Some Concerns about the Recent Republican Debate

Wallace Manheimer

At the initial Republican debate on August 23, two incidents ought to be disturbing to readers of wattsupwiththat.    First of all, when Vivek Ramaswamy suggested that the country use all of its energy resources, coal, oil, gas, nuclear and whatever else worked, someone shouted to him “What about the climate crisis”.  He said: “The climate crisis is a hoax”, but was immediately shouted down, and this was by a group of conservative Republicans.  Probably more readers of wattsupwiththat would use the word false, rather than hoax.  Nobody thinks this is a big joke. 

The evidence against a climate crisis is voluminous, and it is not appropriate to go into it here.  Suffice it to say that in about 2000, Frederick Seitz, the former head of the National Academy of Sciences, spearheaded a petition, signed by over 30,000 scientists, over 9000 with Ph.D’s denying a climate crisis (http://www.petitionproject.org/).   More recently the Clintel Foundation, centered in Holland put out a climate declaration signed by over 1600 top scientists from around the world (https://clintel.org/world-climate-declaration/) making the same point.  Scientists are anything but united on the assertion of a rapidly approaching, CO2 generated climate crisis.  For someone interested in a summary of the evidence against a climate crisis, this author has written one (Wallace Manheimer,  While the climate always has, and always will change, There is no climate crisis,   Vol. 15, No. 5, p. 116 (2022), Journal of Sustainable Development

https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jsd/article/view/0/47745)

The fact that so many believe in the false climate crisis makes Dick Lindzen, perhaps the leading authority on geophysical fluid dynamics, look more and more like a prophet:

“What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world- that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.”

The next is Nikki Haley saying that she will scold the developing world and make them not use coal, oil, or gas. The BP corporation publishes its energy outlook. (BP Energy Outlook 2019,  https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/energy-outlook/bp-energy-outlook-2019.pdf).  It showed that in the more developed world, the so-called OECD countries of 1.2 billion people, the per capita use of energy use is about 5 kW per capita, or 6 terawatts (trillion Watts) total.   Since the entire world uses ~ 14 terawatts, this leaves about 1 kW per capita for the rest of the world.

Let’s see what these power number means. Take a typical American family with two parents and two children in the household. Say both parents work in different places, so they have 2 cars and drive each one the average of 12,000 miles per year. If their cars get 30 miles per gallon (most cars average less), they use together 800 gallons of gas per year. A gallon of gas (or heating oil) has the energy equivalent of about 40 kW hours, and there are about 30 million seconds in a year, so the family’s cars use about 5 kW. Now say they use the average of 500 gallons of heating oil per year to heat their house; this is about 3 kW. Then say that their home electrical use is the average of about 1.3 kW. However, electricity is produced with an efficiency of, of about 1/3, so their electrical use claims another 4 kW total (of say coal, gas or nuclear fuel). Hence this family’s total power use is ~ 12 kW, or about 3 kW per person.   However this is only the personal use, there are many common uses, office buildings, stores, factories, farms, public transportation, airlines, demolition and construction, the military…..

Now think of what life is like in the many countries that average 1 kW per person.  These countries also have factories, airlines, a military, … so the average person probably uses less than ~0.5kW.  These countries are no longer willing to just passively accept this.  They are building up their energy infrastructure as quickly and as economically as possible.  Mostly this means coal.

At a US Department of Energy meeting in Maryland in 2009, a high-ranking member of the Chinese Academy of science attended.  In his talk, he announced that in 2000, the average Chinese used ~ 10% of the power as the average American, and at the time of the meeting was ~ 20%.  He said they would not rest until their per capita energy use is about the same as ours.  (Now is ~ 30-35% of ours)

Here is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Novmber 2021:  The colonial mindset hasn’t gone.  We are seeing from developed nations that the path that made them developed is being closed to developing nations.

Here is Nigerian President Mohamed Bazoum (June 2022):  Africa is being punished by decisions of western countries to end public financing for foreign fuel projects by the end of 2022.  We are going to continue to fight, we have fossil fuel that should be exploited.

For Nicki Haley to think that she can wave her finger and demand that these countries switch to windmills is not only living in a dream world, but also is the height of hubris.

Wallace Manheimer has had a 50+ year career as a scientist at the US Naval Research Laboratory.  He has published ~150 reviewed scientific publications and has recently published a book Mass Delusions, how they harm sustainable energy, fusion and fusion breeding, available on Amazon.