[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

The Prince promotes a goal of ‘a stable climate’, which has never existed before except in someone’s imagination. Net zero fantasy rumbles on.
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I hate to pour cold water on the Prince of Wales’ big night out in Boston on Friday, where he hosted the Earthshot Prize for climate change solutions, says Ross Clark @ The Spectator.

William needs all the help he can get to distract attention from his brother and sister-in-law as they continue their crazed attack on the royal family.
. . .
If we are going to have a prize which genuinely helps get us close to net zero emissions by 2050, an affordable means of carbon capture is certainly one thing you would hope would be among the five winners.

The other four would be:

** An affordable means of energy storage, without which an energy grid based on intermittent renewables like wind and solar simply isn’t going to work.

The problem is that at present all the available technology – pumped storage, hydrogen electrolysis and lithium batteries – cost, MWh for MWh, several times as much to store energy as it costs to generate it in the first place.

** Commercially competitive steel made using hydrogen, rather than coal, as a reducing agent. Without this, we are not going to be able to eliminate the 10 per cent or so of global carbon emissions which emanate from steel manufacturing.

** Commercially-competitive cement which does not produce carbon dioxide as part of the chemical process – and which is currently responsible for 7 per cent of global emissions.

** An affordable means of flying 50 miles without burning fossil fuels. Forget electric planes – batteries are a couple of magnitudes too heavy to enable transatlantic flight. There are potential solutions involving synthetic fuels but, as ever, the problem is cost.

If we cannot solve those problems, we are not going to get anywhere near net zero carbon emissions. Unlike the moon landing, our ambitions will crash and burn before they even reach low-altitude orbit.

Full article here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

December 4, 2022, by oldbrew

Prince William’s Earthshot prize won’t save the planet — Tallbloke’s Talkshop