President Joe Biden’s Green New Deal is an ‘impossible cluster-f***.’ You probably knew this already but below are the raw details.
If the world is to wean itself off fossil fuels and go “carbon neutral” by 2050, here is what might possibly need to be done:
To summarize: to get the world to zero emissions by 2050, our options are to build, commission, and bring on-line either:
• One 2.1 gigawatt (GW, 109 watts) nuclear power plant each and every day until 2050, OR
• 3,000 two-megawatt (MW, 106 watts) wind turbines each and every day until 2050 plus a 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every day and a half until 2050, assuming there’s not one turbine failure for any reason, OR
• 96 square miles (250 square kilometres) of solar panels each and every day until 2050 plus a 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every day and a half until 2050, assuming not one of the panels fails or is destroyed by hail or wind.
The calculations come courtesy of Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That? Feel free to check the math yourself. It is based on the following assumptions:
People generally have little idea just how much energy we get from fossil fuels. Figure 1 shows the global annual total and fossil energy consumption from 1880 to 2019, and extensions of both trends to the year 2050.
I note that my rough estimate of 2050 total annual energy consumption (241 petawatt-hrs/year) is quite close to the World Energy Council’s business-as-usual 2050 estimate of 244 PWhr/yr.
So if we are going to zero emissions by 2050, we will need to replace about 193 petawatt-hours (1015 watt-hours) of fossil fuel energy per year. Since there are 8,766 hours in a year, we need to build and install about 193 PWhrs/year divided by 8766 hrs/year ≈ 22 terawatts (TW, or 1012 watts) of energy generating capacity. (In passing, for all of these unit conversions let me recommend the marvelous website called “Unit Juggler“.)
Starting from today, January 25, 2021, there are 10,568 days until January 1, 2050. So we need to install, test, commission, and add to the grid about 22 TW / 10568 days ≈ 2.1 gigawatts/day (GW/day, or 109 watts/day) of generating capacity each and every day from now until 2050.
The cost will, of course, be stupendous:
The nuclear plants alone will cost on the order of US$170 trillion at current prices. And wind or solar plus 75 percent nuclear will be on the order of US275 trillion, plus decommissioning and disposal costs for wind turbines and solar panels.
But maybe the most stupid thing of all is no-one, apart from the crony capitalist troughers who are going to make like bandits from this scheme, and a few doctrinaire eco-fascist loons actually, wants any of this stuff.
It’s being pushed by the Climate Industrial Complex on the basis of claims which turn out to be completely untrue.
The “most significant public health issue of our time” line being promoted by White House climate advisor Gina McCarthy, for example, is false:
Silly: “Climate change most significant public health issue of our time” Biden’s Climate Advisor McCarthy
Heart disease kills 33% and cancer 26% of all Americans
Heat kills 0.3% and declining. Cold 6.4% and increasing
Yes, problem. No, 0.3% not biggest challenge
refs below pic.twitter.com/C7rrLZJEI0
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) January 28, 2021
And guess which country is going to be the biggest beneficiary of all this green boondoggling…
“China controls 50-70% of lithium, cobalt and polysilicon and is aggressively acquiring other materials to make batteries and solar panels. As we move to electric vehicles, we are essentially shifting control of transportation fuels from OPEC to China.” https://t.co/d76q3KD3b5
— Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) January 27, 2021
Read more at Breitbart
We cannot divest agriculture of fossil fuel. The 20th century agricultural revolution was diesel-driven. Literally.
We can replace that with ethanol but we’ll need to commandeer a fair chunk of agricultural output purely for agricultural ethanol production alone. That would be a recipe for disaster. Or we can replace diesel with hydrogen fuel. If we can.
That’s a big ‘if’ at this stage and could also be a recipe for disaster. Of course, we could all just stare wistfully into space, dreaming of renewables-charged battery-powered combine harvesters. All that pie-in-the-sky thinking won’t actually feed anyone though. Even if big farm machinery could run on batteries, which it can’t, the area taken up by solar ‘farms’ and wind turbines would swallow a fair chunk of actual farmland. Oh, and the mining required to make the batteries would truly be a conservation nightmare.
Solutions are only solutions if they work. If they don’t work, they’re just more problems.
“Or we can replace diesel with hydrogen fuel. If we can.” Unfortunately Hydrogen can not replace diesel as a fuel as its energy density is too low, it is extremely expensive to produce, notoriously difficult to store and is quite explosive.
Those who know much about internal combustion mechanics will notice that I forgot to add how ethanol can be used for big agricultural machinery, but it isn’t exactly efficient for that purpose. Quite simply, for driving farming and trucking, ethanol’s properties are quite wrong.
Gummut, Why not use Ethanol to produce Ethanol? Ans: It does not contain enough energy to produce itself! Using it to operate farm equipment will not work at all?
Biden like just about all Liberal Democrats/Globalists prefer to ignore the truth in the sake of Politics and Money
The extrapolated graphs will have to be drawn much steeper as the requirements for residential & commercial heating, industrial processes, & transportation, etc., are converted to electricity from fossil fuels!