Monday, June 12, 2023
Hydrocarbons in space
"Fossil" fuels are alleged to be created by decaying plant matter. Chemically they are hydrocarbons. How come they are found in space? Fossils in space? Could it be that such fuels are primordial, not the product of ANY terrestrial process? This finding is yet more evidence in favour of the abiotic theory of "fossil" fuel origin
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope discovered evidence of complex organic molecules in a galaxy 12.3 billion light-years away — the furthest and oldest ever detected.
Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have spotted a cloud of complicated organic molecules in a galaxy 12.3 billion light-years away — the farthest from Earth that molecules of this kind have ever been detected. The discovery, which was published on June 5 in the journal Nature, might help astronomers piece together a clearer picture of how galaxies develop.
"We didn't expect this," Joaquin Vieira, an astronomer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and co-author of the new study, said in a press release. "Detecting these complex organic molecules at such a vast distance is game-changing."
The complex molecules in question are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). On Earth, PAHs are commonly found in wildfire smoke and car exhaust. In space, they might play a crucial role in star formation. Scientists suspect that they help regulate the temperature of gas clouds in stellar nurseries, thereby managing when and where stars develop, Nature reported.
Researchers first detected the galaxy, dubbed SPT0418-47, in 2020 using the National Science Foundation's ground-based South Pole Telescope. The distant mass of stars was only visible thanks to a trick of physics known as gravitational lensing. This effect occurs when light from a faraway object bends around a massive, nearby object, due to the closer object's gravity. In the process, the faraway light is distorted and magnified; in SPT0418-47's case, it appeared 30 times brighter.
The team studied this light, and their initial analysis indicated that SPT0418-47 was rich in heavy elements. But the scientists couldn't get a good look at its organic, carbon-containing components using the South Pole Telescope, which doesn't pick up the right wavelength of light.
A schematic showing a telescope looking past a nearby galaxy to see a far distant one
An illustration showing how astronomers use gravitational lensing to view distant galaxies that should be far beyond our sight. (Image credit: S. Doyle / J. Spilker)
JWST, however, can peer into exactly the right infrared range to detect PAHs. Sure enough, when the team trained the space-based telescope on the galaxy last August, a mess of complex organic molecules stood out.
"Everywhere we see the molecules there are stars forming," Justin Spilker, an astronomer at Texas A&M University and co-author of the study, told Nature. This supports the hypothesis that organic molecules help to birth stars.
But weirdly, there were also patches of the galaxy that lacked PAH clouds — and the team observed stars forming in those spots as well. "That’s the part we don’t understand yet," Spilker said. Understanding why and how stars form in these regions, and how they interact with organic molecules, will require further study.
"This work is just the first step," Vieira said. "We are very excited to see how this plays out."
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General newsbeef company CEO fights back: “the climate change argument against cows is garbage and we will not comply”
The push to replace real beef with other forms of protein has been ramping up in recent weeks. The powers-that-be want us to stop eating steaks and instead eat cricket burgers or lab-grown meat replacements as our protein. Ireland is even considering culling 200,000 cows to meet their climate change virtue signaling goals.
But their climate change argument is patently false. Recent studies have shown growing meat in a lab is actually as much as 25-times worse for the environment than producing the same amount of real beef. Corporate media is barely reporting on it, but they’ve been forced to mention it over the past couple of weeks thanks to the persistence of those championing the truth.
One such champion is Dr. Joseph Mercola who recently noted:
While the fake meat industry is being touted as an environmentally friendly and sustainable way to feed the world, the true intent is to recreate the kind of global control that Monsanto and others achieved through patented GMO seed development. In the end, lab-created meats are worse for the environment than livestock and will undoubtedly deteriorate human health to boot, just like GMO grains have.
Dr. Mercola also said, “Each kilo of cultured meat produces anywhere from 542 pounds (246 kilos) to 3,325 pounds (1,508 kg) of carbon dioxide emissions, making the climate impact of cultured meat four to 25 times greater than that of conventional beef.”
Jason Nelson, CEO of freeze-dried food company USA Beef Boxes, has focused his team on producing as much shelf-stable all-American beef as they can have slaughtered. It is his belief that beef cattle will be systematically removed from the American food supply in the coming years and even months with attacks from multiple angles (plus, ordering through this link and the links below benefits The Liberty Daily). The climate change argument is only one of them.
“They prey on the ignorance of the average mainstream media watcher who nods along as they’re being told cow farts will kill them,” Nelson said. “It’s patently ludicrous but they need something shocking in order to get people to comply when they try to outlaw real meat. And they will. They’re already trying to do it.”
“The day will come when they’ll ask my company to replace our real beef from all-American cows with their version of bovine protein,” Nelson continued. “I’ve already told everyone who works for me that we’ll shut it down before we freeze dry a single sliver of lab-grown fake meat.”
As Dr. Mercola and Nelson have said, the climate change reasoning for going after cows is just an excuse for the powers-that-be to exercise control over the people. As Henry Kissinger famously said, “Who controls the food supply controls the people.”
Beef has been readily available and relatively inexpensive for decades. Villainizing cows as culprits in their climate change hoax is diabolical, but it’s also effective. Cities across the nation, invariably run by Democrats, are looking into limiting the amount of beef that can be sold, bought, and consumed.
“This isn’t just some ideological crusade,” Nelson said. “We launched this company last year because we saw the writing on the wall and knew they’d try to make Americans eat bugs or pseudo-meat or something worse. I didn’t serve this nation to then watch it implode over bald-faced lies.”
Nelson, a former member of both the U.S. Army and U.S. Marines, resigned in 2021 due to the Covid-19 vaccine mandate. He then ran for Congress against RINO Pete Sessions in 2022, losing in the primaries.
“We’re proud of our product,” he said. “As far as we know we’re the only company in America that offers freeze dried Ribeye, NY Strip, Tenderloin, and Sirloin that’s shelf-stable for over a decade. Other prepper food companies sell ‘beef crumbles’ and cow scraps they buy for cheap that barely passes as food. I’d almost rather eat bugs. Almost.”
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If It’s Not Open Warfare, It’s Collusive Lawfare
The Biden Administration continues waging war on fossil fuels, aided by environmentalists, politicians, and corporations chasing subsidies, competitive advantages, power and profits. They want to “fundamentally transform” America’s energy and economic systems, prevent “climate cataclysms,” and ensure “environmental justice” for some (by inflicting injustices on others).
Their weapons include withdrawing huge areas from economic activities; banning leasing, drilling and pipelines; and imposing regulatory standards so costly or technologically impossible that coal-fired power plants, internal-combustion vehicles, and gas stoves, furnaces and water heaters must be abandoned.
This open warfare is augmented and amplified by more clandestine “lawfare.”
Environmentalists have long employed lawsuits to impose by court decree what they cannot achieve via ballot boxes or legislation. The litigation often redefines sloppily or deliberately vague statutory language, to impose more onerous standards that can block or bankrupt oil, gas and mining projects – and then ignored for land- and resource-intensive wind and solar projects.
An especially pernicious strategy is “sue-and-settle” lawsuits, wherein environmentalists collude with friendly federal agencies to create a “disagreement” over a policy or regulation, and sue in friendly courts. The parties then agree to a settlement that’s been negotiated behind closed doors, leaving the public and impacted third parties with no opportunity to address the case’s legal or evidentiary merits.
Now ultra-progressive states and cities are charging onto this battlefield with more destructive lawsuits.
Delaware and Rhode Island have joined Baltimore, Honolulu, New York City, San Francisco, and other jurisdictions in filing climate change lawsuits against oil and gas producers, refiners and sellers in state courts – where they believe they will face more sympathetic judges and juries than in federal courtrooms.
The arguments for transferring the cases to federal jurisdiction are compelling – and were presented persuasively by John Yoo, C. Boyden Gray and other experts who reviewed the differing Courts of Appeals decisions, and the policy and legal questions surrounding them:
Fossil fuel “greenhouse gas” emissions alleged to cause climate change cross state lines and must therefore be governed by federal agencies. Sea level rise, flooding and other damages allegedly caused by those emissions must likewise be attributed to multiple sources in multiple states, and thus must also be the purview of federal laws and agencies.
No state, much less any city, should be permitted to set or manipulate national energy, climate or environmental policies and hold other jurisdictions to their agendas. Different legal opinions among various federal courts require Supreme Court intervention.
BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Suncor Energy and other oil company defendants made these and additional arguments in asking the US Supreme Court to reaffirm that cases addressing climate change claims are inherently governed by federal law and should be transferred from state to federal courts.
However, the Supremes inexplicably opted not to review the cases at this time. That means these and other cities and states will continue suing energy companies – perhaps securing verdicts and multi-billion-dollar damage awards.
The litigation will create a legal, constitutional, scientific and public policy nightmare for the nation, businesses, consumers, courts and states, especially after verdicts have been rendered and bills tendered to scapegoat companies for payment. An already confusing and impenetrable judicial and permitting jungle will become even more perilous.
However, these complex pollution issues are made vastly more complicated by the basic question of whether carbon dioxide (which humans and animals exhale and plants require to grow, “green” our planet and help ensure record crop yields) should ever be labeled a “dangerous pollutant.” Even more so by the impossibility of separating “greenhouse gas” emissions from a few US petroleum companies from:
all other American oil and gas, coal, agricultural, industrial, transportation and other emissions;
human activities worldwide, including thousands of coal-fired power plants in China, India and dozens of other countries that have no obligation or intention of reducing their fossil fuel use anytime soon, thus increasing carbon dioxide levels (deliberately and misleadingly called “carbon pollution”) in Earth’s global atmosphere for decades to come;
greenhouse gas emissions (and toxic air pollution) from mining, minerals processing and manufacturing to make the wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, grid-scale backup batteries, transformers and transmission lines required for a “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy future;
and climate changes caused by natural forces throughout Earth past history, now and in the future.
As litigant cities and states pursue billions in penalties and damages from these companies – supposedly to cover the costs of building levees and stormwater impoundments, raising roads and bridges, and otherwise protecting communities from “increasing sea level rise” and “more frequent and intense storms” – they will also have to address other inconvenient truths.
For example, seas have risen naturally 400 feet since the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago. They are now rising at an easily manageable 7-12 inches per century – and much of the perceived sea level rise is actually due to land subsidence in coastal cities worldwide, not rising seas.
The litigants and courts will also encounter the bitter reality that the “fundamental transformation” they so earnestly seek means covering the planet with wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines ... and the quarries and mines to build them. America already lacks sufficient EV charging stations and step-up and step-down transformers for new homes and a functional grid. Millions more will be needed in short order to reach Net Zero – which means thousands of new mines, quarries, processing plants and factories.
Toyota Motor Corp. calculates that “more than 300 new lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite mines are needed to meet the expected battery demand by 2035.” That’s essentially just for new EVs, and getting them approved and developed would likely take decades. A US energy transformation – to say nothing of a global transformation – would require thousands of mines, and thousands of processing facilities.
The process of converting cobalt, lithium, aluminum, iron, rare earths, manganese, nickel and other ores into high-end metals is fossil-fuel-intensive, greenhouse-gas-emitting and dirty. “Reaching the nickel means cutting down swaths of rainforest,” the Wall Street Journal notes. “Refining it ... involves extreme heat and high pressure, producing waste slurry that’s hard to dispose of.” Using little children to mine cobalt and processing rare earth elements involve legendary ecological and human rights abuses.
Worse, all this is only the beginning of the planetary desecration. We’re talking millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission lines, billions of half-ton battery modules – and all that goes into making them. We’ll have to replace fertilizers for crops and feed stocks for thousands of products, by planting millions more acres in food and fuel crops, destroying more wildlife habitats. Turbine blades will chop millions of birds and bats from the sky every year.
Then we’ll have to bury the broken, worn-out and obsolete panels, turbine blades and other equipment. The world has already installed some 100,000 wind turbines and 2.5 billion solar panels. In whose backyards will the landfills go for all this trash – and the massive lakes for the waste slurries?
The Supreme Court – and courts, regulators and legislators everywhere – have a lot of work to do.
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"We can't afford to shut big power station": Australian mayor warns
NSW cannot afford to lose Eraring Power Station any time soon based on the current pace of the state's renewable energy infrastructure rollout, Mid-Western Council's mayor believes.
The Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone is the first of five clean energy generation hubs that are due to be built across the state as part of a plan to deliver at least 12 gigawatts of renewable generation and 2 gigawatts of long-duration storage by 2030.
The zone's "energisation date" was recently pushed back from 2025 to 2027-28 due to an increase in proposed project size from 3 gigawatts to 4.5 gigawatts.
Similarly, the New England zone, which abuts the Hunter Region, will now start in 2029 compared with an initial 2027 goal. The Hunter-Central Coast zone will follow.
Despite the ambitions for the Central-West Orana REZ, Mid-Western Council Brad Cam said there was very little progress to show to date.
"Nothing has been built yet. Based on the number of solar panels that are due to be installed in the Central-West Orana REZ, you would need a shipping container full of panels arriving in the Port of Newcastle every day for the next 365 days," he said.
"Ninety per cent of the world's solar panels come from China and they can't keep up with demand. So tell me where we are going to get the panels we need for this project in the next 12 months."
"The bottom line is we simply can't afford to shut Eraring in 2025. If they do the state will be stuffed."
The lack of firmed baseload power is among the factors contributing to escalating power prices.
Energy Consumers Australia data shows the proportion of households and small businesses concerned about being able to pay their electricity bills has risen above 50 per cent.
In addition to the lack of skilled workers needed to build the Central-West Orana REZ, Mr Cam said there were major concerns about the lack of infrastructure and community services, including health, police and water, in place to support the project.
"They are talking about putting in a 1000-bed camp for the workers who will be installing the high voltage infrastructure. But who's going to service it," Mr Cam said.
"We (the council) need 12 months to prepare and build up a sewer treatment plant and a water filtration plant. Then there's the issue of where are they going to get the construction water from?"
"I think they (the government) are sick of listening to me. "I'm just trying to be practical to help them understand there needs to be better planning and better organisation for this to roll forward," he said.
"In simple terms, we understand the NSW Energy Roadmap relies on green energy being generated in these zones to be accessible to the Hunter via new transmission lines proposed to be built," he said.
"Not only is this intended to underwrite supply for existing demand in Sydney and the Hunter, but also being counted on to be the source of green electrons for new industry that will simply not eventuate without renewable energy being available and affordable.
"We're aware of issues in relation to the provision of labour force and road transportation of materials to supply large-scale renewable projects and if kinks along this pathway become prevalent, its only going to add to the concerns currently being expressed in the Central West."
An EnergyCo spokesman said supply chain cost increases due to global efforts to decarbonise and a significant but necessary transmission route design change to avoid negative impacts on the Merriwa-Cassilis communities and prime agricultural land had impacted the Central West-Orana REZ timeline.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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