REAL FACTS and
NOT ORCHESTRATED “OPINIONS”
To the “Young and the Few”
We have a big task ahead of us, but I somehow know that together we can do it.
Allan Yeomans 11/11/2022
Here are the FACTS, and the ANSWERS
you need to know. Read, and suddenly you’ll find –
You know more than they do!
And then, you tell them what you want them to do.
And then you make them do it.
BEING ARMED WITH FACTS
To end global warming, you need to have a basic but convincing understanding of the facts. Faith and opinions are not enough.
Faith and opinions are what the advertising and public relations organisations employed by the fossil fuel agrochemical industries and countries are expert in. And that is manipulating truth and apparent reality. And they have the money – a billion dollars a week to spend marketing their desired confusion.
And that is what we’re up against.
A simple estimation of the funds available to modify public opinion is well over a billion dollars a week. To beat that your only weapon is the accurate use of understandable facts. Then couple this with marches, signs and billboards, and what-ever you think might work. They’re our only weapon.
At this website everything will be a fact and supported by physics and chemistry and mathematics and where extreme complexities exist, such as in weather phenomena, statistical probability will apply.
If it’s an opinion, and not an already demonstrated and provable fact I’ll say so, then and there.
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THE ATMOSPHERE DECIDES THE TEMPERATURE OF THE BIOSPHERE
The average temperature of the Earth’s biosphere is almost absolutely determined by the optics of the planet’s atmosphere and the radiation characteristics of the planetary surface.
The physics is exactly the same as the physics controlling the temperature inside a greenhouse. The temperature is only minusculey affected by the extremely small quantity of heat soaking up from the Earth’s interior.
The vast majority of the radiation energy in sunlight are the frequencies of visible light, i.e. between infra-red and ultraviolet light. Those temperatures are determined by the outer surface temperatures of the sun. That temperature is a bit under 6,0000 C (Celsius). It’s mixture of frequencies we see and describe as “white light”.
The temperature of an electric welding arc is also roughly around 6,0000 C, so we also see it as “white” light.
The interior of the sun is hot because at the incredible pressures deep inside the sun and at those extreme temperatures and pressures a nuclear reaction takes place. Hydrogen atoms are fused together releasing energy. That process is described as “nuclear fusion”.
The Sun’s outer surface is under 6,0000 C. At that surface temperature it is radiating as much heat out into space as it manages to soak up from its incredibly hot interior.
The Sun’s Nuclear Fusion is the same reaction that occurs in a hydrogen bomb.
But, to get those same pressures and temperatures existing inside the sun they enclose our hydrogen in an exploding uranium or plutonium bomb. There’s a very strong likelihood that it is not theoretically possible to maintain the reaction on Earth and deliver significant useful power.
The interior temperature of the Earth is also around 6,0000 C but that doesn’t affect the temperature of the biosphere. Like the Sun’s internal high temperature – there is a lot of insulation the heat has to get through to get to the surface.
The surface temperature of the Earth would be about minus 15o C from sunshine alone. As nothing much comes from the deep interior.
Sunlight however, shining on the Earth and warming the outer surface – plus –
The heat trapped by the atmosphere’s green house effect – is warming the biosphere to an average and liveable temperature of plus 15o C.
That’s a total temperature increase of 300 C to the whole biosphere.
The warming process is entirely a “greenhouse effect” – as “Climate Change” was initially and correctly named.
That’s why the quantity and type of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is so critically important.
In the, very roughly 50,000 years of the existence us homo sapiens, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have always been around 275 ppm (parts per million). And methane concentrations sat at about 0.7 ppm. Methane is often quoted in “ppb” that’s “parts per billion and not “parts per million.
The quantities of both greenhouse gasses, methane and carbon dioxide have risen significantly but the methane increases are frightening.
We have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by around 50%. That’s not good. But methane levels has risen by an exceptionally dangerous 285%.
Methane is sold as “Natural Gas” being as it’s straight out of the ground. Natural Gas is 85% to 90% methane.
But methane is not that simple. Methane is “admitted” as being 120 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But that “120 times” considerably – and probably deliberately – minimises its real greenhouse potency. The “120 times” is a smart bit of statistical fiction. 250 is more realistic. Somehow it’s been strategically managed so as to factor into calculations methane’s estimated atmospheric “half-life” period. This seems to be combined with cute and totally confusing mathematics, all to convince the unwary that methane/natural gas “is not really so bad after all.”
Below is a logarithmic graph that belies the cute maths it’s derived from, and which clearly indicates its potency compared to carbon dioxide. It does show the potency before any breakdown to be more like 250 to near 300 times that of carbon dioxide, not the 120 times worse the natural gas marketing whizz-kids promote.
Graph shows pure methane 250 times worse than pure carbon dioxide.
The graph has a logarithmic scale. It goes 0.1 to 1 then 10 then 100 then 1,000 times as bad as carbon dioxide.
As you can see; at time zero it’s well over 200 and is approaching 300 times worse a greenhouse gas as is carbon dioxide.
Fig. 3 Radiative forcing of a 1 kg pulse emission of methane and carbon dioxide over time, including the eventual oxidation of methane into CO2. Graph inset is the radiative forcing of methane without the inclusion of methane oxidation into CO2.
Source: Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts
Which is Worse Carbon Dioxide or (at least for the last few years), Methane?
It’s Methane!
Methane is now causing over twice as much heating in our biosphere as is carbon dioxide.
And the above graph shows it. From the graph you can see that a methane emission decreases quickly with time. And initially it is between approximately 230 to 260 times worse than carbon dioxide. So the methane industries with their claim that methane i.e. “natural gas” decays so quickly that it’s heating results are therefore “not that serious”.
That’s a lie as we’ll see.
Methane has a half-life of between 8 and 10 years. It’s constantly breaking down into carbon dioxide which has a considerably less optical trapping ability for white light but lasts for hundreds of years.
So , removing the fiction, how bad is methane, fictions aside.
I say that what is in the air every morning is the deciding factor. Not how much heating does a particular “pulse” of methane actually cause over some long nominated time.
Especially when new methane is constantly escaping and leaking into the air.
Consider: How does the air, and its optics “know” whether a “pulse” of methane lasts forever, and is therefore a “permanent fixture” – just like carbon dioxide – or the pulse is being constantly replenished? It doesn’t. And that’s because it can’t. And gas physics says it can’t.
So, if the level of methane in the air is constant then the heat trapping factor is the same in a hundred years as it was on day one. And at day one it has that, 230 to 260 times worse heating effect as does carbon dioxide.
Think of it this way. Let’s say the methane is in a liquid form, and the burden we carry is a heavy bucket full. But – as the song goes- “there’s a hole in the bucket dear Lisa, dear Lisa”. so the load is constantly demising.
Or is it?
I say: If a hose is suppling a constant dribble of new methane into the top of the bucket, as it is, then the bucket is always full. The burden we carry doesn’t decrease. The highly paid whizz kids are trying to play games with us, and they have been successful. That’s until now.
Since pre-industrial times methane concentrations have risen by 1.2 ppm, i.e. from 0.7 to 1.9 ppm. So, multiplied by just the 250 factor puts its affective rise, equivalent to CO2 at 300 ppm. So-
Carbon dioxide concentrations
have risen 150 ppm.
Methane’s minimum effective concentrations in CO2 comparisons
have risen 300 ppm.
So anything, even brown coal, is better and safer than natural gas.
It follows that closed down coal fired power stations must be reopened immediately and kept running pending their modification to nuclear fuelling.
And natural gas powered generating plants should be closed down ASAP. Or alternatively, where possible converted to running on oil.
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Commercializing natural gas was an incredibly disastrous and irresponsible process undertaken, so deliberately, by the world’s oil industries and nations. It’s almost totally closed the door on efforts to prevent an irreversible change in the world’s weather and oceanic water flow patterns.
But selling the stuff, rakes in an incredible amount of money for a small group that mine it and sell it.
We’ve been burning coal found close to the ground surface for about 5000 years. But mining geologically buried coal releases significant quantities of methane. The English started mining coal it the 1700s. Then suddenly, in the last decade or so there’s been a huge increase in mining the methane gas itself.
And it’s not cattle at all creating the massive climb in atmospheric methane levels as is so often inferred. Cattle population growth tends to closely mirror human population growth. We only eat what we need. To promote the fiction that cow population growth is causing the sudden massive increase in atmospheric methane levels is plain “bull shit”.
To fix global warming there are
these two battles we have to win.
One: We must remove at least as much of the existing greenhouse gas overload as we can.
Two: We must stop putting greenhouse gasses back in the atmosphere.
I don’t know of anything we can do to remove the excess methane from the atmosphere that is in any way economically feasible.
But, if we stop putting it in, most of it will be gone in fifteen years because of its own instability. It turns into carbon dioxide which is less deadly. And that carbon dioxide, I’m confident we can remove.
There is a very practical way of removing the carbon dioxide overload, if it can be instigated and broadly adopted against the public relations deadly manoeuvring of the fossil carbon/agrochemical industries. I believe it can be.
(For the record: This is “an opinion”. It’s not yet “a demonstrated fact.”)
We simply pay our farmers to, by judicious farming, increase the humus content of their soil. The nature of humus is explained in the HOME PAGE Red box 13 and repeated as a footnote below.
What we must argue is for our farmers to be paid something like $12 to $15 per tonne, or more for each tonne of carbon dioxide they remove from the atmosphere in the process of enriching the fertility of their soils by creating humus. What we must demand from our governments is that they do pay farmers for successfully achieving that sequestration.
There is, absolutely, no other way I know of, or have ever heard of, especially at such a relatively miniscule price to remove so much.
All we want is to have farmers try. Mostly they only need to copy the practices of the larger commercial and successful organic or biodynamic farmers. We must not hamstring them with insane bureaucratic requirements as is the case still in Australia (October 2022) from the “behind the scenes” influence of the fossil carbon/agrochemical industries. And for the doubters I say.
If – hypothetically – farmers don’t succeed, then it won’t cost the funding authority – Governments or whatever – “one red cent.”
In Australia the concept of paying farmers for increasing soil organic carbon is – technically – already approved by the passing of the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011. But it never happened with any Australian soils.
The devil was in the subsequent departmental details that killed farmer participation. Google it and you’ll see why at -.
Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011
But bureaucracy it appears was allowed, encouraged or directed to make it impossible for a responsible farmer to accept the concept of turning atmospheric carbon dioxide into soil humus. The concept it seems was simply sabotaged. Was it a massive piece of “luck” for the agrochemical industries. Or did they make their own luck?
I first proposed the concept of increasing soil fertility to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in many talks and lectures and also in a paper I wrote for a think tank on sustainable agriculture in California in January of 1990. I titled it:
“An Agricultural Solution to the Greenhouse Effect”. (A copy is at Red Box 5).
It’s a switch to an almost chemical free type agriculture. This boils down to big money. Agricultural chemicals are second only to transport in their use of oil.
In simple terms, if it works and we do “save the planet” in the little time we have left, it will mean the agricultural chemical industry, as it now exists, goes out of business. So be it. They were very material in creating the problem.
It goes without saying, that, simultaneously we stop the mad practice of permitting our governments to subsidise chemical fertilizers.
As soon as people see, anywhere, soil humus levels rising and “the sky is NOT falling in” the idea will spread rapidly. And the concept will be accepted and be dramatically successful and that’s despite the efforts of the agrochemical industries to stop the knowledge spreading.
Sadly and inevitably; if a few voiceful farmers are maybe paid to claim – “It’s an absolute failure”, it could possibly make it not happen at all. And the agrochemical industries would have won. But I believe that’s an improbability.
I watched my father, P.A. Yeomans, create humus rich fertile soil in enormous quantities in the 1950s.
I also have more faith in the tough common sense of our farming people. But if, somehow I’m wrong; so be it. My advice is then: move to higher ground, buy a fishing line and a good gun. And be on your toes, 24/7.
However, after decades of experience in the manufacture of farm equipment, that, by its use increases the fertility of soils, and constant contact with farmers everywhere, I have faith in them. And it will have a massive and successful result in removing the current carbon dioxide overload from the atmosphere.
To pay farmers for removing the carbon dioxide overload from the air and turning it into soil humus the quantity has to be easily measurable and the results obvious and believable.
What has always been promoted is the idea that accurately measuring increases in soil humus levels reliably and accurately was simply not possible or was very expensive. That was generally true.
So, I had to design and invent equipment and systems to allow for accurate and reliable soil testing. I did.
Additionally I had to write a protocol or a methodology on how thing would all work and to make things as fool proof as possible to satisfy Federal or State procedural demands when they existed. I did that too.
The equipment can be seen at Red Box 9 and the protocol – they’re called “Methodologies” – in Red Box 6
What we want, and what you and I must firmly, and seriously and positively demand from our elected representatives is to give our farmers, our graziers our ranchers, a chance to quickly stop the heating of our Earth’s biosphere by them creating millions of tonnes of humus. And also to guarantee that they’ll be paid for doing it, promptly and in full.
To stop putting it back in we, simultaneously and immediately start phasing out of all fossil carbon fuels. Especially natural gas. In comparison to coal – that stuff’s terrible and people have to know it. How bad it is, is already detailed in this Red Box 2.
Also we start building nuclear power stations as fast as we can.
And in the meantime, let’s stop destroying any more coal fired power plants.
One: They’re safer than methane anyway. And-
Two: They have the infrastructure that generally can be made to suit a quick switch to a nuclear steam boiler.
I believe it will take fifteen, to maybe twenty years to build enough nuclear power plants to supply our energy needs and to also charge up all our electric powered automobile batteries.
And while this is all happening, we get some of our farmers to grow – in their now fast improving soils – sugar cane and Agave to produce ethanol for spark ignition car engines. And to grow oil palms to produce the oil to combine with spare ethanol to produce biodiesel. And there’s nothing to design or invent. It’s already happening. We’ve just need to up the financial incentive and therefor the volumes.
The electric powered automobile using batteries charged from industrial power generated using existing coal power plants is certainly environmentally better than petrol powered cars.
That’s mainly because cars have constantly changing power demands, which internal combustion engines don’t like so much. Also the electric motor vehicle has recharging ability going down a hill to power it up the next hill.
Now let’s consider systems for powering our societies that don’t dump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. It was probably astute marketing and clever image building that probably created the term “renewable energy”.
With our current understanding of the evolution of the universe, no energy is renewable. So a bit of history.
Since the “big bang” some 13.8 billion years ago, when the universe came into existence, its total energy has been declining ever since. The energy is expected to run out in another 22 billion years. Maybe ending in total stability. During that long the “types” of energy levels seem to exchange one with another. That we know. But the grand total moves towards ultimate inert stability. Admittedly there is cosmological conjecture about looking that far into the future.
As I mentioned before the so called “renewable energy systems” aren’t renewable, they are simply recharged from nuclear energy sources beneath our feet, or from the sun 149 million kilometres away.
Energy-wise the wisest thing for humanity to do is to produce its our own nuclear energy. It can be fuelled from some of the energy rich and available minerals close to the Earth’s outer surface.
The widespread use of nuclear energy will put the oil, coal and gas mining industries out of business. That’s fine with me and I know with many of you. They are, after all, the industries and the people in those industries that created the dangerous mess that our weather and oceanic systems here on Earth have gotten into.
Fossil Carbon Interests are always plugging hard to stop Nuclear Energy
The fossil carbon lobby hammered their anti-nuclear fiction that building and running a nuclear power station could kill thousands of innocent men, women and children. It’s also promoted that owning a power station meant the owner could build nuclear weapons. That’s rubbish and that’s not just my “opinion”.
The result has been that it’s generaly the small bad guys that have nuclear weapons, and the small good guys that don’t.
If Ukraine had nuclear weapons would “Putin’s Ego War” have still happened? Many argue: “Certainly not”. The same thoughts could apply to Taiwan. And certainly, North and South Korea.
The fossil fuel industry’s endless promotions that there are “dangerous safety risks” going nuclear is ludicrous. Look at the statistics.
The easiest to see them is at the very informative “Our World in Data.” Then go to :
Death rates per unit of electricity production
This shows that apart from hugely intermittent wind farms and solar installations – which are infinitely safer than oil, coal and natural gas – nuclear energy is almost ludicrously ahead at being the safest industrial power system on the planet.
Plus wind and solar of cause, but those two are so annoyingly and inconveniently intermittent.
Even if we include the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear energy is still, by thousands of points, the safest industrial electric power generation system on the planet. The death toll in those two Japanese cities totalled less than 150,000.
Just six days after the bombing of Nagasaki on the 15 August 1945 Japan surrendered. American President Harry Truman had played his cards beautifully, for they were the only bombs the US had. They’d only made three. The first one was for the trial – to see if they worked. It was tested 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945.
Dropping those two bombs, one after the other, convinced the Japanese that the US had, possibly hundreds of bombs in its arsenal. But it didn’t. The bluff saved the lives of many thousands in the US military and the lives of an estimated three million Japanese citizens and military personal.
In our Earth’s ancient geology uranium ore was slightly more radio-active than it is today and could have been used, as mined, in a modern day uranium fuelled power reactor. It now is confirmed that possibly thousand of these reactors were formed and each happily gurgled away for a million years or so. Apparently bugs that collected uranium built them. And all while not knowing a thing about nuclear physics.
Nuclear power stations (including even the first one ever built) are several hundred times safer than coal fired power stations and over a thousand times safer than natural gas powered systems.
A self-fuelled hydrogen nuclear fusion reactor is unfortunately quite possibly; theoretical impossible.
Therefore, we must cease spending – probably wasting, huge sums of money on trying to make a fusion reactor work. At least until the global warming threat is gone.
To clarify: In a fission nuclear reactor big atoms break in half and the energy is released.
In a fusion reactor tiny hydrogen atoms get stuck together (or fused) and that releases the energy.
The fusion reactor is still a long way off. It’s always been “only fifty years away” since it was first proposed, a long time ago. The hydrogen atoms involved are rare and very special as they have one or two extra neutrons in their central nucleus.
The fusion process is being touted as an even safer system for producing industrial power. It is also touted as able to produce its own fuel supply once it has been started.
But there’s a couple of problems. Firstly; you have to artificially create the millions of degrees temperature and incredible pressures that exist in the centre of the Sun itself.
But it has been done, most noticeably and most dramatically, a few times by putting the special hydrogen inside the core of an atomic bomb; then detonating the atomic bomb.
That’s how the hydrogen bombs work.
The Second problem is that there is still that distinct theoretical possibility they could not produce enough of the heavy hydrogen they need to continue running the reactor.
Common sense says we should put off spending (probably wasting) many billions of dollars on hypotheticals for now, at least until we have the warming of our biosphere (climate change) under control.
If you want to live on a planet devoid of never ending world weather chaos. You can’t complacently just accept personally the safety and advantages of going nuclear. No, that’s not enough. You have to actively and voicefully, and with placards, and billboards, and street marches promote the wisdom and common sense – and the unlimited and permanent abundance of nuclear power generation and their incredible safety record. And promote it to all.
Even starting right now, It will probably take possibly twenty years to build the nuclear power stations necessary. But with that time frame we have little choice save making them build them as fast as possible and with no hold ups.
Powering Transport
Our switch to battery powered, electric vehicles is well underway, albeit almost prematurely. They now get their power, unfortunately from generally the fossil fuel powered grid.
The unavoidable intermittent nature of solar could, maybe, be assisted by the huge battery capacity slowly being expanded in the private transport sector. Or alternatively (and I think better) from pumped elevated water. You do lose a good 10% pumping it up, and you lose another 10% regenerating the electricity. But they’re liveable losses.
I’m reasonably convinced that all motor vehicles in the future will have electric motors driving the wheel.
The age of the internal combustion engine – that’s the diesel engine and the petrol/gasoline engine is over.
Apart from their enormous discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere they have their own theoretical efficiency disadvantage. The fuel they use has to be converted into high pressure gas to work the pistons, or in a turbine system, to spin the blades. In these systems there is a theoretical limit in converting the fuel energy into useful power.
Theoretically they cannot be more efficient than about 35%. What is described as a highly efficient engine – say 90% efficiency – means that the engine is achieving 90% of that 35% theoretical maximum, usually about 30%.
Fuel to electricity systems don’t have this penalty. Their theoretical efficiency is 100% and they commonly achieve a usable 90% energy efficiency. to over
Having an electric motor driving the wheels has another fabulous advantage (as I’ve previously mentioned). Going down a hill or using the electric motor for general braking, those processes re-generates power. That power goes into the onboard battery to assist in reaccelerating the vehicle to cruse speed or just going up the next hill.
There always has to be a battery somewhere in these electric power system if only to absorb regenerated energy.
There are four possible primary energy supply systems we use now.
First: We already have a total battery system in cars that receiving considerable buyer support – Tesla for example. They have plenty of power and can handle the continuous loads. Their disadvantage is the batteries are large and heavy, and fundamentally expensive and additionally they currently take a long time to recharge.
The fundamental problem in battery size is that electricity is produced by two substances combining, discharging, and recombining. That’s how all conventional batteries work.
Second: We have the hybrid system where a generally smaller than usual internal combustion engine – diesel or petrol is constantly or intermittently powering the car or filling the battery. This system uses less petrol or diesel but you’re back to a small engine if the vehicle is confronted with a prolonged high load.
We have two independently different systems approaching commercial development. Both employ a liquid fuel which is “cracked’ to produce hydrogen to feed a fuel to produce electricity to power the transport vehicle. We will discuss each separately.
Thirdly: The first one uses Ammonia liquid (NH3) as the stored fuel. Ammonia is “cracked” in a compact sub-assembly and nitrogen is discharged into the air. The hydrogen is delivered to a fuel cell to produce electricity to drive the wheels for road transport and also allowing some excess power to go to a small storage battery primally used for braking power regeneration.
The system for cracking ammonia onboard as needed for producing hydrogen for self-contained motor transport vehicles is not yet in production, but I understand it’s close. And it has its own advantage and that is –
Huge quantities of ammonia are already currently being produced. It being the main material for nitrogen fertilizer production.
The ammonia is currently being produced using the Haber-Bosh process. Fritz Haber also developed the infamous prison camp gas Zyklon-B.
The ammonia is currently used to produce the fertilizer urea. His ammonia process uses huge quantities of oil and natural gas in its production.
The quantities of agricultural fertilizers used in the world now are second only to transport fuel in their use of oil and natural gas.
The massive quantity of such chemical fertilizer produced and poured into our soils is a blight on the health of most living things on the planet. It’s terrible and possibly, should eventually be criminal.
But here we’re talking ammonia as a fuel. Ammonia can now be produced starting only with air and water and electricity. The electricity must preferably come from solar cells or any other non-fossil fuel-based energy source available. But ultimately and logically from nuclear energy.
The exhaust gases from such vehicles are water and nitrogen gas (which is what clean air is almost entirely made of. Air is about 80% nitrogen. So suddenly the system for producing ammonia becomes environmentally super friendly.
Conveniently, in many instances household solar systems even today, produce more power than the house system requires so ammonia production would be a good “sink” for such excess power. That’s provided it also makes financial and economic sense. And even better, maybe it becomes a good business for people to get into. So it’s on the cards.
In the meantime, we get the ammonia produced using whatever electric power is available. I would suggest coal generated electricity. One is because the power plants are there and hopefully still running. And secondly, the infrastructure is there to convert the coal fired power stations to nuclear fired as soon as nuclear units become available.
There is also a second system to produce an altogether different liquid fuel. The fuel being ethanol.
Ethanol. A lot of effort and a lot of money, by a lot of companies and a lot of institutions around the world are busily developing direct ethanol to electricity conversion systems.
Ethanol, like ammonia, can be cracked to produce hydrogen directly. The hydrogen then feeds fuel cells to produce power. This has the advantage that once perfected can be used, almost instantly. Ethanol production is easy. Humans have been making it and drinking it for millennium. Ethanol is made from the sugars that come from things like sugar cane and the cactus type plant Agave.
One variety of Agave, “Blur Agave” is well known. Its sap is what Tequila is brewed from. Most Agave cactuses have – just like sugar cane – huge quantities of sugar in their sap.
Agave plants also thrives in hot dry conditions and the plants require very little water. I understand they “drink” by absorbing the dew that condenses on them over night. (I never did understand how cactus got their water until I read about that process).
Dry Inland Australia would suit Agave just fine. They are being tried here in Australia in small arears right now.
In a price-wise comparison ethanol costs are roughly around $60 to $100 a barrel. So oil would out price it. But, and it’s a big “but”; but it’s also a good “but”. The reason being: you don’t burn the ethanol as in an internal combustion engine. Instead, you “crack” it onboard the motor vehicle itself, and have the hydrogen released power a fuel cell, to power the wheels, and maybe a little can go into the “down hill” then “up hill” regeneration battery as mentioned. It’s also a beautifully flexible concept.
The system, unlike the internal combustion or even the burning coal system does not have a massive theoretical inefficiency built in. You can get near three times the energy from the same quantity of raw fuel.
So ethanol, used in a fuel cell, would be delightfully competitive against diesel or petrol and environmentally super friendly.
Of course the fossil carbon suppliers have known about all the above since Henry Ford started building his ethanol powered T- Model cars and trucks.
The tropical Amazon rainforest is a huge and dangerous producer of methane gas. That needs to change. And there’s a bonus. The Amazon Basin – with all that rain and warmth is an incredible sensible and great place to grow biofuels.
A well-established forest – rainforest, tropical or anywhere else, had ceased being a net absorber of greenhouse gasses, usually centuries ago.
They’re carbon neutral at best. But not at all are they greenhouse gas neutral. They’re worse – especially in the Amazon.
Why’s that? Decomposing wet rotting leaf matter that litters the wet tropical forest floors over hundreds of square kilometres, generates a giant anaerobic cess pool producing huge quantities of pure methane.
Equating this methane to the equivalent of carbon dioxide we multiply its weight by somewhere between 230 times and 280 times and the figures show it’s an incredible massive source of greenhouse gasses.
Do the sums. The Amazon basin produces more greenhouse gasses (i.e. Carbon dioxide equivalents) per year than the entire European Union. The worth of tropical rain forests is a giant confidence scam, a giant confidence trick. And the oil producers’ logic behind the scam is very simple. It’s this.
To produce more food for the world, it suits the agrochemical industries best to resist increasing agricultural land areas and encourage farmers to buy more chemicals to meet the increased demand – and to hell with the global heating consequences.
Additionally clearing the jungle would mean all that wood on the market would be a blow to their massive plastic customers’ businesses. So they put out the clarion calls – “save the Amazon” “save the rain forests” “the lungs of the World” “hug a tree” “grow food in window boxes” (obviously with lot’s of chemicals). “save endangered species”.
Of cause this applies especially in the Amazon where the oil and methane gas lobby don’t want timber, palm oil and sugar cane to become a threat to their fossil carbon oil and gas incomes.
The Amazon Basin is twice as big as the EU. So would they be satisfied with a “small” reserve the size of a combined England, Scotland and Ireland?
No they wouldn’t.
It’s not “endangered species” they’re concerned about. It’s all that timber competing with their plastics. (I often call wood, “God’s own plastic”). Plus, it’s an ideal place to grow sugar cane and palm oil trees. Their solution – “Brain wash the multitude” and it worked.
Amazon Clearing Rules Should Be.
1) All timber must be harvested and it certainly could be used to replace coking coal in the production of iron and steel.
2) The tiny humus levels currently in tropical soils would have to be increased to match the dry weight of all foliage left after the timber harvesting.
3) No agrichemical fertilizers to be used on the new soil after the first year after clearing.
4) Farmers are to receive payment for carbon sequestration when the soil humus levels, weight per hectare, exceeds the foliage weight after harvesting.
Then they grow whatever suits the farmer best. For the next 15 to 20 years, palm oil trees or sugar cane is what the world needs most, pending the availability of nuclear energy or an abundance of wind or solar generated electricity. Whatever is grown it must be conducive towards rapid soil fertility increases.
So humus itself can also become a “cash crop”.
The Fiction of the Trees
Saving the planet by growing trees on every bit of available land maybe, in theory, might work for a short period. I’m talking months here. For logically, with no agricultural land left to farm, humanity would soon runs out of canned food. The mammals are a grasslands species. We need our grasslands. The dinosaurs didn’t. They ate species of tree foliage that now doesn’t exist. And neither do they.
Useless trees only suit the fossil fuel / agrochemical industries. Tropical rain forests are a good example of the fallacy that trees must be our saviour.
Think about it, if tropical rain forests are continuously absorbing carbon, as is constantly promoted by the fossil carbon lobby, then the trees – after a thousand years or so – would have to be a mile high by now, and they’re obviously not. So, as there is negligible humus build up in tropical rain forests soils, where is all the carbon supposed to have gone? And we know it’s not in the soils. Jungle soils are as poor and as leached as any soils on Earth. A stable forest therefore has to be carbon neutral.
And they are. They breathe in carbon dioxide during the day and then breathe most of it out overnight.
Humus in the soil can easily last a thousand years. So more humus is what we want, not trees. And healthy tasty food only grows in humus rich soils. It’s a real win – win.
The world’s agricultural soils have the capacity to remove all – and I mean all – the excess carbon dioxide in the air that’s causing our global warming. But not methane. Methane, we have to phase out. We must do it quickly and then ban it. Do that and in fifteen years it will be all gone from our atmosphere. It brakes down into carbon dioxide.
The best raw material for the production of humus is the shed roots of all the grass species. The grass plant sheds this material every time a grazing animal bites off the above ground foliage. The grass sheds its roots to use the energy to regrow its leaves. When they’re OK it then regrows new fine roots. The shed roots in turn become humus.
That is why the grasslands of the world have the richest and most fertile soils in the world. Dig up the front lawn and you’ll find rich black soil just under the established grass. Mowing is very similar to grazing.
Glomin is a nitrogen rich material almost exclusively produced by the flowering grasses (The flowers in many are no longer needed and have shrunk to insignificance.) Glomin is needed for the production of humus. Trees do not produce these proteins, and so in turn, forests do not produce humic substances in any significant quantities.
Using Humustic type farming practices we easily turn the air’s carbon into soil carbon. (I use “Humustic” to describe farming where fast humus build up is an active feature of the on-farm management.
Humic molecules are relatively stable. They found humus in the Egyptian Pyramids after 8,000 years. So humus really does last.
Trees however, don’t last – maybe 8 years if you’re lucky, and maybe 80 years if you’re really lucky. But then the tree dies, and the wood and leaves oxidise into CO2,
But not all of it into CO2, as termites ultimately turn the wood that remains into methane (CH4).
Methane eventually breaks down in the air to CO2. But in the time frame we have available, all this methane, as soon as it’s formed, goes straight into the air and starts heating the planet . And remember, the methane is over 200 time more potent a greenhouse gas as is carbon dioxide.
But sadly – as is now so common in places like California and Australia – the trees burn to the ground and again fill the air with carbon dioxide.
Dried out tropical rain forests – our jungles – they’ll be next to self-destruct. For some it’s currently inevitable. It’s because of weather changes. It’s all adds up to yet more carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.
Sadly, in Australia now, administrated insanity reigns. Letting good productive agricultural land revert back to infertile and unproductive scrubland is actually rewarded by our successive Federal Governments. (What a win for the agrochemical industries.)
So, currently, for destroying the productivity of their own land Australian farmers can receives tax funded Australian Carbon Credits.
We Australians are therefor paying our farmers to murder our agricultural soils!
Even more stupidity – ( but not at all for the agrochemical industries).- The random planting of trees on what was formally productive agricultural land, and trees of no commercial value and also trees of which 50% can be expected to be dead in ten years, that bit of insanity is also eligible for Australian Carbon Credits.
As Australian citizens, we are the suckers that pay for these insanities. Your government I’m sure does the same, and that’s what ever Western Society you live in.
The clear message here is – you must look carefully at every law and every proposal and every suggestion put up by anybody and ask yourself “Does it at all, and in any way, benefit the fossil fuel agrochemical industries?” And if it does then you know that “something stinks”. So you must protest against such insanities, loud and clear. Make them change them.
You’ll also find that so many of the environmental organizations around the world are heavily indebted to either some person, or some part of the fossil carbon industry. And all too often the general membership of these organizations simply don’t realise that. And more dangerous, if they’re told some don’t or won’t believe it.
That’s also what you have to protest about. Having the truth recognised and exposed is one of the main tasks of the “young and the few”. And making it happen is now all so frighteningly urgent.
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Worthwhile facts I’ve collected over the years that you can quote.
Weight of CO2 in the atmosphere in 1950 was approximately two trillion tonnes. It has climbed to three trillion tonnes.
We have actually added two trillion tonnes (two thousand billion tonnes) since 1950. But half that has been absorbed into the oceans. So the quantity now in the atmosphere is three trillion tonnes. The one trillion tonnes in the oceans will form calcium carbonate deposits and also stable silt deposits on the ocean floors, but not fast enough. We don’t have a million years.
Also, if left alone and if we cease adding geological carbon to the biosphere it would take from centuries to many millennia just to clear the CO2 overload into sea water. Unfortunately CO2 in water exists as carbonic acid (soda water) and is, even now, beginning to hinder the outer exoskeleton of crustaceans, from prawns to krill. They die.
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Fossil fuel use and “climate change” now kills
5 million people per year.
Air pollution from fossil fuels and agrochemicals has already killed 4.8 million people. The UN says Global Warming effects now kill 400,000 people Per Year from weather related disasters. That figure was at 2012 and severe weather events have increased. So 400,000 is a minimum. Air pollution, what we breath, caused by the use of fossil fuels is also separately contributing to the deaths of at least another 4.5 million people a year. Check the report in the Guardian-
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/26/climate-change-damaging-global-economy
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The use of fracking to mine oil and gas has destabilized geological structuresThis seems to happen to at least the depth the process is being used. And very probably to much greater depths.
USGS (United States Geological Survey) reports that between the years 1973–2008, there was an average of 21 earthquakes of magnitude three and larger in the Central and Eastern United States. This rate has ballooned to over 600 M3+ earthquakes in 2014 and over 1000 in 2015. Through to August 2016, over 500 M3+ earthquakes have occurred.
(The United States Geological Survey is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten it.)
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NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) on US costs —
(This particular report does not factor in soil carbon sequestration)
They report:- “Global warming comes with a big price tag for every country around the world. The 80 percent reduction in U.S. emissions that will be needed to lead international action to stop climate change may not come cheaply, but the cost of failing to act will be much greater. New research shows that if present trends continue, the total cost of global warming will be as high as 3.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Four global warming impacts alone—hurricane damage, real estate losses, energy costs, and water costs — will come with a price tag of 1.8 percent of U.S. GDP, or almost $1.9 trillion annually (in today’s US dollars) by 2100.
We know how to avert most of these damages through strong national and international action to reduce the emissions that cause global warming. But we must act now. The longer we wait, the more painful—and expensive —the consequences will be.”
For the full report go to —–
https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/cost.pdf
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3 billion tonnes of gas
4 billion tonnes of oil
9 billion tonnes of coal
That’s what we buy and burn every year now.
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50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide
Is what that burning produces every year.
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$84 billion per year — That’s over $1.5 billion a week to spend on propaganda.
That’s the “money box” available to manipulate public opinion to suit the fossil fuel/agrochemical industries etc. It comes easy from 1% of sales value for coal and gas, and say US $2 a barrel for oil.
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One typical propaganda is – blame commercial jet transport (planes which are hard to replace). Reality is, jets use 0.230 billion tonnes per year, that’s about a quarter of a billion tonnes, that means jet transport produces less than half of one percent (0.46%) of fossil fuel’s total contribution of greenhouse gasses to heating our biosphere.
I think we could live with that 0.46%. Motor vehicles, diesel power generation, and big merchant ships are the problem, and they are easy to change (if we decide to).
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Each of us on Earth “owns” 0.6 hectares of useable land on which to live on, grow our food, graze our animals, and to sequence the atmosphere’s excess carbon dioxide into the soil.
World total area 51.5 billion hectares…World population is now 7.13 billion…One third is land. We live on, build roads and houses and things on just over a third of the land…So each of us “owns” 0.8 hectares or 2 acres of land. Take out roads and houses etc which leaves us with the 0.6 hectares.
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Homo sapien sapien, that’s us, have existed for 100,000 years.
Hominid are extinct bipedal primates. “sapiens” means wise. “Sapien sapien” is extra wise. Homo sapiens, that’s Neanderthals and a few others have existed for around 200,000 years.
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For more than a million years carbon dioxide (CO2 or CO2) levels hovered around 275 ppm. Since the late 1940s they have climbed to 400 ppm.
275 ppm means 275 parts per million by volume (0.0275%). By weight it’s a different number. Air’s average molecular weight is just over 28. Carbon dioxide’s molecular weight is 44. So 400 ppm becomes 432 ppm by weight and so air is 0.0432% CO2 by weight. Go To — https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/a-timeline-of-earths-average- temperature-in-comic-form
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Both the surface of the Sun and the centre of the Earth are around 6,000° C. However the temperature at the centre of the Sun is 15 million degrees. The temperature on the surface determines the amount of radiant energy emitted, and its frequency.
All bodies radiate electromagnetic energy. . The Sun at 6,000° C. radiates white light, that’s normal visible light. Things at Earth’s surface temperatures radiate infrared radiation. We can feel infrared as warmth but we cant see it. When any electromagnetic radiation hits an object it’s absorbed or reflected off in varying degrees. Oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide are near transparent to the visible light from the Sun but infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface has trouble getting through the “mist” of carbon dioxide, throughout the atmospheres, and can’t so easily get back out into Space. So with more carbon dioxide in the air, the Earth’s surfaces have to be hotter to radiate enough energy to balance the incoming sunlight. That’s how global warming happens.
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The conclusions of the Paris Summit on Climate Change of December 2015 to try to limit temperatures to below 1.5° C, and not to worry too much unless it got to near a 2° C rise, was utterly beyond stupidity.
Global mean surface temperature change from 1880 to 2015, relative to the 1951–1980 mean. The black line is the annual mean and the red line is the 5 year “running mean” Source: NASA GISS. The mean line they use here is 1880 to 2015 but that’s a mix of before global warming started and well into it . The big carbon dioxide influx into the atmosphere really started with WW2. To me the important starting line on NASA’s graph is the period ending at the start of WW2. From then until 2015 world temperatures have risen approximately 1.0° C .
That 1.0° C is all that it took to create the incredible weather instability we are now constantly experiencing all around the world.
This astute quote from the Economist points out the utter pointlessness of the Paris Summit on Climate Change of December 2015, and how they decided things. “The two-degree maximum appeared initially in papers written by the Yale economist William Nordhaus in the mid-1970s. As “a first approximation” he suggested the world should not warm more than it had in the past 100,000 years or so—the period for which ice-core data were available. Given how little was known about the costs and damages of global warming at that time, Dr Nordhaus admitted that the estimate was “deeply unsatisfactory”. Nevertheless, European scientists discussed the two-degree limit during the next decade or so; in 1990 the Swedish Environment Institute produced a report that argued that, on the basis of “the vulnerability of ecosystems to historical temperature changes,” warming above just 1°C was not advisable. The authors knew it was too late to keep within this level, and so suggested 2°C instead. From thence the maximum was adopted by the European Union’s Council of Ministers in 1996; the G8 picked it up in 2009. During the chaos of the UNFCCC talks in Copenhagen that year, the two-degree limit emerged in glory, forming part of the deal made there between the world’s biggest polluters. In 2010 it was enshrined within UN policy.”
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Sea levels rise because the water expands slightly as it gets warmer. Plus glaciers melt and the released water flows into the sea. Then there are various location effects.
Location effects. Prevailing winds can heap water up more on one side of an ocean than the other. That’s a location effect. Around three million years ago atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were also 400 ppm and that resulted in temperatures settling out at between 2°C and 3°C higher than they are now. Those sustained temperatures produced sea levels 25 metres higher than now. And even back then, there was still plenty of ice at the poles ready to melt if temperatures got higher.
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Storms, cyclones and tornados automatically get more violent with higher CO2 levels. So does the size of hail stones.
By trapping the heat we get higher temperatures in the lower atmosphere and lower temperatures in the higher atmosphere. (called the lower stratosphere).
Upward air velocity in storms is a big determinant in their destructivity capabilities. As a hot air bubble rises, it simultaneously cools. The higher altitude it can rise to, the higher the upward air velocity gets. Finally when the surrounding air is warmer than the bubble it stops rising. Higher atmospheric CO2 levels traps extra heat energy in the lower troposphere (ground level to around 35,000 feet). This, plus lower ozone levels lowers the temperature of the lower stratosphere (35,000 feet to around 160,000 feet) so the rising bubble goes higher and so continues to get faster. These heating variations are the main reason for the phenomenal increase in the intensity and severity and the destructive results of storms, typhoons, cyclones and tornados all across the World.
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Tropical cyclones, as a rule only form when the sea surface temperatures get above approximately 28° C. (83° F)
We are now getting those sea surface temperatures at the latitudes of the Tropical Jet Streams.
And that’s a deadly mix. We can confidently expect to see more frequent and more violent tropical cyclones in the months and years ahead. Google these words — “If you thought 2015 was hot, just wait”
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Every 1° C rise in ocean surface water temperatures means the tropical cyclone belt spreads 300 kilometres further north and south from the equator.
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Would cutting all CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow fix climate change? No. No way. Without removing the excess CO2 that’s now there runaway biospheric heating is an absolute certainty.
Without some form of massive sequestration, eliminating all CO2 emissions won’t do the job; levels would stay at 400 ppm for centuries. Ocean water temperatures would slowly rise to catch up to air temperatures. With zero emissions starting tomorrow morning, biospheric temperatures would rise by an estimated minimum of 0.6°C. This effect is referred to as “committed warming”. With this committed warming, the frighteningly unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet would continue to melt, along with most other ice sheets on the planet. What’s not included in that 0.6°C rise estimate is that the world’s permafrosts would continue to thaw and release their trapped methane. Methane is 100 times worse a green house gas than CO2. Arguing that just cutting emissions, by itself, might fix the “climate change” problem is a giant well marketed lie designed to placate the unthinking masses. Do yourself a favour: get the facts. Read published papers by qualified meteorologists, not news paper journalism.
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World temperatures once changed slowly, a single 1° C temperature change could easily take a thousand years or more. Now it’s a thousand times faster.
For 20,000 years, since the middle of the last ice age, world temperatures have moved within a 4.5°C range.. But temperatures are now changing up to possibly a thousand times faster. Most of Earth’s species cannot cope with that. This link is a good illustration: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/a-timeline-of-earths-average-temperature-in-comic-form
Also a recent study, published in the scientific journal Nature, uses some sixty ocean sediment cores to develop a record of Earth’s global average surface temperature dating back 2 million years. ——The study found that if all greenhouse gas emissions were to cease today, the climate would still warm by about 5 degrees Celsius, or 9 degrees Fahrenheit, during the next several centuries.
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Stable tropical rain forest definitely do not absorb carbon dioxide
Get a shovel and have a look. When a rain forests originally formed it would be an absorbers of carbon dioxide. Then the trees mature, and die. So once formed and established, a rain forest totally ceases to be a net absorber of carbon dioxide. The marketing that claims that a rainforest is always absorbing more carbon from the air is an outright lie. If they did, then after a few thousand years the trees would have to be thousands of feet high. And if no big trees then the forest floor would have to be hundreds of feet deep in carbon. They’re not. Rain forest soils are always extremely poor and very lacking in soil organic matter. Tropical rain forests generate the worst soils in the world: except possibly deserts.
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Stable tropical rain forests are net greenhouse gas producers. To combat global warming tropical rain forests are worse than useless: As jungles produce methane.
A stable rainforest breathes in CO2 by day, and breathes it out during the night. Decomposing forest floor litter also discharges carbon back into the air. “Carbon in”, equals “carbon out”. (See previous note) Unfortunately the “carbon in” is carbon dioxide but some of the “carbon out” is discharged as “marsh gas” from the rotting vegetation. Marsh gas is methane. Methane is one hundred times more powerful a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide being absorbed. However, over the next a hundred years the methane being generated will ultimately decompose into the less dangerous CO2. But we don’t have a hundred years. And yet it’s constantly drummed into us, and our kids, that tropical “rain forests can save the World”. That’s worse than telling kids that cocaine won’t really hurt you. Again I say “Do yourself a favour. Get the numbers. Get the facts and only then, decide what to believe.” And then have the courage of your convictions.
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Coal seam gas is at least, twice as bad as coal
Coal seam gas is almost pure methane. Shale gas is the same. Burning either for energy produces about much less carbon dioxide than burning coal. But there is a big problem with methane. In the whole process from mining and collecting the gas to where it is finally delivered and burnt there is typically a 5% minimum escape factor of the gas to the atmosphere. A 10% loss is not uncommon. They named it “Fugitive” gas, which somehow suggests the methane escape was “not really their fault”. Great PR. In some cases Fugitive Gas volumes can be as high as 20% of total production. It’s almost never below 2.5%.
Consider it this way. Burning 100 tons of good quality coal produces around 280 tons of carbon dioxide. Now let’s burn 100 tones of methane.. This produces only 275 tonnes of carbon dioxide. But the Fugitive gas leak into the air at 5%, is 5 tonnes. And 5 tonnes of methane is as bad as 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide. So burning the methane produces 275 tonnes of CO2 plus the 500 tonnes of CO2 equivalent from the Fugitive methane. So it’s 280 tonnes of CO2 from burning the coal And 775 tonnes from burning the, supposedly benign, coal seam gas. But methane gas produces almost twice the energy per kilogram of coal.
For equal energy, the ratio with a low 5% Fugitive Gas loss is therefore closer to 280 tonnes CO2 from coal and to 387 tonnes of CO2 from methane. So at best methane is “only” 37% worse than coal. Fugitive losses would have to be an impossibly tiny 1% for methane to no worse than coal. And that’s near impossible.Much higher than 5% seems to be very common. So burning coal seam gas is never ever better than burning coal, And is often many times worse. But that’s certainly not what the coal seam gas PR people encouraged us to believe. Google —- “Opinion Dirty Little Secret About Natural-Gas Fracking: Fugitive Methane Emissions”
Or go direct to ——- https://sites.google.com/site/gasisnotcleanenergy/gas-is-dirty-energy http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/15/07/07/opinion-fracking-and-natural-gas-s-dirty-little-secret-fugitive-methane-emissions/ .
If it doesn’t come up look at the top of your screen. Click it if it’s there.
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Nuclear energy is a totally sustainable energy system and we must always acknowledge it as so. It must always go on any list of “sustainable fuels”.
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The Sun is powered by nuclear fusion (fusion is joining little atoms together; The Hydrogen Bomb was a fusion device )
Nuclear fusion inside the Sun produces the heat that generates the light that is the “sustainable” energy source that powers solar cells. The same energy evaporates ocean water to make rain to produce “sustainable” hydro electric power.
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Earth’s deep interior is hot because of nuclear fission (fission is pulling big atoms apart: Atoms Bombs are fission devices )
The interior of the Earth contains small quantities of uranium U235 mixed up with a lot of U238. Uranium 235 a fuel used in many nuclear reactors. Deep inside the Earth, U235 fissions as it does in any uranium reactor and the process produces heat. This heat is the energy that drives “sustainable” geothermal power stations.
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The reality is that Tidal Energy is the only non-nuclear energy source on our planet
The Moon revolving around the Earth produces tides in the ocean. No nuclear energy is involved. Tidal energy, therefore is the only energy source that isn’t nuclear based. Tidal energy causes the Moon to slowly slow down.
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All life on Earth evolved in a world full of low level nuclear materials so we are used to it and it’s good for us.
Gamma, X Ray, infrared, ultra violet, radio waves, and visible light are all electromagnetic radiation. Alpha and Beta radiations are particles. Alpha particles are the core of helium atoms. Beta particles are electrons whizzing around and not attached to anything. Electrons, flowing down a wire is electricity. Neutrons make up the numbers in a nucleus and loose ones can be fast or slow. They can get absorbed by an atom and that atom will become another and different material. Neutrons penetrate solid materials and are best stopped by the hydrogen in water. We need to have a good shield to protect us from loose neutrons. Wikipedia is good for neutron information. Everything can kill you and everything is totally harmless; it just depends on the dose and how it gets into your body.
Sunshine and nuclear radiation are good for you; and again it depends on the dose. Typically nuclear workers that receive increased radiation are healthier than their fellow workers that don’t. The coal, oil and gas industries of the world will go out of business if the amazing safety of the nuclear energy industry becomes well known. And especially if the health enhancing benefits of getting regular doses of nuclear radiation becomes widely known. On May 14, 1945 Albert Stevens was injected with a huge dose of plutonium (the world’s biggest ever) to cure his terminal cancer and prevent his pending death. Big mistake. Albert Stevens didn’t have cancer. The injection gave him, in effect a permanent dose of 1,000 mSv per year for the rest of his life. He died just before he turned 80. See Wikipedia and Albert Stevens. Also for some history on the antinuclear propaganda campaign go to — https://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/nuclear.html
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Australia’s known uranium resources are the world’s largest – almost one-third of the world total.
In 2015-16 Australia produce 8000 tonnes of uranium oxide (8206 tonnes). From that we could produce 7000 tonnes of uranium metal (6941 tonnes) . Australia is the world’s third-ranking producer, behind Kazakhstan and Canada. All production is exported.
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In your whole life you will produce a billion litres of CO2, or an egg cup full of nuclear waste
The fossil fuel organizations have a huge, unsolved waste disposal problem. Their solution is to convince the gullible public that there is no problem, and additionally, using the atmosphere as a waste dump is perfectly safe. It’s the principal of the “Big Lie”. Tell a lie loud enough and often enough and it becomes the “truth”.
A person living in any Western society powered by coal, oil, and gas is responsible for discharging into the atmosphere around one billion litres of carbon dioxide throughout his life. The same person in a totally nuclear powered society would produce about one egg cup full of high level nuclear waste. (In conventional nuclear power station design they’re more conservative and allow for a volume of two hen’s eggs.)
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Nuclear waste into deep ocean subduction zones is the absolutely perfect, political correct solution . And it’s OK for a quarter of a billion years.
So the fossil fuel interests got the UN to declare that nuclear waste had to be stay on land and not “pollute the oceans”.A subduction zone is like and upside down volcano. It’s where the oceanic plates dive down under the continental plates. They also form the deepest ocean trenches in the world. Mount Everest would fit in some of them, and you wouldn’t see its peak. The subducted materials gets mixed with the molten outer mantle of the Earth’s crust. The round trip, that’s before any individual atom resurfaces, can be a quarter of a billion years. Cast the waste into concrete blocks and drop them into the trenches. It’s so ridiculously simple and easy and incredibly cheap and incredibly safe.
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Alternatively use abandoned mines for storage .
There are plenty a kilometre or so deep. The geology at some of them has been stable for hundreds of millions of years. Back fill with a dozen or so truck loads of concrete. It would sit there, until some dim distant, future, advanced, civilization, decided to study how ancient humans lived, and decided to dig it up.
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All the high level nuclear waste in the world adds up to just under 240 thousand tonnes. The whole lot would fit in any one of the current world’s bigger oil tankers.
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The Earth’s crust contains approximately 40,000 billion tonnes of Uranium
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The current estimated Plutonium content of the Earth is 6 million tonnes
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Cost of nuclear energy same as coal
And that’s because we allow coal fired power stations to dump their waste into the air, which hinders sunlight energy radiating out. But we make nuclear energy producers lock up their waste for a thousand years: But even so: coal energy in still not cheaper than nuclear energy. US costs comparisons show this clearly.
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France is 100% nuclear. The fossil fuel lobby promote only 75%
Nuclear power stations are the cheapest and safest way of producing electricity. France produces enough nuclear energy to totally supply all its electricity needs. It also produces a lot of hydro power. So it produces something like 115% of its need. It sells the rest. France is the world’s biggest exporter of electricity. However in the world’s fossil fuel compliant media France is always portrayed as being only 75% nuclear, not 100% nuclear. The inference being that it must make up the difference somehow. Maybe with fossil fuels? It’s called “perception management”. France is not silly. It’s not giving away its electricity. It’s selling it for a profit and waste disposal is definitely factored in.
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Biofuels and batteries can run self contained transport
There are two major biofuels, Ethanol and bio-diesel. Ethanol can replace petrol in spark ignition type engines. And biodiesel in diesel engines. Almost all the major automobile manufacturers in the World manufacture engines that run on pure ethanol. When the world price for oil was above US$100 a barrel ethanol was cheaper than petrol. Aircraft engines are now made to run on pure ethanol. In Brazil most agricultural aircraft use these engines. They have been making cars in Brazil for years that can run on pure ethanol, pure petrol, or any blend between.
Biodiesel is produced when you mix palm oil with ethanol with a little bit of caustic soda to catalyze the bonding chemical reaction. Virtually all diesel engines run equally as well on biodiesel as they do on petroleum diesel. Most run better with less problems as biodiesel doesn’t vary from where you get it. Ethanol is made by the bulk fermentation of sugar from sugar cane, or the fermentation of any of the grains. Sugar cane makes the most economical sense as you’re fermenting the sap whereas with grain you’re fermenting only the plants seeds.
Methane is over 100 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. Sugar cane and oil palms grow best in the wet tropics unlike tropical rain forests, no methane is produced to discharge into the air .
In a modern two car family it would be nice if one car at least was battery powered. Of course the perfect combination is a hybrid vehicle with a biofuel design engine.
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Fossil fuel PR promotes nuclear energy as non-renewable
What is promoted as “sustainable energy” is derived ultimately from nuclear fission in the Earth interior or nuclear fusion in the Sun’s interior. Then the pro-fossil fuel, anti-nuclear lobby creates an incredible piece of “double think”. They promote the image that nuclear energy doesn’t qualify as “sustainable energy”. The reality is that there is enough easily and cheaply mined uranium and thorium in the world to last our civilization many thousands of years. There is enough uranium in the world’s ocean, and, with a little development, it would be reasonably easy to extract. It would then easily power human society for many millions of years. And, as has been noted, there is enough waste disposal systems to last us a few billion years.
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As at 23/1/23 and as requested I’m assembling for you a “what to hammer list” of the basic ideas and concepts in my assembled solution to our biosphere’s rapid overheating.
Nutshell reminder list of what we need people to know and understand – especially people who construct the laws we have to live by.
1 Per unit of power produced, coal, oil and natural gas kill over 500 times more people than die from either wind or nuclear or solar. And that’s with the two nuclear bombs that ended WW2 included.
2 Cease all government subsidies to the fossil fuels and agrochemical industries.
3 Convert the air’s carbon overload (existing as carbon dioxide) into soil humus and doing so by any means selected or invented by the farmer. And pay them at least US$10 per ton – carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq) for that removal. It’s the cheapest way to remove it. The quantity removed, however has to be easily and accurately measured. Or nothing happens. The Yeomans Methodology solves that problem. Read it. One farmer’s comment was – “It’s simply unfettered common sense“.
The existing carbon dioxide overload is enough to keep the biosphere heating for decades. Its therefore imperative that we in Australia demand that our federal government use the existing “Carbon Farming Initiative Act 2011” to approve the Yeomans Methodology to create Australian Carbon Credits. Businesses, organisations and governments around the world could use the Methodology to create their own carbon credits and so demonstrate to all, the methodology’s enate practicality.
4 To be clear we are defining “humus” as those molecules that are created from the final breakdown of soil life in the presence of air and water. Humus molecules are also huge – they can have molecular weights in the millions. They have long life-spans – up to thousands of years. In soil they are almost chemically inert. We also include as “humus” soil organic matter that will pass through a 2 mm sieve without any prior grinding. That means the material must have decomposed to the point where it is no longer a fibrous material.
5 In the air, methane gas is 225 to 350 time worse a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
6 Fracking is the process of forcing high-pressure liquids deep into the earth to fracture the rock structures and so release trapped oil and gas. That is oil and gas that’s been safely trapped, usually for millions of years.
7 Apply continuous and enormous monitory penalties to “Fugitive Gas” (methane) discharges that mining companies are constantly releasing into the atmosphere.
8 Ammonia liquid will be, and must be the primary fuel for all our portable energy requirements. It’s the only sane choice we have that we don’t have to grow on farm land, such as ethanol.
9 Ammonia is easy and cheap to produce from air and water and electricity. And now possibly from air and water and strong blue light. Also, ammonia is safer to handle than either gas, or oil, or coal.
( My mother always had a bottle of ammonia in the kitchen to clean the bench top. It’s safe stuff)