No, I kinda ignore it 'cuz there's still a whale of a lot of people that traipse in and out of any US car manufacturer's factory in spite of the fact that they are some of the most automated factories in the country. So, it seems that they still need people for SOMETHING, implying that there's lotsa stuff that can't be automated. Yet. Sure, robots will do more and more, but I'm waiting for someone to show me one that can walk thru the factory, hear the bearings going bad in a 50 hp motor on a press about 25 feet up in the air, go get a lift and a spare motor, get up there and change it out, remove the old motor back to the shop and rebuild it with new bearings and maybe brushes, and put it back in stock as a spare for the next time. Find me a robot that can do that. There aren't any. There aren't going to be any truck driver robots that can jump out and change a flat on the inside dual, either, for a long time. People will always be necessary up until its so automated that we can all use personal slaves who are robots, and never again have to do a damned thing that we don't want to do. It may never be seen by anyone alive today, 'cuz that's still a lot of tech to be invented.
Yeah, things are on the brink of getting dramatically better, I think.
What the problem is right now is the hordes of people that are not showing up in the unemployment stats, but are nevertheless suffering in the job market. Those people that are on a couch, glued to a soap opera daisy chain all day, are there because their spouse, parent, or some significant other has a good jobs and will keep them there. And they're there because $7 or $10 an hour at the burger-flipping or big box retailer just isn't worth driving to.
Now, if this tax cut can take place, things will change. Those people already working those burger flipping and big box retailer jobs are going to see a dramatic rise in the help wanted ads for manufacturers that are adding 2nd and 3rd shifts due to the dramatically lower corporate income taxes that allow those companies to make money with factories inside the USA. They're going to quit Mickey D's and Walmart, and go to work for the local small business with a lot of machines that need tending. Some will even train to be maintenance people, millwrights, etc. They're going to be making $25 / hr.
Meanwhile, back at Micky D's and Walmart, they're going to be going out of their minds attempting to conduct business without those people that left. They can't get those people pryed away from their soap operas until they start paying some real money. So, the $15 / hr minimum wage will be obsoleted, by these companies raising their wages to $15 / hr in order to lure the less-needy off their couches. (We will then see if the Republican apocalypse that everyone is going to go out of business if forced to pay $15 an hour as a minimum.)
As more and more factories are built because it's a profitable thing to do in the USA now, the factory wages will spiral up as the factory owners compete for the last welder or electrician or whatever in the area and the burger-flipping and big box retailing will spiral up as the factories draw off their help to work in even higher paying jobs.
The Republican tax cut could do this, IF they maintain the 20% corporate tax rate AND they don't F around and delay it to 2022 or somesuch.
Passing the Fair Tax could do it in spades, the economy would sprout rocket engines under the Fair Tax as manufacturing would be done in an income--tax-free environment in the only developed country on the planet where that could be done. Foreign business people would injure themselves in the stampede to build factories here in the USA. We would probably actually experience a fairly severe labor shortage, which would spiral wages further. We could probably actually allow more immigrants because we could put them to work and the country would prosper.
But either way, it all depends on stopping the stealing, or greatly reducing it. Income taxes in any form are stealing, and the more stealing that goes on, the more the economy suffers.
"Why is it that only the US seems to need it to be a legally binding contract, when other countries are happy to just get on with meeting their targets?"
'Cuz the rest of the world knows that they are going to go home and not actually do a F'n thing about climate, other than to sit back and criticize the USA for not wanting to be a socialistic shit-hole like they're living in. If they made it the law of their lands, they'd all be in violation and in jail before they could blink.
No, water. Methane, the major component of natural gas, is 4 atoms of hydrogen and 1 of carbon. That yields 2 molecules of water and one of CO2 when burned. Much better than having 100% CO2 exhaust for coal which is pretty much 100% carbon.
We are reducing emissions more than any other country by the increasing use of natural gas, and replacing coal-fired generating stations as the go obsolete (and NOT by gov't edict that causes a good generating station with a lot of service life to be wasted - Waste, that's what gov't does, always.) We're building wind and solar out the wazoo, although those efforts amount to still a tiny fraction of the more reliable sources of power of coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear.
Getting out of the damned agreement was all about not shipping cubic money out of the country to pay for OTHER COUNTRY's climate mitigation efforts. We make agreements and act like we have a bottomless pit of money, when in actuality we teeter on the brink of economic collapse with a 20+ Trillion Dollar Debt. We have to stop doing stupid shit, and paying for the rest of the world's climate efforts, which will be like paying them for anything else - the money will end up decorating some potentate's palace - is stupid shit.
Yeah, we know you touchy-feely types want to have everyone walking everywhere and deprive us of our greatest freedoms, the freedom to travel, but that isn't going to fly here in the USA. We can't ride a bike across the country, its too big - well, at least _I_ can't. We will fight to maintain our freedom to move when and where we want to go, and not necessarily on the schedule of some public transport scheme that is closed when I want to go somewhere (like the Washington, DC Metro system - you can't reliably take it somewhere in the evening, and expect to ride it back 'cuz it'll stop the trains about the time you get out of a movie or somesuch. If you don't have your car waiting within walking distance of the movie, you're likely to end up spending big bucks on a damned Taxi to the Metro station where your car is parked.)
If not time zones, then you're back to "sun time" which is slightly different at each longitude. Try scheduling trains so they're not on the same track heading different directions when the freakin' time is changing with every mile west and east you run. You had to be a mathematical genius to be a railroad engineer back before time zones. Lots of 'em failed, and spectacular train wrecks ensued.
Try your 6th grade story problem, "Train A leaves Chicago at 5:30 AM traveling 60 mph, Train B leaves New York at 6:30 AM traveling 72 mph. They are traveling toward each other. Where and when do they meet?" Good luck, and prepare to jump...
...of not changing would be making drive-in movie theaters viable in the western part of each time zone. Otherwise, you get off work at maybe 5, drive an hour home or maybe more if you're in this screwed-up area of impossible traffic that is the DC area, and when NOT being exactly on the summer solstice, having just a few minutes to get the lawn mowed (hour and a quarter for the 1 acre here, or 45 minutes for the zero-turn mower I have now), and that's it. Not getting anything else done outside. Walk the dog? Do it in the dark. Have a cook-out? Dark. Rake the leaves? Dark.
Dark, dark, dark, dark, dark...
Pee on that. Keep DST, and make the day for something besides sitting in the office and writing code while wasting all the best part of the day for doing stuff outside, then getting home and going broke feeding batteries to the flashlight(s). We can tolerate non-DST in the winter 'cuz its too nippy to enjoy stuff outside anyway, but lets apply roundup to the weeds, spray for mosquitoes, work on our big radio antennas (K8DH here), and everything else outside in the daylight by keeping DST!!!
In addition to wind and solar for the grid, build an extensive railway system. This railway system handles all vehicular traffic. It handles them individually, automatically switching them to their destinations. Build this railway in underground tunnels. Evacuate the tunnels with remaining air pressure between 15,000 and 30,000 feet (passengers would only need oxygen if their railcar carrying their vehicle became depressurized.) Build the system so no electric car has to drive more than 50 miles to get anywhere in the USA. When allowing the pressure to vary between 15,000 and 30,000 feet, use the inrushing atmosphere to turn turbines and generate electricity. This would be a storage of energy via atmospheric air pressure. With a massively built transportation system, the evacuated volume would be enormous, and without doing actual calcuations, I believe that it would be sufficient to power our 4 Terawatts of energy usage for quite some time... long enough... to stabilize the grid without requiring standby coal, oil, gas, or nuclear generating stations.
That's a solution. It would probably employ every available worker to build it. It would take many years to build. it would enable transportation at probably 100 - 150 mph anywhere in the country, Handling railcars individually means not having to stop a train for boarding and debarkation, just keep switching the railcar toward its destination until it gets there. 100 mph means 100 mph average, all the way, a bit over a day coast to coast and you arrive with your car and your luggage in the trunk, unmolested by the TSA.
That's the solution. We have the tech to build it right now, at least everything except switching individual railcars out of a "train" of them travelling together without slowing down, and I know how to build that. I'd just have to finally get a patent on it. Have been thinking about this solution for about 20 years. I know it would work. I'm pretty sure we'll never build it... 'cuz $$$, and 'cuz we can't build anything anywhere near anybody because of "the environment" and NIMBYs.
Its simple. If mining fossil fuels is banned, many people will not be able to afford cars at all, thus increasing the poverty level when they have to take jobs within walking distance of where they live (and zoning laws have made sure that they are miles from their work, ANOTHER modern self-inflicted problem by the so-called "planners", 18 wheelers will cease to move at all because there are no batteries that big, and airliners will sit motionless for the rest of time. Oh, you might get nukes into cargo ships, but the terrorists would just hijack them and use the cores to build dirty bombs all over the world. Ban fossil fuels and society would come to a screeching halt, with economic suffering on the scale of Venezeuela. IOW, it just won't work, we don't have the tech, your law would kill millions, impoverish most of the country.
Again, you have no answers. This is not going to be solved by any legislature, it is going to have to be solved by armies of scientists and engineers, or it won't be solved at all. Geoengineering is probably the best approach, but as I've written elsewhere here, the "environmentalists" have a cow rather than to shortcut their bid to inflict maximum harm on the USA with austerity measures to punish this "evil" country, and of course cart trillions out of this evil country to distribute to the world's poor (which will end up in various dictators' and politicians' wallets worldwide.)
You also are missing many things. First is that not everyone can afford 2 cars. I have 2, but one is 19 years old. I can't buy one for long distances and one for around town, especially since the one for long distances has to also be relatively new or it will be breaking down 1500 miles from home, which sucks. You also miss the fact that if someone is buying gasolinre cars because their electric won't do the job, then they're still buying gasoline cars, so why the H would they drive an electric with a 200 mile range when they can drive a gasoline car with a 400 mile range. My Subaru WRX has a 400 mile range.
OK, you don't need a 200 mile car to get out of a fire, but if your loved one is on his / her deathbed and has maybe days to live, and you're 2000 miles away, and don't fly, then you've got a 30,hour drive ahead of you. That's with gasoline. It would be much longer stopping for a few hours every 200 miles.
And yeah, lots of people drive very long distances in a year. I sold my 3 year old WRX a couple years ago with 124,000 miles on the odometer, for a 41,000 miles per year average. I get around. An electric just would not do, and I can't afford a 3rd car to be driving in less than 100% of the time. Nice that you can get by with 9,000 miles a year, but I can't. There's lots of us, BTW, that drive a lot 'cuz air travel sucks now. The TSA wants to feel you up and the airlines want to beat you up, and I'm not up for either of those, so I drive. Been that way since the flight back from Iraq in 2011. Took just one flight since then, and that's it. So I drive.
Build the automotive hyperloop and I'll ride it unless they get the damned TSA involved with that too, but that should be rich trying to search every vehicle that drives onto the thing.
The bottom line is that with your consideration of short-distance electrics and hybrids, you STILL can't leave the oil in the ground, and so it will STILL be emitting CO2. That's not a solution. There is presently no solution, and may or may not ever be a solution. Casting huge percentages of the population into poverty and therefore an early grave (poverty kills) is no sort of humane tradeoff for forestalling a fraction of a degree temperature rise by 2100. Implement a real solution, or at least propose one that gets to 0 CO2, or quit trying to diminish everyone's prosperity for no actual solution.
If it won't do that - if it won't perform as well as a 1987 Yugo, people will not buy it. If they don't buy it, then you have no solution to your problem. Hey, I'm just re-stating the problem, and noting that it has no solution. There's no point in whining about the problem unless you can provide a viable solution.
Want a solution? OK, here's one. Build the hyperloops big enough to carry cars. Build it out so it covers the entire USA such that there's a terminal within 50 miles of absolutely everywhere. An electric car will have not problem handling driving 50 miles. So move the electric car at 700 miles per hour in a hyperloop sled. Pricey? You bet, but it would at least work, that is, if you can get enough solar and wind and such to power the hyperloop in a the first place. I see that the trend has become to at least plan to tunnel the hyperloop instead of raising it on pylons into the air. I'm sure that will destroy the economy of it, making it far too expensive to actually complete when trying to tunnel 600 miles across Kansas, and then doing it about 70 times in order to have terminals absolutely everywhere you need them to allow the pitiful short-range electric cars to work. I'm not sure there's enough cubic money in the universe to do it...
You are wrong. EVERYONE needs a car that will go 1000's of miles in a short time, because none of them know when they're going to have to get in it and outrun a hurricane bearing down on them, or drive out of a wildfire area or some other sort of disaster. None of these emergencies allows for driving 200 miles and then taking several hours to get charged back up to be able to drive another 200 miles.
And it's not a matter of need, it's a matter of want. If you have your car sitting there in the showroom and it will go 200 miles on a charge, your would-be customer can only think that he cannot get off work on Friday night, drive all night from St. Louis to Vail, and go skiing mid-Afternoon Saturday. Bingo, he buys a gasoline car instead, so you have no sale and therefore still no solution to the problem.
Plus, such electric cars that can perform less-than-a-Yugo-but-are-the-best-we-have are still hideously expensive. For a solution that works, you have to be able to buy them for the same prices as cars on the market right now. If I can buy a $12K econobox and your electric is $100K, or even $35K, I will still buy the gasoline econobox because its the best deal. You can't force people to buy your solution to the problem when they can't afford it.
You need a reality check. In order for your scheme to work, you have to invent an electric car that people will buy. If it will not perform as well as a 1987 Yugo in every respect, people will not buy it. If they don't buy it, then you have no solution to the problem.
I see my original post is considered flamebait. Well, excuse the hell out of me, I am just sick to death of these touchy-feely people whining over this problem without having the remotest f'n idea of an actual solution. They have NOTHING to cure the problem. No, living in a cave in the dark with no electricity will not work, most everyone will die down to the levels that hunting / gathering and subsistence farming with animals will support them. That's nowhere near the 320 million people in the country. And of course geoengineering it the ONLY sector that POSSIBLY COULD, MAYBE, offer a mitigation to the problem, but the whiners go all sideways when you mention it, further raising suspicion that their only actual goal for this is to scheme a way to cart trillions of dollars out of the USA in boxcarloads. Well, F that. Come up with a REAL solution and we can talk. But absolutely no one has a damned thing to offer that will ACTUALLY WORK, all they have is ways to diminish the quality of life and harm prosperity with virtually no effect at all on the actual problem. Sick if this, I tell you.
Doesn't help the USA a bit. Hardly anyone here rides trains. If we did, we'd still need to rent a CAR(!) to get where we're going from the nearest train station, and that might STILL be 500 miles.
...you can do about it? Solar and Wind? Piffle! We can build that for 100 years, and until we get massive pumped storage of electricity, a "magic" battery for storing it, or a world-wide power grid that we can afford to use and guarantee it won't be interrupted by a war - unless we can get one of these up and working, the power will be unreliable and still require the coal and natural gas and nuclear plants to exist for when the wind stops blowing at night.
And then there's the transportation sector. Got a battery that will operate an 18-wheeler, a locomotive, a jet aircraft? I mean one that someone other than Donald can afford? No, no one has these. There's automotive solutions that won't compete favorably with the 1987 Yugo that completed the 1 Lap of America rally, 9000 miles in 10 days, almost always moving, and necessarily refueling in minutes at points wherever they happened to be low on fuel. No electric can do that. Still. Nothing electric is as good as a 1987 Yugo in terms of range and refuelability.
Sooooo... whatcha gonna do about all that evil CO2 and NOT totally wreck society without going back to horses and donkey carts? Eh?
The "Insulated Concrete Forms" construction of concrete housing was what I was aspiring to if I ever built a house. Probably won't, unless a tornado knocks this one down, but the advantages were that the ICF house is highly insulated, almost in the class of superinsulated, and it takes a really big tornado to knock it down. What's "inefficient" about that? I don't even live in "tornado alley" any more, but had a "tornado aloft" take down my ham antenna and turn one mighty oak into a very distracted looking oak that somehow survived (but I was betting against that at the time." Didn't touch the house, but if it had knocked it down, an ICF house would have gone up in its place.
Don't have the batteries that can do this. Too expensive. We don't yet know how to build the magic battery. The magic battery is cheap and high capacity and cheap and quickly chargeable and cheap and efficient in its charge and discharge cycle and cheap and easily recyclable / renewable and cheap. And most of all, it has to be cheap so people can afford it, otherwise they can't use it and the concept falls flat. Right now, falling flat is the only thing that solar / battery combinations can do. We just don't have that battery. We may never find that battery. That battery may not actually be possible. We don't know. We may never know. Counting on batteries for solar / wind viabilitiy is very risky.
Don't forget the other part of the theater that makes watching movies in them more "real." That is, the sound. If an artillery shell lands closeby in a movie theater showing, you not only hear it, but you hear it loudly and you feel it. That's "immersion." That's outstanding. I see virtually everything in the theater, because I enjoy the ultra-real experience that is more like "being there" than watching it at home on even a 40" screen. Getting a projection TV system in the next year or 2, and aim to use my 90's vintage component stereo 120 watts per channel Pioneer receiver with the Cerwin Vega speakers that weigh 95 lbs each to hopefully partially recreate the movie theater experience. But I'll still see it initially in the theater, nevertheless. Its just that old flicks I want to watch, will be better experience too at home.
Horror flicks generally don't have fakey car chases with impossible automotive gymnastics done on streets that are always, always, always wet, including inside parking garages, no matter what the weather was 30 seconds before the cut to the car chase. They also usually don't feel the need to introduce seriously fakey CGI that doesn't work, isn't believable, and just destroys my ability to get "into" the movie.
For me, movies have to make sense. Dark Tower made little sense to me, King Athur made absolutely no sense. Then there's things that happen just because "its in the script", and so those things can't even be attributed to the characters' brainy endeavors. There's lots of idiot stuff such as Clooney dangling from a rope / wire in that space movie "Gravity" and about to "fall." WTF, you can't "fall" in orbit, there's no gravity. All she'd have to have done was give the rope a slight tug and he'd have floated right to her. And then there's King Kong where they somehow get an engine-powered raft from a 1940's fighter plane to go upstream (or something like that) when 1) all the fuel was burned completely when the fighter plane crashed and 2) it was decades ago, and you're telling me if there was some fuel saved from such a crash, it wouldn't have been used for something else in the interim?
Movies have to make sense to be enjoyable, but, well, horror movies not quite so much since the monsters mostly don't exist and the methods in use don't exist (Jumangi simply requires magic / enchantments - we don't question those...) so,
Damnit, tell me a good story, don't make things happen just because "its in the script", have stuff make sense, and maybe you'll come up with something plausible and entertaining like Jaw or Jurassic Park. Even a little suspension of scientific disbelief can be tolerated to follow along with Star Wars and Star Trek and so forth. Transformers? Naw, there's too much mass resultant from too small a volume when transforming a car into a 30 ft high robot. But, c'mon, get real... at least mostly.
Oh, yeah, then there's the upcoming Pacific Rim sequel. Good grief, what a way to attack the problem. You got monsters coming out of the sea? I'm the only one that has ever seen "The Guns of Navarrone?" Shore batteries, lots of them. Any critter that can be defeated by hand to hand combat with a giant robot can have his shit blown to smithereens by an appropriately sized artillery round. Again... get real...
We should lower the income tax rate of the rich to 0% We should lower the income tax rate of the middle class to 0% We should lower the income tax rate of the poor to 0% We should make the capital gains tax to be 0% We should make the estate tax rate to be 0% We should make the gift tax rate to be 0% We should make the corporate income tax rate to be 0% We should make the alternative minimum tax rate to be 0% We should make the payroll tax rate to be 0%
Clinton and her cronies discussed a deep-cover spy in Iran that was feeding us info on their nuclear weapons development, and did it on her uncleared server. The Iranians apparently hacked that (investigations show that at least 5 entities hacked her email) her email, discovered the spy, and executed him. Yeah, there's someone dead because of her damned classified on her damned unclassified machines.
Budget? No, I pay $308.50 a month for cable TV, internet, and phone with all the premium channels. Its just the principle of the thing. MORE money for ONE show? Not happening. If they can get the show to air SOMEWHERE in the group of channels I'm ALREADY paying for, then FINE, I'll watch it. But not a penny more. This also goes for monthly subscription internet content - nope, not happening either. Not Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Levin, any other website for a price BS. Pound sand. I start doing crap like that, I'll be up to $999 a month just for entertainment in no time...
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No, I kinda ignore it 'cuz there's still a whale of a lot of people that traipse in and out of any US car manufacturer's factory in spite of the fact that they are some of the most automated factories in the country. So, it seems that they still need people for SOMETHING, implying that there's lotsa stuff that can't be automated. Yet. Sure, robots will do more and more, but I'm waiting for someone to show me one that can walk thru the factory, hear the bearings going bad in a 50 hp motor on a press about 25 feet up in the air, go get a lift and a spare motor, get up there and change it out, remove the old motor back to the shop and rebuild it with new bearings and maybe brushes, and put it back in stock as a spare for the next time. Find me a robot that can do that. There aren't any. There aren't going to be any truck driver robots that can jump out and change a flat on the inside dual, either, for a long time. People will always be necessary up until its so automated that we can all use personal slaves who are robots, and never again have to do a damned thing that we don't want to do. It may never be seen by anyone alive today, 'cuz that's still a lot of tech to be invented.
Yeah, things are on the brink of getting dramatically better, I think.
What the problem is right now is the hordes of people that are not showing up in the unemployment stats, but are nevertheless suffering in the job market. Those people that are on a couch, glued to a soap opera daisy chain all day, are there because their spouse, parent, or some significant other has a good jobs and will keep them there. And they're there because $7 or $10 an hour at the burger-flipping or big box retailer just isn't worth driving to.
Now, if this tax cut can take place, things will change. Those people already working those burger flipping and big box retailer jobs are going to see a dramatic rise in the help wanted ads for manufacturers that are adding 2nd and 3rd shifts due to the dramatically lower corporate income taxes that allow those companies to make money with factories inside the USA. They're going to quit Mickey D's and Walmart, and go to work for the local small business with a lot of machines that need tending. Some will even train to be maintenance people, millwrights, etc. They're going to be making $25 / hr.
Meanwhile, back at Micky D's and Walmart, they're going to be going out of their minds attempting to conduct business without those people that left. They can't get those people pryed away from their soap operas until they start paying some real money. So, the $15 / hr minimum wage will be obsoleted, by these companies raising their wages to $15 / hr in order to lure the less-needy off their couches. (We will then see if the Republican apocalypse that everyone is going to go out of business if forced to pay $15 an hour as a minimum.)
As more and more factories are built because it's a profitable thing to do in the USA now, the factory wages will spiral up as the factory owners compete for the last welder or electrician or whatever in the area and the burger-flipping and big box retailing will spiral up as the factories draw off their help to work in even higher paying jobs.
The Republican tax cut could do this, IF they maintain the 20% corporate tax rate AND they don't F around and delay it to 2022 or somesuch.
Passing the Fair Tax could do it in spades, the economy would sprout rocket engines under the Fair Tax as manufacturing would be done in an income--tax-free environment in the only developed country on the planet where that could be done. Foreign business people would injure themselves in the stampede to build factories here in the USA. We would probably actually experience a fairly severe labor shortage, which would spiral wages further. We could probably actually allow more immigrants because we could put them to work and the country would prosper.
But either way, it all depends on stopping the stealing, or greatly reducing it. Income taxes in any form are stealing, and the more stealing that goes on, the more the economy suffers.
"Why is it that only the US seems to need it to be a legally binding contract, when other countries are happy to just get on with meeting their targets?"
'Cuz the rest of the world knows that they are going to go home and not actually do a F'n thing about climate, other than to sit back and criticize the USA for not wanting to be a socialistic shit-hole like they're living in. If they made it the law of their lands, they'd all be in violation and in jail before they could blink.
No, water. Methane, the major component of natural gas, is 4 atoms of hydrogen and 1 of carbon. That yields 2 molecules of water and one of CO2 when burned. Much better than having 100% CO2 exhaust for coal which is pretty much 100% carbon.
"most regulations were put in place for a reason"
Fear
We are reducing emissions more than any other country by the increasing use of natural gas, and replacing coal-fired generating stations as the go obsolete (and NOT by gov't edict that causes a good generating station with a lot of service life to be wasted - Waste, that's what gov't does, always.) We're building wind and solar out the wazoo, although those efforts amount to still a tiny fraction of the more reliable sources of power of coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear.
Getting out of the damned agreement was all about not shipping cubic money out of the country to pay for OTHER COUNTRY's climate mitigation efforts. We make agreements and act like we have a bottomless pit of money, when in actuality we teeter on the brink of economic collapse with a 20+ Trillion Dollar Debt. We have to stop doing stupid shit, and paying for the rest of the world's climate efforts, which will be like paying them for anything else - the money will end up decorating some potentate's palace - is stupid shit.
Yeah, we know you touchy-feely types want to have everyone walking everywhere and deprive us of our greatest freedoms, the freedom to travel, but that isn't going to fly here in the USA. We can't ride a bike across the country, its too big - well, at least _I_ can't. We will fight to maintain our freedom to move when and where we want to go, and not necessarily on the schedule of some public transport scheme that is closed when I want to go somewhere (like the Washington, DC Metro system - you can't reliably take it somewhere in the evening, and expect to ride it back 'cuz it'll stop the trains about the time you get out of a movie or somesuch. If you don't have your car waiting within walking distance of the movie, you're likely to end up spending big bucks on a damned Taxi to the Metro station where your car is parked.)
If not time zones, then you're back to "sun time" which is slightly different at each longitude. Try scheduling trains so they're not on the same track heading different directions when the freakin' time is changing with every mile west and east you run. You had to be a mathematical genius to be a railroad engineer back before time zones. Lots of 'em failed, and spectacular train wrecks ensued.
Try your 6th grade story problem, "Train A leaves Chicago at 5:30 AM traveling 60 mph, Train B leaves New York at 6:30 AM traveling 72 mph. They are traveling toward each other. Where and when do they meet?" Good luck, and prepare to jump...
...of not changing would be making drive-in movie theaters viable in the western part of each time zone. Otherwise, you get off work at maybe 5, drive an hour home or maybe more if you're in this screwed-up area of impossible traffic that is the DC area, and when NOT being exactly on the summer solstice, having just a few minutes to get the lawn mowed (hour and a quarter for the 1 acre here, or 45 minutes for the zero-turn mower I have now), and that's it. Not getting anything else done outside. Walk the dog? Do it in the dark. Have a cook-out? Dark. Rake the leaves? Dark.
Dark, dark, dark, dark, dark...
Pee on that. Keep DST, and make the day for something besides sitting in the office and writing code while wasting all the best part of the day for doing stuff outside, then getting home and going broke feeding batteries to the flashlight(s). We can tolerate non-DST in the winter 'cuz its too nippy to enjoy stuff outside anyway, but lets apply roundup to the weeds, spray for mosquitoes, work on our big radio antennas (K8DH here), and everything else outside in the daylight by keeping DST!!!
You want a solution? Here's a solution.
In addition to wind and solar for the grid, build an extensive railway system. This railway system handles all vehicular traffic. It handles them individually, automatically switching them to their destinations. Build this railway in underground tunnels. Evacuate the tunnels with remaining air pressure between 15,000 and 30,000 feet (passengers would only need oxygen if their railcar carrying their vehicle became depressurized.) Build the system so no electric car has to drive more than 50 miles to get anywhere in the USA. When allowing the pressure to vary between 15,000 and 30,000 feet, use the inrushing atmosphere to turn turbines and generate electricity. This would be a storage of energy via atmospheric air pressure. With a massively built transportation system, the evacuated volume would be enormous, and without doing actual calcuations, I believe that it would be sufficient to power our 4 Terawatts of energy usage for quite some time... long enough... to stabilize the grid without requiring standby coal, oil, gas, or nuclear generating stations.
That's a solution. It would probably employ every available worker to build it. It would take many years to build. it would enable transportation at probably 100 - 150 mph anywhere in the country, Handling railcars individually means not having to stop a train for boarding and debarkation, just keep switching the railcar toward its destination until it gets there. 100 mph means 100 mph average, all the way, a bit over a day coast to coast and you arrive with your car and your luggage in the trunk, unmolested by the TSA.
That's the solution. We have the tech to build it right now, at least everything except switching individual railcars out of a "train" of them travelling together without slowing down, and I know how to build that. I'd just have to finally get a patent on it. Have been thinking about this solution for about 20 years. I know it would work. I'm pretty sure we'll never build it... 'cuz $$$, and 'cuz we can't build anything anywhere near anybody because of "the environment" and NIMBYs.
Its simple. If mining fossil fuels is banned, many people will not be able to afford cars at all, thus increasing the poverty level when they have to take jobs within walking distance of where they live (and zoning laws have made sure that they are miles from their work, ANOTHER modern self-inflicted problem by the so-called "planners", 18 wheelers will cease to move at all because there are no batteries that big, and airliners will sit motionless for the rest of time. Oh, you might get nukes into cargo ships, but the terrorists would just hijack them and use the cores to build dirty bombs all over the world. Ban fossil fuels and society would come to a screeching halt, with economic suffering on the scale of Venezeuela. IOW, it just won't work, we don't have the tech, your law would kill millions, impoverish most of the country.
Again, you have no answers. This is not going to be solved by any legislature, it is going to have to be solved by armies of scientists and engineers, or it won't be solved at all. Geoengineering is probably the best approach, but as I've written elsewhere here, the "environmentalists" have a cow rather than to shortcut their bid to inflict maximum harm on the USA with austerity measures to punish this "evil" country, and of course cart trillions out of this evil country to distribute to the world's poor (which will end up in various dictators' and politicians' wallets worldwide.)
You also are missing many things. First is that not everyone can afford 2 cars. I have 2, but one is 19 years old. I can't buy one for long distances and one for around town, especially since the one for long distances has to also be relatively new or it will be breaking down 1500 miles from home, which sucks. You also miss the fact that if someone is buying gasolinre cars because their electric won't do the job, then they're still buying gasoline cars, so why the H would they drive an electric with a 200 mile range when they can drive a gasoline car with a 400 mile range. My Subaru WRX has a 400 mile range.
OK, you don't need a 200 mile car to get out of a fire, but if your loved one is on his / her deathbed and has maybe days to live, and you're 2000 miles away, and don't fly, then you've got a 30,hour drive ahead of you. That's with gasoline. It would be much longer stopping for a few hours every 200 miles.
And yeah, lots of people drive very long distances in a year. I sold my 3 year old WRX a couple years ago with 124,000 miles on the odometer, for a 41,000 miles per year average. I get around. An electric just would not do, and I can't afford a 3rd car to be driving in less than 100% of the time. Nice that you can get by with 9,000 miles a year, but I can't. There's lots of us, BTW, that drive a lot 'cuz air travel sucks now. The TSA wants to feel you up and the airlines want to beat you up, and I'm not up for either of those, so I drive. Been that way since the flight back from Iraq in 2011. Took just one flight since then, and that's it. So I drive.
Build the automotive hyperloop and I'll ride it unless they get the damned TSA involved with that too, but that should be rich trying to search every vehicle that drives onto the thing.
The bottom line is that with your consideration of short-distance electrics and hybrids, you STILL can't leave the oil in the ground, and so it will STILL be emitting CO2. That's not a solution. There is presently no solution, and may or may not ever be a solution. Casting huge percentages of the population into poverty and therefore an early grave (poverty kills) is no sort of humane tradeoff for forestalling a fraction of a degree temperature rise by 2100. Implement a real solution, or at least propose one that gets to 0 CO2, or quit trying to diminish everyone's prosperity for no actual solution.
If it won't do that - if it won't perform as well as a 1987 Yugo, people will not buy it. If they don't buy it, then you have no solution to your problem. Hey, I'm just re-stating the problem, and noting that it has no solution. There's no point in whining about the problem unless you can provide a viable solution.
Want a solution? OK, here's one. Build the hyperloops big enough to carry cars. Build it out so it covers the entire USA such that there's a terminal within 50 miles of absolutely everywhere. An electric car will have not problem handling driving 50 miles. So move the electric car at 700 miles per hour in a hyperloop sled. Pricey? You bet, but it would at least work, that is, if you can get enough solar and wind and such to power the hyperloop in a the first place. I see that the trend has become to at least plan to tunnel the hyperloop instead of raising it on pylons into the air. I'm sure that will destroy the economy of it, making it far too expensive to actually complete when trying to tunnel 600 miles across Kansas, and then doing it about 70 times in order to have terminals absolutely everywhere you need them to allow the pitiful short-range electric cars to work. I'm not sure there's enough cubic money in the universe to do it...
You are wrong. EVERYONE needs a car that will go 1000's of miles in a short time, because none of them know when they're going to have to get in it and outrun a hurricane bearing down on them, or drive out of a wildfire area or some other sort of disaster. None of these emergencies allows for driving 200 miles and then taking several hours to get charged back up to be able to drive another 200 miles.
And it's not a matter of need, it's a matter of want. If you have your car sitting there in the showroom and it will go 200 miles on a charge, your would-be customer can only think that he cannot get off work on Friday night, drive all night from St. Louis to Vail, and go skiing mid-Afternoon Saturday. Bingo, he buys a gasoline car instead, so you have no sale and therefore still no solution to the problem.
Plus, such electric cars that can perform less-than-a-Yugo-but-are-the-best-we-have are still hideously expensive. For a solution that works, you have to be able to buy them for the same prices as cars on the market right now. If I can buy a $12K econobox and your electric is $100K, or even $35K, I will still buy the gasoline econobox because its the best deal. You can't force people to buy your solution to the problem when they can't afford it.
You need a reality check. In order for your scheme to work, you have to invent an electric car that people will buy. If it will not perform as well as a 1987 Yugo in every respect, people will not buy it. If they don't buy it, then you have no solution to the problem.
I see my original post is considered flamebait. Well, excuse the hell out of me, I am just sick to death of these touchy-feely people whining over this problem without having the remotest f'n idea of an actual solution. They have NOTHING to cure the problem. No, living in a cave in the dark with no electricity will not work, most everyone will die down to the levels that hunting / gathering and subsistence farming with animals will support them. That's nowhere near the 320 million people in the country. And of course geoengineering it the ONLY sector that POSSIBLY COULD, MAYBE, offer a mitigation to the problem, but the whiners go all sideways when you mention it, further raising suspicion that their only actual goal for this is to scheme a way to cart trillions of dollars out of the USA in boxcarloads. Well, F that. Come up with a REAL solution and we can talk. But absolutely no one has a damned thing to offer that will ACTUALLY WORK, all they have is ways to diminish the quality of life and harm prosperity with virtually no effect at all on the actual problem. Sick if this, I tell you.
Doesn't help the USA a bit. Hardly anyone here rides trains. If we did, we'd still need to rent a CAR(!) to get where we're going from the nearest train station, and that might STILL be 500 miles.
...you can do about it? Solar and Wind? Piffle! We can build that for 100 years, and until we get massive pumped storage of electricity, a "magic" battery for storing it, or a world-wide power grid that we can afford to use and guarantee it won't be interrupted by a war - unless we can get one of these up and working, the power will be unreliable and still require the coal and natural gas and nuclear plants to exist for when the wind stops blowing at night.
And then there's the transportation sector. Got a battery that will operate an 18-wheeler, a locomotive, a jet aircraft? I mean one that someone other than Donald can afford? No, no one has these. There's automotive solutions that won't compete favorably with the 1987 Yugo that completed the 1 Lap of America rally, 9000 miles in 10 days, almost always moving, and necessarily refueling in minutes at points wherever they happened to be low on fuel. No electric can do that. Still. Nothing electric is as good as a 1987 Yugo in terms of range and refuelability.
Sooooo... whatcha gonna do about all that evil CO2 and NOT totally wreck society without going back to horses and donkey carts? Eh?
The "Insulated Concrete Forms" construction of concrete housing was what I was aspiring to if I ever built a house. Probably won't, unless a tornado knocks this one down, but the advantages were that the ICF house is highly insulated, almost in the class of superinsulated, and it takes a really big tornado to knock it down. What's "inefficient" about that? I don't even live in "tornado alley" any more, but had a "tornado aloft" take down my ham antenna and turn one mighty oak into a very distracted looking oak that somehow survived (but I was betting against that at the time." Didn't touch the house, but if it had knocked it down, an ICF house would have gone up in its place.
Don't have the batteries that can do this. Too expensive. We don't yet know how to build the magic battery. The magic battery is cheap and high capacity and cheap and quickly chargeable and cheap and efficient in its charge and discharge cycle and cheap and easily recyclable / renewable and cheap. And most of all, it has to be cheap so people can afford it, otherwise they can't use it and the concept falls flat. Right now, falling flat is the only thing that solar / battery combinations can do. We just don't have that battery. We may never find that battery. That battery may not actually be possible. We don't know. We may never know. Counting on batteries for solar / wind viabilitiy is very risky.
Don't forget the other part of the theater that makes watching movies in them more "real." That is, the sound. If an artillery shell lands closeby in a movie theater showing, you not only hear it, but you hear it loudly and you feel it. That's "immersion." That's outstanding. I see virtually everything in the theater, because I enjoy the ultra-real experience that is more like "being there" than watching it at home on even a 40" screen. Getting a projection TV system in the next year or 2, and aim to use my 90's vintage component stereo 120 watts per channel Pioneer receiver with the Cerwin Vega speakers that weigh 95 lbs each to hopefully partially recreate the movie theater experience. But I'll still see it initially in the theater, nevertheless. Its just that old flicks I want to watch, will be better experience too at home.
Horror flicks generally don't have fakey car chases with impossible automotive gymnastics done on streets that are always, always, always wet, including inside parking garages, no matter what the weather was 30 seconds before the cut to the car chase. They also usually don't feel the need to introduce seriously fakey CGI that doesn't work, isn't believable, and just destroys my ability to get "into" the movie.
For me, movies have to make sense. Dark Tower made little sense to me, King Athur made absolutely no sense. Then there's things that happen just because "its in the script", and so those things can't even be attributed to the characters' brainy endeavors. There's lots of idiot stuff such as Clooney dangling from a rope / wire in that space movie "Gravity" and about to "fall." WTF, you can't "fall" in orbit, there's no gravity. All she'd have to have done was give the rope a slight tug and he'd have floated right to her. And then there's King Kong where they somehow get an engine-powered raft from a 1940's fighter plane to go upstream (or something like that) when 1) all the fuel was burned completely when the fighter plane crashed and 2) it was decades ago, and you're telling me if there was some fuel saved from such a crash, it wouldn't have been used for something else in the interim?
Movies have to make sense to be enjoyable, but, well, horror movies not quite so much since the monsters mostly don't exist and the methods in use don't exist (Jumangi simply requires magic / enchantments - we don't question those...) so,
Damnit, tell me a good story, don't make things happen just because "its in the script", have stuff make sense, and maybe you'll come up with something plausible and entertaining like Jaw or Jurassic Park. Even a little suspension of scientific disbelief can be tolerated to follow along with Star Wars and Star Trek and so forth. Transformers? Naw, there's too much mass resultant from too small a volume when transforming a car into a 30 ft high robot. But, c'mon, get real... at least mostly.
Oh, yeah, then there's the upcoming Pacific Rim sequel. Good grief, what a way to attack the problem. You got monsters coming out of the sea? I'm the only one that has ever seen "The Guns of Navarrone?" Shore batteries, lots of them. Any critter that can be defeated by hand to hand combat with a giant robot can have his shit blown to smithereens by an appropriately sized artillery round. Again... get real...
I can climb in the back seat and go to sleep, and tell it to wake me when we get there, or take the kids to school.
Its going to have to be full-up AI to do that - converse with it and you don't know for sure if its a machine or not.
I'm thinking 30 years or more... just a guess, tho.
We should lower the income tax rate of the rich to 0%
We should lower the income tax rate of the middle class to 0%
We should lower the income tax rate of the poor to 0%
We should make the capital gains tax to be 0%
We should make the estate tax rate to be 0%
We should make the gift tax rate to be 0%
We should make the corporate income tax rate to be 0%
We should make the alternative minimum tax rate to be 0%
We should make the payroll tax rate to be 0%
Pass the Fair Tax. www.fairttax.org
"No harm was done."
Like hell!!!
Clinton and her cronies discussed a deep-cover spy in Iran that was feeding us info on their nuclear weapons development, and did it on her uncleared server. The Iranians apparently hacked that (investigations show that at least 5 entities hacked her email) her email, discovered the spy, and executed him. Yeah, there's someone dead because of her damned classified on her damned unclassified machines.
Budget? No, I pay $308.50 a month for cable TV, internet, and phone with all the premium channels. Its just the principle of the thing. MORE money for ONE show? Not happening. If they can get the show to air SOMEWHERE in the group of channels I'm ALREADY paying for, then FINE, I'll watch it. But not a penny more. This also goes for monthly subscription internet content - nope, not happening either. Not Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Levin, any other website for a price BS. Pound sand. I start doing crap like that, I'll be up to $999 a month just for entertainment in no time...