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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Sequestering carbon dioxide, aka carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is an important topic in today’s world of  climate change mitigation.

Here’s an article, submitted by 2GreenEnergy supporter Cameron Atwood, that promotes the concept of pumping CO2 into rock formations and allowing the gas to be transformed into solids (carbonates) that are more likely to “stay put” than simply pumping the gas itself underground and hoping it doesn’t leak to the surface.

Incidentally, this is a phenomenon that occurs naturally in our ocean biomes, where high concentrations of CO2 enable shellfish to flourish.  Upon the death of these animals, their carbon-rich shells sink to the bottom, where they are sequestered for hundreds of millions of years, as they are subducted under tectonic plates.  Talk about “staying put.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

From the Washington Post:

Former president Donald Trump and his political allies understood that their allegations of widespread voter fraud in Georgia were baseless but continued to push the unfounded claims in courts and the public, according to recent federal court filings.

The revelations came in an 18-page opinion Wednesday over Trump ally and conservative lawyer John Eastman’s resistance to a subpoena for emails from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter found that several documents between Trump’s allies must be made public, as they showed that the group participated in a “knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court.”
“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Carter wrote. “The Court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
How much longer are we going to suffer under this, America?  Our country is waist-deep in evidence of Trump’s attempts to overthrow the U.S. federal government.  Once the midterms are behind us, let’s rid ourselves of this traitor.
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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

People who believe the legitimacy of this video don’t understand Newton’s laws of motion.

I’m reminded of a grade school science teacher who points out to her students that Superman’s flying through the air would require him to be continuously farting, an image of great humorous appeal to 12-year-old boys.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

The meme here made me smile, and provided a heartening reminder that fossil fuels really are on their last legs.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Here’s another piece on capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air (DAC).

As I’ve said, I find this subject impossible to take seriously; it’s even harder to conceive than carbon capture and sequestration CCS, for several reasons:

The apparatus that performs CCS can be located at point sources of CO2, e.g., concrete manufacturing facilities and fossil fuel-fired power plants that spit out >40% CO2 (vs. 0.04% for DAC).

DAC faces the challenge of moving vast volumes of air through its devices.  If one considers the lower troposphere to be the five miles of atmosphere above the Earth’s surface, we’re talking about 961 million cubic miles of air.

Where CCS requires very little external energy, I can’t imagine how to power fans to process that volume of gas.

The whole enterprise is a scam, as far as I’m concerned.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

My only reaction to the new EV offering from Fisker, the “Ocean,” is closer to PTSD than anything else.

About 10 years ago, venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins backed the luxury plug-in hybrid “Karma” to a disastrous end.  I happened to be interviewing one of Kleiner’s most senior managing partners, Ray Lane, in his Menlo Park office at about the time it was becoming uncomfortably clear that the Karma was not going to make it all the way down the runway and cause a financial conflagration as memorable as the Hindenburg.

I scrupulously avoided the topic during my talk with Ray.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

From this piece from MSN:

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday posted an ominous message on his Truth Social platform in which he declared that the “cancer” coming from “the danger within” the United States was a much bigger problem than any external threat.

The Truth Social post came in reaction to a meme posted by one of the twice-impeached former president’s supporters that accused Democrats of being “totally heinous international terrorists.” (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Yes, pregnant women with certain medical conditions who can’t get access to abortions meet one very specific and inevitable outcome: death.

To hear the media cover this, however, women are more concerned about high gasoline prices.

Somehow I don’t buy that.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Here’s what a professor of theology at Georgetown University told me when I was young, when I happened to have asked him about his career, and his life more generally: Most people work 50 weeks of the year doing something they don’t enjoy (substitute words like hate, resent, put up with, etc.) so they can take a two-week vacation to Europe or the Caribbean.  I do something I love every day of every year, and the idea of taking a vacation from it is beyond stupid; it’s ridiculous.

What I told my kids a generation later was quite similar: You’re going to spend about half your waking hours working, i.e., situating yourself in a position where you can buy food, clothing, transportation, shelter, and so on, the things that make you self-sustaining. Given this, the only rational way forward is to find something you genuinely like and to get damn good at it.

To all young readers who are trying to make sense of all of this in the development of your lives, I hope you find the words here meaningful.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

This is intriguing.  Some things to consider:

There is no doubt that the environmental footprint associated with electric transportation represents a huge improvement over the combustion of fossil fuels, and that delta is widening steadily as zero-carbon sources of energy continue to expand their presence.

Phasing out fossil fuels at the maximum feasible rate goes beyond ecological issues; for example, natural gas is what’s financing Russia’s ongoing spree of war crimes in Ukraine.

That said, our civilization needs to transcend the paradigm that a 2-ton vehicle is used to cart around a 175-pound human body.

Whether we like it or not, the purpose of industries is profit, not saving the planet.  To the extent that they can achieve the latter along with the former is what makes them a boon to human society.

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