BRIAN TOKAR—While most honest writers have at least acknowledged the obstacles to commercially-scaled fusion, they typically still underestimate them – as much so today as back in the 1980s. We are told that a fusion reaction would have to occur “many times a second” to produce usable amounts of energy. But the blast of energy from the LLNL fusion reactor actually only lasted one-tenth of a nanosecond – that’s a ten-billionth of a second. Apparently, other fusion reactions (with a net energy loss) have operated for a few nanoseconds, but reproducing this reaction over a billion times every second is far beyond what researchers are even contemplating.
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DMITRY ORLOV—Although some people claim that wind and solar farms have an EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) of 5 or even 7, it is trivial to prove that this just isn’t so. If, for each 1 kWh of energy invested in their design, marketing, production, installation, maintenance, removal and safe disposal, they were to return 5 or even 7 kWh over their useful lifetime of, optimistically, 20 years, and assuming a constant (inflation-adjusted) cost of energy, they would produce at least 400% of pure profit! Compare that to a bank deposit or a guaranteed income investment yielding 3% over inflation (if you can find one!). Over the same 20 years it would produce a mere 80% profit, which is equivalent to an EROEI of just 1.8. If wind and solar installations were so lucrative, their promoters would not be asking for government subsidies; they would be running away from frenzied mobs of investors shouting “Shut up and take my money!” Such a huge, and guaranteed, rate of return, is something to die (or at least risk going to jail) for.
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WALKER BRAGMAN—On Tuesday, president Joe Biden was one of 100-plus world leaders who pledged to end and reverse deforestation by 2030 during the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland. His Build Back Better framework, similarly, pledges “historic” investment in forest management.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, Biden has been plowing ahead with his predecessor’s approach to deforestation of public lands in the Kootenai National Forest.
On Biden’s watch, the US Forest Service is quietly moving forward with a series of Donald Trump–era plans to open up commercial logging in the Kootenai, despite the fact that the impacts of these projects were never subjected to rigorous analysis.
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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may…
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N. CUNNINGHAM—From devastating wildfires to rising methane emissions, Earth’s vital signs are continuing to deteriorate, scientists warn. An urgent global phaseout of fossil fuels is needed, they say, reiterating calls for “transformative change,” which is “needed now more than ever to protect life on Earth and remain within as many planetary boundaries as possible.”
The warning comes roughly a year and a half after a global coalition of 11,000 climate scientists declared a climate emergency, warning that global action was needed to avoid “untold suffering due to the climate crisis.” The new paper examining Earth’s vital signs, published in the journal BioScience, is authored by some of the same scientists who helped spearhead the climate emergency declaration.
