Plastic from the Air, Global Warming Solution or SCAM?- Transcript

MANY thanks to Linda for supplying the transcript for these videos!

[0:00] news clips: “Well it’s a simple idea with big potential, turning polluted air into actual products that most of us will use every day.”
“Absolutely! Here in a Southern California plastics factory you are NOT gonna imagine WHERE this comes from. Just wait until you see this story.”
“We connect to a Newlight through our technology innovation funnel at Dell . . . who’s doing, of all things, making plastic out of carbon in the air. It almost seemed like it was too good to be true.”

[0:26] Thunderf00t: WOW. So the solution to global warming is here:

[0:31] clip from “Plastic made from air may help solve carbon emissions crisis” (CBS): “This building in Costa Mesa, California, looks unremarkable. And what’s happening inside sounds unreal.”
“So that’s plastic? That was literally made out of thin air?”
“We would be breathing this right now.”

[0:46] Thunderf00t: A way of turning carbon in the air into plastic. And the GREAT thing is, it’s gonna be CHEAPER than regular plastic. And it’s been featured on USA Today, The Guardian, The Weather Channel, CBS, and of course, Fox News, and the computer company, Dell, is promoting this AMAZING new technology, hard—so it can’t be complete bullshit. Right? I mean surely, someone must have fact-checked this. Right?

[1:16] So, firstly they claim that they’re gonna be making this plastic out of exhaust gases:

[1:21] clip from The Weather Channel: “-supposed to be a big game-changer for climate change, and Dave, you were telling us earlier about how they take the carbon out of the atmosphere and turn into plastic. How exactly do they do that, and Stephen our producer said, ‘well, why don’t they just hook up kind of a vacuum to, you know—smokestacks—and just get it right like that?’

[1:38] Thunderf00t: Well, that’s great. So now we know what we’re talking about: carbon dioxide.

[1:43] clip from The Weather Channel: “Yeah, that would be the way to do that. And they ARE doing that. In the future they hope to get it from a concentrated source. Right now they’re taking it from the air and they’re taking it from concentrated sources. But everything you see here—the cups, the bag, the plates—even, in fact, the chair that I’m sitting on right now, it’s all made from this plastic that comes from the air, and it’s one man’s dream.”

[2:07] Thunderf00t: And here’s their CEO saying that, just like trees take carbon dioxide out of the air:

[2:13] clips from Weather Channel, Dell: “pull Southern California’s polluted air from the roof and make something with all that carbon coming from cars, power plants, and farms.”
“Plants do this every single day. The way a tree grows is by pulling carbon out of the air.”
“Every single thing that you see that’s green—that’s ALL produced by pulling carbon out of the air. So we do precisely the same thing. It’s all around us. We just found a way to pull it out of an airstream and then turn it into a plastic molecule, and that plastic molecule we can then turn into shapes and things like that.”
“The environmental impact has the potential impact to be massive.”

[2:47] Thunderf00t: Yeah, that’s mostly right. Trees take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere AND water and a load of energy from the sun, and turn that into sugar—which is then polymerized to make things like cellulose, which is essentially wood.

[3:03] Now, plants GET that energy from the SUN. They are solar powered. Where’s he gonna get his energy from? Solar Roadways [LOL] , thorium-powered cars? Because the one place he can’t get it from is burning fossil fuels, ‘cos that would dump about as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as he’s going to be sequestering.

[3:24] As of rough chemical compositions, most plastics are basically petroleum-based polymers. And their chemical composition is basically that of oil; which is approximately this:

[3:37] Sugars and their polymers, which is cellulose, make up things like wood. And can, at a simple chemical composition-level be looked at as partially combusted hydrocarbon. That is, IF you could simply transform these petroleum-based polymers into wood, it would release a load of energy. And then of course you can simply finish off that oxidation in a very simple manner just by burning wood, which everyone knows releases a load of heat. I mean, it’s basically turning wood, into carbon dioxide, water, and a load of energy; effectively reversing what photosynthesis did in the first place.

[4:16] But energy is conserved here. There are no free lunches. If you wanna turn that carbon dioxide back into wood, you gotta put a load of energy in from somewhere and it will cost you AT LEAST as much energy as you got out from burning it in the first place.

[4:34] And the same thing is true if you’re trying to turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon-based plastics. WHERE is this energy going to come from?

[4:46] Secondly of course, this would just be a drop in the ocean. I mean from my last video you’ll recall that humans breathe out about 1 kilogram of carbon dioxide per day. That’s just your carbon footprint for being alive. And then you have all these people from CBS just gasping with awe at how someone has maybe sequestered 50 or so grams of carbon in a cellphone cover:

[5:13] clip from CBS “Plastic made from air may help solve carbon emissions crisis”: “So I know this sounds more like magic than science, so I wanted to make sure you guys could actually touch and feel this . . .”

[5:35] I mean, seriously, that’s only about 1/20th of their personal daily metabolic carbon footprint and they’re impressed by it!

[5:43] news clips: “Newlight is selling its plastic to companies such as furniture maker KI, which uses it to create chairs. There are also air carbon cellphone cases, soap dishes, and even plastic bags.”
“a big game-changer for climate change, and Dave, you were telling us earlier about how they take the carbon out of the atmosphere and turn into plastic.”
“At a recent Fortune Magazine event, Michael Dell announced he will use Newlight’s air carbon bags to wrap his Dell computers.”

[6:17] Thunderf00t: And just a personal metabolic carbon footprint is peanuts compared to the total carbon footprint. I mean, like I was saying, this is a drop in the ocean AT BEST. I mean let’s keep this in perspective:

[6:32] clip from Weather Channel: “2011, the U.S. alone generated almost 14 MILLION TONS of plastic. Only about 8 percent was EVER recycled.”

[6:39] Thunderf00t: 14 million tons might sound like a lot. Until you realize that the U.S. carbon footprint is about 5,000 MILLION TONS, which was achieved by burning about 2,000 million tons of oil. Yeah, ALL of the plastics that you consume are give-or-take only take about 1 percent of your ENTIRE carbon footprint. If we were talking about carbon dioxide, he’s simply talking crap.

[7:12] Buuut it turns out that all that speak about basically doing what trees do—not entirely honest. Turns out that this process is actually gonna run on methane. That’s right—it’s basically turning hydrocarbon into plastic—which sounds exactly like what the oil industry is currently doing.

[7:32] So, what’s the difference? Well, they claim that they’re gonna get the methane OUT of the air:

[7:38] clip from Dell: “We connect to a Newlight through our technology innovation funnel at Dell . . . who’s doing, of all things, making plastic out of carbon in the air. It almost seemed like it was too good to be true.”

[7:48] Thunderf00t: And I simply call BULLSHIT on that. Well you’ve gotta understand that there really isn’t much methane in air—and for good reason—it gets oxidized away in our atmosphere really quite quickly with a half-life of about 10 years.

[8:01] Now, while it’s true methane IS a very big greenhouse gas, it’s also true that its concentration in air is very low—only about 1 part per million. There is just bugger-all methane in the air.

[8:16] So, I mean, just some ballpark numbers, the cubic meter of air is what this girl is essentially sitting in, weighs about 1 kilogram. So if you wanted to make about 1 kilogram of plastic, you would need to harvest the methane of 1 MILLION cubic meters of air with 100 percent efficiency. I mean, look, this is the tube they claim they’re sucking all our air through to make this plastic:

[8:41] clip from Weather Channel: “pull Southern California’s polluted air from the roof and make something with all that carbon.”
“This plastic comes from the air.”
“And this is it right here, more than 50 percent of THIS plastic right here came from the air on top of this building.”

[9:01] Thunderf00t: So let’s do a real simple back-of-the-envelope calculation. For a TRIVIAL task of say, producing 1 kilogram of plastic per hour—that means they’ve gotta suck 1 MILLION cubic meters of air through that tube. That tube, if you’re generous, is about 0.1 meters by 0.1 meters. So if they’re gonna achieve the paltry task of making 1 kilogram of plastic per hour, iiit turns out they’d have to be sucking air through that tube at about 100 TIMES the speed of sound. And that’s just the flow problem. Unless they’ve got some magic method for extracting the methane out of the air, it’s simply pointless.

[9:41] Now, 100 times the speed of sound—about a 100 times the speed of a bullet—might not sound impossible to some people. So let me put this into more human dimensions. So, we basically need about 1 million cubic meters of air to create a single kilogram of plastic. Well, by happy coincidence, the volume of the Empire State Building is also about 1 million cubic meters. So the bare minimum you would have to do is pump a volume of air the size of the Empire State Building—ignoring all the stuff about extracting the methane and turning it into plastic.

[10:20] But just for the moment, let’s just take a look at the costs of pumping that sort of volume of air. It’s actually going to take a sort of industrial pump that can pump about 2 cubic meters per second, and it runs on about 2 kilowatts. So this pump would take about one week to pump that million cubic meters of air. And just the grid electricity to pump that volume of air would generate about 200 kilograms of carbon dioxide—the equivalent of burning about a 100 kilograms of oil to generate 1 KILOGRAM of plastic.

[10:58] And just to put that into some perspective, the petrochemical industry basically works by taking about 1 kilogram of oil and turning it into about 1 kilogram of plastic.

[11:08] clip from “Dell AirCarbon Plastic – Made from Air, Not Oil”: “Gone from doing less harm, to do no harm, to ‘let’s make it better than we left it’.”
“Newlight’s technology is such a great partner for that, but they’re making it better.”

[11:22] Thunderf00t: This really is the problem that you face, that you have essentially 1,000 tons of air, and you’re trying to extract from that 1 kilogram of methane, which can maybe be converted into about a kilogram of plastic.

[11:36] Look, this is the thing—you can get methane from the petrochemical industry fairly cheaply. But these ‘air carbon’ people claim that their process is cheaper than the petrochemical industry:

[11:47] clip from The Weather Channel: “although Mark truly believes he has found a way to make air plastic cost less than oil plastic.”

[11:55] Thunderf00t: In which case, the obvious question, if your air methane is cheaper than petrochemical industry methane, why not just sell it as ‘fuel’? You know, just for burning. It would be incredibly bio-friendly, as methane’s about 30 times as bad a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

[12:15] I mean there’s just something about this that REALLY stinks. That is, I simply don’t believe that there would EVER be a cost-effective way of extracting methane from the atmosphere like this.

[12:27] Now if you were doing this with BIO sources of methane—weeell, now that’s a little different. But that’s MUCH more what the petrochemical industry is essentially doing at the moment. And calling it “air carbon”, you know, pulled out of the air:

[12:40] clip from The Weather Channel: “Right. So this is actually air carbon.”
“Air carbon is the product name they use for this white powder.”
“How does this become plastic though?”
“Heat it up, and air carbon becomes a plastic called, PHA.”
CBS clip: “So that’s plastic that was literally made out of thin air?”
“We would be breathing this right now.”

[12:58] Thunderf00t: -seems to be ENTIRELY misleading.

[13:01] So, in summary, if they’re talking about making plastic from the carbon dioxide in the air, then they’re simply talking crap, as it could NEVER be cost-effective unless you can find a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels. If he’s talking about methane in the air, then he’s MORE full of crap than the Empire State Building is full of air. And if he’s talking about bio methane created on a farm IN A BIOLOGICAL REACTOR—you know, to generate the methane in the first place—he’s talking about bio methane generated on a farm and he’s not talking about pulling it out of the air. And all those claims about ‘carbon out of the air’—not really true.

[13:47] clip from Dell: “Almost all plastics today come from fossil fuels. So, the difference with air carbon is, air carbon is made from air and carbon that we would otherwise be breathing right now.”

[13:56] Thunderf00t: Look, there’s ONE polymer that is the UNDISPUTED claim to call itself ‘air carbon’. It’s the most abundant biomolecule on Earth: cellulose, created by plants and the key structural component of trees—you know, wood. You wanna use ‘air carbon’ to wrap your computers, use paper. THEN at least the carbon GENUINELY came from the atmosphere and not some fraudulent claims about being able to make plastic cost-effective out of thin air. But I still just wail with despair at just how much scientific illiteracy there is throughout the mainstream media.

[14:38] clip from CBS: “So I know this sounds more like magic than science, so I wanted to make sure you guys could actually touch and feel this.”

[14:45] Thunderf00t: And just how a large company like Dell can promote this pseudo-science without even a cursory look as to if those claims are even remotely possible.

[14:57] clip from Dell: “We connect to a Newlight through our technology innovation funnel at Dell . . . who’s doing, of all things, making plastic out of carbon in the air. It almost seemed like it was too good to be true.”

God Loves you enough to BURN YOU WITH FIRE!: Transcript

Many thanks to Linda for providing this transcript!

[0:00] Thunderf00t: You know, I can put up with A LOT of fiction in a good story. Like blue god-like quantum men, or hundred year old girls fighting werewolves in subways. Or, people in computer games who can stop bullets if they believe it, and so on. However what I can’t take, even in a fantasy, is internal inconsistency. Like say, for instance when these agents—they can punch through walls—and they wanna kill everyone in this car, and this is what happens when he jumps on the first car; he utterly destroys it. And of course, that’s what happens when he jumps on the car with everyone in it he’s trying to kill, right? Nah, he just nimbly lands on the hood, merely making a mess of the paintwork, and so on.

[0:42] Or the time where the car he wasn’t trying to kill the people in is a mangled, bullet time wreck. In films, these are just kind of annoying and they’re called plot holes—it’s an internal inconsistency, and it’s the hallmark of bullshit. And people who can hold these internal inconsistencies in their mind in the real world—and even justify them—are idiots.

[1:05] So, let me just give you an example like: ‘my boyfriend only beats me because he loves me so much.’ Actually, no that’s a bad example because that’s pretty emotionally driven. Let me give you another example, that ‘God loves me so much, that he will torture me for eternity if I don’t do what he says.

[1:24] Huh, now that’s exactly the same thing just for the fictional character. Now it’s just come to me. I’ve got a famous example of this. Like when John Paul II claimed that it was a miracle that saved him from dying when he was shot, and that it was the Lady of Fatima who diverted the bullet away from a critical artery. To which Richard Dawkins famously retorted in The God Delusion that:

[1:48] clip from “Richard Dawkins Reads The God Delusion”: “When he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Lady of Fatima, “her maternal hand guided the bullet”. One cannot help wondering why she didn’t guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserve at least a share of credit.”

[2:19] Thunderf00t: Hell, if he wanted a miracle thing, why didn’t he just make like Neo? I mean believe me, if the Pope could do this, there would be a hell of a lot more Catholics in the wide world. But the reason I bring all this up is ‘cos this YouTube video I saw the other day.

[2:35] The creationist Kent Hovind is currently in jail after being convicted on a host of federal offenses mostly related to not paying his taxes. In fact, he’s been in jail for the best part of the last ten years. So some of the religious folks were discussing this:

[2:50] clip from “New 911 EMERGENCY! Dr. Kent Hovind 07/10/2014 Truth Serum Talk Radio Show Club Creation”: “And if you’re not everyone, priest [?] please lift him up in prayer. God has kept his hand of protection on Kent. Kent has been with some of the most violent offenders in this nation, and he’s not been harmed.”
“Mmhmm. Yes, exactly. And that just shows you the power of the Holy Spirit and the power of God at work here.”

[3:13] Thunderf00t: So did you get that? The fact that Kent has not been harmed in jail—just like tens of thousands of other prisoners who haven’t been harmed in jail—is actually the work of god. However, it would seem that even though god is powerful enough to keep Kent safe in prison, he’s not quite powerful enough to free him from prison.

[3:33] clip from “New 911 EMERGENCY! Dr. Kent Hovind 07/10/2014 Truth Serum Talk Radio Show Club Creation”: “But then again, you know, we do have an enemy and it’s not flesh and blood. Our adversary is the Devil and it’s his objective, um, to clearly to shut Dr. Hovind up and lock him away from the world so he can’t continue winning souls.”

[3:50] Thuderf00t: I mean, really, an all-powerful being who you think has personally intervened to keep you safe in jail, can’t get one man out of jail. I mean DAMN, the sheer self-centeredness of it all. If you’re gonna pray for something, DAMN pray for an end to childhood cancer! Not to get Kent Hovind out of jail. Or even better—get off your knees and actually DO something. ‘Cos as the old saying goes, a single pair of hands at work achieves more than a billion clasped in prayer.

FTB and the conspiracy to defraud/ Drawing a line under this pointless crap

Chuckle, so my evil HAXOR skills have earned me the honor of a dozen or so blog posts telling me what an evil, evil man I am.

Pah, N00b, Neo would have just re-clicked the subscribe button!

The bizarre thing is the principal horror seems to be over something I did NOT actually do.  Namely that I DID NOT drop anyones docs!, and what’s more docs they had already ‘officially’ sent me on their mailing list.

-So how to turn something I did NOT do into an evil act of malice?

Why by speculating of course!  The argument continues like this, ‘but you are an evil haxor, therefore why should I trust you when you say u wont drop docs’.  That’s right, in the absence of any actual doc dropping, speculate that they MIGHT doc drop!  Oddly enough the one question such folk will never directly answer, because they know the answer as well as you, is ‘do you think I would drop anyones docs?’

Thankfully FTBers don’t apply this reasoning to their own, such as the good man PZ.  He was clearly dishonest to me about the deal when I came on board at FTB (freedom to blog about what I wanted my ass! ‘rip into anyone you want’ my ass!)…..  He ‘HACKED’ a phone system by ‘stealing’ a passcode and using it to ‘break in’!! ‘He’s dishonest! Unspeakable, it’s a unconscionably horrific breach of trust… he should be drummed out of the community as a pariah etc etc’ /sarcasm

Why shouldn’t he drop someones docs too?  After all, on paper he officially has access to all the personal details I do!

‘Indeed, given his hatred of me, why shouldn’t he leak docs himself, then blame me for it?  I mean if you read his posts, is there any level the bilious odious man wouldn’t go to fulfill his vindictive vendetta of hatred of….. etc etc.’

-Wow, I can engage in inventive filled paranoid rambling about crimes people MIGHT commit as much as FTB!

However all this time I had been working on the basis that FTB had a significant media footprint, which I now think is wrong.  Put simply, even though FTB have a LOT of skeletons in the closet, and engage in some pretty cheap and vindictive scheming (I wouldn’t have stayed long associated to such a group, even if they hadn’t expelled me first), the bottom line is they are a small group, they are kings of a small hill of beans (I’m still getting more hits than 10 of their bloggers having been gone for a month! see below): they simply are not worth the time when there are bigger fish to fry!  So let me take this opportunity to draw some sort of line under this (I know that sentence alone will have bought rapturous applause from many sectors!).

Bear with me on this…. this is going somewhere!

From my evil haxor skills, FTBer were saying the following on their secret mailing list about a month after I was thrown off.

“Plus, TF had more hits than ten of our bloggers today.  Please tell me he is not getting paid for them.  And that we are divvying up his spoils.”

Firstly FTBers are actually suggesting, not only an intention of stealing, but to do it as a group and to share their ill gotten gains from this fiscal theft.

Secondly, I laughed my ass off when I read that.  Even after being gone from FTB for over a month, I’m still one of their prize bloggers!  If they were the significant organization I initially thought they were, their petit conspiracies would have been a bigger burden on the community, and my whistle blowing more pertinent.  However that’s simply not the organization FTBs is.

Anyways, Ed Brayton, the guy who holds the purse strings responds thusly.

“I haven’t even given any thought to the point at which I would stop paying him. The blog was killed on July 1. I could call that the end or pay him for hits in July, which were not unsubstantial. Or at this point I could just tell him to go fuck himself.”

Lets try to draw a line under this Ed.  DPRJones has a charity event coming up for Medicine Sans Frontier. You can donate ALL my ‘not unsubstantial’ earnings to this charity event (try to keep it dignified Ed, make sure you let people know where the money came from), and then you can delete my blogs hosted on FTB.

To be honest, I wouldn’t want to be seen to profit off petit drama like this (I never monetize videos that deal with this sort of thing), and I’m sure FTB would likewise agree.  Indeed it would be nice to see FTB follow my lead on this and donate all the revenue generated from this pointless drama to the same charity.

From my chair, that pretty much draws a line under this.

This request has been personally sent to Ed Brayton.  Balls in his court now.

Eric Hovind Confesses to being an Atheist!!!!

I greeted the materialization of pre-suppositional apologetics with glee. Creationists might as well have shouted it from the roof tops that they have been routed on every argument they have put forward to date, and so they are now reduced to this grotesquely unconvincing and childish argument that if they start with the presumption that god exists, then god exists.

Yup, pre-suppositional apologetics is an ‘argument’ that whatever you suppose exists, exists! I mean damn, it’s not like we can test those suppositions for validity against anything, like their value in reality or some shit.

So I had this PAINFUL discussion with Eric Hovind, in which I told him I assumed the universe exists. Why assume this? well how would you distinguish a ‘matrix style reality’ from reality? Well Eric, how would you?

After you have assumed the universe to exist, you then need to assume that you can create models about it, and that models with predictive capability are better than those that are not. These are self selecting criteria for beings that want to survive in such a universe, that is organisms that don’t assume they can learn something about the universe don’t survive long in an environment with those that do! (Yup, evolution FTW!)

One of the first models you establish is logic, and the utility of boolean operators like ‘true’ and ‘false’. These are all things Eric MUST have done to even pose his ‘killer’ question ‘is there such a thing as absolute truth?’

Merely asking the question implies a model forming approach to reality (implicit assumption), and indeed the very inclusion of the word true means that he has accepted models such as logic are an adequate way of describing the universe.

I guess it’s to be expected of the dogmatic that they will behave dogmatically, but Eric simply couldn’t handle the fact that this is how his brain worked, and how he models reality and thus his response to everything became ‘but you can’t be sure about it’, even after this has been explained to him a dozen time. In the end he made it up to FORTY EIGHT TIMES. Compulsive obsessives, this man is your GOD!

Even better, is if I adopt Erics ‘pre-suppositional’ position, that is whatever I presume is true, then I come to the startling knowledge that ERIC HOVIND IS AN ATHEIST.  Indeed if I start with the pre-supposition that Eric has confessed to being an atheist, then you KNOW that Eric Hovind has confessed to being an atheist! I know this is absolutely true because the Ghost that never lies told me it was absolutely true, further this was confirmed by title that is always accurate! hmmmm, yup, that’s Check-mate Eric!