Category: Environment

“Although Polybutylene piping may last up to 30 years, many polybutylene plumbing systems fail in as early as ten years.”

This house where I am, quite a bit of the plumbing is passing SEVENTY years old. And sure, it has required alteration and maintenance. But the only part that I can think of ever having failed was the kitchen sink drain. And that is to be expected as they get wrecked by food residue. But ff sake, drains are NOT under pressure.

Imagine the same house, had plastic water pipes been a thing all along. The water, probably a hot-water line first, would certainly have been expected to “fail,” that is burst and flood the house and need replacing, by as early as the mid 1980s. But even with that hopeful 30-year service lifecycle, the system would have been expected to need replacing, AGAIN, by ten years ago or so. Which service would have been precipitated by another plumbing-failure water spectacular.

But that assumes that you get 30 years out of a plastic pipe. I see 25-year warranties, and my mind goes back to the phrase, “many polybutylene plumbing systems fail in as early as ten years.” Who in their right mind wants to rip out and replace all the plumbing in their home every 30 or 20 or 10 years. It’s madness.

And I suspect the madness, like so much plastic-pushing, is because we use so much oil, so much more than we did a decade or two or three ago, that we have to do something with the horrible waste sludge that comes from oil processing, that can be stabilized and made safe by making it into more and more and more plastic.

In the mean time, if you are designing a home with pressurized plastic water pipes, maybe put all of that behind easy-access panels, cause that shit is gonna need frequent replacing… ideally with copper.

Every single person who drives has directly experienced that no matter how many highways you build, no matter how many lanes you add, they ALWAYS become congested. They always, quite quickly, end up over capacity, or way way over capacity.

None the less, too many people, who ought to have noticed that this does not work, will try to solve traffic congestion and shorten trip times by building more highways and more lanes, which inevitably causes more congestion.

It ought not to be necessary to repeatedly explain induced traffic demand, to anyone who has witnessed it with EVERY highway expansion that ever happened.

FFS. More roads, more highways, more lanes will always make traffic worse. It is as inevitable as gravity.

We can go through this point by point. But the TL-DNR is that by and large this is nonsense. However you can reduce your CO2 footprint by building a lot of safe, cost-effective nuclear power. It was always the solution. It may always be the solution.

Live car-free: The public transit infrastructure to get me places I need to go with loads of tools and supplies does not exist.

Battery electric car: In what fantasy do you think I could afford such a car? Neither the range nor charging infrastructure have been, or are being addressed. No attempt is being made to increase our generating capacity to cover the increased demands of electrified personal transportation.

One less long-haul flight per year: While flying can be a large component of an individual’s carbon footprint, most people never fly. So while dramatically reducing your air travel can dramatically reduce your contributions, flying less has limited utility for overall reductions. At the same time it sure is important not to expand air travel because if most people flew, climate change would get worse fast.

Renewable energy: You mean low-output short-lifespan wind and solar. How I wish that were a solution. But while storage is commonly cited as the main problem, in general, resource criticality is the real bugger. There are not enough mineral reserves for a single, 25-year-max, generation of wind and solar, which is therefore “non-renewable,” energy. And most of this technology, though useful in specific ways, falls one or two orders of magnitude short of replacing current generation and is unlikely to ever scale to the doubling or quadrupling of generation needed to replace fossil fuels in transportation and heating and cooling.

Public transport: I am fully on board for this. Except that we continue to not build it. You cannot use what is not there. (see Live car-free) Much of the public transit that once existed has already been dismantled to subsidize the auto industry. Niagara had comprehensive trolly/rail service in the 1950s. Toronto had more bus service in 1980 than it does now. Build it I say. Utrecht every city. Do it. But do not tell me there is anything reasonable or cost effective, as things stand, about a twice daily commute from Ajax to the Fairview Mall on transit. Such trips cost tens of dollars and sometimes take more than two hours in each direction. And that is as opposed to a cheaper 25 minute drive.

Refurbishment/renovation: This happened in the 1980’s. There are still stickers from that time on my mum’s house. The walls and attic got insulated. Tightly sealed storm windows were installed. It is done. I cannot more do it. There is also a twelve year old very expensive top-end high-efficiency furnace which is a technological piece of junk that I would replace with a simpler lower-efficiency unit in a heartbeat. There is no way that thing ever saved enough resources to justify replacing the old one, and it is coming to the end of its ridiculously short lifespan already. Replacing it when the time comes will probably double the carbon footprint of having switched to it in the first place. My other 1996 mid-efficiency furnace, which just keeps working fine. It has likely done less harm to the climate.

Vegan diet: Well you got me there. If we all only eat things that have the smallest environmental footprint then our individual environmental footprint from food would be minimized. Unfortunately no matter how you work this, the benefits are negated by runaway overpopulation. This argument always stinks of min/maxing population. It is just living in denial that half of half this population may be sustainable.

Just for reference though, I recently learned that the biomass of humans is 400 million tonnes. The biomass of all other wild mammals combined is about 20 million tonnes. That’s a twentieth of just the mass of us. Incidentally the biomass of all our mammalian livestock is 600 million tonnes. Min/maxing with dietary restrictions is not going to help with this.

Heat pump: Maybe? I don’t know. My instinct is that it is a fraught technology like my mum’s high-efficiency furnace where all the cost of manufacture, installation, maintenance and replacement negate any advantage. But I have not heard an expert wax poetic on how this would help. Perhaps that in itself is a clue.

Moreover, I recently heard someone from this industry state that for every 1kw of input to a heat pump you get 4kw out. That is amazing. They claim to have a technology four times as efficient as a perpetual motion machine.

Improved cooking equipment: Probably not what you think. I have a gas stove. It is the best stove for cooking on. On the other hand if you have carbon neutral electricity, then a gas stove has a larger carbon footprint. However over much of the world cooking is still done by burning wood or coal. Cooking has a very large carbon footprint indeed. Efforts to get (mostly women) better wood or gas stoves has been fraught and largely ineffective. Explain to me how you are going to provide electric cook tops and ovens to Africa, India and all of China.

Renewable based heating: Well that is electricity isn’t it. I know someone who thinks a distributed network where every building generates its own electricity is feasible. And that would be great. So one day I bothered to check how many full-sized solar panels it would take to equal the power of my gas furnace. Just the furnace, nothing else. That figure was over one hundred. More solar panels than would at all fit on the land available. But it is worse than that. 100+ panels assumes that they are all working at maximum efficiency and output. So noon, June 21, on a cloudless day. When I do not need the furnace. We are way out in fantasy land here.

Some years ago now, there was a More or Less episode investigating a claim that in order for the UK to electrify cars, just cars, that they would need to build an additional ten full-scale nuclear generating plants just to joule for joule replace the energy required to charge those vehicles instead of fuelling them with gas.

That turned out to be an overestimate. The actual figure was SIX. Six additional nuclear power stations, just to charge cars. Only cars.

Canada is a sprawling country most of which is sparsely populated. That makes our electricity situation much more difficult than the compact dense and tiny UK. While we no doubt have fewer cars to electrify, our density makes providing that electricity much more costly and problematic.

So, if we were gonna make all new cars zero emissions by 2035 it would be difficult to back that up with generating capacity for most of Canada because the ONLY technology we have for generating that much electricity works best in densely populated energy intensive areas. And while we are frantically working toward developing SMRs that could help, those are not nearly deployable yet. I would be happy to get a surprise, but SMRs in place lighting up the country by 2035 seems like wishful thinking.

Even if we started, shovels in the ground, today, eleven years is a big ask. We would struggle to hit this target for increased electricity generation. But the problem is that we are not as yet starting to do anything about building out the massive increases in electricity generation that would be necessary to achieve this goal. I do not foresee any start in 2024 and we would have to have a sea-change in policy and support to be doing site selection in 2025 or 6 or 7…

And for the love of all the old gods, don’t try to sell me your wind and solar fantasy. When we bring Pickering back up to full production that alone will dwarf all of our investments in that short-lived unsustainable delusion.

While, of course, decarbonizing means that most future vehicles will someday be electric, this is inevitable if we are to depreciate fossil fuels, the main problem with transportation is NOT that cars burn gas. Cars are vastly more efficient and less polluting than they were when I was born.

No, the main problem with cars is that we design everything around and for cars, instead of around and for people. And because of this, there is no way for the advent of electric cars to solve any of the problems caused by cars and car-centric urban design. And the main problem there is that this focus on cars is utterly unsustainable and is bankrupting cities all over North America.

To fix those problems we have to change the way we do urbanism. We need to redevelop and restore our traditional dense walkable urban centres and rebuild out the transit that we pulled up in the 50s and 60s as a subsidy to the auto industry.

And this is not in any sense optional. The current status-quo of car-dependent urban sprawl is not just awful in that it lays waste to all our productive land. That kind of development is a net financial loss to cities and has to be effectively subsidized by older, denser development, typically where poorer people live, in order to exist. And that is a battle many many cities, particularly in the US are losing badly. Cars are bankrupting them.

And we do not need to discuss if this is true. It is just sums on spreadsheets. Numerical data that cannot be wished or beliefed away.

Yesterday I was reading some news about Portugal’s “renewable” energy, that upon closer examination also turned out to be, not true. And under that post, in exclusively glowing praiseful comments I found this, “Scotland has been producing more than twice the power it consumes since 2014 (from renewable alone).”

Now, normally I would say that anyone can easily check this kind of thing. But I must admit that Scotland is very very good at obfuscating data that doesn’t shine with righteous “Green” purpose. So while I searched over and over for information about Scotland’s overall energy production and consumption, I was almost invariably channelled into information exclusively about the “renewable” electricity sector.

But in one of those documents I did find a useful graph. I mean, it is a very problematic graph. But it is the best carefully-buried, close-to-whole data I could find. And I will no doubt add a screen capture of it below. The first thing to notice is that there are no units. The second thing to notice is that the scale of the Gas bar is drawn at almost exactly 50% of the scale for Electricity. So, what can we learn from this graph, none the less.

Scotland’s electricity sector is indeed dominated by wind. And that sector totals 22,927 units. The gas sector, which is a source of CO2, is 46,999 units. So mostly-wind electricity is ONE third of Scotland’s energy, while natural gas is TWO thirds of Scotland’s energy. And while this must not be the whole story, for instance where is gasoline in that, or wood burning and etc… Let’s take that data and acknowledge that fossil fuels provide a MINIMUM of 67% of Scotland’s energy. It could be much more.

And let us examine a few problems with the “renewable” numbers.

First of all, a relentless mendacity of “renewable” data reporting is to state the capacity rather than the actual generation. Renewables are more honestly called “intermittents” because that is what they are. In practice wind and solar are often operating at a fraction, or a small fraction of their capacity. Sometimes that is 0% of their capacity for days or weeks at a time. This is such a problem that it has its own term, “dunkelflaute.”

But worse than that, the UK’s wind industry is in crisis. It was news just a couple of weeks ago that even with massive subsidies and guaranteed very-high-rate electricity contracts, the UK government could not find any private investors willing to take their subsidies and build more wind capacity. It is estimated that in order to get more offshore wind built the government is going to have to sweeten the pot by increasing the subsidies from £44 per megawatt-hour to £75. That would be a total increase to more than 200% of 2022 prices. And Scotland has some of the most expensive energy already. And all that wind is probably almost all of the cause.

So, here is the thing. I hate that it is true. I hated it the first time I read a promising headline about fifteen years ago that turned out, on closer examination, to be an obscene falsehood. But when you hear glowing statistics about the success of “renewable” energy, be skeptical. Because for some interests wind and solar are cash cows, troughs of subsidies that they can feast upon. And for many other people, people who genuinely want a sustainable future, belief in this LARPing Green nonsense is a religion. And they will say anything in praise of it, whether it is true or ridiculous.

Finally, and just for reference, so you can get a feel for the zealous mendacity, Lazard says the “average UNSUBSIDIZED levelized cost of energy” for wind is $50 USD. It is harder to find, but for offshore wind they give a range of $66–100 USD. But the UK has just proved that the minimum subsidy alone is $94.51 USD. And in light of the UK government’s rich subsidies, please note Lazard’s use of the word, “UNSUBSIDIZED!” £75 or $94.51 IS the guaranteed subsidy, not the whole cost. And again for clarity, that subsidy doubled between 2022 and 2023, in less than a year.

If wind farms were viable, corporations would be building them on their own initiative, fighting with the government for permits, just out of a profit motive.

And… a postscript…

For additional reference the Canadian LCOE for new nuclear is between $55 and $85. The actual UK subsidy for wind @ £75 is $128.85 CAD. Even were that the whole cost, wind incurs a Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS) which increases the cost by 80 to 94%. So that $128.85 inflates to between $231.93 and $249.65 CAD. That’s something like 3 to 4 times the cost of new nuclear.

Just for clarity. A carbon tax is literally the least the government can do to gently and wishfully encourage industry to decarbonize. The absolute minimum. It is not very effective, and populists can easily lie about it to leverage ignorant deplorable anger, but it is ‘technically’ very very slightly more than doing nothing.

As a more useful alternative, we could discourage oil and gas investment by levying a 100% corporate income surtax. We could set minimum standards for making our cities more walkable and… transitable (?) instead of sprawling automobile hellscapes that cannot help but bankrupt us. We could rebuild our passenger rail system and electrify it all, like civilized countries, and add useful reliable frequent high-speed service.

But just to dip a toe in the prospect of saving the habitability of the whole fucking planet, we have a quite moderate carbon tax that is revenue neutral for the federal government and costs no individual earning less than six-figures anything.

But instead we are collectively having an apoplectic fit over this trivial, minimal, alternative to active punitive and restorative legislation that could save us from this shit-show we have manufactured through petulant greed and irresponsibility.