Catching Up

I haven't done a real post in a while, so strap in boys and girls, 'cause here we go!

Trucker protests: I love the fact that the MSM thinks they can ignore 10's of thousands of semi's converging on Alberta and no one will notice. Whether you support the truckers or not, the protests have certainly uncovered a lot of sleazy behavior by the Canadian national government, the police, the MSM, and even crowd-funding site GoFundMe. I love how BLM protesters can set multiple cities on fire, loot, injure and even murder people, and GoFundMe never blinks an eye. But let some (mostly) white working-class truckers finally say "Enough!" to government over-regulation and GoFundMe wants to give the donations to... well... to BLM. When that gambit failed utterly, Trudeau invoked the War Powers Act (renamed to something less sinister-sounding in the 70's or 80's) to allow the Canadian government to seize the bank accounts of anyone receiving donated funds as well as anyone donating. Nice. If anyone would like to know how to turn a peaceful protest into an actual insurrection, just take careful notes of what Trudeau has done and will do. Dumb ass....

Meanwhile, the Olympic Committee has gone full mental by beating up on a 15-year-old girl who had the misfortune of being born in the United State's enemy du jour, Russia. Good job guys; real mature. You managed to throw her off her game enough that she finished in fourth and left the ice in tears. You old fucks must feel real tough and self-important now. Congratulations. I'm becoming less and less interested in sport of any kind. The Olympics were pretty much my last hope and that too has now been flushed down the toilet thanks both to this current nonsense as well as the whole turn-my-back-on-the-US-flag bullshit at the summer games. (And if you think I'm alone in this, check the ratings of professional sports, college sports, Olympics, what have you.)

I haven't talked about climate in a while. Given that everyone seems to have been convinced that replacing coal- and natural-gas-fired power plants with windmills and solar panels is a good idea, I thought I'd revisit the topic. First: Yes, despite what you may hear, fossil fuels are limited. Yes, despite what you may hear, we've used up roughly half of all the coal, oil and natural gas in the world. No, despite what you may hear most of the other half will never be "recovered" due to both technical and economic reasons. Second: Yes, despite what you may hear, weather is getting crazy. Maybe it's natural, maybe it's due to all the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere; probably, it's some of both. No matter, it's here. Now. Not in 100 years. Third: No despite what you may hear we are not replacing the automobile fleet with electric vehicles, if for no other reason than there is simply not enough lithium on the planet to built all those fire-trap EV's. 

So given all that what next? One idea being floated around is replacing electrical generation with nukes. Leaving aside all the questions of what we are going to do with the tons of high-level radioactive waste produced by enough nuclear reactors to replace the existing electrical grid (while ignoring the fantasy that we will "electrify the fleet"), we don't even know what to do with the comparably tiny amount of high-level waste we already produce. The big strike against nukes is that, at least here in the US, it took 40+ years to build and bring one reactor on line. One. We need to build something like 325 nuclear power plants (that's with multiple reactors per plant) every month for the next 100 years just to replace the current coal-fired electrical generation. Anyone who thinks that will happen is just mental. Where would we get all the materials? Where would we get all the uranium? China? I'm picking on nukes, but that's only because they are the easiest to imagine as an alternative to fossil fuels. Replacing even a tiny fraction of electrical generation with wind and solar is already bumping up against hard resource limits. Replacing it all or even a significant fraction (like 1/2 or just 1/3) is not even technically feasible before getting to the economics, politics, etc.

The greenie-weenies talk about cutting carbon emissions in half by some near-future date. So given the previous paragraph, how do we do that? Well, look around where you're sitting and imagine half of everything gone. Half the square-footage of your house. Half the vehicles. Half the food. Half the people in your family, neighborhood, city, state, nation. That's what cutting carbon emissions in half really means. Forget the technobabble bullshit from upper-middle-class "greens" who won't even stop flying to climate conferences or turn down the thermostat or quit stuffing their faces until they are morbidly obese. And no, the rich won't "go first"; remember that the entire US is filthy rich compared to the rest of the planet, so you really don't want to go there unless you want to be put in the same category as Al Gore telling me I need to ride a bike to work while flying on a private jet. (If you're wondering, that category would be "hypocrite".)

Well, it's going on midnight, so I should stop and go to bed. 'Nite all!!