The people don’t really want Electric Vehicles, so the US Government is thinking of forcing them on the buyers by squeezing the industry that makes them. There is talk of new rules which apply to the companies selling cars. The control of production could be hidden in something called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards. By averaging the fuel consumption across a whole company, those brands will have to find a way to sell more EV’s and to limit their own sales of gas guzzlers. It’s a supply and demand thing, if a company can only make so many large internal combustion engine cars, the prices of those will be artificially high. Only the wealthy will be able to afford them. The poor will still pay more for cars than they do now, but the cheapest cars on the market will be EV’s — subsidized by inflated prices on petrol driven cars.
This is just a thought bubble for now, but obviously, the message is to buy your big cars and look after them. They’ll be hot property in the second hand market.
Say goodbye to the free market: The Soviets would be proud of it
Technically these are the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards. The way they work is hidden in the name. They do not govern the average fuel use of cars used by corporations, which the name “corporate average” suggests. No, they govern the average fuel economy of cars MADE by corporations.
The way it works will be well hidden. Instead of telling you and me what we can buy, they in effect tell the car makers what they can make. I am not making this up.
The result is rationing and it has been for many years. The car makers limit the production of bigger cars and trucks, with higher fuel consumption, to stay below the standards. In reality what is rationed is stuff like power, size and safety. I have even heard that they raise the prices of big cars to cut the prices of little ones. This is called a cross subsidy.
So it sounds like the CAFE standards are going to be ratcheted down over less than a decade, until 40% of the vehicles sold are EVs.
Hopefully this abuse of the efficiency standards will be found to be illegal.
But as David goes on to explain, the Brits have their own form of weird plans to make big trucks run off electric overhead wires? See “Trolley Trucks” and read it at CFACT.
Imagine having hot wires strung just above all the nearly 50,000 miles of interstate highways, carrying enough juice to power all those big trucks. Massive accidents waiting to happen? How about them ice storms?
Seems like the wires will only run over the slow lanes, so maybe just 100,000 miles worth.
Blackouts due to unreliable electricity grids will clog up the roads and cripple the country. Good target for foreign adversaries.
How badly do our Health Ministers want to reduce Covid infections and deaths? Not much. If they were at all serious — before they hand out free vaccines, they’d hand out free Vitamin D supplements.
In a study conducted in a Galilee hospital, 26 percent of vitamin D-deficient coronavirus patients died, while among other patients the figure was at 3%. — Times of Israel
If only black lives mattered? Dark skins are so much more likely to be deficient, this is one of those absolutely easy wins for any politician, yet none of them are doing it?
Nearly half the people in the study were deficient, and half of those who were seriously deficient in Vitamin D would go on to develop a severe case. These were the people with levels below 20 ng/ml. Of all the people above that, only 10% would get a severe case. And just being “above 20ng” would still be classified as moderately deficient by many measures, yet it made such a huge difference.
It was a life and death thing — the mortality rate was 25%, fully five times higher for those who fell below the 20ng/ml bar.
The Israeli study looked at the Vitamin D levels of 1200 patients in their medical records before they got infected with Covid. This is important because although studies like the Indonesian study last year showed that people with low levels of Vitamin D were much more likely to die of Covid, those patients weren’t assessed until they turned up at hospital when they were already sick. We couldn’t be sure that something about Covid itself wasn’t chewing through the Vitamin D levels and causing the deficiency. So an Israeli team looked back through their records for up to 2 years to see what their last blood tests showed.
People with the lowest Vitamind D levels were the most likely to get severe Covid.
It’s a retrospective study, so the blood levels of D might have changed, yet despite that, the results still pop out of the data. Ideally we’d measure them just before they got sick.
Don’t wait til you’re in ICU to fix that deficiency. And definitely don’t wait for the CDC or Anthony Fauci to suggest it.
The biggest disadvantage with Vitamin D is that there’s no money in it.
Vitamin D levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma,heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. Vitamin D influences over 200 genes. It’s so crucial, it was likely the reason northern Europeans evolved whiter skin. The lack of sunlight and the introduction of grains in diets (as opposed to eating liver and whales) meant that Europeans weren’t getting enough D from either food or sun. The selective pressure was so strong that lighter skin rapidly took over all the northern communities. Eskimos didn’t need to go white — they were still getting D from offal and plenty of fish.
How cheap was it for the Chinese Communist Party to buy the American media? Like adding a room to a house.
Practically nothing.
The New York Times, the “paper of record” since 1851 in the USA became a tool for China for just $100,000 a month. It put stories out for years that were essentially nothing but Communist advertising. They and other newspapers had a deal with state run China Daily which sanitized and covered up human rights abuses like Uighur concentration camps.
The New York Times quietly deleted hundreds of advertorials that the Chinese Communist Party paid to publish on its website.
China Daily, an official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, has been purchasing advertorial spaces in the pages of mainstream U.S. media outlets for the last decade, using the space to disseminate Chinese propaganda to millions of unassuming Americans. In return, U.S. newspapers such as the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal received millions of dollars.
The NYT has run over 200 advertorials over the last decade,
Key newspapers helped to hide that SARS 2 was lableak and a potential bioweapon. There is blood on their hands.
Last summer, as the COVID pandemic raged throughout the United States, people who still read the New York Times began to notice something very strange happening at the paper. Hundreds of articles that had appeared there, going back nearly a decade, suddenly vanished, they disappeared. There was no way to find them. Nothing like this had ever happened. The New York Times considers itself–very self-consciously– a living historical record. The paper maintains meticulous, searchable archives going back to 1851. Yet last August, a huge number of articles just disappeared. What was in them? We know the answer because a handful of history-minded readers preserved them when they were in print. Every one of them was a propaganda piece paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, designed to look like a news article.
One of them reads “China Watch: Diaoyu Islands Belong to China.” That’s the headline. Why would the New York Times, America’s paper of record, print propaganda’s from a totalitarian regime and pretend it was a news article? For money. …
What’s twenty million to buy the wealthiest country in the world?
Since 2016, the Chinese government paid $20 million to outlets like The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post.
Imagine if the New York Times and others had reported rumors of the Chinese Bioweapon back in the days when President Trump wanted to shut the borders. The world could have kept the virus out. The UN WHO would have been recognised broadly (instead of just on skeptical blogs) that the organisation served China, was a public health menace and was culpable.
When China needed help to cover up the lab leak and bioweapon news, the supposed cream of the US Media were only too happy to help.
In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as “racist”.
At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.
As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper’s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump’s travel ban to and from China as “isolationist”. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China’s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China’s economic war against Australia,…
Over the months, the Times’s coverage grew even more strident — and more in line with Chinese propaganda.
The Times, which used Daszak as a key source in over a dozen articles, has never mentioned that Daszak’s organisation funded the Wuhan lab, in particular research into bats and coronaviruses, a flagrant conflict of interest.
The Times set the tone by calling anyone who asked about the lab leak as being a tinfoil hat nutter…
The CCP also controls access to a vast market, and The Times, like so many other corporations in the US was happy to sell out it’s own standards in order to gain access:
In 2012, seeking to capitalise on China’s burgeoning middle and upper classes, the Times launched a Chinese edition of its daily paper followed by the launch of a luxury lifestyle magazine.
In investing so heavily in China, the Times unintentionally handed the rapacious CCP an editorial lever to sway coverage. The Timeslearned this first-hand when, in 2012, the CCP blocked Chinese access to the Times online in retaliation
The elite media was China’s best friend, and a traitor to the USA.
The culture of hating-the-US-as-a-fashion-statement probably meant the editorial board didn’t even feel like they were selling out their own nation.
Despite headlines declaring the World is Committed to Cutting Emissions, and that ( pick a nation) is an “isolated pariah” — the truth is they were all supposed to “update their emissions targets” but 42% of nations, including the two largest, haven’t. Worse, the updates were supposed be done by the end of 2020, and the UN extended the deadline, so they are already double late. And since China effectively promised to do nothing til 2030, all it had to do was say it would do nothing again, so that’s double-late on a non-promise, and it can’t even do that?
In a warning shot across the bows of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, China, India and 85 other nations have decided to ignore a UN deadline to submit its pledges for cutting CO2 emissions in time for the UN climate summit in Glasgow later this year.
South Africa hasn’t put in its own update, but it has asked for money:
Nothing is more important than saving the Earth, and everyone is doing it except (… where you live…).
Glascow COP 26 could end up as another dud. Except even when it’s a dud it’s a success. The junket is the point. It’s the two week glorious reward for all the Climate Fans. Plus the headlines are already written, the late night prolonged finale will still “affirm” the commitment of blah, every nation, blah. Large meaningless numbers of dollars and gigatons will be massaged into subheaders to woo the distracted into thinking something important just happened.
And in the end, a group of bureaucratic grifters will have forged out a lifestyle of foreign flights, heroic subsidies and unaccountable grants.
And the weather will have done whatever the weather was going to do, while they all pretended they could control it.
We are installing wind and solar power at a great rate and the expectation is that this will go on and RE will increasingly penetrate the system as coal power fades away. In the SE we still have just enough conventional power to get by almost all the time but the tipping point will come when we lose another couple of coal stations and we will need to have a continuous supply of RE. There will not be enough conventional power to keep the lights on through windless nights.
Note from Jo: With the sad demise of Catallaxy, I invited Rafe to continue here blogging about energy and electricity in Australia. So the format of the blog will flex somewhat to try to fill some of that void.
We all heard about the Tesla Megabattery fire in Victoria last Friday, but you may not know it only started operating on Thursday night. Or that 30 fire trucks and 150 firefighters took 76 hours to get the blazing battery under control.
So it burned for three times longer than it operated.
Luckily no one would put a large Tesla battery inside their home, eh?
…
Firefighters were essentially helpless to stop the 13 ton lithium battery from burning, but they did stop the rest of the battery plant catching fire.
“…we cannot put them out with water or anything else. The best way to deal with these things is to let them burn until they are burnt out. If we try and cool them down, it just prolongs the process. …this wind is helping us by keeping it burning fairly freely,” the CFA’s Assistant Chief Fire Officer Ian Beswicke said.
“But we could be here anywhere from 8 to 24 [or even 76] hours while we wait for it to burn down.”
They also measured air quality and issued warnings to residents to get themselves and their pets indoors, close windows, and turn off their heating and cooling so they didn’t breath in the toxic smoke. (That must have been a fun weekend in midwinter.)
No price is too high when you’re saving the planet.
A fire at French renewable energy giant Neoen’s Victorian Big Battery at Geelong continued to burn into Sunday, with fire crews awaiting experts from Tesla to assist in opening the Megapack battery that first caught ablaze.
The fire started at the partly federally funded 300-megawatt Tesla Megapack battery project at Moorabool on Friday morning. Fire crews quickly containing the blaze but were unable to extinguish it completely to determine what started it. A Country Fire Authority spokesperson said the fire had been contained to two battery packs, but sparks flared up every so often, re-igniting the blaze. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
The Tesla battery is expected to become the largest in the southern hemisphere, capable of discharging 450 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity, as part of a Victorian government push to transition to renewable energy.
Luckily no one was injured, but some nearby crops will be enriched in heavy metals.
Don’t put one of these near your home
The first sign of any operation was at 6:15pm the night before. Some part of the plant was operational for at least 16 hours.
So really it burned for four times longer than it ran for.
The incident did not disrupt the grid, but if the battery plant was operating on a hot sunny day and it caught fire, Victoria might not be so lucky. If this had been a coal plant on fire, presumably someone would have already calculated the cadmium and lead effect and how many spotted-quoll-years were lost.
Bill S and David B, David Archibald. Rafe. Jim Simpson.
At some point, the ice sheets want their land back
We’re balanced at the end of a ten-thousand-year warm spike, in an ocean of ice-ages, reshaping our economy to try to stop a half a degree of warming.
Those glaciers are coming… | Photo by Diego Delso
The last million years have been whipsawing climate action. While modern Homo sapiens sees two degrees of warming as an apocalypse, for most of the last million years it would have been God’s gift to Pleistocene man.
….
Ken Stewart compared the current interglacial with the last three, and found our favourite – the Holocene — has already run longer than all of last three did.*
There are several ways of identifying the start and end of interglacials. I have chosen points when Antarctic temperatures first rise above zero and permanently fall below zero relative to 1999. Graph 3 shows the length of time between these points for the previous three interglacials compared with the Holocene.
The Holocene has lasted longer than the previous three interglacials: and is colder.
The point where the green, black and purple lines end is when temperatures fell permanently below our current baseline temperature (1999 give or take a decade). We can also see just how tame the current interglacial has been — with all the others getting 2 – 3 blockbuster degrees hotter.
The key question is when does a little ice age become a Big One? Where’s the point of no return?
Possibly it’s the point when the Northern Hemisphere turns into a giant white mirror:
Many scientists think glacial periods start when summer insolation at 65 degrees North decreases enough so that winter snowfall is not completely melted and therefore year by year snow accumulates. Eventually the area of snow (which has a high albedo i.e. reflects a lot of sunlight) is large enough to create a positive feedback, and this area becomes colder and larger. Ice sheets form, and a glacial period begins. This is a gradual process that may take hundreds of years.
Well before global temperatures decrease, the first sign of a coming glacial inception will be an increasing area of summer snow in north-eastern Canada, Baffin Island, and Greenland.
Despite fifty years of greenhouse gas production, snow on Greenland isn’t melting away in summer as much as it used too. If this trend continues, Ken calculates Greenland might be completely covered in snow all year round in just 45 years.
It’s probably nothing…
But as Ken says, it’s only a short trend, and the Little Ice Age was colder but didn’t trip the albedo feedback loop and plunge us into a Big Ice Age, which was very convenient. We probably have a few centuries yet.
More to the point though — if climate models actually understood the climate, we might know the answer. What are our governments doing about that? They’re working hard to make the planet cooler, which is probably the best thing they could do, since they’re so bad at it, they might unwittingly help.
If the start of the endless winter was 50 years off, would we even know or will we still be holding UN Conferences to stop the warming as the Ice sheets reach Ontario?
Who knew? Climate change causes horrible wildfires but these dump aerosols in the sky which causes cooling which will in theory, stop more bushfires. It’s another feedback loop the models got wrong.
One author even admits the models “have to take fires into account” — which is the same as saying that their robust settled science of the last thirty years was wrong.
It has all the hallmarks of high quality astrology. The science writing is full of colorful vagaries like “vast amounts of energy”, and “overwhelming evidence” without ever spelling them out. There is spooky inference: we “suspected the world might be witnessing something new”. And then there are the vague predictions: if we scale these fires up by (pick a number) we either set off a nuclear winter or we are turbo-charging climate change. That provides excuses for the next fail in any direction.
If only the ABC had real science reporters they could have asked real questions.
Fire thunderstorms during Australia’s Black Summer released as much energy as about 2,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions
Clusters of fire thunderstorms may be powerful enough to change the climate, scientists say
Fire thunderstorms — which occur in pyrocumulonimbus clouds — not only create their own weather system but may also be powerful enough to actually change the climate, according to scientists from Australia and the United States.
A “super-outbreak” of fire thunderstorms — also known as pyroCb events — during Australia’s Black Summer fires of 2019-20 released the energy of about 2,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons, according to a study published recently in the journal Nature Climate and Atmospheric Science.
“The energy released was just vast,” said Rick McRae, somewhat innumerately, from the University of New South Wales.
The Hiroshima counting system sounds frightening, but every second the Sun dumps 2,700 Hiroshima bombs of energy on the Earth at the top of the atmosphere. So the entire Black Summer of bushfires in Australia produced less than one extra second’s worth of energy from sunlight on Earth.
Adriana Midori Takara was only 38 when she died of Covid in Australia last week. She instantly became a posterchild for the vaccine advertising campaign. But the true story may be something else entirely. Rebecca Weisser treads where few dare: Adriana’s family tried to get her ivermectin, which may have have saved her, but even though they found a doctor willing to try, he was not allowed to.
The Guardian and MSN both report relatives saying she wanted but had been unable to get any vaccine. But Rebecca Weisser reports that other journalists heard she was vaccinated, and asked whether she had a vaccine dose. The NSW authorities, who would surely be very interested in her vaccine status, won’t answer that question.
Meanwhile no one is turning the latest 44 and 48 year old victims of Astra-Zenica side-effects into posterchilds for anything. Where are their photos?
Friends in the Brazilian community said that she had received her first jab just before she tested positive. Yet when a journalist told NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant that ‘Some people close to her are suggesting she had at least one dose of the vaccine,’ Chant replied that she’d have to check but she’d been advised that Adriana did not have any underlying health issues. It was an odd comment because Chant should be briefed on the vaccine status of every Covid victim since it is the first question that every journalist wants answered. Yet days later Chant has yet to confirm or deny Adriana’s vaccine status. It floats in the air like a spectral phantom.
Yet the shocking truth is that Adriana died not because she was unable to get a Pfizer vaccine if that is indeed what happened – Sydney is awash with AstraZeneca – she died because she was unable to access the life-saving early treatment that her family desperately sought to provide.
McCullough contacted the Covid Medical Network who are set up to provide this therapy to every person in Australia who tests positive. One of the doctors was appointed by the family but by then it was too late. Adriana had been hospitalised and could not have been saved even if her doctor had been allowed to treat, which he was not, disregarding the wishes of her next-of-kin. Yet her doctor is adamant that had she received treatment at diagnosis, she would be alive today.
At the same time vaccine injuries and deaths in the under-50s are mounting. According to official UK government data, there have already been 180 people under 50 who developed thrombosis with thrombocytopenia (TTS) after the AstraZeneca shot and 29 who died as well as 463 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis, mostly in the young. Yet this is only a handful of the more than a million adverse reports including nearly 1,500 deaths.
Doctors are legally allowed to prescribe ivermectin “off label” in Australia — Greg Hunt the Health Minister said so, but they need information and well informed, but determined patients.
Coal is dead, an old relic, but Germany is burning a lot more coal
If the world cools and gets cloudier will renewables stall as margins become even less appealing? Will wandering jet streams interrupt reliable trade winds as the intersection of hot and cold air generates more clouds over solar panels?
In the Great Pagan Tradition of neolithic fortune telling, modern climate witchdoctors predict everything right after it starts
Last year it was droughts and bushfires. This year its floods. If only the climate models worked, they could have warned the people of Europe, China and India that there would be rampant flooding before it happened.
Imagine a world where climate models worked and they could give people three months notice?
Dr Jess Neumann, a hydrologist at the University of Reading, said: “Flooding from intense summer rainfall is going happen more frequently. No city, town or village is immune to flooding and we all need to take hard action right now if we are to prevent impacts from getting worse in the future.”
As usual, to stop floods, the first recommendation is cutting greenhouse gas emissions. If only the UK had put in more windfarms, they might have avoided this flash flood in London!
UPDATE: New readers might find it hard to get their head around this post. Stick with me. There is a path to freedom from masks, mandatory vaccines and from Chinese bioweapons. But we must plan ahead and understand virology. Strangely, the tool no one wants to mention is Sovereign Borders.
* * *
There might have been no lockdown in Sydney (and then Melbourne, Perth, and Brisbane) if that one Limo driver had been protected
Nobody is talking about the best way to stop lockdowns in Australia — stop the virus leaking in through shoddy quarantine in the first place. “Hard Borders”.
Odds are, we could have stopped the July lockdowns if we made sure drivers of flight crews and international arrivals weren’t put at risk. It’s not about vaccines, which reduce but don’t stop people catching the virus, it’s about a $50 type solution that stops a billion dollar lockdown. The economy of a city of five million (and indirectly the rest of the nation) is relying on just leaky vaccines, masks and hand sanitizer when there are so many better options.
So far, thanks to one leak, 2,227 people have been infected, 10 people have died, and currently 156 people are in hospital. (In NSW). Plus four city lockdowns.
Cheaper than lockdowns:
Put a floor-to-ceiling air tight acrylic sheet between drivers and passengers in the limo’s and don’t recirculate the air.
OR get limo drivers to wear a hazmat suit and a respirator.
AND offer free prophylactic antivirals and Vitamin D to everyone working near travellers in quarantine and in hospitals. A big review shows Ivermectin may prevent 86% of infections.
It’s almost like we want that virus to leak?
Image: Scientific Animations
No system is perfect, but we are not even trying
To stop feeding the virus new bodies we need a gap between people, and the easiest place to put that gap is at national borders. If that gap is breached then everything gets harder. Borders go up around each state, and if that fails, the borders go around each suburb or (really) around each house. A hazmat suit is “a border” around each person. Hypothetically, if we all wore Hazmat suits we could go from a mass national outbreak to zero in a few weeks. (Obviously the logistics are harder than that sounds. Medico’s get training and disrobe with a vigilant onlooker so they don’t make mistakes. Then again, Officeworks sell coveralls for $3.50. 😉 OK, I’m stirring… )
Obviously, it’s worth spending a lot on National borders to avoid the bonfire of money that comes with household lockdowns. Yeah?
The Sydney leak affects the whole of Australia. It spread causing lockdowns in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia*. The Victorian latest lockdown — while better and shorter — was a border failure too. It could have been avoided with a strong state border — then the removalists wouldn’t have brought the virus in. National borders are much easier and cheaper to get right. But there are ways to improve state borders. Trucks could even drop containers and trailers at the border, and new cabs and drivers could finish the trip so all drivers stay in their home state. It’s harder with smaller trucks, but we can unload them and reload them. Sure it costs more, but is a few weeks of hard state borders cheaper than a two week state lockdown?
It’s temporary. While this virus is mutating, and there are no good approved treatments and only an experimental emergency-use vaccine, the best economies and the healthiest ones are the ones that keep Chinese Bioweapons out. Even China is keeping Chinese Bioweapons out.
We’re buying time to watch the UK and Israeli experiments, and get data. Every month we learn more. Like that current vaccines only provide a few months of protection against catching and spreading the virus, though they appear to protect against severe disease (for now). We hope someone is collecting data on all the risks from the vaccine too (but it appears they are not). There are plenty of potential nasty surprises — like enhanced future infections (ADE), or long term autoimmune diseases. What if we vaccinate 90% of the population against the original covid variant only to find out that the antibodies it generates make reactions to the 2022 variant disease worse? That’s kinda bad to put it mildly, and hard to reverse. (Thanks and commiserations to friends in the UK, Israel and the USA for testing this out. We pray it works out well for you.)
We can’t get to zero
Maths (and Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane) shows we can. What goes up exponentially can go down exponentially. Get the R0 below one, and the borders shut, and zero is coming. The lower the R0 (rate of spread), the shorter the lockdown. That’s why the worst lockdowns are the ones that keep the R0 near one and go on forever. Like Sydney at the moment.
We can’t keep doing lockdowns
That’s exactly why we must fix the borders. We need to build asap emergency good quarantine. The last likely CCP bioweapon leak appears to be working well for China. The next one is surely coming. What will stop it? If the West builds good quarantine and hard borders and the CCP know that no matter what they dish up, we will stop it at the border. All good Chinese bioweapons belong in China, and nowhere else.
How to make things easier for suffering border towns:
Instead of border towns getting hit with lockdowns in two states, let’s put the border checkpoint outside them to keep these twin towns as one unit and out of lockdown. The PM could ask the states to agree to a system where border towns would be temporarily assigned together, as one unit, to whichever state had the clean slate. For example, the Covid fence and checkpoint would go in north of Albury-Wodonga when the outbreak starts in Sydney, and south if the outbreak starts in Melbourne. For the duration of lockdowns, the border towns become a part of the other state’s health system.
*Did the Limo driver’s virus also cause the lockdowns in SA and NT? I’m open to suggestion…
Stuffing a useful gas into holes under the ocean is harder than they thought
Chevron spent $3 billion to put just 5 million tons of carbon dioxide under the ocean floor. The project was plagued with delays and problems with sand clogging the machinery. They captured about one fiftyth of the Chevron emissions in a five year period.
Chevron is understood to have spent more than $3 billion building the carbon capture facility, but it took several years after the start of gas production for the Gorgon CCS project even to begin operation due to delays and technical difficulties. The first CO2 was injected into an undersea deposit in 2019.
It is understood regulators may ask Chevron to offset the emissions it failed to store by purchasing offsets from either local or international carbon markets. If Chevron is made to buy Australian Carbon Credit Units, which currently trade at above $20 per tonne, the cost to the company could easily exceed $200 million.
So they could have done it all 30 times cheaper. (Or, if they had used it to grow plants and make beer they might have broke even and made something useful.)
How many cyclones will the Chevron CCS stop? Is that 0.0 or 0.00?
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