Fighting Fire with Coal

China has a solution for the climate crisis, did you know? An elegant way to ensure human habitation despite the lethal heat waves that increasingly plague the world. You wanna know how it works? It’s so clever you wouldn’t even believe it…

The CCP’s fix is; burn more coal to feed their air conditioning systems!

I should just pack it in for this week’s column right there. That, right on the line above, is its own punchline. I’m not going to manage anything more clever after a handful of paragraphs and a pair of allegories, no manner of linguistic wizardry. But for the sake of professionalism, let’s give some context.

China’s big on coal power. Have been for a long time. According to estimates, China produces a full third of global green house gas emissions. And their reliance of fossil fuels is only increasing, all the while – to be fair – they’re also one of the world’s leading investors and constructors of renewable energy solutions, like wind and solar. But the CCP likes the reliability of its coal supply even so. A point of view which only entrenched itself after the fall of 2021, when China suffered a row of massive power outages due to a late summer heat wave. Which took out not only industrial facilities, but hospitals and schools and homes too. Leading to massive, city-wide blackouts for days. Weeks.

So, the CCP had a rough scare there two years ago. And the prognosis assures us that extreme weather will only become more prevalent as we keep churning our commercialist wheel. And, y’know, it makes a short-sighted kind of sense to shore up your energy production by the means available domestically. China has a lot of coal as natural reserves. And what with the global energy crisis, with wars and what-not, it makes sense to prioritize the options you yourself can control.

But! If you look just beyond your own nose, right around the corner, with even a sliver of long-term consequences in mind, it won’t take long to realise that you’re not likely to get out of the pit by digging down. And if you think you can win a chicken-race with the climate, burning more coal just to stop keep your AC on to stop you from burning… I’d wish you all the best and prepare the popcorn. If, y’know… it weren’t for the fact that I’d burn right along-side you.

So, as it stands… Please don’t and stop?

/Sebastian Lindberg 8/8-2023

The Iron Power Age

Humanity’s world isn’t doing too hot. This is known. Nothing controversial about it. We have problems.

Most of whom revolve around our extraction of, and our dependency on, energy. Fossil fuels, to be specific. A habit that it’s turning out to be very difficult to shed. For both its accessibility and for the massive amount of money the oil business generates. And yet, we need to get off it.

Which is where an unlikely candidate is emerging to the surface. Not solar or wind, nor fission or fusion. But iron.

Yes; iron. The very building block which we’ve engineered human civilization around since the late bronze age collapse. Iron stands poised to fill a number of energy industry gaps. As a new, sustainable, and emissionless fuel.

Fucked with my head when I heard about it too. But it’s not all that strange. Not really. Looksee here…

Currently, we get energy from fossil fuels by burning it. Unlocking chemical energy by breaking the carbon and hydrogen bonds apart with heat. Generating even more heat. Which, in turn, we capture as axis momentum, and later as electricity. Unfortunately, fossil fuels generate not just heat, but also gases. Carbon dioxide primarily among which. And all of them are considered greenhouse gases. That is to say, gases that make our atmosphere keep more and more solar heat inside its bubble.

Now, imagine burning something other than fossil fuels. Something that just so happens doesn’t emit any gases whatsoever, either greenhouse or otherwise. That fuel is iron. Burning iron creates nothing but rust (Fe₂O₃). Rust and heat. Since there’s no carbon in it, there’re no gaseous discharges.

All well and good, but as it turns out, it gets better. That rust, our slag produce from burning our iron, can be turned back to the same amount of iron that we just fuelled our power plant with. By turning up the heat, to somewhere between 600 and 1400 degrees Celsius (depending on the specific process) and wash the rust with hydrogen. Which reacts to the oxygen bound to the iron. And out we get the pure iron once more, and nothing but water (H₂O). Which means we can stick our initial fuel right back into the power plant. Presto! A rechargeable fuel source!

This is unimaginably cool. And simple to boot. Iron is one of the most common elements on the planet. It’s heavy, absolutely, so it won’t work well as a car or air plane fuel. But for ships, trains, and the industry sector, it seems a little too good to be true. But despite being heavy, it is safe. Unlike fuel cells or hydrogen gas. And it won’t lose energy efficiency over distances, like what electric currents are want to do. What we got in iron as a fuel is a rechargable and safe sort of chemical battery with absolutely no emissions associated with its use or recharge.

Granted, iron power won’t solve all our energy problems. You still need to spend energy to get it lit up to begin with, and also when you want to recharge it. Iron needs to work in tandem with other power sources.

That being said, some forty percent of our current energy needs could easily be replaced with iron power. That’s not counting transport emissions from train and seaway traffic. And that’s just straight up absolutely spectacular!

Who would have thunk, that such a big piece of the sustainable future that we need, would come from something so old. Something so simple. And who would have thought that the Iron Age would just swing back into fashion like it never went anywhere…

/Sebastian Lindberg 4/7-2023

The Great Pipeline Whodunnit

Since Monday, the sea off the coast of Sweden has been churning. Coughing gas and regurgitating methane in a gaseous maelstrom. The Nord Stream pipelines, Russia’s great gas artery to the EU, are broken, and expunging its greenhouse gas through a hundred meters of ocean.

And everyone, Russia included, agrees that the rupture is no accident, natural or otherwise, but a deliberate demolition. And accusations, as always, are flying higher than greenhouse gases ever could.

Which leads us to the question of who would do such a thing…

As far as environmental disasters go, this isn’t that big a deal. A pipeline-full of methane gas isn’t great, but since it’d be burnt anyway, it’s really all the same. The ocean won’t even necessarily be terribly contaminated, since plenty of marine biology eat methane, quite literally, for breakfast. So, rationally, technically, the demolitions of the Nord Stream pipeline could be to the benefit of the environment, seeing as the sudden pollution can’t hold a candle to the pollution produced if the pipelines were to operate normally over a long period of time. But since no environmental organization has stepped forward to take responsibility, not to mention the fact that the sabotage seems to have been an expertly performed and difficult dive and execution, it seems unlikely that tree-huggers or motorway obstructionists could pull it off.

Which leaves us with state actors. Naturally, most of our suspicious eyes turned toward Russia in the wake of the rupture. Who vehemently refute any such suspicions (which tells us absolutely nothing) and instead turn the lime light toward the US. And the other EU countries around the Baltic aren’t in the habit of blowing up fuel pipelines in their backyards.

Yet, it seems reasonable to believe that the pipeline demolition is part of the Ukraine war. Russia has previously leveraged European dependencies on its gas as a diplomatic chip against the EU’s support for Ukraine. Throughout summer and early autumn, Russian gas pipeline operator Gazprom has cut back on gas delivery through Nord Stream. Ostensibly to perform maintenance.

And say what you will about Putin’s gambit to invade Ukraine being a dumbass move. But he is otherwise not known to be a dumb strategist. And the Nord Stream pipeline was a big bargaining card for him in his negotiations with the EU to stop supporting Ukraine. With winter looming, that diplomatic card would only grow.

And now, that bargaining chip is gone, ripped from Putin’s hands by some enterprising saboteur.

The loss of Nord Stream weakens Putin’s influence in “the West”, because it is now out of his hands to turn the gas on or off for a freezing Europe. Which makes me think it would not be the neo-imperialist’s hand on the button this time, but rather someone wanting to undermine his position.

Sure; it could be the US. But the US aren’t known for subtlety. And though they’ve been opposed to the EU’s Russian gas dependency, why would they bomb the pipelines now that the gas delivery is already on hold? Instead, it seems to me, more likely that the sabotage comes from the east; not the west.

Ukraine has proven resourceful in their war against Russian aggression. They’ve been given enough guns and bombs and western equipment to withstand against, bloody the nose of, and break the Russian advance. And whatever bargaining power Russia has with the West seems to me to look like a potential death threat to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

But even more likely, I find, is that Putin’s house at the Kremlin is full of snakes. Putin’s paranoid behaviour during the invasion tells us as much; that he fears his own as much as the other. His draconic authoritarianism against opposition tells us the same story. It is almost as if he knows, damned well, that his reign will end from within and not from without. And now that his war is turning from a week-long field trip to a losing slog, Putin looks weak. Perhaps for the first time in thirty years. And he has bred a house of beasts, oligarchs eager to slice the throat of the slipping Tsar…

Would it be so unthinkable that Nord Stream exploded at the command of one such opportunist? Disappointed with their supreme emperor, disillusioned with Putin’s play for power, dispirited with this evil war of annexation.

Maybe, just maybe, Russia was behind the rupture. Just not Putin’s Russia.

/Sebastian Lindberg 3/10-2022

An Apocalyptic Appetite

As the Wuhan Virus, aka. Corona Virus, aka. Covid-19, is shutting down production lines, putting billions of people into self-isolation, and thousands into body-bags, the second-worst part of the disease is people’s hysteria about it. Granted; the contagion can be dangerous to a slim minority of the world’s population (a minority that still equates to some millions of people mind you!), but by and large it’s not a Spanish Flu or a Bubonic Plague. Not yet, at least. But that hasn’t stopped people from treating it like the end of days, stockpiling toilet paper and flour and other amenities as if this spring will be last they’ll see of modern comforts.

So, if the virus isn’t all that dangerous, and people’s hysteria is causing more havoc than the actual disease, why do people insist on acting like it’s doomsday-o’clock? Would it surprise you terribly to learn that a sizeable chunk of the world’s population actually want to the world to end?

Sound controversial? It ain’t. Not really. For about a decade, apocalypse media has been some of the most popular art that’s around. With zombie invasions and nuclear holocausts to vampire parasites and desert road trip rock concerts crowding our sensoriums, it really shouldn’t be controversial to say that people love a good World’s End.

You might think this is a modern predilection. That dissatisfaction with the state of the world, with market economics run rampant, with haves and have-nots escalating have somehow manufactured a desire for things to end. But you’d be wrong. Because if you’d have thought as much, you mustn’t have taken into the account the religious aspect. Because as it turns out, a majority of people on this earth pay homage to the Doomsday cults of Christianity and Islam. The Book of Revelations is basically the origins of modern apocalypse myth, and the Muslim tenets of Yawm al-Qiyamah is just more of the same. Hellfire and brimstone for the unfaithful; the Rapture and eternal salvation for the gullible.

And yet we let Christians and Muslims have a say in matters of sustainability. Funny, innit?

It’s not that “some people just want to see the world burn”. It’s that a whole fucking lot of people want to see the world burn.

Oh, you think I’m making mountains out of mole hills? You think people are just hunkering down to weather a storm? Then why, for fuck’s heavenly sake, are people stockpiling guns and ammo along with toilet paper and hand sanitizer? Because you sure as shining shit can’t shoot a viral infection away with magazine of .45 ACP!

We can see it in almost every facet of human society. In our continued reliance on fossil fuels, even though we’ve known for decades that its usage is a death sentence to our world. In our media and fantasy habits, glorifying and romanticising the end of order and the rise of cannibalism and moral ambiguity. In our religions, with seemingly harmonious and saintly folk openly praying for a cessation of God’s little experiment. Just look at how we’ve developed our world. How we have sickened it. How we continuously ignore pleads for sustainability. We, collectively, as a species, want the world to end. Preferably with a bang.

But I don’t judge. Well, I don’t judge a lot. I get it, I do. Every tale needs an end, and ours is desperately overdue one. I just wish people were more honest about it. I wish our fantasies weren’t so cruel. And more than anything, I wish people could imagine an end that was also a beginning of something else, rather than the hard stop, the short drop, and the long silence that most seem to gun for.

/Sebastian Lindberg 30/3-2020

The Norwegian Paradox

”It’s unreasonable that we would take responsibility for your car traffic”, the Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg said. In an interview with Swedish radio last Saturday, on the 2^nd of November. That Norway, a daily extractor of some 1,6 million barrels of crude oil and the fifteenth largest producer in the world, has no responsibility at all for human reliance on petroleum, or the climate change onslaught that’s wreaking havoc around the world.

Take that in for a second. Norway, by way of their prime minister, takes no responsibility for the consequences of their oil exports. None. Their stance is that oil reliance is a consumer problem. Not a provider sin. At all.

Context for all of you that aren’t closely familiar with Norway; it’s a rich country. A very rich country. Largely because of its oil reserves. The country has been peddling its global toxin for decades, and has been very good at facilitating its earnings. Electric cars and their charging stations are wide spread across the mountainous country. Roads and infrastructure are well maintained. It is a functioning welfare nation, fuelled by the socially distributed wealth coming in from it’s oil sales. According to a boastful Norwegian study, Norway is the richest country in the world, per capita.

In layman’s terms, the average Norwegian makes more money per year than any other citizen in the world. And its all because of its oil.

It is no exaggeration to say that every single Norwegian citizen has benefited, profiteered, from the exploitation of their oil reserves. And the world’s dependency on it.

And now, at the brink of a global climate collapse, Erna Solberg, the democratic representative of the Norwegian people, claim that it’s not their fault. They just extract, refine, and sell oil. It’s not their fault that it gets bought and used.

Just like it’s not the fault of a drug dealer that people get addicted to their poisons. It’s not a drug dealer’s fault that people overdose on their swill. Just like it’s not an arms trader’s fault that people die and suffer bloody violence as a result of their products.

Norway is a rich country. It’s a country of nature lovers. Of hikers, mountain climbers, skiers, sailors. And it is one of the world’s worst environmental villains.

It is not just the oil. Norway is one of two (actually three) countries that refuse to stop killing whales. Even though there’s no economic incentive for it (very few Norwegians actually eat whale any more, and the industry barely survives on government subsidies), they keep raising the quotas for whale hunters. Even though the rest of the world has largely collectively agreed that you shouldn’t commercially hunt creatures that have roughly the corresponding intelligence of teenagers. And how do they kill these leviathans? Humanely, one should hope, right? Nope. Not at fucking all. The Norwegian whaling fleet kills whales with explosive grenade-harpoons.

Not only that, but Norway is painfully aware that their oil reserves will run out one day, and have tried to readjust toward, among other industries, salmon farming. But a Swedish magazine of investigate journalism published an investigation (“Fula Fiskar” in Filter, published on the 28^th of January 2019) into the Norwegian salmon industry, and uncovered abhorrent conditions. Not just for the farmed salmon themselves, but also for the ecosystems in which the farms where located. Now, as a result of the Norwegian salmon farms, entire river and ocean ecosystems are dying. Dying from parasites, overfertilization, and straight up plague. All of which is known to the Norwegian government. All of which is being suppressed by the Norwegian government.

Norway, rich and natural and beautiful as it is, is one of the worst environmental scoundrels in the world. Easily ranked, if not in quantity then at least in quality, alongside the likes of the US, Russia, and China. The Norwegian government is a malefactor organization, flooding the world market with a poisonous drug, keeping the global economy dependent on their venomous product, and subjecting its wildlife to unimaginable cruelty.

Norway… you suck.

/Sebastian Lindberg 12/11-2019

Sauron gets a Gas-Ban

Sweden has a government again. Yay. And along with it, a whole slew of promises and declarations. Most of them assuredly bullshit, but promises none the less. One of which is to outlaw the sale and production of cars fuelled with either petroleum or diesel by the year 2030.

Too little too late, one might argue. Unlikely to pass, some others respond, citing that any such law or regulation would have to be ratified by the European Union. A Union practically riddled with automotive manufacturers that may take issue with the forceful eviction from such an economically insignificant upstart such as the little Nordic nation.

And while Swedish national media don’t seem interested in even trying to account for the carbon emission reduction such a regulation might solicit, they spare no time in giving economists and fossil fuel industry lobby representatives a chance to comment. Printing that increased production of electrical cars may endanger several thousands of jobs, that the technology to replace fossil fuel cars doesn’t exist yet despite the fact that there’s at least twenty years of evidence of car manufacturers torpedoing new-fuel solutions to try and validate such a fabrication, or that such a move may marginalize the already beleaguered Swedish economy as the auto-mobile industry flees these well-intentioned shores. One might almost suspect that the media has been side-eyeing the Gilets Jaunes travesty in France and come to the conclusion that paying tribute to the regressive and uneducated is a sure-fire way to retain, or even regain, readership among the population.

But you know what? Credit where credit is due. The current Swedish political environment is an unprecedented and untenable hodge-podge, and yet they aim to make the same noble mistakes that other sinking administrations have made in recent times. With a historically weak, untested, center-left government, they make bold claims to revoke the hold of a century-long industry on the Swedish economy.

So, what exactly will a regulation against the production and sales of new petroleum and diesel cars look like? What’ll it accomplish, if successful? It’ll prevent the car companies from relying on an environmentally toxic market, like what they’ve done for decades past its scientifically unacceptable status was made apparent. The regulation will, if it’s allowed to pass by big brother EU, financially motivate maybe the least environmentally responsible industry in the world to start thinking about a change in attitude and venue. Maybe. Especially if other countries follows suit, like Denmark, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands have been reported to consider.

So, despite my concerns, and the lacking credibility in the people behind the promise, sign me up as intrigued. Legislation such as this should have been forced through decades ago, putting it in the panicked hands of the industry itself to create the technology they keep complain ain’t there. Desperation is the mother of invention, and it’d be nice if the CEOs of the automotive industry would be just as desperate for change, up in their ivory towers, as the sinking citizens in places like the Azores are.

A brand new day in our energy reliance is coming, whether we like it or not. I’d much prefer us retaining at least a modicum of control on how that day dawns.

/Sebastian Lindberg 22/1-2019

Triaging the World

“Fossil fuels help prevent sexual assault.”

Supposedly. According to the US Energy Secretary, and long time Texan Governor, Rick Perry.

The Texan had been on a visit in South Africa, and retold the story of a woman describing the sense of danger as soon as the lights were turned off, due to energy shortages. So, by cranking up the use of fossil fuels, lights would stay on, and this woman would be safer from sexual predators. Because monsters mostly come out at night. Mostly.

This is where I pause and let the story and statement sink in with you, dear reader. Just, roll it on your withered tongue for a moment. The very idea that fossil fuels, and the use thereof, will prevent sexual assault. Then, let’s take a look at the components here.

Rick Perry, a fourteen year veteran governor of Texas, a state that has proliferated fossil fuels since the year of ever. South Africa, a country that already derives some 87% of its power from fossil fuels (mainly coal), being referred to as safer if only it burnt more fossil fuels. And then we have that little gem once again, that the statement and story refers to a sense of safety. Not actual safety itself. And we’ve already discussed the problem with confusing the two.

So, already on the surface, we have a biased person, making an in-context irrelevant observation in favour of an unsubstantiated achievement. And thus, finally, we can get into the heart of the matter.

Riddle me this… How many of you set fire to your bathroom to kill a spider? How many of you cut off your foot so that you won’t stub your toe? How many presently still reading ever blow their brains out with a shotgun so that they’ll cure their migraine? No one? Really? Excellent. Then maybe you’ll also understand why it’s a bad idea to wreck your habitat to deal with societal problems.

Now, hold on. I’m not saying that societal issues aren’t important to talk about. Not important to fix. Sexual assault, domestic and otherwise, needs to become an obsolete behavioural pattern in the human race. I agree wholeheartedly with that. But when you propose that we should ruin our world to do it… Well, first off I’ll applaud your misanthropic gumption. Secondly, I’ll tell you that you’re an idiot.

Now, I want to make this absolutely clear: No subjective vindication, no demographic or ethnic injustice, is more important than our environmental concerns. The preservation of a healthy habitat (alternatively the execution of a successful exodus from a wasted world) is the single most important issue that our generation need concern ourselves with. Everything else should be subject to potentially taking a back seat until we solve the bigger riddle. For example, that includes (in no particular order of magnitude) sexual violence, gender-based socio-economical divides, racism or your precious retirement fund.

And yes, I realize that that sentiment will sound privileged. It doesn’t make it any less true. Because the fear you feel of sexual predators when walking home at night isn’t particularly worthwhile when you can’t breathe the air or grow non-toxic food. When the world is on fire, the waters are rising, the storms are coming, then the reliability of the street lights on your way from work will not be your main concern.

The restoration and suspension of a healthy environment, for all ecosystems, triumphs over all other issues. And anyone that tells you differently, that tries to lure you with the promise of snake-oil safety or comfort in lieu of sustainability, is not only a liar but an intellectual cancer, and is probably one of those aforementioned monsters that do not mind, but thrive, in the light.

/Sebastian Lindberg 7/11-2017