Man has learned how to harness energy slaves. 23.5 g of oil contains the energy output of a man or woman working at 35 W output for 8 hours. That works out as 1.7 C a day when oil was priced at $100 / bbl. Is that all we are worth?
Man has learned how to harness energy slaves. 23.5 g of oil contains the energy output of a man or woman working at 35 W output for 8 hours. That works out as 1.7 C a day when oil was priced at $100 / bbl. Is that all we are worth?
All I’d add is that the result of the failed October Revolution was to convince our masters that Europeans are no longer useful as slave labour—too crafty and ungovernable.
Hence the push now to replace us with “humans” too stupid to organize successful slave revolts.
Two things the government has done which annoys me greatly.
1. Splitting out the price for electricity and adding a delivery fee for a net increase in electricity costs. This lets Hydro Zero say the basic cost of electricity is only $0.09 / kWh when the actual total cost is closer to $0.19 / kWh.
2. To make sure the knife is in deep they charge tax on the taxes. For example, my propane bill has a sub-total. Above the sub-total is ON-GOV CARBON which is the Ontario Government carbon tax. Below the sub-total is HST. They also charge HST on HAZMAT FEE and TRANSP FEE. I order $866 of propane and end up paying almost $1030 (or 16% more).
“giving a lifetime total of 70,725 hours of work out of a total 745,110 hours of life, if we live to 85. OECD Man has therefore learned to sustain a long life by only working for 10% of the time available. This has only been made possible by FF doing huge amounts of work on our behalf”
To think fossil fuels are bad is to deny reality.
If too much CO2 was a problem we could go to 50% hydro and 50% nuclear worldwide for zero carbon emissions in about 25 years. Instead, “green” countries like Germany insist on 40% coal and then supplement with very expensive wind and solar.
So, we could solve the CO2 problem quickly and completely using known technology or we could never solve the problem and use expensive renewable energy to soothe our guilty conscience.
At 11:48 Steve Rockwood again
…or we could plant more trees… P.M. Jean Chrietien’s solution…
There is NO CO2 problem. We are in a geological age (Cenozoic era, Quaternary period, Holocene epoch) which has the lowest CO2 concentration and among the lowest temperature in the history of the Earth. In the Mesozoic, CO2 concentration got as high as 2000 ppm, and the temperature as high as 25 deg C. It cooled down in the Cenozoic. There was no “runaway warming.” As a matter of fact, the Quaternary on the whole can be considered an ice age, with the Holocene but a brief pause between glacial periods. If humans can indeed warm the Earth up slightly, it may be a very good thing, to forestall the coming of another glacial period. The last one buried what are now New York and Chicago in glaciers.
If there is a CO2 problem, it would be because we are perilously close to 250 ppm, at which point photosynthesis would not be sustained and all life will die. But we know that the earth can handle several times 400 ppm. In fact, because the CO2 concentration is slightly higher than before, we are witnessing a greening of the earth, as satellite pictures show, and as bumper crops of grain annually can attest to.
BAM..!! Excellent Comment and bang on the buck….so true with our CO2 at 250..we would die, period. Currently at some ~400…not exactly in danger of GREEning the planet, but it is going in the right direction…
Yet One wonders – the Sun Being the primary driver of Climate, is not being so nice right now – ZERO sunspots and that my friends is usually a fore bearer of cooling…not warming.
Maunder Minimum anyone.??
I think 50% hydro is a problem. Probably not enough sites, and while it is dispatchable it is also environmentally destructive and actually quite dangerous. But 25% hydro, 25% gas and 50% nuclear would not be a bad starting point. Most of the gas and hydro infrastructure is already in place, and so we are talking about replacing coal with nuclear. And reducing the health impacts of burning coal in a country like China is a goal worth pursuing.
Steve Rockwood @ 11:02
“To make sure the knife is in deep they charge tax on the taxes”…
Yes, how hateful, they make sure to suck you in on the campaign trail though. Then they do what the civil servants want who are the ultimate authority. Politicians only want the money.
Some cities are drenched in cash. They overcharge on everything as if they’re the size of a major city. Taxpayers, are now called “Dusty” because we’re sucked so dry.
This installment of Euan’s energy and man treatise needs to be made into a video (I don’t believe school children “read” anymore) and disseminated into every classroom in America. Perhaps President Trump can find a useful mission for The Dept. of Education ?
Our children are taught, nonstop, of the horrors of FF … and never a single word about the BENEFITS of FF. If our society is dependent upon an EDUCATED population to succeed … then it is high time we taught them the TRUTH, the whole TRUTH and nothing but the TRUTH. Put an end to the leftist indoctrination factories.
My very FIRST move as Secretary of Education? Enact strict Affirmative-Action quotas on every school in America. I would MANDATE that each and every school would be forced to hire 50% men as teachers. Males. Men. Not imagined men, not gender-bent men.
Human history is a chronicle of war and conquest, both of man against one another, but also of man against nature.
Nature is harsh and cruel, if you have to scratch out a living with your bare hands. Humans improve their lot with every innovation: fire, wheel (and therefore wagons), agriculture (and animal husbandry), metallurgy (which led to tools and machinery), light industry such as textile. All of that were available maybe two thousand years ago, and led to relatively comfortable life for those advanced cultures who have discovered them. Then things seemingly became stagnant for over a thousand years, until the Enlightenment and industrial revolution.
I rank the discovery that electricity can be generated by a rotating magnetic field one of history’s greatest discoveries. The physics by Maxwell, and the work on alternating current generators by American engineers, ultimately led to the electric grid, which supplies cheap energy to almost every single home in the civilized world. Fuel for the generators were in turn wood, coal, oil, hydro, and nuclear, as we became proficient with each. The cheap electricity, together with the almost obligatory inventions of household convenience based on electricity, almost too many to list, was the watershed moment that freed most ordinary people from a life of drudgery into a life with enough free moments to make it enjoyable. Together with machinery, it means the fruits of one’s labor multiplied a hundredfold or a thousandfold. Even the truly blue collar workers, the assembly line workers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, regularly rely on electric tools instead of brute force, without thinking about it.
We have enjoyed this good life for over a century, and it only keeps improving with the explosion of electronics in the last twenty years. But now come the socialists who realize the best way to seize power is to control energy. So they want to forbid every other form of fuel for electrical generation, except for the totally unreliable and absurdly expensive wind and solar. They are the ones who really want to turn back the clock to where electricity was only available to the aristocracy, and never mind the hoi polloi. That is not “progressive” in any meaningful sense of the word. It is regressive, to want to go back to a past much horrible than the good life we are enjoying.
P.S. I don’t call crude oil “fossil fuel”. There is no compelling reason to believe it came from organic carcasses of the Mesozoic. Really, how much oil does the world consume daily? Were there so much organic carcasses, animal or plant, to support all that? It boggles the mind that some people really believe that. I believe it is created from carbonic rocks and water (the byproduct being mostly oxygen) at the crust-mantle interface. That is why there is so much of it, and more and more as we explore. Peak oil was never a problem. Even as the known deposits run out, more and more new ones are discovered. Right now, the world has known reserves to last to the end of the century.
But now come the socialists who realize the best way to seize power is to control energy.
I am not usually that … Machiavellian … however, in the case of Global Warming, I will make an exception. Because as you also pointed out … the Red Diaper Doper Babies are not only controlling energy … they are controlling $$ disposable incomes. They are literally seizing our $$ livelihood … as you said … by the most REGRESSIVE taxation ever devised (short of seizing all assets). Forcing CA Consumers to pay for “specially formulated” gasoline, increased gasoline taxes, carbon taxes, 300% increases in bridge tolls, mandated solar panels, increased water rates, increased electricity rates, etc. etc. … HURTS the working poor. Badly.
But $$ is POWER, and the Left are seizing POWER by draining the bank accounts of every citizen … while theirs fatten-up.
I am just waiting for the State of CA to have a Donald J. Trump moment. The moment they realize that every single thing done by Jerry Brown and the supermajority leftist CA Legislature has been WRONG, painful, and CORROSIVE to every Californian. Yeah, yeah … I’ll more likely LEAVE this State before that comes to pass.
Probably less if a communist is doing the calculation.