First step...move corporate headquarters back to Seattle. Relocate senior managers to be amongst the engineers not in some ivory tower in Chicago isolated from the real world of plane manufacturing. Sadly this was all so predictable.

(Written on 13/03/2021)(Permalink)

No nuclear is probably the most expensive. LCOE numbers are what you should be looking at not operational numbers. It is the enormous upfront capital costs and build cycle that do nuclear in. just look at the numbers for recent attempts of building new reactors see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_nuclear_reactors_in_the_United_States Also see https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/failed-v-c-summer-nuclear-project-timeline/ If you only consider the "operational" numbers of Solar and Wind are very, very small. See: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019 for a full understanding of what it really costs.

(Written on 15/01/2021)(Permalink)

Please don't ask for help when the next hurricane comes along. Climate change will make hurricanes stronger and as sea level rises flooding will be worse. The link below is to a map of what Clearwater and Tampa area will look like by 2100 given current CO2 production. This is the mean case, the 90th percentile case is above 8ft. The areas in red are below MSL (ie underwater). Checkout where your house is. https://coastal.climatecentral.org/map/11/-82.6601/27.9462/?theme=water_level&map_type=water_level_above_mhhw&basemap=roadmap&contiguous=false&elevation_model=best_available&refresh=true&water_level=6.0&water_unit=ft

(Written on 15/01/2021)(Permalink)

Right now something like 24% of US electricity is generated from coal and 38% from natural gas. If one does the same back of the envelope calculation you get somewhere around 10,000 times. Even going to the very best numbers for the most modern combined cycle units you are at around 8000 TIMES. The numbers I quote are NOT including other pollutants just the CO2. Scrubbers do not reduce CO2 emitted. Two totally separate things. There are limited installations that do carbon capture but they are currently very limited and expensive. Again comparing the sheer volumes of pollutants the amount of cadmium (not used in most panels anyway) vs ash produced by coal, which is the second largest waste produced by the nation makes is not rational. We have something like 1.5 Billion tons of ash stored around the country. It is nasty stuff and contains a lot of heavy metals. As for nuclear there are some significant issues. Most people do not realize that your "average" 1GW r

(Written on 15/01/2021)(Permalink)

Oh by the way americanexperiment.org is run by a known rabid climate science denialist John Hinderaker and the author Isaac Orr used to work at the Heartland Institute which is also rabidly anti-science.

(Written on 14/01/2021)(Permalink)

It is not my "theory" but the actual science based on tons and tons of research. Climate change is true whether you believe it or not. For myself I try to base my opinions on facts, what do you use?

(Written on 14/01/2021)(Permalink)

I find it interesting that people would use the disposal of wind turbine blades as a significant issue. (BTW the articles are out of date). If one does even a quick back of the envelope calculation of "waste" produced by comparing wind turbine blades vs the waste a fossil fuel plant produces blade disposal is a laughable concern. Not that it should not be addressed but in comparison to the bigger picture it is a very small issue. For example: Assuming a 30 year life span for blades, weighing 30 tons for a 6MW turbine with a capacity factor of 40% for the wind turbine, a coal plant, just in CO2 waste ALONE, produces something of the order of 20,000 to 30,000 times as much waste (to produce 1 MWh using coal produces about one ton of CO2). If you add in coal ash the number increases significantly (one ton of ash is produced for every 4 to 8 tons of coal burnt). To really compare apples to apples one would need to add in the CO2 etc produced getting the coal mined and transported

(Written on 14/01/2021)(Permalink)

Clearly you don't understand what a "theory" is. Climate change science has just tons of facts to back up the understanding of what is happening with the planet. The data is just overwhelming. Science, nor scientists never said the world was flat, only dumb uninformed people did. The Greek thinker Eratosthenes calculated the value at around 24,000 mile back in 240BC. He use geometric "theories" and measurements to come up with a pretty close answer at around 24,000 miles. Other theories such as the one that relates matter to energy E=MC2 is just a "theory" but that theory is behind every atom bomb and nuclear power plant on the planet.... Ditto the use of GPS which also relies on Einstein's theories for accuracy. Newton's gravitational theory is just a "theory" but we use it every day to navigate space probes all the way out to Pluto, and to calculate the path of a ballistic shell....However in the 20th century we learnt that it was only an approximation and did not take

(Written on 12/01/2021)(Permalink)

Clearly you did not read the article on how much more fuel is used per passenger mile by a supersonic jet travel! Repeat after me: drag goes up with the cube of the speed (all things remaining equal). So to cut down the air travel time by half you have to go twice as fast and to go twice as fast you have to use 8 times a much energy for half the time. The net is 4 TIMES as much energy is used. This drag is why supersonic aircraft get so hot. Literally at speed Corcorde's wing leading edge was above the boiling point of water. It was the temperature of the skin that controlled the speed of the aircraft (especially the wing leading edges). Concorde had the power to do Mach 2.2 but to get the airframe life they desired it was limited to Mach 2.0 ...the plane could actually fly faster at night when it was cooler! This heat problem also caused the airframe to stretch by about 8 inches from when it is on the ground. Supercruise does nothing to change those numbers, w

(Written on 12/01/2021)(Permalink)

Please explain the "weak" theory you mention as I am not sure which one you are talking about... the only "weak theories" (as there are more than one) I know of are such easily disproven "theories" as the one where people have proposed the idea that climate change is NOT caused by human caused burning of fossil fuels, or the planet is NOT warming, or volcanoes are responsible for the increase of CO2, or it is the motion of the earth around the sun etc etc. Sorry about the pickup comment, my bad, it just the only people I know of with 14 mpg vehicles these days are driving pickups.....most of them use in their actual work and even there V6s are rapidly replacing V8s. Also we have some good ideas about why big dino's went extinct..however their successors are still with us, I hear them singing every day at my house. As for glaciers it all depends on which ones you are talking about. The current ones are clearly being melted by us.....Snowball(s) Earth we are not so sure it was

(Written on 11/01/2021)(Permalink)