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amazon is a private corporation. they are a private entity. they are allowed to do whatever they wish to do with their property. they may choose to serve whomever they want and refuse whomever they want.

even if they monopolize their field to a great extent alone, or with a few other 'competitors', and therefore their choices would basically mean what citizens will be able to do and what they can not, in that field of life, its still their right, because, well, they are 'private', its 'their' property and they are free to do whatever they wish with it. actually, any corporation has those rights, even if they are as big as a fscking country or biger.

http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0718-worlds_largest.html

or, in other words, its naivete, and stupidity.

So, this is what wall street, the mouthpiece of private interests, the lapdog of corporations, is doing.

it passed the stage of whether it being something good or bad, as you see, now they are posing it as questions like 'is it REALLY needed'.

all it is aimed at is, rekindling the fire in the minds of the fools that believe that there can be 'competition' in a conglomerate world in which more than 50% of the top economic entities of the world, are corporations even before countries. http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0718-worlds_largest.html

these corporations are basically GOVERNMENTS. they are bigger than governments. their reach, their effect is much bigger than governments. you can go around and buy innumerable goods and services in a state, and yet still not leave the domain of a holding that maintains a few megacorporations that dominate those sectors. and you wouldnt even know, because of proxy shareholderships, stakeholderships, co-branding, branding and so on.

and there are idiots who believe that 'free market' will handle that. yeah, it handles that. every 15-20 years, when some new technology comes, free market gives a chance for nobodies or small time companies to go big. like in the case of internet. with that, maybe it can be possible for a corporation that is not already owned by an established conglomerate may come up and get some market share, and you, as the consumer, may have 'choice'. but when dust settles, the big established conglomerates will move in with their MEGA capital, and consolidate the sector again. just like how it happened with isps. end of line sharing regulation ended in 2006, mega corps like at&t, comcast started to consolidate the internet, and, ironically, immediately at the same time they started attacking net neutrality. see how that works ?

no, free market wont avail you until a new technology is found. the established powers in a capitalist economy is always bigger than any upcoming competitor can handle. competitors are either destroyed, or bought, or subdued and integrated into the existing hierarchy. it is the way of things in situations where the society allows a dog eat dog situation. the strong subdues the weak.

see, there is THAT much lobbying, even though it is fairly well understood by now that no net regulation will mean walled gardens. there are still shitty pieces like this coming up in mouthpiece conglomerate media like wall street. you think they are doing all that effort for nothing ? you think they will not wall you off ?

you think 'competition' will happen ? lets see how will it happen in this situation http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/04/18/1318210

but actually, yeah, competition might happen. it may take 5 to 10 years for an acceptable competitor to come up and allow you a non walled garden choice. but in the meantime, your kids will grow up, you will have aged a decade, in a world in which you are not able to decide what you can do on the internet, but some corporate appointed administration.

its private censorship, for profit. its worse than any other kind of censorship. even the censorship in repressive countries, have some ideology behind them, right or wrong, an idea. but, in the case of this kind of private censorship, your life gets restricted for the mere sake of private profits of a small group of individuals.

yeah. net neutrality is needed. it is what made internet what it is in the first place. what is not needed is, lapdog publications like wall street trying to do shitty propaganda, and fools believing some school of economics which even the most prominent figure of that school have given up. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/24/economics-creditcrunch-federal-reserve-greenspan

The fact is, that within the continental USA, because we are electrified, the ONLY places that Solar pays for itself is on extreme rural areas

The fact is is solar may be more competitive if it received as much in subsidies as conventional energy gets. Coal receive billions of dollars in subsidies. Add in external costs, such as co2 and mercury emissions, and coal will cost more. Require nuclear power to buy it's own insurance, get rid of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, and make companies pay their own disposal costs and nuclear power will cost more too.

Between 2002 and 2008 coal received around $17 billion in subsidies. Obama's 2011 budget proposal even cuts coal subsidies $2.3 billion over the next decade. But it's hard to see exactly how much subsidies are, as State coal subsidies and US subsidies of oil and coal more than double the subsidies of renewable energy says, it's hard to add up all the subsidies because while some are purely handouts on taxpayer dollars others are deductions on taxes owed. And nuclear power would not exist without subsidies, it is Hooked on Subsidies:

"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."

Falcon

Have we not learned from Australia?

We've given Australia plague after plague after plague. From rabbits to buffalo and from camels to toads. And they didn't even keep any captive Jewish slaves. Introducing new species as a way of killing a current one is rarely a good idea.

What is much, much more effective is introducing large numbers of sterile animals of the same group into the wild though.

This seems to be a key point that is obfuscated or ignored by deniers. That there are gigantic sinks of fossil carbon, in addition to the fossil fuels we bring up, that have been sequestered safely under the conditions prevelant during all of human civilization. Many of these are predicted to, or have already begun being released, as global temperatures rise. Positive feedback means the more it happens, the more it will happen, until the system spirals wildly out of control.

Example of this are the permafrost areas at the edge of the Northern polar region, the Methane Clathrates, reversal of the Amazon rain forest from a carbon sink to a source, and the greater absorption of heat from sunlight as melting ice and snow changes Earth's albedo.

And here is what is meant by irreversible--that these feedback loops will accelerate and cause massive disruption in time scales directly relevant to human civilization--i.e. the next few centuries, at least. Deniers like to bring up crap about there having been massive changes in temp all throughout the billions of years of the fossil record, so we should all relax. That is true, but in each case, these changes caused massive dislocation or extinction of the dominant plant and animal species of that time.

We're talking about what happens to this particular race of animals that is here spending its time reading and writing Slashdot postings. It is disingenuous for deniers to claim some lofty halo of wisdom that transcends mere human-centric concerns, especially when, for the most vociferous of them (such as the paid lackeys of Exxon-Mobile), they are more concerned with making a buck in the next fiscal quarter than they are about the concerns of even the humans alive today, much less those not yet born.

While many of your points are correct and the person you are replying to is a bit of an ass, let's not forget that these cuts occurred under Bush. See for example http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0502-aaas.html. Part of the logic here seemed to almost be "I don't believe that climate change is a problem or is occurring and if I cut your funding you won't be able to show that it is bad." Or something very close to that. This particular problem really can be blamed on the Bush admin.

You see what you did there -- you implied that I only support the status quo when I've said nothing of the kind. Does it make it easier to write someone off when you can put words in their mouth and paint a negative picture of them in your mind?

Yes, it is, now go away. There's no reasoning with you when you can't even understand that climate research does not have to be an exact science to still be accurate in its overall predictions. These guys aren't trying to figure out if it will be raining next month, dolt. They are assessing general trends and patterns. As for nuclear energy, I do not object to looking into using it as an energy source if we were to use any of the more recent and advanced designs. Indeed, that is one of the points of the carbon tax system, to move away from forms of energy that would impose such a burden.

Again, in the words of Charlie Booker, go away.

Actually, he did eventually listen. I noticed he started talking about it after he started talking about dependence on foreign oil. I think he saw it as a convenient way to help us get off oil. He also created a plan to stop CO2 emissions from increasing by 2025, which included building more nuclear power plants, but Democrats opposed the plan vocally. Too bad.

This is one of the reasons, I don't like climate change deniers, you keep repeating the same tired old falsehoods as if they are facts because you happen to like them.

The planet is still warming, there is no cooling trend, just an unusually cool year. We are at a solar minimum at the moment so when you reduce one factor that warms the planet you slow the rate of increase, but it is still increasing. According to NASA, 2009 was the second hottest year on record. The "earth is cooling" meme is just a stupid graph trick. You pick the highest point on the graph and draw a line towards some subsequent point and say "look things are decreasing", but that's not real statistics. You're suppose to fit your slope line to the entire graph, not two arbitrary points. When you properly fit the graph, temperature is still rising, though at a pace that is slightly below the predicted level per decade (0.18C for the last decade versus 0.2C). Mind you the predicted number is the average per decade, and will be both higher and lower on individual decades. If the solar minimum ends soon, we will likely experience more than 0.2C warming over the next decade.

According the the leaked emails "we can't explain" why tree aren't growing at the rate they're supposed to be growing. As it turns out, particulate pollution has darkened the world so less sunlight is reaching the ground levels, for example, which may be a contributing factor for the discrepancy. That particulate has also had a cooling effect on the world which has lessened the amount of warming that has occurred.

Mongabay.com is considered a leading source of information on tropical forests by some of the world's top ecologists and conservationists.

I doubt they are a 'right wing tool', & they are using DOE EIA numbers. Accordingly:

According to the Energy Information Administration, after China and the United States, among major polluters only India is expected to have significant growth of emissions over the next 20 years.

According to the Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Information Administration (EIA), after China and the United States, among major polluters only India is expected to have significant growth of emissions over the next 20 years.

There really are some studies suggesting small amounts of mercury, and other heavy metals, may be healthy.

Hormetic Effects of Heavy Metals in Aquatic Snails: Is a Little Bit of Pollution Good?
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y54l3x43016p6530/

The Changing Science of Toxicology -- Hormesis Makes a Comeback
http://www.mongabay.com/external/toxicology_1203.htm

Wikipedia entry regarding hormesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

Ron

Because totalitarian governments have such a good record in environmental matters.

Every year for the last ten years has been setting record temperatures.

and the counter claim was

Its been cooling a bit for the last 8 years

so out of our sample of 10, we have 8 conflicting with the original claim, then yes I would say that is statistically significant. You could pull back farther into the past (I have no idea what the weather patterns were 40 years ago) but the problem with that is the claim that we dirty Americans with our pollution are causing the change. 100 years ago CO2 emissions were small compared to what they are today. So we have this problem were the weather patterns were doing whatever they were doing 40 years ago. For the sake of simplicity lets say they were going up at a slow rate. It couldn't have been too fast or we would already be baking compared to what it was in 1900. CO2 emissions were rising too, although relative to today, still pretty low. Then a few decades ago CO2 starts climbing rapidly due to global development. CO2 today is likely a few magnitude higher than it was back then, yet despite a spike in CO2 emissions, recent years show a reversal of the heating trend.

Taken all together, it is a fallacy to disregard recent temperatures as being statistically unimportant because they are a minority. Factoring in other information, such as the amount of CO2 released in each of those years, gives them increased importance. PS here is a nice graph showing CO2 estimates over the last few centuries. I have no idea of its accuracy. I just pulled it from a google search http://www.mongabay.com/images/2006/graphs/co2_global_1750-2000.jpg Interestingly, the same place had another chart showing the past few years and future estimates by country. http://photos.mongabay.com/09/forecast_co2_line.jpg Seems the Chinese are the ones we should be worried about, not us fat Americans with our SUVs.

Every year for the last ten years has been setting record temperatures.

and the counter claim was

Its been cooling a bit for the last 8 years

so out of our sample of 10, we have 8 conflicting with the original claim, then yes I would say that is statistically significant. You could pull back farther into the past (I have no idea what the weather patterns were 40 years ago) but the problem with that is the claim that we dirty Americans with our pollution are causing the change. 100 years ago CO2 emissions were small compared to what they are today. So we have this problem were the weather patterns were doing whatever they were doing 40 years ago. For the sake of simplicity lets say they were going up at a slow rate. It couldn't have been too fast or we would already be baking compared to what it was in 1900. CO2 emissions were rising too, although relative to today, still pretty low. Then a few decades ago CO2 starts climbing rapidly due to global development. CO2 today is likely a few magnitude higher than it was back then, yet despite a spike in CO2 emissions, recent years show a reversal of the heating trend.

Taken all together, it is a fallacy to disregard recent temperatures as being statistically unimportant because they are a minority. Factoring in other information, such as the amount of CO2 released in each of those years, gives them increased importance. PS here is a nice graph showing CO2 estimates over the last few centuries. I have no idea of its accuracy. I just pulled it from a google search http://www.mongabay.com/images/2006/graphs/co2_global_1750-2000.jpg Interestingly, the same place had another chart showing the past few years and future estimates by country. http://photos.mongabay.com/09/forecast_co2_line.jpg Seems the Chinese are the ones we should be worried about, not us fat Americans with our SUVs.

For more on the Amazon http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/leakegate.php#more
and http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0204-amazongate.html

An analysis on Himalayas http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/02/anatomy-of-ipccs-himalayan-glacier-year-2035-mess/

How did that Kyoto protocol go? It didn't work, and it didn't have the desired affect

The EU15 are on target to meet the Kyoto limits

Though I disagree with some of what GP says I have to agree with him here. Europe may of reduced it's own emissions, but it shifted the emissions elsewhere. The report you provided the link to even says the EU "promotion of biofuels in transport" was part of how emissions were reduced. Switching to biofuels only switched where the emissions happens. The third biggest emitter of Greenhouse Gases is now Indonesia. How did that happen? In order to feed Europe with those biofuels forests were burned down and wetland drained to plant oil palm plantations in Indonesia which are used to make biofuels for Europe. Europe is just as responsible for this as if they produced the emissions there.

Falcon

There were reports at the time, that the recent Station Fire (the one that threatened Mount Wilson Observatory) put our more CO2 every two to three days as all the cars in the US do in a year. Of course, the AGW people either ignore or deny this because it doesn't fit their dogma.

And how was the fire started? By humans? Indonesia became the third largest CO2 emitter, after China who passed the US last year, and the US. How did they do it? By burning down forests and draining wetlands so that oil palm tree plantations could be planted. They want to feed Europe's biofuels hunger. All Europe did was shift production of GHGs. And by doing so they are endangering Orangutans in Borneo. And of course I expect others to deny that because it doesn't fit their dogma.

Oh, and from 2007: "Top 11 Warmest Years On Record Have All Been In Last 13 Years".

Falcon

There were reports at the time, that the recent Station Fire (the one that threatened Mount Wilson Observatory) put our more CO2 every two to three days as all the cars in the US do in a year. Of course, the AGW people either ignore or deny this because it doesn't fit their dogma.

And how was the fire started? By humans? Indonesia became the third largest CO2 emitter, after China who passed the US last year, and the US. How did they do it? By burning down forests and draining wetlands so that oil palm tree plantations could be planted. They want to feed Europe's biofuels hunger. All Europe did was shift production of GHGs. And by doing so they are endangering Orangutans in Borneo. And of course I expect others to deny that because it doesn't fit their dogma.

Oh, and from 2007: "Top 11 Warmest Years On Record Have All Been In Last 13 Years".

Falcon

• Snow Leopard in Afghanistan
• Snow Leopard Diary
• LEOPARD PICTURES: Rare Snow Cats Caught by Camera Traps
• Terich Valley: Snow Leopard Survival Issues
• Central Park Zoo visitors go wild for new snow leopards

Are you just making this stuff up?
NASA's Goddard Institute ranks July 2009 as the 2nd warmest July globally ever (right behind July 1998). http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1285&tstamp=
And I don't know what 'scientists' you're talking about, but 97% of climatologists agree that global warming exists, and is being influenced by humans. http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0122-climate.html
I've seen the 'petitions' put out by conservative think tanks asking 'scientists' who disagree with global warming to put their names on a list. Their definition of 'scientist' is anyone with a Bachelor of Science. Sorry...but if you're an econ major, you're opinion on global warming pretty much holds no weight. I'll stick with what the climatologists have to say, since they're the ones who would know.

Plastic is made from hydrocarbons, just hydrogen and carbon.

http://www.ider.herts.ac.uk/school/courseware/materials/plastics/polymer.html

There are

And bacteria which feed on propane and butane

There is even the bacterium Bacillus cereus DQ01, which has evolved the ability to feed on the hydrocarbon n-hexadecane.

"Lovins said the reason for the decline is cost: on an even playing field with no hidden subsidies, nuclear is simply more expensive than other options, especially co-generation."

"Nuclear is dying of incurable attack of market forces despite what the industry wants you to believe," he remarked, adding that micropower offer more climate solution per dollar spent than nuclear."

http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0607-nuclear_debate.html

And my favourite: the Nuclear Wonderland! (Now a tourist attraction).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300

Environmentally nuclear is vastly better than all the other serious energy sources.

Prove it.

Now that I asked fro proof I'll provide my own evidence which supports my position as well as contradicts yours. "Report: Wind the Best Energy; Nuclear, Coal and Ethanol the Worst". "For Cheap Clean Energy, Go Geothermal, Study Says". "Oregon Geothermal Energy = Baseload Energy".

Wind and solar are not serious energy sources as is hinted by how much subsidies they need

By that criteria nuclear power is not a serious energy source because it needs massive subsidies. Not only does it need guarantied loans but it also needs it's liability limited and government disposal of it's waste. All alternative energy sources put together including geothermal, solar, tidal, wind, even biofuels only get a fraction of the subsidies nuclear power gets. "While renewable energy may require subsidies for the immediate future, nuclear power needs subsidies forever." From the Financial Times:

"'But those hoping for handouts would be disappointed. The "incentives" for nuclear and carbon capture and storage are only there to "help a nascent sector grow', he said."

"We are not going to achieve a competitive [nuclear] sector by handing out subsidies... we are not in the business of giving out subsidies. We are in the business of maintaining a level playing field."

"It's telling that the 'level playing field' the industry wants and the one the government wants bear little resemblance to each other."

Something is still going to need to provide the power to run the aluminium foundries and nuclear is the cleanest, safest long term solution for that.

Neither you nor anyone else has proven that nuclear power is clean yet I have provided evidence solar and wind are clean. Such as 2 of the links I provide above. Studies linked to say both wind and geothermal and cheaper and cleaner than nuclear. Now will you provide links to evidence says nuclear is cleaner?

Lets run through the check lists.

I provide evidence that this list is wrong, where is yours saying you're right? And for one on that list, "Wind is nice but it's unpredictable and bigger wind farms kill migrating birds", buildings cats, and cars kill more birds than turbines.

Try again.

Together they can never provide more than 20% of the grids needs simply for stability reasons. This is pretty much a hard cap, once you get more than that from unpredictable sources rolling blackouts start to become a real problem.

So you know more about solar power than the writers of the SciAm article "A Solar Grand Plan", and know more about wind power than the writers of a new study in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science" as well as those who created the Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States at the National Renewable Energy Lab? What is your degree in and where did you get it so that you're smarter than they are? The SciAm article says that by 2050 solar energy can provide 69% of the US's electrical needs. The National Acad

When there is more CO2, plants do better.

Some plants grow better with higher CO2 levels, like poison ivy. However other plants grow slower. There are winners and losers wherein some plants grow faster and others slower under high CO2 levels. The same is true under higher temperatures.

Oh, BTW, "The jolt of carbon dioxide also boosted the most-toxic forms of poison ivy's rash-raising oil".

So, please, stop trying to insult the intelligence of people on slashdot until AFTER you have educated yourself about how the world works.

I suggest you do the same.

Falcon

You mean like this study. Let me quote from it:

"Most studies have looked at the effects of carbon dioxide on plants in pots or on very simple ecosystems and concluded that plants are going to grow faster in the future," said Field, co-author of the Science study. "We got exactly the same results when we applied carbon dioxide alone, but when we factored in realistic treatments -- warming, changes in nitrogen deposition, changes in precipitation -- growth was actually suppressed."

In other words, higher levels of CO2 really did cause all plants to grow more, until they started screwing with other environmental variables based on what they THINK a future atmosphere (and temperature) will be like. In other words, they screwed with the gas and baked the plants in the oven until they stopped growing so they can say, "See, GW is bad!"

So when you say, I should do the same, I already did.

When there is more CO2, plants do better.

Some plants grow better with higher CO2 levels, like poison ivy. However other plants grow slower. There are winners and losers wherein some plants grow faster and others slower under high CO2 levels. The same is true under higher temperatures.

Oh, BTW, "The jolt of carbon dioxide also boosted the most-toxic forms of poison ivy's rash-raising oil".

So, please, stop trying to insult the intelligence of people on slashdot until AFTER you have educated yourself about how the world works.

I suggest you do the same.

Falcon

However, the claim that dinosaurs could have coexisted with humans has evidence (google: Mokele-Mbembe, Cadborosaurus, Kongamoto).

I googled all of those. They're all claims of seeing "dinosaurs" in the present day (or near present day) with no substantial evidence. There's no body/remains (unlike, say Coelacanth) to test. Not even a few clear photos/videos to add weight to the claim. If you call these sort of claims Scientific Evidence, you might as well allow evidence in a murder trial that my friend's uncle's cousin once overheard the defendant say he'd kill the guy.

This isn't to say that it is completely impossible for these animals to exist. Just that the stories aren't supported by any real evidence. And science needs real evidence, not wild tales of monsters.

On the contrary, ethanol as a fuel is not only a solution, it's a mature technology.

What's wrong with your statement is that ethanol is mostly coming from unsustainable feedstocks. When they start making it from algae produced during the cleaning of dirty water (alongside biofuel and fertilizer) instead of corn needed for food for humans. Or perhaps it's only that the users of Ethanol are immature? Show me some practical cellulosic ethanol production and that your fuel has come from sustainable sources, and I'll pipe down. A bit.

Any gasoline engine will run, with reduced performance, on ethanol. Tuning a car to run on ethanol is a relatively simple task.

Current gasoline engines suck. Ethanol has a lower energy density than Gasoline. The tradeoff just isn't there. Meanwhile Chrysler built several Turbine-powered cars in the 1960s and they had but two major flaws: One, they wore out their drivetrains, a flaw which can be eliminated by the use of a series hybrid-electric power system; Two, they were noisy and had a lot of hot exhaust, a flaw which can be mitigated by reducing the mass of the vehicle overall and using a hybrid power system, enabling the use of a substantially smaller turbine. Such an engine could be built to run on nearly any fuel, although certain different classes of engine might only be capable of burning certain ranges of fuels.

To convert a whole country to ethanol, as was done in Brazil in the late 1970s, is simple.

If your feedstock crops are grown on oil, as ours are, this is really not viable. It's also not viable if you depend on slash-and-burn Agriculture. Interesting that you mention Brazil, huh? Thanks for that one.

I don't really disagree that Hydrogen is not any kind of answer, at least not a complete one. I would also say that it's simply not useful to us as an energy storage medium right now, although it may well be at some point in the future. But I would also say that increasing the demand for Ethanol when the increased demand is already causing new environmental problems and is likely to cause far more would be almost as shortsighted as continuing to pump oil out of the ground and release its carbon into the atmosphere. Again, I propose AIWPS which solves this problem (producing feedstocks useful for the production of both ethanol and biodiesel) while cleaning water and fixing carbon. (Some percentage of the carbon will end up in the portion of the stock not useful for making fuel, which is fertilizer; some percentage of that carbon will also be fixed in the soil.) Increasing ethanol consumption as things stand now will only cause more harm.

There is a definite equivalence if you knew how to use Google.

It is hyperbole, and it's completely unnecessary given that there are in fact plenty of people who claim that global warming will cause a massive amount of disaster in the future. (B) is thus not by necessity hyperbole, nor is (A).

You should stick to hammering away on the Al Gore thing, because the sibling and I don't agree on that. When you try to take the argument as a whole it only takes two Google searches to show that there is an equivalence between elements of the climate change movement and the radically religious.

Corn Ethanol? uses more energy to produce than it provides.

No, corn ethanol's EROEI, Energy Returned on Energy Invested, is about 1.5 or 1.6 to 1 or 1.2 or 1.5 to 1, about the same as oil sands. While it does make more energy than the energy required to make it, it doesn't even double the energy. Brazil gets from 8 to 10 units per unit of energy used from sugarcane.

PV

PV's produce as much energy in 5 years as it takes to make. PVs are warrantied for from 10 to 30 years depending on the manufacturer, so over their life they produce more energy than they need for manufacturing.

Wind - sure if you're lucky to live where it's windy and you use energy in the spring and fall (you don't).

Wind blows year round not just in the spring and fall. Wind also blows in a lot of places. As the Picken's Plan details the Rocky Mountains alone have enough potential wind energy to provide the 48 continuous states in the US with energy. That's not all though, the Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States gives wind's potential in other parts of the US. The Pacific Coast from British Columbia to Southern California has an abundance of potential, along with Southern CA eastward to Texas. In the east the Appalachias and Cascades have good potential as it does off the coast between Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras.

Falcon

Corn Ethanol? uses more energy to produce than it provides.

No, corn ethanol's EROEI, Energy Returned on Energy Invested, is about 1.5 or 1.6 to 1 or 1.2 or 1.5 to 1, about the same as oil sands. While it does make more energy than the energy required to make it, it doesn't even double the energy. Brazil gets from 8 to 10 units per unit of energy used from sugarcane.

PV

PV's produce as much energy in 5 years as it takes to make. PVs are warrantied for from 10 to 30 years depending on the manufacturer, so over their life they produce more energy than they need for manufacturing.

Wind - sure if you're lucky to live where it's windy and you use energy in the spring and fall (you don't).

Wind blows year round not just in the spring and fall. Wind also blows in a lot of places. As the Picken's Plan details the Rocky Mountains alone have enough potential wind energy to provide the 48 continuous states in the US with energy. That's not all though, the Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States gives wind's potential in other parts of the US. The Pacific Coast from British Columbia to Southern California has an abundance of potential, along with Southern CA eastward to Texas. In the east the Appalachias and Cascades have good potential as it does off the coast between Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras.

Falcon

I'm beginning to wonder just what IS in those deadzones.....

Little to no oxygen. Which I think is a more immediate problem than acidification.

If we have documentation about alkaline runoff - there ought to be more documentation about acid runoff.

It's not so much there would be acid runoff, not because of CO2 at least. CO2 is an acidic oxide, which water will absorb. On land though plants will use it to grow.

Oh, something I just recalled. You know how some people say "let's plant more trees"? While CO2 boosts the growth of some trees, it slows the growth of other trees. And guess what plant loves CO2? Poison ivy. It grows faster with higher CO2 levels.

Falcon

It was the old wind turbines that had smaller blades that killed birds. Today's turbines have bigger blades and spin slower.

The birds are an integral part of the ecosystem.

Cats are also part of the ecosystem yet they kill more birds than wind turbines do. According to this building are a big killer of birds.

Falcon

The elephant-nose fish has a brain to body ratio higher than ours. I for one welcome etc etc etc.

http://news.mongabay.com/2008/1012-frogs.html Strange, and I thought the big threat was coming from the fungi that are devastating species. Good thing they tied the threat to global warming, now we can all do something about it! ::smirk::

Recovery questions.

Q: What is your mother's maiden name?

A: Smith
Incorrect
A: Johnson
Incorrect
A: Williams
Incorrect
A: Jones
Incorrect
A: Brown
Please enter your new password.....

http://names.mongabay.com/most_common_surnames.htm

Not to mention anybody who knows you will know things like "What was the make of your first car?"
Recovery questions are the least secure part of most website accounts.

In a Brazilian movie called Manda Bala . Abductions are a thriving industry in São Paulo, Brazil, and the movie focuses on the common practice of cutting off all or part of a hostage's ear (or finger) in order to expedite a ransom payment.

It is a generally thought provoking movie, with several memorable interviews, and at least some discussion of root causes of the problem (corruption in government among them, although the government of Luiz "Lula" da Silva may be making progress against it, despite so far losing the battle to protect protected areas of Amazon wilderness - a problem also intimately connected with corruption).

However the movie is deeply marred by the inclusion of the anonymous São Paulo businessman, "Mr M" - a self-obsessed, vacuous nitwit, apparently American and perhaps a conveniently interviewable associate of the American filmmaker? whose ego was no doubt unduly boosted by his part in the film. Unfortunately, whatever this individual had to say about being "chipped" is unlikely to betray any insights: In a city known for violent carjackings, this guy's response was to bulletproof his ostentatious Porsche, instead of simply driving a less conspicuous car. I stopped caring about his fate very early into the film; one is tempted to say he need not worry about being kidnapped as nobody would miss him to pay a ransom.

I'm not sure how eating cows increases the methane they produces, or how land has to be cleared for grazing, cows live on land that is already grass. No point are all terrible.

Seriously - do a quick google search and you'll find out that all of your questions are quickly & easily answered.

Here's some links to get you started.

Cattle Methane

Cattle Landclearing

For christsakes, don't be so goddamn clueless when you're trying to poke fun at others...

No, it's even worse (depending on your point of view). There won't be an "eco-fascism" phase, because with more than 50% of the world population urbanised, nobody remembers what the environment is supposed to look like.

All of the "exploitable" environment (the Amazon, most other remaining forests, the Arctic, Alaska, and anywhere else you can think of with any kind of economic value) will be razed/drilled/destroyed, which is going to result in further acceleration of habitat and species loss. Because urbanised people can't grow their own food, this is going to exponentially raise the destructive pressure on the environment outside cities to keep everyone fed, and their cars powered, etc.

This is linked to increasing pollution of all kinds (air, water, garbage, etc) and the "environment" as some of us remember it is purely history.

Our grandchildren will inherit something unrecognisable to us (there are already thousands of species and places that existed when you and I were young, that exist no more). Television and Hollywood, with the complicity of the great globalisers, has trained the world into perfect materialists (mini-Americans) who value convenience and profit above all else; for whom greed is the primary motivator; and for whom waste, pollution, injustice - if noticed at all - are merely acceptable side-effects of a selfish way of life. We have failed every human who lived to defend Nature, and every human who will follow who will never know it as we inherited it; and we have failed every other species on the planet. Even the trees.

No, it's even worse (depending on your point of view). There won't be an "eco-fascism" phase, because with more than 50% of the world population urbanised, nobody remembers what the environment is supposed to look like.

All of the "exploitable" environment (the Amazon, most other remaining forests, the Arctic, Alaska, and anywhere else you can think of with any kind of economic value) will be razed/drilled/destroyed, which is going to result in further acceleration of habitat and species loss. Because urbanised people can't grow their own food, this is going to exponentially raise the destructive pressure on the environment outside cities to keep everyone fed, and their cars powered, etc.

This is linked to increasing pollution of all kinds (air, water, garbage, etc) and the "environment" as some of us remember it is purely history.

Our grandchildren will inherit something unrecognisable to us (there are already thousands of species and places that existed when you and I were young, that exist no more). Television and Hollywood, with the complicity of the great globalisers, has trained the world into perfect materialists (mini-Americans) who value convenience and profit above all else; for whom greed is the primary motivator; and for whom waste, pollution, injustice - if noticed at all - are merely acceptable side-effects of a selfish way of life. We have failed every human who lived to defend Nature, and every human who will follow who will never know it as we inherited it; and we have failed every other species on the planet. Even the trees.

I would hold that the Exxon Valdez incident argues FOR drilling ANWR. Just about everything that could go wrong did. But today you could wander that area and never realize anything untoward had ever occurred.

You wouldn't notice anything unless you were a fisherman who had his life destroyed by Exxon Valdez. More than 10 years later (this from 1999) the fishing industry still hadn't recovered. People in Alaska are still (wrote this February) waiting for compensation, 20 years later. So far the fishermen haven't seen a dime from Exxon. Even today studies are finding wildlife is still adversely effected.

If you think everything is the same for those who had to live through Exxon Valdez you're obviously living in your own fantasy world.

Oil is not a long-term solution.

Agreed. But it IS the only short term solution anyone is proposing.

Drilling for oil off shore is a short term solution? Yea, while people are talking about it, not one of them has said anything about how long it will take before the first drop of oil pumped will end up in someone's gas tank. I surely doubt that will happen one year, forget one month, after exploration starts. The "Wall Street Journal", which is not an environmentalist group, says offshore drilling "won't affect physical supplies of oil." Here's an iteresting quote from Fadel Gheit, oil and gas analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. Equity Capital Markets Division: "If we were to drill today, realistically speaking, we should not expect a barrel of oil coming out of this new resource for three years, maybe even five years, so let's not kid ourselves". Oh, and don't blame Democrats for the offshore drilling ban, as president George H.W. Bush imposed an executive ban in 1990.

Why waste another dime on trying to extend the supply.

Because we need energy NOW.

Yea, right, if we start drilling now we can pump oil now. HAHA!!! See above quotes.

Falcon

Planktos went under, but didn't Climos take it's place?

Iron seeding. Generates algae blooms and feeds the fish and sucks down carbon.

yeah that will have a SLIGHT effect on ocean ecosystems /sarcasm

pH (cough) pH

in related news, looks like those guys who were going to seed dead zones with iron and create algal blooms to suck up co2 gave up the ghost:

http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0219-planktos.html

Or some countries are plowing all their plants for farming, housing, fuel, or even just to make work.

And remember how McDonalds makes burgers so cheap. That Brazillian rainforest made way for their margins.

Most US citizens would stop griping about how bad we are regarding fighting our pollution if they could see a third world country. I went to Venuezuela for a week (mid-90s). Cars belched smog that we haven't seen since the 70s, people threw the trash out their windows and the beach was contaminated by human feces. No, we're not perfect, but if anyone needs to be forced to clean up their act it should be countries like this. But they (the UN or other governing bodies) won't go after the real polluters, they just want to come after us and our deep pockets.

Unfortunately, our country is effected by the pollution cause by others. In the spring/fall the southwest, particulary Texas, gets hit by pollution coming from Mexico and Central America because of agricultural fires at planting time.

http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1115-forests.html

Bullshit. The US ADDS 614 square miles of forest per year. The old-growth forests are going down, true. But they're only old growth because they've been growing for a long time... we're starting the new old-growth forests now.

SO the amount in the air goes up.

      And plants everywhere are happy. There are studies that show that increased atmospheric CO2 is sequestered more quickly by plants. After all, if you eat more burgers you're bound to get fat. Feed the plants more CO2 (while avoiding toxic levels), and they will find a way to use it.

B) This is about oil reserves INSIDE THE UNITED STATES

Actually, the Bakken formation extends into Canada, too.

The Bakken has a rather interesting history. Estimates on how much oil it produced have varied a lot. Back in the '70s, they thought it only had about 10B barrels -- which is a lot, but not when it's spread out over such a huge formation. To make matters worse, the formation is a dozen meters or so thick in most places. All together, recovery rates were expected to be 1-3%, and expensive at that. Not many takers.

Things have changed. After Price's paper that predicted over 400 billion barrels, computer simulations have been developed; the latest runs expect 200-300 billion barrels. Furthermore, horizontal drilling means that you can enter the thin formation and then run along it; this is what is used in the very successful Elm Coulee field.

The Bakken is just one minimally tapped deposit. There's absolutely no shortage of recoverable oil in the world. The problem is the consequences of recovering and burning it all.

C) The US is moving to 'alternative fuels'. The debate is not over whether or not to, but how big a priority it is.

Are you kidding? There's a huge debate over whether or not to, especially after the most recent papers suggesting that even sugarcane ethanol leads to more greenhouse gasses than gasoline. Let alone the fact that there's a widely growing acceptance that, despite the momentum, corn ethanol is a huge blunder. There's the food-for-fuel competition (food prices are up 40%, mostly from fuel prices and alternative fuel pressure). Now, I think it's good that corn prices aren't as artificially low as they used to be, but now they're artificially high, and everything is getting pushed up by the increased demand for biofuel land -- even other staples like wheat.

And what about cellulosic ethanol, this supposed panacea? This is one thing that drives me crazy. Look at how most big cellulosic ethanol companies are making the stuff. They turn the biomass into syngas (CO+H2) by burning it in a poorly oxygenated environment, and then use a complex, inefficient biological or catalytic process to convert it into ethanol. Well, here's the thing: we've been making syngas into *gasoline* for most of a century. That's how Nazi Germany and Apartheid-era South Africa kept their engines running (excepting, in the case of Germany, after we bombed most of their facilities). And it's a relatively efficient -- 70% or so. So, instead of making a fuel that we're *already set up for*, we're instead making a *less dense* fuel that we can only use in *limited quantities* in most cars and *can't ship in our pipelines*. Why? Because "cellulosic gasoline" isn't a buzzword. Nobody likes the word "gasoline", but lots of people like the word "ethanol". You get more investment, you get more tax breaks, and on and on. So the inferior solution gets chosen.

Anyways, if you want to *actually* clean up your act, either increase your MPG or switch your miles over to electricity (the significantly higher thermodynamic efficiencies of power plants mean that even dirty power plants run a car cleaner than a gasoline engine -- plus, electricity is a lot easier to clean up). Biofuels are an "easy" solution that isn't really a solution at all.

Yeah, the RIAA sucks. They're predatory. But they can't hold a candle to the tobacco industry.

Read this.

This is an industry that tries to hook people by marketing to children, adding adjuncts to tobacco so it's more addictive, and putting 4.9 million people per year in an early grave. By a painful death too - I got to watch my father die from cancer. It's horrific. And these people do it to millions every year.

For money.

And they're not the only ones. Big business has been dumping toxic waste next to day care centers, clear cutting rainforests, and blocking access to AIDS medications for a long time now.

You will never see the evil that human beings are capable of until you mix big money and big business. It's astonishing that these people are even the same species as the rest of us.

I guess that's why I'm not shocked and outraged about the RIAA. I won't get really surprised until they start shooting people in the head over a $15 cd. That'd be about par for the course, IMHO.

If you can, change your surname to "Smith".

The value proposition about computer = better education is not verified. There is an interesting article at BBC about Nigeria pilot project quoted at http://aptustech.com/?q=node/14 which explain why it wont work.

Okay, I just read that "interesting" article. It's clueless. -1 overrated.

The XO laptop was designed to work with nothing more than human power. If you add a $10 generator accessory to the laptop, the kid can power it (10 minutes with generator == 30 minutes using laptop). So all the complaining about how a big generator for a school is $3500 and there needs to be a budget for fuel is just stupid.

The XO laptop was designed to work as a textbook... as a whole library of textbooks. So, you don't buy any dead trees paper books, and that frees up budget to buy the laptops (or at least partially offset the cost). In theory at least, a kid could get an XO in first grade and keep using it all through school. At some point it should be cheaper than paper textbooks (which don't last forever, especially in humid climates).

The XO laptop does not need an Internet connection, so the complaining about that is clueless too. Give the teacher an XO and a $20 USB flash drive, and put a useful subset of Wikipedia on the flash drive; bam, the whole classroom (or the whole SCHOOL) can all use that useful subset of Wikipedia. (Thanks to the automatic peer-to-peer wireless network of the XO laptops.) But if the school or village does get Internet, then every XO nearby has Internet too, again thanks to the peer-to-peer network.

I could go on, but I have things to do. That article isn't worth the time to read it, and I want those minutes of my life back. The XO may not solve all the world's problems by itself, but it's not useless either. And I intend to buy one for $400, so some kid somewhere is going to get one from me.

P.S. Technology can make a positive difference. Read this. http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0712-rhett_butler.html