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Solar-powered EV's ...
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| so bedazzled with the sun that everything I look on seemeth green”. |
POISONED Part 1: The Factory , published by Tampa Bay Times, explains how at Gopherresources,
"Workers, hundreds of them, sweat through 12-hour shifts at Gopher Resource in Tampa. They extract lead from used car batteries, melt it down and turn it into blocks of metal to resell."
Despite the exponential increase in the number of used car batteries that EV's will dump onto the world, there is no known method of recycling those environmental nightmares, which will lead, as lead has led, to Gophers poisoning the ground, the water, their employees and neighbors ...
Germany's wind industry disaster has left thousands of tons of wind turbine litter to be shipped to third world countries where it won't have to be added to Germany's energy or environmental costs when claiming wind energy as clean energy, or as a zero emissions electrickity source:
"thousands of these turbines will lose their subsidies with each passing year, which means they will be taken offline and mothballed. (Because, like EV's they have no market without subsidies, and subsidies translates in to an exogenous energy source: it's taking tax dollars generated by no one cares how, so of necessity includes every industry that makes its profits via the combustion of fossil fuels).
"the large blades, which are made of fiberglass composite materials and whose components cannot be separated from each other: Burning the blades is extremely difficult, toxic, and energy-intensive.
"That’s Germany’s Energiewende", (German for energy transition) and contribution to protecting the environment and climate!
Energy transition has a nice ring to it, but what it brings to mind is energy conversion, a process that everywhere in the universe, everywhere other than in the minds of EV enthusiasts and apologists, means an energy loss. And that loss is usually translated in to heat. That loss is best demonstrated by the ginormous cooling towers associated with nuclear reactors. When a chain reaction is started in a reactor, it is stymied so as not to result in a Chernobyl, so the only energy available to do actual work from the splitting of atoms is the heat that the alchemy of transforming one element into another creates: waste heat, which we earthlings bask in, or roast in, every day from the waste heat the sun's nuclear reactions creates. Energy, whether from the sun, the wind, or the waves, loses a percentage of the total energy in the system to the process of converting it from one form into another. What we call fuel is merely a substance that emits a high amount of heat when its state is changed from one state into the other. Is it that we simply prefer to forget that natural gas and liquid oil, and solid coal are all simply matter in each of its different forms? Do we all simply jettison all that knowledge we've learned in school once we're handed a diploma? Ask any seventh grader for the three forms of matter, and they'll say, Solid, Liquid and Gas; ask that same student a decade later, as an adult, that same question, and, at least here in the US, all you'll receive is a puzzled look. After all, Why remember anything like that when you can just google-it? So they don't know the answer, they've unlearned it. The vast majority also don't know that the vehicle they pilot is powered by controlled explosions under the hood. A lack of comprehension that is difficult to grasp, given that it's power is derived from an internal combustion engine.
When the power is derived from solar, wind/hydro, much of that heat is lost to the generator, the spinning blades of which, as in those wind turbines, generate heat, much of it ameliorated by lubricants (fossil-fuel-derived), the less friction the more efficient (by which is meant, instead of losing 30% to it only loses 25% in the process of turning mechanical energy into electrical energy, which is basically what a turbine does: they are jet engines specifically designed to act as dynamos.
Now when the energy generated is greater than the current need, one can, with fossil-fueled generators, feed less fuel to the fire, but in a solar array or windfarm, the last thing you want to do is waste the precious sunlight or windpower as long as it is being, gratis, provided, so what needs to be done instead is store it, in batteries, or some other scenario (the Germans are trying hydrogen, which I hope to have a word on later), which means that not only does the solar energy need to be converted into electricity in situ, that electricity then has to be converted into DC power (transmission facilities are generally AC: voltage is a force, and that force must overcome the resistance of the wires it travels over, much like your car has to overcome the friction of the rubber meeting the road to propel it, something cyclists are far more familiar with than are drivers, as a tap of the toe delivers such an over abundance of the force needed, it's never even observed, but cyclists have to use their own muscle power, so are quite aware that the thinner the tire, the less friction, so the further they can pedal on a given amount of carbo-fuel, otherwise kown as food). But in the case of electricity travelling over a wire, the resistance is proportional to the distance traveled and the gauge of the wire, but with Direct Current, that resistance mounts to ridiculous levels once you exceed a certain distance, and Alternating Current helps overcome, but doesn't eliminate, that obstacle. So the loss of energy to heat rises with distance).
Date: 31/03/21Die Welt:
Green energy transition has turned into an existential threat to German economy, Federal Audit Office warns:
“The Federal Audit Office sees the danger that the energy transition in this form will endanger Germany as a business location and overwhelm the financial strength of electricity-consuming companies and private households. This can ultimately jeopardise social acceptance of the energy transition.”
It took decades for Europe to build up its vast wind network, which currently produces 80% of the world’s offshore wind energy (85 gigawatts) and employs over 210,000 people. The Biden administration’s plan anticipates playing catch-up, injecting $3 billion in loans into the industry, $230 million to ready ports, $8 million for research and development projects, and urging the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to speed along a review of 16 construction plans. That last portion is a reversal from the Trump era; a report from the Center for American Progress found that, during the pandemic, the DOI gave oil and gas companies rent breaks on public lands while slapping wind and solar with bills.
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| The new normal ... nothing to co2 here, folks. |
Which reveals the nature of our relationship with nature and the disconnect between it and the economic system that seeks to wrest, gratis, pushing the consequences of its neglect of the externalities onto entire populations that never get the benefits of the destruction thus wrought, "cheap" energy.
In the prologue to his paean to Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris describes the effect of unfettered Capitalism on the US citizenry of Pennsylvania's coalfields:
"Valley after valley, as the train snaked through, disclosed communities as squalid as any these people had fled from in Europe. Thousands of sooty shacks on stilts, gutters buzzing with garbage; mules clopping to the mineheads, hock-deep in fine gray dust. Beneath that dust, men were scrabbling in wet, gassy gloom, earning a dollar or so for every ton of coal they hacked. In a year they might earn 500 in cash, but that cash was subject to confiscation via compulsory deductions for rent, fuel, medical bills, and food that could only be had at inflated price from the company stores: they aged faster and ailed longer than any other workers in American industry.
Mere boys, they began their "careers" at eight or nine, picking splinters from out of the coal breakers until their hands were scarred for life. These men worked ten ours/day, six days/week. They ate coal dust in their bread and drank it in their milk; they breathed and coughed it up until it lay them in their early graves. At forty-five, most were so ravaged by black-lung disease that they had to return to the breakers to pick slate with their grandchildren, contracting fresh black scars until they died a painful death."
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| Children at Work for the Zero-Emission economy. |
Like Covid patients, they suffocated from lungs destroyed by disease. Externalities no one outside of the pits cared to think about. Like energy in the modern world of Capitalistic legerdemain, it could only survive if its true costs were subsidized, in this case by the lives of those no one would know about, using the same conjuring trick then that it does today, misdirection:
"The subtle, deceptive art of directing the public's attention towards one thing (electricity) so it does not notice another (the inhumane methods and environmental ravaging). It can refer to both the effect of a spectator’s mind being focused on an unimportant thing, or the action that causes it".
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| We marvel at the poetic fantasy of the flapping of a butterfly's wing on one continent causing a hurricane on another, yet think this, multiplied myriad times around the globe, will have no impact. |
And each generation thinks they have "moved beyond" the destructiveness and exploitation of the past:
" .... the science fiction of the "golden age" (the 1940s-1970s) was basically technology-oriented. It was hard for authors to include limits to growth in a worldview that saw atomic energy and space travel as an obvious feature of the future.
Both of which proved to be more hype, more misdirection. Space travel today, a full four generations later, is still only for machines, used to spy on us and wage our Star Wars onslaughts against the Flintstones in Afghanistan, bombing "back to the stone age" a country we used and abused most despicably ... and that was before we invaded them ... and yet still managing to be still losing, after 20 years of gore and treasure poured into the Grave of Empires; while atomic energy turned out to be nothing more than children playing with matches, burning down the house simply to fire up the kettle for a nice cuppa.
The company sold 10.74 million vehicles and made 11.6 billion euros ($14.3 billion) in profit. Volkswagen are racing with industry outsiders such as Waymo and Uber to dominate new ways of getting around (yeah, new ways of getting around environmental regulations and OTHER laws that get in the way of profits).
Volkswagen’s Porsche sports car division recalled about 60,000 diesel-engined Cayenne and Macan sport utility vehicles:
The recall came after inspections revealed that the SUVs contain software designed to reduce the emissions controls for nitrogen oxide.
VW itself settled with Braunschweig prosecutors in June, paying a fine of 1 billion euros.
Which leaves them more than 10 billion euros to fund the development of EV's.
Who, after all, is going to trust any VW-manufactured ICE machine? It was a move of pure self interest. Which is all the push to an all-electric fleet amounts to. Like fracking, the rush to make the US fleet all-electric is a desperate attempt, despite any long-range effects that will never be proven, as the result of private enterprise's perfidy is never a problem, whether in a banking industry that deliberately makes bad loans and then shuffles them off onto the public, ratings agencies that are funded by the exact same entities they rate, stock brokers who recommend a stock that their own firm is selling short, insurance companies that take kickbacks from developers to offer insurance in flood plains, tornado alleys, and coastal communities being inundated from rising seas those same industries, via their landslide of financial support of the "Climate Change is a Hoax" hucksterism, are responsible for, as it sanctions their unfettered release of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, but for which they will never lose a nickel of their profits. Similar to VW, they cynically calculate the likely loss should they get caught, and know the only price they will ever have to pay is in a hit to their profits, but one that makes their illegal shenanigans a very profitable endeavor.
All of which is to say that fraud is at the center of the beast because sloughing off risks and the real costs of doing business on to the public sphere you deride is part and parcel of any capitalist system. That is why this is a War economy, as that is exactly what a War economy does. It allocates resources and manpower to what Putin refers to as "Champions", which in wartime means the difference between winning and losing, but during wartime the central government's role in the economy is assumed and the taxation of those favored companies never questioned, as everyone accepts their contribution to the war effort, and therefore their "favored corpornation status", and therefore the necessity of the warring government to tax them as payback for their government assist.
After WW2 this attitude was still alive ... until Reagan skewered it on the altar of the false god of Greed. That was when the transformation of the capitalistic system to one of outright fraud began in earnest, as best illustrated by the Reagan avowal of small government whereas he supervised the greatest expansion of federal debt, and "Defense" budgets, budgets used to pour American taxpayer dollars into the arming and deployment of troops throughout the Mideast into Afghanistan to the detriment of every American citizen, all to do Israel's bidding, the War Department being, as far as I can recall, part of the government, that part least able to be audited, questioned, or investigated for yup, that's right, Fraud. Part of that fraud being AIPAC's moronic claim that being anti War is anti-Semitic. Which points out the importance of words. When the War dept. is renamed the "Defense" dept., even as it steps up its war efforts and spending during a time of peace, AIPAC can claim that objections to increasing the "Defense" dept.'s budget are anti-Semitic are met with barely a raised eyebrow, as "Defense" is hard to object to. But the US War machine is not a defensive machine by any stretch of the imagination, it is a well-honed, all-consuming enterprise that is in the driver's seat of the US economy. So it is to the War Department's spending that objections are raised and to which AIPAC slanders its detractors with the ever-on-their-lips accusations of "Anti-Semitism", even as they sit silent to the failed former president's Muslim ban, which, being directed at Arab countries, actually was anti-Semitic. Countless Jews are not Semites, all Arabs are. A ban against Arab countries is anti-Semitic, but Jews care only about Jews, not their fellow Semites as evinced by their tacit acceptance of the Muslim ban. The great trick of the most conniving religion in mankind's history is to have infiltrated the organs of the media, government, banking and finance, by pretending that they are an ethnic group when they are in fact a religious group. The Muslim ban was more anti-Semitic than any US government policy since WW2, yet the Jews sat silent. By disguising religion as ethnicity, raising cries of "Anti-Semitism" whenever anyone should object to paying so much in taxes they can't afford to send their own children to university so that the US can spend billions on supporting the Israeli apartheid state, Jewry sidles next to Power in a way that Popery never can, as calling someone anti-Catholic as opposed to anti-Semitic carries close to zero opprobrium in a Protestant country that insists on the separation of Church and State but silently allows the infiltration of the Synagogue into matters of state with nary a whisper in protest: Fraud.
So it's not just Germany's VW:
A study by the monitoring organization Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN) found that refined oil imported from Europe (made from Texas oil sucked up from the Permian) “exceeded EU pollution limits by as much as 204 times, and by 43 times the level for gasoline.” Approximately 80% of oil imported by Nigeria comes from the Netherlands and Belgium alone. Dumping dirty fuel is no doubt an important factor in Nigeria's air quality that is among the worst on the planet.
Selling poorly refined product to developing economies to keep both your CO2 (further refining translates into more energy required) numbers and refinery byproduct pollutants below Europe's tough limits. Misdirection. Nigeria reaps the opprobrium of the world and its own citizens while the nations causing their suffering use the profits derived therefrom to tilt at windmills all the while garnering praise from a world willfully blind to their conjuring tricks.
Why fraud has become the most intractable part of modern Transnational Corponations bottom line is that fraud is built into every aspect of capitalism. It is at the heart of the former failed President's hoax that claimed that climate change was a hoax and the elimination of CO2 as a pollutant from the EPA's list. Economists and Environmental writers alike refer to these as "externalities" but they become more and more often, as in the case of shipping badly refined products to countries whose citizens have no say about what industry befouls their air with, a case of Corporate malfeasance and playing one country's laws against the others (for example shipping ethanol back and forth across the US-Canadian border to collect a "Green" fee for renewable fuel).
The average American uses over 12,000 kilowatts of energy per hour, the average Chinese person uses 3,500. The emphasis on building a zero-emissions electrical grid only means that the average American's energy usage will increase, as it has done ever since the Kyoto protocols were introduced. It has, in fact, gone up at a faster rate after the protocols were passed than it ever did before they were. The computerization of everything under the sun has been achieved via a massive increase in per capita energy consumption, an increase the industry denied, claiming tele-commuting would replace the necessity of the daily commute, saving energy instead of raising the demand for it to unparalleled heights: Fraud. It took a pandemic to show the fallacy of that equation to the public, as the CO2 in the 2021 atmosphere still accumulated at a higher rate than it had in any year prior to the passage of the Kyoto protocols.
There are two other reasons having nothing to do with consumer consumption:
1)The Military: the transport sector of the military alone consumes as much fossil fuels as the modern state of Sweden: an entire country's consumption of energy that sits on top of the averaged consumption of every American, making it more than it actually is, and
2) Fracking: Energy invested to produce energy resources. The price of extraction is the highest in energy terms when the resources are obtained by fracking. The only process more energy -intensive is the extraction of oil from tar sands from Canada's Athabasca region. But fracking's tight oil is unusable by most US refiners because they have been tooled to process the heavy tar-like product of Canada, the heaviest of the heavy oils.
As the first fifth of the New Century is now behind us, it would do us well to notice that we can split it into two Fraudulent schemes, not counting the two Wars the USA initiated in order to supply itself with fossil fuel hegemony, both of which required enormous inputs of fossil fuels, and that therefore left large carbon footprints that we can pretend didn't happen, but the atmosphere can't:
First came the GW Bush admiration's selling of the food to fuel program of planting entire States with corn so as to feed the ever-growing appetite of the American automobile fleet, a fleet that was expanding its per-vehicle footprint and weight, necessitating an ever expanding supply of gasoline to keep it motoring along. Any rational country that had to take such draconian steps in order to keep its automobiles running would surely encourage its citizens to purchase fuel-efficient vehicles, yet here, in the country that has had every safety measure installed by engineers to serve as backup at points of failure removed in the name of an ersatz efficiency, has instead marketed to the public the exact opposite: gas-guzzling SUV's that look more like aggressive military vehicles than a mere means of civilian transport.
The result of which, thanks to all the greenhouse gases exhausted in to the atmosphere to first plant, then harvest, then transport countless tons of corn across a vast landscape to the coal-fired power plants needed for processing all those plants, more than a thousand of which sprung up like mushrooms in a dank basement during the Bush regime, all in the name of renewable fuel to make America "Energy Independent". A renewable fuel that requires non-renewable resources of oil and coal in order to manufacture it is of course, a misnomer, to put it mildly. And burning up American coal, coal that was "mined" by blowing the tops off mountains, far from making America Energy Independent, leaves it instead, with far less energy resources than it had before it started producing its bonanza of "renewable" fuel. The entire endeavor was not only large-scale, climate altering fraud, it was fraud that is now so entwined in the Red States' economies that without the federal subsidies they reap the economy of Iowa, to name but one of the anti-big Washington government poseurs of Midwest federal boondoggle's largesse, would collapse.
The next continent-spanning fraud was of course, the fracking of the entire continental plate to sell the resultant light-tight oil to Asian economies all while claiming it would make America Great again. It didn't. Instead, most of that tight oil that was going to make America Energy Independent had to find a home out in the global market, along with the LNG the industry was creating as a side-effect.
So while every American's carbon footprint was getting larger, the actual amount of energy they consumed was not. Because the economy's footprint, super-sized by waging two generation-long Wars while ripping up the plains and fracturing the earth to smithereens, grew to that of a staggering drunken giant as Corporate America burned up everything in sight, billowing clouds of CO2, flaring steady streams of natural gas, and leaking ever larger quantities of methane from leaking wells and active rigs.
And now, as the century's third decade starts to unfold, a third, another Green fraud, is being perpetuated onto a mostly catatonic public sitting in their driver's seats, their hands clinging to the wheel of their mobile prisons while plans are made to replace those fuel-thirsty vehicles with electric ones. An entire fleet replacement of a quarter of a billion automobiles, 250 million battery-powered EV's, will come at a steep, never-mentioned expansion of our already out-sized carbon footprint, as this latest plan, going hand-in-hand, as it must, (similar to the Bush plan: no coal-fired processing plants, no corn-into-fuel), likewise, no multi-trillion dollar expansion of the grid, no electric cars, no trillion dollar installation of charging stations across the nation, (proprietary stations, no less, so that like Starbucks, you'll have one every corner to accommodate the different plugs: no plug-compatible standard has even been proposed, never mind one being on the drawing table), no EV's. All in a country that can't get its citizens to wear a strip of cloth across their face to keep 500,000 of their fellow citizens from dying a lonely excruciating death. This is the country you think can switch to an expensive all-electric fleet, with their range limitations and time-consuming re-charging rates at electric rates that have already escalated to put them out of the reach of the country's growing ranks of impoverished citizens? Personally, I just don't see it.
I recently read a question asked from an article I read a coupl'a years ago:
We need to answer a question that we barely even know how to ask: what will we do with ourselves as a species if we choose not to go extinct?
It was clear then, and has only become clearer since, that that is the wrong question. We have already satisfied the "if", having chosen to drive oursleves extinct, so the question is now, "What will we do with ourselves"?
As we face yet another in a string of long, hot, fiery summers, it's plain that mostly we will continue to lose years off our life expectancy, points off the GINI coefficient, no matter where you live or what your material circumstances are. In the dead of winter we used to look forward to a summer's day at the beach; now the prospect of summer fills us with dread. It is the season of the Witch, the super-sized Hurricane, the fiery inferno, the all-consuming deluge. Rolling power outages imposed on the hottest of days.
Just as the fracking economy was brought to its knees by a pandemic that laid bare the mountains of debt it had amassed, an avalanche of bad loans as hidden as the defaulting NPL's buried in MBS-stuffed CDO's that fueled the Bush fraudulent Wars of Terror, paying for the dropping of untold tonnage of Weapons of Mass Destruction simply because we accused our "enemy" of having, not threatening anyone with them, just suspected of having, Weapons of Mass Destruction. None of which, even if he'd had them, came close to the killing power and soil and water poisoning capacity of the Depleted Uranium we dropped with abandon on the civilians of Iraq so as to inspire Shock and Awe in them (ie to Terrorize them). The Green economy is still the greenback economy, built on the back of the green dollar, trillions of which must be generated, using the only energy source available: fossil fuels, to pay for this fleet conversion to all EV's. Billions of additional tons of CO2 will be added to an atmosphere that's already toasting us like marshmallows on a stick held over a blazing campfire. All sold to a gullible public as a way to reduce its carbon footprint, but will instead do exactly the opposite. So no, we have not chosen to not go extinct, so the question now is, what will we do with ourselves as we continue to lead lives that ensure that we do?
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