Oil companies sold the public on a fake climate solution -- and swindled taxpayers out of billions

[NNadir]

13. Well, since it hasn't worked, isn't working and won't work, and is, in my view, just another fossil fuel marketing...

...scam, I guess I'll have to continue to understand that there are people who still believe this sort of thing.

Of course, there are still people who believe that a reactionary return to dependence on the weather for our energy supplies that we left in the 19th century will magically make everything all better. That's not working all that well either.

None of this is surprising to me of course.

People believe all sorts of things, everything from the belief that Donald Trump is preferred by Jesus to the idea that underground dumps for CO₂ are superior to the dump we've been using for more than a century, the planetary atmosphere.

In the last 21 years here, while I've been hearing here all about sequestration, solar, wind, hydrogen, batteries blah, blah, blah the rate of accumulation of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, as measured by 52 week running averages of the weekly data in comparison to that from ten years hence at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory, which can be calculated from the data found on the data pages at that website, has risen from 16.62 ppm/10 years to 25.16 ppm/10 years (last week's average). These are numbers; I track them closely, one might even say, religiously, even if I am an old atheist.

Update on the Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa

Some text I modify as required for update for each in this series reflecting reality:

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.

Numbers don't lie. People lie, to themselves and to each other, but numbers don't lie.

I've been hearing about sequestration for a very long time here and elsewhere. When is this sequestration miracle of dumping our waste, sweeping it under the crust, on future generations supposed to break out? It didn't break out "by 2000" or "by 2010" or "by 2020." When then? "By 2050?" Speaking only for myself, I'll be dead then, having left my wastes behind. Will it break out before or after the solar and wind miracle?

If one lives long enough, or even not very long at all, one will be "informed" about all sorts of things that one knows not to be true.

Now, I do credit some CCU schemes, but they will prove at best marginal. Here's an example of a cool one about which I wrote here some time ago:

Electrolysis of Lithium-Free Molten Carbonates

(Note that the paper refers, in the now de rigueur genuflection to solar and wind energy required to get grants, but it would easily be transferable to clean energy.) It is a paper that essentially reverses coal combustion, but it requires huge amounts of energy to operate.

To wit:

The removal of carbon dioxide from the planetary atmosphere strikes me as being just at the level of feasibility, hardly simple or easy, perhaps not subject to overcoming entrenched belief and cant. In order to recover CO₂ from the atmosphere, it is necessary to invest vast amounts of energy to overcome the entropy of mixing, and to reduce carbon dioxide to stable forms, all of the energy that was released to produce it and then some, must be reproduced. This is only possible - at the edge of possibility, hardly a sure thing - with the use of process intensification using clean high temperature energy of which there is one and only one form.

In the ethical universe in which I operate, our carbon dioxide dump (the planetary atmosphere} represents an obscene cost, a huge liability, we've dumped on future generations, and no, I don't believe that they'll be pleased to wonder about the stability of all the carbon dioxide dumps underground (if they're ever actually built - they won't be) we might in some fantasy universe plan to leave for them.

If we were ethical beings, we would proceed forthwith to stop using fossil fuels in their entirety, not propose Rube Goldberg band aids for continuing to use them, not an easy nor a cheap task, but nonetheless an essential task.

We are not ethical beings however. We couldn't care less about the future of humanity. It shows.

We lack even a mote of a sense of decency. History will not forgive us, nor should it.