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  • #77779 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    ET, I think the only available course is to economise, hard and fast.

    The IPCC says we have ten years to halve emissions in order to avoid the worst. Well, ten years is about how long it takes to build a nuclear power station these days. The Experimental Breeder Reactor at Dounraey was indeed built in about three and a half years, though that excludes planning and commissioning. If we call it five years, that’s still half of our available time, leaving the entire CO2 saving to be made in the second half.

    Next we have to consider scale. There are currently over 400 nuclear power stations worldwide, producing about 10% of all electricity. These have been built over the course of about four decades. OK, maybe we can build some power stations in five years, but globally we’d need over four thousand just to address current electricity generation. A lot of the construction is highly specialised, so we’d need to train people in the techniques – more delay.

    Then we need to consider fuel. Both uranium mining and uranium enrichment would need to be expanded by a factor of ten. Enrichment in particular is even more specialised.

    Is this still looking practical?

    Enrichment produces tailings of depleted uranium, in the form of depleted uranium hexafluoride. It’s corrosive, highly soluble, highly toxic chemically, and mustn’t get into the groundwater. The photo on the left is just one of three DUF6 storage yards in the USA alone; note the older cylinders going black from corrosion:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Depleted_uranium&oldid=1033501049#Safety_and_environmental_issues

    Having done all this, we’d be set to exhaust conventional uranium supplies in around a decade, so concurrently we’d have to have built a similar quantity of renewables infrastructure as well, in any case.

    I see great promise in the molten salt reactors, breeding fuel from thorium, and fast spectrum reactors that can cook down our existing spent fuel, releasing centuries’ worth of energy. But they aren’t even properly prototyped yet. There simply isn’t time to go this route.

    #77780 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Note that my estimates above are merely for electricity, not replacing other forms of energy with electricity. Multiply everything by another factor of three for that, and we start running short of uranium before we’ve even finished building the power stations and enrichment plants!

    #77789 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Hydroelectric system will be the largest in all of Africa. Installed capacity of 6.35 GW.
    The role of GERD will be to act as a stabilizing backbone of the Ethiopian national grid. There will be exports, but only if there is a total surplus of energy generated in Ethiopia. This is mainly expected to happen during rainy seasons, when there is plenty of water for hydropower generation. Ethiopia has a young population, keen to work, the second largest population in Africa, after Nigeria. Some years ago they were starving, because the rains failed.
    This will also retain a lot of fresh water, flooding downstream is also expected to become at least partly manageable.

    So it ticks a lot of boxes, not that downstream countries are convinced.

    It concerns me that the Severn tidal barrage was ruled out in favour of Hinkley Point C. One twentieth of the U.K. need for electricity could have been supplied by the Severn barrage for the next few centuries.
    Even if Point C produces 1/20 of U.K. needs that is only for half a century. Then what do you do with the poison?

    #77792 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Hinkley Point C
    The plant, which has a projected lifetime of 60 years, has an estimated construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion. The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the “strike price” will be £50 billion, which “will continue to vary as the outlook for wholesale market prices shifts”. Financing of the project is still to be “finalised”, the construction costs will be paid for by the mainly FRENCH state-owned EDF and Chinese Communist state-owned China General Nuclear Power Group.

    According to December 2017 estimates, Hinkley is being built for £20.3 billion by 2025, to be paid over a 35-year period. According to Dieter Helm, professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford, “Hinkley Point C would have been roughly half the cost if the government had been borrowing the money to build it at 2%, rather than EDF’s cost of capital, which was 9%.”

    There are several problems that I can now detect.
    We now hate the Chinese Communist State, so presumably we will have no further truck with them and not be taking their geld?
    We have just upset the French, who are in charge of constructing the project and will be running for the next few decades.
    I suspect the ramming through of this project in the Bristol Channel was partially about having Nuclear Power but also weapon grade stuff for our Trident missiles, so we can stay at the top table of nutters. I also suspect that the Nuclear Nutters did not want the barrage to go ahead?

    #77802 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Michael norton, Sept 18, 09:33 (previous page):

    “Clark was right, we are in a bit of a pickle.”

    It may be worse than I thought. The following is from the Telegraph, but Yahoo financial news has a non-paywalled copy. Remember I complained that the gas storage facility at Rough was permitted to decay, and was then closed. Well –

    https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/mounting-fears-1970s-style-three-092842868.html

    Mounting fears of a 1970s-style three-day week as Britain’s energy crunch deepens

    – The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7% of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands. Clive Moffatt, a gas consultant and former adviser to the Government on energy security, said: “It should be nearer 25%.”

    – …Mr Moffatt said he warned that closing Rough was a dangerous decision in key meetings with British officials but the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy dug in its heels. “They refused to listen and kept saying that we had diversity of supply: they misunderstood the responsiveness of liquefied natural gas to short-term shocks,” he said.

    – “We are now extremely vulnerable and I’m afraid the situation is going to get worse. Prices could go through the roof. You can’t rely on the interconnectors. Contracts can be rescinded and suppliers can declare force majeure: end of story. The EU made this very clear during the negotiations over Brexit,” Mr Moffatt added.

    #77805 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Michael norton, 17:38:

    “I suspect the ramming through of this project in the Bristol Channel was partially about having Nuclear Power but also weapon grade stuff for our Trident missiles

    No. Reactors use up (low enriched) uranium, and cannot produce highly enriched uranium. There is some plutonium in the spent fuel. To make it into weapons it would need to be extracted by reprocessing, but the UK already has a stockpile of over 100 tonnes of quite pure plutonium. It only takes a few kilos to make a bomb, so 100 tonnes is an immense amount. It is considered a liability because it needs to be constantly guarded. The UK has no need of any more weapons-grade material; quite the opposite.

    On the other hand, having nuclear experts and expertise certainly is associated with nuclear weapons, but the naval reactor facilities offer opportunities for those.

    “Then what do you do with the poison?”

    It is possible to use it up in “fast spectrum” reactors and get a vast amount of energy from it, but comparatively very few such reactors have ever been built. Theoretically you’d be left with waste that would decay to background radiation levels in about 300 years rather than tens of thousands. This has been started in multiple countries, but funding has always been cut off so it has never been carried to completion.

    So instead you reprocess it to reduce its volume and recover the useful stuff that’s in it, make it into a type of glass so that it can’t dissolve or otherwise spread, and bury it deep underground in a geologically suitable place. This should actually work safely; there really isn’t a huge amount of it in industrial terms and some chemical and biological agents etc. are far more dangerous, but due to widespread fear of all things nuclear, local communities always object.

    You can see from my earlier comments that I disagree with using typical nuclear reactor designs to make power, but the problems are misunderstood and popular objections are based on fear rather than reason. Both the pro- and anti-nuclear lobbies have polarised the issues and thereby misled and confused the public. I myself had to work out the truth by comparing claims against the general principles of nuclear physics. I am in favour of prototyping reactors that could cook down nuclear waste and produce power in the process. This seems much better than burying reprocessed waste and thereby leaving it to future generations.

    #77826 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Clark, so why do you think different governments have not been in favour of a Severn Barrage?
    It would, for three hundred years, produce renewable electricity of 1/20th of the entire needs of the U.K.
    It would help prevent up-river flooding, at times something that can be devastating.
    Most of the turbines would turn most of the time, this could be envisioned as base load. There could be road and rail links along the top between Somerset and South Wales. It could be associated with wind turbines for extra pumped storage.
    Yes, it would use an awful lot of Limestone, a downside and it might take fifteen years to complete.
    It would provide a model that could be used in other parts of the World.

    #77834 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    “so why do you think different governments have not been in favour of a Severn Barrage?”

    Michael, I do not know. Possibly governments have dismissed it on grounds of cost and its novelty, possibly due to lobbying by the nuclear industry which is very powerful due to its connection with weapons and the military, possibly due to pressure by environmentalists; a barrage would surely have extensive effects upon ecosystems in the estuary, the nearby coast and upstream, though I expect all could be addressed in its design. Probably a bit of all three. It is something I have not investigated, neither politically nor environmentally.

    #77842 Reply
    ET
    Guest

    “Is this still looking practical?”

    I don’t know Clark. As far as any infrastructure project goes, renewables or nuclear, I suspect all of them have a manufacturing and operational time lag. Nuclear has many issues and I have no idea of the availability of the fuels that would be needed. You demonstrate a superior knowledge in that regard. Can you point to sources that might help to educate us?

    I look at the energy mix and approx 16% total comes from low carbon sources, nuclear and renewables. Hydropower produces the largest proportion of that. Even though low carbon sources account for a bigger percentage of total energy over time we are still burning more fossil fuels year on year. If we require to reduce emissions we are not doing that so far and in reality our total emissions are increasing.

    In terms of deaths per unit energy produced nuclear is far safer than fossil fuels even considering the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima (so far).

    I don’t think nuclear is the only solution more that it needs to part of the solution along with judicious deployment of renewables. Wind suits the UK and Ireland better than solar for instance. Wouldn’t it be more efficient for solar to be deployed where it’s liklier to be more efficient and produce more power at least at the national power generation scale. I don’t know what the answer is but I think the exclusion of nuclear is a mistake.

    #77865 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    ET, Wikipedia citations are a good source of links because editors tend to edit subjects they know about, so they cite good sources. There are some crap sources cited too, but Wikipedia is generally better than the search engines because the citations have been sifted by human intelligence. You can also check articles’ Talk pages (tabs at the top), and for less mainstream opinions, scour article History pages for large sections and citations that have been removed. Shills are busy at Wikipedia, but their tracks remain visible and can be a very useful give-away. Scan down the History of a subject you’re interested in noting the bright red markers eg. “-1536 bytes”, then click “compare with previous revision” on the left to see what someone didn’t want you to see! Often it was removed because it was nonsense, but occasionally you hit gold. Alisher Usmanov’s PR company got caught this way (by me! With help from the Wiki community).

    There is vastly more uranium than just the “conventional sources” I mentioned, but it’s all more diffuse. There is a vast amount dissolved in the oceans as uranium salts, so much that dispersing all our depleted uranium into the oceans would raise uranium concentration by about 1%. But extracting and refining this uranium is untried at large scale. After that, it would still need enrichment.

    “In terms of deaths per unit energy produced nuclear is far safer than fossil fuels even considering the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima”

    Whether this is so depends upon what proportion of cancer etc. is produced by radioactive pollution. Certainly the adoption of the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty for nuclear weapons indicate that it was regarded as a significant health danger – and bombs have only kilos of nuclear fuel in them, whereas power reactors contain tonnes. However, on any matter concerning effects of radiation upon health, UN rules require that the WHO defer to UNSCEAR, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. This committee has been accused by anti-nuclear campaigners of being comprised of advocates for the nuclear industry, which itself of course has deep connections to the military and the secret services. Few people have even heard of UNSCEAR, and there is very little information about its deliberations or how it comes to its decisions. For such an important body it has a remarkably uninformative Wikipedia page, and note the “multiple issues” and “relies too much on primary sources” tags at the top:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Scientific_Committee_on_the_Effects_of_Atomic_Radiation

    I have a vague memory that UNSCEAR was set up because of nuclear industry objections to the WHO’s much higher estimates of radiation risk in the 1950s. Mainstream estimates of the health effects of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters etc. are, of course, based upon UNSCEAR’s figures.

    “I think the exclusion of nuclear is a mistake”

    I agree. Nuclear has its place, which I think is amid heavy industry, providing process heat to smelt steel, produce glass and many other things like that. A typical nuclear power station converts only about a third of the heat produced into electricity. It would seem sensible to use the heat more directly, thereby relieving other power sources of that demand.

    #77873 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Investment Consultants With $10 Trillion Make Net-Zero Pledge

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-20/investment-consultants-with-10-trillion-make-net-zero-pledge

    Which is hopeful, of course, but the initial reductions are crucial; we have to halve emissions in the next ten years. “2050, 2050, 2050”, everyone always make promises about 2050. But what about now?

    #77868 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    And both UK and EU gas hit all-time highs. Javier Blas, Chief Energy Correspondent at Bloomberg News:

    Very steep rise at the right of that graph!

    #77883 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    …which is why I’m gong to continue making a nuisance of myself with Extinction Rebellion despite all these promises about 2050.

    It’s like trying to pull up out of a nose-dive. It’s all very well saying “yes I’ll pull back harder on the stick pretty soon” but it’ll be too late by then ‘cos we’re gaining speed towards the ground with every passing second.

    Of course a cynic would say that promises about 2050 are just a way of kicking it into the long grass…

    #77933 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    The U.K. government want us to bin our Natural Gas heating systems and replace them with Hydrogen boilers. |¦| Maybe they forget that the Industrial way of producing Hydrogen is to use Methane as a feedstock.
    Methane is now very expensive. |¦| Surely this vast increase in the cost of Methane will put the Kibosh on Hydrogen technologies for the near term. |¦| Meaning we will not turn the climate around in time, if we mess about using Methane to produce Hydrogen?

    #77940 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    If we are to quickly move to battery vehicles, where will the electricity come from to charge our new battery World?

    #77951 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    All highly relevant points michael.

    I see the hand of disaster capitalism AKA neoliberalism in this, deploying copious greenwash. There are huge profits to be made by impinging upon people’s consciences, persuading them to replace things that still work with brand new “more ethical” versions. Richer people will be able to acrue more false virtue than those who can’t afford to replace things, driving the cycle yet harder, as the money to purchase such pseudo-virtue will have to be earned, stimulating production along with the inevitable extraction and pollution it always produces.

    In the Second World War, Britons and others economised intensively to defeat Nazism. Six years later, that very demanding goal had been achieved. Like lockdown, the sooner we start the quicker we can get it over with.

    #77985 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Clark,
    so why do we think we need so much more electricity than we needed thirty years ago. Well, our population has increased but mainly we have so many gadgets, that we did not before.

    • Mobile phones, have to be charged.
    • Battery scooters have to be charged.
    • Battery cycles have to be charged.
    • Battery power tools have to be charged.
    • Laptops have to be charged.
    • Electric cars have to be charged.

    Fifty years ago if you wanted a cup of tea, you would boil the kettle on your range or gas stove, now most people use an electric kettle, which is much less energy efficient. Electric tooth brushes, electric carving knives, curlers, t.v., radio, juke boxes, Karaoke boxes, x-boxes, P.C.s.

    • Electric surveillance systems.
    • Electric lifts, electric escalators, electric trains, electric trams C.D. players.
    • Electric beds and armchairs.

    Perhaps we should have less stuff?

    #78001 Reply
    Pigeon English
    Guest

    M N 77985

    When I was young and Idealistic I read a book by Erich Fromm and what stayed with me was something like this:

    The market economy is believed to satisfy humans needs but the market economy (marketing and propaganda) creates needs!

    #78009 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Michael norton – “Perhaps we should have less stuff?”

    Yep.

    People living alone and in smaller groups too. So many with their own washing machines and tumble driers.

    But UK electricity demand has fallen in recent years if I remember rightly. Lots of the gadgets (as opposed to appliances) are low power. LED lamps, radios, TVs and other screens – the colour telly my dad bought was about 250 watt I think – it certainly gave off a lot of heat, needed major ventilation slots and smelled of burning dust when you started it up. Your laptop wouldn’t run long on a charge if its screen was as power hungry as that.

    Pigeon English: yep. The market – advertising etc. – indeed creates needs. One common marketing technique is to induce a sense of inadequacy in the target (audience), and then suggest that the product will rectify it. Then there’s induction of habit, eg. Pringles snacks; “once you pop you can’t stop”. It’s literally an addiction and emotional illness generator.

    #78079 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Avro Energy and Green ceased trading on Wednesday and their 830,000 combined customers face being switched to a new, potentially more expensive, provider.
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58657802
    It is thought that in a short time, mseveral million Natural Gas customers will have to get their gas from one of the Big Six providers, at a more expensive tariff.
    How have we got here?
    As Clark has said our U.K. storage ability has recently been greatly reduced, so we are in a “Just in Time” mode, not a bright idea. It is also suspected that Russia has reduced the Natural Gas flow through Ukraine, this is partially to prepare for opening the second pipe of Nord Stream, into Germany.
    Part of the Methane shortage is the suppression of LNG from Iran, by American sanctions.Part will be the troubles of the War on Terror. Part will be Brexit. Part will be the pandemic.

    Is there a strategic thinker in our government, who was supposed to be overseeing Natural Gas supply.
    It seems they have taken their eye off the ball.

    #78093 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    The other possibility is that the pandemic killed the price of Methane.
    Thus the American Fracking dream, hit the buffers, essentially American Fracking stopped exporting of LNG.

    #78110 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Michael, the reduction in demand due to the pandemic caused Russian wells to be closed. Wells don’t like that; you have to keep them flowing. When vaccination permitted demand to pick up not all of them would reopen properly.

    I see there’s now a liquid fuel shortage too. Lots of empty shelves in my local Co-op. All I’ve heard so far is that a shortage of HGV drivers is the cause, but I strongly suspect there’s more to it than that because shortages are too widespread.

    “Is there a strategic thinker in our government[?]”

    Well it certainly doesn’t look like it. Actually there are, but for too many decades money managers have been given seniority over engineering-type minds. Same as with the pandemic, where scientists and doctors were ignored until it was too late. Twice.

    Money rules in politics, but nature couldn’t care less about money.

    #78111 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    ET, I said I agreed with you that nuclear power had a place, but I had again forgotten something.

    We’ve got a gathering crisis, and in the case of civil disturbance, or economic or societal collapse, even temporary, nuclear power reactors are likely to become a major liability. As I mentioned earlier, a warhead contains kilos of nuclear fuel whereas a power reactor contains tonnes. But reactors have to be tended or they will melt down, blow up, leak or get interfered with by unsuitable people.

    When I consider the immense quantity of shit we can see heading rapidly towards the fan, I’m extremely nervous about building a lot more power reactors. If society breaks down badly enough, it would be a tragedy if, just as we started pulling ourselves back together, everyone started getting clobbered by iodine-131 etc.

    #78116 Reply
    ET
    Guest

    Clark, you are correct, it would be a disaster. However, we are at a point where we have to shift our power generation from emissions generating to clean. If we don’t do that we arrive at the same destination.

    #78118 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    So we need to buy time by economising.

    Same as the pandemic. We need to re-localise, cut back on the unnecessary stuff, unnecessary transport, save what carbon budget and liquid fuel is left for essentials like agriculture.

    #78120 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Michael norton, Sept 23, 13:55:

    “…the pandemic killed the price of Methane. Thus the American Fracking dream, hit the buffers, essentially American Fracking stopped exporting of LNG.”

    That’s the information I’ve been getting too; fracking proved uneconomic so it wasn’t developed, so now the US can’t increase production, hence the shortage.

    And here’s what got us into this mess; not starting early enough – the energy trap:

    The Energy Trap

    #78129 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Clark, that would need a brains trust of “Strategic Thinkers”.
    The Natural Gas shortage, shows that this part of government, is not working.

    #78130 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    North Sea Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link

    “From 1 October, Norway will be able to export electricity to the U.K. via a “North Sea link” of underwater high-voltage electric cables connecting the two power grids.”

    BBC News – Gas crisis leaves Europe searching for solutions (24 Sep 2021)

    I have mentioned this before, several times, this is because I think it is relevant. Almost all power in Norway is produced by renewable means, most of that by Hydroelectric. Some of this Hydroelectric potential has been installed to feed to the United Kingdom.
    This is win, win.

    #78139 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    It is estimated that the U.K. is short of about 100,000 HGV drivers – with gaps made worse by the pandemic and Brexit.

    Downing Street said there was “no shortage of fuel in the UK and people should continue to buy fuel as normal”.

    Reports in several newspapers have suggested that the government is considering getting soldiers to drive fuel tankers under emergency plans.

    This is rapidly working up to a Winter of Discontent.

    #78142 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    “From 1 October, Norway will be able to export electricity to the U.K. via a “North Sea link” of underwater high-voltage electric cables connecting the two power grids.”

    Michael, thanks for some good news; it is sorely needed.

    “The Natural Gas shortage, shows that this part of government, is not working”

    … and hasn’t worked for decades. The long-term storage at Rough was sold off in the Blair era, and closed and shut down in around 2016 I think. And of course, that long term storage infrastructure has not been replaced during the five years since then. It still wasn’t replaced even after gas hit empty during the Skripal fiasco, which should have been impossible to overlook.

    #78183 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Natural Gas

    “Gas has a lower carbon footprint than oil. Nigeria is the country with the largest gas reserves in Africa and the ninth largest in the world, so it makes sense to make use of these resources.”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58652848

    “Many see the gas sector as being kinder to the environment than oil, and therefore a viable proposition alongside renewable energy. Gas-fired plants already account for about 80% of Nigeria’s electricity capacity.
    According to some experts, natural gas plants are more than twice as reliable as solar plants and produce four times more energy per acre of land.
    People see gas as a halfway house between fossil fuels like oil, and renewable energy.”

    That is how I see it, too.
    Methane engines have been about a very long time.
    Clark, has said we should reserve fossil fuels for purposes such as agriculture.
    You could make Methane powered combine harvesters, Methane powered quarry dump trucks.
    Scotland is making Methane powered ferries.
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-51114275

    #78191 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Technology is advancing rapidly and in a couple of decades might not only solve the climate and ecological emergency, but vastly improve quality of life for everyone in the world – “Rethinking Climate Change” by Just Have a Think on Youtube, nineteen minutes.

    But first we have to get through the current bottleneck.

    We have to be careful about using natural gas faster because it looks like we’re running out. The UK is hit hardest because political idiots trashed our storage system which buffered the constant supply rate of gas against its wildly varying daily and seasonal changes demand, but the overall shortfall appears to be global.

    #78199 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Clark, I have just watched that vid.
    The bit that has been attracting me for a long time is “Passive reforestation”
    Greenland – Qinngua Valley
    The Vikings we are told were winding down their farming in Greenland at the time of The Black Death,
    last farms petered out in Tudor times.
    So, before The Black Death, European farming, in Greenland was viable, no doubt helped by slavery.
    But the point is, it must have rained enough and been warm enough for them to pursue that option, European type farming.
    The largest Landmass and biome is the Northern coniferous forests/Taiga.
    As the climate gets wetter and warmer, the tree line will go North – on its own, we need do nothing.

    #78200 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    Greenland – reforestation

    In 2005 the first timber was harvested from the plantation in the Tasermiut Fiord – first of all this was done to thin the stand and thereby increase the annual growth in the residuals but also as a project to estimate the profitability in forestry in Greenland. The logs harvested in the plantation will be used as fencepoles at Upernaviarsuk Agricultural Research Station.

    https://ign.ku.dk/english/about/arboreta/arboretum-greenland/forest-plantations/

    #78252 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Careful what you wish for. Destabilisation of the Greenland ice sheet could raise sea level by several metres, displacing countless millions of people and drowning much agricultural land.

    It’s probably best to use the work of the IPCC as a starting point for such reasoning. The IPCC is a review body; it reviews the entire body of relevant scientific papers, thousands of them, to synthesise an overview of how likely various outcomes are for climate change.

    #78258 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    As the price of Natural Gas has shot up so spectacularly, it is expected that people will open the gas taps, to make economic gain.
    Quite likely the exploration of Methane will be on steroids, soon.

    #78259 Reply
    michael norton
    Guest

    “Chinese investment in Britain’s next generation of nuclear power stations is set to be banned on security grounds! Leaving a multi-billion pound funding hole in the plans.

    Nuclear power is key to U.K. Government plans to future-proof the country’s energy supplies and avoid further price shocks, and is part of a drive towards a so-called Green industrial revolution”

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10028807/China-set-banned-investing-UKs-nuclear-power-stations-security-grounds.html

    No doubt the Nuclear Industries will be shouting from the roof tops that New Nuclear is the answer to high Methane prices, they are wrong.

    #78276 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Natural gas production may have peaked. Look up Peak Oil and Peak Gas; they’re well established geological theory, confirmed in practice at countless oil and gas fields.

    With conventional hydrocarbon production, peak production used to occur when geological reserves were half expended. But driven by the need to make ever increasing profit, modern recovery techniques were developed that maintain production until reserves are mostly expended. This changes the classic bell-shaped curve of production against time (called the Hubbert curve after the geologist who discovered it) into a sweeping rise, followed by a plateau, followed by a sudden crash known as the Seneca Cliff (named after the Roman philosopher, who wrote “fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid”).

    If gas production is falling off the Seneca Cliff, the taps are already open and we are fucked.

    Governments, economise now!

    https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-origins-of-collapse.html

    https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/

    #78289 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    Looks like Norway’s gas is in terminal decline; no new discoveries for years. The Dutch gas field that used to feed the UK is now nearly completely shut down due to earthquakes damaging homes.

    #78291 Reply
    Clark
    Guest

    ET, take a look at this – new Oxford study linked in the following article, confirming reports in 2018 and 2019 also linked:

    Rapid Shift to Clean Energy Could Save ‘Trillions.’ But Corporate-Backed Groups Are Fighting the Transition in US Budget Bill

    “Wind, solar, and batteries are already the cheapest source of electricity and an aggressive shift to clean energy makes more economic sense than a slow one, according to a new study. However, an enormous lobbying effort is underway to block climate policy in the $3.5 trillion [US]budget bill under consideration.”

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