Toxic chemicals threaten health, reproduction, cause cancer, diabetes

Posted on January 4, 2022 by

Preface.  This post could have thousands more entries, but devoting energyskeptic to the tens of thousands of chemicals that are legally polluting our environment would be a full-time job. However scary the transition from fossils back to wood world may be, the inability to pollute in the future and destroy ourselves and other creatures makes me less sad about energy decline and consequent inability to continue to make these mostly fossil-fueled derived compounds made with fossil fuels. They are an existential threat not only to humans, but every species and ecosystem on the planet.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Brokovich E (2021) Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity. The Guardian.

The end of humankind? It may be coming sooner than we think, thanks to hormone-disrupting chemicals that are decimating fertility at an alarming rate around the globe. A new book called Countdown, by Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, finds that sperm counts have dropped almost 60% since 1973. Following the trajectory we are on, Swan’s research suggests sperm counts could reach zero by 2045. Zero. Let that sink in. That would mean no babies. No reproduction. No more humans.

The chemicals to blame for this crisis are found in everything from plastic containers and food wrapping, to waterproof clothes and fragrances in cleaning products, to soaps and shampoos, to electronics and carpeting. Some of them, called PFAS, are known as “forever chemicals”, because they don’t breakdown in the environment or the human body. They just accumulate and accumulate – doing more and more damage, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Now, it seems, humanity is reaching a breaking point. These chemicals are literally confusing our bodies, making them send mix messages and go haywire.

In some parts of the world, the average twenty something woman today is less fertile than her grandmother was at 35, and on average, a man today will have half of the sperm his grandfather had. This threatens human survival, it’s a global existential crisis.

These chemicals aren’t just dramatically reducing semen quality, they are also shrinking penis size and volume of the testes.

Pickard HM et al. (2020) Ice Core Record of Persistent Short-Chain Fluorinated Alkyl Acids: Evidence of the Impact From Global Environmental Regulations. Geophysical Research Letters.

Substances used to replace ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) may be just as problematic as their predecessors. Their degradation components are highly mobile persistent organic pollutants and belong to the class of so-called “forever chemicals” because they do not break down.

 

September 29, 2015. Diabetes, obesity linked to chemical exposure – Endocrine Society.  www.rt.com

Scientific research has increasingly linked common chemicals found in everyday products to diabetes, obesity, cancer, and other major ailments, according to a new policy statement.  Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) like bisphenol A and phthalates, found in food can linings, plastics, cosmetics, and pesticides, are common to the point that everyone on Earth has been exposed to one or more. EDCs – which influence the body’s natural hormones – mimic, block, or simply interfere with hormone functions, leading to the malformation of cells. The Endocrine Society now says in a new scientific statement that research in recent years has repeatedly pointed to links between these and other chemicals to not only diabetes and obesity, but infertility and breast cancer.

“The evidence is more definitive than ever before – endocrine-disrupting chemicals disrupt hormones in a manner that harms human health,” said Andrea Gore, a pharmacology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the task force that offered the statement. “Hundreds of studies are pointing to the same conclusion, whether they are long-term epidemiological studies in human, basic research in animals and cells, or research into groups of people with known occupational exposure to specific chemicals.”

October 1, 2015. Exposure to toxic chemicals threatening human reproduction and health. ScienceDaily.com

Miscarriage and still birth, impaired fetal growth, congenital malformations, impaired or reduced neurodevelopment and cognitive function, and an increase in cancer, attention problems, ADHD behaviors and hyperactivity are among the list of poor health outcomes linked to chemicals such as pesticides, air pollutants, plastics, solvents and more, according to the Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO).

In the U.S. alone, more than 30,000 pounds of chemicals per person are manufactured or imported, and yet the vast majority of these chemicals have not been tested.

Dramatic increases in exposure to toxic chemicals in the last four decades are threatening human reproduction and health. Exposure to toxic environmental chemicals is linked to millions of deaths and costs billions of dollars every year. The opinion was written by obstetrician-gynecologists and scientists from the major global, US, UK and Canadian reproductive health professional societies, the World Health Organization and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).  FIGO, which represents obstetricians from 125 countries and territories, published the opinion in the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics on Oct. 1, 2015.

“We are drowning our world in untested and unsafe chemicals, and the price we are paying in terms of our reproductive health is of serious concern,” said Gian Carlo Di Renzo, MD, PhD, Honorary Secretary of FIGO and lead author of the FIGO opinion. According to Di Renzo, reproductive health professionals “witness first-hand the increasing numbers of health problems facing their patients, and preventing exposure to toxic chemicals can reduce this burden on women, children and families around the world.”

“What FIGO is saying is that physicians need to do more than simply advise patients about the health risks of chemical exposure,” said Jeanne A. Conry, MD, PhD, a co-author of the FIGO opinion and past president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which issued an opinion on chemicals and reproductive health in 2013. “We need to advocate for policies that will protect our patients and communities from the dangers of involuntary exposure to toxic chemicals.”

Exposure to toxic environmental chemicals is linked to millions of deaths and costs billions of dollars every year, according to the FIGO opinion, which cites the following examples:

• Nearly 4 million people die each year because of exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution as well as to lead.

• Pesticide poisonings of farm workers in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to cost $66 billion between 2005-2020.

• Health care and other costs from exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals in Europe are estimated to be at a minimum of 157 billion Euros a year.

• The cost of childhood diseases related to environmental toxins and pollutants in air, food, water, soil and in homes and neighborhoods was calculated to be $76.6 billion in 2008 in the United States.

“Given accumulating evidence of adverse health impacts related to toxic chemicals, including the potential for inter-generational harm, FIGO has wisely proposed a series of recommendations that health professionals can adopt to reduce the burden of unsafe chemicals on patients and communities,” said FIGO President Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, MBBS, who is also past president of the British Medical Association.

 The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The original item was written by Laura Kurtzman.  Journal Reference: Linda C. Giudice et al. International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics opinion on reproductive health impacts of exposure to toxic environmental chemicals. International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, September 2015 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijgo.2015.09.002

 

Blum, D. September 25, 2014. A Rising Tide of Contaminants. New York Times.  

Deborah Swackhamer, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota, decided last year to investigate the chemistry of the nearby Zumbro River. She and her colleagues were not surprised to find traces of pesticides in the water.

Neither were they shocked to find prescription drugs ranging from antibiotics to the anti–convulsive carbamazepine. Researchers realized more than 15 years ago that pharmaceuticals – excreted by users, dumped down drains – were slipping through wastewater treatment systems.

But though she is a leading expert in so-called emerging contaminants, Dr. Swackhamer was both surprised and dismayed by the sheer range and variety of what she found. Caffeine drifted through the river water, testament to local consumption of everything from coffee to energy drinks. There were relatively high levels of acetaminophen, the over-the-counter painkiller. Acetaminophen causes liver damage in humans at high doses; no one knows what it does to fish.

“We don’t know what these background levels mean in terms of environmental or public health,” she said. “It’s definitely another thing that we’re going to be looking at.”

The number of chemicals contaminating our environment is growing at exponential rate. A team of researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey tracks them in American waterways, sediments, landfills and municipal sewage sludge, which is often converted into agricultural fertilizer. They’ve found steroid hormones and the antibacterial agent triclosan in sewage; the antidepressant fluoxetine (Prozac) in fish; and compounds from both birth control pills and detergents in the thin, slimy layer that forms over stones in streams.

“We’re looking at an increasingly diverse array of organic and inorganic chemicals that may have ecosystem health effects,” said Edward Furlong, a research chemist with the U.S.G.S. office in Denver and one of the first scientists to track the spread of pharmaceutical compounds in the nation’s waterways. “Many of them are understudied and unrecognized.”

In an essay last week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, titled “Re-Emergence of Emerging Contaminants,” editor-in-chief Jerald L. Schnoor called attention to both the startling growth of newly registered chemical compounds and our inadequate understanding of older ones.

The American Chemical Society, the publisher of the journal, maintains the most comprehensive national database of commercially registered chemical compounds in the country. “The growth of the list is eye-popping, with approximately 15,000 new chemicals and biological sequences registered every day,” Dr. Schnoor wrote.

Not all of those are currently in use, he emphasized, and the majority are unlikely to be dangerous. “But, for better or worse, our commerce is producing innovative, challenging new compounds,” he wrote.

Dr. Schnoor, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa, also noted rising concern among researchers about the way older compounds are altered in the environment, sometimes taking new and more dangerous forms.

Some research suggests that polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are broken down by plants into even more toxic metabolites. Equally troubling, scientists are finding that while PCBs are banned, they continue to seep into the environment in unexpected ways, such as from impurities in the caulk of old school buildings.

PCBs have long been identified as hazardous, but not every contaminant is so risky, Dr. Schnoor emphasized.

“Out of the millions of chemical compounds that we know about, thousands have been tested and there are very few that show important health effects,” he said in an interview.

But, he added, the development of new compounds and the increasing discovery of unexpected contaminants in the environment means that the nation desperately needs a better system for assessing and prioritizing chemical exposures.

That includes revisiting the country’s antiquated chemical regulation and assessment regulations. The Toxic Substances Control Act went into effect in 1976, almost 40 years ago, and has not been updated since.

The law does require the Environmental Protection Agency to maintain an inventory of registered industrial compounds that may be toxic, but it does not require advance safety testing of those materials. Of the some 84,000 compounds registered, only a fraction have ever been fully tested for health effects on humans. The data gap includes some materials, like creosote and coal tar derivatives, which are currently manufactured at rates topping a million pounds a year.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Schnoor and other scientists want to see the act updated and transformed into a mechanism for science-based risk assessment of suspect compounds. Indeed, everyone from researchers to environmental groups to the American chemical industry agree that the law is frustratingly inadequate.

“Our chemical safety net is more hole than net,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group. The Food and Drug Administration, for instance, doesn’t regulate the environmental spread of pharmaceuticals. And the toxic substances law ignores their presence in waterways.

“Where does that leave us in terms of scientific understanding of what drugs to regulate?” Mr. Cook said.

Anne Womack Kolton, vice president for communications at the American Chemistry Council, an organization representing chemical manufacturers, agreed. “Think about the world 40 years ago,” she said. “It was a vastly different place. It’s common sense to revise the law and make it consistent with what we know about chemicals today.”

The two sides don’t agree on what standards for chemical testing are needed or what kind of protective restrictions should be put in place for chemicals deemed hazardous. And they are in deep disagreement about whether a revised federal law should preempt actions taken by tough-minded states like California.

The council argues for federal standardization as the most efficient route; environmental groups believe that such an action would weaken public protection. Legislators have so far not been able to resolve those differences. This month yet another proposed update to the act stalled in a Senate committee.

“Congress has not sent an environmental law to the president’s desk in 18 years,” Mr. Cook said. “And in the current environment, it’s very difficult to get something through.”

Still, Dr. Swackhamer, who recently stepped down as chair of the E.P.A.’s science advisory board, notes that despite the lack of legislation, scientists have been working toward better ways to assess the risks posed by the increasing numbers of chemicals in our lives. Some may help whittle the inventory of T.S.C.A. compounds down to a priority list that focuses on less than a thousand products.

That’s still a daunting number of chemical unknowns. But given the tens of thousands of materials in the inventory, it’s a start.

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Your life and the economy depend on biodiversity

Posted on January 1, 2022 by

Preface. We are trained in school, newspapers, and TV to view the world politically and economically. Not ecologically.  The World Economic Forum article below is an excellent summary of why biodiversity is so important, as much as climate change, which gets most of the attention paid to the environment at the expense of awareness about other important overshoot threats.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Quinney M (2020) 5 Reasons Why Biodiversity Matters – to Human Health, the Economy and Your Wellbeing. World economic forum.

Biodiversity is critically important – to your health, to your safety and, probably, to your business or livelihood.

But biodiversity – the diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems – is declining globally, faster than at any other time in human history. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things by weight, but humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of all plants. (Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse is one of the top five risks in the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risks Report, too.)

In celebration of the International Day for Biological Diversity, we break down the five ways in which biodiversity supports our economies and enhances our wellbeing – and has the potential to do even more.

1. Biodiversity Ensures Health and Food Security.

Biodiversity underpins global nutrition and food security. Millions of species work together to provide us with a large array of fruits, vegetables and animal products essential to a healthy, balanced diet – but they are increasingly under threat.

Every country has indigenous produce – such as wild greens and grains – which have adapted to local conditions, making them more resilient to pests and extreme weather. In the past, this produce provided much-needed micronutrients for local populations. Unfortunately, however, the simplification of diets, processed foods and poor access to food have led to poor-quality diets. As a result, one-third of the world suffers from micronutrient deficiencies.

Three crops – wheat, corn and rice – provide almost 60% of total plant-based calories consumed by humans. This leads to reduced resiliency in our supply chains and on our plates. For example, the number of rice varieties cultivated in Asia has dropped from tens of thousands to just a few dozen; in Thailand, 50% of land used for growing rice only produces two varieties.

People once understood that the conservation of species was crucial for healthy societies and ecosystems. We must ensure this knowledge remains part of our modern agricultural and food systems to prevent diet-related diseases and reduce the environmental impact of feeding ourselves.

2. Biodiversity Helps Fight Disease.

Higher rates of biodiversity have been linked to an increase in human health.

First, plants are essential for medicines. For example, 25% of drugs used in modern medicine are derived from rainforest plants while 70% of cancer drugs are natural or synthetic products inspired by nature. This means that every time a species goes extinct, we miss out on a potential new medicine.

Second, biodiversity due to protected natural areas has been linked to lower instances of disease such as Lyme disease and malaria. While the exact origin of the virus causing COVID-19 is still unknown, 60% of infectious diseases originate from animals and 70% of emerging infectious diseases originate from wildlife. As human activities encroach upon the natural world, through deforestation and urbanization, we reduce the size and number of ecosystems. As a result, animals live in closer quarters with one another and with humans, creating ideal conditions for the spread of zoonotic diseases.

Simply put: more species means less disease.

3. Biodiversity Benefits Business.

According to the World Economic Forum’s recent Nature Risk Rising Report, more than half of the world’s GDP ($44 trillion) is highly or moderately dependent on nature. Many businesses are, therefore, at risk due to increasing nature loss. Global sales of pharmaceuticals based on materials of natural origin are worth an estimated $75 billion a year, while natural wonders such as coral reefs are essential to food and tourism.

There is great potential for the economy to grow and become more resilient by ensuring biodiversity. Every dollar spent on nature restoration leads to at least $9 of economic benefits. In addition, changing agricultural and food production methods could unlock $4.5 trillion per year in new business opportunities by 2030, while also preventing trillions of dollars’ worth of social and environmental harms.

4. Biodiversity Provides Livelihoods.

Humans derive approximately $125 trillion of value from natural ecosystems each year. Globally, three out of four jobs are dependent on water while the agricultural sector employs over 60% of the world’s working poor. In the Global South, forests are the source of livelihoods for over 1.6 billion people. In India, forest ecosystems contribute only 7% to India’s GDP yet 57% of rural Indian communities’ livelihoods.

Ecosystems, therefore, must be protected and restored – not only for the good of nature but also for the communities that depend on them.

Although some fear environmental regulation and the safeguarding of nature could threaten businesses, the “restoration economy” – the restoration of natural landscapes – provides more jobs in the United States than most of the extractives sector, with the potential to create even more. According to some estimates, the restoration economy is worth $25 billion per year and directly employs more than the coal, mining, logging and steel industries altogether. Nature-positive businesses can provide cost-effective, robot-proof, business-friendly jobs that stimulate the rural economy without harming the environment.

5. Biodiversity Protects Us.

Biodiversity makes the earth habitable. Biodiverse ecosystems provide nature-based solutions that buffer us from natural disasters such as floods and storms, filter our water and regenerate our soils.

The clearance of over 35% of the world’s mangroves for human activities has increasingly put people and their homes at risk from floods and sea-level rise. If today’s mangroves were lost, 18 million more people would be flooded every year (an increase of 39%) and annual damages to property would increase by 16% ($82 billion).

Protecting and restoring natural ecosystems is vital to fighting climate change. Nature-based solutions could provide 37% of the cost-effective CO2 mitigation needed by 2030 to maintain global warming within 2°C (35.6 F).

Natural ecosystems provide the foundations for economic growth, human health and prosperity. Our fate as a species is deeply connected to the fate of our natural environment.

As ecosystems are increasingly threatened by human activity, acknowledging the benefits of biodiversity is the first step in ensuring that we look after it. We know biodiversity matters. Now, as a society, we should protect it – and in doing so, protect our own long-term interests.

References

EIA (2020) International Energy Statistics. Petroleum and other liquids. Data Options. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Select crude oil including lease condensate to see data past 2017.

IEA (2018) International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook 2018, page 45, figures 1.19 and 3.13. International Energy Agency.

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Solar panels in the Sahara could cause global warming

Posted on December 23, 2021 by

Preface. Adding tens of thousands of square miles of solar panels to replace fossil fuels could cause climate change and heat up the planet. Of course this is a fantasy, dust storms would scour the panels rendering them useless, with little water to wash them off meanwhile to prevent degradation of solar generation from dust, and a massive infrastructure of roads, transmission lines, and energy storage batteries would add trillions of dollars to the cost. And it would all have to be rebuilt every 18 to 25 years, the lifespan of solar photovoltaic panels.

So this is a Thought Experiment. Still, it is interesting to consider the consequences. The article below is based on the following scientific paper: Li Y, Kalnay E, Motesharrei S et al (2018) Climate model shows large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara increase rain and vegetation. Science 361: 1019-1022.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Lu Z, Smith B (2021) Solar panels in Sahara could boost renewable energy but damage the global climate – here’s why. The Conversation.

The world’s most forbidding deserts could be the best places on Earth for harvesting solar power – the most abundant and clean source of energy we have. Deserts are spacious, relatively flat, rich in silicon – the raw material for the semiconductors from which solar cells are made — and never short of sunlight. In fact, the ten largest solar plants around the world are all located in deserts or dry regions.

Researchers imagine it might be possible to transform the world’s largest desert, the Sahara, into a giant solar farm, capable of meeting four times the world’s current energy demand.

While the black surfaces of solar panels absorb most of the sunlight that reaches them, only a fraction (around 15%) of that incoming energy gets converted to electricity. The other 85% is returned to the environment as heat. The panels are usually much darker than the ground they cover, so a vast expanse of solar cells will absorb a lot of additional energy and emit it as heat, affecting the climate.

If these effects were only local, they might not matter in a sparsely populated and barren desert. But the scale of the installations that would be needed to make a dent in the world’s fossil energy demand would be vast, covering thousands of square kilometers. Heat re-emitted from an area this size will be redistributed by the flow of air in the atmosphere, having regional and even global effects on the climate.

A greener Sahara

A 2018 study used a climate model to simulate the effects of lower albedo on the land surface of deserts caused by installing massive solar farms. Albedo is a measure of how well surfaces reflect sunlight. Sand, for example, is much more reflective than a solar panel and so has a higher albedo.

The model revealed that when the size of the solar farm reaches 20% of the total area of the Sahara, it triggers a feedback loop. Heat emitted by the darker solar panels (compared to the highly reflective desert soil) creates a steep temperature difference between the land and the surrounding oceans that ultimately lowers surface air pressure and causes moist air to rise and condense into raindrops. With more monsoon rainfall, plants grow and the desert reflects less of the sun’s energy, since vegetation absorbs light better than sand and soil. With more plants present, more water is evaporated, creating a more humid environment that causes vegetation to spread.

Read more: Should we turn the Sahara Desert into a huge solar farm?

This scenario might seem fanciful, but studies suggest that a similar feedback loop kept much of the Sahara green during the African Humid Period, which only ended 5,000 years ago.

So, a giant solar farm could generate ample energy to meet global demand and simultaneously turn one of the most hostile environments on Earth into a habitable oasis. Sounds perfect, right?

Not quite. In a recent study, we used an advanced Earth system model to closely examine how Saharan solar farms interact with the climate. Our model takes into account the complex feedbacks between the interacting spheres of the world’s climate – the atmosphere, the ocean and the land and its ecosystems. It showed there could be unintended effects in remote parts of the land and ocean that offset any regional benefits over the Sahara itself.

Drought in the Amazon, cyclones in Vietnam

Covering 20% of the Sahara with solar farms raises local temperatures in the desert by 1.5°C according to our model. At 50% coverage, the temperature increase is 2.5°C. This warming is eventually spread around the globe by atmosphere and ocean movement, raising the world’s average temperature by 0.16°C for 20% coverage, and 0.39°C for 50% coverage. The global temperature shift is not uniform though – the polar regions would warm more than the tropics, increasing sea ice loss in the Arctic. This could further accelerate warming, as melting sea ice exposes dark water which absorbs much more solar energy.

This massive new heat source in the Sahara reorganizes global air and ocean circulation, affecting precipitation patterns around the world. The narrow band of heavy rainfall in the tropics, which accounts for more than 30% of global precipitation and supports the rain forests of the Amazon and Congo Basin, shifts northward in our simulations. For the Amazon region, this causes droughts as less moisture arrives from the ocean. Roughly the same amount of additional rainfall that falls over the Sahara due to the surface-darkening effects of solar panels is lost from the Amazon. The model also predicts more frequent tropical cyclones hitting North American and East Asian coasts.

Some important processes are still missing from our model, such as dust blown from large deserts. Saharan dust, carried on the wind, is a vital source of nutrients for the Amazon and the Atlantic Ocean. So a greener Sahara could have an even bigger global effect than our simulations suggested.

We are only beginning to understand the potential consequences of establishing massive solar farms in the world’s deserts. Solutions like this may help society transition from fossil energy, but Earth system studies like ours underscore the importance of considering the numerous coupled responses of the atmosphere, oceans and land surface when examining their benefits and risks.

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Freshwater fish under threat of extinction

Posted on December 20, 2021 by

Preface. A third of freshwater fish are under threat from pollution, over fishing, dams, non-native species, climate change, disruption of river ecology and more. 

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Harvey F (2021) Global freshwater fish populations at risk of extinction, study finds. World’s Forgotten Fishes report lists pollution, overfishing and climate change as dangers. The Guardian.

Rivers and lakes are vital ecosystems. They cover less than 1% of the planet’s surface, but their nearly 18,000 fish species represent a quarter of all vertebrates, as well as providing food for many millions of people. Healthy rivers are also needed to supply clean water.

Freshwater fish are under threat, with as many as a third of global populations in danger of extinction, according to an assessment.

Populations of migratory freshwater fish have plummeted by 76% since 1970, and large fish – those weighing more than 66 pounds (30 kg) – have been all but wiped out in most rivers. The global population of megafish down by 94%, and 16 freshwater fish species were declared extinct last year.

Only 14% of the world’s river basin areas have fish populations escaping serious damage from humans activities.

The worst-hit regions are western Europe and North America, where large and affluent populations mean humans’ impact on rivers is highest, such as with the Thames in the UK and the Mississippi in the US.

The report by 16 global conservation organizations, called The World’s Forgotten Fishes, said that global populations of freshwater fish were in freefall. The problems are diverse and include pollution, overfishing and destructive fishing practices, the introduction of invasive non-native species, climate change and the disruption of river ecologies. Most of the world’s rivers are now dammed in parts, have water extracted for irrigation or have their natural flows disrupted, making life difficult for freshwater fish. Only a third of the world’s great rivers are still free flowing without dams on them.

The report found that biodiversity in freshwater ecosystems was being lost at twice the rate of oceans and forests. There are more than 18,000 species of freshwater fish known, and more are still being discovered. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which compiles the global red list of species in danger, has assessed more than 10,000 species and found that about 30% were at risk of extinction.

The 16 organizations behind the report were: Alliance for Freshwater Life, Alliance for Inland Fisheries, Conservation International, Fisheries Conservation Foundation, Freshwaters Illustrated, Global Wildlife Conservation, InFish, the IUCN, the Sustainable Seafood Coalition, Mahseer Trust, Shoal, Synchronicity Earth, the Nature Conservancy, World Fish Migration Foundation, the WWF and Zoological Society of London.

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Create a free food forest

Posted on December 17, 2021 by

Preface. Atlanta has planted 7 acres of land with edible and medicinal plants. Why can’t your city do the same? More than 70 other cities have. All towns have emergency plans. And after a natural disaster or oil shortage, when grocery store shelves empty out, a food garden might be a big help. My home town of Oakland is putting food forests in at Oakland Schools (OUSD 2021) and has 16 community and urban edible gardens. Even the U.S. Forest Service is promoting them (USFS 2018)

Community gardens create a sense of community, make residents healthier, and are a peaceful place to escape from city strife.

How to create one: Constructing a Food Forest, Planting Justice.

Food forests in the news

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com  author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy“, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer; Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Ryan C (2021) Atlanta creates the nation’s largest free food forest with hopes of addressing food insecurity. CNN.

When a dormant pecan farm in the neighborhoods of south Atlanta closed, the land was soon rezoned and earmarked to become townhouses.But when the townhouses never came to fruition and with the lot remaining in foreclosure, the Conservation Fund bought it in 2016 to develop an unexpected project: the nation’s largest free food forest.

Thanks to a US Forest Service grant and a partnership between the city of Atlanta, the Conservation Fund, and Trees Atlanta, you’ll find 7.1 acres of land ripe with 2,500 pesticide-free edible and medicinal plants only 10 minutes from Atlanta’s airport, the world’s busiest airport before the pandemic struck.

The forest is in the Browns Mill neighborhood of southeast Atlanta, where the closest grocery store is a 30-minute bus ride away.

“Access to green space and healthy foods is very important. And that’s a part of our mission,” says Michael McCord, a certified arborist and expert edible landscaper who helps manage the forest.The forest is part of the city of Atlanta’s larger mission to bring healthy food within half a mile of 85% of Atlanta’s 500,000 residents by 2022, though as recently as 2014, it was illegal to grow food on residential lots in the city.

Resources like the food forest are a rarity and necessity in Atlanta as 1 in 6 Georgians face food insecurity, 1 in 3 Browns Mill residents live below the poverty line, and 1 in 4 Atlantans live in food deserts so severe, some find it more apt to call the problem “supermarket redlining.”

“We host lots of students for field trips, and for a lot of them, it’s their first time at a garden or farm or forest,” said McCord. “So here they get to experience everything urban agriculture and urban forestry all in one day. It’s really special.”

The forest is now owned by the parks department and more than 1,000 volunteers and neighbors are helping to plant, water and maintain the forest. In a day alone, there can be more than 50 volunteers working on the forest.

That work of maintaining the forest is done by volunteers is a testament to the forest’s ability to build community, said Carla Smith, an Atlanta city councilwoman who helped start the project.

“It’s really a park for everyone, said Smith. “Every time I go there’s a community there who respects and appreciates the fresh healthy foods. There’s a mentality there that people know to only take what they need.”

Posted in Farming & Ranching | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Will Artificial Intelligence destroy us?

Posted on December 14, 2021 by

Preface. When it comes to artificial intelligence, most articles assume it will happen, so discussions range around when and how it will happen. Often speculation that a general AI may use its ability to find patterns in data will allow it to bootstrap itself to consciousness.

And then it will take over! After all, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and 1.5 million google hits on “Artificial Intelligence existential threat” say so! Elon Musk says adopting AI is like “summoning the demon” because AI will start a world war and they will dominate the world as deathless authoritarians.  Prof Stephen Hawking said thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence because we may not be able to control them, and spell the end of the human race (Cellan-Jones 2014). Putin predicts that the leader in AI technology will be come the ruler of the world, and 51 other experts predict AI will go out of control in various ways (CBINSIGHTS 2019).

Nick Bostrom, at the University of Oxford has written a book about how this new super-intelligence could become extremely powerful, perhaps beyond our control, and consequently our own fate as a species might depend on what decisions the machine super intelligence makes (Bostrom 2014).

Computer scientist Stuart Russel at the University of California, Berkeley, circulated a letter signed by AI researchers at google, Facebook, Microsoft and scientists around the world demanding that only research keeping AI beneficial be funded lest it get out of control and threaten us (Wolchover 2015).

So many sci-fi movies and TV have AI robots like us that it seems as if AI could happen any day now. After all, we’ve been familiar with the idea since the early 1950s when the first robot stories appeared.

AI sells products at a higher price, but it is not intelligent, it is just software code

Artificial Intelligence will never be intelligent. It is just software. There is no Wizard of Oz, just a bunch of programmers behind the curtain. And programmers write bad code. It happens for many reasons: Because everyone makes mistakes, some programmers aren’t very good at it, it is impossible to test code fully, new code breaks older code, or the specifications themselves were incorrect or missing business rules. I know that AI is just software code because for my 25-year career I designed and added new features to computer systems for health care, banking, and transportation, coding in assembly language, COBOL, C, C++, java, Powerbuilder, Model204 and other languages. Now and then I had to back my code out, sometimes I’d made a mistake, or my test data wasn’t extensive enough to find the few exceptions that would break the code. Often a bug was not my fault, but I’d be called at 2 am anyhow, only to discover it was a new upgrade of Oracle, Unix, and other systems of software and hardware.  Like pirates, once you buy another companies products, you pay tribute every year to them as they upgrade it, yet can’t shut it down lest they stop supporting older versions.

AI is just code. Oh sure, it can find patterns. If you give it a million images of dogs, and it was programmed to find dog patterns, it will usually identify a dog in a photo after many hours of computer time and electricity.  But not a cat, a house or truck. That will require many more hours of computer time and electric energy.

Many promised AI miracles may never appear.  For example, it is highly unlikely we will transition to self-driving cars (Friedemann 2020).  I’m all for the drivers assistance with lane changes and emergency braking.  By self-driving I mean cars that let you read a book, sleep — pay no attention at all.   And what a disastrous waste of energy. Studies have shown that people would drive even more with cars far less energy efficient than mass transit, clogging roads with traffic (Mervis 2017, Taiebat et al 2019).

AI will never be intelligent because it can’t match the human brain

AI can never come close to the human brain, because the coding would take hundreds of trillions of lines of code inevitably riddled with trillions of errors, because the human cortex is 600 billion times more complicated than any artificial network (Kasan 2011).

Or even an insect brain. A factory robot is no smarter than the cockroach running around on the floor below. “Today’s state-of-the-art computers process roughly as many instructions per second as an insect brain,” and they lack the ability to effectively scale.” (Kendall 2020).

AI proponents insist that AI can catch up to the human brain, because our brains are also digital.

Not true. The latest science reveals that the human brain is highly analog, with dynamic synapses that “speak in a range of whispers and shouts.” Electric spikes are delivered as analog signals whose shape impacts the magnitude of chemical neurotransmitter released across the synapses, similar to a light dimmer with variable settings. For many years these spikes were thought to be delivered digitally, like an on and off light switch.  This gives our brains tremendous supercomputer level capabilities using the energy equivalent of a refrigerator light bulb (Chao et al 2020).   The brain is so powerful and compact it can fit on your shoulders, while a modern supercomputer can take up space the size of three tennis courts (Schranghamer et al 2020)

AI and other digital systems use a tremendous amount of electricity

Just one bitcoin requires 9 years’ worth of the $12,500 electricity used in a typical home. A year of bitcoins uses more electricity than Finland, a nation of 5.5 million consumers — half a percent of all electricity consumed in the world (Huang et al 2021).

Similarly, training an AI model generates as much carbon emissions as it takes to build and drive five cars over their lifetimes (Saenko 2020). The MegatronLM language model used as much energy as three homes in a year and other AI systems even more energy (Labbe 2021).  AlphaZero, Google’s Go- and chess-playing AI system, generated 192,000 pounds of CO2 during training. John Cohn, IBM Fellow and research scientist with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab said that when you look at how fast AI is growing, you can see we are heading in an unsustainable direction (Dickson 2020).

To program a robotic hand to manipulate a Rubik’s cube required 1,000 desktop computers plus a dozen machines with special graphics chips for several months, consuming about 2.8 gigawatt hours of electricity, the output of three nuclear power plants for an hour.  Machine-learning algorithms consume more and more energy and data while training longer and longer (Knight 2020).

AI learning requires massive amounts of data. AlphaZero used an exabyte of data. It would take 1.5 billion CD-ROM discs to contain an exabyte, which could store nearly 11 million movies in 4K format (Fisher 2021). AI is constantly trolling Big Data to analyze how businesses can make more money and there’s lots of data to crunch through –Walmart collects 2.5 petabytes of data from 1 million customers every hour.

Image recognition training requires huge amounts of data, it took 1.2 million images to train AI to recognize 1,000 objects, while a child can learn to recognize a new kind of object or animal with just one example (Simonite 2016).

And tremendous amounts of energy to crunch through data and images.

More good news: oil and coal are essential for making robots and AI and they’re declining

In my books “When Trucks Stop Running” (Friedemann 2016) and “Life After Fossil Fuels” (2021) I use peer-reviewed citations to explain why transportation and manufacturing are showstoppers for so-called renewables.  Basically essential transportation, the trucks, locomotives, and ships that run on the diesel fraction of a crude barrel of oil (about 15% of it) can’t be electrified or run on hydrogen or anything else.  And manufacturing also requires the very high heat of fossil fuels, there are no electric or hydrogen commercial processes now to make iron, steel (arc-furnaces melt existing steel), ceramics, glass, silicon chips, bricks and more.  Over 90% of the petroleum we use is conventional, and that peaked in 2008, and all world oil production including unconventional oil probably in 2018.  And I make the case that the electric grid itself can’t stay up without natural gas.

If I’m right, then robots and AI cannot make themselves or repair themselves. They cannot reproduce. The electric grid will fail for good when natural gas is scarce or wars destroy NG power plants. AI, robots, the electric grid, wind turbines, solar panels, and anything with cement or steel require fossil fuels for every single step of their life cycle, from mining to manufacturing to transportation of their parts to an assembly factory from all over the globe and to their final destination. iPhones require 75 of the 118 elements in the periodic table, many of them rare, many of them sourced only from China (Stone 2019).

Meanwhile the cost and time to create neural networks is calling into question whether AI can continue to scale up. It costs millions of dollars to train just one model, and supercomputers aided by dozens of expensive servers and graphical processing units. After that, each query requires dozens of these expensive machines (Sparkes 2021).

How AI could harm us

A very likely way AI will harm us is taking down the electric grid.  Algorithms in artificial intelligence, are doubling their power use every two months. Another application of conventional semiconductors, Bitcoin mining, saw a tenfold increase in semiconductor energy use in 10 years and as of August 2021, its estimated annual electricity used (91 TWh/yr) is more than the annual energy use of Finland. Without a strong energy efficiency focus, conventional semiconductors’ energy use may continue to double every three years or faster while energy production only increases at 2-3% per year. Computational energy demand is rising exponentially while the world’s energy production is increasing linearly (DOE 2022).

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

***

References

Bostrom N (2014) Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press.

CBINSIGHTS (2019) How AI will go out of control according to 52 experts. Research Briefs, CBINSIGHTS. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/ai-threatens-humanity-expert-quotes/

Cellan-Jones R (2014) Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind. BBC.  https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540

Chao IH et al (2020) The potassium channel subunit Kvβ1 serves as a major control point for synaptic facilitation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences;  DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2000790117

Dickson B (2020) AI Could Save the World, If It Doesn’t Ruin the Environment First. As AI usage grows, its energy consumption and carbon emissions are becoming an environmental concern. PcMag. https://www.pcmag.com/news/ai-could-save-the-world-if-it-doesnt-ruin-the-environment-first

DOE (2022) Semiconductor Supply Chain deep dive assessment. U.S. Department of Energy Response to Executive Order 14017, “America’s Supply Chains”.

Fisher T (2021) Terabytes, Gigabytes, & Petabytes: How Big Are They? Lifewire.com

Friedemann A (2016) When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation. Springer

Friedemann A (2020) Why self-driving cars may not be in your future. Energyskeptic.com

Friedemann A (2021) Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy. Springer

Hall CAS, Klitgaard K (2018) Energy and the Wealth of Nations: An Introduction to Biophysical Economics. Springer.

Huang J et al (2021) Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries. How Is That Possible?. New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitcoin-carbon-footprint-electricity.html

Kasan P (2011) A.I. Gone awry: the future quest for artificial intelligence. Skeptic.

Kendall JD, Kumar S (2020) The building blocks of a brain-inspired computer. Applied Physics Reviews, DOI: 10.1063/1.5129306

Knight W (2020) AI Can Do Great Things—if It Doesn’t Burn the Planet. Wired.  https://www.wired.com/story/ai-great-things-burn-planet/

Labbe M (2021) Energy consumption of AI poses environmental problems. SearchEnterpriseAI. https://searchenterpriseai.techtarget.com/feature/Energy-consumption-of-AI-poses-environmental-problems

Mervis, J. December 15, 2017. Not so fast. We can’t even agree on what autonomous, much less how they will affect our lives. Science.

Murphy TW (2021) Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet. eScholarship. https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/980

Saenko K (2020) It takes a lot of energy for machines to learn – here’s why AI is so power-hungry. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/it-takes-a-lot-of-energy-for-machines-to-learn-heres-why-ai-is-so-power-hungry-151825

Schranghamer T.F. et al (2020) Graphene memristive synapses for high precision neuromorphic computing. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19203-z

Simonite T (2016) Algorithms That Learn with Less Data Could Expand AI’s Power. Technologyreview.com

Sparkes M (2021) Largest ever AI suggests limits to scaling up. New Scientist.

Stone M (2019) Behind the Hype of Apple’s Plan to End Mining. Gizmodo.com

Taiebat, M., et al. 2019. Forecasting the Impact of Connected and Automated Vehicles on Energy Use: A Microeconomic Study of Induced Travel and Energy Rebound. Applied Energy247: 297

Wolchover N (2015) This Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Has a Few Concerns. Increasingly rapid advances in AI have given Stuart Russell’s concerns heightened urgency. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2015/05/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-concerns/

Posted in An Index of Best Energyskeptic Posts, Artificial Intelligence, Electric Grid, Electric Grid & EMP Electromagnetic Pulse | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Bill Gates on why Electric Airplanes won’t fly

Posted on December 11, 2021 by

Preface. I wonder if Bill Gates has read my book “When Trucks Stop Running”? As he says in the article below: “The renaissance of electrification that we’re seeing in passenger vehicles unfortunately won’t likely adapted to heavier forms of transportation — such as airplanes, cargo ships and semi tractor trailers — in the foreseeable future. Today’s batteries simply can’t hold enough power to sufficiently offset their weight and bulk.”

Then a bunch of nonsense as well (not shown) with the worst recommendation at the end: “We need a massive effort to explore all the ways we can make advanced biofuels and cheap electrofuels. Companies and researchers are exploring several different pathways—for example, new ways to make hydrogen using electricity, or using solar power, or using microbes that naturally produce hydrogen as a by-product. The more we explore, the more opportunities we’ll create for breakthroughs.”

No Bill, no! Hydrogen won’t work, it is the stupidest of all the energy salvation proposals out there, solar PV is not an option, and biofuels have a negative energy return, don’t scale up, and would destroy ecosystems.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

* * *

Tarantola A. 2021. Hitting the Books: Bill Gates on why we can’t have electric airplanes. Or long-haul cargo ships, for that matter. Engadget.

Not long ago, my friend Warren Buffett and I were talking about how the world might decarbonize airplanes. Warren asked, “Why can’t we run a jumbo jet on batteries?” He already knew that when a jet takes off, the fuel it’s carrying accounts for 20 to 40% of its weight. So when I told him this startling fact — that you’d need 35 times more batteries by weight to get the same energy as jet fuel — he understood immediately. The more power you need, the heavier your plane gets. At some point, it’s so heavy that it can’t get off the ground. Warren smiled, nodded, and just said, “Ah.”

The renaissance of electrification that we’re seeing in passenger vehicles unfortunately won’t likely adapted to heavier forms of transportation — such as airplanes, cargo ships and semi tractor trailers — in the foreseeable future. Today’s batteries simply can’t hold enough power to sufficiently offset their weight and bulk.

When you’re trying to power something as heavy as a container ship or jetliner, the rule of thumb I mentioned earlier — the bigger the vehicle you want to move, and the farther you want to drive it without recharging, the harder it’ll be to use electricity as your power source—becomes a law. Barring some unlikely breakthrough, batteries will never be light and powerful enough to move planes and ships anything more than short distances.

Consider where the state of the art is today. The best all-electric plane on the market can carry two passengers, reach a top speed of 210 miles per hour, and fly for three hours before recharging. Meanwhile, a mid-capacity Boeing 787 can carry 296 passengers, reach up to 650 miles an hour, and fly for nearly 20 hours before stopping for fuel. In other words, a fossil-fuel-powered jetliner can fly more than three times as fast, for six times as long, and carry nearly 150 times as many people as the best electric plane on the Market.

Batteries are getting better, but it’s hard to see how they’ll ever close this gap. If we’re lucky, they may become up to three times as energy dense as they are now, in which case they would still be 12 times less energy dense than gas or jet fuel.

The same goes for cargo ships. The best conventional container ships can carry 200 times more cargo than either of the two electric ships now in operation, and they can run routes that are 400 times longer. Those are major advantages for ships that need to cross entire oceans.

Given how important container ships have become in the global economy, I don’t think it will ever be financially viable to try to run them on anything other than liquid fuels. Unfortunately, the fuel that container ships run on — it’s called bunker fuel — is dirt cheap, because it’s made from the dregs of the oil refining process. Since their current fuel is so inexpensive, the Green Premium for ships is very high.

 

 

Posted in Airplanes, Batteries | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The latest monster ships could be a disaster

Posted on December 1, 2021 by

Preface.  The article below makes the case for the hazards of one of these enormous ships running aground or sinking, blocking a major shipping line, leaking oil, and possibly impossible to salvage.

In 2020, the largest container ship is the HMM Algeciras at 1,312 feet (400 m) long and 200 feet (61 m) wide, much larger than the Titanic, which was 882 feet long and 92 feet wide (Bell 2020).

To see where the all ships are go this marinetraffic.com link, where you can filter the map by type of ship, weight, and other parameters in the tool bar on the left side.

— Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

Gray, W. 20 November 2013. Don’t abandon ship! A new generation of monster ships will be even harder to rescue. NewScientist.

Should any of the new monster-sized ships run aground or sink, the resulting chaos could block a major shipping lane and create an environmental disaster that could bankrupt ship owners and the insurance industry alike.  With vessels of this size conventional salvage will be all but impossible. 

Despite a steady rise in air and road transport, our reliance on shipping remains overwhelming: ships move roughly 90% of all global trade, carrying billions of tons of manufactured goods and raw materials.

These monster ships are already plying the seas. There are 29 bulk carriers about 360 meters long (1181 feet). Designed to feed Brazilian iron ore to furnaces in China and Europe, each is capable of carrying up to 400,000 tons. More are on order.

The most rapid increase in size has come with container ships. In the 1990s the largest carried about 5000 shipping containers; the Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller can carry 18,000. Shipyards will soon begin work on the next generation, some 40 meters longer and capable of carrying 20,000 containers, and there are rumors of even larger vessels to come.

But with record-breaking size comes the risk of eye-watering costs should anything go wrong. Roughly 1000 serious shipping incidents occur each year, and according to a recent analysis by a group of maritime insurers, the costs of repair – or in the worst-case scenario, wreck salvage and clean-up – are set to rise rapidly. The value of a single mega-ship’s cargo, for instance, can easily exceed $1 billion, while stricter environmental legislation in many parts of the world means that should a wreck create pollution, those liable can expect to be hit with mammoth clean-up bills.

When the Costa Concordia ran aground, “The easiest and cheapest way of removing the Concordia would have been to cut her up in situ and take her away in pieces,” says Mark Hoddinott, from the International Salvage Union. However, the island of Giglio, where the Costa Concordia came to grief, is part of a marine park on one of Italy’s most environmentally sensitive coasts. As a result, the authorities insisted she be moved in one piece.  The location of the wreck was fortunate. 2380 tons of fuel were able to be removed rather than leak into the sensitive environment.

The site is close to some of the biggest shipyards in Europe, so the salvage equipment could reach the wreck quickly. It is also relatively sheltered, making the key step of fuel removal easier, and since the Costa Concordia was designed for short cruises, it only carried small amounts of fuel.

Had it been a mega-ship it would have been a different story, even in such sheltered waters, says Sloane. Such vessels carry more than 20,000 tonnes of fuel, so removing it is a major operation. And since fuel must be removed first, any delay will exacerbate the disaster. “I don’t think there’s many places in the world where you could do an operation on this sort of scale,” Sloane says.

In many ways removal of cargo containers is even harder, as these 6-meter-long boxes can be stacked up to nine deep above and below deck. The lower decks often include built-in metal guideways designed to speed up loading and unloading in harbour, but with the hull at an angle, these can jam containers together. Several recent salvage operations have sent a shuddering warning through the industry.

In 2007, for example, a container ship called Napoli ran aground in Lyme Bay on the UK’s south coast after her engine room flooded. The cold conditions meant the vessel’s 3500 tonnes of fuel had to be warmed before it could be pumped out, so almost three weeks passed before the salvage teams could begin to remove the 2300 cargo containers. Even then, salvagers had to man-handle lifting chains around each cargo container before removal so it took three and a half months to recover them all. Still unable to refloat due to damage, the hull was eventually blown apart with explosives and removed for scrap.

Worse came in 2011, when the container ship Rena ran aground off the coast of New Zealand. It was 11 days before salvors could begin controlled oil removal and a further month before the first container was removed. Eventually a giant crane was brought in but it was still slow going – just six containers per day were salvaged. Hit by bad weather, the wreck eventually broke up and the stern sank.

Compared with the latest ships, the Rena was a tiddler capable of carrying just 3351 containers, yet only 1007 were recovered in an operation that lasted more than a year. “Offshore, in a remote location, when the ship has anything over a 5-degree list, it’s almost impossible,” says Sloane. “You have to have bigger and bigger cranes, on barges, and it’s very slow and very challenging. The big ones are going to be a nightmare.”

In fact the gigantic Emma Maersk container ship has already hit trouble. In February this year, the 397-metre-long vessel lost power off the Egyptian coast. Luckily it was brought safely to port where almost 13,500 containers were unloaded in a two-week-long shore-based operation while the hull was repaired. In less favorable weather conditions and in a more remote location, things could have been very different. Industry experts suggest that unloading the cargo of a mega-ship in the open sea could take up to three years to complete, if indeed it can be done at all.

References

Bell V (2020) In pictures: World’s largest shipping container arrives in UK. Yahoo News.

Posted in Ships and Barges | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Concentrated Solar Power is unreliable, full of glitches, & has a low energy return

Posted on November 28, 2021 by
Source: California Energy Commission. 2018 ISEGS Annual Compliance Report. Pages 464-469 https://efiling.energy.ca.gov/Lists/DocketLog.aspx?docketnumber=07-AFC-05C&fbclid=IwAR1LS4b6wYJQsflqi1job_1ix-xPgZkZ8v_AGsDP4iiiIEJSSzCD5hIxq-Q

Preface.  Concentrating solar power (CSP) projects usually sprawl in a circle over several square miles and can cost over a billion dollars. They use mirrors and lenses to capture the high temperatures needed to efficiently produce or store electricity. Almost 100 of these plants have been built around the world.

This post has several article summaries related to the unreliability and problems

Castro (2018) concludes that because of a low capacity factor and Energy Returned on Invested, an intensive use of materials—some scarce, and the significant seasonal intermittence — the potential contribution of current CSP technologies in a future 100% RES system seems very limited.

CEC (2020) reports that Ivanpah, a 5 square mile billion dollar CSP plant is falling apart and Zhang (2016) reports that part of it caught on fire. Fialka (2020) cites a National Renewable Laboratory report that found nearly all CSP plants are unreliable and plagued with problems.

Related articles:

2016 Zhang S: A Huge Solar Plant Caught on Fire, and That’s the Least of Its Problems. wired.com

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Too expensive: New ones not being built, old ones shutting down

EIA (2021) World’s longest-operating solar thermal facility is retiring most of its capacity U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) facility in California’s Mojave Desert retired five of its solar plants (SEGS 3 through 7) in July 2021 and plans to retire a sixth (SEGS 8) in September 2021, based on information submitted to EIA and published in our Preliminary Electric Generator Inventory. After SEGS 8 is retired, only one solar thermal unit at SEGS will remain operating (SEGS 9). SEGS, which began operating in 1984, is the world’s longest-operating solar thermal power facility.

Solar thermal power plants use mirrors to focus sunlight onto a receiver, which absorbs and converts the sunlight into thermal energy (heat). The heat is used to drive a turbine, which produces electricity. The SEGS units are parabolic trough concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) systems, meaning that parabolic (u-shaped) mirrors capture and concentrate sunlight to heat synthetic oil in a central tube, which then boils water to create steam. The steam drives the turbine, generating electricity.

Solar thermal plants account for a relatively small share of utility-scale U.S. solar electric generating capacity. As of June 2021, the United States had about 52,600 MW of utility-scale solar capacity. Of that total, 3.3% was solar thermal; the remaining 96.7% was utility-scale solar PV.

2020 A $1 Billion Solar Plant Was Obsolete Before It Ever Went Online. Bloomberg 

The Crescent Dunes solar plant looks like something out of a sci-fi movie with 10,000 mirrors forming a spiral almost 2 miles wide that winds around a skyscraper rising above the desert between Las Vegas and Reno. The operation soaks up enough heat from the sun’s rays to spin steam turbines and store energy in the form of molten salt.

Today, it’s mired in litigation and accusations of mismanagement at Crescent Dunes, where taxpayers remain on the hook for $737 million in loan guarantees. Late last year, Crescent Dunes lost its only customer, NV Energy Inc., which cited the plant’s lack of reliability. The steam generators at Crescent Dunes require custom parts and a staff of dozens to keep things humming and to conduct regular maintenance. By the time the plant opened in 2015, the increased efficiency of cheap solar panels had already surpassed its technology, and today it’s obsolete—the latest panels can pump out power at a fraction of the cost for decades with just an occasional hosing-down.

The plant’s technology was designed to generate enough power night and day to supply a city the size of nearby Sparks, Nev. (population 100,000), but it never came close. Its power cost NV about $135 per ­megawatt-hour, compared with less than $30 per MWh today at a new Nevada photovoltaic solar farm.

The plant is mostly a punchline in a part of Nevada that’s seen its share of booms and busts. The ­nearest town, Tonopah, was the site of a silver rush in the early 1900s. It’s now home to 2,400 people, a motley collection of saloons and casinos, a mining museum, and the Clown Motel, which calls itself “America’s scariest motel” because it’s close to a cemetery and filled with creepy red-nosed tchotchkes.

Neuman S (2013) Flush With Oil, Abu Dhabi Opens World’s Largest Solar Plant. NPR.

Abu Dhabi built a new 100-megawatt concentrated solar power plant for $750 million that can provide electricity to 20,000 homes (NPR). That’s $37,500 per home. There are 132,419,000 housing units in the United States in 2011 (census.gov).  At that price, it would cost $5 trillion dollars to provide electricity to Americans using solar thermal plants, and that doesn’t include the cost of upgrading the electric grid and many other costs.

Fialka J (2020) Futuristic Solar Plants Plagued by Glitches, Poor Training. The rush to complete concentrating solar power projects led to multiple reliability problems. Scientific American.

A hectic pace of development spurred by expiring national and state incentive programs has caused multiple reliability problems among the world’s most advanced solar energy plants, according to a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) “Concentrating Solar Power Best Practices Study”.

Hurrying to complete plants and meet operational and financial deadlines often left crews assigned to operate the plants with too little training about how to deal with glitches. There were a welter of low-tech problems including difficulties making steam, leaking salt water, cleaning mirrors and poorly designed control systems were the major complaints of plant owners.

Described as a “first-of-its-kind report,” it shows how a lack of quality controls caused cost overruns and poor preparedness dating back to 1991. That was the year when the U.S. pioneer of CSP technology, Luz International Ltd., went bankrupt after completing nine solar plants in California.

After visiting owners or operators of nearly 80% of the operating CSP plants worldwide, NREL researchers found over 1,000 problems. More than half of them were operational and maintenance issues.

Expensive problems could and often did happen, such as the need to promptly find and fix tanks that leak salt water onto a concrete floor. Once salt has leaked into the foundation, there is no mechanism to remove the salt other than removing the floor, elevating the tank, removing the foundation, replacing the foundation, replacing the floor and then lowering the tank back into place.

CEC (2020) IVANPAH SOLAR ELECTRIC GENERATING SYSTEM 2018-2019 AVIAN & BAT MONITORING PLAN. California Energy Commission.

The California Energy Commission reports that a major hailstorm damaged between 10,000 and 12,000 heliostats (reflector mirrors) of the 173,500 garage door-sized mirrors.  Replacing them will perhaps push Ivanpah into negative EROI territory. And it takes a lot of energy to move these mirrors around. Each mirror has a motor controlled by a computer, which angles the reflective surface to track the location of the sun.  All those moving parts make Ivanpah more challenging to maintain than static solar panels.

Fialka J (2020) Futuristic Solar Plants Plagued by Glitches, Poor Training The rush to complete concentrating solar power projects led to multiple reliability problems. Scientific American.

Castro, C., et al. 2018. Concentrated Solar power: actual performance and foreseeable future in high penetration scenarios of renewable energies. Biophysical economics and resource quality.

Analyses proposing a high share of concentrated solar power (CSP) in future 100% renewable energy scenarios rely on the ability of this technology, through storage and/or hybridization, to partially avoid the problems associated with the hourly/ daily (short-term) variability of other variable renewable sources such as wind or solar photovoltaic. However, data used in the scientific literature are mainly theoretical values. In this work, the actual performance of CSP plants in operation from publicly available data from four countries (Spain, the USA, India, and United Arab Emirates) has been estimated for three dimensions: capacity factor (CF), seasonal variability, and energy return on energy invested (EROI).

The authors used real data from 34 CSP plants to find actual capacity factors, which were much lower than had been assumed.

OVERALL AVERAGE: ACTUAL CF 0.15–0.3, ASSUMED 0.25 to 0.75

CSP plant Technology Storage Hours Expected CF Literature CF Real CF
Nevada Solar One Parabolic 0.5 0.2 0.42–0.51 0.18
Solana Generating Parabolic 6 0.38 0.42–0.51 0.27
Genesis Parabolic No 0.26 0.25–0.5 0.28
Martin Next Generation Parabolic No 0.24 0.25–0.5 0.16
Mohave Parabolic No 0.24 0.25–0.5 0.21
SEGS III–IX Parabolic No   0.25–0.5 0.17
Crescent Dunes Tower 10 0.52 0.55–0.71 0.14
Ivanpah 1, 2, 3 Tower No 0.31 0.25–0.28 0.19
Maricopa Dish stirling No   0.25–0.28 0.19

Table 2 United States only, not shown: UAE, Spain, and India.  Estimates of the CF of several individual CSP plants, sets of plants and global USA and Spanish CSP systems: expected values from the industry, values used in the scientific literature and the results obtained in the work for real plants

In fact, the results obtained show that the actual performance of CSP plants is significantly worse than that projected by constructors and considered by the scientific literature in the theoretical studies:

low standard EROI of 1.3:1–2.4:1, 12 other researchers gave a range of 9.6 to 67.6 (see Table 7). Given that CSP plants cost more than any other kind of RES, it’s not surprising that the EROI is so low.

Other significant issues for CSP

  • intensive use of materials—some scarce
  • Substantial seasonal intermittence.

Conclusion

Analyses proposing a high share of CSP in future 100% RES scenarios rely on the ability of this technology, through storage and/or hybridization, to partially avoid the problems associated with the hourly/ daily (short-term) variability of other renewable variable sources, such as wind or PV.

But this advantage seems to be more than offset by the overall performance of real CSP plants. In fact, the results from CSP plants in operation, using publicly available data from four countries (Spain, the USA, India, and UAE) show that the actual performance of CSP plants is shown to be significantly worse than projected by the builders and in the scientific literature which has been using theoretical numbers.  In fact, the exaggeration in scientific literature is paradoxical given that there have been publicly available data for many power plants for years.

By overestimating the capacity factor, the life cycle analyses that estimate the energy and material requirements, EROI, environmental impacts, and economic costs are exaggerated as well.

The capacity factor turns out to be quite low, on the same order as wind and PV, CSP has very low EROI, intensive use of materials—some scarce—and significant seasonal intermittence problems, with seasonal variability worse than for wind or PV in Spain and the USA, where the output can be zero for many days in winter.

Since CSP has to be put in hot deserts with a lot of sunlight, they’re vulnerable to damage from wind, dust, sand, extreme temperatures, water scarcity, and more.

Negative EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested)  

In a 1978 study by K. A. Lawrence of the Solar Research Institute, Beckmann states, “To construct a 1,000 MW solar plant needs an excessive amount of materials: 35,000 tons of aluminum, 2 million tons of concrete, 7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000 tons of glass, 1,500 tons of chromium and titanium, and other materials. . . . The energy that goes into the construction of a solar thermal-electric plant is, in fact, so large that it raises serious questions of whether the energy will ever be paid back.” Petr Beckmann, Why “Soft” Technology Will Not Be America’s Energy Salvation (Boulder, Colo.: Golem, 1979),p. 6

So much energy goes into and mining, materials, fabrication, delivery, maintenance and so on, that the energy returned from the solar plant is less than the energy that went into making it.

Solar Plants require 1,000 times more material than a gas-fired power plant.

Too Vulnerable

Solar farms are vulnerable to damage and destruction from:

  • High winds, tornadoes, & hurricanes
  • Storms and hail
  • Sand storms, which scour the mirrors.

Where’s the water?

They’re all located in deserts, which makes it hard to find the water needed to rinse off the mirrors.

The Abu Dhabi plant will need 600 acre-feet of groundwater to wash off dust and cool auxiliary equipment.  Desert groundwater is not renewable.

Too much space required

Central-station solar requires between five and 17 acres per megawatt (Beckmann).

Solar Two took up quite a bit of land for the power being generated. There were 1,900 mirrored panels, each one over 100 square yards, and the results were only one megawatt per 17 acres of capacity. A natural gas facility taking up that much space would generate 150 times as much power (Bradley).

Howard Hayden estimates Solar Two would need to take up 127 square miles to produce as much energy as a 1000-MWe power plant does in one year. (Hayden, p. 187).

Too few places to put it

Concentrating solar power (CSP) capacity grew by about 100 MW from 2009–2011, bringing the cumulative total to approximately 520 MW. This corresponds to approximately 0.2% of U.S. electricity demand being met by PV and 0.015% by CSP.

Solar energy contains a direct component (sunlight that has not been scattered by the atmosphere) and a diffuse component (sunlight that has been scattered by the atmosphere). This distinction is important because only the direct solar component can be focused effectively by mirrors or lenses. The direct component typically accounts for 60%–80% of surface solar insolation74 in clear-sky conditions and decreases with increasing relative humidity, cloud cover, and atmospheric aerosols (e.g., dust, urban pollution). Technologies that concentrate solar intensity—such as CSP and concentrating PV—perform best in arid regions with high direct normal irradiance. Solar technologies that do not concentrate sunlight, such as most PV and passive solar heating applications, can use both the direct and diffuse components of solar radiation and thus are suitable for use in a wider range of locations and conditions than concentrating technologies.

The solar resource available to CSP is highest in the southwestern United States and falls off in eastern and northern states. This is because CSP technologies can only effectively concentrate the direct component of solar radiation, which is highest in arid regions.

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Alaskan tsunamis threaten even California

Posted on November 25, 2021 by

Preface. A 9.1 magnitude earthquake in Alaska send a tsunami all the way to the California coast  and cause at least $10 billion in damage, forcing at least 750,000 people to evacuate flooded areas, destroy port facilities in the Bay Area and Los Angeles [ #7 and #1 ports respectively in terms of the value of import & exported goods], and send water surging up creeks, harbors and canals everywhere. An Alaskan quake of that strength would cause waves up to 24 feet high that would batter California’s low-lying coastal areas with only a few hours of warning.

Alaska tsunamis can also be set off by melting permafrost as McKittrick (2020) explains below.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com  author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, April 2021, Springer, “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

***

Perlman D (2013) How Alaskan quake could lead to California tsunami. San Francisco Chronicle.

Several historical distant-source tsunamis, including those generated by the 1946 magnitude (M) 8.1 Aleutian, 1960 M9.5 Chile, and 1964 M9.2 Alaska earthquakes, caused known inundation along portions of the northern and central California coast

In addition to inundation, a tsunami could generate strong, unpredictable currents in the ocean close to shore, causing significant damage in harbors and bays. An extrapolation of the damage in California from the 2011 Tohoku tsunami even stronger ones can happen that will damage or sink one-third of the boats and damage or destroy over one-half of the docks in California coastal marinas. Small craft damages would include commercial fishing boats. In northern California, the scenario timing in March is considered the off-season and many fishermen would be away from their boats, which aggravates the exposure of the fleets to the tsunami. Loose boats would become floating debris or sink, posing navigational hazards to other vessels.

Fires would likely start at many sites where fuel and petrochemicals are stored in ports and marinas. Many fires during past tsunamis have been caused when flammable liquids were released, spread by water, and ignited by mechanisms such as electrical leakage, short circuits, and sparks created by pieces of debris colliding.

The tsunami has the potential to cause environmental contamination in both inunda ted areas onshore and the coastal marine and estuarine environments. Potential sources for contamination are many and varied, and include, for example:
debris from damaged piers, ships, commercial and industrial facilities, and large numbers of residences; petroleum products released from damaged ships and inundated or damaged marine petroleum terminals, petroleum storage facilities, marinas, power plants, and airports; raw sewage from inundated wastewater treatment plants; household and commercial building contents (lubricants, fuels, paints, pesticides, fertilizers, electronics); smoke, ash, and debris from fires; runoff from inundated agricultural fields containing pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers; and redistribution of existing contaminated sedime nts in ports, the near shore marine environment, and in estuaries, sloughs, and bays.

Property damages include about 69,000 single-family-equivalent homes

McKittrick E (2020) Alaska’s new climate threat: tsunamis linked to melting permafrost. The Guardian.

Research shows that mountains are collapsing as the permafrost that holds them together melts, threatening tsunamis if they fall into the sea. Scientists are warning that populated areas and major tourist attractions are at risk.

One area of concern is a slope of the Barry Arm fjord in Alaska that overlooks a popular cruise ship route. The Barry Arm slide began creeping early last century, sped up a decade ago, and was discovered this year using satellite photos. If it lets loose, the wave could hit any ships in the area and reach hundreds of meters up nearby mountains, swamping the popular tourist destination and crashing as high as 10 meters over the town of Whittier. Earlier this year, 14 geologists warned that a major slide was “possible” within a year, and “likely” within 20 years.

In 2015, a similar landslide, on a slope that had also crept for decades, created a tsunami that sheared off forests 633 feet (193 meters) up the slopes of Alaska’s Taan Fiord.

Over the past century, 10 of the 14 tallest tsunamis recorded happened in glaciated mountain areas. In 1958, a landslide into Alaska’s Lituya Bay created a 524-meter wave – the tallest ever recorded. In Alaska’s 1964 earthquake, most deaths were from tsunamis set off by underwater landslides.

References

USGS (2013) U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2013. 1170– A California Geological Survey Special Report 229 The SAFRR (Science Application for Risk Reduction) Tsunami Scenario. U.S. Geological Survey.

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