COP 26 has rumbled on, under intense public scrutiny, now drawing to an impotent close. I bet you don’t know what COP stands for. I looked it up.
The great and the good and the not so great and the downright corrupt and greedy, those who couldn’t give a fuck. Coveting their dirty secrets to the ends of the Earth. A few little people thrown in for good measure. They will be submerged soon enough. Give them all a free snorkel.
A conference about cutting carbon with an unbelievable gigantic carbon footprint of its own, hot on the heels of the G20 summit. All at what cost to the tax payer and planet in this digital Skypey Zoomy age? Let’s meet up, have a spot of lunch. I’ll see if the jet’s free. Burn some fuel.
Biden makes the effort to show. Looks like he’s not long for this world, needs to put his feet up. Daft old bastard, jetting about at his age. Should be taking it easy.
Boris Johnson flying around on a private plane. Delegates ferried about in a fleet of new electric Jaguar I-PACE – all discreetly charged by a plethora of specially imported diesel generators chugging away every night. Nobody twigged that the hotels around Glasgow do not have the 150 KVA charging infrastructure. No surprise there as we don’t have it much anywhere else in the UK either. The grid would melt if we all plugged in an electric car tonight. We don’t have anything like the necessary infrastructure or power to run it.
How on earth did we elect Johnson? A ridiculously coiffured spongy buffoon, albeit a master of endless pointless analogy and waffle. The bloke doesn’t give a fuck about anyone except No. 1. Lying, deceitful, avaricious, fickle. No integrity. At least in the good old days when one of his lot fucked up they went out and shot themselves. Did the honourable thing don’t you know.
Johnson’s now come to realise that climate change is a vote winner or loser. No longer a denier. But no politician of any colour will ever tell you the truth, really tell you how it is. All hanging unfounded hopes on yet to be discovered technologies, lab experiments and a magic wand. Sycophantic scientists and researchers looking for the silver bullet, with one eye constantly on their source of funding and sponsors. They believe in what they do and would never hear any different. There’s a cheque at the end of every month. Yes sir, no sir, we’ll make it work in this test tube sir, then we’ll think about the bigger
picture. Will it scale up?
COP 26. The number says it all. Things will be the same at 27, 28, 29… until we all fry.
There is no new green economy, green deal, green growth. We live on a limited, finite, depleted, polluted planet, along with way way too many people. If we are lucky maybe Musk and Bezos will fuck off to Mars, that’s two less. We need to shrink, and fast.
Whether you subscribe to climate change or not, the fact remains we are poisoning and polluting the planet beyond measure, depleting resources, destroying habitats that have existed for millennia and causing mass extinction of wildlife, essential to ecosystems which sustain human life. All irrespective of temperature – unless you are a polar bear. Many of the so-called renewable energy sources are the cause of extreme pollution and environmental damage. The renewables themselves cannot be renewed without fossil fuel burn.
Without electricity civilisation will grind to a halt. Very quickly, within days. Mad Max on steroids.
We need to de-grow the economy. Stop buying tons of stuff we don’t need with money we haven’t got – that will be debt. We are always in debt. Somebody gets it all, all your money you haven’t got, but don’t worry you have loads of lovely new stuff – as long as there is a guitar in the pile. And maybe a lovey handmade Cornell amp. Nothing Chinese there.
Show me a solar panel, wind turbine, heat pump, tidal barrage, carbon capture plant… that can be manufactured, installed and maintained without using zillions of tons of coal and oil.
Show me a solar panel that does not degrade and stop producing electricity, a turbine that doesn’t wear out, a battery that will always hold charge.
Show me farm machinery, mining and construction plant, heavy haulage, shipping, road building, that can run on anything but diesel. Every site, every field, every location is different. Try building a robot for that or running a cable to power your combine.
Let’s not even think about aeroplanes.
Show me a kiln or blast furnace, concrete or brickworks, steel making, glass manufacture, fabrication or heavy industrial unit that can run on intermittent electricity provided by wind and solar power. A hospital or office block, where the power goes on and off…. An electric railway line, stopping and starting.
It’s true, the UK has been producing more electricity from wind power recently but simultaneously they must keep the power stations ticking over, burning fossil fuel, just in case the wind drops, which it does. Keep the Grid alive. Merrily chugging out CO2.
Show me the need for a huge new “green work” force. Consider just how relatively few people it takes to manufacture and service a solar panel or wind turbine. Then consider how many tens of thousands of people are currently employed to maintain and run an off-shore oil rig or operate a coal mine, well a hypothetical British coal mine, let alone construct them.
Show me a wind turbine or solar panel that is not manufactured in China. Or assembled elsewhere from Chinese components.
Heat pumps? Old technology, it’s just a fridge running backwards. Have fridges come down in price? Why will a heat pump become cheaper?
We’ve had electric batteries since the mid-1800’s. It has taken nearly 200 years to develop battery technology this far. You might manage 220 actual road miles in your high-end electric car, despite what the brochure says. It’s cold, battery underperforms. Heater on, a/c running, wipers on, fast, slow, lights. None of it in the book. Plan your journey very carefully, assuming you have £60000 or more to spend on your wheels. They are not going to get cheaper, drop to an affordable price for the masses. The answer is to not drive to your destination, is the journey necessary? Manufacturing a new car is done with
fossil fuels, tons of them. Your EV has a huge carbon footprint before it’s even delivered. Not to mention the pollution during manufacture.
All batteries have a finite life, based around the number of charge / discharge cycles. We are told EV’s could power your house, sell electricity back to the grid, make a profit. That’s a practical non-starter, which is exactly what will happen to your car. Do it regularly and your car battery will conk out rapidly, before its design mileage and probably void its own warranty. Nobody mentioned the separate expensive bit of kit you need to install in your home to convert the car’s DC into AC before you whizz it back to the pylons. Invertors – and they have a limited life span too. They talk complete bollocks. But what do
you expect from an elite who have never lived and worked in the real world. They have Green Answers. More Greenwash for the masses. Buy into this, make a bit on the side. Just like the Feed-in-Tariff, run at the expense of the whole population for the benefit of a few.
We’ve had hydrogen fuel cells for decades. Used by the military. They are highly inefficient, using electricity to produce hydrogen to generate electricity to charge a battery to drive an electric motor to propel the vehicle along. Who the fuck thought that one up? Or they can produce fresh water if you happen to live in a submarine. Which I admit is useful and eventually essential. Hydrogen cells need a catalyst made of rare and very expensive platinum. Which needs to be mined. Barking mad. Musk calls it the hydrogen “fool” cell. I think he has a point. Hydrogen manufacture, to power fuel cells, is highly polluting and expensive, unless using 100% renewable electricity – when the wind blows.
Cars with hydrogen fuel cells are just electric vehicles with an added hydrogen fuel cell and storage cylinder. The fuel cell charges an electric battery, smaller than a regular EV’s battery, which then drives an electric motor. They cost a fortune to buy and cost more to run than electric or petrol vehicles.
No new cars, electric or hydrogen are green, unless charged with renewable energy. What comes down your wire I wonder? All cars are made using fossil fuels.
Hydrogen manufacture, storage, transportation and distribution is very expensive. The jury’s out on pushing hydrogen down our existing natural gas mains to burn in your house. Then it won’t work in your regular oven, hob or heating boiler. All change there. Gas meters will probably need changing too. Can you imagine the size of the scrap pile? Probably not. Right at the bottom you might find an old discarded Zeppelin.
Carbon capture cannot be practically scaled up and is hugely expensive to build and operate, consuming lots of precious energy – which means another massive hike in consumer energy bills if it was to ever happen. Carbon capture will not happen at industrial scale. It is researched, and small plants developed, because the Government throws tens of £ millions in grants at it, which is snapped up by the energy companies and dished out to scientists who want to please the money man who pays their wages. The energy companies.
Hydrogen is extremely expensive to produce and must be green hydrogen, not the euphemistically termed “blue” hydrogen. We do not have the infrastructure for hydrogen storage and distribution. Construction would take decades with an open cheque book.
Batteries, fuel cells, solar panels and turbines all require hugely expensive rare earth metals. There are not remotely enough metal reserves on the planet to build the scale of new technologies we need, that every country needs, in huge numbers. Most sources of such metals are mined in poor countries with little or no environmental or employment protection laws. The damage to health, the toxins and pollution caused are a huge cause for concern. Similar problems arise when the same products reach the end of their useful life. We need diesel to drive the huge machinery at remote locations to mine, extract and process the metals. We need fossil fuel to manufacture the huge machines and then transport the machines to work sites and mines.
Fuckwit Johnson is phasing out the internal combustion engine in 2030. Will it happen? If so, the car factories will soon begin decommissioning plant and machinery involved in engine and gearbox manufacture. Tooling up for new and very different types of drive trains. All that consumes vast amounts of fossil fuel. What happens to all the redundant plant?
But we need diesel engines and power for the medium to long term, until there is some magic, yet to be invented, new fuel on the horizon.
So, what happens to all the petrol when you need diesel? First you must distil a barrel of crude oil, which will offer up a large quantity of petrol before a drop of diesel is ever produced. Ironically you must distil even further to produce the heavy tars needed for tarmacadam production to pave and repair our roads, which will be needed for all the electric cars. But you cannot lay a road without fossil fuel machinery and gas to heat the tarmac. Your EV will also have rubber tyres, which comes from oil…… Seems there’s a lot of work to be done here.
So what is Boris going to do with all this surplus petrol? Flare it up a stack like they do with unwanted natural gas?
Flush it into the rivers along with all the shit he lets the water companies dump into our waterways and sea?
Let’s not even talk about fuel oil for shipping or aviation fuel. Bio-fuel? We’ll all starve to death, along with consequences of mass deforestation to grow bio-crops. There’s not enough land for both. And that’s without considering the damage to essential eco-systems with loss of botanical diversity, growing only a single bio-fuel crop on all the de-forested land.
There’s only one slim chance to keep the lights on and that’s nuclear power. But that boat has probably been missed. You cannot bang out a nuclear power station in a year or two, or even ten. We need a lot. I think in the UK we have one new one lumbering along, being constructed, while other old power stations are being de-commissioned.
The holy grail is nuclear fusion. But your back to test tubes again. Nobody has made it happen yet, or at least not extracted more energy from the process than they had to pump in to get it going in the first place. That would be something for nothing, if it worked. So that’s a loser.
And nuclear does not solve the carbon problem, it’s only a slice of the bigger problem. It’s like a bath with no overflow. Tap full on or dripping, one day eventually it will spill over and the planet will be saturated with CO2. Imagine the carbon footprint constructing a new concrete nuclear power station and the diesel needed yet again.
The elephant in the room is world population. Was that discussed at COP? The planet’s fucked. We copped out.
The COP 26 delegates are packing their bags now, bloated on five star + living and flying home, entourage in tow. The whole event probably matching the GDP of one of the small drowning countries trying to get their voice heard, their delegate clutching a free snorkel in a COP goody bag.
At the 11th hour maybe the mega-oil and energy companies will pull a rabbit out of the hat. All those really useful energy saving inventions they bought up over the years and buried, waiting for the day when there was finally no oil. There must be one really good one in that pile somewhere. Share price through the roof. Buy some candles, a jumper and an acoustic guitar.
