Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The Problem with the COP28 Climate Change Conference || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1. HEY PETER - CAN YOU PLEASE HIRE AN ENGINEER: You cannot just stop the methane release from a coal mine but just stopping the digging. Once you have exposed a coal seam to the air the carbon in the coal seam will begin to react. Carbon wants to naturally react with oxygen in the air. In fact if you are not careful coal stockpiles can simply ignite. Its why they have to be doused in water almost constantly. Coal itself is porous and if the coal seam is also laden with methane like we have here in parts of Australia (my country) then once you give that gas a way out it will leave the coal seam and go into the atmosphere. This is just one of the issues with fracking and it can also make underground coal mining extremely dangerous. Methane in the right amount in air is highly explosive as happened at the Pike River mine in New Zealand in 2010. What keeps the gas in the coal seam is the layers of clay and dirt above the seam similar to oil & gas fields. When you dig the coal mine you go through that layer to get to the coal and in doing so give the methane a way to escape into the atmosphere. So its not simply a matter of shutting down the coal mines you also have to seal the whole thing. That can be quite difficult if the mine is an open pit which many of the mines in China are. There's a German documentary (which I saw 12+ years ago) on the poor practices the Chinese employed in their coal mining industry and they had many in seam fires which was what they brought the Germans in to help with. For almost 20 years (all through China's growth spurt) the Chinese burned as much coal in the ground as they did in their power stations. That's part of why they had those smog problems and also why there's now even more CO2 in the atmosphere than expected. Those fires are now mostly put out or under control. The last report I saw said they had contained or put out around 80% of those fires.
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  2. Engineer here: On the base load side of the energy equation its called nuclear. On the load following side of the energy equation its called wind and to a lesser extent solar. A major problem is the pro-nuclear people and the pro-wind/solar people keep whining and finger pointing AT EACH OTHER instead of realising that BOTH are needed. Part of it comes from an odd fact I heard recently. Through the 1960s and 70s nuclear was steadily growing and REPLACING fossil fuel power stations as it did. When the Green transition started RATHER then replacing fossil fuel it started replacing low emission nuclear. Despite all the wind & solar installation there's been very little reduction in emissions because its been replacing nuclear or just increasing the supply to meet demands from growing populations. PLUS into that mix ahs been the stupidity of the nuclear industry with accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima which have been used by the fossil fuel industry to scare the crap out of the general public. One of the most notable examples is Germany where they spent a reported €1.3 Trillion on renewables then TURNED OFF the low emission nuclear and TURNED UP the old high emission coal fired power stations. The result was that after spending €1.3 Trillion emissions went UP not down. IT WAS IDIOCY AT A STAGGERING LEVEL. We can do the energy transition, but the first thing we need is for all of the special interest megaphones to STOP so that us engineers can explain what we NEED to do and I emphasize the word NEED.
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