COP26 - the Glasgow Climate Summit

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by boatman61

Maybe it's time folks like Gord and Lake Effect etc started redirecting some of their ire at the truly selfish, Screw You I'm Fire Proof crowd that Govern the world, supposedly for our benifit..
But till then I'll just keep laughing at their outrage..

Who says I don't? We just don't have any military-industrial-complex threads on CF. Too close to home for the boat-owning class, I suspect.

My "ire" on CF is mainly reserved for willful ignorance and smug repetitions of misinformation... something you have indulged in occasionally. Laugh at your own complicity in that.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by LakeSuperior

Efficiency of a new car is 30 to 35%. This means that of the total energy in a gallon of gasoline only 30 to 35% is converted to mechanical energy. Diesel car efficiencies are in the 40% range.

Modern power plants burning coal, natural gas, etc. convert roughly 45% of the energy into electricity. Of this 45% 6% is lost in transmission yielding about 42% that is available to charge an EV in your garage.

Not considering the back end, getting the fuel to the power plants or gas stations, EVs are just about as inefficient as a ICEs. Especially, they are a wash environmentally when the natural gas for the power plants is a by product of drilling for oil.

In the end, your point doesn't hold up very well.

You haven't accounted for the energy and mess expended to get the oil and to refine, then transport it. You also haven't considered that electricity can come from many different sources, including wind and solar that could be just blocks away from parked EVs. Also consider that EVs usually charge overnight, when grid demand is normally at its lowest. It's an ideal sink of power from wind overnight. EVs can even be considered "mobile battery banks" that could put energy back into the grid at some point.

But I do agree that just switching from big ICE vehicles to big EVs isn't much of an improvement. An electric quad pickup is still pointlessly wasteful. The bigger gains will come from smaller personal EVs. And less of them.

[goboatingnow]

Dino juice exponents always ignore the environmental costs of creating refined hydrocarbons and of course distributing them all over the world.

[Bycrick]

The last few posts show the danger of taking the present and simply extrapolating it into the future. For example,

1. How will simply replacing gas guzzling SUVs with electric SUVs solve the traffic problem? Same number of cars on the road.

2. The pollution from cars is mostly in the urban areas. So the solution should be to distribute the pollution to other places? Or is that just another "equality" dream.

3. According to one story, some 30% of the land area in Houston was involved with cars: streets, parking, dealers, repair shops, private garages. Does that make sense?

4. Why not more public transit? Because in the US we’ve made it too expensive to create and operate. What would happen if we spent all of the money used to create electric cars on public transit?

5. Why does California want to spend upwards of $80 billion to build a high-speed train through the thinly populated Central Valley? Will the alleged ridership come from getting people out of their cars or will it just take passengers from the airlines? If one doesn’t improve local transportation, people will drive between cities so that they’ll have a car when they arrive.

6. Why would I build electric semi-trucks for long haul transportation? If one really wants to reduce this diesel pollution, you’d put the trailers on a train between cities. But don’t ask the Teamsters or the independent truck drivers to support that idea.

7. The idea that because today there’s potentially excess electric power available at night available cheaply is based on there not being a lot of electric cars. What happens when you add 10 million EVs all wanting to charge at night?

The whole system is built around the current business model. Any real substantive change is going to require much more than tweaking around the edges of the problem. That won’t be cheap, or quick, or easy, or painless.

[LakeSuperior]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

You haven't accounted for the energy and mess expended to get the oil and to refine, then transport it. You also haven't considered that electricity can come from many different sources, including wind and solar that could be just blocks away from parked EVs. Also consider that EVs usually charge overnight, when grid demand is normally at its lowest. It's an ideal sink of power from wind overnight. EVs can even be considered "mobile battery banks" that could put energy back into the grid at some point.

But I do agree that just switching from big ICE vehicles to big EVs isn't much of an improvement. An electric quad pickup is still pointlessly wasteful. The bigger gains will come from smaller personal EVs. And less of them.

All the wishful thinking in the world is not going to get 7.3 billion people on the planet to zero carbon on wind and solar especially the top billion highest consumers. So give it up. We are not going back to horse and buggy or caves. Let's work constructively on real solutions.

How about investing trillions per year instead of billions per year in realizing fusion power? How about salt reactor technology? How about getting REAL!! The problem with non-technical folks is that they just don't get it.

Where do you think the natural gas comes to produce fairly clean power we have been using to generate EV electricity. I'll answer that again. It comes from drilling and fracking!!

Why not go out and read and understand what the power engineering community actually has to say about solar and wind and EV. These are folks that actually allow you to have your fantasy world that you seem to live in. Many of you are so clueless about the magnitude of the problem...

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by LakeSuperior

All the wishful thinking in the world is not going to get 7.3 billion people on the planet to zero carbon on wind and solar especially the top billion highest consumers. So give it up. We are not going back to horse and buggy or caves. Let's work constructively on real solutions.

How about investing trillions per year instead of billions per year in realizing fusion power? How about salt reactor technology? How about getting REAL!! The problem with non-technical folks is that they just don't get it.

Where do you think the natural gas comes to produce fairly clean power we have been using to generate EV electricity. I'll answer that again. It comes from drilling and fracking!!

Why not go out and read and understand what the power engineering community actually has to say about solar and wind and EV. These are folks that actually allow you to have your fantasy world that you seem to live in. Many of you are so clueless about the magnitude of the problem...

If you think that a different fossil fuel solves all our problems, it's you that's clueless. Wind and solar have their place. Even natural gas has its place as a transitional step. Fusion.... well it's been "10 years away" for 40 years... A lot has to be done on the demand side, too: efficiency and moderation of use. Bycrick's latest post is closer to reality.

[Nord Sal]

I think in this day and age of advanced communications and remote meetings that the people asking why this conference needs to be held at all are asking a legitimate question. Indeed, shouldn't those promoting these changes be setting an example for the world to follow?


https://www.mixedtimes.com/business/...ed-as-shuttles

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Nord Sal

I think in this day and age of advanced communications and remote meetings that the people asking why this conference needs to be held at all are asking a legitimate question. Indeed, shouldn't those promoting these changes be setting an example for the world to follow?

Individual behaviour change isn't going to be sufficient, so personal examples are empty gestures. Also, some travel is more useful than others. Wouldn't you consider a few thousand expert and influential people meeting up once in a while a better use of resources than millions commuting to/from work daily, in oversized SUVs and pickups, because they can, and because there are no other viable options?

[Bycrick]

While I mostly agree with LakeSuperiors problem statement, he ignores controlling the consumption side of the equation. For example:

1. Why not make it more difficult to build buildings that are designed around year-round air conditioning to be habitable. Try to justify that to the people in south Florida or southern Texas.

2. Outlaw huge TV screens used for advertising. Where would sports be if you couldn’t go to the stadium and watch the game on TV?

3. Limit the size of tank-type water heaters. Do you really need to keep 80 gallons of water hot all the time?

4. Get rid of "always on" appliances. Do we really need to power the TV all the time to save a few seconds of waiting when we want it? Should one really be using disposable batteries in a computerized picture frame?

If I could wave my magic wand and create an economically feasible fusion power plant that supplies infinite free power with no environmental impact (hey, if I’m dreaming, I should dream big), that does nothing to solve the electric distribution problem or the fact that all of that electric energy ultimately gets converted to heat someplace, sometime.

The dreamers who imagine the Mao Tse Tung example of small, distributed power plants (or solar or wind generators) to eliminate the distribution problem are ignoring:

1. If one chooses to live off the grid, for example, the solar panel on every roof approach, what happens when you have a week long storm and there’s no sun? Fire up your ICE generator?

2. When you can’t generate enough "personal, private power," then what? Can you then suddenly decide to connect to the grid? Or do you freeze, or starve because your car can’t charge?

3. What happens to the "poor people" who can’t afford $25k for the solar panels?

4. If half the people are getting all their power from their own systems, who pays for the distribution systems that are needed only occasionally?

If you want to save the world, you’re going to have to give up your cushy, indulgent life style. And that will be a really hard sell to the voters.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Nord Sal

I think in this day and age of advanced communications and remote meetings that the people asking why this conference needs to be held at all are asking a legitimate question. Indeed, shouldn't those promoting these changes be setting an example for the world to follow?
https://www.mixedtimes.com/business/...ed-as-shuttles

You raise a good question, which you then depreciate, by linking to a dubious
dis-informative news article.

It has been announced [1] that Jaguar Land Rover is COP26’s official partner and will be providing electric vehicles for the summit. The Cabinet Office also confirmed that none of the supplied electric vehicles will be Tesla vehicles, although added that it is possible that visiting delegates could have their own vehicle arrangements.

Any generators required for the charging of the electric vehicles will, as has been reported by the Scotsman [2], run on recycled cooking oil (hydrogenated vegetable oil), rather than diesel.

[1] ➥ https://www.gov.uk/government/news/j...aders-at-cop26

[2] ➥ https://www.scotsman.com/news/transp...ortage-3412247

“COP26 Transport Plan” ~ Transport Scotland
➥ https://www.transport.gov.scot/cop26...ransport-plan/


Check your facts!

You don't have to know everything.
"The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library," ~ Albert Einstein.

[Nord Sal]

My point is in this day and age the need for the meeting (and associated travel) is questionable. When politicians and bureaucrats engage in behavior that can be seen as contrary to their stated goals, and contrary what YOU are supposed to do to achieve these goals, it diminishes their message and opens up questions about hypocrisy and privilege.

Some travel is of course more important and thus a better use of resources than others. A sick or injured person's transport to a care facility in an ambulance is an example, there's no real alternative to provide urgent care via the internet. This clearly isn't the case for most meetings.

Your comparison of noble 'experts and influential people' (read politicians) to bubba commuting to work in a pickup, especially when one considers that the experts had viable, less polluting, more publicly-palatable alternatives that could have been used to conduct their meeting is a strawman argument.

[Nord Sal]

Does burning used cooking oil not produce greenhouse gas emissions? If it does, wouldn't those emissions be eliminated or at the very least be greatly reduced if the meeting was conducted remotely?


Do emissions from transportation modes to the conference from vehicles other than officially designated conference transportation not matter?

[LakeSuperior]

In the power engineering world, 10,000s of wind generators simple increase the cost of power to average folks, kill millions of birds, and are a blight on the landscape.

Now imagine a 10X or 100X increase in the funding on approaches to get to real solutions.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ars-milestone/

A multination project to build a fusion reactor cleared a milestone yesterday and is now 6 ½ years away from “First Plasma,” officials announced.

Yesterday, dignitaries attended a components handover ceremony at the construction site of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in southern France. The ITER project is an experiment aimed at reaching the next stage in the evolution of nuclear energy as a means of generating emissions-free electricity.

The section recently installed—the cryostat base and lower cylinder—paves the way for the installation of the tokamak, the technology design chosen to house the powerful magnetic field that will encase the ultra-hot plasma fusion core.

“Manufactured by India, the ITER cryostat is 16,000 cubic meters,” ITER officials said in a release. “Its diameter and height are both almost 30 meters and it weighs 3,850 tons. Because of its bulk, it is being fabricated in four main sections: the base, lower cylinder, upper cylinder, and top lid.”

The entire project is now 65% complete, the officials said.

The world’s first commercial-scale fusion reactor project is on track to officially launch operations at the end of 2025, said spokeswoman Sabina Griffith, but it will take at least a decade to fully power up the facility.

“The date for First Plasma is set; we will push the button in December 2025,” Griffith said. “It will take another 10 years until we reach full deuterium-tritium operations.”

Officials say the ITER nuclear fusion reactor is poised to be the most complicated piece of machinery ever built. It will contain the world’s largest superconducting magnets, needed to generate a magnetic field powerful enough to contain a plasma that will reach temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius, about 10 times hotter than the center of the sun.

Griffith said more milestones will be cleared as soon as construction continues.

[GordMay]

[QUOTE=Nord Sal;3503644]I think in this day and age of advanced communications and remote meetings that the people asking why this conference needs to be held at all are asking a legitimate question...[quote’

Earlier [May 2020?], the decision-making body of Cop26 [the UN, the UK and representatives of developing and developed countries] ruled that governments should hold a three-week long virtual meeting, from 31 May to 17 June [2021], to begin negotiations, and hammer out draft agreements, on key aspects of the talks. [1]

There was broad consensus, that decisions would not be possible, in the virtual format. As a result, the subsidiary bodies’ meeting was convened to advance discussions, without taking any formal decisions.

Connectivity remains an intractable problem, with technical glitches, internet challenges, even power outages, causing negotiators, and even facilitators to drop out of sessions.

The Alliance of Small Island States, 39 countries that are at risk of inundation if temperatures rise above 1.5C, insists that the Cop, itself, must take place in person. Some developing countries are nervous about holding virtual negotiations, as they fear being outmanoeuvred, by big countries, or lack the infrastructure, to hold reliable online meetings, or time zone differences, etc..

UK climate minister, and COP26 president, Alok Sharma, has said, “I have always been very clear that this should be the most inclusive COP ever. I have been travelling around the world and it is very clear to me that people want to see a physical COP, in particular developing countries want this to be face to face.

Almost anyone, who has ever been at a COP, argues that a lot of the important stuff is going on in side-meetings, and back rooms.
Face to face is needed.

[1] “May–June 2021 Climate Change Conference – sessions of the subsidiary bodies”
➥ https://unfccc.int/event/may-june-20...sidiary-bodies

Many of your transportation questions/complaints would be answered, if you’d just read the, previously linked, ‘COP26 Transport Plan’.
➥ https://www.transport.gov.scot/cop26...ransport-plan/

If you’re into virtual conferences, see:
OECD COP26 Virtual Pavilion
Join us for two weeks of live events, as we bring together leading thinkers and policy experts who will share insights and data on accelerating climate action to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Responding to the UK COP26 Presidency’s call for a “whole-of-government” and “whole-of-society” approach to climate action, the OECD pavilion showcases a wide range of OECD analysis and data, from the role of cities and regions in mobilising climate action, to the contribution of tax policy towards net zero, the impact of trade agreements, net-zero transport systems, and the role of teachers and of youth.
Explore our range of events and tune in to participate from 28 October to 12 November.
➥ https://oecd-events.org/cop26/

[Bycrick]

Distinctions without a difference.

1. They’re going to supply Land Rovers, not Teslas. That’s obviously a thoroughly researched decision based on science and has nothing to do with the political fact that Land Rover is a British brand owned by an Indian company.

They’re being recharged with recycled cooking oil which, or course, doesn’t create any CO2(?). And this is all after 30000 people fly millions of passenger miles using those nasty fossil fuels.

We’re all supposed to work at home, socially distance and teach all the kids virtually (whatever happened to the teachers' objections to home schooling as being deficient in "socialization"). But these guys can’t make decisions unless they're face to face. The chairman has been traveling around the world and so everybody else wants to do it too.

And they already know all the question and all the answers. This is about how to do the PR and coercion to make everybody else go along with it. They’ve got "consensus," so they don’t need any more studies.

Part of the "justification" is that "small island states" are scared. They have a right to be, but if I’m going to vote for the US to spend a trillion dollars fighting, for example, sea-level rise, I'm going to spend it to save Miami or New Orleans. I’m unlikely to vote that money to save Kiribati or the Marshall Islands. That may be cynical, but it’s also realistic.