DIYer
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Will it be like the US Civil War, with Brussels sending troops? Or Madrid sending troops? Whose job is it to send troops? How does tiny Andorra manage to remain independent?
What Catalan needs now is allies. Just looking at a map, it doesn’t seem large enough to repel a military assault. And that’s what it comes down to, of course — which party to this ‘discussion’ has the strongest military? Will NATO get involved? Can it AVOID being involved? Which ‘side’ will it take?
And can Catalonia afford to buy a modern air defense system? The military picture in recent conflicts seems to come down to that. If you can’t shoot down your enemy’s drones and/or CAS jets, you have a problem.
I think the arctic ice graph may include data from a malfunctioning satellite. Remove that from the averages, and the graph returns to a more orderly march toward flat-line.
But of course, the cry of the capitalist goes like this:
Woohoo, northwest passage!Low interest rates were supposed to stimulate the economy.
Does not this prohibition against cash transactions further reduce economic activity?
Netherlands “votes” — because “democracy”, apparently…
Netherlands ‘rejects’ EU-Ukraine partnership deal .. with “just kidding” quotes.With 99.8% of the votes counted, 61.1% had said “No”, with 38% supporting a deal, media reports said.
Turnout is projected at 32%, above the 30% threshold of voters needed to be valid but within a 3% margin of error.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his government may have to reconsider the treaty if the vote is valid.
The Dutch parliament has already ratified the EU agreement and the result of the vote is not binding.
England no longer making steel —
It’s nice to have coal, if you are going to make steel. Anthracite coal is especially good. And not just for the heat produced by burning it, but also the chemistry of the steel. Iron and carbon sort of go together.
Anyway, isn’t the UK past ‘peak coal’ by now?
It’s sort of an old-fashioned idea, but I’d think it would be easier to make steel, glass, concrete, etc. near to where the fuel and components are found.Does English steel make sense, really, with iron ore imported from Australia and coal from America?
(and then too, of course, there’s the little no-demand thingy ..)That sheltering trench can double as a grave.
… which I suppose is the whole point of the article …Thanks, Ilargi.
They scapegoated VW before, back in the day of the Beetle and the Rabbit. Even though the smaller engines in these cars emit less junk overall, and get better gas mileage, the rules were set for ‘pollution per unit of volume’ in the exhaust. So the big gas-guzzling Cadillacs could pass, because their oversized engines gulped a lot of air, thereby diluting their emissions.
And interestingly, some of the late ’70s or ’80s Rabbit models had an air pump, to add air to the exhaust stream, just so they could pass emissions tests. So, cheating. But cheating on a rigged system of rules.
Interesting that it was nitrous oxide. I had not seen that bit of information.
The nitrous emission is sort-of ‘optional’. Air is made of nitrogen and oxygen, but it is difficult to get them to combine, and they do not produce energy when doing so. By itself, air does not ‘burn’. So now I understand how this happened. They could tweak the engine parameters for fuel efficiency, or for high power output, or for low NOx emission. It would be one of the ‘adjustable’ outputs of the diesel engine.
CO2 output is not adjustable — it will always produce that as long as it is running. The amount of CO2 emitted is inevitably proportional to the amount of carbon in the fuel, since carbon combustion is the source of ~ 2/3 of the energy from burning diesel. If it didn’t emit carbon, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to burn diesel at all.
My condolences, Roel.
It’s good that you knew her so well, only a few such family relationships are so blessed. More frequently, we don’t know what we have until it’s gone.
What is the underlying wealth made of?
Land? Metals?
And, how does one measure it, other than in terms of currency?
Which currency? Dollar? Sterling? Ruble?Hello again, TAE .. it’s been a while. (I thought Orlov had the trademark on ‘Kollapsnik’, heh)
.. The revolution will not be televised. It will be tweeted. And blogged. But the blogs will be mostly noise, ..
Nice podcast. I especially enjoyed Ilargi’s contributions — kinda filled in the background a bit 🙂
LRacine, what Nicole is talking about when she says climate change will be slow, is by comparison with financial change. Now that the whole world of ‘finance’ is linked, along with all the people, the economy can fail overnight.
Climate change will be a lightning strike on the time scale of geological change, but it will almost certainly take decades to unfold. Of course, like the other changes, it is going on now. We can see it in melting arctic/antarctic ice sheets, retreat of glaciers, and alpine ecosystems moving to higher elevations. It is happening. And will get worse, but over a span of decades.
Nassim, the bomb-test carbon was mostly taken up by the oceans. Like everything else…
“Every year the oceans exchange approximately 90 Gt C with the atmosphere. 92 Gt go in and 90 Gt comes out again. Surface ocean waters contain about 1020 Gt C and so what happens is that 92 Gt goes in, mixes with 1000 Gt and what comes out again is not the same CO2 molecules that went in. What we are trying to measure using the bomb 14C data is the rate at which that notional 2 Gt difference is sequestered. The bomb 14C data can only be used to measure that if the CO2 exhaled had the exact same 14C composition (14C/12C) as that inhaled and this will clearly not be the case.”
This news item has just come to my attention — one more for the damning-with-faint-praise department. ..
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/05/sovello-files-for-bankrtupcySadly, the renewables (though they may have a slightly positive EROI) do not have the support of massive lobbies like the nuclear and fossil-fuel energy industries.
The lack of political support, along with ongoing deflation, means two things: 1) you can get some bargains in solar panels right now, as prices have fallen well below $1/watt in some cases; 2) like the abundance of cheap beef in the wake of the Texas drought, this condition is temporary and will be followed by a not-available condition.
It’s one of those cosmic-scale ideas, like Dyson spheres, or terraforming exoplanets, or geosynchronous space elevators, that will simply never happen. They take too long and require way too much energy/materials/money up front. These projects represent extreme risk, while the market for large projects is drying up due to declining appetite for risk and emerging shortages of energy, materials, and money.
Do the onshore wind farms require diesel? Or is that just needed to run the bilge pumps in the watery windmills?
… profligacy of scale … again … we are now infested with ridiculously oversized and expensive boondoggles.
And, I think I had heard that little fact on TOD a while back, that the windmills had to be kept running even when there is no wind, or something bad happens to them. Can’t recall what it was. The bearings seize up or something.
Speaking of the profligacy of scale and centralized-control-single-point-of-failure, we have a beautiful example playing out right now.
The big financial center in New York City is shut down because the Masters of the Universe are afraid of a little weather.
Makes me realize how important it is to get more local, to the extent that I can.
ilargi post=5916 wrote: …
What I think is crucial when it comes to renewables is that they should NOT be connected to the grid. It’s the same tug of war as the one that plays out in Europe: the haves plead for more centralization, and thereby kill what good there is in the limited union as it exists. The have-nots, on the other hand, should be shouting much harder against that. Thing is, they would first need to understand what is at stake here. …OK I have read the article now. Yeah, it says what I always knew about centralization. Thing is, if the “haves” knew what they were doing, they would not want more centralization. It only benefits the very-most-central of them, and makes the whole system so unstable as to jeopardize most of the “haves”. And the losses encountered in a power grid are not-insignificant either.
IOW, a perfect example of the profligacy of scale.
Apologies, Ilargi, for responding to the snake oil trolls.
There isn’t really a lot to say to Stoneleigh’s analysis, it is spot on. If I ran the circus, we’d be putting PV panels on every available sunny surface, and use a combination of NaS and NiFe secondary cells to store the power for non-sunny times. I would put most of the grid development effort into the local scale, and make the national / transnational scale a distant secondary priority. I’d arrange tariffs and taxes and such to strongly encourage conservation. That, I think, would do the most good for the most people.
But I don’t run the circus, nor do I wish to do so.
And, isn’t it informative that knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics and the conservation principles of physics are so rare in the general population?
Dave Matherly post=5893 wrote: Nassim, this is Rossi’s website
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Boil the water with the heat, duh.
Search “hot-cat” on his site.
The latest videos show the details.Worth a watch.
Dave,
I hate to be all Debbie Downer about this, but after watching the videos and looking at the science on the ecat site, it doesn’t look like a useful source of energy. I didn’t have a lot to do this afternoon.There’s a .pdf file from a physicist, with lots of greek letters in it and good sounding theory. Except that, from what little I know about nuclear science, he has beta decay running in the wrong direction. So I’ll neglect that for this post.
Even if we assume that the claims made by Dr. Rossi are correct, he is only claiming a modest EROI for the operating units. And his claim does not account for the consumables used by them, nor for the cost of constructing the units. He was only comparing heat output to the electricity consumed. Hydrogen and nickel are also consumed (if the theory is correct) — apparently the nickel does not have to be isotopically pure, but still, you’d need an awful lot of those “fusors” to generate enough power to make the hydrogen and refine the nickel. In the video, it looked like they could just barely boil water.
At that EROI, Rossi’s device makes my rooftop solar array look like the first gushing oil well drilled at Spindletop.
As Carl Sagan used to say, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”
Where’s the copper? In one demonstration they claim to have used one gram of hydrogen — stoichiometry dictates that they would have made fifty-something grams of copper in the claimed reaction. That would be a couple ounces of copper, enough to see the silver color of nickel give way to the red color of copper. Or if they are present as oxides, you could dissolve a sample in a strong acid and see the green color of nickel salts change to the blue color of copper salts.Until the boxes can be taken apart and analyzed, it is just another perpetual-motion machine.
[edit] It’s worth noting that, if Rossi wishes to prove his claims in a neutral setting, he can have the lab/scientists sign a non-disclosure agreement. Pretty much a standard legal form in the technology bizzniss. Rossi can strictly control what information is revealed.
And the patent offices of the world, even though the occasional frivolous invention slips through, have a policy of not granting patents to perpetual-motion machines any more.[edit 2] Going to Wikipedia, and looking over the isotope tables for nickel and copper, and considering Rossi’s proposed LENR, I have concluded that his invention is 100% fraud. No other conclusion is plausible.
Sojourner Soo post=5882 wrote: I understand that social change can seem impossible for some, particularly energy change. However, there has been some interesting new developments in the field of “cold fusion,” now called LENR, Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.
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Rossi also has his own blog, where you can ask him questions. Search for “Rossi Journal of Nuclear Physics.”
…LENR is a big “maybe” at this point. Two or three nuclei fusing over the course of a day does not make it anything more than a laboratory curiosity.
As for Rossi’s invention, don’t you think it is telling that he keeps, as a closely-held secret, the contents of his magic box? In public demonstrations, it has been hooked up to a standard, industrial-sized cylinder of hydrogen — and the simple reaction 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O could easily account for the demonstrated energy output of the box.
Whether Rossi is deliberately defrauding investors, or whether he has deceived himself as well, history and peer review will eventually tell; history can be the harshest judge of such diversions.
Of course, an argument could be made that the non-renewable energy industries have been the beneficiaries of even more generous subsidies. Much, much more generous subsidies. A topic for another day, perhaps.
Good distillation of these issues, Nicole. Thanks for putting this article together and publishing.
The electric grid seems to be a good analogue for the issues of centralized/authoritarian vs. distributed/local organizational scales. Or perhaps Tainter’s view that big complicated things become unmanageable at some point.
And of course there’s the little matter that, once exponential growth is no longer possible, the only thing left to do is collapse…
I have it on good authority (My Republican co-workers and Sean Hannity) that this is all the fault of the Community Reinvestment Act.
If the Democrats just hadn’t twisted the arms of the bankers to make all those sketchy loans, we’d all be rich by now.
And probably have pockets full of gold coins.ZH now has a nostalgic article “How I Caused the 1987 Crash” by Bruce Krasting. Back in 1987 I was not really paying much attention, and it did not have an immediate effect on my life.
What might serve as a bottom for the current crash? One would think that there would be some level … I’m trying to picture a broken money system and unable to bring it into focus.
I’m trying to puzzle out how their electric utility ever worked in the first place.
Was reminded of this article by a ‘demotivational’ poster in another forum:
https://diasp.de/uploads/images/scaled_full_1e91eff80441bcde7e49.jpg
For those too demotivated to click the link, it reads
“Kirchoff’s Law: not applicable in India”.Firefox here.
Apparently it doesn’t refresh the menu until Firefox reloads the CSS or something. I, too, did not see the ‘Comments’ menu item until I explicitly refreshed the page.
(it was not enough to load TAE into a blank page on a recently-started browser session)Those no-good punks 30,000 years ago. Fist it was the cave paintings, then the run-by shootings with an atlatl.
The mastodons didn’t stand a chance.
… referendum eh …
Watch it turn into a “straw poll” just before it becomes a “never-happened” non-event.
/cynic
@el g,
It isn’t “budweiser” any more, it’s Inbev.
And I believe they have just sold off the clydesdales.It’s yet another example of Stoneleigh’s principle of centralized, authoritarian political power.
As the empire declines, the political machinery at its core will reach for more and more power, even as its legitimacy declines to insignificance.
They waited twenty-someodd years to attack Michael’s community out there in the boonies of NM, and they did so almost as arbitrarily as Los Angeles attacked the “Phonehenge West” guy. ( by which I mean to say, he didn’t matter to New Mexico in 1980, but all of a sudden, he’s a dirty hippy messing up their desert landscape with unorthodox buildings, now that the “mainstream” builders are all going titsup )
Years ago I happened on this website, just recalled the name, and found it again:
https://thepeacock.com/image/tid/71It’s a couple eccentric guys who live in Kentucky somewhere, I think. They are fond of their mostly underground house, built of stone and concrete.
Expect resistance.
e.g.
https://www.facebook.com/PhonehengeW/posts/273279089412064Now I have earthship envy.
(currently living in one of those chipboard wonders that Kunstler loves to hate — it has brick veneer but I watched it being built, and know better)
jal,
I gave you some “Karma” so you won’t be stuck at 1.It’s ME who is unable to have karma, not you. :p
I suspect this is the beginnings of some kind of filter system, like on Slashdot. (haven’t visited /. in maybe 10 years but suspect they still have the karma thing)
https://theautomaticearth.org/components/com_kunena/template/default/images/emoticons/ermm.png
Yup, another sign of an empire in decline.
Can’t recruit ninjas except from the looney bin, nobody else will play that game.The emoticon test didn’t seem to work too well. https://theautomaticearth.org/components/com_kunena/template/default/images/emoticons/silly.png
:dry:
Oh, you have to read the bbcode and type it in. Quaint.“OPEC, were it present in the United States, would be declared illegal” Oh, noes, he wants to lock up the Texas Railroad Commission! That was the business model for OPEC, back in the ’50s.
The Hoff sounds like Rush Limbaugh, pounding on the lectern and ranting about “American Exceptionalism”. And he’ll go off in six or seven irrelevant directions about the hydrogen economy, tar sands, hydrofracking, biofuels, coal conversion, etc. with a total absence of facts or analysis.
Haha, then he goes on to congratulate the financial industry for its central planning!
So:
– Oil industry, central planning bad;
– Financial central planning good.
… got it.The thank you button works, but after I click it I must scroll down to find the post I was clicking on. It looks like the whole page is reloading after clicking ‘thank you’.
I don’t know how it they do it, but over on ZH, if you click one of the up/down arrows, the page does not move.
When I click on the “Karma -/+” or the “Thank You” button, the screen jumps to the top of the page.
And, I find that the articles have 2 page formats. When I click on “read more” on the “nice looking” page format, it sends me to the same article formatted as a forum post. So I wait for that to load but there isn’t any more infomation, just a different layout.
As for BBcode, I don’t care for it. I’ve seen it used in forums before, and I suppose you have to choose between that and trying to filter any strange html. (because users will post really crazy stuff if you don’t)
