Alernat/ive Histories and Energy

I think about alternate histories. For example, an alternative history where Archduke Franz Ferdinand  avoids assassination, thus avoiding World War I and unlocking greater powers of science. I've done this one before on this blog, but let me go deeper this time. 

In my alternate reality, people all over the world, astonished by the spectacle of Franz Ferdinand and Gavrilo Princip talking to and learning from one another, drop all sorts of opposition: ethnicity against ethnicity, prince against peasant, boss against worker. In place of fear and hatred come fascination, knowledge, hope.

In our "reality," electric vehicles first appeared in the 1830's, and were quite viable by the turn of the century, but by 1914 they were being overtaken by the gasoline-powered stinkers we're familiar with. But in this alternate reality, where Franz Ferdinand lives and saves the life of his would be assassin Gavrilo Princip, scientists not only successfully discourage any dangerous accumulations of radioactive materials, but also are successful in arguing the merits of electric vehicles. Coal, oil and gas stay in the ground alongside uranium. Inner cities only very briefly go from the stink of horse poop to the stink of gasoline, before relatively odorless electrical motors and batteries take over.

In "reality," photovoltaic cells were invented in the 19th century. In my alternative timeline, with the petrochemical lobby strangled in its crib by those very same helpful scientists, solar generation of electricity is mankind's primary source of power by 1920, followed by wind, tidal and geothermal. Burning stuff on a large scale now seems somewhat remote, like living in caves.

Is there a point to such enjoyable mental games? I think so. I think they show us how much power we have to stop destroying ourselves.  We could've done it in 1914, we can do it now. The biggest obstacles to the adoption of solar and wind and other clean sources aren't technological, they're various forms of human stupidity. They're the lobbies of oil, coal and gas, buying laws which stand in the way of the spread of better ways of doing things. It's the attitude that says we have to put up with people like Elon Musk in order to transition to clean energy. It's the acceptance of limitations in general. The primary obstacle to progress in between people's ears.

Dream Log: Mystical Alternative Energy and Elizabeth Banks

I dreamed that a new energy source had been found. Some people, mostly women, were able to gather electricity, like batteries, while they were meditating, and then to discharge it into the grid. During the process of discharge they glowed until they looked like translucent plastic from head to toe. Each one glowed a different color. They were able to sense places where they could go, where there were large amounts of static electricity which they would be able to gather up. Science was not yet able to explain any of this. The people who gathered and distributed this energy came to be known as "batteries." Some compared the process to becoming impregnated giving birth.

By far the most powerful battery happened to be Hollywood actor, producer, director, writer and all-around genius and Nice Person Elizabeth Banks.

During the discharge process she glowed a vivid lime-green. She was able to put several gigawatt-hours into the grid per week. This made Ms Banks even more famous than she had already been. Many people who put most of their time and energy into trying to ensure that we all die from pollution and global warming -- also known as "Republicans" -- at first tried to discount the entire phenomenon of human batteries as a hoax. Then they tried to demonize Ms Banks as a Hollywood liberal. Banks shrugged and replied that she WAS a Hollywood liberal, and she didn't seem very demonic at all. Then the Republicans complained about coal miners and oilfield workers losing their jobs. You know how they do.

Being a human battery, sensing where the electricity was, traveling there, absorbing it while meditating and then discharging it into the grid, tended to be very much a full-time job. Most of the batteries had support teams handling the logistics for them. Banks' team was headed by Seth Rogan, with whom she had worked several times in show business. I was heading another logistics team, for a woman who wasn't famous at all. She glowed orange when she discharged. She could do several megawatt-hours a week.

The Banks operation gave all of their electricity away for free. Some smaller organizations, like the one I was working for, sold our electricity to utilities or consumer co-ops. Republicans, naturally, tried to play things up and make it seem as if Banks and Rogen and all those Hollywood types were taking money away from poor hardworking Murrkins like me and the lady who glowed orange. You know how they do.

Elizabeth Banks set up a conference for human batteries, where advice, organization and, yes, even money could be offered to those in need. 

I had hardly parked our team's mini-van when Seth Rogen was shoving me and yelling incoherently. Then he walked away as suddenly as he had appeared. Then he was there again, sobbing and apologizing and drunk. I assured him that he had not done any damage, and asked him what was upsetting him. He said that he was out of his head because he had feelings for Ms Banks, and they were unrequited. "You and me and billions of other people," I assured him. If I am correctly informed, Ms Banks has been with one guy for several decades. 

Alternative-Energy Developments in Ann Arbor

Christopher Taylor, Mayor of Ann Arbor, has announced -- well, I don't know whether he's announced a "resolve," or actual concrete plans, to put solar panels on the rooftops of all the public buildings in town. Either way, part of that project was completed four days ago, when volunteers from the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor community helped to install rooftop solar panels on the roof of one of the stations of the Ann Arbor Fire Department.

US Representative Debbie Dingell was there, and posted about it on Facebook, and, of course, one of the right-wing trolls who are all over Michigan Democrats on Facebook immediately complained about this "waste of taxpayer money," and why didn't Dingell yada yada instead. I read a few of the replies to this troll, which of course pointed out that these solar panels will save taxpayer money by generating electricity which the taxpayers have been buying from a utility. I stopped reading the replies to the troll before I noticed any mention that Dingell had linked a story about people volunteering to install the panels, which of course saved the taxpayers even more money. And if you've read the news story I linked above, you already know that in addition to working for free, students and local residents also raised several thousand dollars toward the cost of the installation.

In the past several months I have suddenly ratcheted my interest in electric vehicles, known to us aficionados as EV's, way up. I've been paying a lot more attention to the vehicles within a mile or so of where I live, which I suppose is one of the more left-wing 2-miles circles in the US, but which is also very close to downtown Detroit, and has always had a very deeply-entrenched internal-combustion culture. I've seen quite a few Tesla Model 3's since June. How many is "quite a few"? I don't know. I'm sorry. I've seen at least one Tesla Model X. I've seen several Toyota Leaf's, several Chevrolet Bolts and several Chevrolet Volts, and some BMW i3's, and a few other EV's.

Those are all vehicles running strictly on electricity, Although the Volt also has a small gasoline engine which isn't really necessary, except, presumably, to reassure buyers who don't really know how EV's work. (They work just fine without any gasoline at all, believe it or not.)

Then there are the hybrids in Ann Arbor. The city buses are biodiesel hybrids. I have noticed a few hybrids from Ford and Honda, and one BMW i8 which looks like it wandered onto the street off of a seriously-fast racetrack. I talked to the driver, who said, yes, it was very very fast and fun to drive, but who seemed tired of talking about it, as if strangers were constantly asking him about his car, so I tried to give him a break, said thanks and broke off the conversation early. [ PS, 24 October 2019: I forgot to mention that I've seen a couple of Toyota Camry hybrids and one Hyundai Ioniq hybrid.]

And then there are the Priuses. Toyota has manufactured millions of units of the Prius since 1997 -- how many million? I don't know, and I don't know why I'm having such difficulty finding a reliable figure. And I certainly don't know why so many statistics on Wikipedia having to do with things like solar and wind energy and EV's and hybrids stop at around 2016 or 2017. That's ridiculous. It's like having statistics about computers up until 1983.

Be all of that as it may: there are about 3 million Priuses within a one mile radius of my home. I'm kidding, but there are a lot. A lot.

A few days ago I spoke to a nice lady who drives a Toyota Prius+ and does not seem at all tired of talking about it. I asked her what sort of mileage she got. She said 30 or 40 miles. At first I thought she meant 30 or 40 miles per gallon of gasoline, but no, what she meant was that she charges the car overnight in her garage, and then it goes 30 or 40 miles before the gasoline engine starts. The + in the car's name means you can plug it in. (Does her house run on solar, I wondered but didn't ask.) And, she added, the gasoline engine doesn't start very often. She rarely drives that far in a day. She said she got a full tank of gas four months ago, and still has 3/4 of a tank.

If this nice lady has driven 3000 miles in the past four months, an average of 24 miles a day for 125 days, and if her Prius has used 5 gallons of gasoline over those 3000 miles -- that's 600 miles per gallon.

A lot of the EV enthusiasts I've been hanging out with lately are obsessed with getting longer range per charge from EV's, and the range of EV's is increasing very rapidly. 5 years ago, 100 per charge was pretty good. For a brand-new EV today, in a lot people's opinions, 200 miles is pathetic. This would make sense if they were all driving across Alaska, the Yukon and British Columbia all the time, or across Mongolia, but they're not. I'm one of a vocal minority, but definitely still a minority, who think that the obsession with range is sort of getting out of hand. For longe-range vacations and business trips, charging stations are beginning to sprout everywhere like gas stations, and they're not stopping. The EV revolution is underway.

For these EV enthusiasts, among whom it is usual to want more, more, MORE RANGE!!!!! it is also usual to be very frustrated at the continued success of the Prius, when there are completely gasoline-free EV's are available. I wonder how many Prius+ owners get 600 miles to the gallon, and I wonder how much the EV enthusiasts know about real-world Prius gas consumption.

Also on the topic of opinions and awareness: it seems that the general public don't realize how fast EV's are. A new Tesla is faster from 0-60 than any internal-combustion car which costs less than a million dollars or so. But also very sedate-looking EV's like the Chevy Bolt

accelerate more quickly than just about any ICEV's (as we call internal-combustion-engine vehicles) which can be had for less than six figures. Priuses are slow, as people tend to know by now because there are 35 million of them (I'm exaggerating, but I don't know by how much), but EV's are an entirely different thing. They tend to be ridiculously quick, which is among the reasons to stop obsessively loading them with such large battery packs, which give them the lusted-after long range per change, and make them ridiculously quick, and also very heavy, and also more expensive than they really need to be.

Still, ridiculously fast, overweight and all, a new EV doesn't necessarily have to be very expensive any more. Especially not after a big fat Federal rebate, and possibly state and local rebates as well. It's like with solar energy: people need to resort to more and more ridiculous arguments in order to put EV's down.

Unconvincing Concern

It's interesting how all of these concerns about pollution produced by electric vehicles (often referred to by the cool kids as EV's), and environmental havoc caused by the production of wind energy etc, are brought up by people who were never one bit concerned about the environment before EV's and alternative energy were allegedly harming it. Strip mining, oil wells and refineries, coal-powered electric plants, elimination of wetlands to build condos and golf courses, whatever, they're just fine with all of that, but a Nissan Leaf? OMG THE LITHIUM MINING, YOU MONSTER!!!!! A wind power station? OMG YOU'RE GOING TO KILL ALL THE BIRDS!!!!!

Yeah, right, your concern is so touching and authentic. PS: Wouldn't a bus pass beat driving any kind of car? I suppose it would depend on the kind of bus and other factors. Well, there are plenty of very smart engineers and scientists we can ask about that and other things. And we can check to see whether they're funded by oil or coal companies. I've been thinking about getting a bus pass. The buses here are biodiesel hybrids. I would rather that they were all-electric and charged 100% from solar and wind, but they're not. Yet.

And by the way, yes, a certain amount of pollution is caused by manufacturing the batteries which power electric vehicles, but that pollution is typically offset several times over by the emissions avoided by driving an electric vehicle over the lifetime of the car. In some cases, it's offset by the reduction in pollution during several months worth of driving. Also, the emissions caused by manufacturing those batteries are steadily sinking, in significant part because the people who manufacture and drive electric vehicles actually care about the environment and are constantly learning about such things and improving their practices.

And that thing about windmills killing birds? Yeah, turns out that doesn't really happen. Strip mines, on the pother hand, and oilfields, and refineries, and oil and gas pipelines, and emissions from gasoline- and diesel-burning vehicles? It may shock you to learn that all of those things actually do harm birds, and other animals, and plants too.

The US: A "Leader" In Combating Climate Change?

Yesterday, Michael Bloomberg published an op-ed in that liberal bastion, the New York Times -- you ever notice how many conservatives publish op-eds in our nation's supposed liberal bastion? Good! If it were just one conservative now and then, it might be seen as a refreshing sign of open-mindedness, but when it's a constant slew plus a whole bunch of the Times' regular columnists, it ought to be one more huge clue that the Times is a huge joke, and that our country doesn't have a liberal bastion -- in which he assured his readers that Trump will not be able to wreck the environment, and that wind and solar and other clean sources of energy will triumph no matter what Trump does. Many people have been reassured by Bloomberg's column -- but should they have been?

Before we go further, since many of my readers come from countries other than the United States: in the previous paragraph, I used the term "liberal" in the American sense, meaning "Left" or "progressive." Most of the rest of the world, when they say "liberal," mean what we in the US mean when we say "libertarian." Michael Bloomberg is what most of the world would call a liberal, and what we in the US call a libertarian.

His column, asserting that Trump won't be able to stop or slow down the conversion from fossil fuels to wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, etc, is completely libertarian in its outlook, subscribing to Adam Smith's quaint notion that some markets are free, and that free markets are morally good. He says, in essence, that Trump won't be able to stop the conversion to clean energy because that conversion is good.

Bloomberg certainly isn't the only one who is confident that Trump will not be able to have a significant impact in the transition from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy. And I certainly hope he's right. I just don't see anything in his column in the Times which convinced me that he knows his ass from a hole in the ground.

For example, he refers to "American leadership on climate change." I certainly wasn't the only one who said, "Huh, what?!" when I read that.

Here is a page with statistics about electricity produced from renewable sources. I realize that the use of electricity is not the same as all energy consumption. There may be some definitive statistics on energy consumption and pollution out there somewhere. Or maybe there aren't.

There are two lists of this page: the first lists the 10 countries which produce the most terawatt-hours per year from renewable sources.

The second lists all the countries in the world. It includes the percentage of each country's electricity which is generated from renewables. Unfortunately, it does not list the countries in the order of this percentage (Do I have to do every freakin' thing myself?!), or even in the order of total electricity produced by renewables: it lists them alphabetically.

The top 10 in total number of terawatts from renewables is, in descending order: China, the US, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Russia, India, Japan, Norway and Italy. Oh, another problem with this page: it includes hydroelectric among renewables, and although huge dams don't have huge smokestacks, that doesn't mean they don't wreak any environmental havoc. And #1 renewable producer China generates 4/5 of their renewable total from hydroelectric dams, and #2 US nearly half of its total. And it seems that many of the world's countries generate all or nearly all of their electricity from hydroelectric dams. Should dams be ranked somewhere mid-way between coal and oil on the one and wind and solar on the other in terms of negative environmental impact? I honestly don't know whether that would portray dams too negatively or too positively, or about right.

Anyway, keeping that in mind: China generates only 24.4% of its electricity from renewables. But that's better than the US' 14.27%. The rest of the countries on the first list: Brazil generates 83.98% of its electricity from renewables, Canada 64.48%, Germany 32.70%, Russia 16.59%, India 19.11%, Japan 15.53%, Norway 98.47% and Italy 45.90%.

9 out 10 of the top producers in terms of total wattage, AND MOST OF THE REST OF THE COUNTRIES ON EARTH, generate a higher percentage of their electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources than the country Bloomberg refers to as a leader on the issue of climate change.

Here's a list of countries ranked by the kilotons of carbon dioxide they produced in 2015. The top 10 is quite similar to the top 10 producers of electricity from renewable sources. China and the US are 1-2 again. So, I couldn't blame the residents of many countries, or residents of the US who attempt to think globally, if they got angry at someone like Michael Bloomberg for referring to the US as a leader, or even the leader, in tackling the problem of climate change.

Here's a state-by-state breakdown of the US, giving percentages of electricity with and without hydroelectric dams. Vermont leads both with hydroelectric dams (99.8%) and without (44.3%).

Are More People Studying Electricity?

I was wondering about that even before this power outage started 4 days ago, on the 8th of March, 2017. DTE, the electric and gas utility I use, says that over 650,000 accounts were affected by the outage, which coincided with a severe cold spell, that most of them have had their power restored and that I will be one of the 90% to get the juice turned back on before midnight tonight. I wonder whether that estimate is accurate in my individual case. I wonder what it's going to be like for the last 10% to get their power back.

I was thinking about electricity before Wednesday morning when my electricity went out, and studying books such as Rojansky's Electromagnetic Fields and Waves, because I hope and believe that, Trump, Putin and the Koch brothers be damned, we are on the verge of a huge transformation away from fossil fuels and toward electricity generated by solar, wind and other green energy. I've mentioned before in this blog how I'm taking another one of my stabs at advanced math. Studying electricity, and physics, is part of that stab.

Since Wednesday morning I've been wondering things like, How much suffering would have been alleviated if more people here in the Detroit area had solar panels on their roofs, and, What actually is up with these smart grids one hears about in the news, and just exactly how smart or stupid are our grids around here? And, Will more people study electricity as a direct result of this outage? Surely some will. How many have already begun?

What, if anything, could I have done better since Wednesday if I had been an expert on the subject of electricity?

A few years ago DTE switched me over to a smart meter. Among other things, this means I, or anyone else with a smart meter, don't have to phone in a power outage because as soon as my power goes out, DTE already knows it.

Or so they say. I have no reason to suspect mendacity on DTE's part, but the truth is that I still know very little about electricity, and so I have little means of judging public or private statements about it.

I'm 55 years old. If you're shaking your head and muttering something like, "Starting to learn about electricity when he's 55?" -- meh. I'm not claiming yet to have actually learned anything. But Izzy Stone, one of my heroes,

started studying ancient Greek in his 60's and Hungarian after age 80. When I grow weary I just think of Izzy and my strength returns. I also haven't stopped doing push-ups and crunches every day, but Izzy has less to do with that directly. I don't happen to know what his exercise regime was like, or if he had one at all.

I'm also wondering: has President Chump said anything publicly at all about this power outage? I mean, I haven't noticed the National Guard in town handing out blankets and hot soup.

Arnold And Francis

What do a former Republican Governor of California and the Pope have in common?

They're both intensely interested in something Trump says doesn't exist: global warming. They're both promoting alternative energy as energetically as they can.

Of course you can't sell sunshine and wind with big profits the way you can do with petrochemicals. Who cares if it's killing us all, with oil, with Trump, and Putin, there's money to be made!

But -- is there, really? Are the Dakota and Keystone pipelines going to be able to pay for themselves if demand for petrochemicals is drying up, because everybody is switching to solar and wind and tidal and geothermal and biodiesel and vegetable oil and switchgrass and corn ethanol and hydroelectric and nuclear? Not every item on that list is popular with environmentalists, but every one of them isn't petroleum. And with the possible exception of hydroelectric, nuclear and corn ethanol (the only ones on the list which aren't popular with environmentalists), each one is growing fast.

How does this leave us with expanding demand for oil such as that there is any economic reason for Trump's energy policies even if we leave "secondary" considerations such as the health and survival of the human species completely out of the equation?

The oil companies lied to us for so long about the effects of their products. I think they may be lying to us now about the long-term demand for their products. Losers. Sad.

Trump And Alternative Energy

Bloomberg News, Nov 9, 2016: "Trump's Win 'A Disaster' for Plunging Renewable Energy Sector"

Bloomberg News, Nov 23, 2016: "Economics to Keep Wind and Solar Energy Thriving With Trump"

More headlines seem to agree with the second headline than with the first. A third headline, from fiverthirtyeight.com on Nov 14, seems to cover the prevailing opinion pretty well: "It's Hard To Tell Whether Trump Supports Renewable Energy — And That May not Matter Much"

It may not matter much, because wind and solar and other green energy options may very soon be so much more attractive economically than oil and coal that Trump and the petrochemical sector won't be able to kill them. The technology just keeps getting more efficient and cheaper. The tech geniuses just keep thinking stuff up, as Bruce Willis put it in Armageddon. Transparent solar panels, which can cover the entire exterior of a building because they double as windows. Rotating solar panels.

When I said "more attractive economically" above, I was referring to conventional economics, and to the kind of investor whose biggest hero is Adam Smith. Conventional economics or paleoeconomic theory, exemplified by Trump and Big Oil, create a theoretical model of the entire world in which things such as the environment are treated as "externals," as secondary factors, not to be treated as the primary things under consideration when investing. Of course, this is completely insane: conventional economics is an arbitrary way of doing things which functions only because enough people have agreed to do things that way. It can be completely scrapped and replaced by a totally different economic model whenever people agree to do so, and such a change will not harm the atmosphere or the oceans one bit. On the other hand, if the oceans die or the atmosphere becomes too polluted or temperatures rise too much, all of the people will die, and every form of economics on Earth will die with them. Conventional economic theory regards buying and selling and currencies and loans and interest and so forth as essential things, and environment and health as secondary. The plain and obvious truth is that conventional economics has this completely backwards.

It's dawning on more and more people that conventional economics has this completely backwards. Nevertheless, it continues to function in terms of rewarding those who follow its rules with greater accumulations of money than those who don't. It's either dawned on Democrats much more often than on Republicans, or Republicans pretend that it hasn't dawned on them because they're making money with that pretense. "We are what we pretend to be," as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out.

The ironic thing is that solar and wind energy and other clean energies are beginning to win, not because of their ecological benefit, but because of their appeal to those who continue to follow conventional economics and to treat the environment as if it were secondary to buying and selling and loaning and interest rates and wages and so forth. These clean energies are rapidly growing in appeal to those who seem to believe that conventional economics consists of laws of nature rather than completely arbitrary agreements between people, agreements which can be, and are, modified, re-invented or scrapped whenever people agree to do so. Green energy is growing in appeal to those appeal because it's making money and not because of anything to do with the environment or with the health of living things.

Presumably, if clean energies grow by several hundred percent in the next few years, resulting in petrochemical shrinking to a small fraction of the market share they now enjoy, Trump will take credit for the bluer skies and gentler weather and our greater ability to see the stars at night, and claim it was all his idea right from the start, whether he's still president or whether he was impeached and removed from office early in 2017.

Where I See Myself In 5 Years

I'm 55 years old, and last night, for the first time in my life, when I tried to picture myself in 5 years I actually came up with something.

Many times over the course of my life I've been asked, "Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?" and I've never been able to come up with anything. Then last night, channel-surfing, I saw Danny McBride, playing one of the title characters in "Vice Principals" (I was going to watch the entire series but was unable to keep up past the first 2 episodes, because there is simply too much to watch. There is too much good stuff on TV to watch it all! Think about THAT, and compare it to the 1970's, if you ever start to think that the world can't be changed!), posing the question to an actress playing a high school student in a time out. The student was clearly drawing a blank, so McBride snapped at her: "Just make something up!"

And that is how, 55 years in, I finally was able to do the in-5-years thing: I just made something up.

5 years from now, at age 60, lean and fit, a man who runs 30 or more FAST miles in an average week, outdoors, not in a gym, I will be an extremely rich and famous writer, the author of several huge best-sellers, books translated into more than 40 languages. 40 and growing fast. I'm a frequent guest on the big-time celebrity talk-show circuit, a big wheel in the Democratic Party, an unofficial advisor to the Clintons and Obamas, a guy who plots and schemes with Gates and Buffet and Musk, a Nobel Prize winner, a MacArthur Foundation genius grant recipient, a member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences and the French Legion of Honor, a Fellow of the British Academy and the Leopoldina and pour le mérite of Germany and a whole bunch of other things.

But mostly I am known for stomping on the dying ashes of the petroleum industry and replacing it with solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and other means of energy production. By virtue of my great fame I am able to spread knowledge of the lies and dirty tricks of Big Oil and have just about shamed them to death. Through my many connections I've put solar panels on many millions of buildings from Peoria to Peking, windmills in many a windy place, built tidal and geothermal power plants. I've put oil out of business. We mainly just use it for lubrication now, and we've got plenty for that without ever having to drill any more.

I've built a few hydroelectric plants too. I'm aware that huge dams cause problems, but sometimes it's been either that or oil, gas and nuclear, and I stamp out oil, gas and nuclear.

(I confess that I still don't understand hydrogen fuel cells. Whenever I read or hear about them I always think: "Oh the humanity" etc. I still don't know how to categorize them: dirty, clean, safe, dangerous?)

I promote research into ever more efficient and clean ways for humans to do what we do, both by writing and speaking inspirationally about the importance of this transformation, and, through my political connections, by making sure that the educational and research infrastructure in technology and engineering thrives.

5 years from now I will have become the first person to win Nobel Prizes in both the Literature and Peace categories. 5 years from now the weather already will have begun to calm back down, and people will already be able to breathe easier again, literally, and to see more stars again at night. Because of me. All because of ME.

You're Not Going To Be Elected President In 2016, Bernie. But You Can Still Be A Hero

You're still saying, every chance you get, that you have a chance at winning the Democratic nomination. You don't have snowball's chance in Hell. And if you really don't know this, if you really can't do even that much math -- well, then I'm wasting my time trying to talk to you, and this post is strictly for the benefit of other people.

But assuming that you actually can do the math and that you realize that Hillary will be the nominee, why do you keep acting as if you don't realize it? The thing is, there are a lot of your supporters -- nobody knows for sure how many -- who can't do the math. Are you doing them any service by feeding their delusions?

Over and over, you say that your #1 priority is to ensure that Trump is defeated in the fall. So act on that. You can do more than any other single person to swing votes away from Trump and to Hillary, by dropping out of the election NOW and doing all that you can to persuade your supporters that they must vote for Hillary.

You know Hillary personally, you know she's not history's greatest monster and not a Republican in disguise. You know how close most of her positions are to yours and how far to the Left both of you are from the Republicans. But a lot of your supporters, including a lot of very noisy ones, clearly don't know any of this, and they need to hear it from the only person they would possibly listen to about Hillary: you.

You can go down in history as someone who united a nation in a time of great peril, the peril being the possibility of a Trump Presidency. Oh, you'd be such a hero. And the movement you've been in will go on, but with real power, with many of its people in office, getting things done, all clearly due to you. You will have moved the Democratic party a long way back to the Left, and people will love you for it. They will remember.

The thing is, of course, that the longer you wait to drop out and work to unite people around the goal of stopping Trump, the less your impact will be. The more time goes by, the more people will realize that Hillary has won the nomination -- and not just won it, but won it by miles and miles. The 2016 Democratic Presidential campaign has been very exciting, but it was never close, except in the deluded minds of some of your followers. That delusion is fading. The longer you stay in the race, the more you look like a nut, and the more the people who talk about you being elected President in 2016 look like nuts. In a socially-responsible society, nuts are looked after to make sure they're not hurt, but in the positions of power in politics and other practical affairs, they're shunned. They're not allowed to take over, with very few and disastrous exceptions like Hitler and Trump.

The real Stop Trump campaign, ever since he won the Republican nomination, has been Hillary's campaign, and Hillary's campaign will get on with taking care of business, with you or without you. With you joining it now -- right now -- it could be a juggernaut, not only winning the White House in a landslide, but also winning Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and flipping Mayoral offices and City Councils and judgeships from Republican to Democrat, from sea to shining sea, so that a Democratic President and all those other Democratic elected officials will actually be able to pass laws and appropriate money and get things done, things like repairing the infrastructure and expanding Social Security, and restoring funding to education and reducing tuition costs, and converting the US to wind and solar and other clean energy -- you know: all of that long line of things which Hillary supports just as much as you do, as do the vast majority of Democratic office holders and candidates for office, and Democratic voters.

Hillary is going to take care of business with or without your help. I don't think you can actually cost her the election and get Trump elected -- the very opposite of what you claim is your #1 priority -- but you certainly can make the Presidential election, and all of those other elections, much closer than they need to be. The sooner you get on board, the closer the expansion of the social safety net and the restoration of the infrastructure and the conversion to clean energy, and all of the other things that you and I and Hillary and almost all Democrats want, will come.

But the longer you wait, the less power you have here. The more you insist on behaving like a nut who doesn't know when he's been defeated, the more people will treat you like a nut, and the less of a factor you will be in November.

Unless you actually go full retard and 3rd party. You're acting nuttier and nuttier, but I still don't think you're that far gone just yet.

Assuming that eventually you're going to be supporting Hillary and Democrats in general, the sooner you start, the more significant your support will be. If you wait too long, as I said, I don't think it will actually mean that Trump beats Hillary, but it could mean that the House and the Senate stay Republican, and that a lot of the state and local offices stay Republican as well. And then, what will you have accomplished? You will have thrown a huge temper tantrum, and because of that tantrum we will get much less of what both we Democrats and you want, than if you do what politicians have to do very often: compromise in order to get most of what they want, instead of none of it.

Time is of the essence. The longer you wait to drop out and endorse Hillary, the more you will be ignored by sensible people who have to get on with this -- beating Trump -- with our without your help. The longer you wait, the more you will leave us only with the option to ignore you.

Is Alternative Energy The Cause Of The Drop In Oil Prices?

Many people have made doom-and-gloom predictions about worldwide chaos caused by the end of Big Oil, because the world simply runs out of oil -- you've heard it: gasoline casting $40 a gallon etc -- but what if we're headed very soon for the end of Big Oil, not because the supply is drying up, but because the demand is disappearing?

Is demand for oil going to drop nearly to the point of disappearing? (It could still be used for lubrication and plastic if we no longer use it for fuel. Then again, consumption of plastic might drastically drop...)

It might seem as if it would be easy to find the answer to that -- and that the answer would be yes, since wind, solar and other non-suicidal ways of generating energy are growing fast, and hybrid and all-electric vehicles are replacing all-petrochemical ones not just on the roads, but in the cases of ships and trains as well -- but we are told by alleged experts that the reasons for the drop in oil prices are murky and complex.

Also, the most-asked question concerning the relationship between alternative and petrochemical energy -- most-often asked in the mainstream media, anyway -- seems to be, not something like: How soon will we be able to stop killing ourselves with oil use? but the somewhat shorter-term question: will lower oil prices drive alternative energy out of the market? Nevermind whether humanity will be gone in 30 years -- can I make a killing 6 months from now by shorting alternative?

I know that suggesting that the petrochemical industry is controlling and distorting the public discourse about energy trends makes me sound paranoid to some. But research predictions about such trends for yourself, see if I'm onto something when I suggest that there's an awful lot of bullshit out there. Predictions not fitting facts.

Only Republicans Can See The Problems With Solar Energy, The Rest Of Us Are Blind To Them

In my last post I mentioned Forbes sadly telling its readers that this solar craze is based on bad math and gummit handouts. Since then, researching the topic, the only additional naysayers I've found are the Wall Street Journal, Howard C Hayden, author of The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World, and the Heartland Institute, a wonderful buncha guys who, like Hayden, whom they love, say that humans aren't affecting the climate, and have advocated for Big Tobacco and fracking. Recently they've decided they're not going to disclose their sources of funding anymore, and they disrupted the Pope's Council on Climate Change... they're just a bunch of peaches, I tell ya!

Only Republicans can see what a huge disaster and waste solar energy is. Everyone else, each and every one of us, has been duped. And I don't believe that the Amazon customer reviewers who gave Hayden's book 5-stars even though they're hard-core environmentalists who've worked in the solar-energy industry for 40 years -- are actually hard-core environmentalists who've worked in the solar-energy industry for 40 years. Cry wolf often enough and people can start to tell that you're lying sacks of crap.

The bullshit they make up: that electric cars, sadly, aren't actually environmentally friendly because the lithium-ion batteries cause... some sort of huge ecological disaster. Ask a Republican about it. (No-one else has has heard of this problem, because we're all blind, blind, yaaaarggghh!) That smoking hasn't ever made anybody sick. And second-hand smoke much, much less than that! That electric windmills are killing vast quantities of birds who apparently think the windmills are their mothers. (Or something. Again, you'll have to ask a Republican. They're the only ones alert to this environmental danger.) That fracking is safe, that natural gas is clean and that nuclear power is ultra-safe. (I don't know how Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima don't directly contradict that last point, but that's okay: just ask a Republican!)

That solar energy will either make a pitifully tiny amount of electricity, or so much electricity that it will overload and blow up all the grids -- cause, it's not as if an electrical generator could ever be turned off, or anything like that.

Republicans were glad when Angela Merkel of the conservative CDU became Chancellor of Germany in 2005. But I bet that since 2005 meetings between Merkel and Republicans have occasionally been tense, because Merkel has spearheaded a massive increase of government-subsidized solar energy in Germany, which now has more overall installed photovoltaic capacity than any other country on Earth and generates more than 30% of all of its electricity from renewable sources. Somehow those well-meaning, abysmally-ignorant environmentalists got to Merkel. It's only a matter of time now before Germany explodes. (Or something. Once again, you're going to have to ask a Republican, because the horrible dangers inherent in these developments in Germany are way over everybody else's heads.)

Union Of Concerned Scientists Denounces Lies By Petrochemical Industry

If I'm a raving paranoid conspiracy theorist when it comes to the petrochemical industry interfering with the development of alternative energy, then so are the members of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The UCS have released a collection of incriminating documents, The Climate Deception Dossiers. In the UCS' words:

"The documents clearly show that:

"Fossil fuel companies have intentionally spread climate disinformation for decades.

"Fossil fuel company leaders knew that their products were harmful to people and the planet but still chose to actively deceive the public and deny this harm.

"The campaign of deception continues today."

The UCS say that "at a minimum," these companies should be held "accountable for their actions and responsible for the harm they have caused" :

* Shell

* Conoco Phillips

* Peabody

* British Petroleum

* ExxonMobil

* Chevron

The UCS calls on these companies to stop lying about climate change, and to pay for the damage they have caused. (We did it to the tobaccos companies, we can do it to the oil companies too.) (But not if we keep electing Republicans, because these are the people the Republicans work for.) They provide links to documents backing up their charges that these companies have known about climate change for decades and have deliberately and systematically spread disinformation and interfered with the development of alternative energy.

UCS, you magnificent bastards, I salute you! UCS homepage.

Revised Fuel Cost Estimate For Plug-In Electric Vehicles

In in a previous Wrong Monkey blog post, I incorrectly stated that the fuel costs for a plug-in electric vehicle are about half those of a hybrid vehicle of comparable size and performance, and that that hybrid uses about half as much fuel as a comparable conventional vehicle.

Well, loyal Wring Monkey readers, I'm sorry. I should've done a little more research before shooting my mouth off with such sensationalistic figures, because the truth is that for many drivers of electric vehicles, their fuel cost is not 50% of a hybrid and 25% of a conventional vehicle -- but 0% of anything. Nada. Zip. The null set. Just exactly squat.

And I'm not talking about the example I gave in the earlier post about someone living in a zero-energy house which generated enough energy for the car as well. I'm talking about people who drive electric vehicles and are having all of the electricity for those vehicles given to them. For example, anybody who owns a Tesla and is in driving distance of one of these dots:

Those are Tesla recharging stations. Any Tesla can be recharged at one of those stations any time for free. There are more of those stations per square miles in the US than in other parts of the world, but Tesla is working on that. They're also helping people convert their houses into ones which will generate all the electricity from solar, plus enough left over for the car. (What is this Elon Musk guy trying to prove, anyway? And can we all agree that he's proving it?)

In addition, many employers are now providing free recharges to their employees who drive plug-ins. This Department of Energy website has some info about that. Not everybody can afford a Tesla, but if you shop around for a good sale or lease bargain on, say, a Nissan Leaf, and factor in a fuel cost of Squat annually, it no longer seems like you need to be Donald Trump or Elon Musk to get in on this.

Solar Settlement

The more I find out about sustainable energy, the more I wonder why it hasn't already become the dominant model, and the harder it is for me to believe that the petrochemical industry isn't actively blocking the flow of information. Which makes me officially a crazy conspiracy theorist, according to some people. Who no doubt work for the petrochemical industry, probably through lobbyists and shell companies and whatnot.

On the one hand we've got God damn fracking going on all over the world. On the other hand there are things like Solar Settlement, a housing development of 59 homes built in Freiburg, Germany, between 2000 and 2005, all fully occupied since then, selling an average of $5600 worth of electricity per home per year to the grid since then.



But of course this is in the extremely sunny location of Freiburg. You couldn't expect to re-produce such results elsewhere. Of course I'm joking, Freiburg is in freakin Germany and it gets an average of less than 5 hours of sunlight year-round. Imagine a setup like this in Phoenix.

This development was finished 10 years ago. What exactly is the hold-up? Why aren't newer and improved versions of this everywhere, why doesn't the world already have much more electricity than it knows what to do with after having shut down every single coal-, oil- and gas-burning and nuclear power plant in the world? What exactly are we waiting for? If the very fact that big oil is still big doesn't make you angry -- what's wrong with you?

So Suppose We Just Convert Away from Petro-Fuels. "We" Being The Whole Planet

Where my engineers at? What would it take, just in terms of logistics, leaving politics completely out of it for the moment, to relegate petrochemicals to the status of lubricants, and possibly also plastic? We need to talk about plastic too, as well as burning oil and gas and coal.

Of course, politics is a huge part of this, maybe the biggest part. I think that the single greatest threat to our survival is the continuing burning of fossil fuels, and I think that one of the things the petrochemical industry is doing to prevent the transition to more sustainable sources of energy is suppressing information about how easily this transition could be done. I just did a Google search for suppression of information about renewable, and apparently the fact that I think oil companies are blocking the flow of information means I'm a conspiracy theorist. Or maybe I'm just a normal alert citizen and the thing about the conspiracy theory is just more petrochemical industry BS.

Let's look at 2 pages in a world atlas, pp 96-97 in the 2008 edition of the Oxford Atlas of the World. On p 96 a graph shows some information on worldwide energy consumption -- but wait, it shows only consumption of petrochemicals and nuclear and hydroelectric power. "Excluded are biomass fuels such as wood, peat, and animal waste, and wind, solar and geothermal energy which, though important locally in some counties, are not always reliably documented statistically." That's strange, isn't it? What's this tiny fine print under the graph? "Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2007." Okay, not so strange at all anymore, is it?

On p 97 there's a little chart of worldwide wind energy generating capacity yearly from 1980 to 2007, not provided by BP. Because, you know, BP is concerned about the reliability of such figures. Terribly concerned about reliability. Yeah, I'm delusional when I say that oil companies are interfering with the flow of information. 1980, 10 megawatts of worldwide wide energy generating capacity; 2007, 74,300 megawatts. 10 megawatts to 74,300 megawatts in 27 years. Yep, only a totally cuckoo-bananas conspiracy theorist would ask why such figures would be left out of a graph on worldwide energy consumption. Provided by an oil company. To the makers of a world atlas. Who put the figures on wind energy on the next page anyway. Please note, I'm only claiming that it's as obvious as can be and in our faces everywhere we turn that the oil companies are trying to keep the general public ignorant about big basic energy issues, and not necessarily that they're any good at it or are succeeding.

Fun Green Facts

In September 2014, Toyota passed the 7 million mark of hybrid vehicles sold worldwide. More than 4.7 million of those vehicles were Priuses and variants of the Prius. In 2001, the 5th year in which Toyota offered hybrid vehicles, they sold 36,900 of them worldwide; in their 10th year, 2006, they sold 312,500; and in 2013 they sold 1,279,200.

A hybrid-electric car was designed by Ferdinand Porsche, who later designed the Volkswagen Beetle and whose son Ferry founded the Porsche sports-car brand, and exhibited to the public in 1900, the first of several hybrid vehicles Porsche made. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, electric vehicles were fashionable among wealthy car owners but were never mass-produced.

From 2003 through 2014, 712,000 road-ready plug-in electric vehicles have been sold, and sales in 2014 alone accounted for 293,245 of that total.

A few years ago the 1st transatlantic voyage using only solar power was made.

In 2013 more than 38 gigawatts of solar electric capacity was added to grids around the world, bringing the solar electric total to 139 gigawatts. According to the WWEA, in June 2014 the global capacity of wind-generated electricity was 336 gigawatts. Denmark currently gets a third of its electricity from wind.

All that we need oil for any more is to build the stuff which will replace it. (And yes, Ozzie Zehner, it's also very good when people consume less energy. Riding a bike is better for the environment than driving a Tesla, and just walking is even better than that. You're right about all of that.))

Go Green

Two commercials: one is a dorky ad for BMW with Couric and Gumbel in an all-electric vehicle which was made in a wind-powered factory:



In the other a beautiful, statuesque woman with a hypnotic voice is spewing some horseshit about how wonderful fracking and offshore drilling are. How they could add hundreds of thousands of jobs to the economy. I wonder how many of those jobs would be because of increased demand for doctors and other health-care workers to cope with the more numerous cases of heart and lung disease, and skin cancer, and burn victims who lit a match in a house which was fracked under, and heat stroke, and funeral homes to commemorate those drowned in tsunamis, and so forth.

They're going to need some very beautiful actresses with extremely hypnotic voices to get me to forget that, now that we can build cars that run on electricity in factories that run on wind, we're not going to be needing so much oil and gas and coal. When the word finally gets around that plug-in electric vehicles currently have fuel costs about half those of hybrids, which in turn go about twice as far on a gallon of gasoline as their conventional counterparts, and that those costs will continue to sink as power generation becomes more efficient, and that green homes already produce more power than they use, and make money by selling their surplus to the grid, and that what goes for cars and trucks and homes is also applicable to trains and ships and planes and office buildings and factories, people simply won't want their petrochemicals so badly any more. They're going to have to truly hypnotize me, to make me completely unconscious and under their control, to get me to forget all of that.

I'm not talking about green technologies which are under development or theoretical, but technology already in use. We just need to spread the word that the new stuff is already here, and let the oil companies take their rightful place in the leper colony next to tobacco.

How many drivers right now have zero transportation fuel costs, because they live in green homes which produce a surplus even after they tank up their electric cars or trucks? Whatever the number is, one thing is certain: the number is going to grow, and word of such things will get around, and the cost of oil and gas -- compared with less than zero -- will grow less and less attractive even to those people who are just too fucking stupid to factor in the costs of petrochemicals' direct damage to people's health, and the costs of climate change.

But why take my word for any of this? Who am I? That's right: I'm nobody. Paul Krugman is somebody. Listen to him.

The only hope the petrochemical industry has left is misinformation. And so here it comes: the commercials telling us how yummy fracking is and how many jobs offshore drilling will bring. (Don't forget the jobs of the people cleaning up the spills which are actually noticed and then actually required to be cleaned up. Yes, the list of jobs created by big oil really does just go on and on.)