"As long as I get mine, to hell with everyone and everything else."
-typical big dumb amurikan |
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What is beyond debate is that fossil fuels are limited and that demand is growing. There are externalized costs to fossil fuels. However to arbitrarily limit ourselves to certain modes of energy because of political correctness is irrational and foolish. To camouflage this foolishness in a peripherally insulting schema of chemical dependency shows a lack of imagination in presentation. That you crib George Bush, a man considered a buffoon by most on the left, is richly ironic. More so that he introduced this asinine idea, that the US is "addicted to oil", as an entry note for delivering Archer Daniels Midland another generous slice of Corporate welfare. Quote:
Quite another issue when the commissar comes around to make me do it. For my own good, of course. Even lower mammals fight helplessness, something that every tyrant ought to consider. Quote:
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As for laissez faire "not cutting it", that's another of your opinions. We've seen the disasters of collectivism, including horrific ecological catastrophes. If you intend to base your collectivism on green dogma may I enjoin you to consider thirty million children in Africa dead at the hands of the DDT ban. That's five time the number of dead in Hitler's Holocaust, most of them young children. Gene |
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I have some concerns about nukes. One of them is the waste issue. Most of the waste in the US, if my reading is correct, is kept "on site" at nuclear power plants. We really ought to start reprocessing waste to remove plutonium for future use. Since we're building down our nuclear arsenals this is now reasonable, in contrast to the 1980s when we were building our arsenals and could have used plutonium for that purpose. I do not know what percentage of plutonium is recoverable, how it would placed into future fuel and the costs. The waste itself could be used for power generation. Geothermal energy is essentially energy from radioactive decay inside of the earth being used to heat a fluid that transports it where it can do work. Whether we could build a storage facility that can generate electricity, and do it on a cost efficient basis, is another issue altogether. Another concern I have are the capitalization costs. Nuke plants are quite expensive. I think one of the reasons that elderly French die like flies during heat waves is because French electricity contains capitalized costs for the French nuke system. Of course I'm sure that French socialism taxes electricity to pay for "social spending" as well so which predominates I'm not sure. One of the reasons that natural gas is popular is the anthropogenic global warming mythology. One carbon to those four hydrogen looks real good when you're frightened of carbon. Another is that it's a gas and is therefore far more easily transported than other fuels. I think this latter property is far more appealing to industry than green fairy tales. Gene |
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I have seldom seen those that are of the global warming religion return to a position of any self sufficiency to the land and no technology. As we are typing this on the internet, on plastic keys using electricity, radio waves, heat or air conditioning....LOL! I have a life. My father didn't have electricity when he grew up, terrible American, really. If we're addicted, yeah, I guess rehab should have started at the invention of the stick and the wheel. I will not allow the religion of state to saddle my freedom of choice to make economic decisions that are in the best interest of my family's future. However, if you wanna live in a forest searching for berries, growing flax, and collecting solar energy, that is your personal choice. One can be addicted to that. |
Look Guys, the title of this thread is "a polluted future", a real concern, due to some fuel choices that might be made. A more sustainable approach which should be key to the discussion would be to maximize the amount of insulation to minimize the amount of fuel (and pollution) required. The "logical thing" is not to throw more fossil fuels at the problem, that only compounds the problem. Sometimes government is "for the people" in that one must recognize (and I think you do) the imperfectness of the market system and it's capacity for unintended side effects. Polluting is cheap, but wrong for everyone else, everywhere else (call that dogma if you must). The market system is simply not capable of dealing with this bit of injustice, at least not in the time frame required. It is perfectly fine for many other applications though, no argument.
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Well, what are the alternatives?
The EPA has done everything to crush diesels, which use fewer fossil fuels. Yes, more of some things, but that would reduce use immediately. Ethanol is put in gasoline, and while it replaces some gasoline, a fossil fuel, the reduction in mileage basicially negates the change. Additionally, it cannot be shipped by pipeline, so it has to be trucked, using fossil fuel. Ultimately, I bought replaced an E150 van for work with an E350 diesel because I reduced my costs because I used less fuel. Not to mention with a diesel, more of the fossil fuel is used for moving everything. Polluting is cheap. Cleaning it up is cheaper than it was years ago when the "first world" went to work cleaning things up. But the second and third world don't clean up stuff. They don't care. Might want to preach to them as there are more of them, right? Progress in emissions has taken my 1983 $20 Sentra that got 42MPG driving down south in 1994 and given me what? Worse fuel mileage. Unintended consequences show that no one really knows enough about global warming or global cooling. As it is, only God knows what the temperature should be. Certainly a consortium of "leading scientists" don't know what it is, nor can they explain why Mars warmed too without fossil fuels burning, humans, or emission controls. I'm fine with being clean. If coal is going to be in my future, I know there is technology that makes it a viable, cleaner opportunity that it was twenty let alone forty years ago. Nuclear is good. Some need to get over that. Reward is not without risk. There are enough on the fringe that stand in front of everything that might help us now. Without current development, there is no future development. |
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Leveling rain forests is what the Brazilians have done for sugar based ethanol. Great for them. Guess they don't use as much oil.
As for God, I'm not calling on him, but I'm not going to put faith into a bunch of claims that we're warming or we're cooling. The fact is: there is factual evidence that the ideology of the religion of global warming is completely bogus. And it still begs the question. If we are warming or cooling, what scientist, or think tank, is going to "decide" what that magic temperature is? As it is, 97% of all species of life on earth is extinct. Environmental programs are out there that "protect" species all over the place. That's all fine, but there is an amount of Darwinism there. And when some of those "clubs" that put up boundaries against things to "protect" an animal go away when a developer or someone "donates" to them, well, that's polution too. |
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Using coal rather than natural gas to produce ethanol to replace gasoline, that can do less work. :D :D :thumbdown: |
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A short story.... Back in the late 1800s there were no drug laws in the US. Heroin, cocaine derivatives, "laundinum" and many other "hard drugs" were readily available. People had problems with drug addiction. Some coped with it, others fell victim to it. In 1914 the Harrison Act was passed in the hope of limiting the use of narcotics. In 1937, based on the 1934 National Firearms Act, a "tax stamp" was placed upon marijuana. This gimmick allowed the Congress to regulate guns and drugs under the "Commerce Clause" of the US Constitution. I've ignored Prohibition though it's a text book case of a regulation that was widely ignored, pernicious and totally counter productive. By the 1960s drug use became more "fashionable". In response our elites declared "war on drugs". Begun by Governor Rockefeller and President Nixon, the pressure was amped up by Reagan. We even had "zero tolerance" and "Civil Forfeiture", which were meant to curb drug abuse. In parallel US businesses, especially Corporate America, began to drug test employees. The consequences? Two million Americans are behind bars. Many of them are drug offenders. The US has more people behind bars per capita than any other G7 nation. At the very same time street drugs with horrific effects are easy to obtain, easy enough that even grade school aged children can get them. One in seven Americans abuses illegal drugs to some degree or another. Instead of old fashioned drugs like heroin, coca tea, laudinum, marijuana tea, hashish and primitive hallucinogens we have crack cocaine, crystal meth, Ecstacy, PCP, and a whole legion of designer drugs. In a clear analogue to "everclear" being created by the need to concentrate liquor to make it easier to transport underground today's drugs are more concentrated, more addictive, and more dangerous then the kinder gentler drugs of old. So I don't want to hear about how well regulation works... Quote:
Since that time capitalism has been essentially helpless to remedy air and water pollution in the Courts. Since most people don't resort to mafia or private adjudication there was just the political process. What some fail to recognize is that pollution, especially air pollution, is a form of "socializing" costs of doing business. It's not terribly different from dumping one's trash into the street, if one can prove that the items pumped into the air and water were in fact pollution. NOx, SOx and SOME particulates clearly can be shown to cause health problems and property damage. I am skeptical about acid rain in many cases but damage to buildings and automobiles is easy to demonstrate. One of the best examples of a toxic airborne waste was tetra ethyl lead. One of the few times I agreed that regulation worked was when this toxic precursor of lead oxide vapor was banned. However this could have been done in the courts decades before had the Market been allowed to do its job. The hazards of lead in paint and elsewhere were very well known to physicians and scientists decades before pressure began to ban its use as an octane booster in gasoline engines. In contrast, other aerosols and some wastes are not demonstrable pollutants. Two good examples are water vapor and carbon dioxide. The latter is quite controversial, but experimental evidence is lacking, only glorified weather forecasting, argument from authority and some of the shoddiest science since Lysenko seems to support this "global warming" non-sense. Ironically, water vapor has been demonstrated to do a better job than carbon dioxide at blocking the escape of infrared radiation back into space. However since free hydrogen is not freely available as a fuel nobody seems to mind its presence at the tailpipe or anywhere else. As Dillinger once said, you rob banks because that's where the money is and carbon is easy to hate because it's easy to tax and regulate. Where some Greens help to maintain socialization of costs is in their zeal to abuse regulation to control industry and "capitalism" rather than protecting the environment against measurable damage. It's one thing to protect the environment, it's quite another to use the cause of protecting the environment as a vehicle for class struggle. Class struggle creates reaction and understandable reservations, which lead to maintenance of the status quo. Protecting the environment, especially when the suggestions are based upon sound economics and genuine scientific principles, is easy to sell to most people. Even some environmentalists, for example the founder of "Earth First!", have expressed reservations about the direction that the movement has been taking in recent years. I am not quite sure where Skewbie fits in here but it's pretty darned obvious that the disasters of Prohibition and the US "War on Drugs" clearly show the limits of government regulation. Gene |
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