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MIT Says Natural Gas Best To Lower Carbon Emissions
eldavojohn writes "This week MIT released a comprehensive, hundred-page report entitled 'The Future of Natural Gas' that outlined the many scenarios the United States faces when aiming to reduce carbon emissions. From the New York Times recap: 'The scenario goes like this, according to MIT: Nuclear power, renewable energy, and carbon capture and sequestration are relatively expensive next to gas. Conventional coal is no longer a major source of power generation in the United States. "Natural gas is the substantial winner in the electric sector: The substitution effect, mainly gas generation for coal generation, outweighs the demand reduction effect."' Will this urging help to produce a policy shift from renewable energy (like wind) to natural gas for the United States?"
Yes it will.
...the environmental wackos aren't going to like this.
Natural gas = carbon emissions however reduced they may be.
Natural gas = drilling
Yeah, this ain't gonna fly. Just wait for the big fat raspberry from the greens.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Environmentalists demand that you get your power from pixie dust or else!
Owing to the intermittent nature of wind, the need for 100% backup of generating capacity, and the ability to provide at most 20% of total electricity, wind is a way to in effect get an extra increment in efficiency in a natural-gas based electric power generation economy. As such, you can ascribe to wind power all of the evils you ascribe to natural gas production, only, about 20% less.
Yes, because the primary concern when discussing potential fuel sources the the next millenium is deciding where to put the fucking apostrophe.
Have you got nothing better to do with your time ?
The question is whether or not it's cost effective to do so. At the moment, it isn't. If we tax the hell out of coal and oil, it might be.
Pretty much we're at the point where we either have to legislate against coal and oil, or we have to tax carbon emissions heavily. There's no market incentive to stop with either.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Water is not a pollutant. Plants (and you!) would not survive without it.
But too much kills either. Same with CO2.
Almost everything is a pollutant in certain concentrations, and kills things that depend on it. Try eating some pure calcium metal sometime - it's not hazardous because your bones are MADE out of it!! Saying that CO2 isn't a pollutant is pretty stupid. Plants depend on it, but they also depend on a certain temperature range. CO2 changes that range. Plants also need a certain range of CO2. At the moment, most species are still doing ok. That's not a guarantee as levels continue to rise. Finally, pollutants aren't defined based on the effect on plants. There are other living things in the world besides plants.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
And you just lost all credibility right there. I was with you until that one line which lets the entire world that you don't know what you are talking about and you have an agenda more then facts.
Iraq is not, never was, and it not going to be an oil war no matter how hard you close your eyes and wish just because it suits your agenda. The oil in Iraq was up until recently still governed by the UN which regulated how much oil Iraq could sell and what they could get in return for it. It wasn't until the UN- not the US- officially recognized the new Iraqi government as a separate entity from Saddam's Iraq did they start getting control back. The US is not getting oil from Iraq outside of paying for it through normal markets that every other country participates in. The Iraq war had nothing to do with oil at all and you have nothing to show that it was except innuendos and wild conspiracy theories that mostly exist in people's imagination.
You might as well make up externalities like purple dinosaur eggs of something. I love the way people just make crap up, assign a cost to it that suits their needs, and then point to something else and say "look, it's affordable now that we have made up an inflated costs for X and called it the real costs".
Anyways, in case you missed the point, if the US shifts from alternative energies to clean natural gas, then the desire to continue to subsidize the alternative sources of energy will be gone. And with that, so will the subsidies that have giving it the only fighting chance it's had to date. In other words, don't expect to see the same growth if the political will shifts to another source of energy (like I originally said).
A carbon tax is nothing but a crock of shit. Look at the tobacco tax, very little if any of the money from that went to the intended targets designed to get people to quit smoking. Almost every state that participated in the tobacco settlement uses the money for unrelated funding and rely on people smoking to continue those programs. The feds take the fuel taxes and use them for crap other then roads like they were intended for. And the idea of penalizing someone for doing what they would normally do just to encourage they use a more expensive energy source is a bit inhumane if you ask me. The housing market bubble failed not because of the sub prime mortgages or the credit swaps, but because the high costs of energy caused those vehicles to fail when people couldn't afford the mortgages and shit. Increasing the costs of energy will only have the same effect- something that's more evident in Greece and Europe which is suffering much more then the US in the current recession.
What is needed isn't accounting gimmicks from the government or artificial markets that only exist by artificially inflating the costs to other participants. What is needed is an international government board of research designated specifically to making solar, wind, and other forms of alternative energy viable and efficient without distorting markets. The same board can do research into making existing tech cleaner and more available in the midterms. And most importantly, they need to offer this tech royalty free so it can be widely adopted and implemented around the entire world. This is what Kyoto and the IPCC should have been, not some tax the rich nations and redistribute the wealth panel pushing a political agenda.
Translation, he knows the truth so we will ignore him and move on to some useful idiot.
So you do not dispute what I said, the UN controlled Iraq's oil until it officially recognized the Iraqi government as a separate entity of Saddam's regime.
In order for you to believe that, you have to ignore the actual history of Iraq upto and including the takeover. I never could understand how people like you could insist that some conspiracy is at work while ignoring the very real facts in order to make the case. Plenty of other countries shouldn't have even been in your statement at all. Iraq wasn't about bringing democracy to Iraq until after Saddam was out of power. Saddam claimed to have WMDs and wouldn't let the UN inspection teams validate whether he did or didn't. This validation was mandatory as part of the cease fire agreements that stopped hostilities of the first gulf war.
Iraq became a big problem when the threat of terrorism was brought home to civilians instead of military targets abroad. Whether Saddam actually had WMDs or not, the world believed he did in some capacity before the 2003 invasion because Saddam was personally attempting to make them believe that. He said in an interview that he was afraid of invasion if the neighboring countries thought he was defenseless. Now with terrorism hitting home, Saddam having banned WMDs and publicly stating his design to inflict harm to the US, he became a very real threat that not only had the capacity, suspected capabilities, but the motivations to move these WMDs to terrorists for their use against American citizen at home. Bush has always said that after 9/11, we can no longer sit back and wait for something to develop- we need to be proactive when the threat is that real. We invaded Iraq for those reasons- because 9/11 changed everything for the administration.
Now I know you don't get it. You're probably one of those people who won't listen to the details long enough to understand any of them and say Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 when the reality of the situation is that 9/11 had to do with why we went into Iraq not the other way around. Only then can your wild conspiracies make sense outside of your own mind. It's about oil right, yea only if we conveniently forget about the entire 90's leading up to the 2003 invasion.
wait for Ayn Rand to descend from the heavens and tell us what to do
That may seem like a clever quip to you, but Rand's philosophy is all about not telling people what to do.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This 99% fixation on OMG WE NEED MORE POWER PLANTS! Instead of looking to REDUCE DEMAND is plain nuts.
Electricity consumers aren't stupid. There's a natural explanation for why demand hasn't reduced on its own. Because the consumer loses more than they gain. Given that, why should we attempt to artificial reduce demand?
There's tons and tons of places that we could be reducing demand at, without reducing quality of life at all
Then why isn't it already done? Answer: because demand reduction reduces our quality of life.
Rand's philosophy is all about not having people tell her what to do. ...or anyone else. Did you actually fail to comprehend that, or are you just parroting the common anti-Rand propaganda line?
it was pretty much her telling people what to do.
Insiting on being left alone is not the same as telling other people what to do. Your confusion over this point is a common characteristic of people with autocratic leanings.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
CO2 cleanup money grows on trees.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.