Slashdot Mirror

Bio-fuels have the potential to be carbon positive and improve food production in some instances. There are Bio-fuel crops that can be grown on desert margins that are to arid to produce food crops and the parts of the planet that produce no oil can be used for land reclaimation through soil improvement capturing carbon in new soil creation.

Jatropha trees grow on land too poor and arid to support food crops

Here's something for you to read.

http://www.news.utoronto.ca/inthenews/archive/2005 _06_17.html

Toronto has had record number of smog days this year. So your ideas of dropping pollution levels are certainly wrong. Smog days mean that particulate matter is passing above a threshold value at which breathing becomes difficult. Much of the smog "arrive here in prevailing winds from Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee". So it is coming from a fair distance away.

And I CAN say the US Govt isn't doing anything because it has pulled out from the Kyoto Protocol for the sake of $$$

Here

Here

and here

If you knew anything about the middle class of the Chinese, you would know that it is near impossible to own a car given the wages, the prices and the taxes. The middle class isn't the same as the middleclass in Western societies. Middleclass over there means you're just not peasant class. Which is hardly anything to be proud of.

In a global society, you can't point at others until you've pointed at yourself first.

Now, let's orbit these solar cells at 500 km altitude, i.e. a diameter of 13,756.3 km or circumference of 43,217 km. The article doesn't say how wide the ring should be, but to block 1.6% of the sunlight to a circle 12,756.3 km in diameter would require a strip about 160 km wide. That's 6.9 million square kilometers of solar cells in the full ring.

Now the silicon wafer in a solar cell is really quite thin, typically around 300 microns thick, so that's only 2.074 cubic kilometers of silicon all up. Density is 2330 kg/m3, so that's 4,833 megatonnes of silicon required, or about 0.0000005% of the earth's resources. I think we have enough.

Of course, the energy required to manufacture that sort of area of solar cells would be pretty high, but think of the returns. The earth receives about 1370 W/m2 in orbit, so multiply that by the area of cells facing the sun (2.04 million square km), and you get about 2.8 billion MW of incident radiation :-) Let's say these cells aren't particularly efficient, maybe 10%, plus transmission losses of another 70%, and you still have 84 million MW of usable energy, all day, every day.

Now, in 1997 we used 380 quadrillion BTUs, globally, or about 111 quadrillion watt-hours. That's an average consumption of 12 million MW, comfortably within our budget for some time. An energy-producing system with a capacity of 7 times the entire global requirements is worth quite a bit.

There's only one downside to this - if we divert all this energy down to earth & use it, it all ends up as heat in the end, which completely nullifies the original purpose of the ring (if you remember) of preventing global warming! D'oh!

80mpg?

This reminds me of the VW Lupo: http://www.ecoworld.org/Home/Articles2.cfm?TID=169

[QUOTE]
But there is another green car already here, although virtually unheard of in the United States. That car is the Lupo, a small four passenger car produced by Volkswagon that uses a high-technology ultra-clean burning diesel engine and gets 90 MPG.
[/QUOTE]

Peace!

can anyone say kaboom?

When asked about the possible dangers of distributing and stockpiling huge amounts of hydrogen, which is highly pressurized and explosive, Tuso downplayed the dangers. Most of the supposed problems with hydrogen are based on a public perception that it is much more dangerous that it really is. "The perception is evident when you take into account the precautions we take here," said Tuso. "The fueling station we built here cost five times what a comparable station cost in Germany. We have hydrogen alarms and air ventilation systems that are constantly running."

In reality, said Tuso, "The only real problem is the pressure that's involved, and that's not a problem with proper tanking systems." He showed us pictures of cars that had been dropped from 45', then from 90', and in all these test cases the hydrogen tank did not explode, in spite of being under pressure. Moreover, he said, "the tanks are designed to blow up, not out. If, for example, that tank back there exploded," said Tuso, referring to the hydrogen station in the lot behind the building, "90% of the debris would fall within the fence around it."

http://www.ecoworld.org/Articles/Hydrogen_fuel_car s_EW.htm

Socialism is fun. I think social programs will eventually collapse under there own weight. No socal programs seem to work very well and a lot of them fail completely. The only good way to handle stuff like this is to let people do what they want. The bigger the program the faster and more expensive the inevitable failure.

I'd say it's successful in Switzerland because you don't know all the facts of what is really going on.

If it I had it my way, there would be no forced recycling programs. If you want to recycle you can. Our family used to recycle aluminum and scrap metal. Once a month or so we'd haul our garbage to the dump and get a few bucks in the process.

I refer you to these links:
Recycling Myths

Jane Shaw

CO2 metric tons/capita in 1996
Germany = 10,51
France = 6,20
USA = 19,99

In other words, the US has almost twice the CO2 output per person when compared to Germany.

As a side note: I can kind of agree that the Kyoto treaty is "designed to hurt the US economy" as some say. With pollution numbers like that, of course the US economy will be hurt! "Made your own bed..." and all that.

Googling a bit gives us the statistics of West Virginia Coal association (around 164 million tons in 2003), and trace info on west virginian trace amounts of uranium in coal (1.59ppm mean value). This might be a small fraction, but it's probably accurate.

So we have 1.59 mol uranium per million mol coal. I'll also assume that a ton is a metric ton and that coal exists entirely of carbon.

164M tons at 12.0107 g/mol gives us 13654491411824 mol. At 1.59ppm, we have 21710641 mol of uranium. At 238.0289 g/mol, we get 5167132640g = 5167133kg = 5167 tons.

Looks about right. Now let's do a rougher world estimates. This site says coal accounts for 93 Quadrillion BTUs. The number of BTUs per ton of coal varies, but according to Wikipedia's Coal entry, it's around 20M BTU/ton, so 4650M tons of coal. We'll still assume 1.59ppm U. Doing the same as above gives us 146515653621g=146515 ton. Since we used estimates and estimates of estimates, we'll just say "over 100,000 tons".

The usage of uranium? 42,500 tonnes. I suppose that's different fron tons, but screw that, I'm tired.

So yes, if my calculations hold, it's true. There is a lot more uranium in the coal than what we mine.

The UN did not find any weapons of mass destruction, and therefore voted against attacking Iraq... Bush did it anyway.

The US helped work and develop the Kyoto Treaty (the agreement to lower pollution internationally), however once Bush got into power, he scrapped it. (Some good info on that here)

For the last few years, there has been talk about building the "Missle Defense Shield" around the United States & Canada. This of course, would (and probably will) break the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

If the United States can break a treaty at will, can it be trusted to respect others? Not to mention, can it hold others accountable if they break treaties that serve U.S. interests? For these reasons, I don't feel that the US government can be trusted to respect any kind of law/treaty that treats the moon, mars, and other celestial bodies as un-claimable. Any comments?

These get pretty old.