Econuttery and Global Warming

This is the first section of a four part article about the unsound and often absurd ideas proposed and sometimes even passed as law at the Federal and State levels in our nation.

Part One: The "Danger" of Dairy and Cattle

There are laws whose character that border on insanity being introduced and frequently passed in our legislatures and our Federal Legislative Branch. We are having an epidemic of crazy laws,  primarily in Federal circles and blue states. Coming out of legislatures and Congress are “creative” and very expensive ways to “stop” the political non-problem of global warming.

What sort of mind comes up with this stuff? Is it conditioning by our educational and media establishments? Is it drugs? Is it the complete detachment from nature that cities create that permits some of our legislators to think in such illogical fashion?

Whatever the cause, the results are similar: the inculcation of costs to taxpayers and businesses, restrictions on freedoms and absolutely no change to the climate. The rest of the world is laughing at our stupidity as we tear down the fourth largest industrial producer.

Cows: Not Just for Dinner Anymore

A punitive tax on cow burps and cow flatulence was lifted at the last moment in the House version of the Waxman-Markey bill just prior to it being approved by the House of Representatives. The bill creates a cap and trade system for carbon dioxide emissions— a massive tax increase on all forms of energy— and has a large number of amendments whose ink wasn’t dry before the final vote was taken. Prior to several Midwest Democrat congressmen complaining about the tax on cattle emissions, there was a tax aimed at cutting methane from cows, presumably by reducing the number of cattle and forcing us to eat other foods.

The proposed tax would have increased the price of milk, milk products like cheese, beef and leather goods. The tax was $175 per dairy cow per year and $ 87.50 per year for beef cattle. This would have to be passed along to the consumers by the farmers, but some consumers would buy less of their products, which would result in some of the smaller farmers going out of business. Ouch.

The idea behind that part of the bill was that cows produce methane from both ends, via the action of bacteria. Methane, CH4, has a higher heat capacity than carbon dioxide and thus the Environmental Lobby— environmentalists and the politicians who produce this sort of chartreuse legislation— complained that it was X times worse (depends entirely upon whom one asked) than carbon dioxide for Global Warming purposes. Methane is produced abundantly by natural mechanisms, both biologic and geologic but makes up only a tiny fraction of the atmospheric gases. Methane is quickly removed from the atmosphere by several pathways, including atmospheric processes and microorganisms. The science of methane creation and removal from the air doesn’t matter to the Environmental Lobby and the provisions just removed from Waxman-Markey would have laid a large burden on farmers and ranchers, countrywide.

If the idea of taxing cow burps and cow plops is not silly enough, let’s compare some numbers. According to various sources, there are roughly a billion cows in the world, used for milk, meat and religion (India). The U.S. has approximately a tenth of them with less than one hundred million head. If methane from cows were a problem, what about the other 90% of the cows in the world? Surely, our legislatures and Congress would try to stop imports from nations like Brazil, who has twice the number of cows that we do? Or is it merely a tax? India has four times as many cows as the United States. What, no education campaign in India by Congress? No, all of the effort was aimed at our cows, our 10%.

What About Native Methane Producers?

What about native ruminants in the U.S.? They produce methane in the same way. No one has complained about the methane that they produce. What about the thirty million white deer across the U.S.? Some of the eastern U.S. states have more deer than cows. What about the several million mule deer in the western half of the U.S.? The million elk and a million or so pronghorns? Moose? Caribou? Many drivers in New England would welcome a reduction in deer populations, if the increase in deer-car crashes in the last decade is any indication.

Why stop there? Non-ruminant mammals produce methane from digestion. The U.S. has several billion native mice, rats, squirrels, chipmunks, wolves, coyotes, rabbits, foxes and other animals. Are we supposed to tax every mammal in the U.S. for Global Warming purposes?

Then there is the historic abundance of ruminants to dispute the current whining about cow-produced methane. Prior to 1700 or so, besides a much larger population of 40 million pronghorns, it’s estimated that there were sixty million buffalo in the Plains States. Given that a bison weighs half again on average what most domestic cows weigh, chances are that bison produced as much or more methane as our domestic cows do.

Expensive Fixits

Some have claimed to reduce the amounts of methane produced by feeding a special diet to cows. This is more expensive than standard feeds and it would be difficult to verify their claims. The bacterial colonies in intestines are benign and help with food digestion. They have existed as long as intestines have and given what happens when antibiotics kill them off, it’s probably not a very good thing to tamper with them. I’m sure someone will eventually try to come up with a genetically-modified cow that uses some other system to digest food. How about the alkaline digestive tract that butterflies and moths use? Not a good idea, particularly given the failure rate for genetically-engineered plants in the lab and the problems of currently marketed genetically-engineered food plants. One can imagine the headaches of trying to create a cow that has a radically different digestive system, let alone what it would do to the rest of the animal and the person eating the meat, cheese or drinking the milk.

There are even patents out for dealing with cow methane. One has the poor cow wearing a mask. Another has a barn that captures methane. These folks are going to put dung beetles out of work. I wonder if beetles have a union…?

To get back to our original point, one can be thankful that this particular bit of taxing nonsense was removed from Waxman-Markey at the last minute. It’s frightening that Pelosi and company wanted it in the first place. Some still believe that it would somehow help prevent the climate from “warming”.

Beef. It’s what’s for taxing…

Econuttery and Global Warming

This is the second section of a four part article about the unsound and often absurd ideas proposed and sometimes even passed as law at the Federal and State levels in our nation.

Part Two: Fizzy Groundwater

Pumping CO2 INTO Wells

This one is classic. Why, what better way to get rid of a perceived excess of carbon dioxide than to drill a well and stuff it into the ground? Out of sight, out of mind, yes?

No. This ill-conceived idea has the potential to cause some very serious problems, particularly to the environment that the Environmental Lobby claims to cherish.

Several states are investigating the idea of drilling wells into permeable layers of rock and groundwater aquifers and then filling them full of hundreds of millions of tons of liquefied carbon dioxide. Localities currently favored are eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, western New York and western Kentucky. Those same areas are now being actively drilled for natural gas and oil.

Liquefied Rock

Here is a typical case. A test well was drilled near Shadyside, Ohio. They wanted to store 100 million tons of  CO2 in the underlying Oriskany Sandstone, Clinton Sandstone and Salina Formation. Both of the Sandstones are characterized by quartz sand with carbonate cements— that is, various forms of CaCO3— and the Salina Formation is mostly carbonate rocks—CaCO3 again— interspersed with layers of salt. Saline groundwater is present in the formations in pores in the rocks, as are natural gas and oil. More than 70,000 natural gas wells have been drilled in the Clinton Sandstone.

The Department of Energy’s results of the test weren’t very promising. They drilled the well hole and attempted to force pressurized CO2 into the hole. The results suggested that the rock wasn’t very permeable (not many holes/pores in the rock for gas or liquids) because not much CO2 could be forced into the rocks. Nearby geologic studies by the USGS suggest that the rock has considerable permeability, so something else is going on.

When you add carbon dioxide to water, which in this case would be groundwater, you get carbonic acid. H2O + CO2 = H2CO3. Carbonic acid is everywhere. If you open up a bottle of distilled water, the CO2 from the atmosphere forms enough carbonic acid to change the water’s pH from 7 to 5.5. Carbonic acid in rainwater and other surface water chemically erode Earth’s surface rocks.

The pressurized liquid carbon dioxide being pumped into this well (and similar wells) mixes with the ground water in the voids in the rocks and forms high pressure, high concentration carbonic acid. This carbonic acid dissolve the carbonates, both the carbonate rocks and the cements, forming a solution of calcium bicarbonate: 

CaCO3solid+ H2CO3aqueous ? (Ca(HCO3)2)aqueous

In the case of the two Sandstones, you no longer have stone, but now have sand grains sitting in a solution of calcium bicarbonate. The formerly solid carbonate rocks of the Salina have been reduced to a pressurized liquid.

Now that you have a pressurized solution, what happens to existing natural gas and oil wells that happen to be drawing from the same strata? If they are close enough to the injection site, it’s possible that the liquid could squirt to the surface through them. I doubt the natural gas companies would be favorably disposed to the idea of white slop suddenly shooting out of some of their wells.

Further Potential Problems with CO2 Wells

Wait, there’s more. Calcium bicarbonate is unstable. If the resulting solution dries out, say, by reaching the surface through faults or fractures or other types of wells, it dissociates into water, calcium carbonate and carbon dioxide:

Ca(HCO3)2aqueous ? CO2gas + H2Oliquid + CaCO3solid

since it had dissolved a lot of calcium carbonate rock/cement down there, the total carbon dioxide that could be released— if all of the solution were somehow brought to the surface, which is unlikely, mind you, unless it was deliberately pumped out— would be greater than the original carbon dioxide placed in the well.

 

If the Environmental Lobby is determined to remove the carbon dioxide from the air and inject it into wells— an energy costly process and the irony is that most of it will come from coal, which generates yet more carbon dioxide— then they need to do it in a place without groundwater or at least without carbonate rocks and/or carbonate-cemented rocks. How about one of those hydrocarbon-filled salt domes in the southeast? Pump it into the pumped-out portion of the dome. The carbon dioxide is heavier than the natural gas, but lighter than the crude oil. The CO2 could be used to pressurize natural gas wells in areas that are not carbonate rocks in this way.

Injecting carbon dioxide into wells in the ground might be accomplished in areas of acid- resistant rocks, so long as it didn’t cause a problem with water supply. Which is a big problem— how do you guarantee that the addition of such a monstrous volume of carbon dioxide won’t degrade the groundwater. Fizz is one thing, but the acidity can dissolve other things into the water that make it unsuitable for use.

Then there is a more insidious problem that has at least the potential to arise. Assuming that the CO2 is placed in rock that it doesn’t react with, what happens when the carbon dioxide so entrapped escapes? Carbon dioxide is not toxic, per se, but it is inert and being heavier than air, it can collect in low areas.

In Cameroon and Congo, there are locations such as the Lake Kivu region where volcanism causes carbon dioxide to pool up in depressions in the ground when the wind doesn’t blow it away fast enough. There have been incidents where low points in roads and paths have become death traps for people and animals when carbon dioxide has vented from the ground and created pools. People drive or walk through the spot and keel over. What happens when a hundred million tons of carbon dioxide is sequestered in an aquifer and a wellhead is not secured, allowing a portion to escape, for example? There is at least the possibility of the gas escaping the wells to the surface. Whom do we sue when basements are flooded with CO2 rather than radon?

The whole matter of sequestering carbon dioxide in the ground in wells is ridiculous. Besides being a remedy for something that is not happening and the problems listed above, it’s expensive. The only possible use that might have a positive value for pumping such volumes of CO2 into the ground would be to pressurize natural gas wells to aid in removing the natural gas. Which would not appeal to the Environmental Lobby.

Econuttery and Global Warming

This is the third section of a four part article about the unsound and often absurd ideas proposed and sometimes even passed as law at the Federal and State levels in our nation.

Part Three: White-Washing, Painting and Making the World Unclean

A White-Washed World

In late May, Energy Secretary Steven Chu made the suggestion to paint all building roofs, roads and sidewalks white. He claimed it would reduce the Global Warming trend by 11 years and would offset 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Besides being illogical in its basic assumptions, no one seems to have noticed this error: 44 billion tons is more than the 29 billion tons that the EPA and other groups claim that Humanity releases annually. Would that offset some minuscule percentage produced by natural sources then?

You can imagine the problems during the winter in the northern half of the nation. Snow would have to be chemically melted from roads because it wouldn’t melt like it does now. Imagine the increase in the amount of deicing chemicals and salt needed, particularly in areas of the nation that don’t use them now. The reflection of the low winter sun off of the roads would be much worse than now with white-colored roads. The snow would not melt off of them as it does now, either. Plus, if roofs were white, that would mean many more collapsed roofs and other snow/ice-related damage because it wouldn’t melt as readily between winter storms.

If everything has to be repainted white, imagine the sheer amount of petroleum taken from the ground to make the required latex, alkyds, enamels, stains and plastics to make all the paints required! Then there are the astronomical amounts of volatile organic compounds released during paint curing (drying) to be taken into account. Plus the mountains of titanium dioxide that have to mined, because that is the most popular white pigment. Zinc and other metals can also be used for white coloring, but they too, must be mined. The manufacturing of paints, mining of metals, disposal of toxic materials, manufacture of painting equipment and all else that would be required are all things that ultimately require petroleum and coal for fuel and oceans of chemicals. Did the Energy Secretary even THINK of any of that when he made his statement?

Does Secretary Chu own a paint corporation?

Dishwasher Detergent and… Global Warming??

It’s hard to imagine dishwasher soap being linked to Global Warming/Climate Change, but I’ve seen some pretty silly commentary and eco-articles linking phosphates to it. I don’t pretend to understand how they can get from phosphates, which if left untreated in sewage water— as they were 75 years ago— can damage water quality in rivers and lakes to Global Warming/Climate Change. The thought process of the Environmental Lobby completely eludes me on this one. But then, I was trained as a scientist and before that, and engineer, so I’m not able to understand arguments like 1+2 = 75,000.

Whatever the reason, now dishwasher detergent— and eventually laundry soap presumably, once they notice that it, too, contains phosphates— is under attack in various parts of the nation. The States of Maryland, Oregon and Washington all want to ban phosphates in dishwashing detergent.

The City of Spokane, Washington banned the sale of phosphate detergents for the dishwasher. The idea was to reduce phosphates in water. The net result was people going next door to towns in Idaho to buy their dishwasher detergent because the phosphate-free detergents don’t work very well. The alternatives have been shown to work effectively only with distilled-pure water. Mineral content in the water prevent their functioning correctly, so almost the entire United States cannot use the alternative dishwasher detergents.

If everyone stopped using phosphate detergents for dishes and laundry, the net result for water quality would be zero. Why? The reason is tertiary treatment of sewage via lagoons and/or wetlands to remove the final nitrate and phosphorus loadings is standard procedure throughout the United States. Fifty years ago, yes, phosphates were still a problem in many places, but today, they are not.

If phosphates were banned, there would be a net increase in water use. Since the alternatives to phosphate-based detergents are not effective, then more washings would be required to get the job done, or methods to remove the minerals from water prior to use would have to performed. All of these waste water in one way or another. Another possible problem is that nastier chemicals might have to be used to get dishes cleaned, such as hydroxides. These would not be nearly as safe as phosphates to use.

Again, how any of this will somehow help prevent Global Warming with its attendant Climate Change is completely beyond me. Perhaps they believe the algal blooms that used to happen still somehow contribute to warming…

One final note: contrary to the Environmental Lobby’s rhetoric about clean water, one of the strongholds of econuttery in the United States— Ashland, Oregon— refused to fix its sewage treatment system for years on end. This resulted in effluent that was much less clean than the surrounding “conservative” cities. The State of Oregon finally FORCED them to build a new system. Do as I say, not as I do.

 

Econuttery and Global Warming

This is the fourth section of a four part article about the unsound and often absurd ideas proposed and sometimes even passed as law at the Federal and State levels in our nation.

Part Four: And Now for Something Completely Different

Some Really Nutty Ideas

Some really “interesting” ideas have been floated in recent years to “combat” global warming. These are ideas that the media has reported. None have been well thought out, as examined below:

Orbital Power. The idea to have a satellite in orbit with millions of acres of solar panels with a laser that beams power back to a station on Earth. First, the cost of such would be many billions of dollars to insert into synchronous orbit— it’s about $10,000 per pound to place satellites and other equipment into orbit! Second, laser energy scatters in the atmosphere and a high-powered laser would actually heat the air until the air itself was rendered virtually “opaque” to the beam because of the resulting distortion, making it impossible to get the energy to the ground— the laser’s energy would be lost in the atmosphere as heat. So, billions spent to warm the atmosphere. Even if you somehow were able to get the beam intact to the ground, how do you turn it into energy again? That kind of energy would burn right through metals and ceramics. An interesting idea for science fiction, but our technology just won’t allow it for many years, if ever.

Sunshades in Orbit. This idea would place sunshades in orbit to shield parts of the planet from the sun to reduce the amount of heat/light the Earth gets. The first and most obvious problem that the world isn’t warming or cooling due to man’s actions. The second is a matter of scale: to have an effect on climate, such sunshades would have to cover millions of square miles. Thirdly, it’s unlikely that we could control the effects on the climate: after all, part of  the world seems to believe man has warmed the climate when it has not.

Once again, the cost would be astronomical. Millions of miles of sunshade? Plus the ability to move them into place? Even if one could build large enough satellites to do it and an armada of rockets to place them where they are “needed”, imagine the chaos it would cause on the climate as areas that normally get light and heat are rendered completely dark and cold. The sunshades would generate high winds as cold, dense air in the darkened areas rush to the warmer areas.

Ecologically, such sunshades would be a disaster for any shaded area of the planet as the plants would die off from lack of sunlight, and with them, every organism that depends on the plants. How many people would want to live in an area of permanent night? What about their crops, their forests? No one will want that. No country will stand for part of its land area to be rendered useless.

Plankton Blooms. It’s been suggested to deliberately create plankton blooms in the oceans to “reduce” carbon dioxide. How this would somehow be beneficial is beyond me. Such blooms are commonplace near river mouths in developing nations where sewage is untreated, such as Mexico. They also occur when there is a sewage spill in the U.S. Phytoplankton, particularly algae species, grow rapidly from the nitrates in the sewage and then die off when the nutrients are used up. When they grow rapidly, they produce oxygen, but when they die, they rot and rob the water of oxygen, which can temporarily create a dead area of the ocean in which the fish and other animals die off from oxygen starvation. During their growth period, yes, algae remove carbon dioxide rapidly, but the moment the nutrients are gone and rot begins, carbon dioxide production begins in earnest. No net CO2 removal is gained by this method.

Fill the Ocean with Iron Filings. I’ve heard this one for years. It’s been suggested that man should dump iron filings into the ocean to reduce CO2. How this would work is never really explained scientifically. There are some obvious questions: Where do you mine enough iron to dump a foot thick of iron filings over 139 million square miles of ocean? That is the equivalent of a solid cube of iron one third of a mile on a side. How do you mine that much iron, and is there enough in the planet’s crust in normal ores to mine? Or would it require extraordinary means, such as mining iron-poor minerals? Even if you somehow found that much iron, how do you spread it evenly over 139 million square miles? Build a merchant marine fleet of a million vessels? Even in World War II, we had only a thousand military vessels in the Pacific Theater of Operations by VJ Day.

Then, assuming that by some miracle that all that is done: after the resulting iron compounds have killed off all the sealife and there is no phytoplankton to create oxygen for us to breathe, what do we breathe? How many new Siberias and Saudi Arabias would it require for the fossil fuels to run the mining equipment, transport the ore, grind up the iron, and transport the filings to the oceans. Also required are mountains of coal for smelting the ore and for generating electricity for refining it into iron metal.

Then there is manpower required and the acceptance of the burden of the costs: how do you get the entire world to go along with such an idea? After all, it would take the world’s income and billions of people to get all of this done, even if it could be done. A more obvious question: where does the Environmental Lobby come up with ideas like this?? Why don’t we construct a bridge to the Moon while we are at it? It would be about as easy.

What’s Next?

So what absurd idea will be recommended next? The Environmental Lobby and its groupies are assuming that this or that awful thing will happen as the world “warms”. If the world was actually warming up do to man’s actions, their zeal would be understandable. So, why are we doing all these crazy things when 1. the preponderance of our science says no warming is taking place and 2. what we have observed for the last twenty years contradicts every prediction made by the Global Warming/Climate Change lobby?

How about a tax on the air we breathe? Or rather the carbon dioxide that you exhale. It’s about the only thing not taxed so far. Go down to the pulmonologist and get a vital capacity test to determine how much air your lungs will hold. Then, determine how many breaths per minute you take on average— athletes and the very active, such as bicyclists will naturally have to pay a higher tax— and voila, a tax on the carbon dioxide you exhale.

Think that’s too far-fetched? Most thought the tax on energy that just passed was too far-fetched.

The only limit on impracticality and foolishness is wisdom. Have you noticed much of late?