The Transition to Renewables

Actually, one reason to read history is to know how little has generally been known about what was coming next.--Will




The Jim McCague Fat Tour continues: Another dinner out, this time with Jim Bauerle at PGC.

Max Scherzer vs. Zack Greinke on Wednesday night in Game 7. For the championship. I never would have believed this. On pitching, today, the advantage goes to the Washington starter  (although he is hurt) with the deep Astros bullpen their advantage later. But this is amazing. Verlander gets beat again. But it was too late for me to see the whole game--aggravating.

On the other hand, the Pens looked great.

In December last year, veteran naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough warned attendees at the United Nations climate-change summit that the “collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”This pronouncement was very much in keeping with Attenborough’s long-standing neo-Malthusian views, from his insistence that he has “never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more,” or his fondness for heterodox economist Kenneth Boulding’s saying that “anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.” Attenborough’s remarks generated some pushback, both on the grounds that not even the IPCC predicts such a dire outcome, and that his warning of imminent catastrophe is at odds with the positive trends observable in public health, climate, reforestation, and other environmental data. Critics could also have pointed out that warnings of incoming climate apocalypse are much older than the global cooling scare of the 1970s. As the biogeographer, Philip Stott observed, “every age has viewed climate change cataclysmically, as retribution for human greed and sinfulness.” (Spiked.com)

From Phillip Dick's writing in 1996:

1995: Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts

2010: Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to alter the past with scientific information.

How does the internet affect government approval? Using surveys of 840,537 individuals from 2,232 subnational regions in 116 countries in 2008-2017 from the Gallup World Poll and the global expansion of 3G networks, we show that an increase in internet access reduces government approval and increases the perception of corruption in government. This effect is present only when the internet is not censored and is stronger when traditional media is censored. Actual incidents of corruption translate into higher corruption perception only in places covered by 3G. In Europe, the expansion of mobile internet increased vote shares of anti-establishment populist parties.--the abstract from a paper by Guriev et al

A military guy disagreed with Trump's call to the Ukraine. Is that grounds for impeachment? There are some anarchistic precedents being set here. The fact Pelosi wants a vote now makes me think the secret meetings with leaks are not polling well.

A CBC investigation found that escalator accidents happen every second day in the Montreal Metro. In the U.S., about 10,000 escalator-related injuries end in emergency room visits every year. Many of those victims were likely walking. A  study in Tokyo found almost 60 percent of escalator accidents between 2013 and 2014 resulted from people using escalators improperly, which includes people walking or running on them. Danger everywhere.

Americans think that about 24 percent of people are gay or lesbian, but the true percentage is closer to 2 percent. The biggest study I have ever seen, which demanded homosexual contact of some sort, was 1.4% men, 0.7% women.

"I have sought to present the political ideas of the humanists as the expression of a movement of thought and action, similar in its physiognomy if not in its content to the movement of the philosophes of the Enlightenment.  It was a movement that was stimulated by a crisis of legitimacy in late medieval Italy and by widespread disgust with its political and religious leadership.  Its adherents were men who had wide experience — often bitter, personal experience — with tyranny.  They knew that oligarchs and even popular governments could be as tyrannical as princes.  Their movement was largely in agreement about its goals: to rebuild Europe’s depleted reserves of good character, true piety, and practical wisdom.  They also agreed widely about means: the revival of classical antiquity, which the humanists presented as an inspiring pageant, rich in examples of noble conduct, eloquent speech, selfless dedication to country, and inner moral strength, nourished by philosophy and uncorrupt Christianity.  The humanist movement yearned after greatness, moral and political.  Its most pressing historical questions were how ancient Rome had achieved her vast and enduring empire, and whether it was possible to bring that greatness to life again under modern conditions.  This led to the question of whether it was the Roman Republic or the Principate that should be emulated; and, once the humanists had learned Greek, it provoked the further question of whether Rome was the only possible ancient model to emulate, or whether Athens or Sparta, or even the Persia of Xenophon’s Cyrus, held lessons for contemporary statesmen." 
This is from James Hankins' new book Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy. I don't know if it addresses the attempt of European intellectuals to isolate the new humanist movement and make it free of Christianity.

"...today the U.S. government is in the midst of forcing a standoff with China over the global deployment of Huawei’s 5G wireless networks around the world. This is a complicated issue, and financial interest probably plays a big role. But global security also matters here. This conflict is perhaps the clearest acknowledgment we’re likely to see that our own government knows how much control of communications networks really matters, and our inability to secure communications on these networks could really hurt us."-from a cryptography blog 


"The War of the Worlds”—Orson Welles's realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth—was broadcast on the radio on October 30, 1938. 
                    The Transition to Renewables

The West's incredible self-inflicted Auto-da-fé continues. A new report by consulting giant McKinsey finds that Germany's Energiewende, or energy transition to renewables, poses a significant threat to the nation's economy and energy supply. This is culled from an article in Forbes and is dense but is well worth the read. Keep in mind, these strictures upon the citizens and the economy are "voluntary;" they are government-imposed, presumably the result of the agreement of the general political population and not the wishes of a small, successful minority. This promises incredibly difficult restrictions upon life and living.


"If emissions reductions continue at the same pace as they did over the past decade, then CO₂ targets for 2020 will only be reached eight years later, and 2030 targets will not be reached until 2046."

Germany has failed to even come close to reducing its primary energy consumption to levels it hoped. McKinsey says Germany is just 39% toward its goal for primary energy reduction.
Germany still generates just 35% of its electricity from renewables. And if biomass burning, often dirtier than coal, is excluded, wind, water and solar electricity in Germany accounted for just 27% of electricity generation in 2018.
McKinsey issues its strongest warning when it comes to Germany's increasingly insecure energy supply due to its heavy reliance on intermittent solar and wind. For three days in June 2019, the electricity grid came close to black-outs.
As a result of Germany's energy supply shortage, the highest observed cost of short-term "balancing energy"  skyrocketed from €64 in 2017 to €37,856 in 2019.
Renewables are causing similarly high price shocks in other parts of the world including Texas, Australia, and California.

And Britain and Australia have faced similar energy supply problems in recent years as they have attempted to transition to intermittent renewables.

“We have to have systems in place to make sure we still have enough generation on the grid -- or else, in the best case, we have a blackout, and in the worst case, we have some kind of grid collapse,” Severin Borenstein, a University of California energy economist told Bloomberg.

"The ongoing phase-out of nuclear power by the end of 2022 and the planned coal withdrawal will successively shut down further secured capacity," explained McKinsey. "In particular, the industrial regions in western and southern Germany are affected, in which many capacities go off the grid and at the same time, one can not expect high rates of development of renewables."

The growing insecurity of German energy supply is made worse by the fact that its neighbors Belgium and Netherlands may shut down baseload capacity: coal plants in the Netherlands and nuclear plants in Belgium.
To stabilize the electricity grid and avoid becoming too dependent on imported natural gas, Germany is expanding coal mining to the Hambach forest, where environmental activists were arrested last September.
Meanwhile, local communities and environmentalists have successfully blocked the building of transmission lines from the windy north to the industrial south. German electricity prices are 45% above the European average, McKinsey reports. Green taxes account for 54% of household electricity prices.
Electricity prices will continue to rise through 2030, McKinsey predicts, despite promises in recent years by renewable energy advocates and German politicians that they would go down.
And higher prices will threaten the German industry's competitiveness. Among the radical changes required include building transmission lines eight times faster than they are currently being built, building new back-up power plants, and installing instruments to control electricity demand, all of which would drive electricity prices even higher.

"But it is also clear that the consequences of a blackout would be much higher," warns McKinsey.
Alternatively, Germany could abandon its phase-out of nuclear energy, something the consultancy, like many others in the country, does not mention.