'Climate Change Fossil Fuels 101' by Debbie (anoffgridlife.wordpress.com).mp4
'Climate Change Fossil Fuels 101' by Debbie (anoffgridlife.wordpress.com).mp4: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix
'Climate Change Fossil Fuels 101' by Debbie (anoffgridlife.wordpress.com).mp4: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Debbie:
Welcome to 'An off grid life'. My name is Debbie, and this is the second in a series of talks on the environment. The first one was 'Climate change and how we're insulated'.
Debbie:
It's easy to forget that climate change is happening and it's also easy not to know how it happens. This is 'Fossil Fuels 101', and this is basically how and what we're doing to get all that pollution in the air. Basically, we're burning fossil fuels every minute of the day. And you could be in your living room reading a book; you're burning fossil fuels. And those fossil fuels are coal, natural gas and oil. And up front, let's talk about 50% of all of the CO2 in the atmosphere is coming from buildings. And each of these fossil fuels provide the energy for not only our home, but 'Big Box stores,' hospitals, businesses and warehouses. So, 50% of that is coming from buildings. So, we're talking about coal, oil and natural gas. Let's take coal: we used to get 50% of our electricity from coal, but now we get about 30% because natural gas is providing some of that -- which is not a good thing, and we'll go into 'why' in a minute -- but we have approximately 572 coal plants in the United States and about 2,300 worldwide; and when they're burning coal, mercury, arsenic and lead, all toxic things, are spewing into the atmosphere. You don't want to live near a coal plant; you don't want to be near coal extraction, like going into a mine or mountaintop removal. So, coal provides our electricity.
Debbie:
And next: natural gas. Sixty percent of our heat in the United States comes from burning natural gas, and the people that are getting heat from natural gas are getting it from propane -- still a fossil fuel. So it was about maybe 10 years ago, that they discovered or designed a new process, and it's called 'fracking'. And I'd like to recommend a documentary that is awesome: it's called 'Gasland'; it's by Josh Fox. I've seen this thing three times; I've written down notes; it's awesome. It takes step by step how he discovered this because it was happening in his town in Pennsylvania and he took a trip around the United States and found out all about fracking. 'Gasland 2' is also another documentary he did and how it got to be legal and why it's not going away.
Debbie:
So, fracking: they used to just go straight down into the ground, thousands of feet to break up shale. And so now they go down and they go horizontal, which means millions of gallons of water are going down into this well, with hundreds of toxic chemicals (that they won't disclose) and sand, silica sand. So the toxic chemicals are not safe -- and neither is the silica sand; you can get silicosis from either in a sand mine or if it's in your town floating through the air. So, this water is going down into the well. Half of it comes back up and it's called produced water, which may go into a holding pond -- which may or may not have a liner -- and wildlife and birds and insects are drinking this. They're getting sick. They're dying. This water is being trucked off to get treated. It has to be treated in a toxic facility, I mean, a facility that handles toxic stuff. And it's not that they're not having a good result with that. So the rest of the water that's in the well, the casing eventually cracks and the water goes into aquifers and other groundwater, people's wells. Yes.
Debbie:
In the movie they [showed] that set on fire, water, water faucets because of the natural gas. Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas, which is a highly concentrated greenhouse gas, worse than just CO2. And also, they're finding there's earthquakes happening in areas that are fracking, fracking is done in a large portion of the United States. And also the holding tanks for the methane, for the natural gas, is leaking out. Methane: not good. So fracking, it's legal. It should not be; it should be stopped. New York State bandit, everybody should be in it.
Debbie:
Oil is the last. And I save this for the last because oil is the big kahuna of net fossil fuels, because without oil, we don't get anything. We don't get coal out of the ground. We don't get natural gas out of the ground. We don't get food. We don't get clothes. We don't get anything out of the Big Box store. We don't provide everything in all our heat and energy. Some years ago, a couple of years, it was at 84 million barrels a day worldwide. That's how much we're going through. But the International Energy Agency -- I looked it up -- we're at 96 million barrels: and each barrel is 42 gallons. How we have any left is beyond me.
Debbie:
So, we have two big economic players that are emerging: China and India. And I mean, they just didn't happen overnight. It's been happening because China does most all of the manufacturing for us. And also India is doing most of the computing like call centers and imaging issues processing. So those two countries: 1.4 billion people in China, 1.2 [billion] almost in India: we only have 320 million people in the United States. The United States consumes the most resources per person and also pollutes the most per person. But now we have these other two players [whose] standard of living is increasing and they're buying cars and living a lifestyle close to what we're doing. So, that's what the increase is.
Debbie:
There's also another thing that needs to be watched and that is a number; a measurement of the CO2 in the atmosphere, which let's say '350', 350 parts per million. And I don't know exactly when we got to 350, but it was a while ago; that's considered safe. 450 parts per million is unsafe. We're -- a couple of years ago we were at 402, so I looked it up; NASA has us, in January of 2018, at 407.98: let's call it 408; four hundred and eight parts per million. And NASA had it at 402.5 in January of 2016 -- two years ago. So it went up 5.5 points, and it was going up two points every year, so it's increased.
Debbie:
So, if we do the math, we have about 14 years until we get to 450. You know, 14 years is nothing. And that's exactly what the United States is doing: nothing. Countries like Norway, Sweden, Germany or Costa Rica trying to get off of fossil fuels are putting solar panels up. No, we're all about just burning fossil fuels.
Debbie:
The other thing is there is the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions has a great website that details all of the climate talks and what was achieved -- or not achieved -- during those talks. They started them in 1992 and Business Insider in June 1st, 2017, cited that or stated that 195 countries are on board with the Paris agreements that happen in 2015 and the only two countries that weren't on board: Syria, which is in a civil war and not worrying about climate when you're in a civil war; and Nicaragua said, no, it doesn't go high enough.
Debbie:
So Trump gets into office and pulls us out of the Paris agreements, which won't go into effect until 2019. But the greatest country in the world (supposedly) pulls us out of the Paris agreements. The rest of the world is all on board and we're pulling out? What is it, 99.9% of the scientists are on board. Everybody is freaking out and we need to do something. And also, the Union of Concerned Scientists is also a great site to go to for information on fossil fuels and things like that. A great site. Google that.
Debbie:
So, we need to do something about this. So, the more we know about it, the more we can do something about it. So, I hope you will talk with your friends and family about this. Do some, you know, little researching or investigating on this. I know this is a condensed version of fossil fuels, but that's what we're doing. That's what we're burning. That's what we're up against. So I hope you'll join me for future talks on what we're up against with climate. And thank you for listening.
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