Environmental Nightmares
Good news doesn’t sell so let me give some bad news so I can make some money. Over the last fifty years we have seen the environment assaulted by one disaster after another. The Love Canal, Exxon Valdez, Chernobyl, zinc smelters al the Gore family, mercury in rivers, lead shot, auto exhaust, and a host of others easily come to mind. Some were real, like the Love Canal, Exxon Valdez, zinc smelting, and Chernobyl. Some were questionable and probably not valid like lead shot and fluorocarbons. Some of these were just plain junk science but they have been accepted and are being ‘fixed’ on political whim.
Now let’s look at some of the real nightmares that are being ignored.
1) Mercury and other pollutant content in compact fluorescents (CF’s) is significant. Yes, they are claiming to be reducing the hazardous content but this information comes from the producers, the Chinese Industry that has also committed repeated violations in lead content in toys.
Thirty years ago mercury was the focus of the environmental movement. It was the boogey man in tuna. It was poisoning everything. We had to get rid of it. We even did both prudent and stupid things to reduce mercury content. Taking it out of things was a good idea but at times we replaced it with something that was either as dangerous or less effective. And we helped the environment. But like a person with ADD the environmentalists have lost focus, moved on and now mercury isn’t important! Actually it is not important because removing it is not an environmental darling. If mercury was a problem then, it still is. If it isn’t a problem now it wasn’t a problem then so why the fuss? Or is it only a pollutant if it is being pushed by an environmental cause or violates the current environmentalist mantra? That is really the issue.
I believe indiscriminate dumping of any pollutant is a problem but we can go bonkers on things and engage in stupid remediation that is not necessary. The 80-20 rule is generally good. We can do 80% with 20% of the cost. Doing the other 20 costs 80%.
2) Shutting down nuclear power plants. Each nuclear plant shut down makes us more dependent on coal, foreign oil and natural gas. It raises the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere as we burn more fossil fuel to make electricity. France generates nearly ninety percent of its electricity with nuclear. It EXPORTS a significant amount of electricity to neighbors. France uses AMERICAN reactor design! I want to repeat that. France uses AMERICAN reactor design! Do you really think the French could actually design a reactor that worked? We don’t use the design because of Hanoi Jane Fonda’s movie ‘The China Syndrome’ which is based on fear, not science. Few have read the information on TMI. They just know Jane’s movie and what the major networks told them. Most of this was preliminary, over hyped and inaccurately reported news. Few know the TMI core was uncovered TWICE and it didn’t breach the containment. Much of what went wrong there was based on regulatory malpractice, management stupidity and lack of training. The operators followed a management directive that violated good safety practices.
Somehow we believe Hanoi Jane when neither she nor the writer of China Syndrome really have no credibility as a scientist. None, zilch, nada. I doubt Jane could recognize a reactor if it fell on her unless it was labeled and I am nor sure of that. Remember Jane the non-scientist who can’t even recognize our enemies in the film said that if the core was uncovered it would melt to China? TMI proved Jane a false prophet and disproved the China Syndrome in spite of abuse of the reactor by the operators. They uncovered the core twice and it still held. As bad as Chernobyl was, in spite of poor design and bad handling it also disproved it too. Allow me to restate that. These two reactors weren’t anywhere near the best available reactor designs nor were they being run well. Inept would be a valid word to describe the operating teams. Both reactors were being abused by their operators at management direction. The TMI operators weren’t even the B team when it came to running a reactor. Check the NRC reports. Chernobyl was being tested at well over a hundred percent output. It was being stressed! It went bad, the operators were not able to get it under control and the rest is history. But nuclear power in the US died with the false prophet Jane Fonda’s profits. Her career was built on lies and traitorous acts and yet people go to her movies. I don’t. Such is the leadership of the radical left and the environmental movement, liars, thieves, charlatans and fakers. We will talk about Al Gore later because he is far above them in being despicable.
3) Opposition to wave motion and wind power. Wave motion and wind power are not the answer to our energy needs. They are not even a significant part of that answer. But they do have a place in our energy plan. Our current energy plan is like the document that starts out, “In the beginning was the plan and then came the assumptions. And darkness was on the faces of the workers and they said, “It is a crock of shit and it stinketh.” But some of the most powerful politicians, Ted Kennedy and Bobbie Jr. who talk a good talk have opposed a very viable costal wind farm for ‘environmental’ reasons! Bobbie called it ‘polluting’! Why? Because it impacted the view from the Kennedy mansion! So much for the environment! So much for equality. It can mess up my back yard but not the back yard of the self proclaimed American Royal family! How can the environmentalists allow this? Why isn’t Al Gore flying his oil guzzling jet there to protest? Like everything environmental, it is not real science, it is junk science, money and politics. And worse it is tied to America hating people like George Soros and Barak Obama. Yes, these two want to bring down the US as a powerful nation.
Side note: I think Bobbie Jr. is adopted. His mental level tells me he is not RFK’s kid.
4) Solar cells. Millions of square feet of these are being made because they are darlings of the environmental movement. The producers claim they have an expected useful life of ten years and frankly, it is probably half of that because technology is rapidly increasing their efficiency and lowering their cost. I would install about two KW of them right now but I see the price falling while the outputs are going up. I don’t buy investment stocks when the price is falling, why would I invest in a technology I will be able to buy for thirty percent less in two or three years? The cells being sold today will probably have half the output of cells produced in three or so years and in a couple years cost less.
There is another far more serious environmental issue. If it were just the two hundred million two inch square photovoltaic cells on yard lights, or even the hundred thousand four square foot ones used in remote areas, fine. Together this is equivalent to two thousand house roofs. But what happens when we start covering a couple hundred thousand roofs? The amount of photovoltaic material goes up several hundred times. And BTW, the government gets clipped to the tune of about $ 3000 for each home or $ 300,000,000 for every hundred thousand homes. Barak needs that tax money. Joe Biden says paying it is patriotic. The left is schizoid. The bible says wisdom is known or its own children. If you don’t understand that it is no wonder you are duped by the left.
They are now making shingles with the cells and whole roofs are being covered. When they start going bad they go to the land fill, in one half the time of a regular roof and with some really nasty organic chemicals and heavy metals! They are also driving some nasty chemical plants and environmentally devastating mining. Planned recovery and reuse is needed NOW before we start putting this into landfills and propagating another Love Canal type of environmental disaster! In case you didn’t get it the manufacture of these uses even more nasty chemicals and produces nasty waste. If this was an industry that supported the auto industry it would be targeted for shutdown.
In 2009 world power generation was 4800 GW (that is Giga Watts) with photovoltaic being less than 24 GW which appears to be 0.5 percent. This is false, it is far less than that because it functions less than twelve hours a day and at reduced values some days. It is probably realistically less than 0.1 percent.
5) Hybrid Cars. There is no doubt these save fuel. But are they ecologically sound? Are they safe? Should they be experimental or placed into production? Are they the answer to a problem or are they a diversion that feels good? Is it possible they are neither a long-term solution or are they not even a short term band aid. Are they possibly nothing more than an environmentalist placebo?
They do save fuel in miniscule amounts. But it comes at a very high ENVIRONMENTAL price. The environmental movement damns the electronics industry for the chemicals used in batteries but the same battery technologies, Nickel Metal Hydride and lithium ion, that are decried as polluting by the environmentalists when used in portable computers are used in the hybrids. Sure, we have more laptops than cars, but a hybrid battery is more than the size of over eight hundred laptop batteries! Two thousand hybrids use more chemicals and lithium than well over a million laptops. There are other issues of having a large high voltage battery in a vehicle.
One of the big fire risks in an accident is a heavy current short circuit and this is with a twelve volt battery that can produce a couple of KW of heat for a few minutes, twelve volts at over a hundred amperes. The hybrid batteries can produce many times that amount. They are typically about three hundred volts and can produce several hundred amperes. Three hundred volts at two hundred amperes is sixty KW. This is the amount of heat produced by a small home furnace. A short will get white hot in less than a second. In addition there are wires in the car carrying three hundred volts that can be a shock hazard. Too many people think battery, no shock hazard. That electric socket in your home has one hundred ten volts and it can kill you. Three hundred volts of DC is more dangerous to anyone around including rescuers. A nine volt battery shorted in a purse can cause a fire. This is far above that.
6) Electric cars. Everything that is said about hybrids, pollution from batteries for example can be said for electric cars. And there is another issue the environmentalists ignore. I will ask three questions that are the big ones about electric cars. They are about speed, safety and range. There are partial solutions to them, solutions that already exist!
I have looked at an electric, not the government subsidized and over priced roller skates which should be called the Obamamobile but a conversion kit for a Ford Fiesta or VW class chassis. At about ten thousand dollars for the chassis, kit and work it is a very shaky investment with a common sense look. If the hardware price fell about a thousand dollars it would be a winner for me as a commuter car. The problem is, “Where is the electricity coming from?” Electricity does not “just happen.” The environmentalists know that. But they can ignore that fact to promote hatred of the internal combustion engine. That device has created personal freedom at a high level in cars, cycles, and aircraft. Despots and tyrants everywhere including in the US government hate it and have marshaled their fellow travelers, the environazis to destroy it.
If we were to magically develop a battery that charges on less than fifteen minutes, stored five times the energy per pound of today’s best Lithium’s, and could produce a car using them at less than the current comparable model, implemented an electric car program, power distribution in the U.S. would be in serious trouble. Over the last thirty years power conservation has been effective. We have built very few plants. But an electric car that is driven forty miles a day would more than roll back all gains and overtax the system before five percent of the cars were replaced. Home solar generation isn’t the answer. When the car needs charged overnight the sun is on the other side of the world. To do it with solar a set of batteries would have to be in the home during the day to either replace the ones in the car or charge them overnight! The second set of batteries for the kit car above would be over a thousand dollars, at the most a fifth of the ones in the Obamamobiles. I can’t see a second set of expensive batteries. Add to that the efficiency loss of double charging.
An electric car that needed ten horsepower average for an hour would need nearly fifteen KWH per day to charge batteries. An electric car would increase my electric usage more than twenty five percent! If one in five homes got an electric car that is five percent total usage. Power systems in many areas of the country, California for example, could not handle it. California would need the equivalent of at least one TMI unit one to go five percent electric cars! And they are closing nuclear and coal burning power plants. California is at this time committing suicide politically, educationally, financially, morally, in energy and socially. It is just a race to see which will get them.
Now there are those who will bring up “off peak” usage by charging at night. First we have the Hollywood crowd with their incandescent Malibu lighting of their estates that burns this. In addition, hydro uses water of which there is limited supply no matter when it provides power. The idiot enviroloonies haven’t thought this through. And they will not.
7) Hydrogen. This is the environmental darling. It burns to produce water. Actually the water coming out of a fuel cell has some pollutants. But you can’t mine hydrogen. It would probably be an environmental disaster if you could. If we start using it within twenty years Al Gore will be selling hydrogen credits to people who will cut their hydrogen use.
There are several ways to make it. Generally you make it by cracking water into H2 and O2 by electrolysis. The electrical power to crack the water is a little more than if you ran an extension cord to the car or charged a battery from the power line. It is less than a hundred percent efficient. The best estimate is from burning coal to make electricity till you get the energy in the car at least thirty percent is lost in generators, transmission lines and transformers. If you remember the movie about the plants making heavy water in Norway in World War 2, they were placed there because they were close to the rivers that produced the electricity to reduce the power loss in transmission. Think about why that makes sense. You need more energy to compress the H2 for storage and transport. The other way to produce hydrogen is by a chemical process that involves using an acid reacting with a metal, usually zinc. This has terrible environmental issues. By the way, this environmental nightmare, zinc smelting is where Al Gore’s family made the money he used to go to divinity school. This certainly qualifies him as an environmental expert. The polluter got religion but not enough to give away his money to clean up the mess his family made.
Now let’s throw in one other problem. Hydrogen is the fuel that the shuttle uses, what caused the bang when Challenger blew up. Sure there was a lot of it but a small tank is still a bomb.
So we can safely conclude, the environmentalists are destroying our environment and the economy while working with the enemies of freedom, both overseas and on shore to enslave us. If you doubt the duplicity go to your local environmental group’s next meeting. Don’t go inside. Check the number of gas guzzlers in the parking lot! They are committed to taking your freedom but as the elite they get special perks. This is actually the plan of Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto.
B
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Tags: Environmental, Nightmares
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