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CCS via Picking Losers.
CCS means that the CO2 from your favourite project is captured at great expense, converted to a liquid form and then stored in a hole in the ground. Where your source does not have a hole in the ground you can package your waste and send it to one in a remote part of the world. (I’m suggesting Brussels)
Now the government has, finally, approved some new power stations. Unfortunately not nuclear but coal and with some extra costs added on. The cost of the CO2 capture equipment. Now from my understanding from the articles the capture is very power intensive. It will take between 10% and 40% of the output of the power station to capture around 90% the CO2. That’s if it works properly at all. What a waste. That means we need much larger power stations just to stay in the same place as stations are decommissioned. It also will mean that the cost of power will increase because while the inputs will be the same, the outputs will be significantly less so the costs must increase to keep the profits up.
We need to remember that there is only one plant, in France, where this technology is in place on a power station and we have not even got any decent reports from it yet and already our government is mandating that it’s fitted or they won’t approve the new stations.
In addition they make the assumption that the liquefied CO2 will remain in the ground forever. Two things leap at me immediately. The CO2 is kept liquefied by power during collection and transport what is going to happen to it when it is put in the ground unpowered. My understanding is it will turn back to a gas. What will stop it leaking through the rock and escaping? Now as it’s the middle east, not in my backyard, I don’t really care but I wouldn’t want it here because even one container load leaking would not be very good for our health. Never mind the hundreds of containers worth we are talking about. It’ll be like a poison gas attack to any nearby towns.
On the other hand it probably won’t really be an issue. After the collection of all the taxes from this excercise the government will send them all off to China or the Middle east who will plug them into a socket and suck the liquid out. Squirting it out into the atmosphere after they have the signature for where they can send the bill. Bit like what happens with our household recycled materials now.
Bet China isn’t being so stupid as to hamper it’s power stations and my understanding of our contribution to the CO2 output means we will have made very expensive empty gestures.
Just out of interest though. As this CO2 is so powerful at changing our climate if we were to sent it to Mars somehow then it would change it’s environment to make it more friendly for us. Remember Mars is much smaller than the Earth therefore easier to terraform. If we are terraforming Earth on our own just with CO2 then we should be able to terraform Mars easily if we can get the CO2 there. Maybe a bit of a logistical problem there though atm. Maybe soon.
Now another question I have is if we are so sure we can keep a massive amount of a poisonous gas locked away safely why can’t we manage to keep a significantly smaller amount of liquid and solid nuclear waste. Especially as they are already in sturdy containers. Now I know that the half life means they need to be stored for thousands of years but as technology improves, either conversion to an inert material or transport to the sun, or Brussels, would become safer. It won’t have the same issue as CO2 and we can get greener power. Winners all around. Except for the whingy whiney greens but they are never happy anyway so can be ignored.
And to cap it all we are in the middle of a recession. We will never get on our feet at this rate with politicians putting our costs up all the time for no benefit.
Another article where the discovery of a cancer ‘brake’ could stop the disease.
Is it just me or is does it seem there is a lot of new cancer breakthroughs lately. I’ve read articles on new therapies, new understandings of how it spreads and new treatment techniques have been found to treat it. All over the last few months.
Could it be that we are making significant progress on our diagnosis and treatment of this terrible disease. Now I know that the discovery of these techniques isn’t the same as having a pill but maybe we are not too far away from one of these teams having a ‘Eureka’ moment and the problem could be resolved.
Fingers crossed.
All my life I have tried to adhere to the KISS principle. Keep It Simple Stupid. Its very words mean to not overcomplicate things and to make everything simple and easily understood so that everyone knows what is going on.
In general as a species though we like to complicate things. That is why IT, lawyers, banks, schools, etc. have their own little idiosyncrasies and in some cases their own language to make them difficult for outsiders to understand and give them an air of mystique. Make out that only experts in this field can even get involved in discussions when in most cases it’s easy enough to understand if explained properly.
So when I read this title ‘Why we shouldn’t hide our problems from ET’ I agreed straight away. Lying is the worst thing we could do and once the trust is lost we would find it impossible to recover. Reading further however it quickly becomes apparent that they were talking about sending a comprehensive message to the stars. Mmmm.
Thinking about how we can’t even send simple messages to people we know and have similar social understandings with. Examples are Obama’s gaff with the Russian gift, JFK’s gaff in Berlin etc. Our total lack of understanding of the Muslim terrorist mindset. Our lack of understanding of when to buy chocolates and when to buy flowers. Hell, there are just so many examples where we can’t even communicate when there is a high level of trust and caring. How why do we think we can send any sort of detailed message to outer space to an alien culture and hope we don’t put our foot in it is beyond me.
The KISS principle seems to apply here more than anywhere else. Sure send some mathematic, chemical or physics texts. Maybe a subset of a dictionary to enable them to have a basis for communication. Something factual. Just not our history, our social systems or our religions and keep our politicians from getting involved. After all, it could literally be the end of the world as we know it.
After my post on ‘Shoes in the machines‘ I looked at what we can do to stop or cause inconvenience in each one of the areas I thought were key for us. These key areas were;
Name
Home
Financial
Health
Car
Travel
Phone
Internet
It quickly become apparent that we are already past the tipping point and that there is almost nothing we can do to stop the progress of the surveillance state. At the most we can cause mosquito bites and keep ourselves feeling a little bit happy that we have done what we can. Sadly the mosquito bites are on a tank not Gordos soft head.
We now are dependant on whoever gets into power sometime in the future repealing this legislation and when they do may I suggest the easiest way is to repeal all legislation between 1997 and when they start. Be much easier and quicker.
So, let’s look at each one in turn and see what can be done and why, imo, we are too late for anything really drastic.
Starting with Name. What can I say? Everyone knows your name from your neighbours to the council and it’s easily obtainable. From what I understand though it’s still legal to use a false name as long as the intent is not to defraud anyone. So feel free to give yourself a false name and, if it’s not illegal where you are, ensure you get yourself another passport for identification. When ID cards are forced on us one of those won’t go amiss either. They will come in handy in the future as unless the checker is wired up to some method of validation they will be OK. Plus PCSOs will be too scared to open them to check in case the bogey man is inside.
Home. Well this is a bit more of an issue. After all you cannot hide your house or change anything about it. It’s rateable value and details are not only held by estate agents but the council and undoubtedly central government. Not a lot you can do here and when the council snoops have been around to tax your views and how many windows, bedrooms, toilets and how nice it looks we can expect tailored council tax bills. We are screwed on this one. Nothing you can do at all.
Financial. This is the area where every penny is counted and recorded. Difficult for you to hide anything since carrying any significant amount of cash means it is stolen confiscated by plod as drug money. Cash arriving or leaving is monitored and greater control over foreign accounts is being sought by our government as it appears that we are not paying enough tax already. Seeing as all governments are desperate to gets their hands on more of your hard earned cash then they bandy together to stop you protecting your money. In the olden days you could get an account which would not be linked to you but nowadays they are all linked and government knows what accounts are yours. Only thing you can do, and it is an inconvenience, is to keep taking money out and paying for things by cash where you can. I like taking money from the hole in the wall outside the supermarket to pay for items I buy in that supermarket. Pay everyone in cash. Some of them will even give you a discount because they won’t be paying tax themselves. Bad people that they are. I also like transferring money around my accounts. OK. The government knows they are all mine but it make me happy and I can do it online.
Health. All our details are in our health records. Not long ago it was in a nice brown envelope covered in cryptic text decipherable only by arcane practitioners of dark arts. Nowadays they are all stored in computers on the N3 Spine. In some ways this is actually good for us because it means that when you go to other hospitals all your details are available for the new doctors. On the downside it also means all your data is available to those authorised to look. All 2 million of them. In this day and age it means practically anyone in government and personally I would be loath to be recorded now for something like depression or mild fainting spells when it could make a big difference to your ability to get a job or keep your driving license. Nothing is private with this government. However, there is nothing you can really do. Lying about your health is not a good thing to do from a practical point of view. You get the wrong treatment.
Car. Well we already have computerised road tax records and MOT records which are linked. We also have the wonderful ANPR where they can check each cars details automatically and speed cameras where they can monitor your speed automatically. Unfortunately, they have not reached the level yet of sending plod after what they detect but rely on snail mail to your home address. Which is fine, for them, if your car is all legal but not so good if you decide to take a chance on keeping an unregistered car. But besides that they are implementing policy that will monitor every trip you make so they know everywhere you have been and how you got there. Taxes will follow. Again, there is not much you can do about this as cars are easy targets for taxes because running a car means you have money and we have to have them to get to work. Public transport being ineffective unless you actually live and work close to the stations or bus route. I would imagine that due to the lack of Plod patrolling there must be a lot of untaxed, uninsured and unregistered cars out of the main cities who are saving a fortune. Sensible Criminal bastards. Not a lot else we can do though.
Travel. A more interesting one. Not that long ago you only needed to wave your passport to show entitlement and you were allowed to pass in and out of the country. They still searched you every now and again because most things are illegal here that are available elsewhere and they like to try and stop it and, if possible, tax it. Now of course in their insatiable taste for knowledge and sticking their nose in they want to know more details about you. The more interesting are where are you going, where are you staying, what credit cards did you use and your phone numbers and Email addresses. All these of course help our government stop terrorism and help the children by … err… well anyway they must do because they say so. Well here at least you can do something to protect yourself. After all on your return you don’t want an unexpected detour to a UK version of Gitmo do you? Well here you just put down the minimum you can get away with for your travel details and where you are staying. Changing them when you are out of the country due to a sudden change of plans. In addition you can create a phone number to give them, Email address and a credit card none of which you will ever use. Let them keep the data. Create a phone number by visiting somewhere like Yac and creating one for free. Give it on all your interactions with the government. It’s expensive to call but you won’t be calling it. Create Emails on Google or other free Email providers and forward them around. Make them have to go to other governments to get the details. So forward your US Email to a Russia one to a UK one etc. Apply for a new credit card, one you only use infrequently and not for everyday use you can apply for at any credit card company. Get one and just use it for things the government insists on knowing about and nothing else. A spare card.
Phone. Well, all our calls are logged. The contents listened to and passed on to any government body that is interested. Want your kid in another school? Don’t talk about it on the phone the KGB council are listening in. Well for most of us this won’t really be an issue but if you are a bad guy then the easy way to do this is to simply have an unregistered pre-pay mobile phone to make all your school arrangements on and don’t actually talk in the clear. Use code words such as boss for target school, your pad for the local pub and don’t forget to mix up dates and times so you are difficult to trace. So to meet at your pad at midday on Thursday. Actually means meeting them at the local pub at 15:00 on Wednesday. Don’t bother to take ciggies. When you buy the mobile phone use cash and use cash when you top it up. Have it switched off most of the time with the battery disconnected. I have no doubt that soon you will need to provide ID to get one.
Internet. The last bastion of freedom. Well not exactly. Our travel and Emails have been recorded and read for a long time. This new legislation just keeps the connection details for a year. As I’ve said before pretty useless really without keeping the data itself. (Which I’m sure will be next) Now there are things you can do here but they all bring little problems of their own, many require payment and many require the kindness of others and in some cases they would be putting themselves in the line of fire.
Every connection you type into your browser or FTP client will be recorded by your ISP. IM client or Skype will be recorded by the service provider. This data will be recorded with the date, time and your IP but not the data. Now without going into too much technical detail we fool the system all the time while we are by using technology such as NAT. So it is easy to do. For HTTP (Web browsing) and FTP we simply use services such as Proxy and Tor servers. Some will require payment. You configure your system as per the instructions and away you go. The connection data recorded will have the correct date, time and your IP but the destination address will be the Proxy or Tor server. From your perspectiveve there is a delay in loading the web pages or data but otherwise it’s exactly the same. IMs, Skype etc. are a different system but using the same principle. You will need to find systems that will not record the data or details and supply to Plod. Again, you may have to pay. Nothing is free and certainly not freedom. Google, Yahoo etc. will happily pass the data over. Find someone that won’t or set up your own.
Emails. This legislation will record the date, time and Email address of the sender, the recipients and the IP it was send from. The contents will again currently be unrecorded. It’s part of their magic database of who knows who and associations. As you will know from receiving lots of spam return addresses and IPs can be forged. All you need is a mail server on the web that accepts connections and you can send mail without using your ISPs server. This will leave no record of the Email. Alternatively you can send via a remailer who will send the message on so the recipient is recorded as the remailer and the true recipients are unrecorded. Again, you can use others or set up your own.
For HTTP, FTP, IM, Phone, Emails. You can find systems online. Some will charge. Some will not but limit the service. You chose what you want. In addition you can set up your own Proxy or Tor servers, set up your own IM or phone service and/or set up your own Email system or remailer. Bear in mind though that running your own costs money and has some risks. It’s your server that sends the emails on, your server that accesses the suspect files. So when Plod comes around in their hamfisted way it’s you they will talk to first. Best for those that are prepared for a visit from the KGB Plod. Just search for ‘set up your own ? server’
Now consider that nowadays doing something suspicious to protect your privacy is equivalent to actually having sex with seven year olds and treated in the same way you need to be very careful about what you do and why. In most cases to draw the attention of Plod to yourself is not worth it. If you do think it’s worth it there are several things you can do. To cover up most of these internet issues you can make a Cryptobook. Mine was using DOS it was so long ago. I made and sold a few of these many years ago for the firm I was working for. USB sticks are now available that you can put an entire OS on so you don’t need hard drives and can carry your secure systems around. I would imagine you can put an entire Cryptobook on one of them now. I’ll keep my eyes open and see what there is. If only there is a quick way to destroy the USB sticks. I’ve tried a few things but all have inconveniences of their own. In addition there is encryption and steganography. Read about them here.
‘The Volvo S60, which launches next year, is planned to be the first car to be fitted with full automatic braking to avoid collisions with pedestrians. The system uses a combined camera and radar sensor to monitor any obstacle in front of the car. The radar measures how far away it is, while images from the camera are analysed by image-recognition software to determine what the object is.
Drivers get an audible and visual warning of a potential collision, and if they do not respond the system automatically applies the brakes.’
Read the full story here. It’s below the main article which talks about future safety devices that don’t, imo, sound too good being legislated because us evil car drivers don’t care about pedestrians. Just the title gives the clue.
Anyway the story I found interesting talks about the car automatically and on the foresight of the programmer activating the brakes on a car when you do not react. Sounds very dodgy to me. Remember it will be the only car on the road with this capability.
So you are driving down a road at 50mph followed by a HGV or Coach. It’s raining. Nothing on the road for over a mile and you are on a gentle downwards curve. A recyclable and reusable bag is blown out into the road. Currently you would evaluate the situation, take your foot off the accelerator and decide that the bag will be blown clear it and anyway it’s too dangerous to brake hard in these conditions so you don’t. The bag is blown clear and everything is OK. A blip in any journey.
Not however if your car suddenly decides to apply the brakes on it’s own. With only 10m range at 50, which isn’t even the max speed possible in our emasculated society, that is practically an emergency stop. With no real warming. You could slip on the road or be run over by the vehicle behind. Who’s fault would that be? Well in the first instance yours for going too fast and in the second it’ll be OK as it’s the following vehicle. Hope that makes you feel better in hospital. If you live that is.
I can think of several scenarious where this could create problems and not just for other drivers.
Now I like computers and I do believe that the time will come where computers will be able to manage the intricacies of driving but I’m not so sure about this. Sounds too dangerous to me. I’ll stick with a buzzer thanks.
One last point. I’ve heard that people slam on the brakes so that people run into the back of them at slow speeds so they can claim for whiplash. The person behind always gets the blame unless that person is plod. ‘The car did it’ probably won’t cut it I would think.
I’ve always smiled when there is an issue raised about user consent for anything that private, or even public, services want to do. You see I think that in practical terms we like to give the impression that we have a choice but in reality we don’t really. This example, BT wants to roll out Phorm but the EC objects. It’s a joke. BT will just roll it out. It will modify the T&Cs for it’s broadband service to include Phorm and if you don’t want to sign then you will need to find another provider and go through the hassle of getting your MAC code waiting while another useless support department waits ten days to connect you and that is if you can find one that doesn’t use Phorm. Signing up doesn’t seem so bad now.
Just look at what BT does with your phone service now. You don’t even want a BT phone but you need one to get a broadband connection with any ISP so you pay BT £11+ a month even if you don’t need, want or use the phone. OFCOM should fix this but is clearly toothless. It’s effectively a cash cow for BT and an additional cost for subscribers that looks very much like a license fee on broadband. BT marketing did well here. What consent is required for this? If you want broadband by anyone other than Virgin then you need to pay it and sign up to their user agreement. No options.
So look at your kids privacy in school. The schools want to fingerprint them, check their lunch boxes, as them questions about you and subject them to lessons on gay history. You don’t consent? OK, find another school then as they are excluded or you are prosecuted for keeping them from school.
Nobody reads they license agreement on software either. They are so long even a lawyer would fall asleep and ordinary people have little chance of realising that the sentence stuck in the middle means you have just given your first born to Microsoft. Don’t consent? Well tough you can’t get your money back because the wrapper is opened.
Don’t want to consent to show the contents of your pockets in a random stop. Get arrested for terrorism offences and get your house, pockets and bottom searched as well as your prints and DNA taken while you wait 6 hours at plods pleasure.
I can go on forever regarding the abuse of power that takes place under the farce of user consent.
It neeeds to be sorted out and strengthened up so that when consent is not given it cannot be forced and in the case of legislated monopolies that they are forced to cater for all sorts and not just what they want. Civil servants put back in their place as servants and not bullies supported by the power of the gun.
Of course it won’t be easy. Lawyers spend a lot of time finding tricky ways to say things so we don’t know what is going on and service providers, be it schools, plod or companies, want everyone to have exactly the same to save them hassle. It will need tough legislation which is enforced which kind of puts it out of the realms of possibility with this government.
p.s. Phorm if you wait a bit our useless goverment will probably sell you the data you want from this super new database they are building with the data collected from all the ISPs. Should get a good deal as they already need the money. Good luck with Amazon though.
In the past I have said that Socialism doesn’t work because we are not like ants and we are inherently selfish. Socialism requires the drones to sacrifice something of themselves in some way so the whole colony benefits. Ants will all sacrifice their lives for the colony.
Now it appears that those willing to sacrifice themselves for their own colonies are not so willing to do the same for other colonies. To the extent that they mutiny and sabotage the colony when they are enslaved. Read here. Ants are more like humans than I thought.
Of course ants don’t look at other ants watching Jeremy Kyle and benefiting from their labour then changing their minds or every colony would be in turmoil like we are under a Socialist government.
Those base instincts cover more of the animal kingdom than I thought.
I read this article where it was suggested that we could use our ears as a key, they use the word password, to allow access to our bank accounts and our phones etc. as the research indicates that, like fingerprints, our ears create sounds that could very well be unique.
So what happens is that your phone sends a signal into your ear and listens to the returned sound. It then checks that against your biometric and grants or denies access. These sounds are believed to be constant throughout your life but can be changed by drugs or drink.
Of course my first thoughts were what else could this be used for and it didn’t take me long to work out if this was true it would be the key biometric that our KGB style government was waiting for.
You see other biometrics, size, gait, iris scans, DNA, voice and even fingerprints require some equipment and time to process. It is no good for Plod to just pull a group up and take their biometrics and process them for a fishing expedition. It takes too long. DNA takes days, fingerprints several hours, your size, gait, voice etc. requires you to participate and then requires processing before identification.
This new system would just require something, a headset or even just a modified phone, to be held to your ears and the biometric scanned and searched in a database for an almost instantaneous response. Now imagine going into a club or something and getting everyone in there to put this unit to their ear before they are allowed access to build up a complete list of who is in the building.
Now taking it a step further. Imagine that every time you put a phone to your ear this biometric is scanned and logged. It would make every modern phone a way to track and trace you.
The low equipment requirements coupled with negligible training means it would the most powerful tool against us you could ever come across.
Of course you could disguise your returns easily enough if you wanted by wearing a cover or something but not in front of plod or in public without bringing suspicion upon yourself.
So fingers crossed then that this biometric is not unique. It does change with age and/or what clothes you are wearing because otherwise rolling out these detectors is going to be real easy and quick and we will have nowhere to hide. Screw the banks security. I think they are secure enough while we are not.
Well done Guido for putting the boot into our politicians and highlighting a very typical Socialist activity. Read here about the latest from the horses mouth.
Now the bit I find absolutely amazing is not really the content of the EMails but the fact that the government who has done the most to make sure that your private EMails are not private at all seems to treat their EMails as totally secure and nobody has the right to look at them never mind make them public.
How controlling can you get. Sadly for them, and good news for us, total control is an illusion. Clearly people who just a few years ago were keeping the governments sleaze private are themselves feeling disillusioned and now making things public.
Are we anywhere near a Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg yet?
Technology is a double edged sword. Stalin would have loved the database and analysis technology available today and it’s got to the stage where even the most docile among us is aware of what is going on and feeling a glimmer of concern.
The latest bit of legislation, the Internet addresses being recorded, although talked about all out of proportion is only the latest bit of surveillance by our Police state and not even the most dangerous. I suspect it is the straw that broke the camel’s back though.
I’ve looked around since my ‘shoes in the machines‘ post and looked to see what we can do. Thinking about it made me realise how far we already are down the path so I though I should put a stake in the ground first. So here we go.
For years we have been monitored and recorded, for our own good, and of course to make sure we have paid all we can.
The PNC (Police National Computer) has known about any interface you had with Plod. In the olden days it was facts on criminal actions only. Over the last decade it has become a mixture of fact, innuendo and supposition. So we have been surveilled for a while know but as it was by stealth and we just accepted it bit by bit because we never thought for a moment our government would be the enemy.
So basically we have several areas where are monitored and recorded. Key personal areas are;
Name
Home
Financial
Health
Car
Travel
Phone
I’m sure you can think of many more depending on your own interactions with the state. So as you can see a vast amount of data is already available to whoever wants to look. However, as it was in disparate databases it was not quite as encompassing as it is when all the databases are linked together where it becomes a very powerful and uncontrollable tool. Remember all of the above categories are already recorded and maintained under penalty of law. However it should be considered that almost every one of the above categories is being expanded significantly at the moment with the intention of the state having full disclosure.
If you think I’m exaggerating then look what extra data will be gathered under your name with ID cards. Council snoops will be counting windows in your home for a window tax (or a view tax and some more tax anyway). All your UK financial data is already held and Gordo wants access to any offshore funds you have as well. I’d be very wary about telling your doctor you have some mental illness as you never know who will be reading it. Thinking about it your medical record could be looked at by someone like your insurance company. Mmmm. Then there is the proposal to put ANPR(Automatic Number Plate Recognition) on every major road to record your car journeys. The KGB would have loved that. You now have to fill out forms if you are going abroad stating your foreign travel itinerary, cards used, Email addresses etc. just like the old KGB ways we laughed so much about. Finally, your phone records are kept for trawling for several years. This will be linked with the PNC, or an upgraded DB, which already holds links of your known associates.
So the latest to be added, simply recording the senders and receivers of Emails, your web destinations and who you phone on the Internet is really a small step compared to all that. The Email addresses and IP phone details will complete the electronic loop for all your associates although I have heard that you are only separated by 6 people from anyone else so it must be interesting to see the software filters on that. However without the contents being recorded for any of this it can only be used for association as web pages change, Emails are deleted and IP phone calls rarely recorded. Association seems to be very important here. However, expect it to be expanded soon and the contents recorded. That would make some very interesting files to run contents searches on weekly while we do our weekly search for the guilty.
Soon they will have fingers in every aspect of your lives and merely by selecting a few sentences and the subjects of web sites they will be able to get anyone they want out of the way via the courts. Better than going for a walk in the woods but life ruining in another way.
So what can you do?
Well writing to your MP is out of the question. Your MP is an accomplice to your subjugation.
So in a couple of upcoming articles I’m going to make some suggestions about what you can do to help throw your shoes in the machines. It’s not much but will give you a bit of satisfaction. Until we get blown up or arrested of course.
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Carbon Capture and Storage
CCS via Picking Losers.
CCS means that the CO2 from your favourite project is captured at great expense, converted to a liquid form and then stored in a hole in the ground. Where your source does not have a hole in the ground you can package your waste and send it to one in a remote part of the world. (I’m suggesting Brussels)
Now the government has, finally, approved some new power stations. Unfortunately not nuclear but coal and with some extra costs added on. The cost of the CO2 capture equipment. Now from my understanding from the articles the capture is very power intensive. It will take between 10% and 40% of the output of the power station to capture around 90% the CO2. That’s if it works properly at all. What a waste. That means we need much larger power stations just to stay in the same place as stations are decommissioned. It also will mean that the cost of power will increase because while the inputs will be the same, the outputs will be significantly less so the costs must increase to keep the profits up.
We need to remember that there is only one plant, in France, where this technology is in place on a power station and we have not even got any decent reports from it yet and already our government is mandating that it’s fitted or they won’t approve the new stations.
In addition they make the assumption that the liquefied CO2 will remain in the ground forever. Two things leap at me immediately. The CO2 is kept liquefied by power during collection and transport what is going to happen to it when it is put in the ground unpowered. My understanding is it will turn back to a gas. What will stop it leaking through the rock and escaping? Now as it’s the middle east, not in my backyard, I don’t really care but I wouldn’t want it here because even one container load leaking would not be very good for our health. Never mind the hundreds of containers worth we are talking about. It’ll be like a poison gas attack to any nearby towns.
On the other hand it probably won’t really be an issue. After the collection of all the taxes from this excercise the government will send them all off to China or the Middle east who will plug them into a socket and suck the liquid out. Squirting it out into the atmosphere after they have the signature for where they can send the bill. Bit like what happens with our household recycled materials now.
Bet China isn’t being so stupid as to hamper it’s power stations and my understanding of our contribution to the CO2 output means we will have made very expensive empty gestures.
Just out of interest though. As this CO2 is so powerful at changing our climate if we were to sent it to Mars somehow then it would change it’s environment to make it more friendly for us. Remember Mars is much smaller than the Earth therefore easier to terraform. If we are terraforming Earth on our own just with CO2 then we should be able to terraform Mars easily if we can get the CO2 there. Maybe a bit of a logistical problem there though atm. Maybe soon.
Now another question I have is if we are so sure we can keep a massive amount of a poisonous gas locked away safely why can’t we manage to keep a significantly smaller amount of liquid and solid nuclear waste. Especially as they are already in sturdy containers. Now I know that the half life means they need to be stored for thousands of years but as technology improves, either conversion to an inert material or transport to the sun, or Brussels, would become safer. It won’t have the same issue as CO2 and we can get greener power. Winners all around. Except for the whingy whiney greens but they are never happy anyway so can be ignored.
And to cap it all we are in the middle of a recession. We will never get on our feet at this rate with politicians putting our costs up all the time for no benefit.