NNadir
NNadir's JournalSome insight to the environmental impacts of so called "renewable energy": LCA of the Lanthanides.
The weekly readings published at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory (accessed 10/30/16) show that the value recorded on October 21, 2016 (402.07 ppm) is 3.57 ppm higher than recorded one year ago, when the reading was 398.50. Just ten years ago, this increase would have seemed extreme; in 2016 it's distressingly ordinary, rather typical of what we've been seeing all year.
These figures, as I never tire of pointing out, demonstrate in rather unambiguous terms, that the worldwide popular enthusiasm for solar and wind energy is delusional, and that the exercise in throwing vast amounts of money at these international exercises in wishful thinking is a flat and grotesque failure.
Solar and wind energy fall under the general rubric of so called "renewable energy."
I've been poking through back issues of some of my favorite scientific journals in the last day or two, and came across a paper of a type that has been catching my eye recently, since I certainly question the wisdom of investing in the wind and solar industries based on the experimental result of betting the planetary atmosphere on their viability. I would argue that just like many of other popular myths associated with these industries - for example that they will result in reductions in the use of dangerous fossil fuels - that the very name under which these industries justify themselves, that they are, in fact, "renewable" is, well, to put it bluntly, a lie.
The so called "renewable energy" industry relies on the mining and refining not only of prodigious amounts of iron and coal for steel, and bauxite for aluminum, but also of vast amounts of elements that are clearly subject to depletion, several, like indium and gallium, in the short term, in some cases very toxic like cadmium and tellurium, and others very expensive in carbon terms to refine, as well as presenting security and availability risks to their supply.
In the case of the wind and "green" electric car industry, many of these elements are the lanthanides.
The paper to which I refer, which talks about the "LCA" (Life Cycle Analysis) of the lanthanides is this one: Environmental Life Cycle Perspective on Rare Earth Oxide Production ( ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng., 2015, 3 (2), pp 237–244) ("Rare Earths" is an older, but still widely used term for the lanthanides.)
Some text from the paper:
REEs are a relatively abundant resource, however they are often widely dispersed and found in low concentrations, resulting in energy intensive and environmentally taxing mining, extraction, and refining processes.(9) REEs are often utilized for their special luminescent and magnetic properties.(10) However, because they are found in low concentrations, REEs are typically mined as coproducts of more concentrated materials. As such, REEs are typically more resource intensive and costly to recover, as compared to traditional ores such as iron or coal. In the past, the United States (U.S.) produced enough REEs to meet domestic demands, but now relies primarily on imports from China due to lower-cost labor and regulations.(9) In 2011, 95% of global rare earth oxides (REO) were produced in China; (11) the largest REE mine is located in Bayan Obo, Inner Mongolia,(9) see Figure 1...
Here is figure 1:
Some more text:
Of course, a better approach to dealing with the possible effects of "land depletion, water pollution, air pollution, and exposure to radioactive materials,(24)" highlighting "the importance of quantifying the human health and environmental impacts of REOs" would be to simply get all weepy eyed and willing to applaud at any length the billionaires and millionaires who tool around in the bourgeois never never land with their swell Tesla cars.
Anyway, the people who mine and refine lanthanides are not like us, they're um, poor people, and Chinese to boot. It's not our job to care about them, since they, um, well, um, they're far away.
Anyway, a graphic on the processing of "green" lanthanide processing is provided in the paper:
Another graphic about the energy and carbon cost of refining these metals:
I could go on, but why should I? I'm sure we couldn't care less.
We're all in favor of "green" stuff of course, all new stuff, and all of these scientific issues questioning whether they're actually "green" and actually "sustainable" is as annoying as hell. I mean, our embrace of "all new stuff" certainly doesn't mean that we're in favor of being blind consumers in a disposable culture, does it, if someone's here to tell us that our "all new stuff" is "green," does it? Close this post right now and go over to Joe Romm's website, where you can learn that solar and wind industries will save the day, even if they haven't, they aren't, and they won't.
It's not reality that counts; it's wishing real hard for some other kind of reality, even imaginary reality, that counts.
Have a nice Sunday evening.
Jeff Beck and Tal Wilkenfeld at Crossroads 2007. "Because We Ended As Lovers."
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" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Everytime I call up a paper on Physical Review at the library, the software wants me to prove...
...I'm not a robot.
It's a robot though. I don't ask it to prove it's a human.
I'm not a robot...um...am I...I mean...could I be?
It asks me to click on the picture of Albert Einstein, which I do. I probably could train a robot to click on all the pictures until it hit Albert Einstein.
It would be better if it asked me to click on a picture of Alan Turing.
He wasn't a robot, but he knew how to flesh them out.
American Electric Cars Generally Meet the 2030 climate Goals, and Almost the 2040 Goals.
I'm not a fan of electric cars, because, um, I'm not a fan of cars period.
All of the dancing around claims that cars are, or can be, made sustainable is a ridiculous fantasy. The rise of the automobile and the car CULTure it enabled is the primary example in my mind why distributed energy is a very dangerous idea. Other than fire pits and coal and wood burning stoves, the car is the oldest, and perhaps most pernicious form of distributed energy there is and every bit of the environment has suffered as a result of their rise, the atmosphere, fresh water resources, oceanic and other saline water resources, the soil, indeed the bedrock of land masses from Greenland to North America to South America, Asia, Europe, Australia and Africa.
Distributed energy requires distributed pollution, and there is no living thing on the face of this planet which is free of automotive waste of one type or another, and there is no mechanism for remediating this pollution.
I consider that the support for the Tesla automobile, for one example, which is inexplicably popular on the left despite the fact that these piles of future electronic waste, the Tesla cars, are designed for and by billionaires and millionaires is an absurd crime against the future, but no one is asking my opinion.
Tesla cars have nothing, nothing at all, to do with what once were the traditional goals of the Democratic Party which used to be providing a path for all people to enjoy the benefits of our national resources, and not just the ultra rich and yet if one hangs out on Democratic Party websites, one will see people drooling all over one another in praise of this, um, consumer junk.
This said, people nonetheless set "goals" for reducing automotive pollution, just like people set goals for a wide variety of other pernicious practices, like say preventing the wide spread use of sugary soft drinks to reduce diabetes rates. (Diabetes has never killed as many people as air pollution, but no matter...)
The graphic below comes from a publication in one of my favorite journals, Environmental Science and Technology.
Here is a link to the paper, which is behind a firewall, but can be accessed if one is not a subscriber, in a good scientific library:
Personal Vehicles Evaluated against Climate Change Mitigation Targets (Marco Miotti†?, Geoffrey J. Supran†‡?, Ella J. Kim§, and Jessika E. Trancik*†∥ , Environ. Sci. Technol., 2016, 50 (20), pp 10795–10804)
The graphic speaks for itself. Here's the caption though:
Some excerpts from the text:
...Here, we address two missing elements in the literature by both reflecting the diversity of personal vehicle models available to consumers and assessing these options against climate change mitigation targets. When comparing personal vehicles against climate targets, it is important to understand the wide range of models available for purchase because consumer choices are defined by this available set.
In particular, we focus on the trade-offs between costs and emissions that consumers face in selecting a vehicle model. Although cost is not the sole influence on consumer purchasing decisions,(26-31) low-carbon vehicles will only achieve a dominant market share if they are affordable to a majority of the driving population. (Our proxy for affordability is the relative cost of low-carbon vehicles versus popular, conventional vehicles on the market.) Here, we address these issues by examining a comprehensive set of 125 vehicle models on sale today, covering all prominent powertrain technology options: internal-combustion-engine vehicles (ICEVs); hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs); plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs); and battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Our analysis also includes the 2016 Toyota Mirai, one of the first commercially available fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs).
We evaluate vehicle models on a cost-carbon plot(32) to answer the overarching questions: How do the costs and carbon intensities of vehicle models compare across the full diversity of today’s LDV market, and what is the potential for various LDV technologies to close the gap between the current fleet and future GHG emission targets? Specifically, we ask: Do consumers face a cost-carbon trade-off today? Which models, if any, meet 2030 GHG emissions reduction targets? Finally, in the longer term, which vehicle technologies would enable emissions targets for 2040 and 2050, designed around a 2 °C limit, to be met? What role can advancements in the carbon intensity of electricity generation, powertrain efficiencies, and production pathways for liquid fuels play? The insights and choices identified in this study may be of interest to car owners, cars manufacturers, and transportation policymakers alike.
The, um, "2 °C limit" is my opinion a joke. The effort which we are making to meet it, which consists of whoring about endlessly on the topic so called "renewable energy" while burning ever larger quantities of dangerous fossil fuels because, um, so called "renewable energy" hasn't worked, isn't working and won't work, has led to an acceleration in the rate of new accumulations of carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere and not a reduction in - or elimination of - that rate.
The authors use figure for carbon dioxide emissions resulting from electricity:
(GREET is environmental life cycle analysis software that's become something of a standard these days.)
This figure, 623 gCO2eq/kWh is uncomfortably close to the figure for dangerous natural gas electricity, about 500 to 550 depending on who you ask, and it is very unlikely, given current policies which are all gas centric - including the expensive "investment" in the worthless and gas dependent solar and wind industries - to ever fall below that level in the lifetime of anyone now living, although this will not stop the assholes at say, Greenpeace, from offering stupid statements that begin with the words "by 2100..."
And here is what the authors say about the expected use of the cars they analyze:
169,400 miles is roughly 272,600 km if you're looking at the chart above.
So let's look at the chart: The Tesla piece of shit comes in at around 125 g of CO2 per km. This means that one will release, at 20,000 km per year, one would release about 2.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year or 35 metric tons in the cars putative lifetime. (How would you store 35 metric tons of carbon dioxide in your "distributed" waste dumps, by the way?)
A quick Google search suggests that there are between 250 and 260 million registered cars in the United States.
Thus if all of us were rich fools driving Tesla cars, at 2.5 tons per year, - we haven't been, we aren't and we won't be - we would be releasing each year about 625 million tons of carbon dioxide each year to drive.
This is less than we generate now to drive but it is hardly zero.
And let's be clear, since we will never again record a level of carbon dioxide below the current value of a shade over 400 ppm, what we can afford at this point is precisely that which we clearly have no intention of reaching, zero.
The cost of manufacturing this car crap - which will rise as the materials used to manufacture them deplete requiring the use of ever lower grades of ores - can be seen in another graphic in the paper:
The caption:
It says nothing of the cost of disposing of the existing 250 million cars as we mindlessly motor ourselves toward the consumerist goal of "all new stuff" in the mistaken that acquiring "all new stuff" passes for environmentalism. It hasn't; it doesn't; and it won't.
I suppose I'd be more fun if I told you what you want to hear, rather than the truth, but I haven't, I'm not, and I won't.
Have a nice evening.
Get a haircut; save the world.
This post is a bit tongue in cheek, but I came across a fun paper today while leafing through the current issue one of my favorite scientific journals, ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering.
(The current issue has a considerable focus on the chemistry of lignin, the "other" constituent in wood and straw besides cellulose, and in many ways, the more interesting and possibly more useful constituent for producing high value added - and carbon sequestering - chemicals in a sustainable world, not that we have any intention of creating a sustainable world.)
The paper in question is this one: Human Hair: A Suitable Platform for Catalytic Nanoparticles (Dian Deng?†, Mayakrishnan Gopiraman*‡, Seong Hun Kim§, Ill-Min Chung?‡, and Ick Soo Kim*†, ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng., 2016, 4 (10), pp 5409–5414)
One can access the full paper in a good university science library, but I'll put up a few excerpts of the paper here:
"To our delight..." (my bold).
This is what science should be, and occasionally is, "To our delight..."
The chemists here attach gold and silver nanoparticles to materials derived from human here, and conduct a reaction known as the "aza-michael reaction" which involves making nitrogen carbon bonds.
This may be esoteric, but, well, trust me, these kinds of reactions are very important in many areas of technology, including but not limited to, the synthesis of life saving drugs.
Why is this important, and how will it "save the world" (if in fact, the world can be saved, an ever more dubious proposition)?
For one thing, the world is running out of many critical materials, gold and silver among them. While these coinage metals are often valued for their exchange value, it turns out that they are also very critical for a wide range of technologies, including electronics, and, of course, catalysis. Non-chemists may not appreciate catalysis, but in thousands of ways, every day life is totally dependent on this chemistry. By supporting metals on supports like human hair, we can extend the lifetime of these supplies of critical metals far into the future, providing for future generations that we have robbed of so much already.
It's important.
If you think that the collection of human hair cannot be industrialized, you are wrong. Early in my career I was involved in work to manufacture the important AIDS drug Nelfinavir. One of the starting materials for one route to the industrial synthesis of this drug - hundreds of metric tons of the drug needed to by synthesized each year - was the amino acid cysteine. The world's largest source of cysteine, at least at that time - it goes back 20 years - was, in fact, human hair, sourced mostly in China.
The paper has a graphic, produced below, shows a triazol made with the hair based catalyst. Triazols and the related tetrazols are often utilized in medicinal chemistry, where they serve as mimetics for carboxylic acids while conferring several pharmacokinetic and absorption advantages over the carboxylic acids themselves.
Esoteric, I know, but fun, if only in a dorky kind of way. We need a little fun at least until we get rid of that awful orange cancerous growth on the body politic, Trump.
Have a nice weekend.
I feel like some old engine...
...that lost it's driving wheel.
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In the last 3 years, 21 million people died from air pollution. This figure is clearly...
...available in the scientific literature, a literature with which the deplorables in the anti-nuke industry avoid familiarity, since it's pretty clear that they only not only fail to know any science whatsoever, but actually despise science in general, and math in particular.
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)
The air pollution death rate is roughly 800 deaths per hour, every hour, 8766 hours per year, every year, ten years per decade.
And the response from the deplorables in the anti-nuke industry. Innuendo, and more innuendo.
There's something Trumpian about this. Last night the orange asshole carried on about emails, with Ms. Clinton pointing out firmly - and completely honestly - that no secure information was ever breached, and that there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone was harmed by this faux Trumpian defined "disaster."
How is the innuendo here different? Well, for one thing, the deplorable carrying on by anti-nukes, stretching over decades of fear and ignorance resulted in far fewer lives having been saved from death by air pollution than the 1.8 million lives that were saved because of the use of nuclear energy, as noted again, in a highly cited and widely read publication in one of the world's premier scientific journals written by one of the world's most respected climate scientists:
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power
(Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute, 2880 Broadway, New York, New York 10025, United States Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
(Trump, by contrast, hasn't killed anyone yet, not at least to our knowledge, and it seems that the American people will prevent him from doing so by kicking his useless ass in the coming election.)
But the real tragedy associated with the deplorable anti-nuke selective attention - by which they couldn't give a fuck about tens of millions of air pollution deaths even as they carry on about software that has harmed no one - is that they helped promote an approach to the environment that failed and failed miserably.
2016 is now being recorded as a year of unprecedented new accumulations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere. The deplorables in the anti-nuke industry convinced the world to invest quantities measuring in the trillions of dollars on so called "renewable energy," chiefly the solar and wind industry. Combined these two industries, despite this huge expenditure - which might have been more wisely spent on thousands of more useful things - don't produce 5 of the 570 exajoules of primary energy that humanity generates and consumes each year.
As a result, the fastest growing source of energy on this planet is a dangerous fossil fuel, natural gas, without which, by the way, the so called "renewable energy" scam would be even more useless.
In the last ten years while two trillion dollars was being squandered on this unsustainable garbage - which is not actually "renewable" since it relies on the mining of vast quantities of toxic and increasingly rare elements - the rate of increase of the increase in dangerous fossil fuels - the second derivative for those who, unlike anti-nukes, know math - has reached new levels never seen before. 2016 is likely to be the second year in a row that the increase is more than 3.00 ppm, despite never having reached such a rate in recorded history.
So called "renewable energy" didn't work; it isn't working; and it won't work.
Heckuva job deplorables. Heckuva job.
Have a nice week.
Meanwhile Humanity for Hillary Goes Positive...
...Just got to love these beautiful young people coming together to dance to celebrate our diversity and our candidate:
https://vimeo.com/185625717
And on their website, they have this powerful endorsement by Makail Baryshnikov:
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It all makes me positive, makes me feel why we should love our candidate.
Reflections on this year's CO2 minimum at the Mauna Loa observatory.
This will be my 20,000th post on this site; maybe I shouldn't have bothered with the internet all all.
Whatever. As Macbeth remarked, "What is done cannot be undone."
The Mauna Loa Observatory each week releases a data point comparing carbon dioxide concentrations in a recent week with the same week of a previous year and the value of the week ten years before.
Each year, carbon dioxide concentrations almost always reach a minimum for the year as a whole in the well into September or early October. In 2015, this point was September 27, at 397.20 ppm; in 2014, it was on September 21, at 395.31 ppm; in 2013, it was on September 8, at 392.06 ppm; for 2012, it was September 16 at 390.73 ppm; for 2011, it was on September 18, at 389.08 ppm.
For September 27, 2016 - the likely minimum this year - the value was 400.72 ppm
The average value for the increases, as compared to the previous year of these weekly data points recorded at Mauna Loa since their inception in 1975 for all data points, - not just those at minimums - is 1.77 ppm. Of those points recorded in the 20th century, the average was 1.54 ppm. For points recorded in the 21st century, the average increase over the previous year is 2.10 ppm.
For 2014, the average was 2.09 ppm, for 2015 - which proved to be the worst year ever recorded, 3.05 ppm over 2014 - the weekly average increases were 2.26 ppm.
For 2016, the average thus far is 3.52 ppm.
The worst 30 such increases recorded of the 2122 such data points, 15 have been recorded in 2016, including the two worst ever recorded, 5.04 ppm on July 31 of this year, and 4.78 on June 12.
All of our efforts to address climate change have failed.
I have taken some flack over the 14 years I've been writing here for my support for nuclear energy. Everything I have ever written on the topic here and elsewhere may have been a complete waste of time - I spent too much of it calling out, in harsh terms, the complete idiots who despise nuclear energy because they get their information from cartoons and uneducated thugs rather than from science and engineering texts. It was a different approach from the polite attempts to be reasonable, like say those of the great scientist who once headed the Atomic Energy Commission, Glenn Seaborg.
It seems likely everything I have ever said or did about energy has failed; but so did everything that Glenn Seaborg said or did about nuclear energy has also failed.
And we are another kind of minimum, the time when we are doing the minimum to address the crisis before all future generations.
The world is investing heavily is so called "renewable energy." Like my less than important efforts on behalf of nuclear energy, and the work of many highly educated - many great - scientists and engineers who worked on behalf of nuclear energy have failed, so has renewable energy failed, and so, as the data above shows, it is failing, and so the laws of physics require that it will fail.
I did what I could in my thousands of posts here and elsewhere, sometimes at the cost of being shut up, as was the case some years ago when I was banned at Daily Kos by the scientifically illiterate journalists who run the place, for um, telling the truth:
It follows that anti-nukes are not merely enemies of the people, they are murderers, pure and simple, murderers whose weapons are fear and ignorance.
Have a nice of evening.
Comment in: GETTING TO ZERO: Is renewable energy economically viable?
20,000 posts is a milestone, not an accomplishment. I noted in an earlier post here that we will never see a value at Mauna Loa under 400 ppm in our lifetimes, if ever.
Paper in Nature Climate Change: We will never again see monthly readings less than 400 ppm...in our lifetimes.
The author of the paper cited therein, wrote the following about the 400 ppm figure:
El Niño and a record CO2 rise (Richard A. Betts, Chris D. Jones, Jeff R. Knight, Ralph F. Keeling & John J. Kennedy, Nature Climate Change 6, 806–810 (2016))
If you're young, I'm deeply ashamed of what my generation has done for yours, but as old man in the waning years of life, looking back, let me say that the wasted time is the time you will regret when you run out of it.
May we chat again, but if not, as Spike Lee put it, "Do the Right Thing."
Enjoy the remainder of the weekend.
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Member since: 2002
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