Thoughts on the climate change fiasco...

Let me start with my favourite search engine, Google. Today they have a new item on their main page linking to articles and videos about climate change. All well and good - but in the promo video, it shows how a fossil-fueled thermal power plant magically melts into the ground, to be replaced by a group of wind-power generators. Can't happen, Folks.

As an illustration, it effectively gets the idea across, but in the real world, we can't replace what's known in the business as 'base load' or 24/7 supplies with part-time supplementary ones like wind power. Just as a brief review, your power system consists of two kinds of supplies: the 24/7 always-needed base-load providers, and the part-time only as needed peaking supplies used during periods of maximum demand, such as during the evening supper hour. We can't replace the always-needed supplies with part-time or unreliable sources like those wind generators. And right here let me add that the energy produced by a wind generator costs many times more to develop and use than the energy we get from  a large hydro-electric station, for example. So we have to be practical about all this.

There's also been a lot of talk about hydrogen, and the so far mythical 'hydrogen highway'. The information I've seen so far indicates that with present technology, we are using more energy producing the hydrogen than we can recover by using it in fuel cells or other power producing devices. So don't hold your breath until we're all whizzing down the freeway in our hydrogen-powered vehicles.

The car of the near future is probably going to be electric, at least in part, and it will be using Lithium-ion batteries. The same kind we use in our rechargeable cameras, but bigger. Problem solved? Not quite - the experts say we've only got about a 10-year reserve of Lithium available for making those batteries. So those are going to be expensive and not too plentiful I would guess. Back to the drawing boards, Folks.

So far, the global warming problem has been compounded by misinformation and the hot air expended talking about it, mostly to avoid actually having to do something, because it all boils down to making certain sacrifices, and hardly anybody wants to settle for less of anything we're enjoying now. That's our first challenge - getting used to that idea. We can't have everything, because we're rapidly running out of somewhere to put it, and the resources to keep it going.