Bill Gates is suddenly skeptical: pivots away from climate doom and renewables

Jo Nova | joannenova.com.au

 

Yet another climate change heavyweight abandons ship

It’s the beginning of the end of the renewables fantasy, but there will be no apology — no admission they were wrong, or that thousands upon millions of people have suffered because of climate sorcery.

Watch as the billionaire who lectured us from private jets, pivots into word salad. Now he says we still have to solve climate change (whatever that means), but the doomsday view is wrong, and it “will not be the end of civilization.” He’s suddenly turned into a kind of Bjorn Lomborg. Forget mitigation, say hello to Adaptation.

On the cusp of COP30 in Brazil, Bill Gates has launched a life raft for his reputation —  a 17 page memo called Three tough truths about climate

Bill Gates can see what’s coming (a reckoning for the renewables debacle), so he is repositioning himself so he doesn’t go down with the ship. Indeed, he’s almost writing an escape plan for the whole Blob. In a nutshell, he’s admitting between the lines that wind and solar power are unaffordable, and since climate change won’t actually be that catastrophic, everyone should calm down while we invent technologies, and in the mean time, get back to stopping people from starving. Wouldn’t you know, he says “Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.” (That’s Truth #3 ).

What he’s not saying is that he and his friends wasted untold billions (maybe trillions) of dollars of our money installing wind and solar panels which aren’t very good. He is not joining those dots.

We still need that breakthrough mythical technology to save us from the climate monster.

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Why a hipster, vegan, green tech economy is not sustainable

Vijay Kolinjivadi

Al-Jazeera

Improving eco-efficiency within a capitalist growth-oriented system will not save the environment. 

On the western borderlands of Montreal's well-to-do Outremont district and the ultra-hipsterised and gentrified Mile End lies an expanse of land where the University of Montreal is currently building a new science campus. Just across is Parc-Extension, one of Canada's poorest and most densely populated neighbourhoods and a port of call for many newly arrived immigrants.

The new campus has been touted as a model of "sustainable development". It boasts LEED-certified buildings to reduce environmental impact, rainwater collection structures, energy-efficient lighting and heat recycling, infrastructure for electric vehicles and bikes, lots of greenery, and overall, a minimal carbon footprint. A number of tech companies, including Microsoft's new AI Hub, are moving in and are expected to further enhance the "eco-efficiency" of the area.

The unspoken expectation is that once the green new campus is completed, capital and economic growth will naturally flow into the area. This means nearby neighbourhoods will get "revitalised", especially the poorer ones, like Parc-Extension.

Thus, immigrant-owned grocery stores, halal butcheries and community centres will soon be replaced by vegan chain restaurants, hip vintage clothing joints, organic food stores and coffee-shops galore, as landlords push out poor tenants to make space for more well-to-do ones. 

In the process, the implicit socio-economic violence behind gentrification will be invariably "greenwashed" and presented as development that would make the area more "sustainable", "beautiful" and "modern". 

Unfortunately, creation by destruction is what capitalism does best, and its damaging practices are anything but green. This market-driven "sustainable" vision of economic activity, ecological-conscious diets and "hipness" within modern capitalism reinforce inequality and still hurt the environment. 

Before I proceed further with my argument, I should mention that I am an academic, living in a "hip" part of Montreal and engage in activities that follow a particular aesthetic ethos, all of which make me very much a part of the reality I critique below. My aim is not to moralise, but rather to highlight the dangers of a political and economic system that profits from deceiving perhaps well-meaning self-proclaimed progressive folks into believing that a greener, more efficient capitalism is possible.

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Resurgence Talks: Jeremy Leggett – The Solar Civilisation, Renaissance, and the New Despotism

Resurgence Talks: Jeremy Leggett – The Solar Civilisation, Renaissance, and the New Despotism  from The Resurgence Trust on Vimeo.

See also:Global civilisation to descend into ‘hell on earth’ unless we choose a new paradigm

Sacrificed Landscapes - How the energy transition is destroying our environment

English subtitles by Vind-Alarm-Danmark.eu & Friends-Against-Wind.org
Video by Verlagsgruppe Random House for the promotion of the book “Geopferte Landschaften” by Georg Etscheit (editor) and published by HEYNE Verlag. More information at: http://bit.ly/geopfertelandschaften

Gaza Man Invents Solar Powered Water Purification Tank for War-Torn Town

The Mind Unleashed

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has left almost 90 percent of the water supply unfit for people to drink. Fayez al-Hindi has devised a homemade water desalinization setup that is helping to solve the water crisis, though, as some Gaza residents face running out of water in mere months. It runs on solar power and a little ingenuity.

Three years of jets bombing the Gaza strip have left the territory’s water infrastructure extremely unstable. Both reservoirs above ground and below have been damaged, so even when it rains, the water is often contaminated, and made unfit to drink. More than $34 million dollars’ worth of damage has been done to Gaza’s water infrastructure.

You would think that such massive-scale damage would mean that the residents are left hopeless, but not with a little sunshine and a desalinization tank. Al-Hindi’s solution to the water shortage in his area was to build a simple tank that separates clean water from salt and pollutants. The tank doesn’t do industrial-strength work, but it makes just enough water for he and his family to drink and cook with daily – about 2.6 gallons. His tank works without the use of chemicals, and simply utilizes the energy of the sun.

His device started getting a few nods, but people were concerned that the distilled water he was creating was not truly clean. Coastal Municipalities Water Utility tested the water from al-Hindi’s invention, and found that it was more than potable. A technician for the utility said the results were, “fascinating.” 

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Breakthrough solar cell captures carbon dioxide and sunlight, produces burnable fuel

Science Daily

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.

The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.

Unlike conventional solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such "artificial leaves" could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently.

"The new solar cell is not photovoltaic -- it's photosynthetic," says Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC and senior author on the study.

"Instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight," he said.

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Liter of Light's solar-powered, DIY lamp made from a plastic bottle is transforming lives

The Independent

Despite what Back to the Future fans would have you believe, "where's my hoverboard?" isn't a shoe-in for the motto of 2015. "Let there be light" is a strong contender, thanks to this being Unesco's International Year of Light. The opening ceremony in Paris this week celebrated seminal moments in the history of illumination.

It is, I learn, 1,000 years since the great Arabic scientist, Ibn al-Haytham, released his magnum opus on optics, 150 years since James Clerk Maxwell came up with the electromagnetic theory of light, and 50 years since the development of fibre optics. All of which enlightening anniversaries provide a handy springboard for Unesco to promote light-based technologies throughout the year.

For those of us who spend our lives surrounded by artificial light, bathed in floods of the stuff in our homes and workplaces and on our streets, it might seem something so mundane as not to require, well, the spotlight. But today, more than a quarter of the world's population lives in darkness.

According to Unesco figures, more than 1.5 billion people around the world currently have no access to electric light, and around 1.3 billion of them must spend up to half their income on paraffin to light their homes at night. Paraffin kills around 1.5 million people a year in fires, or from associated health problems such as bronchitis and cancer. Inhaling paraffin smoke on a regular basis is equivalent to smoking four packets of cigarettes a day.

The need for clean, affordable alternatives is obvious, which is why one charity, Liter of Light, has pledged to create a million green, off-the-power-grid lights in 2015 using an ingenious design that is, frankly, rubbish. Liter of Light has developed a solar-powered light that is cheap and relatively easy to assemble and whose main feature is a plastic bottle: the kind that holds a litre of fizzy drink, and that is usually thrown away once empty. 

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The Windfarm Delusion

The Spectator
Matt Ridley
March 3, 2012

The government has finally seen through the wind-farm scam – but why did it take them so long?
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.

This forces a decision from Cameron — will he reassure the turbine magnates that he plans to keep subsidising wind energy, or will he retreat? The political wind has certainly changed direction. George Osborne is dead set against wind farms, because it has become all too clear to him how much they cost. The Chancellor’s team quietly encouraged MPs to sign a letter to No. 10 a few weeks ago saying that ‘in these financially straitened times, we think it is unwise to make consumers pay, through taxpayer subsidy, for inefficient and intermittent energy production that typifies onshore wind turbines’.

Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me — the taxpayers — double. I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.

In Britain the percentage of total energy that comes from wind is only 0.6 per cent. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, ‘policies intended to meet the EU Renewables Directive in 2020 will impose extra consumer costs of approximately £15 billion per annum’ or £670 per household. It is difficult to see what value will be got for this money. The total carbon emissions saved by the great wind rush is probably below 1 per cent, because of the need to keep fossil fuels burning as back-up when the wind does not blow. It may even be a negative number.

America is having far better luck. Carbon emissions in the United States fell by 7 per cent in 2009, according to a Harvard study. But the study concluded that this owes less to the recession that year than the falling price of natural gas — caused by the shale gas revolution. (Burning gas emits less than half as much carbon dioxide as coal for the same energy output.) The gas price has fallen even further since, making coal seem increasingly pricey by comparison. All over America, from Utah to West Virginia, coal mines are being closed and coal plants idled or cancelled. (The US Energy Information Administration calculates that every $4 spent on shale purchases the same energy as $25 spent on oil: at this rate, more and more vehicles will switch to gas.)

Renewables Aren’t Enough. Clean Coal Is the Future

 

Wired

Coal supplies over 40 percent of global electricity needs, and that percentage is going up. The only real question is how to minimize the damage. 


Proof that good things don’t always come in nice packages can be found by taking the fast train from Beijing to Tianjin and then driving to the coast. Tianjin, China’s third-biggest city, originated as Beijing’s port on the Yellow Sea. But in recent years Tianjin has reclaimed so much of its muddy, unstable shoreline that the city has effectively moved inland and a new, crazily active port has sprung up at the water’s edge. In this hyper-industrialized zone, its highways choked with trucks, stand scores of factories and utility plants, each a mass of pipes, reactors, valves, vents, retorts, crackers, blowers, chimneys, and distillation towers—the sort of facility James Cameron might have lingered over, musing, on his way to film the climax of Terminator 2.

Among these edifices, just as big and almost as anonymous as its neighbors, is a structure called GreenGen, built by China Huaneng Group, a giant state-owned electric utility, in collaboration with half a dozen other firms, various branches of the Chinese government, and, importantly, Peabody Energy, a Missouri firm that is the world’s biggest private coal company.

By Western standards, GreenGen is a secretive place; weeks of repeated requests for interviews and a tour met with no reply. When I visited anyway, guards at the site not only refused admittance but wouldn’t even confirm its name. As I drove away from the entrance, a window blind cracked open; through the slats, an eye surveyed my departure. The silence, in my view, is foolish. GreenGen is a billion-dollar facility that extracts the carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant and, ultimately, will channel it into an underground storage area many miles away. Part of a coming wave of such carbon-eating facilities, it may be China’s—and possibly the planet’s—single most consequential effort to fight climate change.

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Germany's energy revolution on verge of collapse

New Scientist

GERMANY'S energy revolution has gone sour, as have its efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's "Energiewende" policy aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent between 1990 and 2020, mostly by closing coal-fired power plants and boosting renewable energy. Yet in 2013 coal burning soared to its highest level for more than 20 years. Then last week economy and energy minister Sigmar Gabriel said he will slash wind and solar subsidies by a third, to cut rising energy bills.

Merkel is also shutting down Germany's nuclear power plants, its largest source of low-carbon energy. This means emissions, which had fallen by 27 per cent by 2011, are now on the rise.

"The Energiewende is moving emissions in the wrong direction," says Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado in Boulder. He calculates that Germany will have to more than double renewables' contribution to energy from 17 to 38 per cent to reach the 40 per cent target.

"It seems highly unlikely that Germany can hit the reduction target by 2030, much less 2020," says Pielke, who says nuclear is "the best tool available for reducing CO₂ emissions."

The problem is made worse by a continued slump in the price of European Union permits to emit CO₂, which act as a tax on dirty fuels like coal. The low cost has allowed coal plants to restart.

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