India's first Hydrogen Fuel Cell Intercity Luxury Coach Unveiled

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32. Their business is selling stuff, not environmental protection.

To convince me that one is "sticking" to the "scientific belief (sic) of the vast majority of scientists and economists," one would need to show that one actually reads the scientific literature.

I do.

As such, I can tell who is aware of scientific consensus, and who is just chanting. (This reminds me of past days at Daily Kos, where there were lots of assholes who claimed to believe, the climate scientist Jim Hansen until Jim Hansen said something they didn't like, that nuclear energy saves lives, whereupon the "belief" in Jim Hansen vanished.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

One doesn't "believe" in science; it's not a religion.

One is aware of scientific consensus, perhaps, but one does not "believe" in say even the simplest sense, the second law of thermodynamics, the subject of much religious denial here, usually associated with battery bullshit and worse, hydrogen bullshit.

The general term for environmental analysis of technologies is "LCA," life cycle analysis. I've read many thousands of papers on this subject in my 20 year tenure here, and commented on lots of them.

My journal here is filled with references to the primary scientific literature. I have the distinct impression that the majority of the world's scientists do not even remotely believe that a switch to electric cars will save the world.

Of course, science, like all serious human enterprises, is hardly flawless, and treating scientists as if they were deacons, priests, cardinals, or popes is hardly a worthy enterprise. It is also true that science is influenced by the need to get grants, that is money. Thousands of papers have been published on thermochemical processes using concentrated solar energy, not because anyone seriously believes that environmental tragedies like Ivanpah are remotely realistic or sustainable, but because one can get a grant if one states that this is the goal. (Many of these papers are valuable inasmuch as the thermochemical reactions are easily transferable to high temperature nuclear reactors, far more realistic technology, and far less destructive than that gas dependent in flight bird fryer at Ivanpah.)

Lame excuses about whose fault it is that cobalt mining, which exists as a form of slavery today, widely reported by social justice organizations around the world, does not prove that there is sufficient cobalt to satisfy the stupid bourgeois fantasies about a world dominated by electric cars.

What's the excuse for the indifference, that cobalt mined by companies operating in the Congo region that are owned by Chinese do not appear in American batteries?

There are asses here who think that batteries are appropriate on grids. They soothsay about magic battery grids all the time in order to defend the useless solar and wind industries from the reality that they are just that, useless, unreliable, dependent of access to fossil fuels and mining.

Last autumn, I commented on this, using the product of the Apartheid hero Elon Musk to analyze how much cobalt would have been required to cover the month long episode of Dunkelflaute in Germany:

The Number of Tesla Powerwalls Required That Would Address the Current German Dunkleflaute Event. (December, 2022)

We have people here who still worship the fascist Elon Musk and his slave holding company Tesla, who are always carrying on happily about the industrial installation of Tesla Powerwalls®.

Here are the specifications of Tesla Powerwalls®:
Specifications of Powerwalls®.

It is claimed they have a useable capacity of 13.5 kWh after being charged with 14 kWh of electricity, presumably at 25°C, with a putative thermodynamic efficiency - should you choose to believe it - of 96%. The maximum continuous power output is said to be 5 kW. The power requirements to match the combined coal and gas average continuous power of combined German coal and gas over the last 30 days, 44.4 GW would require 8,880,000 million Powerwalls®, to cover each day of Dunkelflaute; for 30 days, given that the wind wasn't blowing that much over that period, 266,400,000 Powerwalls®.

The specifications say that each Powerwall® weighs 114 kg, meaning that 30,369,600,000 kg of Powerwalls® would be required just for Germany.

According to Forbes, 15% of the weight of a Tesla Powerwall is cobalt, mined by Elon's happy Congolese slaves, meaning that the happy Congolese cobalt slaves would be required to mine and isolate 4,555,400 metric tons of cobalt to make Powerwalls® to cover this instance of Dunkleflaute with batteries.

This is 31.63 times as large as the world production of cobalt in 2021 according to the US Geological Survey

I'm sorry!!! I forgot to use "percent talk!" The demand for cobalt to cover month long Dunkleflaute in Germany observed in Nov-Dec 2022 would be 3163% the demand for all the world cobalt supply in 2021.

The calculations are strictly "back of the envelope" but doing calculations of this type can, in my opinion, eliminate the risk of mouthing insane wishful thinking rhetoric.

I will have been at Democratic Underground for 21 years this coming November. I've listened to over two decades of wishful thinking and denial in this space, generally led by antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes, none of whom can show that any of the bullshit they hand out is even remotely addressing climate change.

Now here we are: Well over 420 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, over 50 ppm higher than when I joined. Skies all over the world are filled with the smoke of burning ecosystems.

I have the distinct impression that despite all of the bullshit about energy storage - an obscenity in a world where the primary source of primary energy is fossil fuels - that none of the rhetoric I've heard here has addressed the problem. The opposite is true: Things are getting worse faster. The claim that batteries and energy storage is quite literally gas lighting, because right now, in 2023, we are burning more dangerous natural gas than we ever have before, and dumping the waste in the atmosphere while claiming in disasters like Texas and California that solar and wind energy are saving the day.

That's not reality; that's religious chanting.

Or am I missing something? Is the world not burning? Are people not dying in the streets, in valleys, in forests, in fields from extreme heat?

What is very clear is that people everywhere - we're certainly not immune - simply refuse to get serious about climate change and just chant and chant and chant and chant delusional bullshit, attributing the bullshit, unjustly, to the scientific community without showing any evidence of even remote familiarity with the scientific literature.

The scientific literature is not biblical in nature, but many people here, like Christians who don't give a rat's ass about what Jesus said about, say, poverty or tolerance, wish to treat science like bible tracts.

If this approach to science were not so tragic under the circumstances, it would be laughable, but I'm not laughing. There's nothing funny about it.

Have a nice day tomorrow.