A Twenty Year Plan

33 Replies to “A Twenty Year Plan”

1. There is an easy fix.
   They get families to live together in multi-generational dwellings. Leaving at least 1/2 of the dwellings vacant until they get their nuclear and coal plants back up.
   That will happen because if it doesn’t happen, people will freeze to death.
   People are smarter than central planners.

   1. “Central planning” is an oxymoron

      1. Burning wind turbines to keep warm this winter are we?
         Still flammable…which means burnable.
         May not like the smoke, but that heat is so enticing…

   2. And they can all wear sweaters or coats inside.

2. The really stupid thing about using hydrogen from natural gas is you end up expending more energy producing it than you get from it, and, if you care about such nonsense, emitting more CO2, than if you’d just burned the GD natural gas in the first place.

   1. And then there is the nightmare of “confining” Hydrogen. The molecule is so small that it travels straight through rubber and metal seals.

      Back to the old “HIndenburg” story.

      The Hydrogen was being “pumped” into the rubberized silk “gas-bags” inside the hull until “lift-off”. This is because the Hydrogen was CONSTANTLY leaking out of those bags. The top of the outer hull had remotely adjustable “vents” to let the leakage OUT. In compensation, there was a large amount of WATER ballast on board to compensate for the “excess” of Hydrogen on board at lift-off.

      As the gas leaked out, as was expected from a couple of decades of airship activity, water was also dumped to maintain or adjust buoyancy / altitude.

      Some silly accident may well have ignited loose hydrogen at the landing site, but what you see burning on that famous couple of minutes of film is NOT a “hydrogen fire”.

      The outer skin of the “Hindenburg” was natural fabric over a light metal frame, BUT, because it was out in the weather, it had to be waterproofed, so it was painted. First came an undercoat of “red iron oxide”-laced varnish / “dope”. This was then over-painted with the final “silver” look; fine aluminium powder in another, probably cellulose-based, varnish.

      The ENTIRE outer skin was covered with THERMITE and nitrocellulose!

      THAT was what can be seen burning at incredible speed, huge visible flames and massive clouds of dark smoke. Hydrogen, on the other hand, burns with an invisible flame; a serious danger in itself.

      Then, when it hit the ground, the remaining fuel for the engines sealed the deal.

3. How much government money will be spent building tankers to carry this hydrogen (from what feed stock CH4 or H2O) from Newfoundland to Germany?

   There appears to be a single ship that is capable of doing it, though there are plans to build 19 more, and this class of tanker can carry 75 Tons of hydrogen.

   Australia is generating the hydrogen to be shipped to Japan at a cost of 160 tons of coal, to extract 6 tons of hydrogen, so it takes 2000 tons of coal to produce enough hydrogen to fill the tanker once. Imagine how much useful work that 2000 tons of coal could have done instead.

   1. They need a desalination plant for the water

4. As if more proof were needed that government bureaucrats are an innumerate, imbecilic microbial life form that exists in a parasitic relationship with it’s host, taxpayers.

   1. Yep! Malice and / or Incompetence all the way down.

5. Germany, supposedly chalk full of brilliant engineers, can’t pull it’s head out of it’s own ass long enough to realize that there are massive obstacles to this. Where are the goddamn engineers and administration officials resigning and saying they won’t build this crap? It’s not even hard to research just how stupid this idea is in practice.

   It’s just so deflating to see how science and engineering principles can be so completely corrupted by the fairytale utopianism and cynical political machinations of the Left with such ease. Like watching Atlas Shrugged in real time.

   1. All that’s missing is a golden haired pirate who seizes the relief ships headed to Germany.
      
      “Do you know what it was that he seized last night?” said the spinster.
      “The big ship with the relief supplies we were sending to the People’s
      State of France.”

      “How does he dispose of the goods he seizes?”
      “Ah, that— nobody knows.”

      “I met a sailor once, from a ship he’d attacked, who’d seen him in person.
      He said that Ragnar Danneskjold has the purest gold hair and the most
      frightening face on earth, a face with no sign of any feeling. If there ever
      was a man born without a heart, he’s it— the sailor said.”
      

      1. Who really is John Galt ?

6. if the leftard-greenies are so worried about us cutting down too many trees in Canada or in the Amazon forest,, then they should let us emit lots of co2 as this will make trees and plants grow better, faster, bigger.

   This is science.

   Dear leftards, prove to us that depriving trees and plants of co2 is good for them.

   Good luck

   1. CF, Careful there pal, your logic is showing!

7. Perhaps with the excess warmth this generates in Newfoundland, they could grow cucumbers?

   lol…

   I think fueling cars with hydrogen is a good idea, if someone can do this without being dependent upon intergenerational gov’t subsidies, have at it.

   1. circa 2003 at SEMA there were lots of “hydrogen” powered vehicles on display, including a factory Ford Fusion. Each of them had one or more large cryogenic hydrogen tanks, and a limited range.

      no company is going to build the infrastructure required unless they can make a profit somehow, and given the Watermelons attacks on greenhouse gases, most of the companies see that hydrogen isn’t the solution, because it produces water vapour, which is a worse GHG than CO2

   2. It certainly worked well for floating blimps /sarc

8. Years away from putting a shovel in the ground and Mr.box o’ rocks along with his loyal howler monkey base will be crowing about how he’s putting Canadians first with good paying “Green” jobs which in my opinion isn’t at all doable from a cost perspective.
   Maybe Fritz can help him with his First Nations potable water problem.

9. There goes out tax money, into the pockets of Liberal cronies I am sure. At least the cucumbers were green.

10. Hydrogen will die a slow expensive death. It cannot work no matter how much politicians and grant money try to defy the fundamentals of the universe.

11. Nobody has explained to me how you’re going to build one hundred and sixty wind mills on the Port au Port peninsula, a desolate piece of coastline for the most part, but still home to a sizable population, when the only access is a two lane pothole ridden blacktop,.
    Not only cars and trucks use this road, but bicycles, ATV’s, pedestrians, including mother’s pushing strollers and small children.
    Explain to me how, without massive infrastructure spending, you are going to transport the materials and men to build one hundred and sixty windmills?
    I wonder how they managed to rig the environmental review?
    Was one even done?

12. Give the Germans some hydrogen bombs.
    That’ll keep them toasty.

    1. Don’t laugh.

       During the last Great Unpleasantness, the German Post Office ran its own nuclear programme, with the ever-jolly SS cuddled up real close.. “Boosted” fission bombs were definitely on the menu. Where do you think most of the technology, knowledge and “personnel” behind the US and Soviet Nuke programmes came from?

13. In real energy news, Germany has agreed to continue running its three nuclear power plants that were slated for closure. Hydrogen is another solution indicative of innumeracy and peak energy ignorance. In terms of life cycle net return on energy, for every unit of input energy (mostly fossil fuel based) you get a return of one to two units with wind and solar. With nuclear power you get a net return of from seventy to eighty units. If you want to transition away from fossil fuels which would you rather choose?

14. Raif Mair(former BC cabinet minister and radio talk show host) once said “you make a big mistake thinking people in power actually know what they are doing”.

    1. No truer words have been said.

15. No one is mentioning that the windmills come from China and the environmental impact of making the @#%$ things.

16. When I was working on this they were “trying to get the Carbon out”. It’s so nice to see that we have “Green Hydrogen” now… ever so much better than black hydrogen.

17. Until the Germans figure out the next step – converting H2 molecules to He atoms – this is just tilting at windmills.

    1. Lots of Helium 3 on the Moon in the regolith not to mention frozen water in the craters of the Dark Side.
       Maybe Musk is onto something.

18. The entire Trudeau / German hydrogen plan is just a smokescreen for both the Trudeau and German governments to use as a distraction from the mess both have made of the energy situation. Germany is in the worst position , but Canada is not far behind as Trudeau seems determined to match Germany’s energy lunacy.

19. I must have missed the announcement of the drilling rig that struck hydrogen.

    6 times the energy to make hydrogen from water that you get from burning it.
    Making it from gas… better to just burn the gas.

    Make more sense to just send over their dead batteries and have us recharge them.