I started watching this new cable series, Landman, mainly because it has Billy Bob Thornton in it. I think he’s a good actor, even if he has fallen into the rut of playing bad, cynical characters…which is what he does in this show. It’s about rough, tough, oilmen doing the difficult, dangerous, and lucrative job of drilling for oil in Texas, and it really plays up the idea that manly men are all obnoxious and arrogant because they need to be in order to keep the oil flowing.
I was not particularly enjoying it. It’s a kind of self-serving genre, the whole assholes being assholes because it makes them great at getting shit done thing. I kept at it just because Billy Bob is so entertaining at doing that thing. But then I got to the third episode, where Billy Bob is entertainingly raging at a liberal lawyer woman (of course — no man in this show would be so wimpy) about the futility of wind turbines.
Do you have any idea how much diesel they had to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel and haul this sh¡t out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fսck¡ng thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don’t get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery. And never mind the fact that, if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don’t have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It’d take 30 years if we started tomorrow. And, unfortunately, for your grandkids, we have a 120-year, petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. And, hell, it’s in everything. That road we came in on. The wheels on every car ever made, including yours. It’s in tennis rackets and lipstick and refrigerators and antihistamines. Pretty much anything plastic. Your cell phone case, artificial heart valves. Any kind of clothing that’s not made with animal or plant fibers. Soap, fսck¡ng hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats. You name it. Every fսck¡ng thing. And you know what the kicker is? We’re gonna run out of it before we find its replacement. It’s the thing that’s gonna kill us all… as a species. No, the thing that’s gonna kill us all is running out before we find an alternative. And believe me, if Exxon thought them fսck¡ng things right there were the future, they’d be putting them all over the goddamn place.
Wait a minute…I’m at a green university that has been putting up turbines. We’ve got a pair of them pumping out 10 million kWh of electricity. We’ve got photovoltaic panels all over campus. We’ve got a biomass gasification facility. We’re officially carbon neutral right now — how could that be, if the installation of these features was so expensive that we’d never be able to offset their carbon footprint?
That stopped me cold. If Billy Bob delivered that rant to my face, I wouldn’t be able to answer it. I don’t have the details to counter any of his points, because I don’t have the background. I have been told that each of our wind turbines is an expensive capital investment, but that they pay for themselves in about a year of operation, which kind of undercuts Billy Bob’s claim. I also live in a region where people are putting them fucking things all over the goddamn place. Who am I going to believe, the scientists and engineers who are providing the energy to run my workplace, or a fictional character in a fictional television show that valorizes the oil industry?
So I stopped watching and went looking for verifiable information, because, you know, university administrators and bureaucrats do have a history of lying to us. Maybe Billy Bob is right. He sure does have a lot of passion on this point, and we all know that angry ranting is correlated with truth. Then I found this video.
It includes references! It turns out that data defeats ranting, no matter how well acted.
(Sorry, I just copy-pasted from the video description, and YouTube butchers URLs.)
[1] Life cycle analysis of the embodied carbon emissions from 14 wind turbines with rated powers between 50Kw and 3.4Mw (2016)
https://pure.sruc.ac.uk/ws/portalfile…[2] Life cycle energy and carbon footprint of offshore wind energy. Comparison with onshore counterpart (2019)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…[3] Life-cycle green-house gas emissions of onshore and offshore wind turbines (2019)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…[4] Life Cycle Analysis of Wind Turbine (2012) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/…
[5] Orders of Magnitude – Energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_…)[6] The Keystone XL Pipeline and America’s History of Indigenous Suppression
The Keystone XL Pipeline and America’s History of Indigenous Suppression – UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog[7] ExxonMobil lobbyists filmed saying oil giant’s support for carbon tax a PR ploy
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2…[8]Bonou, A., Laurent, A., & Olsen, S. I. (2016). Life cycle assessment of onshore and offshore wind energy-from theory to application. Applied Energy, 180, 327–337.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.apenergy…[9] Weinzettel, J., Reenaas, M., Solli, C., & Hertwich, E. G. (2009). Life cycle assessment of a floating offshore wind turbine. Renewable Energy, 34(3), 742–747.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.renene.2…[10] GCC – Potential Climate Change report
https://s3.documentcloud.org/document…[11] Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air – How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/…
Basically, scientists have done life-cycle analysis of wind turbines, measure all the energy and CO2 produced to build one of those damned things, and weighed it against the total energy produced over their lifetime, and also compared CO2 produced by a wind turbine against the CO2 produced for an equivalent amount of energy produced by burning coal and oil, and guess what? Billy Bob lied to us all. Wind turbines pay for themselves in less than a year, and oil-burning plants produce 60 times more CO2 than an equivalent bank of wind turbines.
I’m not resuming the series. I was already put off by the gross sexism of the show, but learning that it’s propaganda for Big Oil killed it for me.
I also learned that this show is made by the same people who made another popular series called Yellowstone that I’ve never watched and never will. What I saw of it is that it’s about heroic ranchers in the mountain west, and I’ve known ranchers — they tend to be horrible ignorant people with an extreme sense of entitlement — and I know that the regions full of ranchers tend to be regressive, bigoted, unpleasant strongholds of far-right political movements. Think Idaho. So I’ll pass on that one, too.
I bet it’s easy to get funding for those kinds of shows, though.
They shouldn’t have done this analysis. Elon’s teenage nerds will now be scrubbing any of the documents and papers from websites.
Segments of the concrete/cement industry are trying to reduce the carbon content of making and using the stuff. I think the idea has inspired one of Trump’s rants of not being allowed to do something or other that manly American builders should be allowed to do.
The rant is horrifically stupid, anyway. In the last part, “We’re going to run out before we find a replacement”…uh…Wind? Solar? Nuclear? Maybe hold back that oil for support in advancing those industries instead of dumping it into vehicles and furnaces?
I, too, have been thinking about watching it simply because of BBT but yeah…guess I’ll skip it now.
Yeah, looks like Hollywood’s performative flirtations with liberalism and environmentalism is over. At least they’ll now be honest money-grubbing shits.
And just imagine…this crap is streaming into the homes of millions of people who don’t question the rant, nod their heads in approval, and vote for MuskTrumpster to “fix” things. I wouldn’t be surprised if Fox News picks it up and treats it as scientific fact because Billy Bob says the lines convincingly.
Meanwhile down in Florida, DeSanitation man and the Rethuglican legislature are at each other’s throats over how to implement their inhuman anti-immigration policies. This is what we get when people elect ideologues who don’t want to govern but rule and grift.
It’s difficult to have any optimism.
OK, I’m not going to dig in to the sources because I’m at work, but having spent quite a lot of time thinking about and looking at these sorts of things, the question that immediately leaps to my mind is: “what, exactly, is being compared here?”
On the one hand, we’re clearly talking about whole lifecycle emissions for the wind turbines, because that’s the only sensible way you can talk about emissions for wind turbines. On the other hand, I strongly suspect that we’re only talking about operating emissions on the fossil fuel side – i.e. ignoring the lifecycle emissions for the plant and infrastructure. If that’s the case, then the comparison isn’t really valid, and the actual situation is even more strongly in favour of wind.
(And that’s without getting into any complicated arguments about system boundaries…)
A liberal city-slicker lawyer who doesn’t know what a wind-turbine is? That line alone — “what are those strange alien things standing so ominously on the horizon?” — turned me off the show. Was this turkey made by the same clowns who gave us the “Atlas Shrugged” movies?
I haven’t seen it but the fact that it is a Taylor Sheridan product makes it unsurprising that it takes on the rightwing mindset. Yellowstone, another Sheridan project, was exactly the same. It, too, portrayed environmentalism as something practiced by the weak and strange while showing a man who literally murders people to maintain his ranch and lifestyle to be admirable. These shows exist in order to give the MAGAt hive something they can raise a beer to while chanting “USA. USA. USA.”
Well, it’s pretty accurate that a Texas oilman would have a counterfactual rant against green energy and a shitty attitude toward women lawyers. But as in fiction, I wouldn’t recommend believing anything an actual Texas oilman has to say on the topic either.
Presumably the lubrication requirements he had were before the latest Neodymium Iron magnets reduced the need for gearing in wind turbines.
Good point.
That oil burning power plant didn’t build itself.
They are made of metal, concrete, and plastics.
Humans had to mine the ore, some of which such as copper came from Chile, transport it, refine it, and fabricate it.
The same with concrete which is made by burning lime, an energy intensive process. Plastics are usually made from…oil.
They also use water as the working fluid to turn the turbines as steam.
I tried to find an estimate for how much CO2 it releases to build an oil fueled plant. Didn’t get much.
One source said millions of tons of CO2 but the amount varied depending on the size and details of the power plant.
I’m sure a windmill is a lot less because they are simpler and smaller.
As many have commented, conservatives can’t do comedy. This is what they do instead, produce macho dramas full of lies. Liberals need to do drama too, otherwise we are going to steamrollered by the lies of Faux News.
I wonder which great thinker realized that Americans (and us Canadians, and probably the Brits, Aussies and who knows who else) gain almost all of their understanding of the world from fictional television. Maybe it was Dick Wolf, who realized that people could be convinced that the NYC justice system was populated with competent people who gave a shit, despite all real-world evidence to the contrary, just by producing well-crafted shows with charismatic actors.
The degree to which this happens even in people who should know better is appalling. When I was a cop, many years ago, I had a Sergeant/Detachment commander who ran our isolated northern post (4 constables, 1 sgt). This guy had been policing in the remote north for close to 40 years. He exclusively watched TV dramas about cops (and other first responders), and it definitely informed his worldview. That’s probably the scariest thing for me: every time some McBain-alike cop movie has a scene where the ‘rogue cop’ turns in his badge and ‘does what he has to do’, there’s a non-zero number of cops watching the thing and thinking “Yeah, that’s the right way to do it, fuck those pencil-pushers with all their rules”.
If you want to convince North Americans of things, just fund a TV show that contains your desired beliefs as unstated premises. Hire attractive actors and competent writers, and if you can get enough market share – you’ll move the needle. This is also why right-wingers get so upset about queer/POC characters in movies/TV/games. They understand this process intuitively. They know that positive depictions of minorities drive broader public attitudes – and they hate it.
I talked to our UU church’s HVAC contractor about our desire to replace our gas furnaces with electric heat pumps to reduce our carbon emissions. He said we were drinking the political koolaid and that our emissions were less than that of a single car. He didn’t know or care that I had reviewed our gas usage and already knew we were emitting the carbon of six cars.
Facts don’t matter to conservatives.
You may have seen “studies” which show that electric cars produce more CO2 over the full life cycle than gasoline-burning cars. These include the CO2 cost of mining the lithium for the batteries, etc, but ignore the costs of building the gas-burning car. And they still had to fudge the numbers.
And while I’, on the subject, it’s true that EVs are 20% less efficient on a really cold morning, but you can warm them up before you unplug them, and gas cars are 15% less efficient, but that somehow doesn’t get mentioned.
Is Billy Bob’s character in the show an authoritative truth teller, or a cynical, self-serving bloviator? If the latter, I see no reason to stop watching the show — his character may be a liar serving big oil, but for all we know, later in the show, these lies will be pointed out and turned against the liars.
“The carbon footprint of making things” is the elephant in the room of energy independence and just about everything else. As a fan of wildlife videos, one example I can point to is what it takes to rescue a stranded cat from a tree — the notion of mobilizing all manner of fossil fuel-consuming equipment and resources to effect a tiny improvement is beyond most people’s comprehension.
#7: no, those numbers include the cost of everything to build and assemble a turbine, not just the operating costs.
Wait, Thornton(‘s character) said something negative about a Tesla?
His private financial/medical data (and his director’s, producer’s, and masseuse’s) will be all over Xitter by this weekend!
I’m sick of Fossil Fuel Fracking Fools! To use my newly created acronym again, they can all COAD (crawl off and die). I’d say ‘nuke them’, but now the deranged aholes running this country want to push us down the death spiral further and faster by wasting billions of dollars and years funding dangerous, wasteful nuclear powerplants.
drksky @3, petrochemicals.
(Can’t remember where, but as a lad I read a short story where aliens come to Earth and are appalled that we just basically burned away our treasure)
Here is a source from an industry that competes with wind and solar:
https://world-nuclear.org/images/articles/comparison_of_lifecycle1.pdf
@18, iiandiiii
Nope, that does not happen. I watched them all.
I did not know the producer was the guy who did Yellowstone or I probably would never have started watching it.
However, I did find the show interesting and entertaining overall.
I just looked, I’ve generated almost 47 MWh from my 18 panels, so far, in a bit over 4 years.
(That’s really quite a bit of energy)
Looks good: https://morris.umn.edu/sustainability-umn-morris/sustainability-goals-initiatives
My wife and I just started watching Yellowstone. We’re still on the first season. And frankly, I’m not really getting drawn into it.
But wait, are the Kevin Costner character and his family supposed to be the good guys? I haven’t seen Breaking Bad, yet, either, but from what I’ve heard of that, I thought this was something similar – a TV show showing everything from the villains’ point of view.
Nobody can watch that show and think the Duttons are heroes, right?
This reminds me of a real life (I think) clip I ran across a while ago of an activist arguing with an Australian rancher about the emissions of leather vs. fake leather. The rancher flatly claimed that faux leather is worse for the climate. The activist didn’t have a reply, but I looked it up, and of course that’s also mostly bullshit. (IIRC, unlike the wind case, it’s fairly close, but faux leather is still slightly ahead.)
I think we have to try to be ready for more of these arguments, and innoculate against them. But it’s hard because it’s basically just climate change Gish gallop stuff. If people are just going to make stuff up and lie, you can’t be ready for all of it.
-—
@19: IIUC, that’s what Dunc was saying — it’s obvious the wind number is all up b/c otherwise the emission cost from wind is basically zero. The question is whether the comparisons with fossil plants ALSO include embedded emissions, like all the concrete/steel/copper etc. required to build them. If they took the shortcut of just looking at emissions on the fossil side, wind could be more than 60x better…
@27: I haven’t really watched Yellowstone, but from the clips I’ve seen, I think if it’s supposed to be portraying them as bad guys, the portrayal might be a bit too subtle for a fair chunk of the target audience. Breaking Bad is probably an apt comparison, because I get the impression a lot of casual viewers think whatsisname is the hero there too.
IMO doing anything creative that doesn’t make the good and bad guys absolutely black and white is pretty tough these days. The lines have just been blurred too much. Heck, look at how many Warhammer 40K fans unironically think of the xenophobic fascist imperials as the “good guys”. And that’s not even especially subtle…
I’m reminded of a bit in the 90s that was circulating on usenet and bulletin boards and such. Someone had pieced together a bunch of values and calculations in a “proof” that a cyclist caused more petroleum consumption/emissions than someone riding a car. A couple people poked and prodded at the numbers, and it was just an oranges to apples comparison – they included all the fossil fuel use to make fertilizer, grow crops, transport crops, build the bicycle, etc., but for the car acted as if the gasoline just magically appeared at the pump handle. Or that people driving a car still need to eat food as well.
Just a bunch of dishonest sophistry
Nevermind that, if Billy Bob is correct, and we need oil for all those other products, and there is no alternative, then we should stop using it for electricity and cars to make it last as long as possible.
One thing I find interesting in these comparisons is what I’m going to call “intrinsic” vs. “circumstantial” emissions — if there’s an existing term for this, I haven’t seen it. I’m not sure the most of this literature does a good job of elucidating the difference.
For example, IIUC, what many of these comparisons are doing is figuring out, say, how many KWh of input power it takes a factory to make a solar panel, then converting that to a fossil fuel/CO2 equivalent (perhaps using a factor based on the current mix of power sources, either globally, or on the national grid where the factory is). Thus, if you’re manufacturing a PV cell in China, where something like 60% of the power comes from coal, in some sense you’re converting a certain amount of coal into solar cells, and there’s some embodied CO2 in your panel from that power production process.
I’ve actually seen people take those figures and use it to serious argue that this makes solar power unsustainable: “it takes X tons of coal to manufacture N Kw of PV cell, so we are going to use up all the fossil fuels either way.”
But, at least in theory, that’s obviously just a temporary condition. Solar panels, wind turbines, etc. all produce net power over their lifetimes. If the current CO2 input to the quartz mine, solar factory, etc. is basically just grid electric power, and there’s no intrinsic emissions involved in the process (due to chemical processes etc.), than the emissions produced by the current grid are purely circumstantial. Once the grid is 100% renewable (and the transport chain, etc.), the lifecycle emissions from manufacturing the power plants would drop to essentially 0.
Thus in the long term, the only emissions that matter are the intrinsic ones, like the CO2 released baking limestone into cement, or using carbon to reduce iron ore, or methane escaping from drilling operations for petrochemical feedstocks.
[OT]
“Heck, look at how many Warhammer 40K fans unironically think of the xenophobic fascist imperials as the “good guys”.”
The Imperium of Man is just that, in-universe. Or, at least, the least-worst.
Unless you prefer the Necrons or the Dark Eldar or Chaos Marines or Tyranids or Orks.
(The whole franchise was set up to be the ultimate cranked-up-to-11 over-the-top setting possible)
[OT]
@31: “Unless you prefer the Necrons or the Dark Eldar or Chaos Marines or Tyranids or Orks.”
Well, that’s just the point. IIUC, ALL the factions are supposed to be horrifying, each in their own distinct and interesting ways. That’s what gives the setting its excuse to have everyone pointlessly backstabbing and going to war with everyone else all the time. It’s a war game, after all, not a peace game.
It’s also understandable that a lot of people choose to identify with the “human” faction, despite its huge in-universe flaws. If nothing else it’s familiar, and gets a lot of narrative attention. I just get the impression that there are a few people who go a step further, and take the traits that are obviously supposed to be in the Empire’s minus column — like the over-the-top authoritarianism — and put them in the plus column instead. Maybe not a lot of people, mind you, but certainly non-zero.
Not just a game, jack. There’s the Black Library, and so on. A franchise, now.
But sure, no actual good guys in a totally dystopian grimdark setting, other than relatively.
I’ve heard the same thing about the environmental costs of EV since it was a complaint about hybrids.
It requires you pretend that internal combustion cars pop into existance.
My own conservative brother one actually complained about all the plastic in a Prius!!! Um, like your car doesn’t have just as much.. on top of the petroleum it constantly consumes?
I read the spiel.
Hollywood?
To be fair, this bit is rather indisputable: “And, unfortunately, for your grandkids, we have a 120-year, petroleum-based infrastructure.”
(We shat our bed, now we lie in it)
@27,
This is the sad reality of television/movies – if you attempt to tell a story from the point of view of a villain/antihero you will inevitably end up with a substantial number of people who miss the point and uncritically admire the character you were trying to show as evil/irresponsible/destructive/whatever.
See: American History X, Fight Club, Breaking Bad…. the list is endless.
I have only watched the clips posted on the tube and I did notice a similarity between the oil show and the rancher show. I am not surprised it is the same producer you hit the current winning formula again and again till it is not winning then move to another to make the big bucks.
I like the oil one better Billy Bob is great to watch as is Jonathan Banks in the clips from his 2 series I have seen. I am not at all interested in the whole programs such. I have a hard time suspending my disbelief and disgust with the underlying story to watch the whole thing. I can tolerate the setting up the bad guy and the defeat dealt to them in short doses only many clips from other shows fit that as well.
[OT]
That’s perfectly normal and understandable.
Hardly sad.
It’s the skill of the writer(s) and other contributors.
They are after all, the protagonist. The focus character.
(If the protagonist can’t hold the reader/viewer’s attention and stand out prominently, it won’t sell)
—
E.g. you ever read ‘Grunts’ by Mary Gentle? I did.
[addendum]
Um, unless the point is that the main character should be hated and thus hate-watched.
Then you might have a point.
(I doubt that’s the most financially successful formula, however)
unclefrogy, salient point of this post is “but learning that it’s propaganda for Big Oil killed it for me.”
Comparing the carbon footprint of building a wind turbine to that of an oil or more likely gas fired power plant is not valid since the latter already exists (CO2 from building it is water under the bridge) and probably produces the power of several wind turbines. A better comparison is to comparing the Carbon Footprint of a wind turbine to that of of one of the oil/gas wells that feeds the beast. These wells are going to be horizontal with multi fracs. Let’s start with steel. The part that is visible (the wellhead and other surface facilities such as a separator) amount to a rounding error compared to what is below ground. We will only consider the casing (pipe that is cemented into the wellbore to keep the hole from falling in and to keep different formations isolated. The tubing that the well be flowing up can be recovered when the well is abandoned. There will be about 200 m of large diameter (200 or 244.5) mm surface casing to protect ground water. This is going to have linear density of 30 or 48 kg/m. This is 6 or 9.6 tonnes of steel. If the well is 1000m or so deep with a horizontal section of 1500 m it will require 1000 m of 178 mm casing with a linear density of 25.3 kg/m. This is 25.3 tonnes of steel. If we are not doing too many fracs we can get away with 114 mm of 14 kg/m casing for the 1500 m liner (a liner is a casing string that does not reach all the way to the surface) for the horizontal section. This is 21 tonnes.of steel. This is 52 – 55 tonnes of steel. This casing and liner will require 10 or so tonnes of cement to fill the space between the casing and the hole.
The big ass crane that is used to set up the wind turbine is not going burn anywhere near as much diesel as the frac CONVOY (a dozen or more frac trucks plus cement bulkers and tank trucks etc). There are also the trucks required to transport the drilling rig and all that casing and tubing. The rig is going to burn a substantial amount of diesel. The bit isn’t going to turn itself.
Jack Lecou and John Morales, #31-33
The thing about Warhammer 40k’s Imperium, like most dystopias, is that it is made up of institutions, systems and ideologies that are horrifying, but very often has individual characters within it who are not. Or who might be considered horrifying in a different context, but embedded as they are in such horrible systems are basically just getting by and doing the best they can. I think there is human relatability there, on the scale of people rather than of structures.
On the other hand, I have never found anything Imperial at all interesting where 40k is concerned. I find the alien races – particularly the Eldar – fascinating, but the Imperium in all its bombastic theocratic militarism has little I can warm to. Especially all those tedious Space Marines that get everywhere – they don’t even have a compelling visual aesthetic like the rest of the exaggeratedly baroque Imperium does. Which is why, objectively, the original fantasy version of Warhammer is infinitely better and I will fight anyone who says otherwise in the car park.
Actually, speaking of morality and the alien races, the Eldar, Tau and Squats are not really all that horrifying in the way most other factions in the universe are. Certainly far less exaggeratedly vile than the Imperium. Yes, the Eldar are haughtily dismissive of everyone else and willing to sacrifice non-Eldar for their own survival without a qualm, the Squats are exploitative and capitalistic and the Tau have a harsh caste system and inflexible colonialist mentality, but none of these things are beyond the flaws of contemporary human societies. And on the positive side the Eldar are contemplative, artistic and meditative, the Squats have strong bonds of kinship and loyalty to one another and the Tau believe in inter-species cooperation and sacrifice for the greater good. The human Imperium appears to have no redeeming virtues at all.
@ #19 / #28: Yes, the point I was making is that the wind figures are whole lifecyle, but it’s not clear that the fossil fuel ones are, so the true comparison may well be substantially more favourable to wind.
@41
sure but that is the attitude of the character, it is the part that I find too difficult to suspend my disbelief for.
The conflict and the resolution are amoral at best and involve threats and violence lies and cheating. That is the point that brings the audience the propaganda may help it to be produced I grant you but the conflict is what is being sold.
As for having a bad guy as the main protagonist there is of course “The Scottish play” that has been preformed for some time now and still popular as just one example.
@23 John Morales posted: Here is a source from an industry that competes with wind and solar: https://world-nuclear.org/images/articles/comparison_of_lifecycle1.pdf
I reply: first, thanks for the info John. And, looking at the bar graph, if you were to create an appropriate weighted mean for photovoltaic and wind combined, I think it would blow all other sources out of the water. Also, the statement below the graph about ‘nuclear safety’ is a shovel full of crap. I’ve studied the nuclear plants in calif and scarizona and they are DANGEROUS. If you stay in a motel in San Luis Obispo Calif, there is a sign on the back of the door in every room that effectively states if you hear the nuclear warning siren, just ‘kiss your ass goodbye’.
Further to my longwinded post @43, while a wind turbine is going to produce power at more or less steady annual rate, a horizontal well with multiple very long fractures in a very low permeability formation will have a very rapid production decline. This results in a much shorter life cycle.
Don’t forget that much of the carbon footprint of manufacturing things can be reduced by using renewables in the manufacturing process.
A meme going about is to show a train load of coal as the source of energy for our electric cars. Only true if you don’t charge them from a renewable source.
Kinda strange how mining companies are putting up renewables on their mining sites, until one realises they are using the cheapest solution. Profit-driven, they are.
https://www.mining-technology.com/features/off-grid-on-site-power-australian-mines/
Note this: “It is also worth considering the impact of increasing electrification of machinery such as excavations and dump trucks – a shift vital to meeting emissions targets – and the significant demand for power this will create in the coming decade.”
@43: “Comparing the carbon footprint of building a wind turbine to that of an oil or more likely gas fired power plant is not valid since the latter already exists (CO2 from building it is water under the bridge) and probably produces the power of several wind turbines.”
Depends on the context. Typically, these are a “marginal costs of additional generating capacity” kind of thing, so we’re talking about new plants on both sides of the equation. (It might be a different story if the context were only about retiring old plants, but the US still has plenty of natural gas generation planned. Believe it or not, there is even still new coal capacity coming online this decade, mostly in China and India.)
Also, the relative sizes of the plants aren’t relevant, since the denominator is always something like megawatts (or lifetime megawatt hours). It might take a dozen wind turbines to equal a single natural gas plant, but that divides out and the comparison units will be, e.g., “tons CO2 per MWh”, which is apples to apples.
@48: “while a wind turbine is going to produce power at more or less steady annual rate, a horizontal well with multiple very long fractures in a very low permeability formation will have a very rapid production decline. This results in a much shorter life cycle.”
This is more of a marginal cost (oil is an input, and the amortized cost of the drilling should just get tacked onto the CO2 content of the oil) but I’d be interested to know what the numbers actually are on that. My intuition is that a few tons of steel and diesel are a rounding error compared to the vast quantities of energy being extracted. (My own quick google suggests that as far as energy in => energy out, it’s about three orders of magnitude: extraction costs a few megajoules per barrel, but a barrel of oil holds 6 gigajoules. Also: although the production rate tails off rapidly, most wells still have an economically productive lifetime of two or three decades, which is almost exactly the same as a wind generator’s service life.)
Basically, oil fields yield lower EROI over time.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0171083
@52:
Makes sense. They get diminishing returns as the field dries up, so they ramp up steam injection and whatnot as they go to try to goose the returns into diminishing not quite so fast. At the expense of putting in a lot more energy.
Am I reading those graphs right though? It looks like there’s only about a 20:1 return on energy at best, down to under 10 after a few decades.
Alas, yes, jack. :|
Thank you for this info…I’m putting the rebuttal up on Book of Faces tout suite…I, too, would have had no idea where to get the relevant info…
Sadly, this just confirms what I suspected about the show without ever having seen it. Upon first seeing ads for it, my initial thought was that the series would probably cater to anti-environmentalist types by dramatically glorifying the fossil fuel industry, so I added it to the list of things I should avoid watching because they will only raise my blood pressure and fill me with an urge to yell at the television. I was perfectly willing to revisit that judgement if any evidence that I was being too hasty came along, but it appears my instincts were correct. Sometimes being right can be depressing.
John Morales @3, the story is “Oil-Mad Bug-Eyed Monsters”, by Frank Herbert, published in his short story collection, “The Worlds of Frank Herbert”. Good stories, look for it. I read it as a young man and it has never left me.
“These monsters were raping their own world.”
“He was only glad that he wasn’t human.”
Dave Wise
Oops, sorry, that should be “John Morales @22” not @3.
Well, it’s pretty accurate that a Texas oilman would have a counterfactual rant against green energy and a shitty attitude toward women lawyers.
I guess it’s also pretty accurate that someone who makes a TV show about such an oilman would have shitty attitude toward women, lawyers, AND women lawyers.
Thank you, Dave.
Holy cow, I’m wrong. My memory has lied to me. Sorry! “Oil-Mad Bug-Eyed Monsters” was written by Hayden Howard not Frank Herbert, and I probably read it in Best SF 1970.
:) no worries Dave. I did check, FWTW.
https://youtu.be/wBC_bug5DIQ?si=4Aus25JJuY-AT88c
This video about the Billy Bob Thornton speech from the humorous and insightful Climate Town channel may be of interest.