Wrong solution of the week. Proof of parking to buy a car?

Don't have parking space? Can't buy car: Centre mulls new norms - Times of India: "NEW DELHI: You may not be allowed to register your new car or any other vehicle unless you produce proof that you have adequate parking space for it, according to a rule that the Centre is looking at introducing in future."

They don't care what kind of bureaucratic nightmare they create. Governments will do anything but make buses free all the time. The oil industry won't let them do that, so they come up with the craziest, stupidest schemes.

World Bank’s forest protection plan a nine-year scam

Global Justice Ecology Project: "Rainforest Foundation UK calculates that almost two-thirds of the money spent under the FCPF since 2009 has gone on the World Bank’s own administration, consulting expenses and transaction costs.
Simon Counsell, Executive Director of the Rainforest Foundation UK told Bistandsaktuelt that all this money, “has not saved a single hectare of forest or prevented a single gram of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere”."

At #COP22, 8 Countries Commit To Expand EVs In Government Fleets

insideevs : "Eight countries, which make up the largest EV markets, declared from the Marrakech Climate Change Conference (COP22) they would increase the share of electric vehicles found in their government’s fleets."

More proof that the big power plan for #climate is a hoax. Most people know that switching to electric vehicles has no impact on emissions and just encourages more growth.

Fossil-fuel industry still pushing #CCS and other laughable "solutions"

Forest advocates say zero-carbon goals too reliant on unrealistic tech: "The problem: the emissions reduction goals of international energy companies in Marrakesh appear to be hinged on unrealistic means. These companies keep promoting new technologies to enable the continued burning of fossil fuels and carbon-based energy, one being “bioenergy carbon capture and storage,” or BECCS. In this scenario, huge forests would be grown primarily to be burned as biomass with the carbon released from this energy production theoretically captured and stored.

Critics here argue that the technology is not only land-use intensive, but also that carbon capture is costly and largely unproven. Other forms of geoengineering that would allow further fossil fuel use, like space deployed sun shades, are generally deemed by climate scientists as equally unworkable, if not laughable."

Methane emissions from hydropower have been undercounted

Reservoirs are a major source of global greenhouse gases, scientists say - The Washington Post: "The research, said Deemer, complicates the idea that hydropower is a carbon-neutral source of energy, although she stresses that the authors aren’t saying that they’re against using large bodies of water to generate energy through dams. Rather, they’re arguing that the greenhouse gas calculus has to be included in evaluating such projects.

This problem is not an entirely new one: A major 2000 study in BioScience raised this issue, and the International Hydropower Association on its website acknowledges that “While hydropower is a very low-carbon technology, it is known that some reservoirs in certain conditions can release quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas. Reservoirs can also, in other circumstances, act as carbon sinks.”"

Why nation-by-nation carbon emission stats are misleading

Reporting Climate Science: "It should also be noted that imports and exports of energy products have an impact on CO2 emissions in the country where fossil fuels are burned: for example if coal is imported this leads to an increase in emissions, while if electricity is imported, it has no direct effect on emissions in the importing country, as these would be reported in the exporting country where it is produced."

Carbon capture and storage a costly, risky distraction

Greenpeace International: "To actually deliver reductions, the emissions captured and injected must stay underground permanently. If leaked back into the atmosphere, they would only make climate change worse and threaten people and animals."

Ten Reasons Intermittent Renewables (Wind and Solar PV) are a Problem

Our Finite World: "what happens to world CO2 emissions when we ramp up intermittent renewables? As far as I can tell, it tends to raise CO2 emissions. One way this happens is by ramping up China’s economy, through the additional business it generates in the making of wind turbines, solar panels, and the mining of rare earth minerals used in these devices. The benefit China gets from its renewable sales is leveraged several times, as it allows the country to build new homes, roads, and schools, and businesses to service the new manufacturing. In China, the vast majority of manufacturing is with coal."

The dark side of renewable energy

Eco-Business: "Rare earth metals, hard-to-find materials, with unfamiliar names such as lanthanum, neodymium and europium, are used in wind and solar energy projects, but dwindling supplies could hinder a roll-out of low carbon technologies and slow China’s shift away from coal power.

These compounds, which are highly toxic when mined and processed, also take a heavy environmental toll on soil and water, posing a conundrum for policymakers in China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of rare earths.   "

These Clean Energy Projects Pollute More Than Coal Power Plants

Bloomberg: "Gurmat, a developer based in Ankara, is studying how to inject the CO2 it produces back into the ground, according to Ali Karaduman, the company’s general manager. It’s also considering selling the gas to greenhouses, which can use it to stimulate plant growth. All the CO2 from its five plants is now released into the atmosphere."

Turning air into stone? Seriously? More magical thinking

The Economist: "Whether CarbFix-like schemes will work at the scale required for fossil-fuel power stations remains to be seen. In these, the main additional pollutant is sulphur dioxide, which has different chemical characteristics from hydrogen sulphide. Scrubbing may therefore still be needed. Another constraint is the supply of basalt. Though this rock is common, it is found predominantly on the ocean floor. Indeed, geologically speaking, Iceland itself is a piece of ocean floor; it just happens to be above sea level. There are some large basaltic regions on dry land, but they are not necessarily in convenient places.
Nevertheless, if the will were there, pipelines from industrial areas could be built to carry exhaust gases to this basalt. It has not, after all, proved hard to do the reverse—carrying natural gas by pipeline whence it is found to where it is used. It is just a question of devising suitable sticks and carrots to assist the process. How much those sticks and carrots would cost is crucial. But Dr Matter’s proof of the principle of chemical sequestration in rock suggests it would be worth finding out."

Oh my. More magical thinking. From a magazine that can tell you current-account balances all over the world, but does not know how to factor these costs into the net-energy of fossil fuels. Clean-up costs are rarely included in net-energy figures. In many cases these costs take the net-energy below zero.
That brings up the question, why would humans use energy that costs more than it yields? Answer, because costs can be deferred by allowing carbon emissions or postponed by increasing debt. What will be the result? The bill is coming due now.

Solar panel roads? Seriously? Think again.

TreeHugger: "Solar Roadways is engineering PV panels to withstand 40-ton vehicles going 80 miles an hour over them day and night for decades. How much more does it cost to make solar panels-already a bit pricey-totally indestructible? We're guessing a lot. And this all so we can avoid putting them someplace sensible, like on all those empty rooftops in America's sunnier climes, where cars and trucks don't drive and where there also happens to be an existing electrical grid for them to hook into.

We do expect a few angry comments about how we're misguided and don't really get the idea. But then again, the company has gotten lots of friendly press pick-up and a big pile of tax dollars for a totally batshit crazy plan, so we figure they've earned a bit of ribbing ."

It's not the type of cars that is annoying it's any car... @carfreecities

The Washington Post: "Battery-powered and driverless cars do not affect this situation to any great degree. They still demand too much street space for their movement and use too much energy. The movement of significant numbers of cars through the streets will always damage streets’ social use, regardless of how quiet and safe the cars may be. Only when people can stop in the middle of the street to talk without fearing what may be bearing down on them will we have fully restored the social function of streets."

New study: fully automating self-driving cars could actually be worse for carbon emissions

Vox: "Right now, driving involves a cost, in time, attention, and stress. Automation could reduce or eliminate that cost, leaving "drivers" free to do whatever they want. When the cost of a service declines, demand rises (this is known as the "rebound effect")."



'via Blog this'

Capitalism's crazy schemes to reduce CO2. They will try anything but #freetransit and #degrowth

The suddenly urgent quest to remove carbon dioxide from the air - The Washington Post: "“If you want to balance the books at this point, I don’t think you have a choice but to pull CO2 back that has already made it out,” Lackner said. “Or is about to make it out, because we are not overnight shutting down all the coal plants.”

But that turns out to be very hard to do. There are a wide variety of ideas for getting carbon out of the air — from little boxes like Lackner’s to specialized power plants that burn renewable biomass and stow the carbon away. But they all have costs and downsides — and they’re all part of a race to see whether any such technology can really be big enough, and cheap enough, to make a difference."

The coming nuclear energy crunch

@NafeezAhmed - Guardian: "As the British and American governments signal their renewed commitments to nuclear power as a clean, abundant source of energy that can fuel high growth economies, a new scientific study of worldwide uranium production warns of an imminent supply gap that will result in spiraling fuel costs in the next decades."