We Can't Meet the Climate Goals

 We can’t meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement!

Global CO2 emissions is the product of the CO2 emissions of the individual person multiplied by the number of people in the world (more in the post on Undesirable Green Developments from November 2019).

In 2014, the environmental protection organization Ecopop (www.ecopop.ch) launched the popular initiative “Stop Overpopulation - Safeguard our Natural Environment” in Switzerland. The initiative called for government funding worldwide to promote voluntary family planning.

The National Councillor Balthasar Glättli (of the Greens) called Ecopop's aim to prevent population growth with contraceptives abroad a “contemptuous, neocolonialist attitude” (NZZ).

The reader will no doubt have noticed that I am not a fan of parties like the Social Democratic Party and the Greens that spread socialist ideas. But this is not about political exchanges. The aim is to find out how the left and the Greens can remove their ideological blinders so that they too can help lower the world’s population in the next 50 years.

If we enable voluntary family planning around the world, we will achieve two goals:

1. We facilitate the living together of women and men in developing countries and prevent abortions. More in the blog on Self-determined Sexuality in Developing Countries from June 2019.

2. At the same time, we help to reduce global warming.

            We humans have to choose whether we want to stop global warming with ascetic living or take other rational measures.

In industrialized countries, we should  a l s o  promote dropping the number of children per woman to 1.2-1.6. (The population remains stable with 2.1 children per woman). I believe that the number of children should not drop below 1.2, because we need to ensure that old-age provisions are not endangered. The lack of contributors to old-age provisions can only be partially replaced by immigrants, as the willingness and ability of the local populations to accept them should not be overestimated. With the number of children from 1.2 to 1.6, some couples can also have 3 children, because there will be more and more couples who have no children.

7.7 billion people currently live in the world.

1.4 billion live in industrialized countries. China, which is difficult to classify, also has 1.4 billion.

This means that almost 5 billion people live in emerging and developing countries.

CO2 emissions are slowly declining in industrialized countries. China also wants to get there in 10 years.

But the crucial question will be how the CO2 emissions of emerging and developing countries will develop.

There are articles to the point of weariness in the media about global warming, but there are no articles that deal with the issue above. Developing countries are only recorded individually in the statistics.

Let's take India as a “model state” for emerging and developing countries. There are developing countries that are developing faster than India, but there are also many that are developing more slowly.

India emitted 0.61 tons of CO2 per person per year in 1990 (Wikipedia: CO2 emissions per capita). In 2020 the value will rise to around 2.0. So the value has more than tripled in the past 30 years. We can assume that the value will also triple in the next 30 years (by 2050). This means that CO2 emissions in the “model state” of India will amount to 6.0 tons per person in 2050.

India represents 5 billion people in the emerging and developing countries.

5 billion people times 6.0 tons per person gives 30 billion tons of CO2. How much is 30 billion tons of CO2?

Global CO2 emissions in 2017 were 36.2 billion tons (Statista Research Department).

We have to conclude that emerging and developing countries will emit huge amounts of CO2 in 2050, which cannot be compensated for by reducing the values in the industrialized countries.

One can object that India will also partially switch to alternative energy generation by 2050. That may be, but the “model state” of India also stands in for Africa, and the population in Africa will increase to about 2.5 billion by 2050.

The world population is now 7.7 billion. Another 2 billion people will be added by 2050. (The population is declining in industrialized countries, but the population is increasing rapidly in the underdeveloped countries). How much CO2 will these 2 billion people emit in 2050? The experts have apparently never asked themselves this question. Please let me know if you find any reports mentioning the above question.

             If we look at the development of the world’s population, we can hardly assume that CO2 emissions can be significantly reduced by 2050.

But maybe in the next 10 or 20 years new methods for energy generation will be found that make the switch to CO2-free energy generation easier than previously thought.

Photovoltaics:

If solar panels are installed on roofs and exterior facades, electricity can be generated in a very environmentally friendly way with photovoltaics.

However, photovoltaics have one major disadvantage. In Central Europe, solar panels generate 10 times less electricity in January than in July.

But we need a lot of electricity in winter. Solar panels only make sense if we can build storage facilities in which the electricity generated in the summer can be stored for the winter, or we accept that additional electricity must be generated in the winter with gas power plants. I will come back to electricity storage later.

Wind energy:

Eight years ago, I was in western Texas. There are large wind farms with very high towers. I drove under a wind turbine that was surrounded by five others. A constant, strong or very strong wind was blowing. There was an impressive roar. You could feel that huge amounts of energy were being tapped here. It was as loud as if three helicopters were taking off at the same time. But you couldn’t live near there. I was amazed that they wanted to build hundreds of such plants in Switzerland and Germany. There are too many dreamers and too few realists among energy-system planners and journalists.

          Offshore wind farms have a future. However, if too many farms are built in a region (e.g. the North Sea), there is a risk that the power grid will collapse if there is a lull.

The development of floating wind turbines, which can be installed on the Atlantic coasts of Portugal, France, Great Britain and the USA, is promising.

To stop impending climate change, industrialized nations like the USA would have to invest considerably more in basic research on energy supply, says Microsoft founder Bill Gates. This also includes research on new types of nuclear reactors, such as the so-called rotor reactor, the development of which is being co-financed by Gates.

 Bill Gates also said: “All technologies that call themselves renewable are not reliable because they are not available in sufficient quantities in all locations.”

We need high-performance energy storage. The Linth-Limmern pumped storage power plant is the newest and most powerful pumped storage power plant in Switzerland. It has a storage capacity of 33 GWh. The annual consumption of electricity by the city of Zurich is 3000 GWh. The Linth-Limmern pumped storage power plant could only compensate for fluctuations in electricity production for the city of Zurich for a few days. That’s surprisingly little, as the Linth Limmern reservoir holds 23 million m3 of water and the height difference is 600 m. Solar electricity from summer cannot be saved for winter this way. (Recommended article: https://www.bulletin.ch/de/news-detail/wasserkraft-versus-batterien.html

All realistic-thinking natural scientists know that physics sets narrow limits when it comes to building energy and storage facilities. There will be no miracle facilities in the future!

The situation is different in the IT area, where amazing developments can still be expected.

In the long term, one of the biggest problems will be that the CO2 we release is extremely slow to break down. About half of the CO2 released will be absorbed by the sea and land after a few decades, but 15% to 40% of the CO2 will still be in the atmosphere even after 1000 years (IPCC). This will have far-reaching consequences.

Self-determined sexuality also in developing countries

Since May 1968 it has been a human right to be able to freely decide how many children you want. In 1994, the World Population Conference in Cairo adopted a plan of action to improve reproductive health care, including family planning and the empowerment of women.

        But a right to family planning is of no use if access to contraceptives is not made possible in practice. For large sections of the population in developing countries, the means for family planning are prohibitively expensive. They thus depend on aid organizations offering them contraceptives at a very low price or free of charge.

Left-leaning liberals and religious organizations prevent money from being spent on family planning in developing countries.

The Catholic Church refers to catechism.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/DEU0035/_P8C.HTM

2370 Temporary abstinence as well as the methods of conception regulation based on self-observation and the choice of the woman’s infertile periods [cf. HV 16] correspond to the objective criteria of morality. These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage them to be affectionate and favor educating and raising in genuine freedom. On the other hand, “any act which, either in anticipation of, during or after the execution of the matrimonial act, at the end of its natural effects, is intended to prevent reproduction, whether as an end or as a means to an end, is reprehensible" (HV 14). While sexual union, by its very nature, expresses an unconditional gift of the spouses to each other, contraception turns it into an objectively contradictory gesture - a gift of not giving oneself completely. Thus the active rejection of openness to life is accompanied by a falsification of the inner truth of marital love ....

 When I read this section online, I initially thought that I had accidentally opened a version of catechism from centuries ago. But there is no more recent version.

Psalm 127 says: Children are also a gift from the Lord; whoever receives them will be richly rewarded. But one cannot derive from this that it is “reprehensible” to use means for family planning. In Europe, while hardly any Catholic adheres to catechism, they are unlikely aware that it causes great issues in Africa when they donate money to Caritas.

The following view held by left-wing liberal circles and do-gooders is no less inhibited:

In order to place women in a better position, access to family planning should not be improved, but education, health and prosperity should be promoted. Reproductive self-determination will then emerge automatically.

I recommend people who hold such views take a trip to a poor rural area in Africa. Look into the eyes of hopeful young girls who will probably never be able to raise the funds for family planning and imagine how these destitute girls will soon be mothers of six to eight children!

A lot of girls become pregnant at an early age and then prematurely end their time at school.

Every year there are 89 million unwanted pregnancies and 36 million often fatal abortions. https://www.dsw.org/freiwillige-familienplanung

There are certainly also men who want to prove their potency by means of the number of children they have, or mothers-in-law who urge women to have more children. However, millions of women in developing countries have no access to the means and materials for family planning.

Most African young adults have the opportunity to watch western movies on occasion these days. These then show them the sexual liberties that we enjoy in Europe and the US.

An American study revealed that young men think about sex 19 times per day. But it is obvious that this is no different in Africa.

We have brought life-saving medicines and a very permissive culture to people in developing countries, so we are now obliged to provide access to funds for voluntary family planning.

A racist mentality would be needed to want to reserve self-determined sexuality for the white population, only.

25.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV. This is another reason why more resources need to be spent on health care combined with education and access to contraceptives.

In Zambia, for example, 60 percent of the population lives on less than one dollar a day. How is the population there meant to raise the funds for HIV prevention and family planning by itself through more school education in the coming years?

From Carnivore to Fruitarian

The number of vegetarians and vegans is increasing significantly.

They believe that animals should not be killed.

For vegetarians and vegans, the difference between humans and animals is small.

For people who do eat meat, the difference between humans and animals is so great that they consume meat without a guilty conscience.

However, vegetarians and vegans also kill animals. While walking, they may involuntarily step on ants and for the cultivation of their plant-based food countless worms, beetles and mice are crushed while the fields are worked and thus die an agonizing death.

Most people have much more sympathy for horses, cattle, sheep and rabbits than for chickens and fish. But we also feel more for chickens and fish than for insects or even for the unicellular paramecium. Or don't we also hesitate when we have to kill a paramecium in biology class?

Do we have the right to feel more for horses than for a paramecium? We have more consideration for animals in which we see a resemblance to us or which behave similarly to us, such as dolphins.

Fruitarians take it even further. They believe that not only animals but also plants have a right to life.

Fruitarians strive for a diet with plant products that do not damage the plant. These include fruits, nuts and seeds, for example. The wood for furniture should only come from trees that have fallen over.

I feel bad when cutting lettuce in the garden. The crunchy lettuce actually wanted to shoot up and form seeds.

The stalk of a freshly cut birch ejects large quantities of xylem juice. Is that comparable to bleeding or crying?

Steve Jobs was a fruitarian for a while. He had empathy for growing plants. Was that why he was so good at understanding the minds of us IT laymen and became the first to develop a user-friendly cell phone?

Mahatma Gandhi also lived as a fruitarian for five years before becoming a vegetarian again.

On November 27th, 2017 I published a blog post in which I wrote that I would welcome the reawakening of a moderate pacifism. I think it's a pity that vegetarians and vegans aren’t expressing themselves in this direction as well.

In my eyes, meat eaters and fruitarians are the most consistent. Vegetarians and vegans have to face a lot of questions - questions they can only answer with great difficulty.

Vegans avoid carmine red, which is often used as a food coloring. Carmine is a red pigment extracted from cochineal scale insects and is therefore an animal product. But what do vegans do when their roses are infested by aphids/greenflies? No one is forcing them to use harsh chemicals. You can use ladybirds, which are now available in specialized stores. Is that permitted if you don’t also watch the ladybug gobble up the flies? Or are you allowed to use a nettle decoction to kill the aphids slowly?

Vegetarians don't want animals to suffer or be killed because of them. They only eat dairy products, eggs and plant-based products.

In the past, I thought vegetarians could easily live by their principles until I came across the website animal-rights-switzerland.ch/milch during my research:

Every second calf is male and would have to be killed immediately after birth if there were no meat eaters.

The newly born calf may spend just one to three days with its mother. After that, it is torn from its mother so that it does not drink away the cow’s mother's milk.

After only ten weeks, the cows are artificially inseminated again. Cows give the most milk after calving. If they wouldn't be giving birth constantly to calves, the milk production would drop significantly. Hence it follows that a lacto-vegan diet is only possible thanks to meat eaters.

Vegetarians and vegans don't want animals to be killed because of them.

Extreme animal rights activists describe the killing of animals as a criminal act. They demolish raised hides, free chickens and pigs from animal factories, deface butcher shop windows and threaten people who oppose them and despise even moderate animal rights activists.

In his book “Tiere Denken", Richard David Precht writes that this demarcation marks one's own identity and holds together self-esteem and group solidarity. ....an intellectual insight that one follows uncompromisingly, or the desire to see others as worse than oneself.

In my opinion, these are all characteristics that can be found in any other ideology and religion. These mechanisms can be found with the young socialists, with the neo-Nazis and with all extreme religious movements.

It’s called eat or be eaten in nature. Mice eat crickets, snakes eat mice and eagles eat snakes. Nature is brutal.

So why can humans not eat animal meat? Animal rights activists are often of the opinion that the difference between animals and humans is small. But why are we not allowed to act like a link in one of the food chains?

The difference between humans and animals must be so great that entirely different rules apply to us!

We are responsible for the animals.

When I was born there were 2.5 billion people, now there are 7.5 billion. Thousands of animal species are facing extinction. Humans have reproduced at the expense of animals without holding back. And there are still people around the world who oppose the promotion of voluntary family planning.

We are responsible for animals, so we must stop the extinction of species as soon as possible and we also need to stop the suffering related to livestock farming.

The surface area that is given to a single chicken or pig continues to be scandalously small! And many animal factories are horribly big!

Most consumers would hardly continue to eat meat if they were to visit an animal factory with the minimum and legally permitted standards.

Green ideas and ideologies

in German published 2018-11

Green Aberrations

Plastic
Huge amounts of plastic pollute the seas. This must be stopped! But how?
Most of the stranded plastic from ships ends up on the beaches in Europe.
All ships had to pay a waste fee up in the ports of the EU states until now, regardless of the quantity.
They receive a quantity limit for that. If a ship wants to deliver more waste, it has to pay an additional fee. This of course leads to the temptation to dispose of the surplus waste illegally in the sea.
Under a new proposal for a directive, ships can dispose of waste without quantity limitations. The ports would have to charge higher fixed fees for this and offer resistance, because this would lead to a competitive disadvantage.
But these new directives need to enter into force as soon as possible if we seriously want to stop pollution of the seas.
I heard about this new directive only once in the media.
Instead, the media spread dozens of articles arguing for adding charges for the use of plastic bags and suggesting that this would do something to clean up the seas. But I suspect that in Europe hardly a thousandth of these plastic bags ends up in the sea.

This is pure grandstanding.
It isn't attractive for the media to report on port reception facilities for ship-generated waste. They prefer to report on laws that restrict the use of plastic items and thus serve the syndrome of “saving and renouncing” that is anchored in the emotions of every human being.
Apart from that, of course, I am also in favor of everyone's personal commitment to the sustainable use of our resources.


Firewood
Heating with wood is climate neutral. That is only half the story!
          Leaves, branches and tree trunks rot in the forest and form humus. The humus itself is slowly degraded by bacteria (mineralization).

In a natural forest, the humus layer always remains the same height. There is a balance. The amount of humus formed from new biomass is the same as the humus broken down by mineralization.
If wood is removed from the forest on a regular basis, a new balance is created, the humus layer becomes thinner, and humus as a CO2 store decreases.
There are several thousand billion tons of carbon bound in the top soil layer of the world, more than in the earth's atmosphere and the entire earth's vegetation combined.
The humus is a very important carbon sink, which is also significantly reduced today by intensive agriculture and slash-and-burn.

Solar Energy
Photovoltaics is a fascinating technology that can generate almost unlimited Energy.
But the use of solar energy still has a lot of Problems.
In Zurich the sun shines on average 6.8 hours in July, but only 1.4 hours in January (wetter.com).
However, energy consumption is highest in January and lowest in July.
The feed-in compensation is the same in winter and summer.
That's unrealistic! The feed-in compensation has to be higher in winter than in summer!
Short and long-term storage are needed.
Power-to-gas plants are promising, but the stored energy is still too expensive today.
When the recovered methane is converted back into electricity with a gas turbine, the overall efficiency is only 30%.

Global warming
CO2 emissions have to be reduced.

The CO2 emissions in tons per person per year varies widely across countries.                      

Qatar 40.4
USA 16.5
Germany 9.4
India 1.6 (rising rapidly)
Republic of the Congo 0.5

Reduction of consumption can reduce the CO2 emissions per person.                        

Global CO2 emissions are the product of individual CO2 emissions times the number of people in the world.

CO2 emissions of single individual  x  Number of individuals in the world = Worldwide CO2 emissions

The world population is therefore as important as the emission per person.
But this fact is taboo for most Greens.
Every 12 years the world population grows by 1 billion people.
There is no point in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by one-third if, at the same time, the world's population increases by a third.
The increase of the world population should be slowed down by voluntary family planning.
Greenpeace, the WWF and most conservation organizations are silent about these relationships, and you could be considered a racist if you talk about it. Those responsible are too cowardly and would prefer to let the world go to ruin.
Ideologues and religious adherents have difficulty dealing with the topic of population growth.

Species extinction

Experts estimate that between 50 and 150 species per day disappear irretrievably from the earth.

A large part of the animal and plant species will disappear in the coming decades.
The only way you can fail to see that the main cause of species extinction is population growth is by wearing ideological blinders.

The problem with the do-gooders

in German published 2018-03

The Duden German dictionary adopted the term Gutmensch (do-gooder) in the year 2000.

Is a do-gooder a good person? Or: Is well-meant the opposite of good and is well-meant not the same as well done?

It could be argued that the term do-gooder is often used polemically. In 2015, Gutmensch became "non-word of the year" in Germany.

Every human being who aspires to higher goals (myself included) repeatedly slips back into the role of the do-gooder.

           However, the influence of the do-gooders can have disastrous consequences, as the war in Syria has shown.

In the past there were true believers, who also felt they were better people than their fellow men. The true believer feels superior to the paper Christians.

The term Pharisee is even more pejorative.

The do-gooder, the orthodox and the Pharisee all feel morally superior.

Do the do-gooders have an ideology? Is there a do-gooder ideology?

Most do-gooders are positioned to the left of the center.

They have a rosy worldview.

The Swiss politician Blocher coined the term "the left and the nice".

The nice are for the most part religious.

The do-gooders want to remove all dictatorships in developing and emerging countries, whatever the cost. In Syria, an attempt has been made to overthrow the bad man Assad. As a result, half a million people have died for nothing and several million Syrians have had to flee.

Sure, Assad is a brutal dictator, but can a country in the Middle East be governed in accordance with human rights?

What would happen if a do-gooder was instated with full powers as head of the government in Syria?

Do-gooders can also have a negative influence on development aid. The distribution of second-hand clothes in Africa decimates the local textiles manufacturing. Due to food distribution, local farmers can no longer live on the sale of their products. Clothes and food consignments only make sense in disaster areas. However, this does not shine a light on do-gooders, because they have often been taken over by the helper syndrome.

Only help for self-help gives people in developing countries a boost.

Do-gooders oppose the fact that we support voluntary family planning in developing countries, because we may be subject to racist motives. There is certainly a danger of this, but that does not have to be a reason to make family planning a taboo subject. This promotes famine and the neglect of children who are sent out on the street by their parents, because they can no longer feed their large hoard of children.

         I would like to transplant do-gooders to Africa and see how they use the opportunities there to feed 6-8 children without having access to any contraceptives.

          More than 3 million children die each year as a result of malnutrition and hunger. This number would be much smaller if we were to allow all women to volunteer for family planning.

Now a look at the USA: Why was Trump elected? US voters were fed up with Obama, who was accused by Trump of placing more importance on political correctness than the welfare of the American people.

           Trump is the anti-do-gooder.

Whereby it is unclear how anti-do-gooders are to be classified.