Bill Gates on 60 Minutes just now.

[NNadir]

34. I am not talking about the ability to advertise. Trump had a great deal of influence as well.

Having a big microphone does not make what one says true. The last 4 years have demonstrated this clearly.

We have a different definition of what "working" might mean.

If it's merely to say that you can light a light bulb with a solar cell at noon by getting the solar cell to push electrons through a circuit, yeah that can be done. The photocell was invented in 1954. I don't deny that.

My definition of "working" would be addressing climate change and reducing the use of dangerous fossil fuels. If this is not the goal of the solar and wind scam, the big microphone that it apparently has all around the world claiming otherwise is Trumpian.

The trillions spend on solar and wind have not, not even remotely addressed climate change.

That's a fact.

Facts matter.

It is a fact that we are now using more dangerous fossil fuels after carrying on about wind and solar for half a century, and after spending close to 3 trillion dollars on solar and wind to push electrons around at arbitrary times.

It is a fact that readings of over 416 ppm of carbon dioxide were recorded last week.

It really, really, really, really, really doesn't take much insight to show what the energy to mass ratio of so called "renewable energy" to nuclear energy is. There are tens of thousands of LCA papers written in the primary scientific literature about them all the time.

I recently, very elaborately, over in the Science forum discussed in considerable detail, the land use requirements of the very stupid and useless wind industry by doing a very, very, very, very simple straight forward calculation of electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to make motor fuels, which as I pointed out, is a bad idea, although the paper I cited was a very, very good paper that subtly put a sense of reality into this much studied topic.

It is here: Synthesizing Clean Transportation Fuels from CO2 Will at Least Quintuple the Demand for Electricity.

An excerpt, consisting not of commentary on the paper under discussion, but my commentary:

Above we see, in figure 6, that the electric power consumed in the United States amounts to 14.2 exajoules per year. From this, we can calculate that about 400 reactors would be required to completely eliminate all carbon dioxide output connected with electricity, about 4 times as many as we built between 1965 and 1985, using primitive technology. (If, using the techniques described above, we were to raise the thermodynamic efficiency of these plants to 60%, a little over 200 would be required.)

An acre of land is equal to approximately 0.405 hectares. Thus the Diablo Canyon plant itself takes up about 5 hectares, and the surrounding land belonging to the power plant takes up about 365 hectares. The 3.1 nameplate wind turbines, which, allowing for capacity utilization of 33% as suggested in the authors' text, produces about 1 MWe on 35 hectares of land, means that to provide the same electrical power that the Diablo Canyon reactors produce would require 2280 MW * 35 hectares/MW = 79,800 hectares.

Note that this land, unlike the Diablo Canyon site, whose 365 hectares are mostly pristine, the 79,800 hectares would need to be crisscrossed with asphalt or concrete service roads.

The 19 million hectares, described above for the reduction of ethanol's carbon dioxide side product, would also be reduced. The average continuous power produced by 216 GW of power from any source at 100% capacity utilization is about 6.8 exajoules, a huge portion of the current electricity production. This would require about 200 nuclear reactors to meet, although, as I spent considerable time describing above, it would be stupid for a nuclear plant to produce electricity to reduce carbon dioxide, since thermochemical means would be far superior via high thermodynamic efficiency. But if we used the 40-50 year old technology used to design Diablo Canyon, and only produced electricity, 216 GW/(2.28 GW/nuclear plant = 95 nuclear plants would be required. At 365 hectares, mostly unused per nuclear plant, this amounts to around 35,000 hectares, most of which would be undisturbed land, or about 0.2% as much land.

Now, as someone who closely follows LCA literature and has collected thousands of papers on the topic if I've collected one, and as someone who extremely interested in climate change and approaching the end of my life thinking about it in most of my free time, I am acutely aware that about ten billion tons of carbon dioxide additions to the atmosphere are connected with land use changes, and about 35 billion tons are attributable to the rising use of dangerous fossil fuels. I also know how steel is made, how aluminum is made, how the isolation of lanthanides (and for that matter the actinides) is accomplished. Nobody makes aluminum waiting for the wind to blow to power up Hall–Héroult electrochemical plants. Nobody. Nobody fires up blast furnaces only when the wind is blowing so they can be electrochemically heated. Nobody.

If your interest is to prove that one can light a light bulb at noon with a solar cell, I concede "solar energy" works. You win. Happy?

If your interest is the same as mine - and clearly it isn't - addressing climate change, well, data is data is data is data is data and data. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, measuring this week, at more than 416 ppm is a fact. It is also a fact that within a month, a new record will be set there for the weekly average.

Like it says on one of the t-shirts they send you with your AAAS membership, "Facts are facts."

The corollary is that facts matter.