LifeItself

My dear old friends from McKinsey & Company have come up with their view of the world's top technologies .  As a historical note, beginning in the mid 1980's and through the 1990's, McKinsey was instrumental in irreversibly damaging the U.S. oil and gas industry.  McKinsey was hired by the scared oil & gas managers to do a hatchet job on the researchers and operations staffs across the U.S. and - for a lot of money - did a awesomely devastating job. Suffices it to say that the oil and gas industry in the U.S. will never again have the same breadth and depth, ever.  This statement of fact has some interesting connotations when it comes to operating in the ultra-difficult, super-inhospitable environments, which seem to enter into our future.  In fairness to McKinsey and several other consulting outfits, they acted as expensive mercenaries used by management to execute (no pun intended) the already agreed upon plans, as in: "What do you want me to conclude, bo...

Using the approach introduced in the previous post , I will now investigate how electricity is produced and imported in Texas and California.  I choose these two states because I have strong ties to both of them, and they also enjoy very different public images.  Texas is generally viewed as pro-oil, gas, coal and nuclear power, while Californians appear to oppose all of these sources of electricity in their outlets, while touting the green and renewable sources.  It is therefore instructive to look at the main sources of your electricity when you live in Texas or California. For the record, last year, Texas produced twice the amount of electricity imported and produced in California. Most of the difference was caused by air-conditioning everything in Texas, but also by Texas' large base of heavy industry, which is already gone from California, perhaps forever. I start with my home state,Texas, because it is very simple to describe its electricity sources.  ...

Given the noisy propaganda about the positive impact of renewables, or "clean energy,"  or "green energy" on global emissions of carbon dioxide, one expects there would be some.  Unfortunately, there is none as far as I can tell.  In fact, the situation is even more hopeless than I feared in my darkest dreams. Here is the data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), plotted originally by P.F. Henshaw, and replotted a little differently by me. You can click on the plots to see them in high resolution. Above you see a semi-logarithmic plot of the normalized Global Gross Domestic Product (GDP),  Rate of use of energy in the world (Energy),  Rate of global carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), and  Dollars of income generated per unit of energy expanded globally per year ($/Btu).   All values are relative to those in 1971, and all curves start from 1. All trends are exponential, so they plot as approximately straight lines on the semi-logarith...