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 18th 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.
