just pathetic

The electric company wants it.
Consumers want the lower and reliable costs that come with it.
Less pollution overall.

Fewer greenhouse gases.

But yeah STFU you stupid entitled cow.

Not sure why utility company hadn't sued her for filing spurious challenges.

We've spent trillions on solar and wind in this century with the result the concentration of fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere, chiefly but not limited to carbon dioxide, is climbing at an accelerating pace.

The purpose of the reactionary effort to return to dependence of energy sources on the weather - abandoned beginning in the 19th century for a reason was to attack the only sustainable and scalable form of climate change energy that is available to humanity, nuclear energy.

Of course, I regard the wind and solar industries as enablers of fossil fuels, useless and rather dirty, so there's that.

I may not applaud everything about her - I have no use for guns whatsoever for instance - but her defense of wilderness from encroachment by energy developers who are clearly anything but "green," despite the dishonest rhetoric to the contrary recalls John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, which has, a century after Muir's death, morphed into pro-development club for distracted rich kids.

Good for her.

China’s CO2 emissions have essentially plateaued due to their investments in wind and solar.

https://www.iea.org/news/massive-global-growth-of-renewables-to-2030-is-set-to-match-entire-power-capacity-of-major-economies-today-moving-world-closer-to-tripling-goal

I do that. Every week.



Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory.

We began squandering trillion dollar sums of money on the useless, mass and land intensive, so called "renewable energy" scheme in the 21st century, and the amount of money being so squandered is increasing, particularly because this junk has a short life time.

Similarly the rate at which the accumulation of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide is also increasing. I modeled, here, in this space, a crude quadratic function to represent the roughly parabolic axis on which the sinusoidal annual function is imposed.

I did so here in 2022:

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

I update the constants of integration weekly using the latest data. (I formulated the crude equation, using low level high school calculus, in 2022.) It predicts - and there has been no inflection in the data - that we will hit 500 ppm in 2046, and in 2050 we'll be at 520 ppm. Apologists for the reactionary, useless, and fossil fuel dependent so called "renewable energy" scheme couldn't care less.

The tremendously failed so called "renewable energy" scheme was never about climate change. Advocates of this worthless crap that has left the planet in flames have zero interest, except for lip service, in the ongoing and accelerating collapse of the planetary atmosphere. Their goal, as the OP demonstrates was always to attack the only scalable, safe, and carbon free source of energy available to humanity, nuclear energy. At this they have succeeded, at an unimaginable cost to the future of humanity and all living things.

The most dangerous lies are those we tell ourselves.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

Have a pleasant week.

Shouldn't there be a noticeable dip or plateau in that data due to COVID? It was the largest decrease in worldwide energy usage in my lifetime for over a year.

Factories were shut down.
People were staying home
Airline traffic was reduced
Office building weren't being used
etc.

You can see it in total usage of Natural Gas in the US going from 2019 to present.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_cons_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm

Wouldn't that support the assumption that CO2 is being significantly added from other sources beside burring FF?

My guess is it's coming from thawing Artic regions releasing carbon. And the oceans and the Artic isn't getting cooler - they are getting warmer and not sure what's going to change that.

...let me guess, you want to say the data a Mauna Loa is wrong?

I fully understand that most "renewable energy will save us" types are uninterested entirely in the data connected with the collapse of the planetary atmosphere and thus have no experience with the data published there. I am well aware as well of the contempt for science, but as a person working in analytical chemistry, I can also say that the procedures utilized in compiling this data are available on the website and are beautiful to read, rigorous with a discussion, as analytical chemistry should have, of instrumentation, analytical blanks, accuracy, precision, and data processing. It will be a terrible event if the orange pedophile, his contempt for science exceeding even that of the antinukes around here, shuts the facility down.

It is not as if reducing, for a period of 50 to 60 weeks, slightly, energy demand, is going to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. However if one opens the page, one can also see the data for increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide for every year going back to 1960, which is not to say that antinukes are remotely interested in these numbers. In 2022 that increase was 1.83 ppm for the yearly average, 2021, 2.34 ppm and 2020 2.30 ppm, compared to 3.36 ppm for 2023, and 3.33 ppm for 2024. A bar graph is available at the site for the people who can't read very well.

2023 and 2024 set records for the worst and second worst years ever.

I seem to recall that Covid did not result in the shutdown of all the planet's power plants and gas stations. Did I miss that?

We are trillions of dollars into the solar/wind/electric car miracle advertised here as "the energy transition" that people carry on endlessly about.

In my opinion, "the energy transition" has less of a reality than, say, the Easter Bunny. The evidence for the Easter Bunny is that when my kids were small Easter baskets used to show up filled with candy, although I concede my wife may have had something to do with that. The evidence for an "energy transition" by contrast is not evident from the high quality scientific data available at Mauna Loa for concentrations of carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere.

Have a nice day.

let me guess, you want to say the data a Mauna Loa is wrong?

Not in the least. Actually I'm counting on it being accurate.

The data from Mauna Loa pretty much duplicates what scientist from Exxon predicted in the 70's if we built our energy grid based on burning large amounts of fossil fuels.

The point I am trying to make is that when the entire world basically shut down due to covid for the better part of a year the reduction in CO2 being produced should have been evident in the data from Mauna Loa. That it wasn't leads me to think CO2 is coming from other sources and I think it's from the thawing of the massive carbon sinks in the Artic.

We are very close to not being able to afford the insurance to cover the damage caused climate change storms. Another 10 years and the damage caused by hurricanes will be decades long scares on the affected areas. Florida was still cleaning up from Ian when Helene hit last year.

...my computer worked all through Covid. I was in contact with people all around the world at the time also during Covid. I remember an Italian client telling me that the US was where Italy was a few months before it shut down, but our conversation, such as it was, was on Zoom. During her "shut down" her lights and computer were on.

Those German antinukes burned coal through the whole thing, for example, and were happily buying gas from their Putin Pal who employed the "nuclear phase out" heroic ex-Chancellor of Germany, Gerhardt Schroeder, as a Gazprom executive, a job I believe he still holds.

Ukraine can thank Germany for its recent wonderful initiation of civic remodeling efforts, shades of 1941-1943.

Some time ago, I prepared a table from several editions of the World Energy Outlook in my files.

It's here:



The 589 EJ of energy used in 2020, dominated by the dangerous fossil fuels about which all of our antinukes couldn't care less, was vastly higher than the use in 2000, when people were running around predicting a solar and wind miracle "by 2020."

Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't look like solar and wind reached its goal of destroying the nuclear industry, and of course, there was no interest in phasing out fossil fuels, which have been growing in both in real numbers and "percent talk," all through this century, the minor blip in 2020 notwithstanding, not that the advocates of solar and wind ever gave a rat's ass about fossil fuels. They didn't in 2000, nor in 2010, nor in 2020, and they don't in 2025 either.

Even if there was the will and the resources to do so!

The fact is, renewables are the only hope to get carbon emissions on a downward trend and I’ll point out that the CO2 levels measured at Moana Loa would be significantly higher without the renewables we do have.

Adoption of disruptive technology takes time but renewables are being added to the global power mix at a faster rate than at any previous time and that rate is accelerating. China’s emissions have essentially plateaued, years earlier than expected, thanks to their investments in wind and solar.

Finally, wind and solar are nuclear power. They are produced by capturing energy from that giant fusion reactor at the heart of the solar system and the amount of energy from that source that reaches the Earth’s surface is several orders of magnitude larger than any other source of energy. It is ridiculous, on its face, to claim that the planet cannot be powered largely by renewables.

First of all, the graphic in the post to which your respond, shows that so called "renewable energy" has had no effect on fossil fuel waste accumulations in the atmosphere in this century but below we can talk about time and quantity and the grotesque failure of so called "renewable energy" to do a damned thing about the extreme global heating now underway below.

Again, it was never about fossil fuels. The purpose of the so called "renewable energy" fraud was to attack nuclear energy at which it succeeded, leading to the destruction the planetary atmosphere.

I track the data at the Mauna Loa CO₂ regularly, weekly in fact, and report on the rates of accumulation each spring when new records are set, for example, here:

New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 430.86 ppm

Here's some text from that post:

Since I am still keeping that data in a spreadsheet updated weekly, I can now report the updated comparators over the last ten years as of the last week posted, week 32 of 2025.



The running average of 10 year increases has now reached 26.34 ppm/10 years as of last week posted, week 32 of 2025. Ten years ago, week 32 of 2015, that average was 20.92 ppm/10 years. Clearly things are getting worse faster, because the unsustainable fossil fuel dependent land and material intensive reactionary so called "renewable energy" scheme does not now, never has, and never will be about attacking fossil fuels. Even if this were the intent - and it isn't - it has failed miserably. The sole purpose of enthusiasm for solar and wind enthusiasm is to attack the only sustainable expandable form of primary energy now available to humanity, nuclear energy, technology developed by the finest minds of the 20th century, and trashed by popular embrace of some of the worst thinking at the end of that century and well into this century, at least in this country, and in coal burning hellholes like Germany.

So don't tell me that the trillions of dollars squandered on solar and wind junk has anything to do with fossil fuels. The Germans didn't shut their coal plants. They embraced them. They shut their nuclear plants, thus killing people, since nuclear power plants save lives. As for the atmosphere, things are getting worse faster. I TRACK IT. Weekly. Why do I track it? Because I'm not interested in chanting. I'm interested in data. I care. I give a shit.

The purpose of the useless "renewable energy" scam has always been about specious attacks on nuclear energy, including the lie that nuclear power takes too long to build.

I note that the United States, with engineers who lived and operated largely with slide rules and computers less powerful than a modern Apple Watch, built more than 100 nuclear reactors in this country over a period of about 25 years while producing the cheapest electricity on the planet. Routinely, I am told that what has already happened is impossible, generally by people who I regard as arsonists complaining about forest fires. The willful destruction of US nuclear manufacturing capability has only served the gas industry, but this situation is not obtained in the rest of the world, as I will show below.

I am often taken to task on this website for reproducing this data page from the IEA while discounting the soothsaying on it. There are people here, who think if one produces data again and again, it then becomes untrue. They are, of course, antinukes, filled with dogma, and devoid of any reference to data.



IEA World Energy Outlook 2024
Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296.

The tables consist of two parts, one of which is data, 2023, the last year recorded - the 2025 WEO is published in November each year and will show data for 2024 - and then some soothsaying which antinukes credit, being as they are, faith based rather than reality based. I have been monitoring the WEO since the late 20th century, and have copies of every WEO in the 21st century in my files. This disabuses me of taking soothsaying seriously, although I do credit the data.

We have antinukes here who whine and cry about it, but the fact that combined, the useless solar and wind scam at a cost of trillions, produced combined 16 Exajoules of energy (despite the dishonest practice of the renewable energy hype squad to lie by posting units of power for unreliable systems like fossil fuel dependent solar and wind junk, all of which will be landfill and need replacement before today's newborns finish college, if there are colleges to finish). Solar and wind produced these paltry sums on a planet where humanity consumed 642 Exajoules of energy in 2023, this in an atmosphere of extreme if insipid cheering. The nuclear industry, by contrast, produced 30 Exajoules of energy in an atmosphere of insipid vituperation, the immoral claim that if anyone anywhere can even imagine someone dying from radiation exposure, it's then OK for millions of people to die each year, at a rate close to 20,000 people per day, from fossil fuel waste, aka, "air pollution" not even counting the effects of extreme global heating.

The rest of the world really doesn't give a rat's ass about antinukes in the United States. China has built 58 nuclear reactors in this century and now has 33 under construction. They are about to pass France as the world's 2nd largest producer of nuclear energy, probably in this year, and will pass the United States, still the world's largest producer of nuclear energy because of stuff built mostly 40 years ago, in the next few years. Their reactors produced in their country alone, 1.85 EJ of electricity, which corresponds if we assume that the reactors are Rankine devices, as most reactors (with some exceptions in China and elsewhere) corresponds to 4.6 EJ of primary energy at 33% thermodynamic efficiency. Note that unlike the solar and wind junk, one doesn't need to build redundant gas or coal plants to back them up. They run at some of the highest capacity utilization in the world.

If solar and wind are so cheap, why is everyone still building gas and coal plants?

The reactors in China will still be saving human lives when every solar and wind device on this planet will have been landfill for half a century.

I really am disinterested in slogans, particularly slogans distracted from and in conflict with data.

We have lost the ability to construct nuclear power plants because of intellectual and moral weakness, and because we're OK with dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste into the planetary atmosphere, where it kills it. We just love dangerous natural gas. We claim it's "cheap" because we ignore the unimaginable cost of destruction of the planetary atmosphere.

I hate to say it, but the United States is now at least 20 years behind China in an engineering infrastructure to build nuclear power plants, and in fact, behind - I really, really, really, hate to say it - Russia. Rosatom is a major exporter of nuclear power plants and is building them all over the world. Most of the 70 reactors now under construction around the world that are not in China are Rosatom products. The latest VVER is an impressive device.

Thanks for sharing the usual chant with me. I'm not impressed to be honest, but I'm certainly prepared to address it, since I've been dealing with this nonsensical claim for quite some time. Uncritical belief in this claim, in my view, has left the planet in flames.

Have a nice evening.

You just posted the equivalent of a Gish Gallop to deflect from it. Nuclear (fission) power is not the answer for climate change and you know that damn well. You would prefer to focus on the technologies that are slowing and will reverse the rate of emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. And China is leading the way.

As I said, we already have a giant fusion reactor to extract power from that will last for at least a billion years before it boils the oceans (longer with engineering to move the Earth’s orbit further out). It’s just insane not to take advantage of that. The Earth receives more solar energy at the surface in a day than humanity uses in a year. Apparently you would prefer to just ignore that.

...antinukes are very, very, very bad at critical thinking, particularly when it comes to comprehending numbers.

I note that I know a great deal about nuclear energy; I doubt there are many people on this website who know as much about the subject as I do, as I have been following nuclear engineering issues in the primary scientific literature for about 40 years, ever since Chernobyl blew up.

Antinukes are not qualified to tell me what I do and do not know. I regard them as poor thinkers, if you must know, extremely uneducated about environmental issues.

I stand by my remarks, whether or not they go over anyone's head.

Most of these wind projects are useless litter that will do nothing in the long run to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gasses humans dump into earth's atmosphere.

We're all against littering, aren't we?

I don't get any warm fuzzies when I see these fossil fuel green-washing machines littering formerly pristine landscapes and seascapes. I've done the math.

yeah, OK

I get the skepticism about conservative “concern”. The right helped delay action on climate change and their credibility is obviously suspect. I can’t even remember when it became too obvious for them to even stop insisting that it’s a hoax.

But green growth has its issues. It is a strategy by industrial groups who don’t like sustainability, but want continuous growth on a finite planet.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/01/oil-companies-lithium-mining-rural-communities/

That’s Mother Jones and Grist so they aren’t at all against green energy.

The climate scientist quoted in that article sounds more cautious than the area resident. So we’ll see..
The GOP has acted with such bad faith on all environmental issues including climate change that it can tend to obscure a second layer of conflict between people truly acting in good faith to protect the environment and or labor rights (these guys tend to not care about either-they think child labor is awesome) and those who are just exploiting greenwashing.

As I said it’s complicated. The hideousness of the GOP and social media/media in general have made processing of grey areas harder overall in the public mind.

Because of the constant hammering by Cato/Koch and libertarian think tanks, on the left we have a some (perfectly legit) wariness when people are “just askin questions”.
But it is some of the worst players and these guys are the kind to saddle us with a new crisis..they are truly depraved, amoral and mercenary. They bear watching.

The green transition would need to factor in more than green growth imo, but it doesn’t seem like industry will allow that.. we really need fewer people overall. And a transition to a slower, less consumption centred lifestyle, or it seems like it will be forced on us by theses guys running the show anyway. I feel like every dystopian scifi from Soylent Green to Elysium is fine by them.

It was ridiculous to not have family planning be a part of public health policy when infant mortality rates dropped. Especially given the religiosity on every corner of the planet (which by default promotes that quiverful stuff over any discussion of family planning). It is not a decision to take lightly and that’s more so now than ever as young people and children face an even more uncertain future than we did. Migration, reproduction, all way more complicated these days.

Cato and Koch also love that - cheap labor and consumption. And they won’t be there when Trump carts people off to El Salvador.



Edit: As the article notes, the Biden admin was sensitive to the need for regulation and protection of the environment and the needs of the communities involved. But under Trump, it would be full on pro creepy corporate interests and fuck the environment and the people.
We’ll see..

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127184880

I spend a lot of time watching the behavior of the electric grid in California and calculating the actual performance of solar electric systems.

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

As some kind of radical environmentalist I regularly oppose all solar development on previously undeveloped lands, especially on the California desert.

I don't oppose solar development on land that's already been trashed by humans -- rooftops, parking lots, etc.

Offshore wind projects are simply vile, almost as bad as offshore gas and oil projects.

Yeah, Trump opposes these wind projects too, but not for the same reasons I do. Clearly Trump doesn't understand that these projects will only prolong our dependence on fossil fuels and cause further environmental destruction, otherwise he might support them.

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/08/14/eastern-oregon-la-grande-irene-gilbert-environment-wind-solar-nuclear-projects/

Another comment I have is that new HVAC lines heavily promoted for wind power are rarely used to transmit wind power exclusively. They can be also be used to transmit cheap but filthy coal or gas power .

( I block bsky.app just as I block the site formerly known as twitter. )