NET ZERO:NET NONSENSE

 

      Well I may be back to blogging on energy and its role in our lives. I only have done this to try to understand the dynamics of this complex self regulating superorganism we call our current civilization. I have said that if you can’t understand or even try to understand this civilization without seeing it as part of a complex system and complex systems can’t be understood without using the tool of systems analysis. I have the opinion that energy is the keystone resource of our civilization and that means fossil energy. The most important fossil energy is Oil but Coal and gas are also crucial. Without these energy sources we would still be reliant upon the muscle of our animals and ourselves. Most of us would still be laboring by the sweat of our brows to stay warm and to feed ourselves. That changed when the coal miners digging in the coal pits of Newcastle found themselves knee deep in water unable to increase coal production which was the new miracle energy source of the 18^th century. Europe had cut down its previous energy source “trees.. and now coal  production was imperiled.

   It fell to a British inventor, Thomas Newcomen in 1711 to step in with a practical solution. He designed a pump powered by steam from burning coal which operated a pump to remove the water from the mines. It was crude but it worked. It was not the first attempt at utilizing the miraculous power of steam. In the first century AD a Greek called Hero who lived in Alexandria came up with the first device to try to utilize the power of steam to run a “machine. That insight never developed legs for a variety of reasons  Coal mine pumping technology was steadily improved and it wasn’t long before other inventors saw the incredible utility of steam to use it for powering all manner of machines. Oil eventually supplanted coal in many uses and gas supplanted oil right up to this day.  We have always had energy from biomass(mostly wood)  and some water and wind power but even today fossil fuels are still 82% of world energy. We have economists and politicians telling us that because all this burning of fossil fuels is creating carbon dioxide emissions which are heating up our planet, that we need to reduce or eliminate them if we are to “save” our planet. Instead of getting our energy from finite sources we need to get our energy from “renewable” sources which have no emissions to heat up the planet. What’s more we are told we must try to remove these emissions as well which will in theory reduce and eventually and hopefully reverse planetary warming. We will have to “decarbonize” our energy and if we have to continue to use these fossil fuels for a while longer we will have to invent ways to remove Co2 as well as use little or none going forward. Every problem has a solution, right? This is the solution.  All future energy will be from renewable energy. If we have to use a fossil energy source we will have to offset that emitted energy with technology that remove it so there will be no net increase in emissions. That is the “net zero” part of it. How this is supposed to be done will be by means of technology not yet invented and current methods such as increasing the efficiency of existing machines and using less energy to heat and cool our homes and factories. If you build a Tahoe you will have to offset the energy of that Tahoe from the build to the energy emitted during its life time by planting trees for example. That will keep the energy to a net of zero  emitted C02.  Of course we will try to pour investments and subsidies iinto something more effective by inventing methods to “capture” those emissions. Something is bound to be invented if we pour enough money into research and development. Good old American Know How will eventually save the day. These ideas come out of the mouths of politicians and analysts and economists. They also flow from the mouths of school children and adults who see the damage of a warming world possibly dooming their future.

      All of this activity to reduce global warming or climate change has led to a kneejerk response. Climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels.  Ergo stop burning fossil fuels. It has become a single issue with a single solution encouraged and promoted by conferences and meetings for the past several decades generating more proposals and aspirations from politicians and economists full of sound and fury and to date: signifying nothing!!!  Is Net Zero a stupid idea or one whose time has come? In this and following blogs if I write them, I will try to lay out why the Net Zero movement will be hard pressed stopping the trajectory of climate change.

In fact Net Zero is a terrific idea and one that should be implemented whenever and wherever practical.  But remember: Net Zero is not reducing emissions,. It is offsetting emissions. Reducing carbon emissions should be the necessary ambition to be pursued as a policy objective if it could work. The problem is that a Net Zero framework  can’t and won’t solve the emissions of CO2 in the world’s industrial economies. I will try to show why doing something as simple as decarbonizing our energy supply by stopping the combustion of coal, oil and gas as a crash program is flawed and impractical. That we should do everything in our power to reduce emissions  is laudable and essential but in order to attack this one aspect of industrial global pollution we simply must try to look at it with a big picture perspective. That is, we need to look at the entire world. Think of the world as a forest. We cannot just focus on just one tree in the forest. Concentrating on global warming from carbon emissions s just one aspect of one tree.

     There is likely more than one cause of global warming/climate change and human induced CO2 production by fossil fuel burning is certainly a major cause but I will not enter that discussion. If the major cause is C02 from burning fossil fuels that is a cause that will eventually go away starting in this century. We are past peak production of oil, gas and coal in most regions. It is a problem with a solution and the solution will be depletion. In the next blog I will try to layout the role of fossil energy in developing and maintaining our industrial economy.

Is sugar poison?: review of Robert Lustig's new book "Metabolical."

      I have someone you need to meet. I mean REALLY need to meet. I met(saw) him at a lecture a few decades ago when I was attending a medical conference in  the Bay Area  He is Bob Lustig MD, a professor and pediatric endocrinologist who is starting to be noticed because of his health warnings of excessive sugar and processed food consumption. His lecture to medical students was my first exposure to the evils of sugar consumption. That is, the evils of fructose consumption. Fructose is the evil twin of sucrose, table sugar. Thus table sugar is about ½ glucose, AKA dextrose, and ½ fructose. I will sketch out the damage that sugar, fast food and the gigantic processed food industry has wrought upon the US and world population in the past 50 years. Bob and his research group wrote an article in the NY Times in 2011 asking if sugar was toxic? This was news to the world and created a furor in Big food and big Ag and sugar industries who counter attacked fiercely.

       Bo went on to write a book called “Fat Chance” in 2013 and a companion volume “The Fat Chance Cookbook.” I may review and refer to them as well but this review is for his latest (2021) book entitled “Metabolical.”

      If you want to see the body shapes of America before our current epidemic of hypertension, obesity and diabetes just turn on Turner classic movies of films from the 30’s and 40’s such as “It’s a wonderful Life”. What do you see? NO FAT PEOPLE. Ok maybe a few chubs and compare that to the folks you might see at the Atlanta airport, a hub of America. It’s stunning. What happened to the US in the past 5 or 6 decades?

What happened is  the “Metabolic Syndrome.”  I need to tell you that this is a really terrible term which needs a better catchy name but we will have to wait until someone comes up with a better moniker.

     What you need to know is that the Metabolic Syndrome is a collection or constellation of “diseases” that are linked by a common thread of damage and dysfunction at the cellular level and most notably at the mitochondria, that organelle inside every cell that usually is referred to as the “powerhouse” of the cell.  Those of you not well versed in physiology and biochemistry may even now be struggling and thinking this book may not be for you but you are wrong, with the emphasis on DEAD wrong.

     Metabolic Syndrome  refers to what happens to the body when  fed the wrong food rather than “Real Food”. Real food is what Michael Pollan referred to when he said it was food that his grandmother would put on the table in the years before processed food dominated food offerings. You can tell real food because it does not come with an “ingredient list” or a food label. It is what grows in the ground and on trees and bushes, what lays eggs and grazes on grass and swims and thrives  in open unfettered water. It includes grains and legumes and forbs consumed by people and animals.  Anything else is not real food. Even wheat is not real food if it only includes white flour from the endosperm of the wheat berry. Whole wheat is only real food when it includes the bran and the wheat germ as well as the endosperm which is mostly carbohydrate, some protein  and a few micronutrients. This goes for all the grains. If you grind up the wheat and throw away the bran and the wheat germ, you are left with “processed” food.

    Bob Lustig states repeatedly that consumption of processed food and sugar is the cause of the Metabolic syndrome which may affect as much as 88% of the American population. The primary defect in metabolic syndrome  is at the cellular level and most specifically at eight processes within the cell which go awry leading to improper and inappropriate routing of fat to the liver and to visceral fat which lines your abdomen along with subcutaneous fat,” butt fat”.  It is associated with insulin hypersecretion and insulin resistance. The most obvious manifestation is obesity.   Obesity   may be a “symptom” of the metabolic syndrome, a biomarker, if you will. Obesity associated with the metabolic syndrome is not THE problem. Obesity of course can be a serious problem associated with things like respiratory and orthopedic issues.  Interestingly perhaps 20% of obese people do not have metabolic syndrome and will live long and as much as 40% of  thinner folks may have metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome includes hypertension and cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and probably dementia as well as some autoimmune diseases such as ankylosing spondylitis.

    Accordingly it all comes down to diet primarily and lack of exercise as the etiology of the metabolic syndrome.

  The real value of the book is how and why we came to this terrible situation in which most of the developed and developing world is unhealthy because of bad food.

Lustig lays out a long list of missteps and wrongheaded policies at the governmental and corporate level starting with dust bowl policies and terrible totally wrong recommendations such as the low fat policies put into place by nutritionists misled by shoddy research from people like Ancel Keys in the 70’s. Once industry started trying to market low fat foods the population rebelled because the food tasted like cardboard. Industry’s solution was to add sugar and salt and a variety of preservatives and other chemicals to overcome eating cardboard. Society was  also changing. Women were entering the workforce and people felt that buying boxes and cans of processed and nearly prepared food was so much easier than making their own meals from scratch. And along came McDonalds and other fast food chains that did all the work and got you in and out with a supersized double mac, giant order of fries and a 32 oz coke for less than $6. Over 1200 calories for less than $6.

      Lustig lays out the list of villains and it is a long one indeed. They include doctors and dentists and nutritionists and Big Pharma, big AG and feckless politicians whom he names by name.  The biggest nutritional villain is sugar. Lustig presents data on sugar consumption which was about 15 gm(3 tsp) a day  after WW`1 and  about 40 lbs per person/year  in the “70s to 130 lbs(!!!) by 2010. An important driver of this sugar consumption was soda , sports and energy  drinks  and fruit juices. A 32 oz soda from McDonalds has 95 gm of sugar, 19 teaspoons!      Another telling statistic was that of the 600,000 foods in grocery stores over 80% have added sugar!
And it was not only sugar but lack of fiber  that was damaging our bodies. Removing fiber from foods damages the gut. The trillions of “Good” bacteria in the large intestine need to be fed properly to develop a healthy biome and it is fiber, both soluble and insoluble fiber that feeds these beneficial critters. If you don’t feed the “good” bacteria their proper diet of fiber you get an influx of “bad” bacteria which leads to all manner of problems like “leaky gut” syndrome. The other important toxin is fructose in sucrose and honey and maple syrup , agave and most especially high fructose corn syrup, a chemically derived ultra cheap sweetener. The problem with fructose toxicity is almost identical as the problem of alcohol toxicity because fructose can only be metabolized in the liver and therein lies the problem. The metabolites are aldehydes…think formaldehyde. Excess of alcohol and fructose end up in the liver and visceral fat with terrible consequences among which is inflammation. Fatty liver disease and alcoholic liver disease may progress to inflammatory cirrhosis.

   At this point I need to tell the reader that Bob’s earlier book “Fat Chance” is an easier read for the lay person . Metabolical has about 30 pages in Part 2 that I found extremely useful and valuable to a detailed understanding of metabolic syndrome. But a disclaimer here: I am a doctor who studied biochemistry and physiology and I majored in chemistry. If you didn’t, you may find this dense and incomprehensible. In fact Bob even suggest skipping over it to his excellent recommendations of how to self diagnose and discuss this  intelligently with your physician . I think that is fine but I do suggest the reader trying to understand the disease at the cellular level and if necessary come back to review or seek other sources in books or on youtube.

   One of the more interesting sections of the book dealt with the addictive properties of sugar and other additives to fast and processed food such as caffeine and Lustig makes an analogy with the crimes of the Tobacco industry doctoring nicotine content to increase addictive properties. He also goes to great length to describe why all these chemicals and additions and subtractions to food are done which has mostly to do with stability and shelf life. Recall the stories of 30 year old Twinkies!

     He also discusses at some length what diets exist and why some are better than others at ameliorating metabolic syndrome. It’s not all good news. Some of the depressing revelations have to do with the concept of epigenetics in which the dietary missteps of a pregnant mother influence the health and long term outcome of her fetus. Allowing children unfettered access to sweets and horrible foods like sweetened morning cereals can doom a child not only to cavities but to long term sugar dependence.  Once a person has loaded up his liver and visceral fat and arteries, removing it can prove very difficult to reverse.

     I will let the reader draw his or her own conclusions upon understanding the value of real food and avoiding consumption of “unreal” food.  Over the past decade we have made changes to our diet and now eat almost entirely real food such as grinding our own grains, raising our own livestock and poultry that graze on grass, eating wild game and having large gardens. This can be difficult for urban apartment dwellers but most of us have access to farmers markets where you can look the farmer in the eye. Get used to it. Real food costs more. Processed food  and fast food which I call “fast garbage” is cheap and subsidized and convenient if you are by nature lazy.

 Real food is the key to combating the metabolic syndrome. And don’t forget exercise. Exercise is a lousy way to lose weight and if that is the only reason you do it, you will be sorely disappointed. Regular exercise generates increased production of mitochondria, lowers serum cortisol, aids your sleep, diminishes stress and if you’re lucky gives you doses of endorphins, your runner’s high.

      There is one thing which Robert Lustig  gave in his detailed recommendations in both books which I found particularly useful. He divides food into 3 colors: red foods, yellow foods and green foods. Red foods might be that big slab of chocolates cake slathered with ice cream which you can have occasionally, even once a week. Yellow foods are foods such as potatoes or white flour pasta, high carbohydrates maybe 2 or 3 times a week and green foods are almost all fruits and vegetables eggs  and whole grains to consume anytime and often.  Lustig  does not specifically mention foods I would call “black foods” which should never be consumed but it is tacitly there all through his book if you read between the lines. Never NEVER drink sodas or sweetened drinks or any fruit juices. Oranges and apples, yes. Orange and apple juice juice, never. The fiber in the fruit is the antidote to the fructose. And renounce all fast food outlets. Avoid them like the plague.

   Finally Bob lists what can be done to combat the giant industries  on a political level who have been willfully destroying public health and that of course is enacting laws and issuing fines to the culprits much like what was done to big tobacco. That means laws and of this I am less sanguine. I live in a wonderful state full of libertarians suspicious of the “nanny state” who want to issue laws restricting your freedoms like taking away your guns and now your sugar! I think a more realistic strategy is educating the public that sugar is a poison in large amounts. Use a little occasionally and if it is in the ingredient list on the box, just put it back on the shelf.

    I have just a tiny quibble with Bob’s sugar as a poison concept.It is the fructose that is the real poison. If you simply must have some sweet in your life, substitute Glucose, commonly known as dextrose. It is expensive in small quantities and so we buy it bulk in 50 lb sacks which can be obtained online or in places like brewer supply stores. If the recipe call for sucrose and you don’t want to give up the yummy tang of molasses or brown sugar, try using only 50% sucrose and using dextrose for the other 50%.  If we bake sweets, that is how we use sugar. BTW, Karo corn syrup is pure liquid dextrose.

      Bob mentions in his book that people’s attitudes can change and prohibitions enacted. MADD have sut drunk driving accidents way down. Seat belts in cars were ignored and ridiculed and now who would climb in a gar without snapping on their belt. Even trans fats were in all bakery goods and are now gone. If you value your health and those you love you must read this book. Now that Bob is retired he is finding time for interviews with people like Nate Hagens on Youtube.

 

 Net zero.....Net Nonsense........continued.

 

  I have long been  influenced in this blog by a  scientist named Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He has authored 40 books and more than 500 papers dealing with energy and its role in the world’s industrial economy.

     In one of his books he writes about the 4 pillars of our industrial economy. They are steel, plastics, cement  and ammonia. There are more pillars but Vaclav has chosen to list just these four. The key aspect of these four is that they all require specific fossil fuel inputs. I will take them individually. Take steel. Steel is not the same as iron. We have had iron for a very long time. One of the earliest sources was “bog iron” obtained during the Iron Age from about 1000 BC. These were chunks of  iron that could be obtained from swamps and bogs without mining and was easier to smelt than using hard rock iron ore.  The most valuable and useful use of iron is in the manufacture of steel. Steel is made by adding small amounts of carbon to iron and this carbon can be added from carbon sources such as charcoal , carbon monoxide or coal. The modern productions of steel didnt really take off as an industrial product until the Bessermer process was invented in the 1800s by an Englishman of the same name. Even something as common as stainless steel didn’t come into broad use until about 70 years ago.  The modern production of steel requires, indeed demands fossil energy inputs from diesel engines mining, and transporting the ore and coal to smelt and refine it into a product with the desired characteristics needed by its users. The Bessemer process demands the use of coal. Not only does coal provide the extreme heat needed to melt ore, it is essential as a cheap carbon source in order to convert iron into steel. You cannot make steel with the energy from a windmill or a solar panel or the Hoover Dam. OK, technically it is possible to use an electric arc furnace to melt and fabricate steel but for economical production of steel from ore you need an abundant and cheap carbon source and that is coal. IF coal disappears it may be possible to make steel in small quantities just as in former times by cutting down trees and using charcoal but when coal disappears, so will large scale steel production. It is theoretically possible to treat iron ore with hydrogen but it is far from economic given the paucity of industrial hydrogen almost all of which is derived from natural gas .

    Plastics used in our current economy are made from  natural gas and petroleum inputs such as natural gas liquids. There are hundreds of varieties but the petrochemical industry is entirely reliant upon these cheap fossil feed stocks. It is theoretic ally possible to make plastics  or even any hydrocarbon from  carbohydrates  or algae or peanut butter but large scale economical  production of plastics demands these fossil sources.

     Cement is another pillar that is made at high temperature using fossil fuels which heat limestone to 2700 F mixed with silica sources. The resulting product is clinker which is ground down to a powder. If it is mixed with sand it becomes mortar which has been used for millennia to bind bricks and stone. If it is mixed with sand and pebbles it become concrete which is really the pillar of civilization. The energy involved in making cement is huge and limestone is fired with coal, gas or oil.  In a town I used to live in(Pocatello ID) we had a cement plant that used to fire its kilns with scrap tires until the nearby inhabitants quashed that practice!  This is another pillar that cannot be made by a windmill or a Chinese solar panel. If you think about it, our windmills are hundreds of tons of concrete at the base, steel as the structure, copper, neodymium in the alternator and plastics as the rotors. A windmill cannot replicate itself. It is technically possible to use less fossil energy to make cement but absent fossil energy (or tires!) without FF, you dont have cement.

   The final pillar is Ammonia, NH3 which is familiar to any house husband. Ammonia as a household cleaning chemical represents a tiny fraction of its utility. Ammonia is made by combining nitrogen which is 80% of our atmosphere with hydrogen. Ammonia can then be combined with a variety of salts like nitrate or sulfate to make fertilizer or with other compounds to make explosives. The process was invented in at the beginning of the 20^th century. Fritz Haber developed the first significant method mixing gaseous nitrogen with a catalyst  to bind the hydrogen in natural gas to the nitrogen.  The technique was improved and refined by Bosch at the BASF chemical company just before World War 1 and is referred to as the Haber-Bosch process. It involves using large quantities of natural gas under very high pressures and temperatures. Ammonia s’ most important derived product is commercial fertilizer which was introduced in the 1930s to increase crop production by providing nitrogen cheaply to plants and grains. This one single product has allowed the worlds’ population to more than triple since WW2. Vaclav Smil does not include pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides with ammonia but large scale industrial agriculture using ammonia would not exist without these products which are all made from petroleum.

     . These four pillars of industry consume a large percentage of all world energy and with the depletion of fossil energy sources their production will fall and this fact is beyond dispute, In the future we will still have access to these pillars but they will no longer be cheap and abundant. You cannot replace these pillars with renewable energy sources, so called “green” energy sources. What is a green energy source anyway? Does such a thing even exist?

I will assume that by green energy they mean energy that does not produce CO2 emissions. Is it possible to produce energy or electricity from any process that does not involve burning /oxidizing carbon compounds? I have a degree in chemistry and the only process I know that produces energy especially in the form of electricity are the organisms on the deep ocean floor that use crustal emissions and minerals in seawater. in hydrothermal vents. I  know of no others. So I will say there is no such thing as green energy. The Hoover Dam produces energy from falling water releasing no CO2. So does a Tesla using battery energy going from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds. There is no CO2 produced by the solar panels on the roof of my tiny house to run my fridge or its lights and heat.  But Building the Hoover dam involved huge quantities of diesel and coal to move the rock and make the concrete before it released   even a single electron. What about the energy to make the turbines, the copper and steel and other metals as well as the copper or aluminum and steel transmission lines and towers which demand constant maintenance by workers driving diesel powered pickups. Is, the Tesla S sedan  green? The people driving them must think they are with their virtue signaling behavior as they fly past me going 80 on the interstate. Electric cars like the Tesla do indeed emit no CO2 emission when underway and there is certainly a place for them in some areas, such as countries with dense urban transportation networks and poor air circulation and inexpensive and abundant  electricity. An electric car in Oslo makes a great deal of sense. Norway is a country with almost all its electricity produced from hydro dams with occasional fossil fuel backup from its abundant FF reserves. In fact 80% of all new cars sold in Norway today are electric. No CO2 from the tailpipe and none from the dam. What is not to like?  Can’t we all be Norwegians?  Wait just a cotton picking minute. The physicist Mark Mills who says that  some electric cars will emit more CO2 over their lifetime than an ICE car!  What? . VW recently showed a graph recently promoting their new electric VW in which they showed a comparison between a green VW and a conventional VW. I will try to link the graph.  The graph shows that by the time the electric VW hits the showroom it has consumed 14 tons of CO2 whereas the gasoline VW only 5 tons. As the miles pile up the gasser has to buy gasoline carbon fuel and the electric one does not. The graph shows that by 80000 miles the two graphs cross and by 80000 miles they have emitted equal quantities of C02. By the end of their lives VW estimates that the electric will emit about 20% fewer emissions. I have seen other similar comparisons, some by people not associated with car  manufacturers. Mills says that electric cars are at best a wash in emissions and some certainly even over their lives will emit more than a ICE car!! The VW comparison assumes CO2 emissions at a steady temperature. What about a Tesla in my native Wyoming in the winter when the temperature is 30 below? Or in northern Norway in winter?  Granted the electric motor is well over 90% efficient whereas the ICE is at best 30% or so. But this inefficient  gas engine has a real advantage in a cold climate as its waste heat can be used to heat the car’s interior as well as parts of the engine and transmission. You can also fill up your ICE car in a few minutes in Wyoming. How long would you have to stand outside to charge up your Tesla? Lithium batteries perform very poorly if they are not kept warm. If you leave your cell phone in your car in Wyoming overnite in the winter you will have no usable phone in the morning. Here is some more battery info. A typical 1000 lb lithium VW battery will involve mining  500,000 lbs of the earth for its  battery components.  Here are the components in this battery: about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics.  I have also read as much as 1000 grams of silver. These are scarce  metals not even mined in the US. They are refined almost entirely in China, not in the US\. That is the amount in the base  model, the Tesla S. The nicer Tesla Y has a battery over 1700 lbs. This gives the deluxe Tesla a weight of over 5300 lbs empty, the size of  my 1998  Tahoe. Then of course there is the source of the charging current for your electric car. Most , produced electricity, 70% or so is  from Coal and natural gas. The US is not Norway or Canada with abundant hydro. The C02 is emitted  elsewhere if you are buzzing around Silicon Valley.  They may be released in SW Wyoming at our Jim Bridger Coal plant which exports electricity to California.  Out of sight out of mind. All the emissions to make these batteries are emitted  not where the car is driven but somewhere else. The only conclusion I can make is that Electric cars may not be  any greener than my aging Corolla . One of the worst things about these battery powered cars is that the battery is not recyclable even with all these scarce and expensive metals. The same is true of most of the batteries in today’s electronics. The world is burning through declining quantities of expensive diminishing metals and minerals and they will all end up in a landfill. At least when my little Toyota goes to heaven you will be able to recover much of the steels and aluminum.  Next we will talk about where all the materials to make these unrecyclable batteries come from and since none of it is recyclable, how long will these reserves last?

The Green New Deal & Net Zero=Net Nonsense!

 

Well I may be back to blogging on energy and its role in our lives. I only have done this to try to understand  the dynamics of this complex self regulating superorganism we call our current industrial civilization. I have said that if you can’t  understand or even try to understand this civilization without seeing it as part of a complex system.  Complex systems can’t be understood without using the tool of systems analysis. I have long held  the opinion that energy is the keystone resource of our civilization and that means fossil energy, oil coal and gas. Without these energy sources we would still be reliant upon our  muscles  and those of our animals. Most of us would still be laboring by the sweat of our brows to stay warm and to feed ourselves. That changed  when the coal miners laboring in the coal pits of Newcastle  found themselves knee deep in water unable to increase coal production which was the new miracle energy source of the 18^th century. Europe had cut down its previous "energy source” ..,.,trees.. and now coal was imperiled.

   It fell to a British inventor, Thomas Newcomen in 1711 to step in with a practical solution. He designed an engine  powered by steam from burning coal which ran a pump to remove the water from the mines. It was crude but it worked. It was not the first attempt at utilizing the miraculous power of steam. In the first century AD a Greek called Hero who lived in Alexandria came up with the first device to try to utilize the power of steam to run a “machine.” For a variety of reasons that insight never developed legs. The coal mine pumping technology using steam power was steadily improved and it wasn’t long before other inventors saw the incredible utility of steam to use  for powering all manner of machines. Oil supplanted coal in many  traditional manual labor uses and gas supplanted oil right up to this day. Fossil fuels still power our civilization. Nowadays oil fuels transportation and is the feed stock of most of our  organic chemicals.Coal manufactures cement and other  high heat requiring manufacturing and  generates electricity  along with natural gas. We have always had biomass energy (mostly wood) for heat and metal smelting  and some water and wind power but even today fossil fuels are still 82% of world energy.We have economists and politicians  and pundits telling us that because all this burning of fossil fuels is creating carbon dioxide emissions which are heating up our planet, that we need to reduce  or eliminate them if we are to “save” our planet. Instead of getting our energy from  finite sources we need to get our energy from “renewable” sources which have no emissions to heat up the planet. What’s more we are told we must try to remove these  already circulating existing emissions as well which will in  their opinion  reduce and eventually reverse planetary warming. We will have to “decarbonize” our energy supply and electrify everything in sight.  Every problem has a solution, right? This is their solution.  All  future energy will be from renewable energy. If we have to use a fossil energy source we will have to offset that emitted energy with  techniques that remove CO2  so there will be no net increase in emissions. That is the “net zero” part of it. Note that this activity does nor reduce or eliminate emissions. Emissions  can stay the same or even increase as long as these emissions are offset. How this is supposed to be done will be by means of  an economical technology not yet invented and current methods such as increasing the efficiency of existing machines and using less energy to heat and cool our homes and factories producing the pillars of our civilization.. If you build a Tahoe you might  offset the energy of that Tahoe from the build to the fuel purchased during its life time by planting trees, for example. That will keep the energy to a net  zero C02.  Of course  the government  will pour investments and subsidies into something more effective by inventing something to sequester or capture those emissions such as CCS, Carbon ,Capture, and storage. Something else is bound to be invented if we pour enough money into research and development. Good old American Know How will eventually save the day. These ideas come out of the mouths of politicians and analysts and economists and not physicists or scientists. They also flow from the mouths of passionate and worried  school children and adults who  see the damage of a warming world  dooming their future.

      All of this activity to reduce global warming or climate change  has led to a kneejerk response. Climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels.  Ergo stop burning fossil fuels. It has become a single issue with a single solution encouraged and promoted by conferences and meetings for the past several decades generating more proposals and aspirations and resolutions  from politicians and economists full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. Except for a brief Covid pause, emissions continue to increase. In this and the following blogs if I write them, I will try to lay out why the Net Zero construct will be unable to stop the trajectory of climate change.  Net Zero  is a delusional idea underlain with specious assumptions and magical  uninformed  and naive thinking.

       Reducing methane and CO2 emissions is a terrific idea and one that should be implemented whenever and wherever practical.   The problem is that  a Net Zero methodology can't and  wont solve the emissions of heat inducing planetary gasses in the worlds industrial economies. I will try to show why doing something as  seemingly simple as decarbonizing our energy supply by stopping the combustion of coal, oil and gas as a crash program is flawed and impractical. That we should do everything in our power to  reduce emissions  is laudable and essential but in order to attack this one aspect of industrial global pollution, we simply must try to look at it with a big picture perspective. The issue should be  not reducing emissions  but reducing all forms of energy and offsetting emissions with practical and proven  simple and enactable measures, such as planting trees.  We need to look at all aspects of  the entire world's economic, industrial, financial and ecological system..Think of the world as a forest. We cannot just focus on just  one tree in the forest. Concentrating on global warming is just one aspect of one tree. We must look at all the trees as components of the entire system.

     There is likely more than one cause of global warming. Human induced CO2 production by fossil fuel burning is probably the  major cause but I will not enter that discussion. If the major cause is C02 from burning fossil fuels, that is a cause that will eventually begin to abate starting in  this century. We are past peak production of oil, gas and coal in most regions. It is a problem with a solution and the solution will be depletion. In the next blog I will try to layout the role of fossil energy in  developing and maintaining  our industrial economy.