"...an electric power company owned by the Swedish government."
Are the Swedes doing what the Norwegians are doing, and what Mossadegh tried to do until he was deposed by British Petroleum? Are they using a natural resource for the general welfare of the public?

And for people who are resistant to trying seaweed, you almost certainly have already eaten it. The seaweed carrageenan is frequently used to improve texture in ice cream.

Oishi

People who work out on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico like to talk about how the sea life are attracted to the bases of the platforms and how good the fishing is out there. They like to imply that oil drilling is good for the oceans!

Jackson is an icon.

I thought the ad was going to replay Trump saying "RRRREEERREEEEREERRR" and flailing his arms imitating windmills. Who does that?
Mr. Jackson should be saying, "What the HELL are you talkin' about."

Sam L rocks.

...and at one moment got the chance to ride along the side of a wind farm, close to a large wind turbine at a very quiet moment.

I can report that the sound of the turbine was not loud, no buzz, nothing but a gentle, rhythmic whoosh. It was serene and pleasant.

A big middle finger to CO2 indeed!

More please...😊

On the contrary, they entrench fossil fuels.

The failed reactionary effort to make our energy supplies dependent on the weather was never about attacking fossil fuels. It was always about attacking the only sustainable infinitely expandable form of energy there is, nuclear energy.

The Germans didn't shut their coal and gas plants when they started building wind turbines. Instead they threw tons of money to Putin to buy gas and finance his Imperialistic wars, notably against Ukraine, a nuclear powered country. The Germans shut their nuclear plants and embraced coal. Their carbon intensity is atrocious.

The belief on our end of the political spectrum that so called "renewable energy" is sustainable and that it has something to do with arresting the collapse of the planetary atmosphere is nonsense. It's not even "renewable" owing to the mass intensity, never mind the land intensity and the unreliability.

Over the last year, (2024) the fossil fuel loving Germans, despite their "renewable energy" fig leaf, have a carbon intensity of 334 grams CO₂/kWh, compared to France's 33 grams CO₂/kWh. Almost 50 years ago France did the exact opposite of what the Germans did in the 21st century: They shut their fossil fuel plants, including their coal plants and built nuclear plants.

Electricity Map Yearly

We have spent over 5 trillion dollars on solar and wind crap in the last 10 years, all of which will need to be replaced in 20 years.

It made not even a weak dent in the disastrous rise in the rate of accumulations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere. In fact, with the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered each year on solar and wind beginning in the 21st century, things have only gotten worse faster. The following graphic below shows this:



Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2)

I have shown that the axis on which the sinusoidal annual variations are superimposed is roughly quadratic, deriving an crude model equation for it:

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

When I joined DU in 2002, I believed that solar and wind were important tools for addressing climate change. I was supportive of money spent on the infrastructure and research devoted to this theory. Of course, when I joined DU in November of 2002, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere was 372.68 ppm. For the last week for which Mauna Loa data has been posted as of this writing, the week beginning July 3, 2022, that measurement was 419.73. I trust - hopefully not naively - that people can add and subtract. The first derivative, the rate of change of CO2 concentrations as measured by 12 month running averages of weekly Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory data, in November 2002 in the week I joined DU, was 1.66 ppm/year. Given the last data point as of this writing, it has reached 2.45 ppm/year.

Let's do something very, very, very crude, just as an illustration with the understanding that it is unsophisticated but may be illustrative:

As of this writing, I have been a member of DU for 19 years and 240 days, which works out in decimal years to 19.658 years. This means the second derivative, the rate of change of the rate of change is 0.04 ppm/yr^2 for my tenure here. (A disturbing fact is that the second derivative for seven years of similar data running from April of 1993 to April of 2000 showed a second derivative of 0.03 ppm/yr^2; the third derivative is also positive, but I'll ignore that for now.) If these trends continue, this suggests that “by 2050,” 28 years from now, using the language that bourgeois assholes in organizations like Greenpeace use to suggest the outbreak of a “renewable energy” nirvana, the rate of change, the first derivative, will be on the order of 3.6 ppm/year. Using very simple calculus, integrating the observed second derivative twice, using the boundary conditions – the current data - to determine the integration constants, one obtains a quadratic equation (0.04)t^2+(2.45)t+ 419.71 = c where t is the number of years after 2022 and c is the concentration at the year in question.

If one looks at the data collected at the Mauna Loa displayed graphically, one can see that the curve is not exactly linear, but has a quadratic aspect somewhat hidden by the small coefficient (0.04) of the squared term:



This admittedly crude "model" roughly suggests that the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste, carbon dioxide concentrations, given the trend, will be around 520 ppm “by 2050,” in 28 years, passing, by solving the resultant quadratic equation, somewhere around 500 ppm around 2046, just 24 years from now.

I’ll be dead then, but while I’m living the realization of what we are doing to future humanity fills me with existential horror.

So the estimate in 2021 was we reach 500ppm CO2 by 2046.

4 years later, in 2025, the estimate is 500ppm by 2044.

While human activity accounts for the vast amount of CO2, volcanic eruptions can release a lot. Significant eruptions release vast amounts of CO2. We've been going through a pretty active volcanic period recently. Lots of big eruptions along the Ring of Fire. Major eruptions can block out the freakin' sun.

Warming oceans are releasing increasing amounts of methane, a more potent "greenhouse gas" than CO2.

Melting tundra is increasing in northern latitudes, releasing even more methane than before.

I'll bet there are more sources of methane and CO2 than we even currently realize, and we may or may not be able to control them.

My point is simply that the rise of CO2 is attributed to more than just human activity. And human activity is increasing around the globe. Wind power, while relatively unreliable and still carbon-intensive, is at least an attempt to "do the right thing," however misguided. I can't fault humans for it. I don't feel like I've been told that wind power will significantly slow the rise of or decrease CO2 in the atmosphere, so I don't feel "lied to." It likely helps, in rather insignificant amounts.

I have believed that nuclear power is the best option for many years. There will be accidents, like with any energy source. The Germans freaked out over Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. Maybe being in closer proximity to those disasters affects how you think about nuclear power.

While I think nuclear power is the best source we have at our fingertips, I also like having a robust wind and solar power industry for a more personal, localized use. And I don't know if ANYTHING we can do will slow the rise of CO2. And I could add that getting other countries to "cooperate" with us has been close to impossible. And now WE, the US are going in the wrong direction.

https://russblib.blogspot.com

It is unambiguous that the graphic produced in my post is attributable to the rising use of fossil fuels. While there have been events in geological time where these levels have changed owing to natural effects, this isn't such a time.

The expensive solar and wind scam - trillions upon trillions of dollars to merely achieve 16 Exajoules of energy annually while requiring the back up of fossil fuels - is not "robust." Rather it's a horrible waste of money that could and should be devoted to nuclear energy. Solar and wind are miserable failures if the goal was to do anything about fossil fuels. But that was never the goal. The goal was to attack nuclear energy, and the consequences for the partial success of that awful effort has left the planet in flames.

I regard the enthusiasm for solar and wind as cultish, a quasi-religious faith. As a former advocate of that faith, an apostate, one honest enough with himself to recognize that the data does not support the religion, I have come to know they are useless, expensive and destructive. The mining required, and the vast requirements for land and sea wilderness disruption are environmentally odious.

I often like to quote the shit-for-brains antinuke Benjamin Sovacool, published, ill advisedly, in Science on exactly how much destruction of the planet he is willing to embrace for this reactionary solar and wind fantasy, while dishonestly calling this crap "sustainable." Exactly what is going to power the mining of the sea floor, clipper ships?

Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future

Subtitle:

A large wildfire can exceed the emissions of any industrialized country. In 2022, wildfires emitted an estimated 5.3 billion tons of CO2. During that same year, CO2 emissions from the United States were estimated at 6.3 billion tons. (figures from the EPA). Are wildfires "natural?" No doubt they are contributing to the total greenhouse gasses.

I suppose the question becomes: how much CO2 can the planet handle? Is there a tipping point? A tipping point into what? Sea level rise of 200-300 feet? Unlivable spaces that used to support life? The science is murky, but wildfires have been increasing in frequency and intensity in recent years. We could make great progress in reducing CO2, only to have the gains wiped out by a few mega-fires and/or gigantic volcanic eruptions.

I still would like to have some solar and wind power available to people if and when other power sources fail. Widespread power outages, including nuclear plant accidents, could keep people in the dark for long periods of time. Extreme heat or extreme cold could be deadly with no local power like wind or solar. People in remote locations, far away from nuclear plants, could benefit from small-scale wind and solar.

The new generation of nuclear plants is promising, but will take huge investments. Someday we may conquer nuclear fusion, but it is still likely decades away. Will we have them in time to save our asses?

https://russblib.blogspot.com

...nuclear plants to "save our asses," because ignorance has won.

This apparently thrills antinukes, who claim building nuclear reactors is "too slow," which places them in the category of arsonists complaining about forest fires, as they were successful with their penny ante whining that led to the embrace of fossil fuels.

They also have their heads up their asses: Solar and wind energy combined have never matched the annual primary energy production put out by nuclear plants continuously since the 1990's, roughly 30 Exajoules per year, despite worldwide vast cheering and trillions of dollars put out by the solar and wind people, and picayune hostility directed at the vastly superior nuclear industry.

I note, with disgust, that the nuclear manufacturing infrastructure was deliberately vandalized in this country, which once, with engineers who trained using slide rules and computers less powerful than what's in a wristwatch today, built more than 100 nuclear reactors in this country in less than 25 years while providing the cheapest electricity on the planet.

Today, China has the kind of nuclear manufacturing infrastructure that we once had in the United States; they have 58 operable nuclear reactors and 32 under construction.

They will easily pass the United States, a country that has become to worship ignorance (regrettably on both ends of the political spectrum where energy is concerned), in nuclear energy production in this decade. I note that the United States has been, for nearly half a century, the world's largest producer of nuclear energy despite the success of antinukes in destroying its manufacturing infrastructure. This suggests that nuclear power plants, unlike wind and solar garbage, last a long time.

Nuclear energy need not be able to "save our asses" after this deliberate and ignorant sabotage by energy ignoramuses, nor does it need to be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is. It remains, as it has been for decades, our last best hope. Nothing is better, which implies everything else is worse.

nuclear waste and it only takes one major "accident" to push massive long term damage to the planet and elevate the costs into the trillions of dollars. When Fukushima happened I didn't see anybody talking about the necessity of going back and adding in the still ongoing costs into some cost per kWh. It should get done. If a huge natural catastrophe hits some wind turbines we won't be dealing with massive radiation cleanup and discharge into the oceans of millions of gallons of contaminated cooling water.

Nuclear has been shown to be a massive problem when things go wrong. There is no such thing as an infallible machine or construct. As we see with Fukushima, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon. Massive systems with all kinds of safeguards and yet they failed and collectively have damaged millions of people and cost trillions of dollars and counting in damages and ongoing cleanup and containment that will stretch for decades and decades as well as creating "exclusion zones" on the planet that will be ruined for generations.

Windfarm Snacks!

TY & Samuel L Jackson!

Scientists discover that standing too close to a windmill may cause (checks notes) windmill-induced vibes, spontaneous tree-hugging, and chronic logic deficiency. Early symptoms include shouting "cancer clusters!" while ignoring actual science. Thoughts and prayers.

And I'm not completely against nuclear power, but I have had solar panels for 17 years and I love them. I'd love to not have to rely on the grid for power, since the grid is vulnerable to disruptions (intentional or otherwise--see Texas). I have friends who have enough panels to make MORE than they use, but they are still grid-connected. I'm all for whatever would be the cleanest source for grids---but I'd love to have a switch to use my solar as a backup if the grid went down.

You go, Samuel!!