don’t want to unravel this again after one year.”
The German coal phase-out law was agreed in July 2020 – 18 months after the country’s coal exit commission recommended that coal-fired power generation should be ended by 2038 at the latest.
But the phase-out is much later than in many EU countries. Most have a phase-out date of 2030 or before while others, like Belgium and Austria, have already ditched coal from their energy mixes.
The Paris Agreement also calls for developed countries to have ditched coal by 2030 – eight years before Germany’s current target.
BERLIN, May 17. /TASS/. Germany’s Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) has authorized the laying of pipes for Nord Stream 2 in German waters, but the construction may follow only at the end of May, the German regulator said in a statement on Monday.
https://tass.com/economy/1290641?mc_cid=565ffdf6d5&mc_eid=4961da7cb1
If even Germany is dragging its feet, I hardly think the rest of the world is going to give a toss about what the IEA have to say.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Defund the IEA for its cruelty and climate war crimes.
Jimmy Carter energy policy and inflation returns with a vengeance.
When they came for coal I didn’t speak out, because I didn’t use coal in my home.
When they came for gas I didn’t speak out, because gas I was told wasn’t green.
When they came for oil I didn’t speak out, because Big Oil were clearly wrong.
When they came for my candles I didn’t speak out, cause it was freezing in my home and talking wasted body heat.
Slow cuts and compromises, kids. Inches and miles.
How inefficient of them… Typical polecat politicians.
California cities are passing new building codes now that eliminate natural gas plumbing in new construction and mandate all electric heating. At the same time they are closing the one and only nuclear power plant, which provides 10% of the state’s power.
Harriban seems to believe that the UK’s natural gas distribution system can be simply converted to hydrogen. He seems to be forgetting about hydrogen embrittelment and hydrogen blistering of certain steels. The entire system would need to be re-engineered to determine whether or not it could be used for hydrogen.
Another issue with using hydrogen in lieu of natural gas is safety. Hydrogen has a very wide explosive range in air compared to natural gas. A hydrogen flame in air burns with a very pale flame. It is visible in darkness, but in daylight a hydrogen flame is essentially invisible. Another characteristic of a hydrogen flame is that it does not produce infrared radiation. This means that a hydrogen flame does not radiate heat. You will not feel the heat of burning hydrogen until you are in the flame.
It would be possible to covert natural gas systems to hydrogen, but it would neither be quick nor cheap.
I remember when North Sea gas was first introduced in the 1970s having the nozzles on my gas appliances replaced to cope with the different characteristics of NSGas from Town Gas.
It was done over the whole country an was a massive and expensive undertaking.
yes please do. i’ve got 60 acres of forest. and a wood stove.
If ground heat pumps extract heat from the soil, won’t that mean the soil freezes solid like permafrost? Wouldn’t that have a detrimental effect on the soil ecology?
No, it don’t do that. Ground has plenty of heat to extract.
This is already law in France.
Any new construction can not have any “fossil fuel” installations: BT2000 regulation came into force 1 jan this year.
France has lots of nuclear energy. So much they export it. Its 100% Fossil free, so at least they walk the walk while talking the talk.
Two grand for a gas boiler? I paid 560 for min, its a combi, limitless hot water and heating, and costs a quarter of electric for heating.
It is already illegal in the UK to fit a gas boiler to a new house, so this law is already in place.
But whats the point moving the emissions from the home to the power station? Only 20% of UK electric comes from renewables, about another 20% from nukes.
Utterly stupid. And any attempt to put 35 million electric cars on the road is going to completely swamp our generation and supply infrastructure.
The only solution (to the non problem of CO2) was to start building nukes a decade ago, at least ten for the UK, so have any hope of supplying enough power.
As usual, ask the two questions:-
1) Ban them where, exactly? In which countries?
2) What effect will this ban, in these countries, have on temperatures?
You will discover that the last thing anyone proposes is to ban them in China. And that the effect of the proposed action on the global total of CO2 emissions will be negligible.
Now ask another question:-
3) Why do activists always demand measures which are both impractical and useless?
For instance, converting home heating to hydrogen, when the pipelines cannot carry it, the boilers cannot burn it, and there is no supply. Converting all cars to electric, when even could it be done, the grid is not capable of supporting charging.
Hint: The impossibility of persuading decision makers to implement these demands is not a bug. Its a feature.
Its happening already.
Mrs Johnson has decreed no more gas boilers installed in the uk from 2025.
It is appalling that a conservative government is trying to kill pensioners.
I have written to my local conservative MP and he agrees that with the present plans, nuclear is the only solution.
But there is no way the bureaucracy in the uk will allow a new nuclear power station to go from nothing to commissioning in ten years. I was part of a government study on the UK’s skill readiness for nuclear, and the central premise, that we werent allowed to challenge, was that you could go from nothing to commissioning in 3 yrs. When we showed some simple present day stats, the lalalalalala we’re not listening brigade came out in force and closed it down.
The study obvioulsy concluded that we needed more studies to ensure we could build lots of nuclear in the next three years. – but the studies would need three years to prove it!
We had a gas boiler installed here in Belgium in 2019 and were told it was till 2030 only, after that electric only. And in 2024 Belgium has scheduled the closure of the nuclear plant that supplies 40% of the country’s electricity (under pressure from Germany).
The “no gas” home heating policy has “what could possibly go wrong?” written all over it like none other. Countries will either ignominiously U-turn from it, or plunge into a fiasco which will not be funny if thousands freeze to death which is eminently possible, even likely. It has the potential to bring to an end the whole climate circus.
SO lets burn Hydrogen to increase NOx emissions, and eliminate the devil gas CO2?
do I have that right?
Where’s my bill for the all the others? I want to see my bill.
The curious nature of the Green Lobby proposals.
Lets say you accept, with the Green lobby, that global warming is a real problem and has to be solved by reducing CO2 emissions. Lets say you also accept that the priority in doing this has to be decarbonizing electricity generation.
Both of which are pretty unreasonable in themselves, but carry on. Because the interesting thing is whether the resulting proposals make any sense in the terms of the movement itself.
The Green lobby then proposes to accomplish the decarbonization by moving to wind and solar generation, with perhaps some bio fuel.
The curious thing is that no-one ever makes the quantified argument that this is the best and fastest way to lower these emissions. Where are the studies showing that you get more and faster reductions from installing wind and solar than you would from installing a mixture of nuclear and gas powered generation? Or from simply installing gas powered generation?
As with many of the other demands of the warming alarmists, when you look at what they are demanding and the reasons they give for demanding it, you inevitably reach the conclusion that the means they have chosen is not the best way to their supposed objective. In fact, they are so dysfunctional that they may not even lead there at all.
There is after all plenty of evidence (from France) that installation of nuclear generation will lower emissions. There is also plenty of evidence from the US that increasing gas generation will lower emissions. There is zero evidence from anywhere that installing any amount of wind and solar will lower emissions.
So now ask yourself why the Green lobby is demanding, in the name of reducing emissions, that we do things which are certainly not the best way to lower them and probably do not even lower them at all.
Do you think it could be because the point of demanding wind and solar is not to lower emissions, its to use the demand to organize opinion around? And its a lot easier to organize around wind and solar than it is to organize around a demand for installing more combined cycle gas plants.
If your object is organization and not carbon reduction, its immaterial how effective your proposed policies are on carbon. What counts is whether they are effective in the sphere of public opinion. This is where we are at the moment. Advocating things that will have no effect on the supposed problem, and carefully not advocating things which (like reduction of emissions by China, or increased use of gas and nuclear) are both effective and essential to the supposed objective.
I would include by the way in the category of things useless in reducing emissions but quite promising as organizing vehicles the practice of declaring municipalities or regions zero carbon zones. (Or nuclear free zones for that matter).
Declare some city to be aiming for carbon neutrality. It has zero effect on global emissions. Even if hundreds or thousands of cities join in, it will still have no effect, because most of the emissions are not locally controllable, and even if they were, and even if this resulted in a decline in national emissions, the nation’s emissions are too small as a share of global emissions for it to have any effect when the Far East is increasing emissions and coal use as fast as it can.
Another similar case is the proclamations by individuals that they have lowered their carbon footprint by doing things like driving electric cars, cycling to work, turning down the thermostat.
No effect whatever on global warming. But, like wearing a hair shirt which has no effect on salvation, great as a public statement of being on the right side of the movement.