Babies Miraculously Saved from Tornado in Bathtub.

The BVM Stirs things up.

Ripped from today's headline:

"Babies Miraculously Saved from Tornado in Bathtub"; one can only assume it was one in which the BVM was ensconced. Being so close to Christmas, one can't help but wonder if one of the bairns wasn't the Christ himself ... or themselves, clumsily using the plural to ensure gender neutrality (If you take CIS from "Christ", it leaves, HRT, which means, His/Her Royal Trannie). How else explain the miracle of a tornado in a bathtub?

From the Desmog blog:

"And amidst all this turmoil, the push for an energy transition away from fossil fuels drives onward." That's just one of the many disconnects that the one-eye-blind approach to the intensification of Climate Derangement leaves the world's energy consumers blind-sided by, as the steady increase of CO2 and the concomitant explosive increase in methane is occurring simultaneously with that so-called, much-ballyhooed, "energy transition." 

Since that sentence should more accurately read, "The push for an energy transition away from fossil fuels is what drives Climate Change onward," because there has never been, nor will there ever be, an "energy transition." The energy powering the PC I'm using to write this post has changed not one iota since I started using PC's in the nineties. The fuel used to produce that energy may have changed, but that doesn't mean there's been an energy transition. The electricity produced by a nuclear reactor is electric energy, and that produced by a windfarm is in that same form: electric energy. So the only "transition" one can really talk about is the transition from using natural gas to produce heat to using electricity produced by natural gas to produce heat. So NatGas use, far from being mitigated, increases. But that doesn't make it an energy transition.

But in the home, mixed sources of energy inputs has now been, more and more often, transitioned into all-electric, as opposed to the mix of electric and NG. But that is far from a good thing. It is in fact, in terms of total energy and total CO2 produced, a big negative. Not to mention the benefit of having two sources of energy instead of a single source, the loss of which leaves the household powerless. As the weather regime becomes increasing volatile, having energy delivered by an underground infrastructure has distinct advantages, so what do they do? Deprive every citizen of the ability to have it delivered via an existing underground pipeline network, the largest in the world, and leaving it increasingly vulnerable to electric outages caused by tornados and hurricanes, which are increasingly popping up in places where they have never occurred before, ripping up power poles. Plus, using natural gas to produce heat at the location where it is needed is far more efficient than  producing electricity with that same fuel thousands of miles away and shipping it over transmission lines to the site where it must use ramped-up resistance to its flow, which is how heat from electricity is produced, but reduces the efficiency of heat production from ~ 65% for NG ( the remaining 35 percent is wasted through combustion and ventilation) to the efficiency of the power plant (between 30-60% before it's shipped across transmission lines). In Germany, for example, resistive heating is almost non-existent in new houses. Electricity is far too expensive for that (which it would be here, were it not for government subsidies to solar and wind farms and cheap NG from fracking, which NG is rapidly being shipped out of the country at a record pace via the US LNG industry which, a mere five years after its inception, is the largest in the world. That is not energy transition but energy transiting: from the US to US competitors). Heat pumps are used regularly in Germany, but not as often as e.g. natural gas. Producing heat via the clamping of electron flow means, since V=IR, that current flow decreases to a miniscule amount as resistance to its flow increases, so more voltage is required to produce a given current ... it is that resistance that creates heat in certain materials, so a large increase in Voltage is necessary, and that voltage is produced by burning more natural gas in the power plant to heat homes thousands of miles away, delivering across wires where it loses @ least 10% of its current to the same phenomenon: resistance to its flow over copper wires, which again, creates heat, this time right into the environment where it is not needed. So when you create an all-electric environment, and you have in that environment hot water heaters, clothes dryers, oven ranges and space heaters, for hundreds of millions of people, the energy requirements to produce the electricity necessary to be used for nothing more than to create heat, skyrockets.

Which brings us back to the term energy transition: it is thus not so much an energy transition that is occurring, but an energy EXPANSION disguised as an energy transition.  

Mankind blithely increasing its energy dependency since the introduction of the Kyoto protocols in 1992, ie, in the teeth of its recognition of the fact that the planet has been warning us that it has a limited capacity to maintain a livable environment when one of the species living on it is determined to continue its outsize energy production and utilization, even as the costs of said production spirals, together with its effluents, into the stratosphere, is but one of the many facts that are producing climate chaos: it is the push for an energy transition away from fossil fuels, while simultaneously continuing to increase the amount of energy required to run our societies, that is CAUSING the turmoil. 

Far from decreasing our energy usage back to pre-millennium amounts, we are using 100 million bbl's of oil today, just as we were in 2000. Only now, added to that burden of oil is that from the expansion in the combustion of natural gas and a doubling in the burning of US coal. The coal use by US power plants has been somewhat mitigated, but this year it increased by 22%. So when people using the term energy transition claim that we now generate 17% of our energy from wind/solar, what they omit from that little datapoint is that the world is still burning through 100million bbl's of oil/day, so mankind's use of energy hasn't "transitioned"  it has exPANded, and now includes renewable sources, even as we combust the same amount of fossil fuel in the form of oil, while burning up far more coal and natural gas than we did at the turn of the century.

 Interesting term, fossil fuels. Because fossils only come from living creatures, and what that means is that fossil fuels are a subset of biofuels: although not all biofuel is fossil fuel, ALL fossil fuel is biofuel, as it is derived from once-living organisms; like ethanol from corn, it's base ingredient is derived indirectly from solar energy. Only, in the case of ancient biofuel, time and geological processes have furnished the requisite energy needed to process the biological inputs into energy-dense fuels. But modern biofuels have no such helping hand in their production; that must be provided by ancient sunlight in the form of fossil biofuels. What that means of course, is that what they call biofuels are impossible without the combustion of those anciently-derived biofuels of coal, natural gas and oil, all of which  are, by the definition of the same people who insist we are in an "energy transition", non-renewable. From that it should be obvious that we are using ancient, eons-old, stored solar power to produce current current. In fact, other than geo-thermal, all our energy is solar-derived, as wind is a product of temperature gradients from the sun warming one part of the earth to a different temperature than the rest, and wind is nature's way of balancing that gradient. 

From this it can be seen that every term the Eco crowd uses to propagandize the switch to renewables and biofuels and green energy, are all bogus: 

Without fossil fuels, there are no more biofuels;

Without fossil fuels, no renewables are possible;

There has been no energy transition, but there has been a dramatic energy expansion; because just like burning down forests and calling that biofuel and net-zero, since the forests will grow back in the next century, gives us the picture of the entire Green Energy paradigm: burning additional fossil fuels now and venting their CO2 into the atmosphere in the unproven assumption that we will therefore burn less at some distant point in the future: the logic is the same, and it is just as (deliberately and maliciously) flawed.

Worldwide energy use has never been greater than it is today. And all the plans made by the corponationals assume that to be true every day going forward: every year we will use more energy than the year before, so it should come as no surprise that every year the planet gets warmer, and not just because of the greenhouse effect: mankind itself produces prodigious amounts of energy, and every conversion of energy from one from into another creates waste in the form of heat. Heat that cannot radiate into space any more than the sun's can. The more energy we produce, and it takes massive amounts of energy to produce an entire infrastructure for energy production from scratch, as well as massive amounts of energy to produce the fuel to provide the electricity meant to transit that new infrastructure, so the more carbon we vent, that much less of that waste heat can be dissipated. Which all means that every so-called solution to the Climate Derangement is in fact adding to the burden of CO2 in the atmosphere and therefore contributing to, not ameliorating, global warming, even as the legacy industries of coal, gas, and oil continue to produce record quantities of methane and CO2 of their own; only now the damage they do has been goosed, by the fuel transition, into hyperdrive. In other words, looked at with sober eyes, we are literally throwing more fuel on the fire yet expecting that to somehow put the fire out. Should it therefore be any surprise that, far from being mitigated, the rate at which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere is instead accelerating?

 In other words, it is the relentless push to pretend that we are actuating an energy transition away from fossil fuels, when instead we are burning through those stores of fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate in order to create an ill-conceived fuel transition, that is increasingly driving the weather turmoil we're witnessing all around the globe.