6 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

1. Greenwashed plastic tarmac vs. plutonium-eating bugs

   Facebook’s algorithm has fairly enough profiled me as a sucker for good news on green tech. Last week it served me up a typically unreferenced item on a successful project in Minas Gerais state in Brazil to add recycled plastic waste to bituminous road surfaces, at lower cost and an improvement in durability. Big win for the climate! Not for long.

   I checked it out. The tech is real; here’s a fat World Bank report from 2023: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099003105242322144/pdf/IDU0743eda4a0091c049000acd506d2f0b9ae123.pdf It turns out this process is being actively developed in many countries, led in fact by India, the first one to adopt technical standards. There are heavyweight corporate backers including the notorious Dow Chemical. So far so good.

   How big a contribution can it make? Google AI is great for quick-and-dirty calculations. It says the world total length of roads is 65m km, of which 35% is is paved, 23 m km. The lifespan of a paved road is 10-30 years depending on traffic, let’s say 20 years on average. This is generous, as most roads carry only light traffic. This gives an annual demand for repaving of 1.14 m km. New roadbuilding and paving of dirt roads pushes this up, say to 1.5 m km. We aren’t going to get 100% of this with our plastic tarmac. We pencil in 33% – 500,000 km – as the prudent target and 50% – 750,000 km – as the stretch one. The standard plastic addition is 1 tonne per km, the highest claimed feasible use 4 tonnes/km. These ranges give an upper limit of 3 m tonnes a year and a prudent estimate of 500.000 tonnes.

   The world total of plastic waste is 400 mt/yr. So at best recycling it for road-building only uses up 0.75%, more likely 0.12 %. A minor contribution, worth including in the overall plan. For a major plastics producer like Dow, it’s patent greenwashing.

   What would a serious attack on plastic pollution look like? The current work on a global plastics treaty is better than nothing. but not much. A pair of “unrealistic” proposals that might make a difference:

   1. A global Pigovian plastics tax, weighted by damage, levied on producers like Dow, and fully hypothecated for mitigation.

   Argument: same as for GHGs.

   2. Shifting the priority from recycling to biodegradation.

   Arguments:

   (a) There are just too many different types of plastic for comprehensive recycling after use to be feasible. One good thing about the road-building plan is that up to a point you can use an unsorted mixture from the town dump, but this is unusual. Most recycling requires precise and expensive sorting: PET bottles here, LDPE there, PVC in a third bin, and WTF is this?

   (b) Biodegradation in contrast is a single broad metric, placed in the zero band of any plastics tax. It is much simpler to administer than credits for product-by-product recycling.

   (c) The strategy fits in with the existing logistics of the retail business. All food products have a defined shelf life, and the single-use packaging around them only needs to survive this with a safety margin (say 2x). When the food is sorted, you move on to the longer-life products like bottles of detergent. Refill comes in here.

   (d) If biodegradation works at all, it would scale easily with simple equipment, and should work out much cheaper than recycling.

   (e) Above all, biodegradation is nature’s way of recycling dead stuff. Why make macho chemical reactors, product by product, when you can ally (via GM) with greedy no-wage and freely reproducing bacteria and fungi, maybe working all at once in a single digester chain?

   Is this wishful thinking technically? I think not. There are hero bacteria that thrive in the nightmare environment of ponds or heaps of nuclear waste, actively collecting radioactive compounds. Some tap the energy for their own metabolism, others sequester them, yet others precipitate soluble compounds into insoluble minerals or metallic forms which are less toxic to humans or easier to recover. Some can even take up plutonium: oversize, radioactive, extremely toxic, and novel. The element does not exist in detectable quantities in nature, so this extreme adaptation took place, quite unaided, in the 81 years since the X-10 pilot production reactor went critical at Oak Ridge on 4 November 1943. Do you think that the vast bacterial kingdom, with a helping hand from legions of human biologists, will be defeated by mere microplastics, forever chemicals and composite wind turbine blades? https://asm.org/articles/2023/january/how-do-microbes-remove-radioactive-waste

2. I don’t know enough to have an opinion, but, if you visit the US, try to get over to Arizona and check out their freeways. I think they put rubber in them. It feels great!! We don’t have those here. Ha. Our roads are a mess.

   I am still in the guilt phase of dealing with my food plastics. I would have to cook a lot more to avoid it, for one thing.

3. Looney tunes

   I am also a sucker for stories of Ukrainian successes on the battlefield, as a counterbalance to the hand-wringing of the mass media. Iran is a full ally of Russia in that war, and the Ukrainians tend to be over-enthusiastic supporters of Israel and the USA in their war on Iran. That’s how I learnt of a hair-raising scheme promoted by hawks in Washington, thankfully not yet the Pentagon: open up the Straits of Hormuz by seizing an enclave on the Iranian side and clearing the coast of the harbours, launch sites and command centres that ensure Iranian control of the sea passage. ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIhSo07_Huo

   This could normally be dismissed as a loony plot cooked up by a pair of senile drunken crackpots in a bar. But since the government of the United States is in fact in the hands of a drunk, various crackpots and toadies, and a senile escapee from a retirement home, we should at least take a look.

   An opposed landing is among the most difficult and costly of military operations – see Gallipoli, Dieppe, D-Day, and Iwo Jima. The USA has not pre-positioned in the region the troops, heavy equipment (tanks, artillery, landing craft, armoured bulldozers, ammunition, etc.) that would normally be required. An improvised surprise attack would have to rely on a small number of special forces and paratroopers available at short notice. The track record of similar lightning operations is not good. Against the success of the D-Day paratroop operations, well-planned and linked up within 24 hours to the heavier units landed on the beaches, we have to set the costly failures: Operation Market Garden (Arnhem, September 1944) and the Russian attempt to seize Hostomel airfield in the first week of the invasion of Ukraine. German paratroopers did manage to take the main airfield in Crete in 1940, but the casualties were so high that the Wehrmacht never attempted another large-scale independent operation.

   Take a look at the geography. https://www.freeworldmaps.net/ocean/hormuz-strait/hormuz-strait.jpg The Straits form a sharp inverted V. At the Iranian apex you have a port city, Bandar Abbas, population 350,000. It sits in a seismic zone and has many large and stoutly built multistorey buildings made out of reinforced concrete. As Bakhmut, Voychansk and many other frontline Ukrainian towns have shown, such an urban hellscape is very favourable to defenders, even in a state of ruin. The Iranians have presumably already mined the port installations ready fr speedy demolition.. When the wrecking is done by professionals, ports can be rendered unusable for a long time. Cherbourg was liberated on 27 June 1944, but it took three critical months for the Allies to make the port usable for large-scale shipping – by which time they had captured Antwerp intact. Bandar Abbas is ringed by rugged hills, extending a good way down the coasts on either side. This is also good terrain for defenders: recall Dien Ben Phu. The standard 25 km range of 155 mm artillery is 25 km, so the airfield and port could therefore be hit from guns in the nearest hills, aided by cheap spotter drones.

   The deence of the straits is in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards. Their doctrine of “decentralised mosaic defence” is very far from the Stalinist centralisation of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and prizes flexibility, resilience to decapitation of command structures, and asymmetric warfare – Vietcong rather than Vietminh. From all this, I infer that the MAGA coup de main can only succeed if the regime, and particularly the Guards, has already collapsed to the point that the incursion is unnecessary. The working assumption is that the Guards will fight effectively and long enough to inflict a critical number of US casualties, say !,000 body bags, adter which Trump will bre forced by public outrage to give up.The Iran war is already very unpopular in the USA, and there is no rallying round the flag. While fighting continues, the straits stay closed to tankers, and the price of oil – and, critically, the US retail price of gasoline – will soar. The stock markets will at best slide, at worst (given the AI bubble) crash.

   It looks to me (I claim no expertise here) as if Trump has lost his war and, for practical purposes, his presidency. If he just continues bombing, many Iranian civilians will die, infrastructure is trashed, the dictatorial Iranian regime survives, the straits stay closed, and the oil crisis wrecks the world economy. If he launches a small land incursion, it fails. If he launches a large one, without surprise, it bogs down with high casualties. His best bet is to cut a Venezuela deal: declare victory and go home.

4. Even on D-Day the paratroop and glider components were problematic. And the seaborne assault was massively more than the US can possibly assemble.

5. This article spells out the mess that Trump has created, and its not one that has any easy options.

   https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/iran-has-just-fired-the-most-dangerous-shot-of-this-war-and-it-wasnt-a-missile/

6. I thought the world was supposed to be becoming less dependent on oil, at least according to some prescriptions and descriptions. This current high concern, almost everywhere, about oil prices seems to indicate that almost nobody believes we are or can become less dependent on oil globally.

   Alternatively, everyone could state as an aim, “Let’s quickly work out how to run things on 20% less oil.” That we are not saying that must mean it is beyond our collective imaginations, ability and cooperativeness or that it is already somehow impossible given the baked-in course of our global system.

   Note, the above makes no comment on what the USA, Israel and Iran should or should not have done with respect to starting and/or continuing this war. It takes the current situation as a relatively persistent but not necessarily permanent fait accompli.

   What I am pointing out is that almost nobody, apparently, can conceive of the world living with less oil. I tend to agree with them but only precisely because they can’t conceive it and clearly will never agree to it until it is forced on them by factors outside their control and probably outside all human control. Meantime, climate change rolls on.