A ban on new petrol or diesel vehicles by 2030 and $16 billion for a British ‘green new deal is the latest proposal from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party. Did Johnson just become Prime Minister Pander Bear? If you follow the science, Bill Whittle says, the “green industrial revolution” proposal would elicit laughter.
Background Resource:
Boris Johnson Says Britain Needs Its Own Green New Deal
[Karla Adam, The Washington Post, November 18, 2020]
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Bill Whittle Network · Prime Minister Pander Bear: Boris Backs Petrol Car Ban, Billions for British ‘Green New Deal’
41 replies on “Prime Minister Pander Bear: Boris Backs Petrol Car Ban, Billions for British ‘Green New Deal’”
(written at the time the episode was fresh)
This episode had an unusual amount of inaccuracies. 🙁 It’s not a good thing to just recall all the stock talking points not bothering with the context. Scott’s intro did include nuclear in the Boris plans, actually started with it. Along with off-shore wind farms that are the (almost singular) good case for wind. Sending the env money to these makes perfect sense. And if not, you need to actually point out why instead of shooting the points that apply to most of the other nonsense cases.
On hydrogen you sounded the concern about where we will get it — it’s NOT the main problem here. It would be possible to run those solar/wind plants in remote locations just creating H2. But we have no practical storage and usage solutions. The molecule is very small and tends to seep through materials. And getting out in the air creates highly explosive mixture.
On Chernobyl you mentioned the other reactions are still running. They aren’t for some 20 years by now. (Sure they could if the contamination from the 4th were not in the way.)
Please be less emotional and more factual, it would be a shame creating distrust with issues easy to spot.
BBC overnight had a bit about windmills (producing energy at inappropriate or useless times) that use their production to make hydrogen–a kind of storage instead of batteries. Sounds plausible.
Power Hungry by Robert Bryce is a great easily read and understood resource on this stuff
If we had enough energy, we could theoretically take water and carbon dioxide from the air and make hydrocarbons, which we burn, which produces water and carbon dioxide. Since solar and wind right now won’t cut it, let’s go go something more futuristic: matter antimatter reactions😉
We got this.
I laughed out loud at that. Thanks.
Nice! It’s the freakin’ physics of buttered-cat-bread.
Speaking of impossible tasks, I was away for two weeks without internet access, plus a few more days for computer repairs, so I will never catch up with all of the past BWDC output from 11/1/20 to 11/19/20.
With that in mind, if you all have suggestions for those few episodes of BWN and RA that might still most merit a revisit even after this passage of time, I welcome your recommendations. Thanks in advance.
It simply comes down to cost. Wind and solar are decreasing in price / increasing in output (perovskites seem interesting) at a very fast rate and has already reached a point where coal and gas plants simply are not fiscally viable, and even nuclear is struggling when you factor in the cleanup and decommissioning (yes, even my favourite Thorium).
Likewise bulk battery storage, examples already rolling out such as the Hornsdale battery in South Australia , are also decreasing in price and increasing in output as well as providing millisecond response times for grid balancing. The Hornsdale one is already clearly profitable.
I will agree on the issue with landfilling turbine blades though.
Infrastructure costs (and safety) for hydrogen make it unlikely for anything smaller than a train and most likely to see action on cargo ships. Recent advances in lithium batteries to roll out over the next 3 years will see a 50% output increase, a 50% cost decrease and a nearly 80% reduction in manufacturing cost, with American based mining now viable under new processes.
Tesla has already essentially proven the supremacy of their vehicles and I expect a sea-change in the way we utilise transportation over the next 5 to 10 years (possibly quicker) whether you like it or not.
I for one am not particularly disappointed to see our dependence on foreign powers for gas supply minimised, pollution to be curbed, safety improved in passenger vehicles and jobs replaced by those in cleaner tech.
We are the party of engineers and rockets and innovation. We’re interested in better, cheaper, faster, more awesome. We don’t need to frown at technological advances just because some eco-hippy has stolen the dialogue for their own nefarious purposes (like the ludicrous carbon credits).
The issue here is that the left has somehow managed to claim the fast cars, futuristic tech, engineering etc as their own. I’m sorry Mr Obama, but you didn’t build that. It was entrepreneurial engineering by people operating within a free market (for the most part) under conservative principles in our capitalistic paradigm that got us here.
It’s about time we stopped wittering on about green eco nonsense or lefty new deals and took back the future of tomorrow to where it belongs, on the right.
The wind turbine people drive me crazy. NYC uses 11,000MW-hr per day. Siemens GAMESA’s largest offshore turbine is 14MW. Using a typical 3x factor (since the wind doesn’t always blow and sometimes blows too hard off shore) means you would need 100 of the largest turbines for one big city. What would that do to the shipping lanes and the fishing lanes?
Not to mention they never talk about getting rid of the graphite blades after 20 years. Can’t recycle them, you just bury them in a land fill. All 100m of them.
Ridiculous!!
The method used to produce most hydrogen is to fracture it from petroleum because it’s the most cost effective way to do it. Gaseous hydrogen is nasty stuff to burn in an internal combustion engine, but works very well in a fuel cell to produce electricity. Hydro dams are the cheapest and cleanest way to produce electricity, but right now produce about 10% of the demand if I recall the statistic correctly.Our electric grid is stretched to the limit right now and can barely meet the demand without many electric cars on the road at present.
I have done research about switching cars to compressed natural gas and it can be done by a qualified technician, but must be inspected regularly to ensure it is operating safely and is expensive to install. The only place you can get it refueled is a local bus company that uses CNG and is willing to sell it to the public. Because it is only compressed and not liquified, the tanks must be refilled often and I’m told there isn’t much cost savings either.
A couple of days ago, I saw a picture on Gab.com that had a gas powered van towing a diesel generator that was recharging an electric car! Kind of counter-intuitive, don’t you think?
Don’t forget that Hydro buries the environment of a lot of little creatures and the environmentalist whack-o’s don’t like hydro.
The two main issues with hydrogen for cars (safety and storage difficulties aside) is that 1. it’s simply less efficient to burn fuel at a small scale to produce electricity local to the vehicle, that then powers the wheels, rather than to simply have a power station do it at massive efficiencies of scale and charge the car up to use the power direct [yes I get the argument about density but batteries are constantly improving / charging is getting quicker, and how far do you really need your car to go anyway before you bladder gives out and you need to take a break from driving?]; and 2. the majority of hydrogen used for fuel cells comes from cracked methane rather than hydrogen which doesn’t really limit the issues with methane storage or pollution during manufacture. As a conservative, I do quite like the environment around me, and don’t see the need to pollute the air I personally have to breathe more than necessary, when alternative options exist.
It’s also worth noting here that as far as energy efficiency goes, the average electric car is around 90% efficient, compared to combustion engined vehicles which can be sub-50%. Not to mention they’re significantly less impact on your pocket book in the long run.
As for the grid coping with electric cars, most of them slow charge over-night when demand and load on the system is low, are driven a few miles to work and then either left in the car park unplugged, or some plugged in to essentially trickle charge / maintain charge. There’s actually a big opportunity here, during those 8 hours you’re at work, for the grid to use vehicle-to-grid technology and pay you for using your car battery to help balance the grid, such as the usage spikes at break times; which in the long run could actually benefit the grid and even lower electricity prices, as we’ve seen in a project across South Australia using people’s home powerwalls to do the same.
I have noticed that the green-religion people have stopped claiming that we’re going to run out of oil if we don’t switch to something else. This claim made the peculiar assumption that Big Oil doesn’t know that we’re running out. I always maintained that Big Oil would be the first to make plans to switch to another kind of energy production if there were any remote projection that we were going to run out of oil. Otherwise, they’d go out of business when we run out of oil. So they’ll be pouring R&D into alternatives, and those alternatives will become economically viable. Problem solved–and we didn’t have to spend any taxpayer money.
Speaking of spending taxpayer money, you do get what you subsidize. It’s why we have ethanol, which does nothing but increase the costs of energy production for everyone. But if there were a way to make solar, wind, or unicorn juice functional, we’d have done it already.
They invented other rubber ducks. And especially looked for things they can paint as more imminent danger. We know we will run out of oil, that is inevitable when fossiles are stored energy collected from sunshine and every year we burn like what was collected in a million of years. (substitute real figure). The earth does not have infinite amount of storage, it gets deplated like a battery. However the amount of stores are bigger than it was estimated 1-2 decades ago, so it may serve another 50+ years. Most marks could not care less about what happens in that timeframe, while can be properly spooked by promising that everyone will die in 12 years from global warming. Even after the first few doom dates are in the past.
Bill, just as a heads up, you can go to YouTube (I just did) and there are numerous videos of cars and motorcycles that can run on salt water and alcohol or carbides. I remember watching a video probably 10 years ago about a man who invented a water-powered car. Then, he inexplicably disappeared. I figured big oil might have something to do with that. Anyway, I know you’re way over your eyebrows in research on other subjects, but just thought you might be interested in what can be found on YouTube when you have time to look into it. /love and huggles (chaste, of course) from a long time fan.
Thank you, Bill. This is a great high-level summary of energy-source options available in our modern world. It is very unfortunate that your positions on this matter are not the mainstream, which is the result of a general human fear of the unknown. Nuclear is “scary,” because most people do not comprehend it.
If we coupled a large nuclear energy production infrastructure with hydrogen production facilities, then our electrical energy demands would be met and so would our collective demand for internal combustion engines used for transportation. There are other fuel options that could be injected into such a fuel cycle, but let’s keep it simple for the sake of this discussion.
I’m in England, guys. The big difference between our two countries on this is that in the US there is a whole mainstream party to the right of the Green New Deal; here in England, there is no mainstream party to the right of the Conservatives. Just clear blue water. There are attempts to build new political parties every now and again, and in a sense they can occasionally move the dial in some respects, but they almost never get real traction. Why? Because the Westminster system of govt is designed to repel outsiders. Why do you think every tinpot dictatorship in the developing world has embraced the Westminster system, and not one has embraced the US Constitution? Clue: it isn’t because the US system sucks.
Well said! The adoption of the “Westminster system,” as you call it is the primary reason I left the country of my childhood (not birth) and returned to the Untied States from Canada. I inherent notion that my individual human rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) are not unalienable is anathema to me.
Untied States = non Unitary political prospects?? 🙂
So sorry, Joe!
As we know, the Constitution claims to exist to provide for “a more perfect Union” and “insure Domestic Tranquility”.
So our Union was not perfect to begin with, and is looking less perfected during these recent years (decades?).
Untied States = crappy typing skills and really poor spell checking that day. 😀
“here in England, there is no mainstream party to the right of the Conservatives. Just clear blue water.” I suppose you were facing South when you said that? 🙂 During my 3 week stay in England in 1990 I had to adjust to the idea that the Atlantic was to my left when facing North, not to my right as in the USA. For some reason I did not have the same concern while in the Army in Germany in 1971 or in Sweden briefly in 1976.
As an aside, I understand that the Australian aborigines have different words for describing directions based on what direction they are facing at the time they are speaking. There are certainly multiple cultures, but not all of them are equally prosperous or efficient or meritorious in all regards.
Water’s not a fuel in itself, but it does contain hydrogen. I’m not a scientist, but my understanding is that the technology isn’t there yet to practically separate the hydrogen as a fuel source
It can be done but takes more energy to do than what you get from the hydrogen. I could be wrong about that but that’s what I remember hearing. (Same is true for using corn to get ethanol. I’m certain of that one.)
You are correct. The energy required to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water exceeds the amount of energy that can subsequently be extracted from the combustion of the hydrogen. However, there is potential for a supply-side infrastructure that could use other energy production (wind? solar? nuclear? hydro?) to to the separation process. This could have the potential to maintain a hydrogen supply for internal combustion engines in the consumer markets. It is important to note that such infrastructure would NOT produce excess energy; it would just shift the demands for existing energy sources.
I don’t have a problem in principle with any possible power source for cars, if the (un-government-aided) economics favor it. Thinking about it, though, the only reason I can come up with for using hydrogen is the vroom factor.* I appreciate a powerful-sounding car as much as the next guy and if hydrogen can preserve that, fine. If not then there’s no reason to use it instead of sending the electricity directly to cars so the extra energy required to produce the hydrogen isn’t wasted.
Personally, if I were ever to have a really hot car, I’d want it to be completely, utterly silent instead of advertising it’s presence for half a mile. “Hey, officer, just follow the sound to find me!” Nope. Also, I’ve never had anything but compliments from women so I have no need to compensate for anything.
So I’m fine with going all electric once it can be justified economically. If we end up dropping all the “sources” that need more energy to create than they produce – hydrogen, ethanol, unicorn farts – which makes them not true sources, well, we should be doing that now.
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*There’s a mild justification for hydrogen-powered cars because they’re safer then gasoline if the fuel catches fire, due to the difference in the way the two burn or explode, but AFAIK there aren’t enough deadly car fires even with gasoline to make a difference that counts.
The problem with such an argument is related to energy density. The energy density of hydrogen is much higher than current battery technology (see attached image taken from here). There are other advantages of hydrogen (fuel cell?) vehicles:
However, valid arguments (here) are made that the well-to-wheel efficiency of battery electric vehicles is significantly higher than that of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Unfortunately, there are other significant supply chain problems associated with an increased dependency upon high-capacity batteries:
In short, the world is very much going to need both, and both technologies will require significantly more robust electric power generation (i.e., nuclear fission and maybe one day, fusion). Wind, solar and hydroelectric will be insufficient for the task.
Personally I don’t see the continued need for oil / gas products, other than within the plastics industry and there was an interesting technology currently being pioneered by an Australian company that can recycle a very high percentage of current plastics back into oil.
I can see a lot of base-load power ending up as nuclear (hopefully Thorium) and the rest being a combination of alternatives such as solar, wind, hydro or even wave combined with large battery stacks; and some gravitational/kinetic systems (such as the UK company putting weights attached to motors/dynamos in old mine shafts) for peak control.
Batteries themselves are constantly evolving to become cheaper, higher density etc, and there are other options than just the usual chemical solutions. One that particularly interested me is currently being trialed in the UK using cryogenically liquidised air, from company Highview Power.
I’d like to see countries use a broad spectrum of innovative solutions rather than relying on one source, particularly one that my country generally has to import.
Oil is simply a problem. Yes it has its pollution issues, and yes it has its transportation issues; but it also has large-scale geo-political issues that I’d very much like to see impacted by a reduction in the influence it gives to certain foreign powers.
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Note: handy website to see what sources power is generated from in the UK https://gridwatch.co.uk/
“Personally I don’t see the continued need for oil / gas products…”
Continued from when? Bill is absolutely right that none of the current alternatives for oil can produce anywhere near enough energy to satisfy present needs. And the vast majority of them depend on government subsidies to survive.
Sure, if at some point in the future they become more viable then we won’t need oil for energy production. But then won’t oil just be naturally phased out by the market because it’s not the best option any more? That it remains in such widespread use means it’s still necessary.
To add to Michael’s reply, we must collectively admit that individual wealth and chance for survival are both increased with the production of inexpensive and easily accessible energy that is relatively clean. I use the term “relatively clean,” because there are other forms of inexpensive combustion energy (i.e., coal, wood, etc.) that are far dirtier and harmful to both the environment and human life.
Whle I agree that a robust diversification of energy production/storeage methods are imperative, we cannot currently hold fast to the unreasonable notion that petroleum fuels must be abandoned because they don’t meet some ideal of zero emissions. If we persist with such naive notions, then the average human life will be diminished in both length and quality. To paraphrase something often bandied by our fellow member, Lionell Griffith, “I object” to the idea.
As an aside, I’ve read that our current atmospheric CO2 levels are barely sufficient to support plant life on the planet (something about 150ppm being the point of plant death). I apologize, but I don’t have the reference at hand. This implies that we as a species would do better with higher-than-current atmospheric CO2 levels because our food sources would thrive. Food for thought.
I tend towards seeing the warming and cooling of the Earth as more a natural process (like the mini ice-age in the Victorian era that froze the Thames) rather than believing that our CO2 output is going to murder us all in our beds due to our evil factories.
Certainly all the interesting animals and plants thrived during periods of warmth and higher concentrations of CO2. Perhaps I can look forward to growing grapes in my garden and taking a holiday to Antarctica when the ice has melted. 😉
My issue with fossil fuels is more towards the inherent pollution issues and transportation/storage (there’s a tremendous amount lost by those pipelines and tank farms) as well as the huge geo-political skullduggery that goes on around the industry.
I ‘d be very happy to have a small-scale Thorium reactor in a shipping container at my house, and I think that’s a path forward for the base-load power that renewables cannot yet provide.
Antarctica in July. Nice!
I call this “Penguin on a Warm July Day”:
Remember back in Roman times when the global climate was way hotter and all life on earth died?
I remember that. I got frostbitten.
Now if we could only figure out how to selectively apply that same mass death to the morons promoting the idiocy that the end is nigh (i.e., less than 12 years away) unless we let our so-called “intellectual betters” save us through top-down bureaucratic controls.
I don’t know how old you are but I can remember the screaming that we only had about ten years to live coming out every year since at least 1970. Population, ice age, warming – it’s a new claim every few decades. Not one of the predictions has ever come to pass.
I keep this quote around because of that:
Excellent quote!
I am approximately 16 months older than the first boot prints on the moon, so I have very few memories of 1970. However, I am quite familiar with the numerous failures to predict the world’s demise due to “bad weather.”
I seem to remember back in 1962 we were discussing atomic annihilation in my senior class in high school and the teacher said “Look! Earth has been thru worse than this and it still exists. Do you think this infestation called Man will destroy it? No, it will survive long after we are gone.” He had a good point. It may take millennia, but Earth will forget we were ever here.
“Food for thought.” I like that!!
I’m amused by Brazil producing alchohol from sugar cane and producing enough to make it available cheaply at filling stations as an alternative to petrol. Every attempt at growing sugar cane in FL or LA has met with resistance from the government because they are subsidizing farmers to grow corn for that purpose. Also, it takes a special process to produce ethanol from corn where using sugar cane it occurs naturally. Add to this whole scenario the fact that alcohol contains less latent heat by volume than petrol and the whole thing gets warped.