NNadir
NNadir's JournalNature: Harris Candidacy Stirs Optimism Among Scientists.
From my Nature News Feed: What Kamala Harris’s historic bid for the US presidency means for science
Max Kozlov, Mariana Lenharo & Jeff Tollefson. Nature News 22 July 2024
Subtitle:
What Kamala Harris’s historic bid for the US presidency means for science
The daughter of a scientist and a supporter of diversity in STEM, Harris’s prospects have stirred optimism among scientists.
Excerpts:
Here, Nature talks to policy analysts and researchers about what a potential Harris administration might mean for science, health and the environment.
A background in science and justice
Health and science have been a part of Harris’s life since an early age: her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who Harris cites as a major influence, was a leading breast-cancer researcher who died of cancer.
Much of Harris’s career has centered on criminal justice – she served as the district attorney for San Francisco for seven years and then California’s attorney general for six years until 2017 when she was elected as a US senator for the state.
As senator, Harris co-sponsored efforts to improve the diversity of the science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) workforce. She introduced legislation to aid students from underrepresented populations to obtain jobs and work experience in STEM fields. And as a candidate in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, she proposed a plan to invest $60 billion to fund historically Black universities and bolster Black-owned businesses...
... Climate and environment
Harris has long promoted action on climate as well as environmental justice, says Leah Stokes, a climate-policy researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As a district attorney in San Francisco and then attorney general for the state of California, Harris became a champion for communities on the front lines of fossil fuel pollution, Stokes says. Harris followed a similar path with work on public health and the environment as a senator from 2017-2021.
If she prevails in November, Harris is expected to maintain both the momentum and the unprecedented investments that Biden has injected into the climate movement in the United States. This includes upwards of US$1 trillion in funding for clean energy and climate change over a decade, a legislative accomplishment that many energy experts say could sharply reduce US greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades....
My boy asked my advice on choosing his Ph.D. project.
My kid is seeking his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, with a materials focus, working with 3D printed alloys.
He's faced with an embarrassment of riches on projects to choose as he finishes his second year but understands he needs to narrow his focus. They're letting him play with everything.
He can either focus on the characterization of the printed alloys - he is now an expert in TEM and can visualize alloys on an atomic level - or on the actual preparation of the alloys, the printing techniques themselves.
I asked him if he wanted my advice.
He said yes.
So I gave him my advice. It doesn't matter what the advice was; what mattered to me was that he wanted it at all.
I told him that he is not intellectually or professionally locked in by what he chooses; life will take its turns, and it's likely, if he's lucky, he will spend a life pulling in all directions, never bored, always intrigued by new things, unafraid to know little as a path to learn a lot. (I'm not doing for what I was trained.)
I even had the privilege to point to a 4th parameter in combinatorial optimization of materials of which he was not thinking: Heat transfer. He told me he appreciated that.
My sons please me greatly; but as men in their 20s don't always appreciate their parents - I didn't - I feel some parental success in this outcome.
I'm a happy guy.
Update on the Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa
As I've indicated repeatedly in my DU writings, somewhat obsessively I keep spreadsheets of the of the daily, weekly, monthly and annual data at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory, which I use to do calculations to record the dying of our atmosphere, a triumph of fear, dogma and ignorance that did not have to be, but nonetheless is, a fact.
Facts matter.
When writing these depressing repeating posts about new records being set, reminiscent, over the years, to the ticking of a clock at a deathwatch, I often repeat some of the language from a previous post on this awful series, as I am doing here with some modifications. It saves time.
A recent post (not my last on this topic) reflecting the annual record being set is here:
A New Record Concentration for CO2, 427.98 ppm Has Been Set for the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory's Weekly Average.
A more recent example of this series is here:
2024's Disastrous CO2 Increased Readings Continue at the Mauna Loa Observatory.
We've just had another very, very, very bad week of data, that of the week beginning 7/14/2024. (I was not able to post about it on Sunday as I was traveling.)
If one looks, one can see that the rate of accumulation recorded at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory is a sine wave superimposed on a roughly quadratic axis:
Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2
Thus this week's data is not a record - in the Northern hemisphere summers concentrations decline from the peak until generally September, but the data is nonetheless highly disturbing.
This week's data:
Week beginning on July 14, 2024: 425.95 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 421.45 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 398.98 ppm
Last updated: July 23, 2024
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
There have been 2529 weekly data points such as that immediately above, recorded at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory which are available on the data pages of the website which compare the value with the same week of the previous year. The reading above, for week 28 of 2024, shows an increase of 4.50 ppm over week 28 pf the previous year, 2023. Among all such increases for weekly data, again, 2529 of them, compared with the same week of the previous year, this is the 11th highest ever recorded. It is one of only 29 readings to exceed an increase of 4.00 ppm, eight of which took place in the current year, four of which exceed increases of 5.00 ppm, three of which were in 2024. Of the top 50 week to week/year to year comparators 16 have taken place in the last 5 years of which 10 occurred in 2024, 39 in the last 10 years, and 45 in this century. Of the five readings from the 20th century, four occurred in 1998, when huge stretches of the Malaysian and Indonesian rainforests caught fire when slash and burn fires went out of control. These fires were set deliberately, designed to add palm oil plantations to satisfy the demand for "renewable" biodiesel for German cars and trucks as part of their "renewable energy portfolio." The only other reading from the 20th century to appear in the top 50 occurred in the week beginning August 21, 1988, which was 3.91 ppm higher than the same week of the previous year. For about ten years, until July of 1998, it was the highest reading ever recorded. It is now the 34rd highest.
The same media that loves to promote a seriously intellectually crippled serial rapist and con man and felon as a viable Presidential candidate likes to talk about a so called "energy transition" that is supposed to save our asses.
This highly advertised propaganda is connected with the unsupportable belief that the vast sums of money spent so called "renewable energy," which I personally regard as reactionary as the six thugs of the apocalypse in the rogue US Supreme Court, is about addressing climate change.
If so, the money is clearly wasted and ineffective. How much money is it?
The amount of money spent on so called "renewable energy" since 2015 is 4.12 trillion dollars, compared to 377 billion dollars spent on nuclear energy, much of the latter to prevent the willful and deadly destruction of existing nuclear infrastructure.
IEA overview, Energy Investments.
The graphic is interactive at the link; one can calculate overall expenditures on what the IEA dubiously calls "clean energy," ignoring the fact that the expenditure on so called "renewable energy" is basically a front for maintaining the growing use of fossil fuels.
A 52 week running average of week to week comparators with those recorded 10 years ago has reached a record, 25.14 ppm/10 years, in other words, 2.51 ppm/year. In 2000 this same figure in week 25 of that year was 15.76 ppm/10 years.
The data in comparison to week 28 of 2024 with that of week 28 of 2014 is 26.97 higher. This is the 2nd highest increase in comparison to that of 10 years earlier ever recorded.
Things are getting worse faster.
People lie, to each other and to themselves, but numbers don't lie.
I fully expect our nominee, VP Harris, to have profited by her exposure to what I regard as the most important climate policy of the best Presidential Administration of my lifetime: The embrace of nuclear energy.
The Biden administration has rightly described itself as promoting "the largest sustained push to accelerate civil nuclear deployment in the United States in nearly five decades."
White House holds summit on US nuclear energy deployment
My strong opinion that nuclear energy is the last best hope of the planet is not subject to change by appeals to clap trap about so called "nuclear waste," Fukushima, Chernobyl (and even more silly) Three Mile Island, blah, blah, blah...
I suggest finding someone more credulous than I to whom to chant endlessly about these points. I'm far more concerned with the collapse of the planetary atmosphere than I am with the fear that someone somewhere at sometime may die from an industrial accident involving radiation. Let me repeat: I am far more concerned with the vast death toll, extreme environmental destruction, and the global heating associated with the normal use of dangerous fossil fuels. I am pleased to note that history will record that Joe Biden was a leader in doing something about this, perhaps less than would have been desirable in a sensible world, but at least he thought anew.
In any case I am certainly prone to thank our current President for his hard work to press for the expansion of nuclear energy, since very clearly we are out of time. I look forward to a Harris administration embracing this important legacy of President Biden.
When our country, as precious as it has been to us, is an ancient memory, the rot we left behind in the planetary atmosphere will still persist. I am pleased to note that history will record that Joe Biden was a leader in doing something.
As for the rest of us, history will not forgive us, nor should it.
Well as pained as I am, the idea of a black/Asian WOMAN with a Jewish husband...
...kicking the ass of that misogynist adjudicated rapist racist convicted felon excites me to no end.
That would be sweet justice.
Sharp Wind Turbine Debris Shuts Nantucket Beaches.
Scenes from the industrialization of the benthic ecosystem:
Nantucket beaches shut down to swimming after debris from Vineyard Wind turbine washes ashore
Subtitle:
Boston Herald, 7/17/24.
?w=563
The offshore wind development company on Tuesday said it was sending debris recovery teams to Nantucket’s southern-facing beaches, adding that the cause of the breakage remained unknown. Vineyard Wind’s operations have also been temporarily shut down following the incident.
“Vineyard Wind is fully committed to a swift and safe recovery of all debris, with an unwavering focus on community safety and environmental protection,” the company said in a statement.
“As part of its immediate action plan, Vineyard Wind communicated with officials on Nantucket to inform them of the presence of debris and recovery efforts on the southern-facing beaches of the island,” Vineyard Wind added.
The water was closed to swimming on all of Nantucket’s south shore beaches due to the large floating debris and sharp fiberglass shards...
... “You can walk on the beaches, however we strongly recommend you wear footwear due to sharp, fiberglass shards and debris on the beaches,” the harbormaster added.
The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement over the weekend was notified of a turbine blade failure incident at Vineyard Wind 1, about 21 miles south of Nantucket.
“There were no injuries reported, but operations are shut down until further notice,” the federal agency added...
There will be no effect of the wind plant's failure on the recent runaway acceleration of global heating, since the operations of the entire wind industry, working or not, on the entire planet has had no effect on global heating.
Lithium Pollution and Its Associated Health Risks in the Largest Lithium Extraction Industrial Area in China
The paper I'll discuss briefly in this post is this one: Lithium Pollution and Its Associated Health Risks in the Largest Lithium Extraction Industrial Area in China Xuezhi Yang, Haonan Wen, Yin Liu, Ying Huang, Qun Zhang, Weichao Wang, Haiyan Zhang, Jianjie Fu, Gang Li, Qian Liu, and Guibin Jiang Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (26), 11637-11648.
As I often point out, despite an intractable generally held belief - one can hold beliefs in things that are not true, even if one is relatively sophisticated - that energy storage is "green." Scientific laws are not, however, subject to beliefs, whether the beliefs in question are religious or merely a question of wishful thinking.
This unsupportable belief that storing energy is "green," is a function of the lie that most of the world's energy comes from the reactionary impulse to return to the 19th century and make energy dependent on the weather, precisely at the time we have destabilized the weather by burning fossil fuels because we couldn't depend on the weather. Solar and wind, in particular, are neither sustainable nor are they significant forms of energy. Almost all of the world's batteries are charged using electricity overwhelmingly generated - at a huge thermodynamic cost - by burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste into the planetary atmosphere.
The second law of thermodynamics, particularly in a fossil fuel powered world in which we continue to live, precludes energy storage from being "green." This is because storing energy wastes energy. The word "green" is thrown around in an increasingly sloppy way, so much so that it's basically degenerated into nothing more than a meaningless marketing slogan. It's attached to very dirty scams that act more or less for the dangerous fossil fuel status quo, for instance, "hydrogen," and, of course, the topic here, batteries.
A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.
Besides their energy cost, both embodied and operational, batteries have a material cost. In some sense, I believe they run the risk of being more like the wonderful invention of tetraethyl lead in gasoline which solved the awful problem of "engine knock" with the minor risk of distributing lead through all the world's ecosystems.
I wrote on the "miracle" of tetraethyl lead here: For my 30,000th post...
Regrettably, I won't have much time to dig into the details of the paper cited at the outset, but a few excerpts and comments are warranted:
Currently, Li is exclusively extracted from hard-rock ores and continental brines. (11,12) Although brine resources contain more abundant Li than Li ores, the extraction process for brine is typically slow due to the lengthy concentration time required through open-air evaporation, ranging from 10 to 24 months depending on the deposit, which is not responsive to rapid changes in market demand. (11) Consequently, the global production of Li from hard-rock ores is rapidly increasing to meet the rising demand for Li to achieve the “carbon neutrality” target. It is estimated that the global Li resource reserve is 22 Mt (metal), with 34% sourced from hard-rock Li ores. (13?15) In recent years, the share of the world’s supply of Li resource from hard-rock ores has reached approximately 44%. (15) Geographically, Li ore resources are concentrated in Australia and China. (16?18) Currently, the leading countries of Li resource mining are Chile, Australia, the USA, Argentina, and China. Among them, China serves as the primary destination for global Li minerals and boasts the largest global yield of Li chemicals, including lithium carbonate (Li2CO3), lithium hydroxide (LiOH), lithium chloride (LiCl), etc. (15) In details, the total production of Li minerals (including ores and brines) and Li chemicals (including Li2CO3, LiOH, and LiCl) in China was 15.0 kt Li carbonate equivalent (LCE) and 61.2 kt LCE, respectively, accounting for 8.7 and 35.4% of the global production of Li minerals and Li chemicals, respectively. (15)...
There is absolutely zero evidence that the growing enthusiasm for batteries, other than in faith based chanting, has anything at all to do with "carbon neutrality." The rapid expansion of the use of batteries is taking place during an unequivocal increase in the rate of atmospheric degradation because of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide. Still we hear this unsupportable association mentioned even in the primary scientific literature. We can lie to each other and lie to ourselves, but numbers don't lie:
A New Record Concentration for CO2, 427.98 ppm Has Been Set for the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory's Weekly Average.
Things are getting worse faster:
(Since April 28, the number of "highest readings" of week to week increases taking place in 21st century has risen by one to 45.)
So much for "carbon neutrality" and battery worship.
Some accounts of the environmental and health risks:
So much for "green."
A graphic on risk in the mining areas:
The caption:
We have a lot of problems on this planet, but the root of them is selective attention coupled with a big, big, big, big dollop of wishful thinking and denial.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
Our last common ancestor lived 4.2 billion years ago--perhaps hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought.
This note came in on my Nature news feed under the header "Meet the Parents." It refers to the always interesting topic of the origins of cellular life.
The Science article in the News section is here: Our last common ancestor lived 4.2 billion years ago—perhaps hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought.
Subtitle:
Science, Robert F. Service.
Some excerpts:
“I was quite excited,” says Betül Kaçar, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who saw the research presented this week at the Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution meeting in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. (The study is also published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.) “It’s a comprehensive analysis and a good example of how to do this work.”
It’s not the first attempt to sketch the identity of the hypothetical last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. In 2016, for example, researchers led by William Martin, an evolutionary biologist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, used a related approach of comparing known microbial genomes to provide the most compelling genetic evidence yet that LUCA likely was an anaerobe that grew in an environment devoid of oxygen required by most cells today. Martin’s genetic analysis also found evidence suggesting it was a “thermophile,” a heat-loving microbe, that fed on hydrogen gas (H2). That combination suggested it may have lived near deep-sea ocean vents near underwater volcanoes...
The full original scientific paper is open sourced:
Moody, E.R.R., Álvarez-Carretero, S., Mahendrarajah, T.A. et al. The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system. Nat Ecol Evol (2024).
An excerpt:
Estimating the age of LUCA
Life’s evolutionary timescale is typically calibrated to the oldest fossil occurrences. However, the veracity of fossil discoveries from the early Archaean period has been contested11,12. Relaxed Bayesian node-calibrated molecular clock approaches provide a means of integrating the sparse fossil and geochemical record of early life with the information provided by molecular data; however, constraining LUCA’s age is challenging due to limited prokaryote fossil calibrations and the uncertainty in their placement on the phylogeny. Molecular clock estimates of LUCA13,14,15 have relied on conserved universal single-copy marker genes within phylogenies for which LUCA represented the root. Dating the root of a tree is difficult because errors propagate from the tips to the root of the dated phylogeny and information is not available to estimate the rate of evolution for the branch incident on the root node. Therefore, we analysed genes that duplicated before LUCA with two (or more) copies in LUCA’s genome16...
It's quite a bit of reading and I've only skimmed it, but it looks like a cool paper with cool ideas. Some very interesting graphics are included in the full paper.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
Recovery of Fluoride From PFAS "Forever Chemicals" Via Thermal Mineralization.
The paper to which I'll refer in this brief post: Enhancing the Thermal Mineralization of Perfluorooctanesulfonate on Granular Activated Carbon Using Alkali and Alkaline-Earth Metal Additives Charbel Abou-Khalil, Liliya Chernysheva, Anthony Miller, Angela Abarca-Perez, Graham Peaslee, Pierre Herckes, Paul Westerhoff, and Kyle Doudrick Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (25), 11162-11174
In 1987 the world's main ores of the mineral cryolite, (Na3AlF6)which was mined mainly in Greenland were depleted. This is a key mineral in the production of aluminum, in an electrochemical process, the Hall process, in which the reaction is carried out in a cryolite molten salt at high temperatures. Happily it is straight forward to synthesize cryolite by treating bauxite with HF and sodium fluoride.
The main ore for fluorine is fluorite, the insoluble salt CaF2. It too, like cryolite may be subject to depletion; to be clear I'm not up to date on this risk, should it be problematic. This said, I am a fan of closed matter cycles.
Much of the world's fluorine has been used industrially to manufacture PFAS "perfluoralkylated substances" which have emerged as serious intractable pollutants as I noted recently in another post.
The Effect of Brine on the Radiation Driven Near Complete Destruction of "Forever Chemicals"
This paper refers to a scheme to recover fluorine by "mineralizing" (destroying) PFAS thermally.
The authors here note that one solid phase adsorbent for the removal of PFAS is granulated activated carbon, but as discussed in the previous post this process removes PFAS, but does not destroy them.
From the introduction:
Conventional water treatment processes face limitations in effectively removing and destroying PFAS. (15,16) Adsorbents such as granular activated carbon (GAC) are an attractive prospect for removing PFAS from water due to the low cost. (16) However, managing spent adsorbents contaminated with PFAS poses a disposal challenge. The United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense (DoD) have outlined interim guidance for handling PFAS-laden solids, suggesting landfilling, thermal reactivation, and incineration as potential methods. (17,18) Landfilling carries the risk of PFAS re-entering the environment, (19) making thermal treatment more practical for end-of-life destruction or regeneration of PFAS-contaminated GAC. (20?23) Yet, the thermal destruction of PFAS requires very high temperatures (>1000 °C) and it releases undesirable products of incomplete destruction (PIDs) in the flue gas. (15,24?26) As a result, the DoD has advised exercising caution in employing thermal treatment for managing PFAS wastes until further information is acquired. (17)
The authors study the use of various basic mineral bases to overcome these limitations. One of the byproducts of the thermal decomposition of PFAS is HF gas, which is an extremely valuable but extremely dangerous, as it is highly toxic and corrosive, industrial reagent. (It's main use is the cracking of petroleum to make gasoline.) HF is one product of the thermal decomposition of PFAS.
(For the record, I favor the HF molten salt procedure for the recovery of valuable components of used nuclear fuels.)
The authors examine various procedures for minimizing by products like HF using inorganic oxides.
The authors find, unsurprisingly, that calcium hydroxide yields the best results, generating a synthetic form of the mineral fluorite.
A figure from the paper:
The caption:
"IF" refers to inorganic fluorides, "OF" to organic fluorides, probably mostly TFA, trifluoroacetic acid, although they do not identify this as such.
They evaluate the effect of Ca/F ratios on the results:
The caption:
From the paper's conclusions:
In the rest of the conclusion the authors note some limitations and areas of additional study.
This is a nice paper from the annals of study of closed matter cycles.
I like it.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
Effects on Global Heating on Hydroelectricity and Water Scarcity in China.
The paper to which I'll refer in this post is this one: Water Scarcity Assessment of Hydropower Plants in China under Climate Change, Sectoral Competition, and Energy Expansion Linze Hou, Jianxun Yang, Chenyi Ji, Miaomiao Liu, Wen Fang, Zongwei Ma, and Jun Bi Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (24), 10536-10547.
It is difficult for me to choose between the vast death toll from air pollution or global heating as to which I regard as the worst energy disaster of all time. The former has killed more people, if the paper I often cite from Lancet is accurate - I think that likely - but the latter is catching up, especially in indirect causes, the driver of the "indirect causes" being weather extremes presenting as extreme instability. (We are also seeing an increasing direct death toll of global heating in what is called "heat stroke."
Although it pales before these two ongoing energy disasters, a possible third highest energy disaster is not generally acknowledged, the 1976 serial dam collapses in China known collectively as the Banqiao disaster, which did not get all that much attention in the world press despite a vast death toll:
Case Study: Banqiao Dam (China, 1975)
A bill of goods has been sold to humanity that dependence on weather for energy is a good idea. It's actually a reactionary idea; dependence on weather for energy, including, including but not limited to the availability of biomass (partially through animal power), was largely abandoned by the dawn of the 20th century, this when the world population was a fraction of what it is now. This reactionary posturing is clearly failing, at least if a goal is weather stabilization. So called "renewable energy" has soaked trillions of dollars out humanity in the last decade and remains - at least in the case of the popular but disastrous "solar and wind" industries - trivial and useless if the goal is to address global heating or reduce the use of dangerous fossil fuels. (If the goal is to produce fabulous marketing of the status quo; wild eyed cheering; and wishful, if delusional, thinking, solar and wind are successes.) One can recognize this simply by monitoring the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the air.
I have noted in this space many times that the readings recording increases as measured at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory, which has functioned since 1959 are unambiguous. For example: A New Record Concentration for CO2, 427.98 ppm Has Been Set for the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory's Weekly Average. It is clear the rate of global heating from dangerous and deadly fossil fuel waste is accelerating, not decelerating. Of the 50 highest recorded increases in comparison to weekly readings a Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory with the same week ten years ago, all but two, in 2019, have occurred in this unfinished
2020s decade, 15 of them this year.
These data are recorded weekly, released every Sunday:
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 422.37 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 399.92 ppm
Last updated: July 14, 2024
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
Hydroelectricity in China, and in India, the world's two most populous nations, depends on the Himalayan glaciers; it's not a pretty picture.
From the introduction of the paper cited at the outset:
As one of the most touted solutions to the climate crisis, hydropower itself is now facing rising water scarcity risks. Hydropower sector relies upon water resources of substantial and predictable volume. (4) Climate change induces changes in precipitation, evaporation, and runoff at various spatial scales, which increases the likelihood of heat waves and droughts and disrupts the stability of water resources. (5,6) Water scarcity limits the electricity generation capacity of hydropower plants, (7) and it is projected that global hydropower capacity would decrease by a maximum of 10–17% per month due to declining flows by the 2050s. (8) To fill the demand gap caused by reduced hydropower generation, local governments may shift the electricity generation mix toward fossil fuels, which increases carbon emissions and hinders the net-zero target. It is estimated that one standard deviation increase in water scarcity results in 15% expansions in natural gas generation and pollution emission in the US. (9) Disruptions in hydropower generation due to water scarcity are also sources of social and economic risk. In 2022, heatwave dried up Sichuan Province in China, where hydropower takes 80% of the province’s total power capacity. The local government issued an industrial power rationing plan, which led to cascading output losses through supply chain networks. (10) In this context, it is crucial to identify water scarcity risks of hydropower projects and implement targeted adaptation strategies to ensure water–energy security.
Moreover, global water demand has sextupled in the past century, and the competition between sectoral water uses further complicated water scarcity risks in hydropower sectors...
The paper offers a set of "scenarios."
The "scenarios" described are linked to the climate "scenarios" in the 2022 IEA World Energy Outlook; I've referred to these annual documents, including that of 2023, many times in this space. Even in the IEAs soothsaying, which I personally regard as overly optimistic handwaving, they do not predict an end to dangerous fossil fuels.
The numbers (2023) are here: 2023 World Energy Outlook published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), Table A.1a on Page 264.
All of the soothsaying about the end of fossil fuels has proved delusional. Nothing we are doing is working (again, if "working" is defined as "if the goal is to address global heating or reduce the use of dangerous fossil fuels." )
As far as the soothsaying goes, it's not clear that the gas will be there, the oil will be there, but coal will be; the claim that wind and solar, unreliable forms of energy, are alternatives are coal is a lie supported by the availability of gas and oil. More importantly, it's not clear that the water will be there.
Hydroelectricity is the only form of so called "renewable energy" that can hold a night light to nuclear energy; and even that produces less than half of what nuclear energy produces in an atmosphere of vituperation and dishonest fearmongering.
It's at risk in China. A graphic from the paper:
The caption:
China has a very successful operative nuclear power plant manufacturing infrastructure, now the best in the world. They now have 54 operating nuclear reactors, matching France, and 25 under construction.
Given the risks to its water supply, they'd better keep at it.
Their huge solar over capacity isn't doing shit to address climate change, all the cheering and pretending notwithstanding.
We can continue of course, to lie to ourselves; we're very good at that. However reality is breaking through.
Have a pleasant workweek.
I almost never weep in the movies, but I did today. If you want to feel alive, see this film, a tragedy.
We have in our area a local nonprofit "art film" house that sometimes shows mainstream movies. With one son in China and another away at graduate school, it seemed like a perfect time, on the spur of the moment, I decided to take my wife on a date to see a film about which I only was aware of the theatre leader, having never heard of it:
Ghostlight
That's a very spare description of a very moving film. If you have ever felt grief, you will recognize how deforming and reforming it is.
I didn't know any of the actors or actresses in the film, but they were great inasmuch as they were people.
I'm not a particularly sentimental guy, but I wept. So did my wife.
I suggest seeing it.
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