Becoming different – Part 13: : Reviewing the Basics again – Part 2

Having high quality energy is the reason that our technology has advanced so much in the last century.  Now having high quality energy that doesn’t pollute has to be our next main goal.  But as I alluded to in the last post, we have to change our consumer mindset and not rush into making decisions based on fear.  One such major fear pushed by the mainstream media and corporate systems is that of global climate disruption (GCD) and the dreaded term driving this fear is carbon dioxide (CO₂).  When billionaires, financial systems (e.g., the WEF, IMF, WB, etc.) and corporate heads push ideas that are driving government policies for ‘green deals’ to solve the issue, then perhaps it is time for a big pause and not hit the panic button for acquiescence to global governmental control.  Regardless of where anyone sits on beliefs about GCD, let’s take a deeper-term look at this dreaded CO₂ menace.  I’m not saying that GCD is a fake.  But we need to look at the big picture of what is causing GCD and not simply be led into a panic political-corporate reaction that promises to save us all – sounds a lot like the Covid crisis in a different guise. 

We have been so wonderfully conditioned to believe that the world will end by 2100 when CO₂ continues it horrific hockey stick rise and we globally are 4^oC above ambient temperatures of 1900.  A quick reality check.  GCD does not harbor well for civilization as we currently like it, but the world is not ending.  Indeed, if you look at any long-term chart of global temperatures during the past 500 million years (or even if last 3.5 billion) you notice that the planet has always been a lot warmer!  The planet has always been between 4 and 14^oC warmer, and during all that time life thrived.  Indeed, during the Cambrian Explosion (when life went from simple cellular organisms to complex multicellular ones) the temperatures may have been over 14 degree C warmer than today! 

With the exception of the Permian glaciation period (300 million years ago) that may have occurred because of intense volcanic activity to form a cloud layer so dense that a snowball earth occurred, the planet was warm until about 50 million years ago.  At that time the global temperatures cooled a bit to around 4-6^oC above todays preferred ambient temperatures and then 35 million years ago began a long slow decline to the coolest period in Earth’s history that we take as normal.  Then around a million years ago a sequence of ice-ages began that coincided with the solar Milankovich Cycle minimums. The last mere 10,000 years or so is the only time that temperatures stabilized at what we call ambient and that after the catastrophic Early Dryas period.   And the most likely reason for this decline in global temperatures? – the cessation of the really long-term Tethys equatorial circulating Thermohaline current to today’s more equatorial-polar circulating one.      

The challenges we humans face with a warming world for how we live are not insignificant, and our releasing all that stored CO₂ and other massive levels of pollution from technological processes are certainly not helping, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that a global elitist group can find a solution to curbing the issue.  After all, it is their greed (and ours from buying into their consumerist vision) that got us to this point.  I read about carbon taxes and other economic reforms meant to curb fossil fuel use yet little about real investments in alternate energy sources and alternate lifestyle.  The big guys know our modern world is all about energy, and they make massive amounts of money providing it to us – what incentives do they have to really stop their current activities?  They give wonderful lip service to solving GCD but underlying all of it is always this global governmental structure to manage it all.  Call me paranoid but putting global elite foxes in charge of the global hen house does not strike me a as a good idea for any reason!

More reality checks, and reasons for changes in thinking how we live because there are no simple solutions such as carbon trading, etc.!   Just look at who the energy hogs are in the world. Consumer living comes at an increase in energy and for the last century and a half has exponentially been derived from highly polluting fossil fuels.  Yes, we have seen an increase in ‘renewables’ but as I said in my last post, they are only green in the electrical generation utility phase, and currently they only run at about 11% of global energy options.  All fossil fuel options are now running in exponential depletion phase and we need to look closely at what we do next.  Obviously major voluntary conservation is needed but it is not a popular option when your consumer lifestyle depends upon using energy. 

While coal and natural gas are primary used for electrical generation, let’s take oil as a case-in-point of blind-spots we are missing.  For starters the age of oil is about 200 years and then it is gone for any time frame we humans can envisage.  Oil use began in 1859 and will most likely be gone by 2159 – a mere two-hundred years of financial glory.  Most oil analysts agree we are well past the peak (The Saudi’s won’t even release data on how much they have left) and we still increase our exponential usage of it.  And why is that so poignant?  Well, most people recognize oil as a wonderful energy resource.   For instance, a cubic mile of oil is equivalent to 104 large coal fired generating stations, or 4 Three-Gorges Dams, or 52 nuclear power plants, or 92 million solar panels, or 33,000 large wind-turbines.  But the main point is that the most important aspect about oil is not its energy, but its key aspect in all walks of our consumer lives.  In a developed country especially, look around you.  Some 3000 items are derived from oil with few substitutes for its ubiquity.  And we choose to burn about a third of it as fuel in our vehicles and homes. 

In my last post I gave one of our key six root problems as ‘inefficiency.’   Let’s look at our cars as an example.  In your typical gasoline (petrol/Diesel) driven car, for each 100% of energy input of fuel, only 14% actually drives the car with 86% lost to engine heat, friction from moving parts, inefficiencies, idling, and the running of accessories (e.g., water pump, air conditioning, electrical generator, etc.), plus the amount of energy and pollution in the fuel generation phase and waste phase (see last post).  Now when economists talk about the costs involved, they rarely involve all these inefficiencies.  When you price all those and then compare gasoline to hydrogen as a fuel, remember that hydrogen is essentially green in its utility and waste phases.      

When you look at ‘hybrid cars’ using a mixture of gasoline and electric engines, then the inefficiencies change as the electric engine takes on more of the propulsion energy giving a reduction in engine heat and inefficiencies and almost zero in idling for an increased 42% fuel in to propulsion efficiency (up from 14%!).  Now add the options of Hybrid cars using a mixture of Gasoline/Hydrogen and electric engines with batteries charged from ‘green’ (utility phase) and the propulsion efficiency can be as high as 85%.  Before you get whoopy-do on battery technology, another reality check.  Lithium battery technology (all current battery technology really) is exceptionally high environmental and social cost in the fuel generation and waste phase.  Remember that batteries only store energy, not produce it, so all electric cars not only must get energy from ‘green sources’ to be any improvement over gasoline, and don’t forget that they also include much more polluting battery technology (during fuel production and waste phases) than a gasoline car.  

From the Sumerians to the start of the industrial revolution, technology was limited by energy and the materials available from limited energy options.  Our modern world exists because of high quality fossil fuel energy.  What we are talking about is the need to be honest about how we cost-out energy for every item we purchase and how that item uses energy everywhere in its lifetime from cradle to grave/or recycle.  Ecolologists, Howard T. and Elizabeth C, Odum, wrote about this in detail in their book A prosperous Way Down, and coined the term ‘Emergy’ to account for the embedded energy in all aspects of our lives that can be quantified for inputs to transparent decision making.  If this is such a fair way to look at all costs, why isn’t it implemented already? 

To Be Continued …………………