Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Canada's Harper - Kyoto Is Socialism

Well, well, well. What do you know. The marks are starting to wise up. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Kyoto is socialism all the way. As I have been saying for a while, human caused global warming is Socialist Science. Let me let the Prime Minister tell it like it is.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper once called the Kyoto accord a "socialist scheme" designed to suck money out of rich countries, according to a letter leaked Tuesday by the Liberals.

The letter, posted on the federal Liberal party website, was apparently written by Harper in 2002, when he was leader of the now-defunct Canadian Alliance party.

He was writing to party supporters, asking for money as he prepared to fight then-prime minister Jean Chrétien on the proposed Kyoto accord.

"We're gearing up now for the biggest struggle our party has faced since you entrusted me with the leadership," Harper's letter says.

"I'm talking about the 'battle of Kyoto' — our campaign to block the job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto accord."
This is the same reason that the American Senate killed the very idea during the Clinton administration by voting against it 95 to 0.

The Prime Minister goes on:
He writes that it's based on "tentative and contradictory scientific evidence" and it focuses on carbon dioxide, which is "essential to life."

He says Kyoto requires that Canada make significant cuts in emissions, while countries like Russia, India and China face less of a burden.

Under Kyoto, Canada was required to reduce emissions by six per cent by 2012, while economies in transition, like Russia, were allowed to choose different base years. As developing nations, China and India were exempted from binding targets for the first round of reductions.

"Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations," Harper's letter reads.

He said the accord would cripple the oil and gas industries, which are essential to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.
I'll bet if America adopted it that it would be bad for Texas and Oklahoma too.

So much for history. How about some news.
OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government promised Tuesday to get tough with polluters, but it angered opposition parties with a throne speech that reiterated its intent to ignore the country's legally binding targets under the international Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
So how is Europe doing? About as well as Al Gore. They say one thing and do another. Robert Samuelson had this to say in 2005:
Almost a decade ago I suggested that global warming would become a "gushing" source of political hypocrisy. So it has. Politicians and scientists constantly warn of the grim outlook, and the subject is on the agenda of the upcoming Group of Eight summit of world economic leaders. But all this sound and fury is mainly exhibitionism -- politicians pretending they're saving the planet. The truth is that, barring major technological advances, they can't (and won't) do much about global warming. It would be nice if they admitted that, though this seems unlikely.

Europe is the citadel of hypocrisy. Considering Europeans' contempt for the United States and George Bush for not embracing the Kyoto Protocol, you'd expect that they would have made major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions -- the purpose of Kyoto. Well, not exactly. From 1990 (Kyoto's base year for measuring changes) to 2002, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, increased 16.4 percent, reports the International Energy Agency. The U.S. increase was 16.7 percent, and most of Europe hasn't done much better.


Here are some IEA estimates of the increases: France, 6.9 percent; Italy, 8.3 percent; Greece, 28.2 percent; Ireland, 40.3 percent; the Netherlands, 13.2 percent; Portugal, 59 percent; Spain, 46.9 percent. It's true that Germany (down 13.3 percent) and Britain (a 5.5 percent decline) have made big reductions. But their cuts had nothing to do with Kyoto. After reunification in 1990, Germany closed many inefficient coal-fired plants in eastern Germany; that was a huge one-time saving. In Britain, the government had earlier decided to shift electric utilities from coal (high CO2 emissions) to plentiful natural gas (lower CO2 emissions).
You know I think Kyoto is dead. I am also of the opinion that after seeing what is going on in the rest of the world any Kyoto like treaty will be no more popular in the Senate than it was the last time. It seems like Al's Nobel signifies what the Peace Prize always has signified. A person whose time has passed.

Let me make it official then. Nobel Peace Laureate Al Gore is now officially a has been. He should than the Nobel Commission for the recognition.

11 comments:

LarryD said...

Here's hoping that WB-7 and WB-8 pan out.

But even if they do, it will take a decade and more to start deploying Polywell fusion plants, and that only helps for fixed location power consumption, or large vehicles like naval vessels, that are big enough to carry their own reactor.

Of course, I'm not convinced that an increase from 280ppm to 383ppm (0.03% to 0.04%) can really have a climatic effect. Water vapor, yes (clouds, obviously), but water vapor is around 0.25% over all, 1% to 4% near the surface. Right after 9/11, when commercial aircraft were grounded, they got a chance to study the effects of contrails on climate, and found that they just moderate temperature swings, the mean temperature remained the same.

M. Simon said...

Larry,

The deployment could happen in as little as 3 years if the project was Manhattanized.

An 10 ft diameter Bussard reactor could power aircraft. Especially if certain reactivity enhancers work out.

Dr. Bussard mentioned them in passing in his final audio. You have to listen closely. What he was talking about was the POPS effect.

Dr. Bussard's Final Interview

LarryD said...

The Interview is in a format I can't play.

I expect it would take at least three years to refine the design for mass production, before any serious deployment could begin. Some things you can't expedite by throwing more resources at. And of course, there is the infrastructure to develop, Boron we mine in large quantities, but we don't have that much demand for isotopicly pure Boron-11, yet. I don't know how much the nuclear industry produces as a by product, but it's going to have to be turned into a deliberate product.

Re Aircraft: Yes, for a 747. Maybe the next size down. But no one I know has done any work on electrically powered aircraft engines, so the application that comes to mind is the Airborne Laser. Until someone develops an electrically powered replacement for a jet aircraft engine, with at least near equal performance, commercial jet liners will continue to use JET A.

Re POPS. I assume you mean Periodically Oscillating Plasma Sphere?

M. Simon said...

Larry,

Actually you can expedite things a lot if cost is no object. I'll let you come to your own conclusion about the meaning of that.

There is more than enough demand for B11 in the semiconductor industry to get started.

I believe work is going on in the superconductor area for aircraft motors. Certainly ship motors. Airborne, ship based, and ground based lasers are good candidates.

Yes. POPS.

BTW send me an email - I have some things that might be of interest.

LarryD said...

The technology already developed for nuclear powered naval vessels means sea going ships are covered. The Navy is already funding a lot of research towards all-electric ships, including electromagnetic artillery (i.e., coil guns and rail guns).

Propeller driven aircraft, I don't think any such aircraft still in service are large enough to be candidates. Commercial airliners, some of which are big enough to be candidates, are (I believe) either jets or turboprops. I doubt the airlines would accept a replacement engine that resulted in a significantly slower airliner, especially for the long routes. There once was a project to develop Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (1951-1963), but I don't think any of that research would be applicable.

Transportation has always been the sticky part of trying to get away from petroleum. We (and the rest of the world) use a lot of gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuel.

Hmm, maybe it's time to start working out just how much Boron-11 would be needed per mega-Watt hour. That would give us a handle on how much Boron-11 would be needed.

Given the performance of Congress, I think I'd rather see this not "Manhattanized", thank you very much. It's too important to mess up, and legislators especially tend to muck things up. Remember Synfuels Corporation?

The final Stage 2 EMC2Fusion plans will take five years to develop, allow three years to develop a mass production version, then serious deployment can begin.

M. Simon said...

Congress is going to do what Congress is going to do.

There are prop aircraft that can cruise at about 500 to 550 mph. Just like jets. There may be a noise factor. For military jets it won't matter.

A 100 MW reactor would burn about 1 lb a day. At that rate we have 100,000 years of boron on land and a billion years worth in the sea.

Congress will throw money at this like you can't believe to shorten the cycle. The waste will be tremendous. And worth it.

M. Simon said...

Larry,

I responded to your email. Did you get it? The address was peculiar.

LarryD said...

It's a spamex address, I created specifically for this purpose. The history shows your reply has reached the spamex server, but it hasn't been forwarded on to my work email yet. One advantage to a spamex address is I can switch it between home and work.

2005 data shows US electrical consumption at 4,054,688 thousand megawatt hours / 2400 = 1,689,453 lbs. Under a thousand tons of B11, but still not a small amount. Depending on what the amounts produced by the nuclear industry and consumed by the semiconductor industry are, that may or may not take a bit of ramping up..

According to Wikipedia, Turkey and the US are the major Boron producing countries.

M. Simon said...

It will take a LOT of ramping up.

However, current production is more than sufficient for experimental purposes and a few operating plants.

LarryD said...

From what I've been able to survey (admittedly limited), electric aircraft propulsion is largely constrained by lack of high temperature superconductors. And it doesn't seem likely that when such engines are developed, that they will fit into current jet nacelles.

So it seems unlikely that any current airframes will be retro-fitted for electric engines. We're going to be using aviation fuels for quite a while even if WB-7 and WB-8 succeed. Well, avation only constitutes about 9% of finished petroleum products anyway, about a fifth of what gasoline does.

Replacing gasoline and diesel fuel for cars and trucks is always going to be the big stumbling block for getting off of oil, anyhow.

M. Simon said...

It won't be done with current air frames.

Think of large loitering vehicles.