Daily Quick Read - August 29, 2019

Gassed Up

Free to good home

The Trump Cosa Nostra is going to make it easier and cheaper for the fracking industry to force more natural gas out of the ground.  What’s curious is that there is so much natural gas being harvested that people don’t know what to do with it all.  The US market is saturated so large volumes of gas are being liquified and sold as LNG (liquified natural gas) overseas, but those markets are also saturated.  And, Trump’s trade war has turned off the China market for US produced LNG. 

These are crazy times, when we know that fossil fuels are cooking the planet but hey, there is money to be made. There are few things crazier right now than the natural gas industry, where American producers are fracking so much gas that they can't sell enough of it in North America. So now they are building Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminals and trying to export it. Except nobody wants to buy it…

It's crazy. Here we have drilling companies producing gas nobody needs or wants locally, causing massive releases of methane in the process, so they then try and sell it internationally, and nobody wants or needs it there either. Energy is wasted liquifying it and shipping it. The worry now is that natural gas prices will go even lower because the drillers planned for the LNG consumption. But they will just keep drilling and flaring and giving, just to keep busy.

The Good Ol' Wood Fire

Speaking of dangerous fuel.  Fire is pretty much the first human invention and we have been burning wood for millennia.  What for most people is a minor convenience is also a dangerous source of air pollution. 

The gorgeous vistas around Mont Blanc in the French Alps are hidden in haze every winter as residents of the Arve Valley light up their stoves. Researchers in Helsinki reported wood burning accounts for as much as 29 percent of winter particle pollution there; in the suburbs, it reaches 66 percent. Greeks turned to cheap or scavenged wood for heat when economic crisis hit, and air quality plummeted. In California, heating with wood contributes more than 20 percent of wintertime PM2.5 emissions; at one site in Seattle, Washington, it accounted for nearly a third. Wood smoke is why particle pollution in Fairbanks, Alaska, is among America’s worst.

When particulate levels rise, of course, illness and death inevitably follow. Happily, the reverse is true too. A study that highlights wood smoke’s unseen harms found death rates among elderly people in Tasmania, Australia, fell by 10 percent after a push to convert households from wood to electric heat. And when more than 1,000 stoves were replaced in a small Montana town, particle pollution dropped by more than a quarter, and parents reported less wheezing and fewer respiratory infections among children.”

First Fire Then Our Cars 

After we abandon fire, it may be necessary to also get rid of the automobile and, in fact, pretty much all forms of personal transportation, except those exclusively human powered.  According to a report to the UK parliament, private vehicle ownership is incompatible with the nation’s carbon reduction goals.

Reducing car use is a crucial way to reduce transport’s carbon emissions, the science and technology select committee told the U.K. government today. The cross-party group of MPs says switching from internal combustion engines to battery-powered engines is not the game-changing solution the government thinks it is.

And there’s little comfort in the report for electric bicycle fans either because the committee warns that the rare minerals required for electric vehicle batteries are fast running out and are sourced from unstable countries with dire records on workers’ rights.

“In the long-term, widespread personal vehicle ownership does not appear to be compatible with significant decarbonization,” says the blistering parliamentary report.

Keep the Cars, Just Don’t Drive Them

The US could make a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas generation if we cut our light-duty vehicle use by 10%.  EVs aren’t going to save us, but making an immediate effort to reduce our motor vehicle usage would have a substantial impact. 

In 2017, light-duty vehicles in the United States (including cars, S.U.V.s, pickups and most of the vehicles used for everyday life) produced 1,098 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents. That’s about one-fifth of the country’s total emissions footprint.

A 10 percent cut, therefore, would be roughly 110 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the same as taking about 28 coal-fired power plants offline for a year.

To achieve such a reduction, every American driver would, on average, have to cut about 1,350 miles per year.

While not easy, that target is realistic for most people, said Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst at the Frontier Group, a nonprofit research organization.

Not Quite Bartertown

One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.  People like Adrian Paisley are making a living on the left-overs of America’s industrial age.  It’s requires the skills of a detective, patience and an understanding of how the system works.  This is industrial scale recycling with a supply chain the stretches from abandoned junk at the curb to high tech plants that process the junk into valuable material again.

Adrian Paisley spends his days hunting for scrap metal: aluminum, brass and (holy of holies) copper. At 42, Paisley, who weighs just 135 pounds, is wiry and muscular. I once saw him move an old refrigerator by himself, hurling it onto his pickup truck as if it were made of Styrofoam. He lives for this kind of thing. Like the time he found an abandoned car, sawed it in half and hoisted it onto his truck using pulleys. “That’s manly,” he recalled. “What dude wouldn’t enjoy cutting a car in half?”

In truth, Paisley is less a survivalist than an entrepreneur, a small player in an enormous industry. The recycling of scrap metal is a $32 billion business in the United States, according to IBISWorld. As virgin materials become increasingly difficult to mine — and demand soars globally for metals — scrap is more important than ever. When he makes a good find, like discovering a length of copper wire, for example, he immediately checks the current prices using an app on his phone called iScrap, which lists the rates for all types of scrap metal. When it comes to copper wire, there’s “bare bright,” “tin coated copper,” “insulated wire copper,” “computer wire” and many others. Depending on the prices, he may opt to cash in right away or hoard it until prices go up.