Society in General

EV Revolution Winding Down

Posted on by Ron Clutz

An article from John Ray explains how the Electric Vehicle movement is losing steam The electric car ‘revolution’ is a disaster before it’s begun.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. (The UK references are due to the original article appearing in The Telegraph.)

The electric car revolution is stalling, of that there can no longer be any doubt. It has left the big global carmakers floundering, uncertain of how to proceed in a race they reluctantly entered in the first place.

Electrification was initially met with fierce resistance. But once politicians held a gun to the heads of company bosses with a series of cliff-edge deadlines for phasing out the combustion engine, carmakers had little choice but to go all-in.

Century-old business models were declared dead and ambitious plans hurriedly drawn up to electrify entire portfolios from small city run-arounds to family saloons and SUVs, at astronomical cost. Even Ferrari has embraced the movement – much to the consternation of petrolheads everywhere.

But with electrification barely off the starting grid, one by one the big carmakers
are already pulling back as demand badly falters.

Volkswagen is so concerned about flagging sales that it has taken the extraordinary decision of halting electric vehicle production at one of its biggest plants. Assembly lines for electric models will be paused for six weeks at the Emden factory in northwest Germany and 300 of its 1,500 staff laid off after sales fell 30pc short of forecasts.

This means production of the new VW ID.7 electric model, which had been due to commence in July will be pushed back until the end of the year. The ID.4 electric SUV and the upcoming ID.7 electric sedan will also be delayed.

“We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector,”
plant boss Manfred Wulff said.

That is remarkably plain language from the largest car manufacturer on the planet, and a company that recently announced plans to invest €120bn (£103bn) over the next five years in “electrification and digitalisation”.

It comes months after Ford poured cold water on the shift to electric
with thousands of job losses in Europe.

Electric vehicle production is unable to support anything like the same number of jobs that petrol and diesel models are able to sustain, it said. Boss Jim Farley estimates that 40pc fewer staff will be needed to develop battery versions.

A generation of pure electric vehicle makers has hardly fared any better. On Tuesday, Lordstown Motors, the US electric truck specialist that Donald Trump once heralded as the saviour of a depressed Ohio town, filed for bankruptcy protection.

Even Elon Musk has been forced to repeatedly cut the price of Teslas in a desperate effort to prop up demand and protect market share.

But it’s the setback at VW that stands out, raising serious questions about whether politicians are making the catastrophic mistake of forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them. Indeed, the decision to impose strict deadlines for the phase out of petrol cars could turn out to be one of the most ruinous policy decisions of our lifetimes.

Think about it for a second: an entire industry not only forced to abandon a product that the vast majority of people still want and use, but also bullied into channelling all its resources into making something on a colossal level that there simply isn’t the market for – at least not within the horrendously short timeframe that is being imposed on car manufacturers.

It’s industrial self-sabotage and a commercial, economic and social catastrophe in the making. But what’s worse is that the damage risks being far greater in the UK than anywhere else in the Western world thanks to the Government’s myopic obsession with arbitrary net zero targets.

While the rest of the industrial world seems to have largely settled on a 2035 deadline for petrol and diesel phase out, ministers, for reasons destined to remain a mystery, have decided Britain needs to hit this milestone five years earlier than everyone else.

It makes no sense at all, and yet the ramifications threaten to be huge. By diverting capital into something that lots of people essentially don’t want, it risks inflicting massive losses on an already fragile UK car industry.

It is pure fantasy to imagine that Britain – with a dearth of battery factories (consultants Alix Partners estimates as much as a third of Britain’s battery requirements will need to be imported), a paucity of chargers and dramatically higher energy costs – will be in any position to go fully electric in the next seven years. And the Government simply isn’t capable of solving any of these challenges in time, if at all.

The UK risks becoming the unfortunate guinea pig in a costly and dangerous experiment that persuades the rest of the world to push their own deadlines out even further, turning this country into an example of how not to become a nation of electric car owners.

 

Election Fraud is Weaponized Identity Theft

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jay Valentine explains how ballot harvesting depends on industrial scale identity thefts, and only the Left is willing and organized to do that.  There is an antidote to restore free and fair elections, but it won’t happen by trying to out-harvest the Left’s machine.  Note this is not about voter turnout but the opposite.  It’s stealing votes from people on the voter rolls by sending their ballots to invalid addresses where they will be collected and filled in, when and where they will make victory for favored candidates.  His American Thinker article is A Line of Defense Against Mail-in Ballot Fraud.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The RNC, the Trump Campaign, almost every Republican state party chairperson believes the road to 2024 electoral victory is to “out-ballot-harvest the left.” It’s hard to argue with absolute nonsense.  To the rescue, however, comes a retired mail carrier who sent the following message:

Message: I am a retired mail man.

I just saw your War Room interview.
I now know where the mules got their ballots. Straight from the post office in returned/undeliverable mail.
While I have zero proof of where they ended up, I had those ballots you were talking about in my mail bag with wrong addresses or lacking apartment numbers or even people that moved and still had ballots delivered to their old apartment.
We put those ballots in a basket and someone came by and picked them up.
Hundreds or even thousands of ballots.
Who picked them up, where did they go?
Now we know why signature match was removed…
Someone needs to investigate the post office and their democratic union run activities.

Tell us, RNC, how are you going to beat this? 

The only way to stop the government, in particular the United States Post Office, from gathering hundreds of thousands of loose ballots, all of which go somewhere other than to Republican candidates — is to stop those ballots in the first place.

We know, from numerous sources, that the Post Office is one of several ballot-gathering apparatuses of the Left.  How much ballot harvesting at evangelical churches is needed to make up for government-sponsored ballot harvesting — industrial scale?

A key to winning in 2024 is to identify every, or as close to every as technology and diligent work can enable — every ballot being sent out that will land in that “basket” that “somebody” later picked up.

What are the addresses on those ballots?
  • Ballots mailed to vacant lots — or in Arizona, street corners.
  • Ballots sent to apartment buildings without the unit or APT number.
  • Ballots sent to college dorms for students registered there for decades.
  • Ballots sent to fraternities with a 105-year-old student.
  • Ballots sent to churches — which have no bedrooms, thus cannot be someone’s domicile.
  • Ballots for the person who moved — over a year ago.
  • Ballots mailed to hotels and casinos.
  • Ballots where the address was modified — by the voter commission (as in Arizona) — the week those ballots went out, thus missing the recipient.
  • Ballots sent to Manchurian restaurants, laundromats, banks, and 7-Elevens — all of which are not valid addresses for voters.
  • Ballots sent to UPS and FedEx boxes — sometimes to a dozen people living in that little box.
  • Ballots sent to the apartment building — but the address is the clubhouse — which has no bedrooms.
  • Ballots sent to the 22,000 new voters in a single county entered just days before the election — who were invisible to Arizona Republican candidates in 2022.
  • Ballots sent to Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Gonzalez, Mr. Gonzalles, all at the same address with the same date of birth.
  • Ballots sent to the Wisconsin college dorm that has 1,000 registered voters but can house only 250 adults.
  • Ballots sent to the 11 adults at the single-family Houston home that is 823 square feet with one bedroom and one bathroom.
  • Ballots mailed to people registered at an address in 2020 but the building was not built until 2022.
  • Ballots sent to the rehab facility for dozens of people who claim it as a residence for years.  (Rehab is not a “years” thing.)

Welcome to the Undeliverable Ballot Database.

A simple mail carrier, supported by other mail carriers we interviewed in person, shows how completely useless is the GOP campaign to “out-ballot-harvest” the Left.

Ballots — which will not land in an eligible recipient’s hand – must be identified,
months in advance of being mailed.

Most of those ballots, using super-compute technology, can be identified, shown to be illegitimate, and brought to everyone’s attention 6 months before election day.

When Harris County (Houston) floods the zone six months before early voting with 240,000 new voters, each needs to be instantly checked, verified, validated, and if necessary challenged — before the 2024 election.  Wake up, Ted Cruz!

When Arizona and Wisconsin counties change identifiers the week mail-in ballots
go out, then change them back, real time compute needs to flag it and ask “why?”

Here, let’s do it.

Two state legislatures invited the Fractal team to do a “proof of concept” for their state voter rolls.  So, that’s what we’re doing.

We ingest multiple copies of the voter rolls.  We want at least three dates but in one of the states, we will probably do a dozen.  Multiple copies of voter rolls shows movement, lights up changes made to the voter rolls that make you say hmm.

We compare every copy of the voter roll with every other copy — every cell against all corresponding cells.  If someone’s zip code was changed, we flag it.  Might be no big deal, but then, might be Arizona where 33,000 zips were changed days before the election.

In a state rep election, for a Republican candidate, a primary, we found 212 people who moved from all over the state to this guy’s district.  They all voted.  Then about a month after the election, they all moved out of the district.  Where do you think they moved?  Back to their original houses!  He won!

We ingest the personal property tax rolls for the county.  Those show the type of building, if it is a business, the number of bedrooms, baths, units, year built, square footage of living space, and about 40 other useful attributes.  In Austin, Texas, we add the construction/permit rolls, giving us a closer to real time view of every property improvement.

For these two state legislatures, we want something for the Attorney General.

We bring in the FEC (Federal Election Commission) contribution rolls.  With a single click, the AG can see every “contribution mule” in the state.  If that’s not enough, we bring in the massive Medicaid rolls — all claims, all providers, all recipients for dozens of years.  At this point, we are in the tens of billions record level — and guess what we find?

Some of those same sketchy voter addresses — fake people living in UPS boxes correspond to Medicaid providers — who are likely fake.  We migrated from just cleaning voter rolls to making a state some real dough — identifying Medicaid fraud.

This is the power of real time super-compute.

Our thesis to state governments is that it isn’t just voter fraud.  It’s identity fraud and
not just in their voter rolls, identity fraud permeates every state government roll.

While we developed the Undeliverable Ballot Database to identify every address where a ballot will be sent yet not find an eligible recipient, we also created an address and identity database for people who claim one identity in Medicaid, another in WIC and another on the voter roll.

Vast government databases are virtually invisible to current SQL/relational technology.  Fractal and other super-computes are delivering real-time visibility to identity fraud lasting decades.

One of the first benefits is the Undeliverable Ballot Database — saving the mail carrier all those fake ballots.

Now Can We Stop the Blame Game?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

See Also Virtue Signaling Is a Vicious Circle

One key to understanding much of the bewildering behavior we see around us is to recognize the power and popularity of “virtue signaling.” Keeping virtue signaling in mind will help you understand a lot of behavior that otherwise makes no sense.

What, for example, is the point of removing Confederate statues or attempting to disown the country’s Founding Fathers because some were slave owners? It makes sense if your objective is to be sanctimonious. You make yourself feel better by looking down your nose at Thomas Jefferson.

Virtue signaling is the modern version of what St. Augustine in the 5th century referred to as “outward signs of inward grace.” A major difference, however, is the kind of grace he referred to actually meant something.

A precondition to needing to virtue signal is guilt. Virtue signaling is one of the left’s package deals that typically involve two steps. Firstly, make people who have done nothing wrong feel guilty. Then, offer them ways to assuage that guilt. It’s little more than a con game but it has worked amazingly well for social revolutionaries.

It always helps to keep in mind that everything is relative. In order to feel superior, you need something to feel superior to. Virtuous relative to what? In order to feel holier than thou you need a thou.

Does virtue signaling accomplish anything outside of the individual? Anything tangible, significant? Any activity as widespread and long-lasting as virtue signaling has to have payoffs. The payoffs for virtue signaling are inner, not outer, directed.

An irony is that the need to virtue signal is an insecurity about your own virtue. An observation a psychologist friend likes to make is, “The bigger the front, the bigger the back.” Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “The louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” Virtue signaling is motivated more by insecurities than virtue.

 

 

 

Carbon Capture Boondoggle

Posted on by Ron Clutz

John M. Contino explains in his American Thinker article The Contradictions of Carbon Capture.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In May, 2022, the Biden Administration announced a $3.5 billion program to capture carbon pollution from the air, and the money has been flowing copiously. A quick search on LinkedIn for companies engaged in Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) projects will reveal dozens of companies, most of which are U.S.-based. They are well-staffed and generously funded with millions of up-front taxpayer dollars. [Note the bogus reference to plant food CO2 as carbon pollution.]

Summit Carbon Solutions does have its share of proponents — among them ethanol producers, heads of Chambers of Commerce, and politicians of all stripes from state and local governments. It’s one thing to dangle large sums of other people’s money to induce cooperation, but landowners are apparently being bludgeoned into submission with eminent domain.

The CCUS projects in the Midwestern faming states are all predicated on the continued, if not expanded, production of ethanol, because ethanol facilities present localized concentrations of CO2 that can be harnessed and disposed of more efficiently than merely sucking carbon dioxide out of the ambient atmosphere.

A Reuters article from March, 2022 reports that

The government estimates that ethanol is between 20% and 40% less carbon intensive than gasoline. But a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon intensive than gasoline, largely due to the emissions generated from growing huge quantities of corn [emphasis added].

The production of ethanol results in a net loss of energy: “Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol…[which] has an energy value of only 77,000 BTU.”

And let us not give short shrift to Power Density. In his 2010 book Power Hungry. The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, energy expert Robert Bryce compares the amount of the energy produced by various sources in terms of horsepower per acre, or wattage per square meter. An average U.S. Natural Gas Well, for example, produces 287.5 hp/acre. An Oil Stripper Well (producing 10 bbls/day) produces 148.5 hp/acre. Corn Ethanol comes in at a pathetic 0.25 hp/acre (pg. 86).

An Occam’s Razor approach to solving this problem would be
to shut down all the country’s ethanol production and
to not generate all that carbon dioxide in the first place.

Granted, the ethanol industry enjoys wide bipartisan support. But that doesn’t make it rational, or good for the country. Farmers receive substantial revenues by diverting an average of 40% of total corn yields to the production of ethanol. Why not just give that money to the farmers in exchange for them allowing 40% of their corn acreage to lie fallow? We might ask, facetiously, if we really needed all that extra corn to eat or export, why would our government prefer we burn it in our gas tanks?

Think of the savings:

♦  CO2 that would not be generated by growing and harvesting all that corn;
♦  water that would not be drained from our aquifers for irrigation; 
♦  salination of our topsoil that would be abated by not applying unnecessary nitrogen fertilizers; and
♦  most obviously, the absence of the need to capture and bury carbon from ethanol plants.

An advantage of ethanol is that it reduces greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy reports that a 2021 Argonne Labs study “found that U.S. corn ethanol has 44%–52% lower GHG emissions than gasoline.” Let’s say ethanol reduces GHG by 50%. So, a tankful of gasoline with 10% ethanol yields a net GHG reduction of only 5% (50% of 10%).

Another advantage of ethanol is jobs in rural areas. The National Corn Growers Association reported that “[I]n 2019, the U.S. ethanol industry helped support nearly 349,000 direct and indirect jobs.”

Even if those advantages were sufficient to maintain or expand the ethanol industry, it sounds almost farcical to ask:

♦  “what is the cost-benefit analysis of spending billions of dollars to capture and sequester the CO2 from those corn fermentation processes, and

♦  to what extent would all that CCUS actually benefit the planet?”

When a John Kerry or a Greta Thunberg utters Climate Change Disaster words to the effect of “the sky is falling, we’re all going to die!” they would have us believe that it’s trivial to worry about boring quantitative cost-benefit ratios and returns on investment when the entire planet is facing an imminent, existential threat.

The hyperbolic language of the climate change crowd has been wearing thin ever since Al Gore’s dire predictions from 2006 have inconveniently not materialized. It’s up to us to make the left realize they’ve overplayed their hand: they cannot ride roughshod over property rights whenever it suits them, just as they cannot force us to drink Bud Light if we don’t wish to do so.

 

 

 

 

2024 Election Will Be a Computing Contest

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jay Valentine explains how the election game will play out in his American Thinker article How to Out-Compute the Left.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In 2024 Republicans cannot “out-fraud” the left, cannot “out-ballot-harvest” them, cannot “out-lawfare” them, cannot “out-media” them, cannot “out–contribution mule” them, cannot “out–Justice Department” them…but sure as hell can out-compute them — and that may do it.

The left owns the election apparatus — voting equipment, ballot-manufacturing, vagrant habitats, election commissions, media intimidation of judges not to look at election fraud and driving out any lawyer who raises a valid case.

Electioneering, by both sides, currently runs 1970s technology.  Leftists make good use of obsolete relational tech; Republicans, not so much.

In 2024, there is an opportunity to out-compute the left. Here’s what it may look like.

Ninety percent of current election fraud comes in two buckets:
♦   election commissions jacking with voter rolls like Arizona and Wisconsin and
♦   mail-in ballots collected and illegally voted like everywhere.

Neither fraud bucket is thwarted by organizational solutions —
both can be stopped with real-time compute power.

Let’s define the terrain.  Twenty twenty-four election will be won or lost in six swing states.  In each swing state, 2024 will be won or lost based on fraud turnout in two or three counties.

The leader of the free world, the end of the Deep State, for many the future of America as they have known it depends on about 17 counties. Remember — two types of fraud — voter commissions and phantom ballots.

The problem comes into focus.

Let’s start with fraudulent election commissions — at the state and county levels.

Sketchy election commissions know they can modify voter rolls when mail-in ballots go out by

 ♦  changing ZIP codes (Arizona),
♦  adding a fake street (Florida),
♦  putting hidden characters in voter IDs (Wisconsin),
♦  creating an inventory of nice unvoted mail-in ballots gathered by the U.S. Postal Service (Illinois and Wisconsin) given to leftists — for a fee.

Current relational technology is blind because of database latency.

In one Republican state, our team found 41,000 voters changed from inactive status to active, voted, then changed back. In Arizona, 107,000 changes, plus 22,000 new voters added in one county alone — days before the 2022 election.

Real-time changes all the rules — it just needs to be applied before the election, not as a data autopsy afterward (Arizona).

In 2024, in 17 counties, let’s do real-time voter registration analysis beginning six months before the election.  Download daily, weekly, or monthly copies of voter rolls. Compare every voter roll with every other, showing every change. Were large numbers of addresses changed? Were thousands of new voters added 90 days before early voting from ineligible addresses (Houston)?

Ineligible? Who determines?  Good question, dear reader.

With relational technology, someone must knock on the door and ask if Phineas lives there. When told, “No, never heard of him,” the canvasser fills out an affidavit, goes to the judge. Nothing happens.

With real-time super-compute, our pal Phineas’s address is cross-tabbed with the county property tax records. They show 11 people registered in his 823-square-foot house, and the county health department says “no-no” to more than four people per 500 square feet. Seven fake voters just got busted.

The voter integrity types will tell you nothing can be done; we hear that all the time. But you are not dealing with their SQL limitations. Real-time gives you choices because you see this fraud before the election — before votes are cast.

Sit down with the county registrar. Pull out your tablet showing that on her voter list, there’s a phantom nest.  You are not saying it. The tax records — government dox — say it.  Look her in the eye and say, “Phyllis, we both know these addresses are ineligible. Your health department says so. We are taking this list to the sheriff. If people here are mailed a ballot, we will report you for a criminal violation.”  Sound harsh? It does. It also works.

Chat with the team in Wisconsin who almost single-handedly shut down 40% of the phantom vote in 2022 — helping a U.S. Senate squeaky win. They showed the phantoms, identified with real-time Fractal technology, to registrars — with a smile.

When you have better technology than the government,
the government hesitates.

This one step, alone, will reduce leftist fraud by 30 to 40%. It is unrecoverable. Leftists need fraudulent voter roll changes to impact their numbers — if they miss these quotas, there is no way to make them up.

Shut down election commission fraud, via real-time visibility, and you just cut election fraud in 17 counties 30–40%. In Arizona, Kari Lake would now be governor.

We’re not done.

Now for the phantoms.

There are several kinds of phantoms.

One type signs a voter registration application at the leftist church, the homeless shelter, the gas station and never votes. She may be dead in a tent on an Austin street. Who knows? Leftists do not care; they have a forever voter.

Another phantom is a not-too-interested person who registered, lives in a house, but does not vote because it is useless, an effort or a distraction. She is the “I don’t care” voter. Leftists have a ballot and voter for her.

There are phantom ballot, not people, collection points.

A large urban apartment building has a mail room, where hundreds of mail-in ballots collect because nobody cares to open them. There is no check inside.

As the junk mail gets tossed, ballots accumulate. They aren’t collected by Ronna’s Kiwanis Club Republican county chairman — he’s on the golf course. They are collected by a vagrant, paid $25 for each mail-in ballot in that trash can. They get voted while Ronna is ballot-harvesting in densely Republican churches.

Real-time compute makes this a game two can play.

With the Undeliverable Ballot Database, it can be determined where almost every ballot collects. Skip Ronna; send a kid to that mail room and have him pick up those ballots, and give them to the sheriff — noting they were in the garbage!

Do you think this just might be more effective than Republican ballot-harvesting at evangelical churches who are going to vote anyway?

Leftists made huge, 40-year investments in corrupting voter commissions,
getting their team on board, building phantom armies
they could vote when needed.

Unfortunately for them, their fraud is dependent on 1970s relational database — its limitations, its latency, its clumsy use by Republicans.

Real-time changes the outcomes.

Every address in every county, certainly in 17, can be profiled in excruciating detail — square feet, year built, number of baths, bedrooms. Voter roll changes can be seen the moment they are augmented by helpful leftist voter commissions.

Challenges happen now — before the election — publicly — not months afterward, when nobody cares.

In 2024, the goal is not to stop voter fraud. Stopping fraud will take years.

Super-compute can reduce fraud by 40% or more — and that is more than enough to stop leftists who are stuck on relational technology.

The most significant confrontation on North American soil since Gettysburg will happen in 2024. Super-compute can determine who has the high ground.

Comment:  It is a contemporary twist on a well known election truth:

Lab Meat: A Pharma Product with Huge Carbon Footprint

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Tyler Durden reports at zerohedge Lab-Grown Meat Gets Green Light On US Menus. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The World Economic Forum’s dietary blueprint for the masses is becoming a reality as lab-grown meat, bugs, and plant-based foods are quickly being adopted under the guise of solving ‘climate change.’ The latest move by elites and governments to reset the global food supply chain is US regulators approving the sale of meat cultivated from Chicken cells. This makes the US the second country worldwide, besides Singapore, to approve the sale of lab-grown fake meat.

The Agriculture Department approved Upside Foods and Good Meat to begin selling “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” chicken meat from labs in supermarkets and restaurants.

“Today’s watershed moment for the burgeoning cultivated meat, poultry and seafood sector, and for the global food industry,” Good Meat said in a statement.

Researchers conducted a life-cycle assessment of the energy needed and greenhouse gases emitted in all stages of production and compared that with beef. One of the current challenges with lab-grown meat is the use of highly refined or purified growth media, the ingredients needed to help animal cells multiply. Currently, this method is similar to the biotechnology used to make pharmaceuticals. This sets up a critical question for cultured meat production: Is it a pharmaceutical product or a food product? -UC Davis

“If companies are having to purify growth media to pharmaceutical levels, it uses more resources, which then increases global warming potential,” according to lead author and doctoral graduate Derrick Risner, of the US Davis Department of Food Science and Technology. “If this product continues to be produced using the “pharma” approach, it’s going to be worse for the environment and more expensive than conventional beef production.”

Cultured Beef Burger grown from stem cells of cattle made by Professor Mark Post of Netherland’s Maastricht University.

The scientists considered the ‘global warming potential’ to be the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted for each kilogram of meat produced – and found that the global warming potential (GWP) of lab-based meat using these purified media is up to 25 times greater than the average for retail beef.

The study is Environmental impacts of cultured meat: A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment  Derrick Risner et al. (UC Davis) 2023.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

Interest in animal cell-based meat (ACBM) or cultured meat as a viable environmentally conscious replacement for livestock production has been increasing, however a life cycle assessment for the current production methods of ACBM has not been conducted.

Currently, ACBM products are being produced at a small scale and at an economic loss, however ACBM companies are intending to industrialize and scale-up production. This study assesses the potential environmental impact of near term ACBM production.

Updated findings from recent technoeconomic assessments (TEAs) of ACBM and a life cycle assessment of Essential 8™ were utilized to perform a life cycle assessment of near-term ACBM production. A scenario analysis was conducted utilizing the metabolic requirements examined in the TEAs of ACBM and a purification factor from the Essential 8™ life cycle assessment was utilized to account for growth medium component processing.

The results indicate that the environmental impact of near-term ACBM production
is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production
if a highly refined growth medium is utilized for ACBM production.

Figure 1 is a process flow diagram of a fed-batch ACBM production system with associated energy requirements.

Lifecycle Impact assessment (LCIA)

After all the inputs were identified and consolidated, a life cycle impact assessment was completed utilizing data and methods from the E8 LCA, OpenLCA v.1.10 software and OpenLCA LCIA v2.1.2 methods software. The tool for reduction and assessment of chemicals and other environmental impacts (TRACI) 2.1 was the LCIA methods utilized in the OpenLCA LCIA software, and these results were combined with the facility power data to determine the potential environmental impact of the production of 1 kg ACBM (wet basis).

Scenario analysis

All scenarios utilize a fed-batch system as described in the Humbird (2021) TEA. Energy estimates from the Humbird TEA are utilized in all scenarios. Growth medium components were assumed to be delivered to the animal cells as needed and the build-up of growth inhibiting metabolites such as lactate or ammonia are not accounted for unless specifically stated in the scenario. The growth medium substrates are also assumed to be supplied via fed batch to achieve the highest possible specific growth rate in the production bioreactor. The three minimum/base scenarios were defined utilizing data from the Risner et al. and Humbird TEAs then a purification factor was applied based on the results from a LCA which examined the environmental impact of fine chemical and pharmaceutical production (Wernet et al., 2010).

Each of the three base scenarios were examined independently and then
with the purification factor applied for a total of six scenarios in the assessment.

Results

The LCIA was conducted on both the base scenarios and scenarios with purified growth medium components.  The GWP for all ACBM scenarios (19.2 to 1,508 kg of CO2e per kilogram of ACBM) was greater than the minimum reported GWP for retail beef (9.6 kg of CO2e per kg of FBFMO) (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). The GWP of all purified scenarios ranged from 246 to 1,508 kg of CO2e per kilogram of ACBM which is 4 to 25 times greater than the median GWP of retail beef (∼60 kg CO2e per kg of FFBMO). Without purification of the growth medium components, the GWP of the GCR scenario is approximately 25% greater than reported median of GWP of retail beef (Poore & Nemecek, 2018).

It should be noted that the system boundary of this LCA stops at the ACBM production facility gate and does not include product losses, cold storage, transportation, and other environmental impacts associated with the retail sale of beef. Inclusion of these post-production processes would increase the GWP of ACBM products.

Figure 3 illustrates the difference in the GWP of retail beef and cradle to upstream ACBM production gate.

Discussion

Our results indicate that ACBM is likely to be more resource intensive than most meat production systems according to this analysis. In this evaluation, our primary focus has been on the resource intensity of the growth mediums. We have largely focused on the quantity of growth medium components (e.g. glucose, amino acids, vitamins, growth factors, salts, and minerals) and attempted to account for purification requirement of those components for animal cell culture. We also acknowledge that our analysis may be viewed as minimum environmental impacts due to several factors including incomplete datasets, the exclusion of energy and materials required to scale the ACBM industry and exclusion of the energy and materials needed to scale industries which would support ACBM production.

Animal cell culture is inherently different than culturing bacteria or yeast cells due to their enhanced sensitivity to environmental factors, chemical and microbial contamination. This can be illustrated by the industrial shift to single use bioreactors for monoclonal antibody production to reduce costs associated with contamination (Jacquemart et al., 2016). Animal cell growth mediums have historically utilized fetal bovine serum (FBS) which contains a variety of hormones and growth factors (Jochems et al., 2002). Serum is blood with the cells, platelets and clotting factors removed. Processing of FBS to be utilized for animal cell culture is an 18-step process that is resource intensive due to the level of refinement required for animal cell culture.

Thus, the authors believe that commercial production of an ACBM product utilizing
FBS or any other animal product to be highly unlikely given this high level of refinement.

Conclusion

Critical assessment of the environmental impact of emerging technologies is a relatively new concept, but it is highly important when changes to societal-level production systems are being proposed (Bergerson et al., 2020). Agricultural and food production systems are central to feeding a growing global population and the development of technology which enhances food production is important for societal progress. Evaluation of these potentially disruptive technologies from a systems-level perspective is essential for those seeking to transform our food system. Ideally, systems-level evaluations of proposed novel food technologies will allow policymakers to make informed decisions on the allocation of government capital. Proponents of ACBM have hailed it as an environmental solution that addresses many of the environmental impacts associated with traditional meat production.

Upon examination of this highly engineered system, ACBM production appears
to be resource intensive when examined from the cradle to production gate
perspective for the scenarios and assumptions utilized in our analyses.

Our environmental assessment is grounded in the most detailed process systems available that represent current state-of-the-art in this emerging food technology sector. Our model generally contradicts previous studies by suggesting that the environmental impact of cultured meat is likely to be higher than conventional beef systems, as opposed to more environmentally friendly. This is an important conclusion given that investment dollars have specifically been allocated to this sector with the thesis that this product will be more environmentally friendly than beef.

In sum, understanding the minimum environmental impact of near term ACBM is highly important for governments and businesses seeking to allocate capital that can generate both economic and environmental benefits (Zimberoff, 2022). We acknowledge that our findings would likely be the minimum environmental impact due to the preliminary nature of our LCA. This LCA aims to be as transparent as possible to allow the interested parties to understand our logic and why we have developed these conclusions. We also hope that our LCA will provide evidence of the need for additional critical environmental examination of new food and agriculture technologies.

Bottom Line:

“Our findings suggest that cultured meat is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef. It’s not a panacea,” said corresponding author Edward Spang, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. “It’s possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media.”

Even the most efficient beef production systems reviewed in the study outperform
cultured meat across all scenarios (both food and pharma), suggesting that
investments to advance more climate-friendly beef production may yield
greater reductions in emissions more quickly than investments in cultured meat.

 

Nations Planning for Future Hydrocarbon Energy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

From energypost.eu comes the news Nearly half of national climate pledges (NDCs) intend to keep extracting fossil fuels.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs) are a nation’s published plans to reduce emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.  Nations are obliged to update their NDCs every five years, to give more detail. That added detail is a cause for concern in the latest round of NDCs: there is an increase in countries communicating plans to maintain or increase production rather than phase it out.

This goes against the fact that oil and gas production needs to decline
by at least 65% by 2050 in scenarios that limit warming to 1.5C.

We found that more and more countries are discussing the production of fossil fuels in their “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).

The topic is mentioned in two-thirds of fossil fuel-producing countries’ second-round NDCs, an increase on the first iteration, highlighting the increased discussion around the topic.

But we observe that while a few countries are reporting on measures to phase out fossil fuel production, nearly half of second-round NDCs included plans to maintain or even increase fossil fuel production.

Here, we take a closer look at the growing discussion of fossil fuel production in NDCs and “long-term low emissions development strategies” (LT-LEDS), the significance of their inclusion and how governments could build in targets and pathways for winding down production as we look to the next NDC cycle.

Within the analysis, we looked at 103 first-round NDCs (those published between 2015-19), 95 second-round NDCs (2019-March 2023) and 31 LT-LEDS belonging to fossil fuel producing countries.

Additionally, we looked at 65 first-round NDCs, 48 second-round NDCs and 19 LT-LEDS submitted by countries that do not produce fossil fuels.

Overall, only two countries discuss targets or policies designed to restrict or wind down fossil fuel production in their first-round NDCs, illustrated by the mid-green sliver in the second column from the top of the chart above. This rises to five in second-round NDCs (dark green) and 13 in LT-LEDS (light green).

Others – as shown in the first set of bars – do not include active policies, but, rather, quietly acknowledge the reality that their fossil fuel production will decrease. Australia is in this camp, for instance. Its LT-LEDS, while pledging to continue producing fossil fuels for as long as the world needs them, predicts that production will be 35% lower in 2050 than in 2020 due to changes in global demand.

However, a much larger number of countries plan to increase fossil fuel production, or indicate that they will maintain current levels: 35 first-round NDCs, 45 second-round NDCs, and 13 LT-LEDS . This is illustrated in the second set of bars in the figure above (“continuing or increasing production”).

In particular, this increase within the second-round of NDCs is notable, with 15 new countries including the continuation or expansion of fossil fuel production in their second-round NDCs, while only three have dropped the reference in the second iteration.

Indeed, two countries that do not currently produce oil and gas – Lebanon and Senegal –
expressed intent to begin in their second-round NDC.

Many countries, such as Canada, Norway, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, include commitments to reduce flaring, electrify processes or increase the energy efficiency of fossil fuel production.

These countries mostly do not simultaneously indicate any intention to scale down production volumes, however, despite the fact that oil and gas production declines by at least 65% by 2050 in scenarios that limit warming to 1.5C.