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Saturday, October 26, 2013

Energy From Shale Can Grow Immensely Whenever Allowed

  From a couple of new posts on the GWPFl

This graph shows how the shale gas industry is taking off in the USA

  OK these are North Dakotan and Texan fields but they account for 75% of US growth.

  Note that this rise started in 2010m the year our "supporting shale" coalition government came to power. This is a nearly 10 fold  growth rate in shale over the period. Does anybody doubt that we could have done the same if the Tories had supported it, or that we would have achieved growth if that had happened. Or indeed that Grangemouth would have been booming if it had had access to shale, though to be fair to the Tories, Scotland has its own government and the SNP say  “In Scotland, with our renewable potential, we don’t need the hassle” - less active in saying they were actively avoiding the hassle of having people employed in Grangemouth but clearly they are.

    I did report a previous graph which showed the then, by previous standards, spectacular growth from 2007-10, which now looks pretty ordinary (but exceeded the growth rate they expected to continue).
       Another sign of how progress rates tend to be underestimated, even by me.

     And this article reported by GWPF proves my point. It comes from somebody who I am sure thinks himself a technological progressive but who I think is being overly restrained in his vision.

“If we have the courage to do big things, all of humanity has a fine future. Everything is possible with energy.”

.... says Lawrence M. Cathles, Cornell professor of earth and atmospheric sciences.

“In spite of our apparent environmental problems, we stand a remarkable chance of achieving solutions,” he says. “Societies all around the world are living longer. We have more access to food, clean water and energy… and we’ve never been more healthy.”

Cathles outlines his optimism about the world’s prospects for sustaining the human population in an environmentally responsible way in his article, “Future Rx: Optimism, Preparation, Acceptance of Risk,” in a special publication of The Journal of the Geological Society, released Oct. 24.

“If we have the courage to do big things, all of humanity has a fine future,” says Cathles in the article, which addresses food sustainability, natural resources and energy levels, and what he calls the “Grand Challenge” of the next century for everyone to achieve a European standard of living. In his paper, Cathles proposes a path to achieving that standard.

Today the world hosts 7.13 billion people, and Cathles says that while humans are living longer, the world population will peak at 10.5 billion about 100 years from now. The most essential resource is energy, and today most of the world uses less than 2 kilowatts of power per person (for heat, lighting, transportation and manufacturing), while those at the European standard of living (the average French or German citizen, for example) use 3.5 times more. The world currently consumes energy at the rate of 15 trillion watts (15 terawatts), with 86 percent from hydrocarbon sources.

Meeting the Grand Challenge would require energy production of 50 terawatts today and 75 terawatts 100 years from now, ideally all from zero carbon energy sources, says Cathles. Growing from 15 to 75 terawatts over a century requires a growth rate of 1.6 percent per year, which is modest, he says, compared with the U.S. growth rate of 2.6 percent over the past 50 years and China’s recent 12 percent growth rate and their planned growth over the next 10 years of 7 percent annually.

The lion’s share of the power expansion could be met by wind, solar power produced in deserts or nuclear; but by far the least environmentally intrusive, feasible and realistic option is nuclear, he says. The oceans have enough dissolved uranium to sustain 10.5 billion people at a European standard for more than 100 centuries, and the extraction footprint would be tiny.

Everything is possible with energy, nothing is possible without it,” says Cathles.

    A growth rate in energy use far in excess of 1.6% is easily possible as he effectively admits by mentioning China. The mention of wind and solar is merely arse covering - nuclear is it, with a side order of shale (though improvements in solar efficiency means it is not as useless as it seems.

    But the important thing is that he acknowledges the obvious last line. Obvious to intelligent people, but not to the ruling class of the western world.  

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Friday, October 25, 2013

Professor Salby Speech 7th November

The Scottish Climate & Energy Forum is pleased to announce a seminar by
world famous Australian climate expert
Prof. Murry Salby
Atmospheric & Oceanic studies Faculty of Science,
Macquarie University, 2008-2013
Climate Change: What We Know and What We Don’t
as part of his
UK TOUR
Thursday 7th November
The Links Hotel, Edinburgh
7 – 9pm
Entry is free, but please book early as places will be limited
Contact: Mike Haseler 0845 10 88 500
Email: chairman@scef.org.uk

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Thursday, October 24, 2013

Warming Alarmists In Full Retreat - Hot Pursuit - Don't Let Them Regroup

   James Delingpole put up a post yesterday about the "Green" movement not being "wrong but romantic" but actually really rather evil. I put this harsh which, has gained a fair number of likes and nobody among the ecofascist trolls who haunt the site feeling able to argue:   

The valuable moment in Cabaret, that makes it more important than any 50 mere musicals, is the beautiful child singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me and only once the audience is hooked is it made clear the kid is hitler youth. Real villains do not wear black hats, indeed they may be more willing to claim sainthood than decent people because they are not restrained by decency.

The "Green" movement is unquestionably guilty of at least twice as many killings as the Nazis (DDT, impoverishment, golden rice etc); it is unquestionably corrupt & genocidal; it is unquestionable that the overwhelming majority of its supporters have no slightest trace of honesty or integrity (just ask any of them to dissociate themselves from the most obvious lie by other ecofascists); it is unquestionable that ever one of the dozens of world catastrophe stories put about by these obscene animals has proven to be a lie (CAGW merely the latest); it is unquestionable that it has deliberately robbed every human alive of decades of our birthright of human progress (we could & should have had a couple of decades of power "to cheap to meter" and the settlement of the solar system by now).

Say what you like about Adolf Hitler but at least he was no Jonathan Porritt.

---------------------------------------------------

   I have made the Hitler and Stalin comparison before so I'm not just speaking up as we are winning, but we are winning - a couple of years ago I would at least have been accused of being not terribly nice.

* Labour and Conservatives are falling over each other in the rush to declare they want lower electricity costs despite previous total unanimity on the Climate Change Act (the UK version costing at least £800 bn and the Scottish one being the single most destructive such in the world) and on wishing £3,000 a year bills (twice the current) by 2020.

* They are all (well except the Greens who are a bit slow) backing away from any responsibility for Grangemouth closure, despite, or because of, the owner saying it is their fault not the union's.

* A new paper which, on indisputable calculations, shows that CO2 increase, far from being "catastrophic" -  The monetary benefits conferred by atmospheric CO2 enrichment on  global crop production  amounts to a total sum of $3.5 trillion over the 50-year period 1961-2011. We will know the econazi campaign has folded when the world's most fascistic state broadcasting monopoly, the BBC, gets round to reporting it.

* Return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 29% in a year.
  • 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than in 2012
  • BBC reported in 2007 global warming would leave Arctic ice-free in summer

  • ##############################################

          But even if this "hobgoblin" (see the Mencken remark on the masthead) has been killed and those lying totalitarian parasites who pushed retreating in disorder there will be another along in due course as long as big state parasitism is rewarding.

         Here are a list of 26 fraudulent scare stories promoted by the ruling class. (also another 45 that don't perfectly fit.
    1
    Population growth and famine (Malthus)
    1798
    2
    Timber famine economic threat
    1865
    3
    Uncontrolled reproduction and degeneration (Eugenics)
    1883
    4
    1928
    5
    Soil erosion agricultural production threat
    1934
    6
    1939
    7
    Fluoride in drinking water health effects
    1945
    8
    1962
    9
    Population growth and famine (Ehrlich)
    1968
    10
    Global cooling; through to 1975
    1970
    11
    Supersonic airliners, the ozone hole, and skin cancer, etc.
    1970
    12
    Environmental tobacco smoke health effects
    1971
    13
    1972
    14
    1974
    15
    1976
    16
    1979
    17
    CFCs, the ozone hole, and skin cancer, etc.
    1985
    18
    Listeria in cheese
    1985
    19
    Radon in homes and lung cancer
    1985
    20
    Salmonella in eggs
    1988
    21
    1990
    22
    Mad cow disease (BSE)
    1996
    23
    Dioxin in Belgian poultry
    1999
    24
    2004
    25
    Mercury in childhood inoculations and autism
    2005
    26
    Cell phone towers and cancer, etc.
    2008





     


























































     


     









     

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    Wednesday, October 23, 2013

    Ineos Knows EF + CE = FG, But GO'D Doesn't

         Via the GWPF comes a round-up of news about the closure of Grangemouth petrochemical plant.

       "Its chairman singles out energy costs, which he says has been driven up by high environmental taxes on consumers.

    In a rare interview, chairman Jim Ratcliffe told the Financial Times that Grangemouth was “at a crossroads”.

    “To have a future, it needs cheap feedstocks . . . and a sensible cost structure,” he said. “If we can’t resolve those issues, it would need to shut down.”

    and

       "Jim Ratcliffe, chief executive of Ineos, one of the world’s largest chemicals groups, says the danger is that some companies, especially manufacturers, will move to places where energy is cheaper. “It’s fine being very, very green, but not if you’re interested in manufacturing,” he says.

    “The UK is already disadvantaged on the wholesale cost of energy, and then it puts taxes on it. Anybody who’s an energy user is just going to disappear.”

        So while we will doubtless see the obedient media telling us it is the fault of mulish unions or evil bosses the true blame for this lies in the hands of our LabNatConDemGreen cartel who voted with  Soviet style unanimity for the most expensive, restrictive and destructive legislation against "catastrophic global warming" in the world.

         It takes rare talent to make an oil refinery onshore from Europe's biggest oil field uneconomic but our ruling cartel have shown they are up to the job.

         In this case it is worth noting BBC Newsnight's hustings for the Dunfermline by election. According to the BBC the main issue was the potential closure of a few rural schools. Windfarms were simply not on the agenda and Grangemouth was relegated to the end. The BBC also decided to ask all the candidates to speak about the latter except Peter Adams the UKIP one who apparently had somehow become invisible to the beeboids. Peter did make a point of aying so, therby losing the chance to speak in the last round too. This is how a state owned "balanced" propagandist behaves not a journalist. The Green candidate was stupid enough to say they didn't want Ineos to put any more money into the plant and they should instead put the money into subsidy dependent "greenery". That is, of course, lunatic but it is the policy of all the approved parties and she deserves a little credit for being more honest than the LabNatConDems.

          Hopefully the people of  Dunfermline will recognise, even at this stage, that UKIP are not their best friends on the ballot - they are their only friends on the ballot.
    ==================================

        Other news today is that the former head of the civil service Gus O'Donnell (aka GOD) has produced a pdf of how to solves what he agrees are the dreadful problems of the British economy. This is the comment I put on it on Douglas Carswell's:

        "I just read GO'D's words and apart from "unfortunately our main trading partner, the euro area, is unlikely to increase its demand for UK exports very much in the short or medium terms. Our historical trading patterns, which have been so beneficial in the past, are likely to condemn us to the global slow lane for years to come" which explains exactly why we should quit the EU as quickly as possible, I was not impressed.

    He says it is "unfortunate" that government is no longer believed able to solve problems but this popular recognition is a necessary foundation for the free market, small state, economy we need.
    He says the basic problem is low productivity but has not a single word pointing out that this in turn is a symptom of our energy scarcity.

    Economic Freedom + Cheap Energy = Fast Growth but GO'D has barely recognised the first and is wholly ignorant of the 2nd, let alone willing to say anything against the Green Luddites who set our policy (but then the civil service fund most luddism and use it to encourage more civil service expansion).

    90% of our electricity costs are state-parasitism and since there is a 1:1 correlation between energy use & gdp we could clearly get into fast growth any time our political class were to allow us energy without their parasitism.

    Although his suggestion that civil servants be allowed to see if people are "qualified" before allowing them to stand for election, has drawn most media attention, he has nothing to say about what "qualification" is required - I suspect that studying the diletantte "PPE" degree would be qualification but being unable to see the catastrophic global warming we are alleged to be suffering from would mean disqualification.

    In 8 pages the only truly useful line is that cutting nursery costs would improve productivity (something I blogged on ages ago). British nursery care cost 40% of an average wage while in Estonia it is 6%. Clearly 85% of the cost is state regulatory parasitism and yes it does prevent people going back to work."
     

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    Tuesday, October 22, 2013

    Morbid Obesity Costs Twice As Much As Trident

       James Dellingpole has a highly amusing post today about government waste  £5 billion a year:
        

    In the 1980s, the Judge Dredd strip in 2000AD ran a series of stories about the League of Fatties – people so grotesquely obese that they could only waddle around with the help of a trundle wheel supporting their enormous bellies. Back then, in our innocence, we thought it was dystopian satire…
    If you haven't yet read Max Pemberton's Spectator cover story Obesity Is Not A Disease I urge you to do so. It describes a social problem of quite grotesque, wobble-jowled, saggy-bottomed enormousness: the vast sums of money – £5 billion a year – being funnelled from our pockets in order to pay for the extra healthcare costs of the clinically obese.

    And we're not just talking pleasingly rotund, or "carrying a little bit of weight girls", here.
    Take the East Midlands Ambulance Service. It emerged this week that it has been picking up so many fat patients — weighing in excess of the 28-stone maximum — that it needs a new fleet. It has, hitherto, been struggling along with just one ambulance for fatties (a ‘bariatric’ vehicle), but now thinks all 272 of its ambulances need to be upgraded with double-wide stretchers for patients who (it says) can weigh in at 55 stone. The plan will cost £27 million.
    .....Here's how that process of cause and effect should work with obesity: you eat too much, you get fat; your food bills rise to accommodate your expanding girth; so too does the cost of your health insurance, both to cover the extra cost of your "bariatric" specialist treatment and also because you are that much more likely than a thinner, fitter person to require medical care; also, people will hate sitting next to you on aeroplanes, only fellow fatties (or the odd thin person, maybe, with a bear fetish) will want to have sex with you, you will probably smell more and die younger. In a free country you will, of course, remain as free to get as fat as you like. But there will be consequences for your actions in the form of mild social opprobrium, increased financial penalties and so on. Thus, without any meddling or hectoring or needless expenditure from the Nanny State, fat people will be encouraged to get thinner because they will find it in their best interests to do so.

    What our current socialised healthcare system does, unfortunately, is to remove this vital connection between cause and effect. Not only are the obese cushioned from the financial consequences of their wanton self-indulgence but they inhabit a culture so in thrall to the idea of victimhood, so fearful of "judgementalism" and so wary of causing offence that it doesn't even dare hint that there might be a problem with being fat.

    This cannot end happily. It won't end happily. When future historians come to survey what it was we did wrong before the Great Collapse, one of the details that will tickle them to the point of incredulity is this: that with Britain's national debt fast approaching 100 per cent of GDP, and with the NHS approaching breaking point, it was yet considered good practice for the state to spend £5 billion a year it hadn't got – not to build a new airport or finance a nuclear power station but simply to enable millions of fat people to go on enjoying their apparently unalienable right to stuff their lardy faces at Greggs and McDonald's."

         The solution is obviously not eating. Somebody who is bedridden by being 55 stone is clearly being fed by somebody else.

         The libertarian answer would be to let them choose to give up or die and would work one way or another.

         The authoritarian one is to arrest the feeder for abuse. Perhaps also fitting them with an electronic collar that would give a small shock any time they swallowed more than a set amount. That would work & keep them alive.

         This is an example of how wealthy we are as a society & how when nothing else can harm us, we have become a self-harming society. This is a fact via Tim Worstall which I have waited for an excuse to use and this is certainly it:

          "In 1870 the daily wages of an unskilled worker in London would have bought him (not her: women were paid less) about 5,000 calories worth of human, not horse food: not oats (although Scotsmen would disagree) but bread--5,000 wheat calories, about 2½ times what you need to live (if you are willing to have your teeth fall out and your nutritionist glower at you). In 1800 the daily wages would have bought him about 3,500 calories, and in 1600 2,500 calories. Karl Marx in 1850 was dumbfounded at the pace of the economic transition he saw around him. That was the transition that carried wages from 3500 calories per day-equivalent in 1800 to 5000 in 1870. Continue that for another two seventy-year periods, and we would today be at 10,000 calories per unskilled worker in the North Atlantic today per day. Today the daily wages of an unskilled worker in London would buy him or her 2,400,000 wheat human-food--potato--calories. Not 10,000. 2,400,000. That is the most important fact to grasp about the world economy of 1870. The economy then belonged, even for the richest countries, much more to its past of the Middle Ages than to its future of--well, of you reading this."

         By that standard, and it is a good one, we are all 1,200 times better off than in 1870.

         Nobody in the Middle Ages could afford to be 55 stones. Another, even more demeaning effect is that nobody but a king could afford to kidnap and feed 3 girls without anybody noticing as American bus drivers now can.

         I maintain that a wealthy society is far better than a poor one but no silver lining is without a wisp of cloud.

         But on silver linings I commented on Dellors saying what we could do with the money wasted on this:

         " Brilliant article James.
    Much needed.
    Imagine what we could do with £5bn a year

    Build 8 x 1 GW nuclear plants each year for free,
    Cut Corporation Tax by 40%
    Cut Income Tax by 1.5p
    Put it into a Space X-Prize Foundation and get space development 12 times what NASA gets.
    Build 5 OTEC powered floating equatorial islands annually, which would each produce enough algae to feed 10 million hungry people annually.
    Build HS2 in 16 years or preferably a Hyperloop in 2.
    More than match all the money spent on research on stopping/reversing aging worldwide.
    At £20K each, build 250,000 new modular houses annually.
    A fair trial and hanging for 50,000 government parasites, war criminals, child abusing "professional carers" and pensioner freezers annually."

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    Monday, October 21, 2013

    Hinkley Point - £16bn For 2 Generators That Would Cost £4.5bn If The Politicos Would Let It

    Hinkley Point C: £16bn nuclear power plant gets go ahead despite criticism over 'strike price'   
        
    THE plant in Somerset will begin operating in 2023 but ministers faced criticism over the £92.50 per Megawatt hour that will be paid for electricity produced - around double the current market rate.

     

    Hinkley Point
    Hinkley Point


    BRITAIN'S first new nuclear power station in a generation is to be built under a £16 billion project which will create thousands of new jobs.
    The move followed an agreement between the Government and French-owned EDF Energy, which will see Hinkley Point C in Somerset begin operating in 2023.
    -----------------------------

       That's how the Daily Record put it, neatly combining enthusiasm for the project with anti-nuclearist concern for the price and an absence of any mention of who is responsible for the price.

       This is a rather long post I put on John Redwood today and which is also going out, slightly edited,  as a letter to all and sundry. We will see if any sundry part of the press is less obedient in censoring the facts than I expect:

    This is not a good day for the supporters of nuclear because the government have negotiated all their parasitism in place.

    The reactor will take 10 years to build. In China they are building them in 3. This means it has no effect on the previous politicians' promises of electricity bills of £2,000 a year by 2020.

    It will cost £16 bn. An equivalent pair built by European firms in China is costing $7.5bn (£4.5 bn). http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/09/european-nuclear-reactors-are-three.html 

    The difference in cost is entirely government regulatory parasitism. Thus so is the need for a price guarantee.

    But it allows the Luddites to scream "subsidy" (though they are on a sticky wicket in that they approve far greater subsidy on windmills).

    Also there is less to the eye on the price guarantee than appears - in 10 years prices will have increased about 40% so the guarantee is the equivalent of about £60. 60 years later, when it closes prices will have increased  8 fold so the "guarantee" will be equal to £12.

    This suggests the builders are working on the assumption that they will make back their money in 10 years and hoping that Miliband or some successor doesn't break the contract before then (as Labour bankrupted BNFL by regulatory fiat and forced them to sell off Westinghouse, probably the world's leading reactor builder, at a fire sale price to Japan). This distrust of government and the state parasitism obviously both push up prices beyond reason.

    There is no honest debate against the proposition that 90% of our electricity costs are state parasitism (the price differential mentioned above proves it again). Unfortunately there is no honest debate allowed on the subject in our state owned broadcaster or most of the obedient press.

    Because of the 1:1 correlation between gdp and energy use it is obvious that the recession is entirely the fault of the political class who make electricity 10 times more expensive than it should be. The 25,000 pensioners who die of fuel poverty every year are also on their consciences.

    I am quite sure the Chinese would have been willing to build on purely commercial terms if the government had agreed to remove their parasitism (or to pay them for it). It might be worth a question in the House on that.

    A bad day for Britain because state parasitism has been welded even more strongly in place.

    UPDATE
    The price guarantee situation is considerably worse than I thought. John's new post today says

    "However, the guaranteed price at twice today’s wholesale market price, to come in in 2013 when they start generating power, is also indexed to general prices."

    I don't know if this means the indexing starts in 2010, in which case we are stuck with paying the equivalent of £60 forever, or tomorrow in which case it is the equivalent of £92 forever.

    In either case an abysmal "deal" at least for the people, designed to hide the amount of government theft (about 90% of total cost) going on.

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    Sunday, October 20, 2013

    Heinlein - How We Can Settle The Solar Systen Now & Create Art Someday

       A couple of Heinleinisms on 2 entirely separate themes - Art and settling the solar system.

    Art

    “Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.”
    Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/129814-art-is-the-process-of-evoking-pity-and-terror-which


       Which makes Kick Ass certainly and Grand Theft Auto probably art (which I mentioned on the Newsnight ART debate) and Tracy Eminem's bed definitely not.

    ######################################

          Settling the Solar System

      In his book, Expanded Universe (not available outside the US & Canada) starting on page 368. is an article about the time needed to get to Mars or Pluto at various accelerations.

    Mars
    at 1 G 4.59 days ; at 0.1 G 14.5 days ; at 1/100th G 45.9 days; at 1/1000th G 145 days

    Pluto (50 times further away and the furthest planet (actually no longer classed as planet)  
    at 1 G 4.59 weeks; at 0.1 G 14.5 weeks; at 1/100th G 45.9 weeks; at 1/1000th G 145 weeks

       As he points out there are, or rather were in 1950 when he wrote it, ways to achieve 1/1000th G including very simple nuclear rockets or solar sails. I assume we could do 1/10th of a G now with nuclear rockets.

       But we don't have to. He compares those last timescales with those of the Age of Exploration. Note that this was written in 1950, 63 years ago and what was possible but difficult now is, in engineering of not political terms, easy now:

    "It took the Pilgrim Fathers 9 weeks and 3 days to cross the Atlantic
    Two years and nine months - that was the a normal commercial voyage for a China clipper sailing out of Boston last century..











    England, Holland, Spain, and Poerugal all created worldwide empires with ships that took as long to get anywhere and back as would a 1/1000-gee spaceship
    ...even the tiniest constant boost turns sailing the Solar System into a money making commercial venture."







     

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