Author: spitfireresearch

Waste to Energy/Waste to Fuels: the Great Greenwashing Machine

Most of us find waste to be viscerally repugnant. The smell and even the appearance of garbage revolts us. And yet we all generate it, in seemingly endless quantity. In “developed” (rich) nations, we therefore have built extensive systems to get this repugnant material out of sight, and hence out of our minds, as quickly […]

Global Warming Risk Arises From Three Facts

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a real risk for future generations including my own children. It’s a risk I’ve personally taken seriously, and have taken personal action against, since the late 1980s when I was in university. And while we’ve seen some extremely positive developments in the past 30 years such as the creation of new industries […]

What Are the Energy Solutions?

What are the Energy Solutions? UPDATED 25/06/2024,  because LinkedIn messed up the formatting, deleted every apostrophe etc. How the hell does that stuff happen? No idea…but I’ve cleaned up the mess, and added a lot of links to new articles on related topics.  And I’ve also admitted that my predictions about Ontario’s tendency to re-kindle […]

Hydrogen From Renewable Energy- Our Future?

Image credit: https://www.rolandberger.com/zh/Publications/European-cities-bet-on-hydrogen-fuel-cells-to-help-meet-emission-targets.html Is the image I’ve used, and credited above, a fair representation of our future? Hydrogen proponents, particularly those who want to sell us on the superiority of hydrogen as a transport fuel for fuelcell electric vehicles, would like us to believe it. But what would it take to make such a dream- the […]

Ammonia Pneumonia

Few in our society realize just how dependent we all are on a poison gas. Ammonia has literally permitted about half the humans on earth today to exist at all. The vast majority of our food calories, and especially those of our food animals, are totally dependent on ammonia as the source of nitrogen fertilizer. […]

Hydrogen to Replace Natural Gas- By the Numbers

Hydrogen to Replace Natural Gas- By the Numbers Update: my peer reviewed article in Energy Science and Engineering summarizes many of the issues in this particular blog post: https://scijournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ese3.1861 UPDATED: April 6, 2023 There’s been a lot of talk recently about hydrogen as a replacement for natural gas. The scheme is to gradually add H2 […]

What is #hopium?

First of all, #hopium isn’t my original idea. I would attribute the use of the term to the person who I first heard use it, but sadly I’ve forgotten. The moment I heard it, I knew this was the ideal description of a problem I’d been seeing in numerous areas of our attempt to decarbonize […]