How much do you depend on petroleum-based products? A few of the non-fuel uses are previewed in the following video:
cbdakota
I want to respond to Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s video titled “Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the real problem with climate change deniers” so here goes. The problem according to Tyson is that “deniers” do not understand science. “They can not sort out what is true and what is not true,” says Tyson.
If you watch late night TV or mainstream TV news you probably know Tyson. He and Bill Nye “the science guy” are their favorites when the media want someone to talk about “deniers” and global warming. Tyson is reasonably informed about the theory of man-made global warming while Nye is an embarrassment. See Nye’s debate with Marc Morano of Climate Depot.
Back to Tyson. Climate Depot has assembled a list of 700 or so prominent scientists that are skeptics. Most of them have as much or more understanding of climate science than does Tyson. Is Tyson overwhelmingly arrogant or living in a cocoon? I suspect the answer to that is probably both. With regard to the cocoon, he probably never looks at any of these Skeptics work or their reasons for being skeptical.
The bluster emanating from the Paris climate talks challenges the Potemkin Villages as the biggest attempted cover-up of the real facts on the ground in history. The agreement produced only voluntary caps on CO2 emissions; only voluntary transfers (reparations really) of money from the 1st world to the 3rd world); and reporting of emissions and international oversight do not exist. Further more, neither China or India will cut back their expected increase in CO2 emissions as they plan to serve their citizens first.
The Paris climate leadership acknowledged that even if the emission cuts would take place as promised, their arbitrary goal of holding the global temperature rise under 2C would not be achieved. President Obama flew a 500+ army to Paris. All they accomplished was to spend our money and a lot of CO2 emisssions.
The President, however, will claim he must have the money to pay reparations to the 3rd world countries and laws enacted to shut-down our industry to reduce CO2 emission. The science is not settled. Why wreck our economy and put our people out of work when there has been no significant rise in global temperatures for almost 19 years and polar ice is increasing.
cbdakota
The last two postings discussed an EPA regulation being imposed on coal-based 
power plants to reduce mercury (hg) and Air Toxics. The regulation is based on questionable/maybe fraudulent science because the full data used will not be provided to other scientists so they may verify the findings.
The use of Secret Science in the above is not the first use. From the Committee Report on the Secret Science Reform Act of 2015:
“EPA also has a record of relying on science conducted outside the Agency that is not available to the public—or to the EPA—and therefore cannot be replicated or verified by independent research- ers. For example, virtually all Clean Air Act regulations under the Obama Administration have been justified by data sets collected by two non-governmental institutions over 30 years ago, which have been withheld from the public and cannot be replicated. In 2014, Congress learned this data either no longer exists, is of such poor quality that modeling results cannot be replicated, or has not been coded to facilitate independent analysis. However, EPA continues to rely on this data to support major regulations. “
Warner Baxter is chairman, president and CEO of St. Louis-based Ameren Corp, the largest energy provider in Missouri, serving more than 1.2 million electric and gas customers. He says that” taking one-third of U.S. coal-fired power plants off the grid by 2020 simply isn’t workable”. He laid out the reasons for this belief using a posting on the Wall Street Journal.com titled “The Dirty Secret of Obama’s Carbon Plan”. This posting is behind a paywall, so you may not be able to access it.
Not really a posting about Climate Change, but having worked in the chemical industry for almost 40 years, this youtube caught my interest.
I though we has some products that required extreme care and caution when handling, but these are really novel (in a negative way of course):
cbdakota
Posted in chemistry, German Chemists, US Manufacturing Companies
Wired has a posting titled “A Two-Day Battle to Charge My Car Convinced Me We’re Not Ready for EVs” by Alex Davies. Davies relates that he borrowed a Nisan Leaf for a test run. He planed to make a trip from San Francisco to Mountain Valley, California for a meeting. The distance from his apartment to the meeting is 35 miles. The mileage available meter on the Leaf indicates its range at the current charge was 50 miles. The trip to the meeting was uneventful. The problems begin when he knows that the battery charge is not sufficient to get him back to his apartment. What follows was several hours getting the Leaf charged.
President Obama announced a “historic” (probably should have said “hysterical”) agreement with China regarding greenhouse gases. The President says we will reduce CO2 emissions by an economy-wide targets by 26%-28% below its 2005 level in 2025. This will require an equivalent reduction of the use of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal). China will continue to increase its CO2 emissions to sometime around 2030 and to make best efforts to peak early and intends to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 20% by 2030. So, the US will incur sharp increases in the cost of energy over this period of time. China gets the green light to use the cheapest form of energy production until at least 2030.
Dan Kahan, the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law & Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School, is a member of the Cultural Cognition Project, an interdisciplinary team of scholars who use empirical methods to examine the impact of group values on perceptions of risk and related facts. Much to his surprise, his testing revealed that Tea Party members have higher “science comprehension “ than do “not teaparty members”. The chart below shows this result:
A previous posting, “Fuel Cell Vehicles”, reviewed the basics of the fuel cell and the fuel cell vehicles. At the end of that posting, it was said that: “There are a lot of things going for H2 powered fuel cell vehicles except the economics.”
What does that mean? There are two factors that make H2 non-competitive versus other alternatives. Factor one is that hydrogen (H2) is very costly to produce, and distribute. The second are the physical characteristics of H2 that increase the cost of distribution and use.
Climate Change Sanity 