pro fossil fuel climate science

Every economic boom in history, from Uruk onwards, had ended in bust because renewable sources of energy ran out: timber, crop land, pasture, labour, water, peat. All self-replenishing, but far too slowly, and easily exhausted by a swelling populace. Coal not only did not run out, no matter how much was used: it actually became cheaper and more abundant as time went by, in marked contrast to charcoal, which always grew more expensive once its use expanded beyond a certain point, for the simple reason that people had to go further in search of timber.  By 1870, the burning of coal in Britain was generating as many calories as would have been expended by 850 million labourers. It was as if each worker had twenty servants at his beck and call.   Not even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that – in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat – it would somehow be good for the ...

High-Level Thoughts I learned a ton from this book both about history and how energy has influenced our development as a society. It’s very dry at parts so you might have to push through, but you’ll come out on the other end with a new lens of thinking about energy and civilization. Summary Notes 1: Energy and Society Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done. From a fundamental biophysical perspective, both prehistoric human evolution and the course of history can be seen as the quest for controlling greater stores and flows of more concentrated and more versatile forms of energy and converting them, in more affordable ways at lower costs and with higher efficiencies, into heat, light, and motion. “Other things being equal, the degree of cultural development varies directly as the amount of energy per capita per year harnessed and put to work ” Only a tiny part of the incoming radiant energy, less than 0.05%, is tra...

2: Energy in Prehistory Human walking costs about 75% less energy than both quadrupedal and bipedal walking in chimpanzees . The brain’s specific energy need is roughly 16 times that of skeletal muscles, and the human brain claims 20–25% of resting metabolic energy , compared to 8–10% in other primates and just 3–5% in other mammals Fish and Lockwood (2003), Leonard, Snodgrass, and Robertson (2007), and Hublin and Richards (2009) confirmed that diet quality and brain mass have a significantly positive correlation in primates, and better hominin diets, including meat, supported larger brains, whose high energy need was partly offset by a reduced gastrointestinal tract While extant nonhuman primates have more than 45% of their gut mass in the colon and only 14–29% in the small intestine, in humans those shares are reversed, with more than 56% in the small intestine and only 17–25% in the colon, a clear indication of adaptation to high-quality, energy-dense foods (meat, nuts) ...

The problem posed by the existence of nuclear energy was that it proved we didn’t need to radically reorganize society to solve environmental problems. We just needed to build nuclear plants instead of coal-burning ones. And so the New Left environmentalists attacked nuclear energy as somehow bad for the environment. [S]olar farms require hundreds of times more land, an order of magnitude more mining for materials, and create hundreds of times more waste, than do nuclear plants. And wind farms kill hundreds of thousands of threatened and endangered birds, may make the hoary bat go extinct, and kill more people than nuclear plants. Nuclear energy should be the environmentalist’s greatest gift: in one fell swoop we could make a serious dent in CO2 emissions. But of course, the more ardent an environmentalist you are, the more fiercely you oppose nuclear, going nuts from just voicing the option (“Nuclear is awful, filthy...

Despite the U.S. handing out up to US$10,000 for each electric car, less than 0.5 per cent of its cars are battery-electric. Almost all the support goes to the rich. And 90 per cent of electric-car owners also have a fossil-fuel car that they drive farther. Indeed, electric vehicles are mostly a “second car” used for shorter trips and virtue signalling.   If you subsidize electric cars enough, people will buy them. Almost 10 per cent of all Norway’s passenger cars are now electric because of incredibly generous policies that waive most costs, from taxes to tolls, parking and congestion. Over its lifetime, a US$30,000 car might receive benefits worth more than US$26,000 . But this approach is unsustainable for most nations. Even super-rich Norway is starting to worry, as it loses more than a billion dollars every year from exempt drivers. Though technological innovation will eventually make electric cars economical even without subsidies, concerns over range and slow ...

Part of the problem is that many people don’t understand electricity. They think of electricity as a commodity when it is, in fact, a service — like eating at a restaurant. The price we pay for the luxury of eating out isn’t just the cost of the ingredients most of which which, like solar panels and wind turbines, have declined for decades. Rather, the price of services like eating out and electricity reflect the cost not only of a few ingredients but also their preparation and delivery. It's why high use wind/solar areas like Germany, Denmark etc. have the highest electricity rates in Europe and California in the US     Electricity prices increased by: 51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016; 24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017; over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.   https://www.forbes.com/site...

  Cheap source of energy. Statistically, fossil fuels are some of the cheapest sources of fuel on the planet. Although the process of extraction and refinement is relatively expensive, the return on investment is pretty remarkable. Safe to transport. Because fossil fuels are safe and stable, they can be transported easily and efficiently over long distances. They can be transported on large trucks or pumped through large pipes below and above the ground. Massive economic benefits. It’s a no-brainer that fossil fuels mightily contribute to a country’s prosperity. If you look at the economies of oil and gas producing countries, you will see a common trend; economic prosperity. Completely stable. Fossils fuels contain carbon and hydrogen molecules, making them highly stable. The constant state of their molecular composition also makes them easy to store.

1 More Renewables Mean Less Stable Grids 2 Increasing Fossil Fuel Use (Natural Gas) Reduces Emissions More Than Increasing Wind/Solar Energy 3. Renewables Fail To Deliver: When Demand Is High, Generation Capacity Is Low  4. Renewable Energy Becomes More Costly The More It Is Deployed … Renewable Energy Expansion Ensures More Fossil Fuel Installation Is Necessary As Backup  5. Biofuels – Declared Carbon-Neutral Renewables By The EU – Increase Emissions More Than Coal 6. Biofuels “Use More Energy At A Higher Cost” And Produce More Air Pollution Than Fossil Fuels 7. Proximity To Wind Turbines Significantly Reduces Quality Of Life, Well-Being For Nearby Residents 8. “Renewable Energy Consumption Has A Negative Effect On Economic Growth”  9. Research: 100% Renewable Energy Is “Unattainable” In Reality – Decarbonization Is “Arguably Reckless” 10. Wealthy Countries impose Social-Environmental Disruption From Wind, Solar onto Poorer Countries 11. Wind Power Harming The Env...

Fossil fuels are lifting billions of people out of poverty, reducing all the negative effects of poverty on human health. Fossil fuels are vastly improving human well-being and safety by powering labor-saving and life-protecting technologies, such as air conditioning, modern medicine, and cars and trucks. Fossil fuels are dramatically increasing the quantity of food humans produce and improve the reliability of the food supply, directly benefiting human health. Fossil-fuel emissions are contributing to a “Greening of the Earth,” benefiting all the plants and wildlife on the planet. A fifth benefit could be added only if fossil fuels are in fact responsible for a significant part of the global warming recorded during the second half of the twentieth century. That benefit would be: Fossil fuels should be credited with saving lives by reducing deaths due to extreme cold weather. Weather is also less extreme in a warmer world, resulting in fewer injuries and deaths due to e...