Category: Climate Change

Sprung Spring

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The daffodils began blooming on February 20. This was extremely early for Spring to appear in South Charleston, West Virginia. And it was not the little daffodils breaking forth first, but the hordes down the hillside where I have spread bulbs in the 30 years we’ve lived in this house. I am enclosing three pictures in this post, two showing the hillside in front, and one showing the blooming bulbs in back of the house. Not shown are the blooms around the gardens, the blooms in between our neighbor’s house and ours, or any of the blooms we have encouraged at the interface between mowed lawn and natural woodland on the side of our property. Indeed, at times like this when all of the bulbs burst forth simultaneously, you can see the thousands of blooms we have in our yard, and I have the pleasure of knowing I’ve placed a majority of these bulbs myself. I grin when I see the bees grabbing the pollen from these early flowers.

I have not purchased bulbs for years. The last virgin bulbs I planted were left over from Easter displays at our church, where the blooms we sponsored became available after everyone tired of the Easter joy. That’s where the small daffodils which normally pop out first showed up. Not this year. The only bulbs not showing up are the jonquils, which always come last, and have multiple flowers per stem, so they appear to keep the bloom parade on track. Instead of purchasing bulbs, I let the greenery die down naturally, and that leads to giving enough energy to allow the bulbs to bud with new bulbs. Since these new bulbs always are higher than the parent bulbs, eventually the bulbs crowd the surface, and show up when I am weeding the beds. That is my prompt to dig up the bulbs, and replace a few back into the original holes, where they begin to repeat the cycle. I’ve dug up hundreds of bulbs in some years, and distributed them to relatives across the country, and to many in this city. It is always good to hear others talk about the blooms they have each Spring due to our efforts.

We subscribe to the New York Times. One of the commentators I enjoy is Margaret Renkl, who is based on Nashville and sometimes writes on the nature she sees outside of her window. On March 6 her column was titled ”The Beautiful and Terrifying Arrival of an Early Spring”. She commented on what she was seeing (blooming bulbs, flowering trees bursting out into full color, and birds confused on what signals to follow as part of their annual routine). She mentioned the risk these early spring adopters ran from late winter cold snaps. Well, we are now in the midst of several days with lows in the low 20’s Fahrenheit, and we are running the risk of ruining the early blooms. So far the daffodils seem impervious to the cold, but we will see what happens to the Lenten Roses and the flowering cherry tree now bursting forth to declare Spring officially here. We just had a story about the storm of the century, back in ’93. We were here for that blizzard, so we know winter still can throw a nasty trick at us. But somehow, I think the plants and animals in this area will adjust to the vagaries of the weather, and even if some of the blooms are withered by the late cold, we can look forward to the days ahead where the daylight savings time change enables later afternoon, and soon evening work hours in the warmer temperatures of Spring.

Reduce Carbon Footprint? Ha-Ha!

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I really wanted an opportunity to reduce my carbon footprint by getting rid of my gas stove and going to an induction cooktop. But alas, I live in West Virginia. Here there is no commercial option to replace methane with electricity generated without the aid of fossil fuels. In fact, in this state, we still receive 91% of our electricity from coal – the fuel source with the most possible emissions of carbon dioxide. In this state, we have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the current age, since we want to segregate ourselves in the past when America was great.

In this state, those companies who wish to insure they have a source of low carbon energy are viewed as radical woke environmentalists, and the legislature has made it extremely difficult to implement alternative energy sources. At the residential level, the state has left in place roadblocks against any form of community solar energy, which is about the only option I would have since our house alignment is not conducive to installing solar panels. See, we love coal in this state, and we will do our best to ensure we use this fuel source until we’ve stripped every minimal vein from under our feet. Yes, strip mining is still a thing, only we use explosives to rip off the tops of ridges in order to gain access to the black gold still in the ground. Putting the surface back into some semblance of the previous terrain? Yes, that is what the law says you should do, but even the most responsible companies kind of punt on this, leaving a slightly rolling surface good for – well, just what is this ground good for, once the top soil has been blasted away leaving behind only rubble. More on this later.

Coal mining is macho. The image in this state of a young, virile male coal miner leaving in the morning with their lunch bucket in hand, off to fulfill some companies plan to provide fuel for power plants. This image is strong and resilient. Why bother getting an education since you will likely be involved in extracting coal from the ground for a living? And make no mistake, it is a good living. It is the only job capable of sustaining a middle-class lifestyle in much of this state. But there is so much to coal mining that is bad. Since the veins of coal are so thin, any method of extracting the coal involves much more exposure to rock dust. Rock dust? Try almost pure silica. Increased exposure to silica is fueling an epidemic of black lung among the same young, virile miners mentioned earlier. Whereas black lung used to affect miners in their 50’s, this new variety is hitting younger miners, often in their 30’s and 40’s.

Black lung is not the only problem. Especially when engaging in mountain top removal, the tailings are pushed over the side of the mountain. Selenium is one of the components in the rock other than silica, and it leaches out of the exposed rocks and is released into the disturbed streams. There it can lead directly to fish kills, or indirectly lead to human disease via rudimentary water services requiring the use of the degraded water. And remember, in order to remove the rocks atop of the coal, explosives are used to blast off the overburden. The dust from these blasts settles down in the area, causing exposure to silica dust even for those who do not benefit from mining jobs. In all, a lousy way to free up a burnable resource.

Of course, we should not worry about the end product of coal combustion. Carbon dioxide is a necessary resource for plants, at least that’s what I read in anti-global warming tracts. But what is not stated (perhaps due to an antipathy towards evolution) is that existing plants are finely tuned to their current environment. Changing two of the components necessary for growth (temperature and carbon dioxide) at the same time is, as the movies have said, Risky Business. Of course, most of those who deny that climate change is real and caused by human emissions hold sway at local political levels. We see that in West Virginia where one of the State Senators with jurisdiction over coal adoration has called renewable energy a “fairy tale”. Well, sir, my education was as a chemical engineer, and in my pursuit of that education I took several semesters of thermodynamics and atmospheric science. For humanity to have the hubris to return much of the carbon sequestered over millions of years into the atmosphere in a geological eye blink and not expect any unanticipated consequences is indeed, folly. I do not care that carbon dioxide is only several hundred parts per million in the atmosphere. Greatly increasing that amount will not cause Eden to break out over all of earth. We will instead see instability of weather patterns (polar vortex invasions in winter), flooding events in summer (warmer air can contain more moisture and the increase is exponential), and an increase in what is considered clear weather flooding due to sea rise.

Earlier I referred to the land made mainly level after reclamation from mountaintop removal. What can such land be used for? Since the topsoil was scattered to the winds, the remaining soil makes a poor candidate for any growing activity. It is well suited, though, for solar farms, since this will not displace productive farmland. Can we adjust to a passive energy source after having depended upon land disruption for so long to feed the coal industrial complex? We will have to examine our soul as a state and summon the will to make legislative changes that support this change, rather than consider it a “fairy tale” suitable only for those with gossamer wings. This transition has started in West Virginia, but it is an exception, even at this late date.

You Can’t Fool Mother Nature

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When I entered this world, in the mid-1950’s, the earth held about 2.7 billion people. This is the wondrous time people are calling for the US to return to, since we were “great” then. As of today, we are nearing and may have gone over 8 billion people on this planet. Unfortunately, the rules that were possible with a population of 2.7 billion, become unmanageable when there are 8 billion people on the planet.

Just think of the issues we face now which were not problems in the mid-1950’s. We now face many existential crises, and even still face the one we thought we had put behind us, that of nuclear conflict. The seas are becoming deserts as huge trawlers scrape all living creatures into their maws. The lungs of the planet are now succumbing to clear-cutting and soybean cultivation in Brasil, led by a mad-man who refuses to acknowledge the limits of our planet. In the US, population pressures in distant lands have led to an unstoppable tide of those wishing to claim refugee status within our borders. And everywhere we suffer from the natural byproduct of civilization, that is carbon dioxide, along with a refusal by many to believe in the laws of thermodynamics. So be it. Those who claim college educations are worthless deserve to come up against the inexorable power of nature, and suffer the inevitable horrible consequences. All that is left is for those of us who are educated to say “I told you so”. A poor response to deal with the human carnage set to come when the effects of global warming become more pronounced.

In so many ways, we are dealing with national governments which refuse to take a holistic view of the world situation. So many folks still believe we live in a world with only 2.5 billion people, rather than the real world which holds 8 billion humans. Whether it is the retrograde Republicans in the US, or the near-sighted populists of Brasil, or the newly-minted electoral majority in Italy trying to channel Mussolini, political movements across the globe are imitating flightless birds sticking their heads in the sand. By refusing to admit the world has changed, they are subjecting their followers towards the inevitable crisis as they drive their car off of the mesa and do a swan dive towards the ground below. So where do we find those who are really trying to deal with the problems of the present which will make our future untenable?

First, we must begin to listen to those of us who are screaming about physical limits inherent on the earth. There are certainly folks who recognize limits to systems on the earth, though their voices seem swallowed up by those who preach the gospel of prosperity. Many people renounced the mantra of bigger is better, and have gone towards a more sustainable lifestyle. Back in the 1970’s, those folks were characterized as tree-huggers, since they advocated and lived a simplistic lifestyle off of the grid. Now it is possible to be off-the-grid, yet still be connected to the world through solar cells. Yet we still see those new subdivisions built in places never intended to house large numbers of humans, places where the first unpleasant reality is a lack of water. A small encouraging sign has appeared in states like Arizona and Nevada. There legislation was enacted which removes the abilities of Home Owner Associations to require grass lawns. Note there is nothing that requires a more sensible landscape for desert cities, just that people may not be compelled to use immense quantities of water to maintain grass. I am quite certain that those who opt out of a green lawn still may face peer pressure to keep up their conspicuous consumption of water, and their spigots turned on.

If we are having to fight for common sense through legislative actions even for a resource as limited and as visible as water, what hope do we have in convincing large segments of the population to repudiate ongoing use of fossil fuels? Well, we can try to educate. At least some people may be convincible, especially since the world is changing in more visible ways. People look at fossil fuels as being the only effective sources of energy for humanity. But those who claim that do not have a clue that any combustion process has a thermodynamic limitation of efficiency. No combustion process can have an efficiency much greater than 50% due to the laws of nature. Therefore, in all combustion processes, whether an internal combustion engine used for transportation, or a steam power plant, fully half or more of the energy of combustion gets transformed into waste heat. Maybe you can harness some of that waste heat for other human needs, but that costs additional money, and is seldom used on a year-round basis.

Renewable energy is decried for being unreliable and diffuse, and requiring energy storage devices in order to ensure energy availability when needed. Maybe so, but an electron generated from a solar cell does not have the same thermodynamic limitation as energy from fossil fuels. And when it is produced at the same location as it is consumed, transmission losses become minimal. Only the inverter loss (about 10-20%) represents energy lost from solar cells vs. 50% from combustion. So solar energy has a head start on other energy sources used in mass plants and then distributed.

Wind energy is truly variable, and at the scale it is built at, either large energy storage systems are required, or alternative sources of energy aimed at load leveling are required in order to take advantage of this energy source. Once more though, electrons produced through wind energy are fully available to the electrical grid after going through an inverter.

Yes, but fossil fuels are macho! That seems to be the argument underpinning many of those who champion continued and unlimited use of fossil fuels. I don’t know about you, but climbing up some of those 300’ towers to service a windmill seems macho enough to me. Fossil fuels are somehow viewed as our right to use, regardless of any ill effects. Well, it seems we now know it is not a good thing to rejigger our atmosphere and reintroduce all of the carbon sequestered over the millions of years in a blink of a geological eye. But to those who say, we were given dominion over this planet, I say, I agree. And it is about time we use what we have learned to prevent a giant bollocks while we still have time.

I’m Agin It!

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High tide pushed about a foot of water inland where Lockwood Drive and Broad Street converge on Monday, Sep. 21, 2020. Matthew Fortner/Staff Journal & Courier

With due respect to Time Magazine’s person of the year, they should have made the person of the year a composite image of an ‘aginer’. Someone who is against anything and everything that hints of progressivism. Vaccines that use science to prevent or moderate infections from COVID? Agin it. An extension of the child tax credit? One person may use that to buy drugs, so I’m agin it. Coming up with a way to provide incentives to use renewable energy? When God gave us all of these fossil fuels to mess up our nest? I’m agin it. Fossil fuels were good enough for my parents, they will always be there to fuel our needs.

In a way, the reason so much was packaged into a single bill was due to the intransigence of the “Aginner” party. After 10 years of total opposition to any legislation proposed by Democrats from Republicans, the Democrats recognized they had a brief window of opportunity to enact their priorities. Thus, all of the desires bottled up were packaged into a single bill, and this unwieldy device tottered through the legislative process.

But for some unexplained reason, legislators still seem beholden to Grover Norquist. Instead of admitting the faults with the trickle down philosophy governing our tax system, we seem to forget the days of balanced federal budgets coinciding with tax increases in the late ‘90’s. I still remember the wringing of hands on CNBC when they were worried about the impending dearth of treasury bills for those who needed an ever-increasing stream of debt instruments.  Of course, those tax increases were swiftly reversed during the reign of W. And thus we’ve had a string of deficits extending from the early years of this millennium to as far ahead as the eye can see. It is amazing the resistance to raising taxes which exists in our ruling class.

So we in this country value capital over labor. That is why the preference for capital is so entrenched in our tax code. I might actually be in favor of a flat tax, if it treated income from capital the same as income from labor. And if the rate were set so that it did balance our expenditures, and we were forced to change the rate annually to account for differences in spending rates. Like that will ever happen!

Meanwhile, we just keep on keeping on, leaving future catastrophes to overwhelm us in their time. Social Security being imbalanced? Well, as long as we have those fictitious bonds in the federal lockbox to balance the spending, we can continue to inflate the money supply to send money to seniors. (Full disclosure – I receive a Social Security benefit at the upper end of the benefit distribution). Climate change costing us more and more? Just let insurance cover the effects, don’t worry about the cause. All of those people living in poor countries on the margins of the seas? They never have mattered, so why worry about them now.

Ah, but those poor rich people in Miami Beach. Time to worry about blue sky flooding, where inexorable sea level rise is reflected in salt water intrusion under the expensive beach front properties. Even Governor DeathSantis is worried about flooding in Florida, enough to propose hundreds of millions of dollars to strengthen the state’s infrastructure. But none of this liberal ideology sticking its camel’s nose under the state’s tent. No, this will be good ole concrete and drainage systems that will stop the sea’s rise in its tracks.

Miami. Charleston, South Carolina. Virginia Beach / Norfolk Virginia. The locations where clear sky flooding are the harbingers of sea rise to come in this country. Still, it is apparent that Republicans will continue to thumb their nose at the true causes of sea level rise, and instead choose to spend billions and billions of dollars to fight a vain and ultimately losing battle against the inexorable enemy of the sea. Meanwhile, an attempt is being made to make the national flood insurance program reflect the costs it incurs in dealing with not only tropical storm flooding, but increased floods upstream from unprecedented storms like my state of West Virginia suffer. The areas that flooded in West Virginia 2016 and Tennessee in 2021 were not highly flood prone areas, but when you are dealing with available moisture, a few degrees of dew point rise can unleash feet of rain in single storm events. So what will happen when the flood insurance premiums rise? The howls unleashed will cause legislators to force the federal agencies to rescind the increases, and one more cost will be amortized across the entire population of the nation.

It is very likely that control of the US Congress will revert back to the Republicans after the 2022 elections. What we’ve seen to try to counter that reversion is a flurry of legislation to attempt to alter the trajectory of this country, since the Reagan administration set the people against the Federal Government. As long as one side of the political spectrum only sees evil and laziness in the lower income brackets, we will continue to have policies that favor the fortunate few instead of policies aimed at improving the lot of the many who find themselves at the lower end of the income distribution. We seem destined to continue our trip into plutocracy, where those who are the true beneficiaries of government policies, convince the masses that cultural issues are all that matters, and it is the Godless liberals who are the true enemies. One wonders how long this misrepresentation of Biblical principles will continue. But in the famous words of H. L. Mencken, “No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people”.

Even one hundred years ago, the foresight of this sage stands out as describing our current situation perfectly. One may ask, who is the Mencken of today? And would anyone listen to that person and heed their words?

Seasons Change, and So Did I

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Summer’s hold lingered on this year. Even in mid-October, we were able to enjoy our outdoor living room and had morning coffee along with the newspaper outside. But as the calendar turned to November, the mornings turned to frost. We finally had a killing frost, so the last of the basil and peppers and tomatoes turned to a wilted heap of formerly living matter. This year, though, our beech nut tree was prolific in its generosity to wildlife. So much so that earlier in the summer, we lost several large branches off of the beech full of nuts. The forester we use said it was actually the weight of the nuts causing the limbs to give way. So it was not a surprise for us as we sat outside in the early evening to see a family of deer grazing on the bountiful nuts littering our lawn.

Beech nuts are small. Only a few calories per nut, and you have to peel the triangular shell back to release the nut. Deer don’t worry about the extra roughage from the nuts, though. They just keep eating the whole thing, then depositing the remains as fertilizer on our lawn. We have learned to live with our four-footed neighbors, since we swapped out our flowers to deer-resistant varieties over the years. We do get to see sights like this year’s fawn trying to aggressively nurse from its mother. My guess is that the doe had already dried up since the fawn quit trying to nurse as abruptly as it tried to start.

This is the season of the suicide squirrels. You see their squashed carcasses decorating the roads all over this area. As you drive, you are likely to see a squirrel begin its dash across the street, then suddenly turn to go back to the safety of the grass, only to reverse course again and continue across the road. Many is the time when I’ve discovered how good my brakes are, by stopping before our car adds to the seasonal slaughter. Of course, we got to watch a squirrel score a touchdown at a recent Marshall game. The squirrel raced across the field, crossed the goal line to the delight of the student section, then eventually retraced his steps and left the stadium with humans in pursuit. Wildlife on the field is a common theme right now, though. This past weekend we were graced with the sight of a fox at the Arizona State – USC game. And I just saw footage of a moose running across the field at South Dakota State, although no football game was in progress. It is that time of year.

Photo by Zachary Hiser

Later falls and lessened tree color. Are these signs of global warming? As the statistician in me says, individual anecdotes do not a trend make. Still, one has to wonder when summer-like warmth extends later, and later into the year. Some trees still haven’t changed colors, like our cherry tree in our front yard. The only thing we can do is watch the trends, and report as appropriate. See, no one remarks when the expected happens. We only talk about it when our expectations are not met. In the case of the extended summer, it was unexpected, but welcome. Only when I reflect upon the weather do I realize that this is not normal. I am not accustomed to not needing a jacket in the middle of November. But I can enjoy it, for as long as it lasts.

Only a month ago. Now just a memory in green

Make West Virginia Great Again!

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So this is what it’s like being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Here in West Virginia, we are being blackmailed into continuing the use of coal for electric power generation until the year 2040, regardless of the economics. And we are going to pay dearly for the privilege of using the dirtiest fossil fuel extracted from the earth in the most damaging way possible. How is this possible? Let us say when we selected a coal baron as Governor, we accepted his appointments to the Public Service Commission (PSC). And when a position came open in the 3-member commission, the Governor filled it with the recently-retired head of the WV Coal Association.

There are three large power plants run by Appalachian Power in the state of West Virginia. These plants sold power throughout West Virginia, and also to Kentucky and Virginia. All three plants face the need to upgrade their sludge handling facilities by 2028 in order to meet EPA regulations. The Kentucky and Virginia PSC’s refused to accept their portion of the costs for upgrading the water treatment facilities, so it fell to the WV PSC to make its decision. To no one’s surprise, they approved the half billion-dollar upgrade, along with the requisite costs for the utility to not only offset its investment cost, but enable Appalachian Power to earn a return on the incremental investment. The PSC stated their rationale for approval as: “Direct employment at the Plants, use of West Virginia coal, state, county and local taxes related to operating generation plants and related employment in businesses supporting the Plants and the coal industry cannot be discounted or overlooked.” I can’t wait for the first shipment of Wyoming coal to these plants, justified solely on cost. Lower cost will eventually out trump any other justification.

When I moved to West Virginia in the late 1980’s, a point of pride in the state was the low cost of electricity as it was totally dependent on coal generation. Since those days, a revolution in energy generation has occurred. Natural gas availability has increased exponentially, and the cost of renewable energy has plummeted. At the same time, the deep thick veins of coal have mostly played out in the state, and the coal industry has resorted to the extremely destructive and disruptive practice of blowing off the tops of mountains in order to expose the relatively thin veins of carbon remaining. So now we suffer from periodic explosions causing rock to rain down from on high throughout our coal fields, and then suffer from the exposure of virgin rock to the atmosphere where every metal present is leached out into our streams. All for the pleasure of allowing our neighboring cloud factories to vent their excess heat into the atmosphere.

Much has been written about how coal has held this state captive for over a century. Coal mines, and coke ovens, have plagued us ever since industry began to exploit this resource. Of course, you wouldn’t want it extracted in your back yard, since the act of extraction just may make your yard and house uninhabitable. But we are still held in thrall to the large utilities and their subservient governmental regulators, all under the massive oversight offered by our oversized Governor. It makes sense that the state suffering from rampant obesity should select an exemplar of this trait to be its leader.

So while the rest of the nation learns how to adapt periodic energy sources into a system which can handle volatile energy demands, this state will muddle along with the power system of the last century. Once more, West Virginia is insistent upon remaining a vassal state to the rest of this country, and ensuring our subordination for multiple decades to come. A state looking ahead would try to market the flattened mountains as opportunities for solar farms, since the soil won’t grow useful plants due to the dearth of organic top soil. No, instead we will continue to permit the desecration of our lands in order to fulfill our need to pay obeisance to the gods of coal.

Do we deserve to be last in almost every economic category within these states? It would seem so, since we appear destined to race backwards rather than face forward and try to improve. The state has changed from a progressive labor enclave, into yet another southern US state where the Republican party staged a takeover. Law after law is enacted aimed at hamstringing the labor movement, many straight from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) playbook. It makes you believe the legislators have no individual capacity for thought, they have to outsource it to ALEC. But those are the facts on the ground, and we have to deal with the unfortunate circumstances we find ourselves stuck in.

It may be that all politics are local. What is unfortunate is that the local variant of politics in this state consists of denigration of education, followed by an insistence on wishing for an economic rescue from the economic gods of the past, instead of realizing the facts on the ground have changed, and no longer will we thrive if we refuse to look beyond coal. There is a reason why the coal extracting regions are among the poorest in the world. Only when you think coal is the only resource you have to share, will you accept the degradation it brings. Here in West Virginia, we think we only have coal to offer to the rest of the world.

And If Elected, I Promise To ….

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My career choices have expanded exponentially. All I have to do now is lie unashamedly and the future is mine as a Republican elected official. It is amazing, you don’t even need to worry about those videos showing your deeds and words, all you need to do is, say, recast those events into more flattering versions of the truth. And to be sure, your version of the truth has just as much merit as any other version that just happens to be backed by video and audio.

So instead of acknowledging the medieval violence perpetrated by those in the vanguard of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, you can portray those inside of the Capitol building as normal tourists, even managing to draw (stay) inside of the lines as they took selfies desecrating congressional spaces. Why, it is impossible for white citizens to have evil intent. We all know it is those others from BLM and Antifa who were the real terrorists. Those Proud Boys and those 3 Percenters? Just patriotic tourists who happened along and shared hugs and kisses with the Capitol police.

If those mean ole Democrats propose any changes to the taxation structure of this country, thereby risking reversal of 40 years of pandering to the rich? Just portray them as unrepentant socialists, who are working at implementing redistributionist policies, taking money away from the hard relaxing billionaires whose spending keeps so many of the little people employed.

If businesses have difficulty hiring people at starvation wages, expound ceaselessly on the dignity of work, and state that America has lost its work ethic. Never worry about the lives of those who have risked their existence by working during this pandemic, just define those who are using what little power they have (their labor) as morally corrupt for not wanting to exchange an hour’s work for 8 federal reserve notes. Of course, we who hold millions of those federal reserve notes have proven our moral integrity and should never be chastised.

Yes, I can lie with the best of them. I can claim no one has ever seen this virus everyone is scared of, and all of the hospitalizations are just efforts at getting the highest reimbursements from our socialized medicine providers. I can claim that since the advice from the scientists has changed from what was given 18 months ago, then all advice from scientists should be ignored, and my anecdotal evidence about efficacy of horse dewormer out trumps your peer reviewed massive trials. I have my rights and you are not about to infringe on them by pansy-assed pleas to consider the public good.

I can even lie about what is going on all around us. Sure, we never used to have these massive fires in Australia, Greece, Portugal, and the US west coast. But it cannot have any relationship to the increase in temperatures we’ve seen across the globe. And those flooding rains we seem prone to now? Has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that higher dew points induced from a warmer climate allows for higher rainfalls. But God would never allow for his infallible creatures to be capable of inflicting harm to the environment. Therefore, all who worry about the coming climate crisis can just go on with their lives (and the campaign contributions of the vested interests keep on rolling in).

I will have to work on my ability to cry crocodile tears at the opposing political party for insisting that we take responsibility for our actions in the past at increasing the deficit. Just as long as I can feign concern for our debt when I didn’t care about increasing deficits as long as the favored classes made out from our tax cuts. I’m not really good at naked hypocrisy, so my acting skills need a little brushing up before I can stand in front of cameras and wail about the reckless spending taking us over Niagara Falls without even a barrel to shield us from the rocks below.

I can if I wish start at the state level. I can say that I’m going to change human nature, and eliminate all rapists from the streets while I prohibit any possibility of abortions. I can insist that all who inhabit our penal systems are deserving of every bad thing they get, and once someone has made a mistake, they forfeit all rights forevermore. I don’t care about offering any rehabilitation programs in prisons, all those who find themselves there are unworthy of anything other than white bread and bologna sandwiches. Bring back Joe Arpaio! He had the right ideas.

Of course, only those who see things the way I do deserve to be placed in positions of public trust. Therefore, I must manipulate the electoral system so that only I and my fellow travelers can win elections from now on. I must pick any remnant of the liberals from my clothing in disgust, so I can remain pure and unblemished.

I can hardly wait. The next election cycle is upon us, so I must hurry so I can establish myself in the minds of those we allow to vote.

Corn? Corn Is Always Good!

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Corn Ethanol Plant Craig MO

It is 2021, not 1973 with its Arab oil embargo and lines of cars dancing the slow samba towards the still-working pumps. Nowadays, no one can claim with a straight face of the necessity to grow corn to produce ethanol, thereby increasing domestic energy supply, and loosening the noose of foreign oil producers on the neck of the United States. Yet the mandate to use ethanol in gasoline has become a sacred shibboleth, and its importance gets reinforced each presidential election cycle, where Iowa is the first state to hold a presidential preference event Thus no serious candidate can propose elimination of the ethanol requirement in gasoline. Why? Because the corn industry, and its lobbyists, will whip up the furor of its Iowa farmers to decry any change in policy as being anti-American.

So we are shackled to a policy which doesn’t save energy, causes demand for corn to be well above the market for nutritional usage, increases soil erosion and loss of nutrients to our waterways, and tricks Americans into believing the mantra of energy self-sufficiency. What’s the upside? We no longer have to worry about gas line freeze-up in winter.

There were two chemicals proposed to increase the oxygen concentration in gasoline. One was ethanol, and one was methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE). Increasing the oxygen concentration in gasoline reduces tailpipe emissions, while reducing engine knock. Thus MTBE was favored initially by gasoline refiners since it was simple to produce in scale, and was inexpensive. It does have one very bad characteristic, though. If it is released into groundwater, it migrates into the water, rather than stay with the organic phase. MTBE soon found its way into ground water, and into drinking water. It is a compound that can cause significant harm to humans over prolonged exposure, so MTBE was phased out of gasoline in the early 2000’s. Ethanol soon took over as the preferred oxygen additive to gasoline, and it had the unexpected benefit of raising the cost of corn for farmers in the Midwest who needed a price boost in order to stay solvent.

Once legislative mandates were in place requiring use of corn ethanol, the investment soon followed. When I graduated college in chemical engineering in Nebraska in the 1970’s, there was essentially zero chemical industry in the region. I had to move to where they made chemicals in order to get a job. Now, there are ethanol refineries dotting the farm landscape throughout the corn belt. You can see the steam plumes from miles away. Corn ethanol is favored legislatively. During the formative years of the corn ethanol industry, there was a $0.50 / gallon tax benefit given to gasoline refiners in order to use the mandated amounts of corn-derived ethanol. Thus US tax policy drove gasoline refiners to select corn-derived ethanol, imposing in essence a tax of 5 cents per gallon on the consumer to enable ethanol to thrive. In fact, the true price to the consumer is even higher, since the demand for corn for ethanol has put a floor on the overall corn price. If you look at food prices, much of that comes from corn, through its value in feeds for meats, or use as sweeteners. So by making the price of corn higher than it would be, the price of all derivatives of corn is higher as well.

One of the most pernicious effects of the legislative mandates for increased use of ethanol in gasoline is increasing corn acreage. Using USDA statistics, the 3-year average of corn acres in 2019-2021 was 91 million, while the 3-year average from 1997-1999 was 79 million. The key difference between the two periods was the increased demand for ethanol from corn. The 15% increase in acreage means that corn has increased its fertilizer demands, and it is no surprise that an ancillary effect of a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico due to excess nutrients, that dead zone has also increased in size during the two-decade period in question. Not only that, when all inputs are factored in, ethanol from corn may barely create more energy than it takes to produce. If methanol were allowed as an oxygenate, it could be generated from natural gas and reduce the impact on the land.

So why do we have this policy which seems in opposition to many goals we aspire to as a country?  We say we want to reduce the impact of humanity on the environment, yet we persist with a counter-productive policy mandating the use of corn ethanol in our gasoline supply. Square that requirement for an absolute volume to be blended with the now stated policy of converting half of new vehicles to electric by 2030. Sooner or later, the demand for gasoline will fall to the point that you cannot blend the mandated quantity of ethanol and still stay at a 10% ethanol concentration. When we get to that point, it will be interesting to see how the politicians deal with the physical limitations of the gasoline market. Of course, we could always export more gasoline and fulfill the legislative requirement that way, but I don’t think that will be looked upon favorably.

It is time now to look at the mandated use of corn ethanol and begin to wean the farm sector away from the incremental corn demand brought about by this legislation. Phasing out the requirement over a 10-year period would reduce the effect on any individual farmer, and then only the companies who have invested in corn ethanol production facilities will end up on the short end of the stick.

Do I expect our politicians to have this degree of foresight and begin to reduce the mandated volume? Amazingly, there is a bill stirring in the Senate that would repeal the mandate to use corn ethanol to produce gasoline. Tellingly, none of the Senators mentioned in conjunction with the bill are from major corn-producing states. Given the entrenched opposition towards ending any government quota program, my expectation is that the bill will suffer an ignominious death. But maybe, just maybe, it may be revived in the future, and face a better fate. I’ll believe it has a chance when I see some courageous presidential candidate have the guts to tell Iowa voters that corn ethanol is bad for the climate, and economy, and must go.

Of Thermodynamics, and Sealing Wax, and Other Fancy Stuff

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Power plant cooling towers venting waste heat

The gauntlet has been thrown down. The US needs to cut their carbon dioxide emissions by 50% by 2030, starting with a baseline of 2005. In order to accomplish this, real changes in the US economy must occur, along with some sacrifice by US citizens. And, the entrenched interests in continuing the status quo (energy companies, Republicans, utility providers) must be convinced of the necessity of this extreme action. Pretty difficult to do especially since the Republicans have made it their brand to not only dismiss the need for change, but they have proudly waved the banner of climate change hoax / no science to refute the claims of climate scientists. They have waved these banners for generations, and their influence will not go away, especially at the state and local levels.

First, it is necessary to present some simplified discussions of thermodynamics. This is the branch of physics which describes the limits nature imposes upon humanity. The first item needing description is black body radiation. Simply put, it means a body will emit radiation which puts it at equilibrium with the incoming radiation. Any disruption that affects the radiation balance will affect the equilibrium temperature. In our case, radiation from the earth is dispersed into the coldness of space. One is most aware of this phenomena on cold clear nights, but still above the freezing point of water, where frost forms on surfaces that are exposed to the vastness of space. Like, your car windshield which requires scraping when there’s no frost anywhere else.

The increase in carbon dioxide concentration (CO2) in the atmosphere affects this radiation balance. Put simply, CO2 absorbs some of the radiation that is escaping to space, and re-radiates it in all directions. The fraction that is radiated back to earth is radiation that increases the total amount of radiation earth normally receives. It increases the equilibrium temperature of earth, which is global warming. Since CO2 happens to absorb radiation in a range normal atmospheric components do not absorb, this means that CO2 exerts an outsized influence even though it is a minimal component of the atmosphere. Those who say that a small amount of this gas cannot affect the temperature of the globe are ignorant of basic physics and mathematics.

There is a second aspect of thermodynamics that comes into play with fossil fuels. That is the limitation in the amount of useful work that can be extracted from a high-energy fluid. All large-scale power plants depend upon a heat source (burning fossil fuels, nuclear fission, burning biomaterials) to heat and vaporize water to form steam. It is the steam that turns the turbines and results in the generation of electricity. Well, thermodynamics imposes a limit of about 50% peak efficiency for this type of power plant. You’ll have to trust me on this figure, since understanding and calculating the Carnot system efficiency is a staple of college engineering and science courses. There’s only so much explanation you can put into a blog post.

This says that whenever you have a concentrated source of energy being converted to another type of energy (combustion of fuel to electricity), you only get about 50% of the useful energy as an output. The rest is wasted as heat. Any time you convert one type of energy to another, there are losses involved. So why are folks so convinced that renewable energy sources are so necessary? One reason is that the conversion losses from solar and wind energy are much less than from a standard power plant. In the case of solar electricity, there is also much more potential for locating the power generation at the point of consumption. This reduces transmission losses.

The problems with renewable energy production? It’s variable. In the case of solar, it is guaranteed to not produce at least half of the time due to earth’s rotation. In the case of wind, it is at the mercy of the wind. Therefore, you need to either supplement renewables with a concentrated source of production, or you need efficient means of energy storage. While progress in energy storage is impressive, it is still expensive to use either battery storage or capacitors to bridge the gap between availability of renewable energy and consumption of that energy. The second problem with renewables is that you are depending upon a diffuse source of energy. The sun only shines so hard, and even wind turbines can’t compare to the energy density of a classical fossil fuel source.

The other problem with renewables is that they allow the consumer to bypass the utilities and the fossil fuel companies for some of the energy demand. While the prospect of going off the grid is extolled as an ideal, it is not practical for most people. We still need an energy infrastructure to cover those times when energy is required to supplement locally produced electrons. It is expensive to maintain and improve this grid, and what we’ve seen, especially with Texas, is that the grid can fail catastrophically if it is not maintained. So as much as we might want to be rid of giant monopolies governing our energy supplies, we need to construct a future system where they play a role, or else their looming obsolescence will cause them to resist any needed changes.

In my state of West Virginia, we’ve been in denial about the future of coal ever since I moved here in 1986. Coal was the exclusive source of electricity in this state for decades. Only with the increase in natural gas availability due to fracking did anyone in this state seriously doubt the moral goodness of coal, and of those who mined it. So we have suffered as local communities were shattered by the blasting needed to support mountain top removal. This form of mining only employed a small fraction of the workforce needed for an underground mine, but when it is all you know, you put up with a lot. We now have many acres of once pristine woodland and hillside covered in scrub grasses, devoid of topsoil, and unable to sustain much life. Such places would be ideal for solar farms, and slowly this state seems to be growing aware of this possibility.

West Virginia has suffered population loss for decades, ever since the coal mines first became mechanized. What better way to offer hope to the youth who now succumb to opioids than to provide jobs in solar energy? Education to enable people to learn the basics of electrical installations would raise the general education levels in this state. We must resist the siren song of reversing coal’s decline, and embrace the trend towards renewable energy that is the wave of the future. No matter what the Republicans say.