To What Extent Are We Using Science for Sustainable Development?

[NNadir]

I came across this analytical opinion piece in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology:

To What Extent Are We Using Science for Sustainable Development? Susan Schneegans and Tiffany R. A. Straza Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (44), 16719-16727

The paper is part a bibliographic analysis.

It contains this trenchant remark:

The study found that a much larger volume of scientific publications was documenting environmental decline than promoting sustainable solutions. For instance, studies analyzing the local impact of climate-related hazards and disasters grew faster between 2011 and 2019 than studies on local disaster risk reduction strategies or new technology to protect from climate-related hazards (Figure 2). Scientific publications documenting floating plastic in the ocean grew faster than research into ecological alternatives to plastics (Figure 2).

Except for tiresome blather about solar and wind energy (and worse, hydrogen), none of which has proved useful despite half a century of chanting, chanting now reaching a level equivalent to saying the rosary to cure cancer, it almost it feels like what goes on at DU to a large extent.

The problem extends way beyond DU of course, into the greater culture, including the culture of science apparently.

If we are to save anything left to save, and restore what can be restored, we need to change our focus.

[Woodwizard]

1. Tiresome blather about solar and wind?

It works and is growing, have had solar since 2014 it first system installed was 9KW it was put on my shop roof did 80 percent of our electric and paid for itself in 7 years. This year I added another 4.6KW which should make 100 percent and it runs our heat pumps for fossil free heating and cooling. Cost of components has dropped a lot in the last decade. Just stay away from solar giants like Sunrun.

If every house that has a viable space for solar power needs from central plants would be greatly reduced during peak demand.

So how does it not prove useful?

Are there other problems to be solved of course, solar and wind are a start. Especially in developing nations without much of an established grid.

[NNadir]

2. Yeah, tiresome blather.

I follow the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide weekly from the Mauna Loa observatory. I frequently report on this in this space. I also have reported oodles of times on the trillions of dollars squandered on solar and wind in this century. I also report on the data in units of energy each year on the findings of the IEA on energy produced by sources. Solar and wind energy, which are dependent on access to dangerous fossil fuels, are growing slower than fossil fuels are.

The reactionary "renewables will save us" scheme has not worked, is not working, and won't work to address climate change.

We can lie to each other and lie to ourselves, but numbers don't lie.

[Woodwizard]

3. Ok, you go wring your hands in defeat.

I will carry on.

So what is your solution since solar does not work.

By the way my system has produced over 80,000 KWH of electricity since 2014 are you really going to tell me it used more fossil fuel to create my system of 36 solar panels wire conduit and a string inverter than it has produced?

Show me the math.

I see this stuff on FB all the time, did not expect it here.

[NNadir]

4. My journal in this space is filled with references to the primary scientific...

...literature including data and mathematics.

I don't spend my time parroting wishful thinking dogma.

The fucking planet was on fire during the Northern Hemisphere summer this year.

I don't actually give a rat's ass about any particular person's trivial bourgeois solar toys. I've been hearing all about this junk for decades here, but the reality is written in the planetary atmosphere.

The solar industry is a failure if the goal is to address climate change. That was however hardly the goal driving this reactionary fantasy. The goal was to attack the last best hope of humanity, nuclear energy.

[Woodwizard]

5. Ahh gotcha nuclear the only solution........

[Woodwizard]

6. One thing I would like to adress

This right here. "I don't actually give a rat's ass about any particular person's trivial bourgeois solar toys."

I am not a rich man by any account I have spent my life concerned about the environment and alternative energy.

Attitudes like yours just add to the crap pile of plain misinformation.

If every house was doing what I decided to spend my hard earned money on we would be in a better place. Trivial solar toys? I gave you my numbers how many KWH's a year do you consume?

I really don't give a rats ass about people like you that just whine and do nothing to fix the issue.

[NNadir]

7. Well, it's very cute, but I'm interested in numbers that matter, again, not numbers associated with toys.

Now perhaps there are people here who think they care about the environment, but disregard data, from say, the International Energy Agency as "misinformation."

Every year the International Energy Agency publishes the World Energy Outlook (WEO) and I generally refer to each issue throughout the year.

My most recent entry on this topic, referring to the 2023 WEO released just two weeks ago is here:

The 2023 World Energy Outlook Has Been Released. 632 EJ, 15 EJ from Solar and Wind in 2022.

Excerpted:

If you want to know why the planet was on fire in the Northern Hemisphere Summer This Year, it may be useful to look at the following table, Table A.1a on Page 264 of the 2023 World Energy Outlook published by the International Energy Agency (IEA).



...

...Solar and wind combined grew as fast as coal, by three Exajoules, except that combined solar and wind produced 15 Exajoules in 2022, whereas coal use rose to 170 Exajoules. In "percent talk," so often utilized to obscure the uselessness of the solar and wind industry in addressing climate change, coal produced 1133% as much primary energy as solar and wind.

The consumption of petroleum rose by 5 Exajoules from 2021 to 2022 to 187 Exajoules, 167% as fast as solar and wind in "percent talk."

Overall, world energy demand rose from 624 Exajoules to 632 Exajoules, by 8 Exajoules if one has not joined Greenpeace and can thus do simple math. In "percent talk," world energy demand grew 267% faster than solar and wind...

Now if one is so busy patting one's self on the back for owning a solar array - which will be electronic waste for which future generations will have to deal in less than 25 years - for producing 80,000 kWh of unreliable electricity over a period of 9 years one may not be paying much attention to the world beyond.

80,000 kWh over 9 years works out to 288 billion joules, or 32 billion joules per year. Humanity was consuming, according to the WEO which may be represented as "misinformation" by anyone embracing delusional dogma, in 2022, 632 Exajoules of energy, where the Exa prefix refers to 10¹⁸, or one billion billions. Thus 32 billion Joules (32GJ) represents a fraction equal to 0.000000032 of the world energy supply. It follows, even if we ignore the consequences of the 2nd law of thermodynamics as battery assholes do all the time to deal with the issue of "night," that we'd "only" need close to 20 billion solar set ups like the one described in this thread to meet the world energy supply.

I also track, regularly the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide and its concentrations in the planetary atmosphere.

A recent, among many posts in my journal here is this one:

New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record (Provisional) Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 424.63 ppm.

An excerpt:

Here is the latest provisional data from the Observatory, again subject to revision resulting from our continual policy of doing nothing to address climate change:

Week beginning on May 28, 2023: 424.63 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 421.71 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 399.94 ppm
Last updated: June 03, 2023

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

Whenever I say "doing nothing," I can surely expect all kinds of excuses, tortured prevarications, and soothsaying from aficionados of the failed, and yes, useless, solar and wind industries and the even more stupid and far more dangerous ideas of storing energy (with the appalling hydrogen and battery nonsense) when we do not have clean primary energy. These are to be expected. Popular lies always die with difficulty, particularly when they take on cult status.

If you want to argue that mining and land use changes with associated with the useless the solar and wind industries are "doing something," please be assured there is a zero probability that I will buy it. You are of course, entitled to believe whatever you wish, but there's a 100% probability that I won't buy it.

At the close of the 20th century, a 52 week running average of comparators with data of that obtained in the same week 10 years earlier was 15.26 ppm/10 years. As of this week the same figure is 24.25 ppm/10 years.

Things are getting worse faster.

Whatever it is we think we're doing to address the waste crisis associated with the use of dangerous fossil fuels, it clearly isn't working.

In my experience, as a scientist, I am acutely aware that people who refuse to have their lazy dogma challenged refer to facts as "misinformation." We saw it a great deal during the Covid crisis, but actually, in terms of consequences, energy dogma is much worse, because climate change is killing the future for all coming generations and Covid only killed a few million people.

As it happens, while all our "solar will save us" heroes spend time patting themselves on the back for their nobility, 19,000 people die every day from air pollution while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come. Covid never killed as many as 19,000 people in a single day, even on its worst day.

Ref: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).

Excerpt from the reference:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

Now over the years here, 21 of them as of later this month, I've heard lots of bull from people who claim to care about the environment but not so much as to look in any detail at it. It's all handwaving and chanting with these types.

Since the week I joined DU, the concentration of the dangerous and deadly fossil fuel waste, as of this week, has risen by 46.48 ppm. In May of 2024, assuming I'm still alive, which I may not be, we will pass the 50 ppm mark in my tenure.

All the while people have been hyping solar and wind energy, which remains trivial, useless, and unsustainable, doing nothing more than to entrench the use of dangerous fossil fuels, about which solar and wind advocates couldn't care less.

As for whining about "wringing hands in defeat," I am very proud of the fact that I raised a son who is working on a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering.

He's certainly not sitting on his ass repeating self congratulatory pablum about "doing something" which in fact amounts to doing nothing and worse, cheering for doing nothing.

He and his colleagues consider that they are doing what can be done to save what is left to save and restore that which can be restored.

If one cares about the environment for real one will know what's going on. One get's off one's ass and looks into the matter, the numbers that matter, not just some trivial numbers in some personal provincial setting, but in the world at large.

The planet now burns in summers. People die in the streets from extreme heat and indoors when the air conditioning fails. Vast ecosystems are collapsing. Extreme weather rips all around the world The glaciers on which billions of people depend for their water supply are disappearing.

In general I encounter people all the time who claim to care, but actually haven't even a trace of knowledge about what is happening.

It is, indeed, regrettable how many there are. They, like the "solar and wind will save us" bullshit they hand out are what I said they are in the OP, tiresome.

Have a wonderful day tomorrow.

[Woodwizard]

8. At this point, I dont GAF what you put up.

Rude and obnoxious condescending people I know enough of to not deal with them online

The one track solution and disdain for anything else is all I need to know.

Your dismissive attitude of solar just shows the ignorance of how inexpensive and how much more efficient they have become in just the last 5 years.

Capitalism is holding solar back the big players have come in with loans and leases charging 7 times what the components cost. I installed my own grid tie second system it cost me 4 grand for 4600 watts of panels and inverter and a week on the remainder of my shop roof it will have paid for itself in 4 years. We are now at 100 percent power production in Nov in the NY Catskills on sunny days.

I never said solar was the panacea you dismissed it out of hand.

If we started building nuke plants right now we would not have them online for 15 years and really do we want to put them all over the world? That would just be great! Lets just give every country nuclear material that will work out just fine....

But really, I don't give a Rat's ass.

[NNadir]

9. Usually denial, coupled with defense of the indefensible. is accompanied with platitudes.

If one really doesn't care about what I say, the "ignore" button at DU works quite well. I can be ignored.

If however, one doesn't "GAF" what I say about energy and the real world data I present, I am free to interpret this as not "GAF" about anything.

Nevertheless not "GAF", it's not clear that what I said is actually being ignored, since it generated a response, the same tiresome platitude that has been flying around here about how solar energy is becoming "cheap."

This line of bull has been flying around here for the last 21 years too.

Cheap for whom? For the future generations that will have to clean up the electronic waste in an environment with a destroyed atmosphere because the solar fantasy did nothing, zero, nada to address climate change?

I note that advocates for solar and wind want to talk about money all the time, and then they pretend that the problem with their rickety crap is "capitalism."

Then, the citing of numbers, in this case, the number of Exajoules produced by energy sources is sometimes called "ignorance."

Really?

As for the mindless bullshit about how long it takes to nuclear plants, I note that the United States once built - with 1960's and 1970's technology more than 100 nuclear reactors while providing the cheapest electricity in the whole world. Many of those reactors still operate.

And now we hear that what has already happened is impossible.

The allegedly "quick to build" solar crap on the entire planet produced. this after half a century of mindless cheering, just 7 Exajoules of energy in 2022. It has never come close to generating the roughly 30 Exajoules of energy that nuclear energy has been producing for about 30 years in an atmosphere of criticism and vituperation by people who show a clear inability to engage in the simple critical thinking that compares two numbers, in this case 30 and 7.

Since it took 50 years of cheering to get the useless solar industry to 7 Exajoules, one can suppose that it will take 200 years of cheering for it to get to 30 Exajoules, although 2021 to 2022 set an all time record for increases in the use of solar junk, 2 Exajoules worth on a planet consuming 632 Exajoules per year and rising.

To repeat, people lie, to each other and to themselves, but numbers don't lie.

Or are we here to deny that 30 is bigger than 7?

As for whether I want nuclear plants all over the world, of course I do. I give a shit about humanity based on something called "reality."

I am thrilled, as I've noted at DU to see Africa looking to get into the game, for example. The sooner the better. No one sensible or decent should want the Africans to climb out of poverty as the Indians and Chinese have done, with coal.

There already are nuclear plants all over the world, and they have demonstrated a remarkable ability to save human lives, as noted in a much cited scientific paper by the famous climate scientist Jim Hansen working with a colleague:

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)

My son is working on projects involving printing nuclear reactor cores.

When the stupid pills being sold by antinukes and widely swallowed by people who can't think too well to start wear off, my son and his colleagues will work to save what is left to save, and hopefully create enough infrastructure to clean up the awful mess left by the "solar will save us" types in their tiresome and frankly toxic indifference to numbers entail, building reactors quickly and efficiently to address the emergency generated by an inability to do the numbers.

As for solar, the multitrillion dollar solar energy industry is useless, has been useless, and always will be useless if the goal is to address climate change.

Source: Source: UNEP/Bloomberg: Global Trends in Renewable Energy.

If one manually enters the figures in the bar graph in figure 8 to see how much money we've thrown at this destructive affectation since 2004 (up to 2019): It works out to 3.2633 trillion dollars.

This money has been squandered for no result in changes in the use of dangerous fossil fuels and correspondingly, no result in stopping the acceleration of the rate of climate change.

But it's "cheap?" For whom exactly?

As for any remarks about my personality, I really, really, really don't care what people think about me. I'll be dead soon enough.
Nonetheless, in my last years, I do enjoy the opportunities to expose bad thinking for what it is.

If anyone wants to know, bad and dangerous thinking, particularly around the unnecessary driving of climate change and the willful destruction of the planetary atmosphere, makes me angry.

I note that if anyone here doesn't like me - and many people don't - DU has a wonderful ignore feature. It can be activated by calling up my profile page and clicking on "ignore." By using it, one can avoid hearing any truths from me that one doesn't want to hear.

If, on the other hand, anyone wants to be sure, by posting a response to what I say, that I know that they don't like me, I reserve the right respond, depending on my mood.

Have a wonderful Friday tomorrow.