Our 1998 Volvo Station Wagon Is Green
Of course this is not what Greta and the Gullibles will tell you
Geez. I am having a flashback to that Nietzsche quote at the beginning of the Ukraine rant I did last July. The lines were, “All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” (1)
Background
Last March 17/24 I did a little energy rant which basically said that over human history, our energy sources have gotten more and more energy dense (dung→wood→coal→ oil→hydrogen→nuclear). By the way, lithium batteries are below dung on the dense scale. Some think energy density is not as good as another metric called surface power density but the same order still stands except that natural gas is looks real good.
Last March 1/24 I did a little electrical grid rant which basically said the biggest machine mankind has ever made, is not like a big tub storing something like oil because the grid “stores” only electrons. It is also precarious because it is old. It is not air gapped for a big time 1859 Carrington-like event. “Renewables” (big question mark on that word!) are screwing up the grid creating negative spot prices for electricity because they are intermittent [and don’t tell me that another Enron will prevent this {2}]
No Such Thing
No such thing as renewable energy bc it takes a lot of diesel to mine the stuff you need to make solar panels or wind turbines. It takes a lot of land to bury that stuff after it wears out. Btw, wind turbines in the ocean kill whales (3) but don’t tell Greta…..the whaling hypocrite country Norway is just east of Sweden, don’t forget.
No such thing as clean energy bc all infrastructure has a environmental cost. No solutions, only trade offs ala Thomas Sowell’s famous line.
No such thing as an energy transition. As we “transitioned” from wood to coal we needed more wood to support mine tunnels to mine coal. As we “transitioned” from coal to oil we needed more coal to make steel to mine the oil. ETC. Jevons paradox is true. The more and cheaper energy gets the more we use.
There are two big geopolitical spots on planet earth right now where they produce way less oil than they consume. China and Europe. Guess where the biggest EV penetration is?
China makes all our stuff BECAUSE they have cheap energy BECAUSE they burn four billion tons of COAL a year (50% of the world’s coal burning) to make that cheap stuff which is then amazoned to us so we can brag about how green we are.
There are two billion people on this planet who burn dung/wood to cook their food in a hut and watch their children die young from all the sh*t they breathe in. These people want/need/deserve a frig and a gas stove. And until they get this, the poor areas of the world will stay poor with dirty air and the green greta uninformed freaks of the rich world with clean air will preen about Net phuquing Zero.
There’s an old engineering saying is that you have only two of the following three….fast/cheap/good. Same applies to energy. Net Zero is beyond a joke. Net Energy Poverty is what the new American Secretèary of Energy is all about. Carney Canada will be WAY beyond a joke.
So. Getting back to our old 1998 Volvo Station Wagon. Isn’t she a beaut?
If you do a query on your favorite LLM about the environmental economics of a gas engine car (ICE) vs. an electric car (EV) you’ll get lots of analysis around manufacturing carbon and driving carbon and amortized carbon and so on and so forth. The bottom line is that if you walk a lot and drive a little, then keep the old ICE and, as they famously said in the famous Monty Python movie, empty your nose in the direction of your Tesla owning friends. LOL.
Notes:
1)Actually Nietzsche did not say this. The real line is “it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations..." and it comes from his notebooks; not his published work.
2)Just think about “renewable” solar for a minute. Let’s run a little experiment in some town in the sunbelt where the sun pounds down 12 hours a day and see if it works as the sole power source. Well. What happens at night if I have no base load fossil fuel, or nuclear, or hydro? Well. You are in the dark and maybe quite cold. Solar does not scale like the silicon valley VC’s love to drone on about.
3)The standard line is that oil stopped the whale hunt at the turn of the 19th century bc kerosene was better than whale oil for night time lighting. But really it just delayed a much bigger slaughter (Japanese and Norwegian and Icelandic big brave whale hunting morons are the last holdouts in 2024). When oil powered ships got going the whale killing really came back with a vengeance with all that extra cheap energy that humans could now use to power massive whaling vessels and harpons. As another aside, Churchill’s decision to modernize the British navy in the 1910’s with oil powered ships was the basic reason that the little pink island “conquered” 25% of the world’s landmass.