One Step at a Time

Harry Palmer

CO₂ is a bonus product extracted with natural gas in the Taranaki gas field. It’s used in fire extinguishers, soft drinks, beer propellant in pubs and dry ice in the entertainment industry, for example. However, when I was a production engineer at a NZ company producing a wide range of industrial and medical gases in the 1980s, CO₂ was produced by burning oil (a lot of it the used sump oil removed from vehicles at local garages). This low-pressure gas was compressed, cooled into a liquid and stored under pressure before being filled, still as a liquid, into small, very high-pressure cylinders for distribution.

There’s a reason why the suppliers of gases store and ship their bulk products as liquids. A litre of liquid carbon dioxide evaporates to about half a cubic metre of gas at room temperature. If a hospital were to store oxygen as a gas, rather than a liquid, it would probably need an old-fashioned gas holder as big as the hospital itself.

Now compare this with what we’re told by government and their helpers: we’re going to capture the CO₂ and store it underground. What are these idiots talking about? Have they any idea?

Which is it? Are they going to store the bulk liquid in refrigerated tanks underground? Can they store CO₂ in underground “geological formations”? As what? Liquid or gas? How is it going to be captured and get there? Like most of this ‘green’ stuff, it’s untried and just ‘in their dreams’. If there’s a power failure, the liquid will evaporate to gas, lift the tank safety valve and escape to the atmosphere once again; as it will if it’s a gas pumped into leaky ‘geological’ formations, which are subject to rupture in the event of an earthquake. And have these people any idea of the vast volumes of CO₂ that would need to be removed from the atmosphere to reduce the total by even a fraction of a fraction of one per cent?

And if the storage of refrigerated liquid CO₂ is opted for, are they going to create the huge concrete (lots of lovely CO₂ released in the manufacture of concrete) caverns needed to be built to house all the forever growing numbers of storage tanks and equipment? Where is all the refrigeration power and energy to capture and bury the CO₂ coming from?”

The Demonisation of Natural Gas

The banning of gas appliances and, one suspects, eventually of the supply of natural gas is another phenomenon that has arisen in Western countries in the past year or two. Huge demonstrations have been witnessed in recent times in Holland, as farmers protest their governments seeking to ban nitrogen fertilisers, manufactured using natural gas, and the compulsory purchasing of lands that have been in their families for generations. The Dutch and farmers in other countries know that the unavailability of nitrogen fertiliser will drastically reduce crop yield and food production and quite possibly initiate a disastrous decline in the economy of a country. Not to mention the serious effects such as removal or reduction of production of essential grains and fruit and vegetables will undoubtedly have on a population. 

Natural gas is also the only means of cooking in, and warming of, millions of homes.

Once again, electricity appears to be the only viable replacement for natural gas in so many applications, but not all of them are as obvious as the above. Where will it all come from?

Heat Pumps

I served one of my engineering apprenticeships in the design office of a heating and air conditioning engineering firm in the UK, so I am in favour of using refrigerant in a ‘heat pump’ to cool a home in summer, and to reverse the cycle in winter.

Some manufacturers claim that their units continue to work as heaters down to when the outside temperature is minus 10 degrees centigrade. Air-source heat pumps possibly do, but with a not uncommon outside temperature of zero degrees centigrade it will likely be for only 10 minutes or so in any given hour, followed by 25 minutes of defrosting the outside part of the heat pump, before it can return to a further 10 minutes of heating. Net result: you remain freezing and this is what the Brits are complaining about as they are forced to replace gas fires and electric heating with heat pumps.

There are also the much more expensive ground-source heat pumps that are also expensive to install, because the outside unit is buried in your back garden where the in-ground temperature remains more or less constant. I expect that ground-source heat pumps perform for much longer before a defrost becomes necessary, if they ever need to, but with outside units grouped close to one another in the gardens of a tightly packed housing estate, there could be falls in efficiency over prolonged cold spells, as the ground temperature inevitably will fall.

Heat pumps can also be used to warm domestic water supply but apparently have trouble in reaching the minimum temperature recommended by the authorities for the killing of bacteria. With that in mind, I have to wonder what the ‘recovery’ time would be for the water cylinder to regain maximum temperature, for example after a shower. Would you be restricted to how much hot water you can use on any given day?

Conclusion

These are just some of the stepping stones that need to be crossed, one to the next, on the way to the land of ‘net zero’. But taking all of the above together, one must surely conclude the politicians pushing the green stuff on us are either completely incompetent or for some reason deliberately misleading Western civilisation.

With probably three quarters of the NZ Government’s Cabinet only ever having been leeches on the public teat or having studied political spivery at university, what else can you expect? Their evident lack of knowledge of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and thus their ability to think logically, is scandalous.

Instead of listening to the needs of their constituents, today’s politicians now consider themselves to be ‘masters of the collective’, and play one group off against the other by utilising low cunning to manipulate and coerce them. They have fully replaced the intelligence and compassion of their political forebears.

We’re not alone in this respect. British politicians dreamed up the HS2 rail link around 2010 and projected to provide a high-speed connection between London and Birmingham. All of 20 minutes would be shaved off the journey and the whole exercise was budgeted to cost around 32.7 billion pounds sterling in 2012. Work started, thousands of people were upset at being forced to sell their homes and land as the work progressed and the budget rose to (now) 107.7 billion pounds sterling. In the first week in August 2023 it was announced by the British “Infrastructure and Project Authority” that the project was not “deliverable in its current form”.

Joe Rukin, founder of the Stop HS2 campaign group, described the project as an “unmitigated disaster from start to finish”. Sounds like a fair description of the ongoing shambles of ‘net zero’, too.

These government proposals are premised on the fictitious notion that mankind is a parasite on the Earth (prompting monied entities to demand a population reduction to a more manageable 500 million) and is causing its temperature to rise a degree or so over the next hundred years, while completely ignoring the massive swings in temperature that the Earth has experienced over many millennia.

As the UK’s Daily Telegraph columnist Alistair Heath writes:

[T]he pendulum has swung too far away from majoritarian rule, and too much power handed to social engineers. Today, the problem doesn’t lie with the public, which is largely tolerant and liberal-conservative, but with the elites, who have become authoritarian and anti-democratic, captured by wokery and a dislike of material aspiration.

What we call populism, in the current British context, is really the majority trying to reassert itself. … The message to politicians is clear: start listening to the voters again, or else Britain will soon face a popular uprising orders of magnitude greater – and more unpredictable – than Brexit.

I agree, we don’t have a ‘global warming’ problem, we have a very poor quality and dishonest politicians problem. I only hope that any uprising here in New Zealand will not be the Maori versus Pakeha, right versus left, scenario currently being curated by our so-called political ‘elites’, but more a focus on ridding us of those ‘curators’: the Pied Pipers who are leading us down the road into the unimagined horror and devastation of their ‘net zero’.