Energy

The interesting discussion I got into the other day about climate change 🌎

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The interesting discussion I got into the other day about climate change 🌎

The other day I was in an interesting discussion about climate change. It was kind of interesting in the sense that it came with a fundamental misunderstanding of how I see the problem and how it relate to the solutions towards it. Often people who are concerned about climate change, mostly see the problem in a collective sense, or one of personal guilt, rather then a personal risk — something to be prepared for and take steps to prevent oneself from becoming a victim of it in the future.

There is a popular trend in the liberal ideology to feel a lot of guilt about the world today. To be concerned about the hungry starving children in India, the poor people loosing their homes and all their belongings to wildlife or floods. People who have a lot less then they do, who ultimately fell into their misfortune by no fault of their own. Some people truly do have bad luck, but also some people bring upon their bad luck by making bad decisions and not being prepared for likely scenarios of the future.

Every other day when I open up Facebook and the Youtube, I see another one of these so-called sustainable investment opportunities and technologies. Endless advertisements for heat pumps, solar panels, renewable energy schemes (SHOUTING GIRL IN YOUTUBE AD: get solar power, now without panels on your roof !!!), electric cars, recycling, organic and vegan food, and endless investment opportunities in sustainable funds. Because if you have money, you can buy your way out of your guilt. Or so we are told by the advertisers, pushing endless amounts of plastic, aluminum, not-so-green chemicals, and electronics upon us. No need to give up the suburbanite way of living, as long as you pay for your sins. I often see these sustainable ads, and have to wonder what Martin Luther would have said about them?

All the evidence suggests that climate change is a big problem that is going to be solved by government action, not individual choices. Buying the right kind of car or properly cleaning out your salad dressing bottle and recycling it isn’t going to stop the planet from getting warmer. Investing in the latest green energy scheme might feel good, but there is no guarantee it will be profitable or even have much of an effect on the warming planet. Feel good actions are nice, but they aren’t really significant if they don’t lead to political change. There is an important place for political activism, and it’s wonderful that some people step up to do it — but political activism shouldn’t cover for personal failings.

My view on climate change is pretty darn simple — it’s going to happen and going to be real bad, especially if politicians fail to enact policies that are dramatic enough to arrest it. There is a lot of denial, especially in “greenie” circles that climate change won’t happen, especially if you buy the right products. Not the big jacked up truck I have, or the fact that I don’t clean out plastic bottles before chucking them in the fire. In this discussion I was having, it was pointed that if I move out to country, with my hobby farm, driving my big jacked-up truck back and forth to the city, my carbon footprint will increase, as will the impacts on the land by farming and living on it compared to my small apartment in city, where I can ride the bus to work, walk to a lot of destinations, and it’s a short drive to the store.

But if you believe that climate change is going to bad, and is almost inevitable as politicians don’t want to enact unpopular policies to slow it, then you have to take a different tack at the problem — namely, taking action to protect oneself from the worse impacts of climate change.

That means first and foremost saving and investing, so you have a liquid asset that can be a means to purchase necessities to survive when shit hits the fan, which is almost inevitable. It also means having land where I can produce a lot of my own food, and an off-grid system that isn’t dependent on a power grid that is likely to have a lot of problems in the future as storms become more severe, more areas flood and trees come down. Where power plants struggle with extreme heat and a wildly fluxing gulf stream. Where civil disorder becomes more common in cities, as people bake and traditional institutions fall. When driveway and roads washouts become more common, and need to be fixed by the farm tractor regularly.

It’s a scary world ahead, and I don’t think I can change it, but I can be prepared for what is going to happen. I can live with less, live simply, and reduce my impacts without buying into all these greenie crap that the marketers are constantly bombarding us with advertising on.

Bill banning coal tar-based sealants heads to Cuomo’s desk

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Bill banning coal tar-based sealants heads to Cuomo’s desk

State lawmakers this month advanced a bill that would enact a statewide ban on the use of coal tar-based sealant products commonly used for driveways and parking lots.?

At issue is the chemcials found in the sealcoats, including concentrations of?polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are considered toxic to aquatic life and lawmakers say are cancer-linked.?

The bill now goes to Gov. Andrew Cuomo's desk for his consideration before it becomes law. The measure has been sought for the last decade by Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal and environmental advocates.

Is Aluminum going to revolutionize energy storage? Or are its properties just seducing us? | Springer Nature Sustainability Community

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Is Aluminum going to revolutionize energy storage? Or are its properties just seducing us? | Springer Nature Sustainability Community

One of the things that was clear to me as we dug into the Al literature and recently funded projects is that nearly everyone (researchers, funding agencies, etc.) has been intoxicated by the promises of ultra-high capacity (2981 mAh/g) and energy density (4140 Wh/kg) for metallic Al. This is not new. Al has been explored as a battery electrode material for literally 170 years. A brief summary of that development is shown in Figure 1. However, no battery has come even close to meeting the capacity and energy density numbers above in a lab cell, let alone a practical one. And the pathway forward is quite unclear. 

In aqueous batteries, Al is either rapidly corroding or catastrophically passivated. In non-aqueous cells, such as those with ionic liquid electrolytes used in aluminum ion batteries (AIBs), the Al complexes in the electrolyte and the overall reaction does not give 3 electrons per Al atom that is assumed in the high numbers above, but actually gets only 3 electrons for every 8 aluminum atoms. Most of the extra Al is not solid, but dissolved in the electrolyte – meaning a lot more weight and volume than “theoretical”. In addition, these AIBs typically use graphite cathodes that need many C atoms per Al, adding mass. The combination of electrolyte mass and cathode mass (in addition to other practical things like packaging, etc.) significantly drives down the achievable energy density to values closer to 50 Wh/kg. And the true limit when all practical components are taken into account is only around 80 Wh/kg. Though these values may be competitive with Pb-acid batteries, they are not competitive with Li-ion batteries at all. And primary chemistries that exist based on aluminum air batteries (AABs) have also only been able to achieve practical energy densities well below 100 Wh/kg, far below the alkaline and LiFeS2 primaries that we can already buy at the drug store. Another aspect where Al-based batteries have failed so far is in their lifetime. State-of-the-art chemistries have very poor long-term operational and shelf stability.