Category Archives: climate

CO2 Emissions

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In Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section concerning net-zero and carbon emissions, a writer asks

When can we have an honest discussion of a plan to reduce carbon emissions?

We cannot until we have an honest discussion of the context of carbon emissions and why we should care about them. That context includes all the epochs of higher planetary temperatures and lush life, epochs of higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations and lush life, and those separate sets of epochs’ lack of correlation with each other.

The Greenies’ Desired Outcome

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As even the wokest of the woke “Green” energy aficionados know, oil is at the heart of a modern economy, both for energy and for other products.

  • resin sheet makers that in turn get raw materials from big chemical companies—which get their chemicals from hydrocarbons: oil and natural gas
  • fertilizer typically includes ammonia or other nitrogen compounds that are made in a process starting with natural gas—that’s all of our food, from the grains we eat to the grains we feed meat animals

Also negatively impacted by the Greens’ attack on hydrocarbons:

  • the availability of plastics and carbon fibers for the electric vehicles they’re so enamored of
  • the availability of plastics and carbon fibers for the “environmentally sound” housing and office buildings they so vociferously demand
  • the availability of energy to produce the glasses and metals necessary for the solar and wind and battery storage devices they demand to replace hydrocarbon-sourced energy production

But let’s see how many of these items they’re willing to live without.

Of course the food supply and cost won’t bother these dilletantes—they’ve got the money. It’s the poor who will suffer from the higher prices, become nutritionally deficient because they can’t afford the higher prices, suffer the damage and deaths from the famines that will result from the lower production rates of food.

Just a Thought

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Much is made of our current hydrocarbon-based energy and industry economy and the resulting pumping of carbon dioxide—CO2—into the atmosphere, with the supposedly bad planetary warming associated with that pumping.

Hydrogen production is being seriously looked at as a substitute source of energy, along with solar and wind energy production (although the extreme costs and environmental pollutions of the latter two are being ignored). Hydrogen, though, is supposed to be utterly clean: its only product from use, after all, is water.

Air Liquide, one of the three truly major producers of hydrogen for energy production use, for instance, believes that hydrogen will be

powering buses and smaller commercial vehicles by 2025 and big-rig trucks, trains, and cars by 2030. Ships and airplanes will take longer still. The market will need support for years but seems likely to get it.

And there’s hydrogen-based energy to power industrial production. But what about that water that results from hydrogen use? What about, in particular, the vast amounts of water that would get produced (reproduced, since the hydrogen will come primarily from splitting water molecules) were hydrogen to become as ubiquitous for energy production as hydrocarbons are today? Where would all that water go?

Much of it would, to be sure, be used as liquid—drinking, food production, even aquifer replenishment in the few places where that would be practical. Much of that water, though, would be evaporated into the atmosphere. And there’s the rub, maybe.

Today’s Earth is two-thirds covered by clouds, on average (with wide variations by region, season, whether over land or sea, but we’re talking about the planet as a whole here). Clouds have three contradictory effects on planetary temperature. One is that they’re fine infrared reflectors, so as the earth radiates its heat (from lots of sources, one of which is industrial activity, another is loss of heat absorption at the surface due, among other things, to human clearing of land for urbanized use), clouds reflect that heat back to the surface—if not contributing directly to global warming, contributing to global not-cooling.

Another cloud effect is blocking sunlight, which prevents solar heat from getting to the surface in the first place. The third effect is from clouds’ albedo: they actively reflect sunlight back into space. This is related to, but separate from, the simple blocking effect.

What are the relative weights of the three effects? Today, that two-thirds coverage is in relative balance for today’s planetary temperature.

What happens, though, if a planet-wide hydrogen energy economy pumps significant amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere to become an increased level of cloud cover? We worry about increasing atmospheric CO2, yet the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is measurable in a very few decades; it has constantly to be replenished to have any warming effect. Individual clouds might last a few hours to a very few days, but the aggregated cloud cover is permanent relative to human lifetimes.

Just a thought.

Energy Independence

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Let’s say, arguendo, that the Biden-Harris administration is sincere in its desire to switch America over, entirely, to renewable energy sources. Let’s say, also arguendo, that that’s even a good idea. Former Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke had some thoughts that bear on the execution of these premises:

The first two years of the Trump administration, we went from 8.3 million barrels a day [and] declining in just two years to 12.5 million barrels a day, the world’s largest exporter of energy. And it just wasn’t fossil fuels, it was across the board. So fast-forward now; we have Russia and we should immediately ban Russian oil [the Biden-Harris administration finally got around to doing this last Tuesday, albeit with an unspecified effective as of date].

However, the Biden-Harris administration still is begging OPEC to increase its oil output, now talking seriously about lifting sanctions on Iran so as to buy Iranian oil, and adding to that going to Venezuela to “negotiate” for oil from that nation. This is because we no longer have the ability to control our own energy pricing through our own domestic oil and gas production. Paradoxically, Biden-Harris has attacked our fossil fuel industry with greater zeal than it has shown against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

All of that is in the name of getting us off fossil fuels and onto “green,” renewable energy sources as quickly as domestic fossil fuels can be eliminated, regardless of the cost to us Americans, financially and politically around the world, and regardless of the current inability of wind and solar to deliver reliable energy, much less in the amounts our economy needs.

Here’s an alternative path to that golden chalice.

Biden-Harris should take the Federal government out of the way of our fossil fuel production industry—oil, natural gas, and yes, coal—and let us produce all of that energy that the market can bear. That will let us return to energy independence.

Biden-Harris acolytes always point to the 9,000, or so, oil leases that oil producers already own and aren’t exploiting. Biden-Harris acolytes, along with Biden-Harris himself, carefully ignore the fact that those leases require exploration and development of actual oil locations and that the Biden-Harris administration is sitting on existing permit applications to do that and refusing to accept (or slow walking, which functionally the same) new permit applications. Biden-Harris acolytes, along with Biden-Harris himself, also carefully ignore the usurious royalties Biden-Harris has decided to charge on new extractions–new oil and gas drilling/fracking. Biden-Harris acolytes, along with Biden-Harris himself, also carefully ignore the administration blocks on pipelines–and blocks on the separate permits needed to transport oil and gas via those pipelines (and via train in the case of oil)–and on storage facilities so that oil and gas can be delivered to refineries, and they carefully ignore the time required to obtain rights of way for those pipelines even were on permitted [sic] to be built.

Oil and natural gas producers also are wary of the Biden-Harris administration’s fickle performance with regard to its fossil fuel regulating regime and are hesitant to commit the several millions of dollars that are required up front just to get started when that fickleness is too likely to block an effort after those millions have been committed.

Letting our nation return to energy independence will, tautologically, make us not dependent on other nations for our energy—not our enemies, not our allies, not our friends.

That will put us—our free market economy and its private enterprises—back in control of our energy production. That production control would extend to production from all sources, including renewable (and nuclear, which can be quasi-renewable) sources.

That will generate the time and prosperity that then will let us develop the technologies needed to get reliable renewable energy in the industrial quantities we need, without the worsening pollution and expanding carbon footprint (assuming, once again arguendo, that that’s a bad thing) inherent in current production abilities, at a pace that we can afford, and at prices we Americans can afford to pay.

A Window on Biden-Harris Priorities

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Not so much from President Joe Biden’s (D) words or his Vice President and co-President Kamala Harris’ (D) careful silence, as much as what’s left in and left out of the current iteration of his reconciliation bill.

What’s still in after its seeming paring from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion (don’t believe those numbers or that any numbers are anywhere near close to finality or even accuracy, but take them at value for now): climate change initiatives.

What’s out (so far):

  • paid family leave and Medicare expansion
  • drug pricing, paid leave, Medicare expansion on dental and vision
  • pathway to citizenship for millions

As Varshini Prakash, Executive Director of Sunrise Movement argued,

Progressives are the ones who have fought like hell for Biden’s full agenda, and their votes cannot be taken for granted[.]

Yet those concrete and potentially directly actionable programs are the ones that were dropped in favor of the Biden-Harris (and of so many others) fantasy of global warming as an existential threat to our species.

Yet, if those dropped programs actually were any good, they’d be fully supportable and easily voted up in their separate and individual bills. Prakash even (cynically I say) argued that the pathway to citizenship for millions was left to an unelected parliamentarian—never mind that here too, maybe especially so, the pathway to citizenship question, if it’s actually something We the People want, would be easily voted up in a separate Pathway Bill.

But no. Progressive-Democrats know these are not particularly desirable; that’s why they tried, from the height of their control of both houses of Congress and the White House, to ram these things through unilaterally with not a syllable of input from the minority party.