Sub's Alternative Energy Thread

[SubGod22]

Another pretty cool tech that could have a lot of real value in combating energy usage. Even if you don't buy into the global warming extremism, this could significantly reduce costs when it comes to cooling buildings and vehicles and could be of significant value to those who drive EVs and wouldn't have to run the AC as much, killing the range.

Instead of Painting: This Film Can Color Cars or Buildings While Cooling Objects From Sun - Inspired by Blue Butterflies

New nanofilms could significantly reduce the energy needed for cooling buildings or vehicles.

Just like white clothing feels cooler than other colors due to reflecting the sun instead of absorbing it, other colors, like blue or black, heat up when they absorb light. But new colored cooling films inspired from the nanostructures in butterfly wings can eliminate much of the heating effect, while still adding vibrant color.

The new films, which don’t absorb any light, could be used on the outside of buildings, vehicles, and equipment to reduce the energy needed for cooling.

“In buildings, large amounts of energy are used for cooling and ventilation, and running the air conditioner in electric cars can reduce the driving range by more than half,” said research team leader Guo Ping Wang from Shenzhen University in China. “Our cooling films could help advance energy sustainability and carbon neutrality.”

An article published in the journal Optica details that the films are lowering temperatures to about 2 °C below the ambient air. Furthermore, researchers also found that when left outside all day, the blue version of the films was approximately 50°F cooler (26℃ ) than traditional blue car paint.

If the films are used on buildings, this would represent a huge energy savings by lowering air conditioning use.

[1972Shocker]

Thanks to Government, Maui's Lahaina Fire Became a Deadly Conflagration

https://mises.org/wire/thanks-govern...-conflagration

Nearly a decade ago the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, a research nonprofit, warned the Hawaiian government that the area around Lahaina was extremely fire-prone due to frequent downslope winds, steep terrain, and dry grass. Little was done to address these risks. A subsequent report in 2020 added that an invasive species of exceptionally flammable grass was prevalent in the surrounding fields and that passing hurricanes created strong winds known to fuel wildfires on the islands.

The area where flames were first spotted is full of electrical infrastructure, mostly operated by Hawaiian Electric, the state’s monopoly electricity supplier. This included a substation and a multitude of power lines. Most of the land in the area is owned by the State of Hawaii except for a parcel belonging to the estate of one of Hawaii’s last princesses. This parcel housed a solar farm supplying electricity to the Hawaiian Electric substation. Early last year, NPR published a glowing article about the solar project, praising it the direct result of government regulation crafted to help transition Hawaii to 100 percent renewable power by 2045.

But on the morning of August 8, as winds hammered the old wooden utility poles, this highly electrified area in the dry grasses above Lahaina was quickly becoming dangerous. Yet no formal procedure was in place to shut off sections of the grid in the face of severe fire risks. As a result, twenty-nine fully energized poles fell across West Maui that day.

But even with downed poles in the way, the first firefighters on the scene met with some early success. Around 9 a.m., the county fire department declared the fire “100 percent contained.” But the message to residents included an ominous request. The county’s water pumps were powered by electricity, much of which was frantically being turned off to deactivate the downed lines. Officials asked the public to conserve water to preserve water pressure.

But by midafternoon, a flare-up brought the fire back to life on the Lahaina Bypass, a major road that heads straight into town. The flames moved swiftly into Lahaina at 4:46 p.m., one minute after the county government finally sent out an alert to warn the city’s population, largely without power, about the flare-up that had occurred over an hour before.

To make matters worse, county officials failed to activate emergency sirens, leaving residents unaware of the danger bearing down on them. And as firefighters heroically rushed toward the flames to try and save their community, they found that there was little to no water pressure in the fire hydrants, which quickly ran dry.

With a single backed-up highway leading out of the city, many residents of Lahaina had nowhere to go.

To review, a power company shielded from competition by the state placed electrical infrastructure among highly flammable state-owned grass fields above the historic city of Lahaina, which the government was twice warned were highly susceptible to fire. And once a fire broke out, a combination of defective water infrastructure, terrible communication by government officials, and only one escape route doomed the people of Lahaina to the worst wildfire experienced in this country in over a hundred years.

[Shockm]

Be ready for big future inflation figures and costs, largely because of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. This could result in hyper inflation in the U.S. and put our economy into a downward spiral.

Inflation Reduction to cost 1.2 Trillion Dollars according to Goldman Sachs. But some say it will cost more than 2.1 Trillion.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/energy/i...man-sachs-says

Inflation Reduction Act will cost many times more than what the White House said. You can count on it being inflationary instead of reducing Inflation. We’ve already had at least 16% inflation since Biden took office. Count on a healthy amount of inflation from this Biden produced Act.

Newsweek says One Year later Inflation Reduction Act a total Flop.

https://www.newsweek.com/one-year-la...pinion-1820309

[1972Shocker]

Sorry Mainstream Media, Climate Change Has Not Caused 2023’s Heatwaves

https://townhall.com/columnists/hsterlingburnett/2023/08/15/sorry-mainstream-media-climate-change-has-not-caused-2023s-heatwaves-n2626888

Climate change is a long-term phenomenon, driven by a combination of numerous factors at different locations during different eras. A single year’s spike in heatwaves is not evidence of long-term climate change; a steadily increasing trend in heatwaves would be, but that’s not what the evidence shows. Instead, data show that the warming of the past 150 to 170 years has not produced a trend of increasing heatwaves. As a result, the modest recent rise in global temperatures serves as a backdrop or baseline for the recent heatwave; it is not its cause.

It turns out a confluence of overlapping weather and meteorological events account for the pattern of persistent heatwaves in many locations.

One event contributing to a global rise in temperatures this year is the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption. Water vapor makes up 98 percent or more of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the subsea Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai eruption added an additional 10 to 13 percent to atmospheric water vapor. Scientists from NASA and the European Space Agency agree that this huge addition to the dominant atmospheric greenhouse gas is contributing significantly to this years’ temperatures.

In addition, El Niño is back, and it’s a strong one. Before the summer heatwave struck and the mainstream media focused on climate change as the reason behind it to the exclusion of almost every other factor, the media was warning that with the shift from La Niña to El Niño, hotter temperatures would result.

One little discussed factor affecting this summer’s temperatures is the increasingly active sun. After a period of relative quiescence with little solar activity, the sun has become active again. An active sun has a direct, if modest, effect on the Earth’s temperatures.

Regionally, a variety of entirely natural weather patterns have also contributed to warming.

Across parts of the western and southeastern United States, and in southern and central Europe, heat domes or “blocking patterns” formed and persisted. As CNN described the situation, “an enormous, relentless stubborn ridge of high pressure has trapped air inside in a ‘heat dome’ resulting in extreme temperatures as the dome parks itself over areas.”

The blocking patterns in Europe trapped a heat dome there as it did in the western United States. In addition, in early July, the jet stream shifted. These two meteorological events combined to deliver colder than average, even fall like temperatures, in northern Europe and across the United Kingdom in July and into August, while locking-in, for an extended period of time, extreme summer temperatures in a large swath of southern European nations abutting or near the Mediterranean Sea.

Another factor contributing to hotter than average temperatures this summer is changes in the ocean circulation patterns in the North Atlantic. As Judith Curry, Ph.D., and Jim Johnstone note, it seems that sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic are unusually high this summer, due to significant changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation and weak surface winds. The resulting increase in Atlantic Ocean temperatures has been hyped in the media, but wrongly attributed to long-term climate change rather than localized, natural weather anomalies.

Fossil fuel use does not cause volcanic eruptions, oceanic and wind current shifts, or changes in solar activity, thus their use can’t be blamed for this summer’s heatwaves.

[1972Shocker]

When It Comes To The Energy Needed For The Modern World, Thor Will Save Us!

https://www.americanthinker.com/arti...l_save_us.html

Only now can a few clear thinkers see what a terrible error ignoring thorium was. Thorium is safer than uranium by a light-year. If we consider using only the Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), it does not need a source of water nearby for cooling because, if something goes wrong, the liquid fluoride will expand, slowing and stopping the chain reaction, causing the fluoride salt to solidify.

The fissile material that thorium reactors produce is the uranium isotope U-233, which is the source of neutrons for maintaining the chain reaction. The heat produced is so great (up to 800 degrees C) that it can boil sea water, distilling it for drinking and agriculture. As well, the heat is high enough to help manufacture fuels that can then be used in cars and trucks. Another useful function for LFTR reactors is that they eat waste from uranium-based reactors, waste that otherwise needs to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years.

Thorium is such a dense source of power that a hardball-sized chunk contains enough energy for all the needs of one person’s lifetime. That baseball constitutes an amazing 13,000 times more energy than any other fuel source such as its closest rivals, oil or coal, thus lightening the footprint of energy production. It puts wind and solar to shame in terms of cost for an equivalent unit of energy and, if implemented as our main source of electricity, will return the pristine beauty of our rolling hills and offshore areas after we figure out how to dismantle and dispose of our solar panels and wind turbines.

Also important, thorium reactors can be scaled up or down depending upon their proposed uses. They can be built big enough to power cities or small enough for submarines. Many medium-sized power plants rather than just a few big ones can give us the advantage of redundancy, making any single breakdown less devasting. Production of these power plants can be done on an assembly line and then trucked to their final sites; no need for extensive containment buildings because there is no pressurized hot water to make nuclear mishaps potentially catastrophic. (Check out Copenhagen Atomics.) Shorter timelines to build out functioning LFTR plants make the thorium solution practical today.

Kirk Sorensen is a nuclear engineer and a vocal advocate for thorium reactors. He has many YouTube videos outlining his deep understanding of this technology.

Here, Sorensen discusses thorium theory in two and half hours of engineering talk that is within the understanding of a high school graduate who took chemistry. It is so entertaining that one may watch it in an evening, in place of some Netflix production.

Sorensen posted the video 12 years ago. Twelve years and nothing has happened in the US. Meanwhile, China is way ahead of us.

[pinstripers]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/green-transition-renewable-energy-not-125823334.html

well, no sh!t

[wufan]

Of all the government intervention that can be done for climate, funding research is the only one that has a positive economic return.

[SubGod22]

Another potential way to repurpose plastic.

Plastic Waste Can Now be Turned into Soap Thanks to Eureka Moment from Virginia Tech

Polyethylene, one of the most common plastics used today, is actually very similar in chemical structure to the chief fatty acid in soap, and a scientist at Virginia Tech has discovered a long-sought-after way to convert one into the other.

The compound, called a surfactant, is now being seen as an effective way to upcycle polyethylene plastics into soap, detergents, and more.

Guoliang Liu, a researcher at VA Tech, felt that there must be some way to divide the long polyethylene chains into shorter, but not too short, fatty acid chains that could be used to make soap.

Liu believed there was the potential for a new upcycling method that could take low-value plastic waste and turn it into a high-value, useful commodity.

Having considered the question for some time, Liu was struck by inspiration while enjoying a winter evening by a fireplace. He watched the smoke rise from the fire and thought about how the smoke was made up of tiny particles produced during the wood’s combustion.

Although plastics should never be burned in a fireplace for safety and environmental reasons, Liu began to wonder what would happen if polyethylene could be burned in a safe laboratory setting. Would the incomplete combustion of polyethylene produce “smoke” just like burning wood does? If someone were to capture that smoke, what would it be made of?

“Firewood is mostly made of polymers such as cellulose. The combustion of firewood breaks these polymers into short chains, and then into small gaseous molecules before full oxidation to carbon dioxide,” said Liu.

[SubGod22]

Analysis Shows We've Been Overestimating the Amount of Plastic in Oceans by 30x

Scientists in the Netherlands have shown quite convincingly that the issue of plastic pollution in our oceans is far smaller than anyone believed.

Their research highlights a variety of good news tidbits: the first one being that abstract scientific modeling can be more than just wrong, but completely wrong, and the second is that organizations pulling trash out of the oceans and rivers today aren’t simply mowing a golf course with nail clippers: they’re making a significant difference to these ecosystems.

According to the Netherlands Times reporting on the study, estimates for how much plastic has made it into the oceans over the last 20 years range from 50 million tons to 300 million tons, but the actual amount is likely somewhere around 3.2 million tons.

20,000 measurements described as “reliable” informed the calculations of oceanologist Mikeal Kaandorp and his team, with highlights being that rivers bring much less plastic into the oceans than previously thought, and that microplastics are a significantly smaller percentage of plastic waste.

The good news is there isn't near as much plastic in the ocean as previously thought.

The bad news is there's still way too much.

The other good news is that it really isn't that difficult for most countries to keep plastics from reaching the ocean and helping eliminate the problem.

The other bad news is that most countries don't really care enough to do much of anything to actually accomplish that.

[1972Shocker]

The big eco lie: Solar panels produce five TIMES more carbon dioxide than previously thought, report claims

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12356901/The-big-eco-lie-Solar-panels-produce-five-TIMES-carbon-dioxide-previously-thought-report-claims.html

Solar panels release five times more carbon dioxide than previously thought, according to a new report.

An Italian researcher made the claims after finding a database that world institutions use to calculate global carbon footprint projections omits emissions from China, which produces 80 percent of solar panels worldwide.

China is known to use coal-burning plants in manufacturing, which has dropped the price of technology for Americans and other Western countries.

Without data from China, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry emissions are 48 gCO2/kWh.

However, the new analysis suggests that the number is closer to 170 and 250 gCO2/kWh - 62.5 percent as much carbon dioxide emissions as natural gas electricity generation.

[SubGod22]

For whatever reason, this link jumps to a different topic.

I edited it and it worked for me this time. Weird that it was linking to some 2009 article.

[1972Shocker]

A possible, perhaps plausible, explanation for the current "heatwave" that does not involve anthropogenic global warming:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/what_nasa_and_the_european_space_agency_are_admitting_but_the_media_are_failing_to_report_about_our_current_heat_wave.html

The current heat wave is being relentlessly blamed on increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there is a much more plausible explanation, one that is virtually endorsed by two of the world’s leading scientific organizations. It turns out that levels of water vapor in the atmosphere have dramatically increased over the last year-and-a-half, and water vapor is well recognized as a greenhouse gas, whose heightened presence leads to higher temperatures, a mechanism that dwarfs any effect CO2 may have.

So, why has atmospheric water vapor increased so dramatically? Because of a historic, gigantic volcanic eruption last year (01/15/2022) that I – probably along with you -- had never heard of. The mass media ignored it because it took place 490 feet underwater in the South Pacific. Don’t take it from me, take it from NASA (and please do follow the link to see time lapse satellite imagery of the underwater eruption and subsequent plume of gasses and water injected into the atmosphere).

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The underwater eruption in the South Pacific Ocean also blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Luis Millán, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. He led a new study examining the amount of water vapor that the Tonga volcano injected into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between about 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer. That’s nearly four times the amount of water vapor that scientists estimate the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines lofted into the stratosphere.

NASA published the above in August 2022. Half a year later, a newer study increased the estimate of the water vapor addition to the atmosphere by 30%.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory further explains:

Volcanic eruptions rarely inject much water into the stratosphere. In the 18 years that NASA has been taking measurements, only two other eruptions – the 2008 Kasatochi event in Alaska and the 2015 Calbuco eruption in Chile – sent appreciable amounts of water vapor to such high altitudes. But those were mere blips compared to the Tonga event, and the water vapor from both previous eruptions dissipated quickly. The excess water vapor injected by the Tonga volcano, on the other hand, could remain in the stratosphere for several years.

[ShockTalk]

Another example of successfully reclaiming land and bettering the environment and surrounding ecosystem.

The Largest Landfill in Latin America has Been Turned into a Mangrove Forest

For whatever reason, this link jumps to a different topic.

[SubGod22]

Another example of successfully reclaiming land and bettering the environment and surrounding ecosystem.

The Largest Landfill in Latin America has Been Turned into a Mangrove Forest

At nearly 150 acres, the Jardim Gramacho landfill in Rio de Janeiro was one of the largest and most infamous in all of Latin America. Now it’s a mangrove forest teeming with life.

Decommissioned 11 years ago, between 1970 and 2012 the dump, bordering Rio’s famous Guanabara Bay, received 80 million metric tonnes of trash from the area’s Gramacho neighborhood.

Now, a public-private partnership led by the Rio Municipal Cleaning Company has returned the area to nature, specifically mangroves, one of the most valuable of all ecosystems.

Planting 24 acres of mangroves at a time, today the forest stretches out more than 120 acres and is the largest mangrove area of the bay.

“Before, we polluted the bay and the rivers. Now, it’s the bay and the rivers that pollute us,” a lead official on the project told Africa News. “Today, the mangrove has completely recovered.”

[SubGod22]

Another potential way to use less oil and have less plastic waste in the world.

An Infinitely Recyclable Plastic Could Solve the World's Pollution Problem

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a new infinitely recyclable plastic that could be the answer to the world’s growing pollution problem.

They’ve engineered microbes to make the ingredients for a sustainable alternative to the 90% of plastics that can’t currently be recycled, many of which use finite, polluting petrochemicals as the building blocks.

The California research team has successfully engineered microbes to make biological alternatives for the starting ingredients in an infinitely recyclable plastic known as poly(diketoenamine), or PDK.

“This is the first time that bioproducts have been integrated to make a PDK that is predominantly bio-based,” said project leader Dr Brett Helms.

“And it’s the first time that you see a bio-advantage over using petrochemicals, both with respect to the material’s properties and the cost of producing it at scale.”

He explained that, unlike traditional plastics, PDK can be repeatedly deconstructed into “pristine” building blocks and formed into new products with no loss in quality.

PDKs initially used building blocks derived from petrochemicals, but those ingredients can be redesigned and produced with microbes instead.

They claim it's also cheaper and can be made to work at higher temps than oil based plastics. It will be interesting to see where this goes as they work towards 100% bio based plastic.