Nerdgasm—Thoughts on Tesla's Battery Day

Like many, I was looking forward to what Elon Musk would say about what is easily the most critical and expensive part of building an electric vehicle—the batteries. The presentation was literally breath-taking. Several times I found myself holding my breath as I tried not to miss any important details. Musk and company had gone to great lengths to simplify their descriptions of what they were attempting. Unfortunately for me, I hadn't taken a Chemistry course since 1966 so I found myself fishing in some forgotten waters. Fortunately, it was easy to watch repeats on YouTube so eventually the requisite understanding returned. (I needed four tries ;-)

There is really no sustainable energy future without effective storage. Anyone who has ever lost their electricity knows that life gets extremely difficult VERY fast. Yes, I know humans survived without electricity in hazardous places such a North Dakota in winter. But those people were unusually hardy, strong, and clever. Even so, preparations for winter began the first days of spring. If you had trees, you chopped wood. Trees are stored energy. Unfortunately, there aren't many trees in North Dakota. Fortunately, there are energy sources that will sustain human life up there—lignite coal and then after the 1950s, oil and natural gas. Now that burning fossil fuels has become a big no-no, North Dakota also has abundant wind power but harnessing it as a practical matter requires storage.

Energy storage has been the big scary boogieman since the invention of fire. We like to treat the problem socially the same way we treat hauling out the trash and for many of the same reasons—it is UGHLEE. Clear-cut forests, oil refineries and tank farms, and the like smell funny and in myriad ways are offensive if not serious health hazards. Storage is especially tricky when the energy is electricity. Electricity moves at roughly the speed of light. With tiny exceptions, therefore, electricity must be used the instant it's produced. While this nearly instantaneous speed is easily electricity's most useful characteristic, it seriously hampers more widespread adoption of renewable energy.

Greta Thunberg comes to New York

The Fridays for Futures movement inspired by the frankly incredible Greta Thunberg has been fun to follow since it started only a year ago. She was a disgusted child who decided to skip school to camp out in front of the Swedish Parliament. The goal was to remind the politicians that they were not doing enough to arrest the climate crises. Her logic was absolutely impeccable:

• The scientific consensus is that unless there are significant changes in how societies operate, we only have twelve years before the CO2 tipping points have been breached and all hell is going to break loose.
• The most commonly reported tipping point was 1.5°C (2.7°F) We are almost there.
• 2018 broke records for high temperatures and widespread forest fires in Sweden. Anyone who wasn't frightened to death by these developments was probably clinically unconscious. It was an amazing demonstration of what environmental collapse could look like.
• Greta did the math. She was 15. 12 years and she would be only 27. This is a very grim future.
• "Why educate yourself to be a useful and productive citizen when the future is so hopeless?" reasoned Greta. Besides, she was extremely studious so missing a little school to make a political point seemed a logical path. Her grades weren't going to suffer.

A typical angry teenager, she distilled her beef with the world in the perfect summation, "You adults are shitting on my future." It is almost impossible to imagine a more powerful battle cry if the goal is to unite the world's young into a vast protest movement. But I am almost certain that not even Greta had any idea of the firestorm she was igniting.

She has spoken to the European, British, and French Parliaments. She went to Davos to scold the filthy rich for their role in the crimes against the climate. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. And her latest was her decision to address the UN General Assembly which meant a transatlantic trip. Since she doesn't fly, this left her with few options. The one she chose was to sail on an environmentally-friendly racing yacht.

The possible routes to sustainability

Once in awhile, it's good to see what thoughtful grownups sound like when they discuss how exactly folks go about building a world that doesn't need to run on fossil fuels. Here Deutsche Welle follows some of the more promising strategies—e-mobility in Norway, the hydrogen strategy in Japan, etc. It's remarkably well done.

Scientists Create Liquid Fuel That Can Store The Sun's Energy For Up to 18 Years

IF this works, it will truly be the game-changer. Storing energy has been the ultimate quest since forever. So far, the best we can do is lithium-ion batteries—good enough to give us Teslas but unlikely to provide us with base loads and eliminate coal plants.  But the idea that we could capture solar energy and store it in a liquid form means we could reuse a bunch of the petroleum infrastructure.

But this is a lab experiment. We do not know how the process scales. We don't know how much energy it requires to make nor do we know how many storage cycles this magic liquid can do before it loses its transformative powers.

But good luck! May the land of Linnaeus and Celsius and Nobel get it right one more time.

Sweden's waste to energy, and other advanced problem-solving

The various schemes to make societies less carbon intensive fall into two categories—conservation of resources, and capture of alternative energy sources. When I wrote Elegant Technology, I was quite enchanted by Sweden's waste disposal system that provided most of the heat necessary to warm their homes during those long dark winters. So it is interesting to see how things have turned out—as seen through the eyes of an Australian documentarian. I am not so enchanted by this waste-to-heat solution as I was 30 years ago—I am pretty much down on fire these days. OTOH, I have not seen a better scheme anywhere else.

Aug 20, 2018



This documentary was done during the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. The most interesting part of this doc is probably the claim that Denmark did not decide to reduce their need for fossil fuels as a reaction to climate change, but as a response to the 1973 oil embargo. This means they have a 45-year head start on most countries—esp.USA.

2009



This is from PBS. It concentrates on Samsø island in Denmark—which has nearly reached the target of complete sustainable energy generation. You will notice there are  tractors in use so they are still importing some petroleum.

Dec 12, 2015

Synthetic Photosynthesis

When I first started writing about climate change and the environment back in the 1980s, the atmospheric CO2 levels stood at approximately 340 parts per million. We are now firmly past 400. We are so far into uncharted territory, that all predictions are at best, educated guesses. However, very few of these guesses are encouraging. Anyway, I like this fictional account below.

Because it points out an obvious fact. Not only are we going to have to spend big bucks replacing the fire-based infrastructure, we must do something to return the CO2 levels to let's say, 310, or even 275. What we need is a synthetic version of photosynthesis. And we need it immediately because say we did invent a process that could capture atmospheric CO2 and turn it into O2 plus a very pure carbon, we are going have to put up probably 250,000 installations to start moving the needle down. Even Elon Musk wouldn't promise this in five years. We are talking a Manhattan Project-size effort x 50.



Compared to the effort to make inexpensive solar cells, the synthetic photosynthesis business is still pretty primitive. But at least there are folks who are producing hardware who also have a good idea how important this is.

On Class and Climate Change

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen would publish perhaps the most interesting, and misunderstood, book ever. It was called The Theory of the Leisure Class. Many, perhaps most, of the readers of this scintillating tome consider it a wonderful work of satire that highlights the foibles of the idle rich, and those who would emulate their lifestyles. And while I would agree that many parts of Veblen’s analysis are screamingly funny, we miss the point if we assume that Veblen was merely trying to entertain. Because beneath the chuckles, there is a deadly serious class analysis that goes a very long way towards explaining why a problem like climate change doesn’t get treated as seriously as it should be.

In Veblen’s world, there are two basic classes. The Industrial Class organizes the community’s necessary work. The Leisure Classes fasten themselves on the backs of the industrial classes “through force and fraud” in the often successful attempt at getting something for nothing. The Marxists then ask, “Aren’t your industrial classes merely another name for the proletariat?” This is important—the answer is NO.

Back in the day when Marxists preached that they were the friends, advocates, and only true representatives of the Proletariat, there was always something demeaning in their analysis. When someone picks strawberries all day in the hot sun, the Marxist description of the Proletariat and their troubles is still surprisingly accurate. But what do you call an farmer with 2500 acres under cultivation, or an engineer, or a big building contractor, or any number of important and often high paying occupations? They are obviously Industrial Class jobs but they all come with very different problems than face someone doing stoop labor. Obviously, there is an incredible amount of stratification within the occupations that can be found under the heading of “organizing and performing the community’s necessary tasks.”

Just as the Industrial Classes are stratified, so are the Leisure Classes. There is a large gap in income and status between a pickpocket and a hedge fund manager. But while there are hundreds of differences between the two major classes, many quite profound, the most telling is that when the Leisure Classes engage in conspicuous consumption and waste, their highest calling is uselessness. On the other hand, the goal of the Industrial Class is to be useful.

This class analysis is almost universally despised by the academic idea police. The right wing hates it because so many of their elites are little more than well-dressed thieves. The “left” (especially the Marxist varieties) hates it because it opens the possibility that there are enlightened, imaginative, and quite necessary “capitalists.” But it continues to be relevant because it describes the existing social order so much better than probably all the competing class descriptions combined.

Renewable energy in India

While I was at the University of Minnesota, I had several neighbors from India—engineering and computer science majors (yes, there was a time when Minnesota had several leading-edge computer makers including Honeywell and Control Data.) These young men were very interested in India's modernization and discussed development issues a lot. At one point, one grumped, "Our problem is that we have but two sources of energy—nuclear and dung."

That might have been true in 1971 but as the clip below shows, it is not true any longer. India has a bunch of serious environmental problems but when it comes to converting to sustainable energy supplies, they have an enormous advantage—they don't have to replace as much embedded infrastructure as someplace like USA and Western Europe. Plus they have an excellent system for training young STEM students and a vast labor pool to maintain the sometimes fussy solar and wind systems.

Go India!

PROMISE OF PANELS —

India eyeing a new monster 100GW solar-capacity goal

Country still working to meet its current solar goals and staggering under pollution.

MEGAN GEUSS - 6/24/2018, 8:00 AM

Earlier this week, India's energy minister R.K. Singh suggested that the country is considering issuing a tender for 100 gigawatts of solar energy. PV Tech confirmed the report, which added that the tender could be tied to solar panel-manufacturing buildout. In 2015, India set a goal to reach 100GW of solar capacity as part of its larger aim of 175GW of renewable energy in general by 2022. This latest 100GW tender would be for a 2030 or 2035 target.

The existing goal is ambitious, so a stretch goal further into the future is even more so. The country's current total solar capacity is just 24.4GW, according to The Economic Times. (For context, as of this month the US has about 55.9GW of installed solar capacity total.) But although the solar sector there is still small compared to the US, it's growing quickly. Utility-scale solar capacity grew by 72 percent in the previous year, The Economic Times noted.

Johannes Urpelainen, an India-based fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, said that the 100GW tender wouldn't be for one massive plant but would represent financing for small projects.

"Solar is very popular in India," Urpelainen wrote to Ars. "It's not expensive, Prime Minister Modi repeatedly talks about it, and people everywhere now see solar being used. I have been going to India for the past six years, and in 2012 solar was still very rare. Now it is everywhere."

Keeping the momentum on buildout would be significant for India, a country where explosive economic growth and a continued reliance on coal have created terribly polluted cities and skylines drenched in smog. (Despite all this new solar, India also added 4.6GW of coal-fired capacity in the previous year, the Times noted.) In his comments this week, Singh said there is an urgent need for renewable energy in India, where 20 of its cities are ranked among the most polluted in the world.

In addition to adding capacity, India has also been building out its Inter-State Transmission System (ISTS).

Urpelainen told Ars that a single 100GW solar tender would be ambitious but feasible as long as India's economy keeps growing. "The cost of a 100GW tender at current prices could be in the ballpark of 100 billion dollars," he said, "but renewable energy prices will continue to decrease. If the government insists on domestic manufacturing, though, the cost could be higher because the inexpensive Chinese panels would be inadmissible." more

Final beta (Climate Change video)

This version incorporates most of the suggestions I have gotten, mostly from Tony's Progressive caucus, Grandpa Smet and my favorite political operative, Da Wege!

So this covers the main points I had in mind:

1) The science of climate change is overwhelming.

2) The reasons why climate change is so difficult to address are mostly structural and technological.

3) Only a massive building effort can alter these structural problems.

Enjoy the video. It is 18:03 minutes long. If you enjoy the music track, it is because some of the music is especially appropriate. For example, the song, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" topped the charts the same year James Hansen testified before Congress, or that the hymn, "Nearer My God to thee" was published the same year oil was discovered in Pennsylvania—the same industry that was soon to be monopolized by a devout Baptist Sunday School teacher named Rockefeller.

Are we doomed?

In a recent post, I mentioned that there is a growing body of belief that it is now too late to save ourselves from the disaster that is climate change. This little bit of news made working on a "solution" video incredibly difficult. I should have given examples of this school of thought but right on cue, The Guardian put up a story of someone who is firmly in the "We're doomed" category.

There is much to be valued in the case Mayer Hillman is trying to make. He is a social scientist and anyone looking at the sociology of climate change has more than ample reason to be alarmed. I am constantly distressed at the irrelevant efforts even gifted climate scientists engage in whenever they venture beyond shouted warnings. I shudder to think of the major heel-dragging when the financial sector is told they MUST fund the transition to the solar-powered future. I am amazed at the number of people with fancy degrees from fancy colleges who believe utter nonsense because they never really learned 7th-grade science or the difference between a big number and a very small one.

Hillman is mostly right. But there are reasons to think he maybe looking at the wrong people. There are MANY such reasons but two are most significant to me:

1) In spite of being woefully underfunded, the people who have been beavering away at making solar panels have performed a miracle. Most of the world's populations live in sunny climates. Cheap solar energy will transform their lives. Replacing the fire-based infrastructure in the more "developed" economies will be more difficult, but $.75 a watt with no fuel costs is a POWERFUL argument. Climate change is a Producer-Class problem and they have done well in this esoteric world. Energy is everything—we cannot solve any of the other environmental problems until we solve the energy dilemma. But now we have an incredibly important tool—a working replacement for fire itself.

2) I am incredibly impressed with the net-zero house my brother built for himself. Everything works and since the solar panels are on the backyard side of the roof, there is no way this solar house announces itself. The systems are virtually noiseless and there is plenty of hot water. But this outcome was far from easy. My brother brings a lot of skills to the table along with a lifetime of accumulating tools—he has LOTS of them and knows how to use and maintain them. He always reads the manuals. In short, he is far from being a run-of-the-mill DIY. He more resembles those frontier inventors like the Wright Brothers (and Thorstein Veblen's father who figured out ways to make harsh places like Minnesota habitable.) He subscribes to the first law of Peirce's Pragmatism—if something isn't working, then try something else. So out of the misinformation and boastful claims of the solar world, he was able to distill enough useful information to build his complicated house from parts he could buy online—and make it work. I am not suggesting that anyone could have done this—that is obviously NOT the case. But is demonstrates that it CAN be done and those who think the solar future will be painful and ugly are just wrong.

Building a net-zero house

A couple of days ago, I saw my brother grinning broadly and occasionally giggling. The occasion for this mirth was a recent encounter with his meter-reader for the local utility company—Duke Energy. The news was that last month his photo-voltaic cells had generated roughly 300 kw of electrical power more than he had consumed. While much of this joy is due to the fact that he was billed the $9.86 minimum for being connected to the grid while most of his neighbors were getting $350 bills for homes of similar sizes, the giggling was probably due to the idea that he is "sticking it to the man."

Tony heard this story yesterday and insisted I explain what was involved in producing such a house. So this morning I asked and while his story was hardly complete, it highlighted the parts he thought important. So in no particular order, here they are.

1) His property in the country was large enough so the house's site orientation was pretty much anything he wanted. So the house's ridge line runs east-west, the roof pitch was selected to maximize solar gain, and the overhangs are large enough so the south wall is completely shaded between the equinoxes.

2) The holding tank for the solar hot water heater was located close to the showers so the water used to get hot water on start-up is minimized.

3) The air handler for the air conditioning system was located smack dab in the middle of the house which does wonders for efficiently distributing the cool air.

4) Room for the insulation was designed in from the beginning. The exterior walls were framed with 2 x 6 studs and the roof trusses were scissor-type which made for higher ceilings while provided plenty of space for 16" of insulation.

5) Because excessive heat was the primary problem in Florida, aluminized Mylar was chosen for the moisture barrier.

6) The steel roof was put on sleepers which allowed the underside of the roof to stay cooler and dry.

7) The original air conditioning compressor was a SEER 13, which in 1992 was the most efficient unit one could buy. It was replaced in 2010 with a SEER 18.

And so on. They key to understanding this house is that VERY important decisions that significantly affected long-term performance were made in the planning stage. None of the features mentioned above cost much to implement but have saved thousands in energy costs over the years. As I have said since the 1980s, pollution is a function of design.

Then in 2008, the decision was made that photo-voltaic cells were now inexpensive enough so adding them to the mix should be cost effective. This was pretty easy to do because the roof was already pointed in the right direction. PV cells were still pretty spendy in 2008 so only 5 kw were purchased. By 2011, the costs had dropped significantly so another 5 kw were added which leads to the monthly grinning when the meter is read.

So while the costs of building a solar home from scratch are not much more than conventional construction, retrofitting an existing house is difficult, time-consuming, AND quite expensive—even though the price for PV cells is now lower than $1 per watt.

A sense of urgency

Quite honestly, I do not know a great deal about Robert Hunziker. But on Monday, he wrote a piece that was special because it injected urgency into the climate debate. Urgency is a quality I often forget to stress both in my life and this blog. So I really appreciated his effort. If we are to escape the fire and energy trap we have built for ourselves, time is rapidly running out—if the goal is to build a post-fire civilization, we should have gotten serious about it in 1973. Projects take time. BIG projects take BIG time and effort. So rebuilding complete civilization, which is the biggest project I can imagine, will require trillions and a global effort.

In addition to reposting him below, I wrote him an email.

Your There is no time left was magnificently crafted—not to mention scary as hell.

As I see it, the fact that no one wants to talk about genuine climate change solutions is that the problem is SO large, very few can comprehend even a tiny segment of the big picture.

The basic problem is fire—that’s where most of the excess CO2 is generated. Making things worse, we are burning carbon that is millions of years old (coal, petroleum). And making this catastrophic, civilizations were designed to run on fire. This took humanity at least 6000 years to accomplish. If your essay is even partially correct, we have about 5 years to replace this incredible investment.

Part two is cultural. This sort of solution will absolutely depend on the kind of people who build the extremely difficult. While the idea of covering a cloudless hunk of the Gobi with solar cells is imaginative, it doesn’t work unless people figure out how to move that massive energy to China’s great cities. Since this has never been done before, it rivals the moon shot in complexity. (Five years, huh?) And yet, we live in a culture whose closest portrayal of the scientific and technological literate is The Big Bang Theory. Yet it is precisely these sorts of persons who have ANY chance of building the new and necessary world. At least we could stop making fun of them and learn what they must accomplish.

Rebuilding complete civilizations will be expensive. We need the world’s central banks to change policy so that the end-fire project is properly financed. Unfortunately, the people who pull the large levers of monetary policy share a fatal flaw—they are scientifically and technologically illiterate. Yet they can either ensure a new civilization or watch the one we have burn to a crisp. Time to make a new qualification for potential central bankers—they MUST be able to demonstrate an understanding of what it means to live in a fire-based civilization.

Congratulations

Donald Trump isn't the only solar power protectionist

The Chinese really DID cheat on solar panels. The chain of events goes something like:

1. The Germans, even though blessed with very few good natural solar sites, decide to forge ahead with solar cell development anyway. To make this all work, they create an industry from scratch and cover the upfront capital costs with subsidies. They justify this public expense by claiming it is a jobs program for the old DDR.
2. Solar cells are very sophisticated products. To make them successfully, they required the creation of very sophisticated tooling. The folks who figured out how to make these tools, naturally looked for new customers beyond the Germans that bought them first. So when the Chinese got into solar cell manufacture, they could purchase excellent tools off the shelf sold to them by folks who knew what they were doing. Ah yes, the advantages of being second.
3. Suddenly, the Chinese could build solar panels for a fraction of what it cost to invent the methods in the first place. In fact they created a glut on the market that could could only be cleared by dramatically lowering prices. They lowered them so much, that the Germans (and others) actually won some trade rulings in WTO. 
4. The EU slapped tariffs on Chinese solar panels in 2013, which were renewed in 2017. So when Trump got into the act in 2018, he was not being especially innovative. There seems little to make one believe that he acted to protect infant solar industry in USA—the most common defense of tariffs. Rather, he did it to burnish his America-First credentials. We will see how that goes.

My guess is that these tariffs will have very little impact. The reason solar is growing by leaps and bounds is that the industry has perfected some very efficient and low-cost methods of manufacture. Solar is already cheaper than any of the alternatives and new methods will probably lower costs even more. And if the Chinese government is already subsidizing their solar industry, they can probably plug a few sales holes caused by tariffs.

Ultra High Voltage Direct Current from ABB

ASEA, Brown, Boveri is a Zürich-based electrical engineering company. They have vast experience in large electrical infrastructure projects. ABB is the product of a merger between Swedish-based ASEA (founded 1883) and Brown, Boveri & Cie (founded 1891 in Baden). Both were leaders in the production and installation of heavy electrical machinery. ASEA, for example, built much of the systems that powered the Swedish rail lines and built 9 of 12 of her nuclear power plants. These days, the company is concentrating of the sort of hardware necessary for sustainable energy.

China has a very large desert that could be paved over with solar cells. The problem is that these cells are a LONG ways from the big population centers. So China has to move all that energy without incurring large transmission losses. Alternating Current, the preferred technology for heavy-duty electrical transmission for a host of very good reasons, has one major flaw—it's not efficient for long-distance. As a side issue, it is almost useless for underwater power cables which becomes very important in places like Japan and Indonesia.

Enter Direct Current transmission. More expensive and not as flexible as AC but it is really the only solution for long-distance and underwater. No one has a lot of experience in DC transmission but ASEA once built a link from mainland Sweden to the isle of Gotland in 1954 that's still working. And now, ABB has announced the completion of successful tests for transformers and key equipment for world’s first 1,100 kilovolt (kV) project in China.

1100 kV. Scroll down to see what kind of equipment is required to "go solar."

The German auto giants face an existential challenge

A few weeks back, a friend of mine bought himself a used Nissan Leaf. Even though it is fully electric, this car is a long way from being a Tesla—its range is less the 100 miles and quite honestly, it is kind of ugly. Even so, I am pretty sure that no purchase in his life has made him happier. It actually makes him giggle.

Based on this small sample size, I am quite willing to announce the day of the electric vehicle (EV) has arrived. Yes they are still quite expensive although his used 2015 with less than 20k miles on the odometer cost about $11,000. Yes their low range and high recharging times make them still something of a hardship to own. But the upside is a luxuriously quiet ride combined with hiccup-quick acceleration and premium handling due to a very low center of gravity. This is in addition to a seriously reduced need for routine maintenance, lower costs for fuel, and the satisfaction of knowing your vehicle is arguably the cleanest set of wheels around. But just to make sure my friend has plenty to giggle about, Nissan has built in an incredible electronic feature set. His favorite seems to be the announcement of available chargers whenever his range drops below 20% complete with directions for finding them.

But even if EVs are the future, the current reality is that they still constitute less than 1% of cars on the road. And nobody is making money selling them. This leaves the auto giants with a monumental problem. If they spend the big money developing EVs, they will be manufacturing a money-loser that will take sales away from the highly profitable vehicles they already sell—a least for the foreseeable future. And so the temptation to not change anything is very high. This problem is especially acute in Germany where the automakers sincerely believe that they already make the best cars on the road.

The Circular Economy—still one of the great ideas

One of the lightening bolts of insight that staggered me as a man in his 30s was the idea that because there is no "away" the throwaway society is ultimately doomed by simple physical reality. It is quite impossible to dig up raw materials to be sent on a journey to the landfills forever. Either you run out of resources or you run out of places to store the waste, or both. The only way out of this dilemma is to make products so they can be reprocessed into new things when the time comes for the original product to be replaced.

Yeah.

This is one of those ideas that would require about a million times more effort, cost, and inventiveness to do than to dream up. After all, not only are most things designed and built without the slightest consideration for disposal, large numbers of products are designed to be disposed of after only one use. Designer junk, if you please. I once gave a talk at 3M, a company that has made their primary mission the production of designer junk. I chose to talk about design for disassembly, and other proposed schemes to create a less wasteful world. The assembled 3M folks were not amused. Needless to say, I wasn't asked back.

The idea of the circular industrial society is still one of the better notions to have crossed my mind so I included it in Elegant Technology. It can be found in Chapter Ten: Do Producers Have a Plan? Of course, no one ever reads a book to Chapter Ten so I might as well have never written it at all. But when I saw someone discussing this idea the other day under the title The Circular Economy That Could Save Countries Thousands, Reduce Waste (reprinted below) it made my heart glad. But first, I have decided to reproduce the section from my Chapter Ten called Closing the Loop. I hope that you readers will understand why this was the idea that made me believe a sustainable world was possible. I also hope no one minds that this was first written in 1985.

Summer Sacrilege

Paul Street is rapidly becoming the most interesting contributor to Counterpunch. As the USA stalls out politically over the partisan arguments concerning the legitimacy of the 2016 election, Street is suggesting that reasonable folks rethink the usefulness of all this squabbling. And maybe get back to thinking about the incredibly serious problem of climate change.

So far so good. But the one "blasphemous" thought Street has that I cannot agree with is entitled "Think Capitalogenic, not Anthropogenic Climate Change." Street wants us to believe that the root cause of climate change is, ta da, Capitalism. Well, no. The cause of climate change is too many people burning too many fires. If anything, the "cause" of climate change CAN be ascribed to Industrialization BUT Capitalism and Industrialization are two VERY different things. The confusion between the two pretty well explains why even though socialism can talk a good talk when it comes to environmental problems, it has a dismal track record when it comes to performance.

For example, when I first became concerned about environmental problems, one of the more articulate spokesmen was this guy named Barry Commoner. He had written a book called The Closing Circle. One of his brilliant insights he called the Iron Law of Non-renewable Resources—every barrel of oil (etc.) discovered and extracted only makes the next barrel harder to find and more expensive to recover. Anyone who wants to know why fracking is so expensive need only refer back to this law. But for all his genius, Commoner stumbled because of his willingness to believe that Capitalism and Industrialization were the same thing. He was an avowed Marxist and believed that Socialism would yield far superior results when it came to environmental matters. When the Wall came down and "socialist" industrialization was revealed as the utter catastrophe it was, poor Commoner, for all his genius, was tossed on the ash heap of history. Which is unfortunate, because his Iron Law of Non-renewable Resources is still perfectly valid.

One thing the "left" should keep in mind is that the "capitalism" of stock markets, monetary policy and central banks, and the rest of the activities associated with the movements of money, did NOT cause industrialization in the first place and if the past 40 years are any guide, is the leading cause of de-industrialization. This is MOST unfortunate because for all the rapacious damage that Capitalism has inflicted on industrial activity, it staggers forward in its crippled state because industrialization fills real human needs.

If China Can Fund Infrastructure With Its Own Credit, So Can We

The basic truth about money is that it doesn't matter what it is made of compared to what are the mechanisms for making it valuable. Money that can be traded for necessary items such as food and energy is always valuable. Money created to fund human inventiveness also falls into this category. Which is why people who understand this know that so long as it is spent to create necessary items such as infrastructure, the amount of money that can be created without triggering inflation is nearly limitless. The key is spending the new money right away on the products of human genius and hard work.

And so we see that China could build 12,000 miles of high-speed rail in a decade (among a host of other major infrastructure projects) without becoming Zimbabwe. If China had created a massive pile of new money and used it to fund a massive global shopping spree, the outcome would have been dramatically different.

Here's to Ellen Brown who has rediscovered the arguments for why massive amounts of fiat money CAN (under the right conditions) lead to massive increases in prosperity. And because climate change can only be meaningfully addressed by massive amounts of new and significantly redesigned infrastructure, and since this project is absolutely necessary for continued human life on earth, Brown is addressing THE most important topic in all of political economy.

Tesla's growing pains

From 1974 until 2007, I drove a Saab. My last one had 296k on the odometer when it was destroyed in a tennis-ball-sized hail storm. So I know about driving a car from a niche manufacturer—it's an interesting trip. In 1974, Saab built arguably the most interesting car on the planet—roomy cabin, great driving position, a fold-down rear seat (which allowed me to avoid the dreaded pickup truck even during a major rehab project), good—if not great—mileage, four-wheel disc breaks, great suspension for bad weather and roads, and the big deal—front-wheel drive. In 1974, there were a tiny handful of cars with front-wheel drive and Saab's was easily the best.

Saabs are still being made by a Chinese company. And of course, they are FAR from the most innovative on the planet. In fact, almost every car maker makes some version of the Saab 99. Most are cheaper. Many are better built—the Toyota Camry, for example. It is quite easy to see a quite similar future for Tesla. Yes, Elon Musk has provided the world an enormous gift when he showed the rest of us how to design and build the very cool electric car. But this is manufacturing and there are others who have been making cars a whole lot longer than Musk and are perfectly capable of reducing Tesla to an interesting historical detail.

Toyota could easily build a line of fine electric cars but so far, their big bet on hybrids has seemed to be paying off. They have also built a fuel-cell car so even their electric experiments have avoided the big battery packs. Volkswagen, on the other hand, bet big on "clean" diesels and have clearly lost that bet. They have a huge market in China which is mandating large fleets of EVs. The latest Geneva Auto Show saw Volkswagen's thinking on what their EV fleet will look like—and it just sparkled with innovative thinking. It is very possible that we have already seen "peak Tesla"—the era when the company was redefining parts of the transportation infrastructure may already behind us. From now on, Tesla will be trying to survive in a market where their competitors got his message and will now compete on execution—cost, build excellence, customer support, etc.

But right now Musk hopes to keep building the best cars. And as he is finding out, manufacturing is a LOT harder than it looks. Personally, I think Musk belongs on Mount Rushmore for what he has already accomplished. But the truth be told, he is going to find the going a lot harder when folks like VW start selling an electric Microbus.

Moore's law for sustainables?

It's WAY past time to get serious about climate change. Any serious effort will have as its primary goal, the elimination of fire. It's more complicated than that, of course, but in theoretical terms, not much. The real complications will come from trying to implement that strategy.

The worst possible policymaking error was in play when drafting the Paris agreements of 2015. Problem ONE was setting the emission reduction targets for 2050. In most minds, a goal 35 years away says there is plenty of time to organize the project and do it right. This is nuts, of course. We took roughly 6-10,000 years to build and perfect the fire-based civilizations we live in and so we have less than 1/200th the time to replace global energy structure. NO! There is NOT a lot of time for goofing off.

In this piece from Deutsche Welle, a new policymaking framework is being proposed that if nothing else, would at least pump some urgency into the matter. As we know, arguing from analogy is usually a hazardous venture, but here we have some serious thinkers arguing that we should address this HUGE problem by trying to replicate Moore's "Law" with sustainable infrastructure. While this may sound a little pie-in-the-sky it actually makes a great deal of sense. After all, the same innovation path that gave us cheap flat-screen TVs is behind those incredibly cheap solar panels.

The folks who argue that the computer industry set the example for best practices when it comes to innovation certainly have a point.