The gov says 13.02 million barrels per day of petroleum for US transportation. Since we want to eventually replace semi-tractor-trailers and ship and boat engine consumption too, we'll go with that.
That's 13,200,000 barrels per day. There's 5,800,000 BTUs per barrel for a 76,560,000,000,000 BTU per day of transportation energy consumed.
Since the gasoline internal combustion engine is around 35% efficient, then we're actually using 26,796,000,000,000 BTUs per day.
To do that with electric cars, divide by the 0.9 efficiency of the electric motor, and 0.9 efficiency of the battery charging. That gives us 33,081,481,481,481 BTUs of electricity required.
There's 3412 BTUs per kilowatt-hour, so we'd need 9,695,627,632 KwH per day of new power.
Since there are 24 hours in a day, 9,695,627,632 KwH / 24 = 403,984,484 Kw = 403,984.5 Megawatts = 404 Gigawatts.
The Palo Verde nuclear complex, our largest nuke, has 3 reactors that each generate about 1 1/4 Gw, so that's 3.75 Gw for our largest nuke. so, 404 / 3.75 = 107.7 or to round up, 108 nuclear power plants the size of our largest nuke.
OK, my estimate was off by a zero, its over 100 nukes, not 1000. But that is still over 100 nukes that will NEVER GET BUILT because of the envirowackos.
So, tell me how we're going to fuel electric transportation without fossil fuels.
1) The USA has reduced AGW gasses more than any other country, thanks to natural gas produced in part by envirowacko-hated "fracking."
2) There's not a damn thing we can do about the CO2 level in the atmosphere as long as the rest of the world digs coal like there's no tomorrow.
3) There's absolutely, positively no alternative to fossil fuels to get cars and trucks to move down the highway. We need someone to invent the magic battery. The magic battery will hold as much or more energy than a tank of gas, and be capable of either being recharged or replaced in approximately the same time as filling a gas tank. If you want to save the planet, get your PHD in physics and electrochemistry and get your butt into a lab and invent the magic battery.
4) After inventing the magic battery, there will be over 1000 power plants to build if we were to use the largest nuke plants ever built. How many nukes will we build? Thanks to envirowackos, that number will be zero. So, what are electric cars going to run on that doesn't involve burning fossil fuels? Wind? Replacing the entire automotive fuel supply with wind would have a wind machine of the largest size ever produced every 20 square miles if they could be distributed evenly. Of course, due to impossible terrain like mountains, windless areas, etc. you'd probably get 1 wind machine every square mile, and located in a place where you have to construct 100's of 1000's of miles of power transmission lines (that envirowackos will ALSO oppose) to get it where you need it. And that may be an impossible task due to radiation losses and IR (heating) losses in the wires themselves.
Go ahead, figure it out. Just be smart enough to know that you don't have an answer, so you can quit condemning everyone else for simply trying to survive. We can't support the population numbers we have with 19th century farming methods that involve not using fossil fuels both in production and food transport. Do what can be done on its own schedule, and quit beating up on everyone else.
Consequences? Promoting expensive energy casts thousands or millions into poverty both from lack of work and from high energy prices. Poverty kills. Don't like coal? Get your butt into a lab and invent something cheaper that provides the same energy. No, wait, simply invent something AS cheap as coal. Betcha can't. And while elite liberal snobs with great tech jobs find a rise in energy prices a mere inconvenience, other people's kids go to bed hungry (no kidding, 1 in 6 people in the USA struggle with hunger) due to choosing between heating their homes and buying food. Me, I'll continue defying a much-disputed theory that will make it easier for more people to eat well. This "science" is _not_ settled:
Imagine an aircraft with multiple computers networked throughout the airframe. The task is then to detect which of the computers has ceased to exist (because of the 0.50), and shift all its functionality to one or more of the other computers, without missing a beat since these computers may be doing really time-critical stuff like controlling airfoils...
Re:Not that impressive!
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The $5,600 Tablet
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Its impressive when a computer does it.
Took a class in computer reliability in the face of all sorts of problems, and the instructor was a bit taken aback when those of us from the DoD started talking about having the computer system take a 50 caliber round. It wasn't a failure mode he was familiar with.
Good luck studying CS in college - I always advise against it for just this reason. The industries cry about not having competent domestic help, but what do they do? Simply outsource to save a buck, and the domestic help, us, work at Walmart.
Anyway, the fix for this, at least the H1B's, is the Fair Tax. It is a consumption tax on spending on new retail items for sale and services. it abolishes the income taxes, which make doing things in the US much cheaper, because there would be no corporate income tax. As for H1B's, the Fair Tax has a mechanism called the "prebate" that sends every citizen enough $$$ to cover the Fair Tax on all his spending up to the poverty level. The prebate is paid to citizens, not foreign workers. So, the foreign workers would be put at a disadvantage even if they do want to work for peanuts here. The Fair Tax is the way to full employment for the American people. We just have to pass the Fair Tax in congress.
The limiting factor for electric cars is the availability of electricity. Convert 13.02 million barrels / day of transportation petroleum to BTUs, account for the 35% or so efficiency of the IC engine, and then battery charging (90%) and battery efficiency (90%.) Got a nice big number? Divide that by the number of very large wind machines like the Vestas V164 8MW machine, and then multiply that by maybe 3 to account for wind conditions that are less than optimal for 8 megawatts of production. Will there be a bird left alive in the sky with wind chargers as far as the eye can see? I'm saying wind because it is relatively cheap for green energy, and we can actually build them, unlike nukes. So, if you don't mind a landscape that has turning wind machines as far as the eye can see from ANY vantage point in the country, then we can probably supply power for all of the US's transportation. The question then is how fast we can build them. At least if we're using wind to charge batteries, we can sidestep the fact that the wind doesn't blow all the time, and we can truck / rail the batteries to where they have to be to exchange them for spent batteries like the Tesla "Supercharger" stations which sidesteps the evirowacko / NIMBY crowd that will keep the necessary wires from being strung to distribute the power.
Deniers are not saying it's impossible to get off petrol, we all know that we have to do it eventually. We're just saying we can't do it NOW, and our best course of action is to drill and frack and keep energy prices low, while researching a better way.
If there's a way to apply nitrogen to crops and its cheaper and sans petro, I'm sure it will be used. "Cheaper" is the key.
I am unfamiliar with battery tech that can be practically used for a farm tractor. Yeah, there's some things that cost out the wazoo that would work, but we need "cheap" to get from "possible" to:"feasible", and I'm not familiar with any such sort of feasible. As for hybrid, I don't know how that would work. Ordinary hybrids gain their efficiency from recovering the kenetic energy of a car under braking, using it to charge the battery as the car slows, but how could that work in a tractor or combine?
Yes, the vast amount of CO2 is from cars and trucks, but if we're looking to leave the petroleum in the ground, we have to include boats and locomotives and tractor trailers and so forth. Tougher nut to crack, but all of it must be solved in order to get to the "no oil" state.
And yes, we are starting, because there's lots of research being done on the magic battery. Its not very visible because they've not been having a lot of success. But if you watch different science places like Slashdot.com and physorg.com and wired.com, there will be an announcement of high capacity batteries from time to time. So far, none have really worked out to be high capacity, capable of standing the rigor of automotive service, and be cheap enough to power the US fleet.
And the reason that we need to maintain / promote prosperity while keeping energy prices down is so that those places that ARE researching the magic battery, or the absolutely safe nuke, or many other possible solutions are not employing a pile of people that are all concerned about coming up with the $$$ to take care of their aging parents in an economic environment of dwindling wages and salaries, and be incentivized to move into private industry instead of a university environment, and go to work on something for profit instead of something for the advancement of green energy.
Extracting CO2 out of the air to preindustrial levels within 10 years would probably give us Valley Forge sort of cold every winter, but certainly no "global warming" would exist after that. The precipitate from that process, elemental carbon, might cover the state of Texas to about 30 ft. deep with such carbon, but we could always burn the ultra-pure carbon as fuel, in everything from formerly coal-fired power plants to the return of the steam locomotive.
10-4 good buddy. OBTW that will restore prosperity to millions of people in the USA, bring back manufacturing from overseas (because it went there due to being chased out of the country by income taxes so high that exporting raw materials, assembling them overseas, and importing the final product is still less expensive than paying 39.5% income tax to the Feds.) Pass the Fair Tax and life will get good again.
...most of the voters don't give a F, and therefore don't vote.
Rectification of this abomination may eventually take those millions of guns that exist in American society for exactly that purpose, although I'd like to think that there is some other way. The Article V constitutional convention that is being proposed by certain states may be able to tackle this, dunno. But the gov't doesn't do what's good for the people, that can be seen in our unemployment stats and so forth.
We could cut global emissions by taking manufacturing back, and doing it with clean(er) natural gas. Lets do it. Pass the Fair Tax, that eliminates the income taxes, and we can have our manufacturing back, because it's the income taxes that forced industries to send their jobs overseas on the 1st place, and the Fair Tax abolishes income taxes. Simple. We just have to do it.
"Acting now" is, again, NOT abusing the American people with more regulations and expensive things that will send more of them into poverty. It is instead researching the means to user CHEAPER energy such as electricity, that will, incidentally, greatly reduce GHG emissions from this country. If it were to be combined with nuclear power, we could drive to the transportation sector's emissions to 0. But harming the economy with more expense to achieve an extremely tiny improvement in GHG emissions is hugely counterproductive, and probably the best way to ensure that, if there really are any apocalyptic results from global warming, we will experience them.
Wrong, we like 'em. They're an engineering marvel. Unfortunately, they produce really expensive electricity. Implement them widely, and the 49 million people in poverty already, and already an unacceptable number, may go to 70 million, or 100 million. Cheap energy is how we live well. If it gets expensive, it's going to kill some people, because poverty is deadly.
There's research on things like battery tech, but it is coming out of Universities for a large part. You can see that most announcements of "breakthrough" battery tech are usually traceable back to a University. But great profit awaits someone that solves this puzzle, too.
Producing oil and gas and so forth is not making things worse, because it is the cheapest energy. If the price of energy goes up, so do the number of people in poverty. Poverty is deadly, and will take 6.5 years off your life. If you live in poverty as a child, those 6.5 years are unrecoverable even if you become rich later. We absolutely have to do the right thing for the American people, all of them including the poor, and it doesn't matter whether the petroleum companies decide to work on wind or geo or solar, just as long as someone does it. Some are, and new wind and solar are being built, and every now and then you find some envirowackos that are trying to keep geothermal from advancing by bitching about small earthquakes it may or may not generate, so someone most be working that too. The nonsense about bitching about the research is what needs to stop - earthquakes of that magnitude is just something to be endured - so suck it up, cupcake, that's what insurance is for. And unless you build out of adobe, it's not going to kill you.
Basically, tax retail sales and not income. It would revitalize the US economy, restore prosperity to the American people, and make plenty of money available, some of which could be used for the development of alternative energy.
I know what they're suggesting, and it will be absolutely 100% ineffective in the face of India and China digging coal without restraint. And raising the price of energy within the USA is absolutely unacceptable. It won't wreck the economy, because it is already wrecked with 49 million people in poverty. But it will make the economy worse.
And thanks for mentioning the STEP process. Note that the massive amount of money necessary for it would be available from the sale of its byproduct, elemental coal. This could be used to power coal-fired electrical generating plants, without the usual pollution from mercury and radioactive elements being cast into the air. Our biggest problem with this is where to put the carbon extracted from the atmosphere, as it would be massive.
I looked that the news report on the Harvard study you quoted, and it conveniently glosses over HOW the several states are going to use all this solar, wind, and other renewable energies to power a car down the road. All these renewable energies appear to be offered in the form of electricity, and cars do not yet run on that except for some very slippery-through-the-air, very expensive cars that most of us can't afford. What we need to utilize this energy would be a "magic battery" that stores probably 10X what a lithium ion battery stores now. There are legions of scientists working on this because finding the answer will make their companies rich, but so far we don't have what we need. A Ford F-150 powered by what's available in batteries today would probably have a 12 mile range. A semi-tractor-trailer running on electricity is currently unthinkable. Generate all the electricity you like with renewable energy and you're not going to have a solution until you make transportation run on electricity. And even if we do that, there's still India and China that give every indication of not caring even a little bit about this problem. I don't care about it either, because I still believe it is a fraud, but converting to renewable energy has other benefits that are worth it _if_ we do it without abusing the American people with higher energy costs.
And I believe there is an approach that we are not pursuing that would greatly BENEFIT the American people and that is to bring industry back to the USA. That would cause manufacturing to be done on planet earth by a country, US, that can use clean(er) natural gas to supply energy, gradually convert to 100% renewable energy, and drive emitted GHG's to lower levels while providing universal employment at good paying jobs for absolutely anyone that wanted one. What we have to do to achieve this is to abolish the income taxes. The income taxes are what really caused our jobs to go overseas, not American labor rates. American labor rates might have had something to do with that in the beginning, but now, with the high rates of automation available, it isn't a factor. If you don't believe it, look at pictures of Foxconn factories in China. They build iPhones. Note the vast array of tables where human beings stand and do this assembly by hand. That's because they are paid slave wages, but of course there are so many of them that overall, the labor can't be that cheap. No, I don't have those numbers, but imagine what that factory would look like in the USA. It would be rows and rows of machines doing these things automatically and faster, with many fewer workers that simply keep the machines running and supply them with the materials necessary to build the phones. And while there would be fewer workers, there would be workers. US auto manufacturing companies are highly automated, too, but 1000's of workers still go tromping in and out of them every day, earning a good living. That's what needs to happen all over the country, and can happen if we can prevent the US Gov;t showing up every year with its tax gun drawn, and attempting to steal 39.5% of the companies profits. Companies cannot and most often do not survive this tax abuse, and either go out of business altoge
Doesn't matter, petroleum and natural gas will eventually run out, whether it's 30 years or 300 years. We need to build nukes that can handle Uranium and Thorium and Plutonium for fuels, and breeder reactors to create more fuel and reprocess old fuel. Keep working on fusion, and someday fusion will be practical and our energy source will then be virtually inexhaustible.
No, they're not suggesting not using petroleum tomorrow. What they're suggesting is a carbon tax that will prevent millions of people from ever climbing out of poverty (there's about 49 million of them in the USA, a shameful number already) as well as hurling millions more into poverty. Poverty isn't just an inconvenience, it will take about 6 1/2 years off your life, and if you experience it as a child, that 6 1/2 years is unrecoverable even if you eventually recover to a prosperous life. We desperately need to do something about poverty, and these approaches to this arguably specious problem is costing the bottom portion of our society dearly. We need to reject these approaches, especially because not even their proponents claim that they will _cure_ the problem. 10 years ago they were telling us that we had to spend 50 trillion dollars (and you KNOW that most of this would have ended up being American money) and we could maybe avoid 1 - 1 1/2 degrees of warming rise by the year 2100. That's not good enough. We need an absolute cure for that kind of money, and nobody knows how to do it now.
So, what I'm saying is to make priority #1 the getting prosperity back to the USA, and then #2 using that prosperity to work on the problem of dwindling fossil fuels. Abusing the American public with expensive restrictions on petroleum use that will not make a whit of difference in the face of China and India and others not doing doodley squat along the same lines, and just continuing to dig coal, is unacceptable. Solve the problem for all time, or keep working on it, but don't hurt people with half-measures.
I'm all for advancing beyond fossil fuel, since it _will_ run out eventually (unless Freeman Dyson is right, and it doesn't come from fossilized plants but instead from a reaction of limestone under heat from the earth's core), but not at the expense of the lives of many Americans right now. All the approches suggested by the AGW alarmists are hideously expensive,, and so will cause millions to be cast into poverty. Poverty is deadly, and not to be promoted by the well-to-do for a goal that even they admit will not solve the problem. The temp is going up because it is flat impossible to not use oil and other fossil fuels in the near term.
The way to approach this is research into alternative energy as well as research into geo-engineering to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere. The latter approach, if successful,, could actually cure the problem much quicker than stopping fossil fuel use and sitting back and waiting for the CO2 to be filtered out of the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, defend the poor from those who would harm them with epensive solutions that won't work anyway.
The bottom line with your fertilizer response is that making fertilizer requires energy and hydrogen, and its coming from some fossil fuel that the climate fraudsters claim we have to stop using, that being natural gas. Yes, natural gas is a fossil fuel.
Your temperature control statements ignore reality. Tell you what, you go live in my home town of Fostoria, Ohio and tell me how well insulation works when the high temperature is 4 below zero like it was a couple months ago.
Farm tractors using electricity? Really? That either requires a battery or a very long extension cord, neither of which is easy or cheap. And you still didn't solve the energy needs for moving it to Krogers and Piggly Wiggly.
I don't think that's realistic. "Me" putting in solar is a possibility, but I'm already spending $25K - $30K next fall to install geothermal heating and cooling. Even I, as a retired Navy engineer, can't afford to do both, at least not right away. And, my electricity is so cheap anyway, being anywhere from $65 / month to $150 / month in the summer when the air conditioner runs won't save me much, I think. And the poor, including the working poor that we have millions of today, won't be able to afford it either.
Solar, if it ever works at all, is probably going to have to come from the electric company setting up large facilities.
But solar reducing poverty? I just don't see it in either mode, privately owned solar systems or power company owned systems. I believe that electricity will be much more expensive than we have now.
Well, I just don't believe that abusing the American people, to prevent the relatively small amount of driving that isn't absolutely essential, in a country that has already reduced its carbon footprint more than any other, in the face of countries like China and India that don't really give a F, is going to be sufficient to solve this problem.
I believe the way to solve this problem is to keep prosperity as high as we can make it, research the problem scientifically and find a solution that the American public will buy. That solution would be something that solves the problem _and_ makes their lives better. That solution would be something like the STEP process I've been linking to, that would reduce the carbon in the atmosphere to pre-industrial revolution levels. That solution would be the electrification of transportation completely, bringing with it a dramatic reduction in the cost of transportation from everyone from the poor to the rich. Stuff like that. Building 1500 or more huge nuclear power plants and the invention of the magic battery to enable using it on the highway would have the American public kissing your feet.
But (further) crippling the economy with a carbon tax, and most likely precluding the research necessary to make these things happen I still believe to be counterproductive.
Hey, here's one thing we can do with a political solution that will improve the situation and be "bought" by the American people. Since the income taxes, and NOT "work-for-peanuts" foreign workforces is the real reason that jobs have gone and stay overseas, lets REPEAL the income taxes, get our jobs back from overseas and cross-border, build 100's of 1000's of factories that run on electricity that is produced by MUCH cleaner natural gas that will come from fracking the whole USA, and shut down those foreign factories that are running on coal. Now, THAT will have a positive effect on the carbon footprint of manufacturing world wide, as American industry does it better with cleaner energy, and incidentally results in full employment including those that never went to college. It doesn't take college to do pipefitting and welding and millwright things and electrician work or production line work or etc. in a factory. The economy would boom, we would have a positive effect on the CO2, and it wouldn't even require that those participating in the whole thing believe that they are doing something for global warming. They don't even have to believe in global warming, they can believe it is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated upon mankind, but will still cooperate because it is in their interest to do so, as would be the electrification of transportation.
These sorts of things will work because it would be good for everybody. A carbon tax won't work because it will further pauperize the American people and they will resist it, successfully, politically.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, check my math:
The gov says 13.02 million barrels per day of petroleum for US transportation. Since we want to eventually replace semi-tractor-trailers and ship and boat engine consumption too, we'll go with that.
That's 13,200,000 barrels per day. There's 5,800,000 BTUs per barrel for a 76,560,000,000,000 BTU per day of transportation energy consumed.
Since the gasoline internal combustion engine is around 35% efficient, then we're actually using 26,796,000,000,000 BTUs per day.
To do that with electric cars, divide by the 0.9 efficiency of the electric motor, and 0.9 efficiency of the battery charging. That gives us 33,081,481,481,481 BTUs of electricity required.
There's 3412 BTUs per kilowatt-hour, so we'd need 9,695,627,632 KwH per day of new power.
Since there are 24 hours in a day, 9,695,627,632 KwH / 24 = 403,984,484 Kw = 403,984.5 Megawatts = 404 Gigawatts.
The Palo Verde nuclear complex, our largest nuke, has 3 reactors that each generate about 1 1/4 Gw, so that's 3.75 Gw for our largest nuke. so, 404 / 3.75 = 107.7 or to round up, 108 nuclear power plants the size of our largest nuke.
OK, my estimate was off by a zero, its over 100 nukes, not 1000. But that is still over 100 nukes that will NEVER GET BUILT because of the envirowackos.
So, tell me how we're going to fuel electric transportation without fossil fuels.
1) The USA has reduced AGW gasses more than any other country, thanks to natural gas produced in part by envirowacko-hated "fracking."
2) There's not a damn thing we can do about the CO2 level in the atmosphere as long as the rest of the world digs coal like there's no tomorrow.
3) There's absolutely, positively no alternative to fossil fuels to get cars and trucks to move down the highway. We need someone to invent the magic battery. The magic battery will hold as much or more energy than a tank of gas, and be capable of either being recharged or replaced in approximately the same time as filling a gas tank. If you want to save the planet, get your PHD in physics and electrochemistry and get your butt into a lab and invent the magic battery.
4) After inventing the magic battery, there will be over 1000 power plants to build if we were to use the largest nuke plants ever built. How many nukes will we build? Thanks to envirowackos, that number will be zero. So, what are electric cars going to run on that doesn't involve burning fossil fuels? Wind? Replacing the entire automotive fuel supply with wind would have a wind machine of the largest size ever produced every 20 square miles if they could be distributed evenly. Of course, due to impossible terrain like mountains, windless areas, etc. you'd probably get 1 wind machine every square mile, and located in a place where you have to construct 100's of 1000's of miles of power transmission lines (that envirowackos will ALSO oppose) to get it where you need it. And that may be an impossible task due to radiation losses and IR (heating) losses in the wires themselves.
Go ahead, figure it out. Just be smart enough to know that you don't have an answer, so you can quit condemning everyone else for simply trying to survive. We can't support the population numbers we have with 19th century farming methods that involve not using fossil fuels both in production and food transport. Do what can be done on its own schedule, and quit beating up on everyone else.
Consequences? Promoting expensive energy casts thousands or millions into poverty both from lack of work and from high energy prices. Poverty kills. Don't like coal? Get your butt into a lab and invent something cheaper that provides the same energy. No, wait, simply invent something AS cheap as coal. Betcha can't. And while elite liberal snobs with great tech jobs find a rise in energy prices a mere inconvenience, other people's kids go to bed hungry (no kidding, 1 in 6 people in the USA struggle with hunger) due to choosing between heating their homes and buying food. Me, I'll continue defying a much-disputed theory that will make it easier for more people to eat well. This "science" is _not_ settled:
http://www.petitionproject.org...
Only in the fact that it surprised the instructor when he found out that when we said that a computer got shot, we were literal, not figurative.
Imagine an aircraft with multiple computers networked throughout the airframe. The task is then to detect which of the computers has ceased to exist (because of the 0.50), and shift all its functionality to one or more of the other computers, without missing a beat since these computers may be doing really time-critical stuff like controlling airfoils...
Its impressive when a computer does it.
Took a class in computer reliability in the face of all sorts of problems, and the instructor was a bit taken aback when those of us from the DoD started talking about having the computer system take a 50 caliber round. It wasn't a failure mode he was familiar with.
Good luck studying CS in college - I always advise against it for just this reason. The industries cry about not having competent domestic help, but what do they do? Simply outsource to save a buck, and the domestic help, us, work at Walmart.
Anyway, the fix for this, at least the H1B's, is the Fair Tax. It is a consumption tax on spending on new retail items for sale and services. it abolishes the income taxes, which make doing things in the US much cheaper, because there would be no corporate income tax. As for H1B's, the Fair Tax has a mechanism called the "prebate" that sends every citizen enough $$$ to cover the Fair Tax on all his spending up to the poverty level. The prebate is paid to citizens, not foreign workers. So, the foreign workers would be put at a disadvantage even if they do want to work for peanuts here. The Fair Tax is the way to full employment for the American people. We just have to pass the Fair Tax in congress.
The limiting factor for electric cars is the availability of electricity. Convert 13.02 million barrels / day of transportation petroleum to BTUs, account for the 35% or so efficiency of the IC engine, and then battery charging (90%) and battery efficiency (90%.) Got a nice big number? Divide that by the number of very large wind machines like the Vestas V164 8MW machine, and then multiply that by maybe 3 to account for wind conditions that are less than optimal for 8 megawatts of production. Will there be a bird left alive in the sky with wind chargers as far as the eye can see? I'm saying wind because it is relatively cheap for green energy, and we can actually build them, unlike nukes. So, if you don't mind a landscape that has turning wind machines as far as the eye can see from ANY vantage point in the country, then we can probably supply power for all of the US's transportation. The question then is how fast we can build them. At least if we're using wind to charge batteries, we can sidestep the fact that the wind doesn't blow all the time, and we can truck / rail the batteries to where they have to be to exchange them for spent batteries like the Tesla "Supercharger" stations which sidesteps the evirowacko / NIMBY crowd that will keep the necessary wires from being strung to distribute the power.
Deniers are not saying it's impossible to get off petrol, we all know that we have to do it eventually. We're just saying we can't do it NOW, and our best course of action is to drill and frack and keep energy prices low, while researching a better way.
If there's a way to apply nitrogen to crops and its cheaper and sans petro, I'm sure it will be used. "Cheaper" is the key.
I am unfamiliar with battery tech that can be practically used for a farm tractor. Yeah, there's some things that cost out the wazoo that would work, but we need "cheap" to get from "possible" to :"feasible", and I'm not familiar with any such sort of feasible. As for hybrid, I don't know how that would work. Ordinary hybrids gain their efficiency from recovering the kenetic energy of a car under braking, using it to charge the battery as the car slows, but how could that work in a tractor or combine?
Yes, the vast amount of CO2 is from cars and trucks, but if we're looking to leave the petroleum in the ground, we have to include boats and locomotives and tractor trailers and so forth. Tougher nut to crack, but all of it must be solved in order to get to the "no oil" state.
And yes, we are starting, because there's lots of research being done on the magic battery. Its not very visible because they've not been having a lot of success. But if you watch different science places like Slashdot.com and physorg.com and wired.com, there will be an announcement of high capacity batteries from time to time. So far, none have really worked out to be high capacity, capable of standing the rigor of automotive service, and be cheap enough to power the US fleet.
And the reason that we need to maintain / promote prosperity while keeping energy prices down is so that those places that ARE researching the magic battery, or the absolutely safe nuke, or many other possible solutions are not employing a pile of people that are all concerned about coming up with the $$$ to take care of their aging parents in an economic environment of dwindling wages and salaries, and be incentivized to move into private industry instead of a university environment, and go to work on something for profit instead of something for the advancement of green energy.
...and get this or something like it to work:
http://phys.org/news199005915....
Extracting CO2 out of the air to preindustrial levels within 10 years would probably give us Valley Forge sort of cold every winter, but certainly no "global warming" would exist after that. The precipitate from that process, elemental carbon, might cover the state of Texas to about 30 ft. deep with such carbon, but we could always burn the ultra-pure carbon as fuel, in everything from formerly coal-fired power plants to the return of the steam locomotive.
10-4 good buddy. OBTW that will restore prosperity to millions of people in the USA, bring back manufacturing from overseas (because it went there due to being chased out of the country by income taxes so high that exporting raw materials, assembling them overseas, and importing the final product is still less expensive than paying 39.5% income tax to the Feds.) Pass the Fair Tax and life will get good again.
...most of the voters don't give a F, and therefore don't vote.
Rectification of this abomination may eventually take those millions of guns that exist in American society for exactly that purpose, although I'd like to think that there is some other way. The Article V constitutional convention that is being proposed by certain states may be able to tackle this, dunno. But the gov't doesn't do what's good for the people, that can be seen in our unemployment stats and so forth.
We could cut global emissions by taking manufacturing back, and doing it with clean(er) natural gas. Lets do it. Pass the Fair Tax, that eliminates the income taxes, and we can have our manufacturing back, because it's the income taxes that forced industries to send their jobs overseas on the 1st place, and the Fair Tax abolishes income taxes. Simple. We just have to do it.
"Acting now" is, again, NOT abusing the American people with more regulations and expensive things that will send more of them into poverty. It is instead researching the means to user CHEAPER energy such as electricity, that will, incidentally, greatly reduce GHG emissions from this country. If it were to be combined with nuclear power, we could drive to the transportation sector's emissions to 0. But harming the economy with more expense to achieve an extremely tiny improvement in GHG emissions is hugely counterproductive, and probably the best way to ensure that, if there really are any apocalyptic results from global warming, we will experience them.
Wrong, we like 'em. They're an engineering marvel. Unfortunately, they produce really expensive electricity. Implement them widely, and the 49 million people in poverty already, and already an unacceptable number, may go to 70 million, or 100 million. Cheap energy is how we live well. If it gets expensive, it's going to kill some people, because poverty is deadly.
There's research on things like battery tech, but it is coming out of Universities for a large part. You can see that most announcements of "breakthrough" battery tech are usually traceable back to a University. But great profit awaits someone that solves this puzzle, too.
Producing oil and gas and so forth is not making things worse, because it is the cheapest energy. If the price of energy goes up, so do the number of people in poverty. Poverty is deadly, and will take 6.5 years off your life. If you live in poverty as a child, those 6.5 years are unrecoverable even if you become rich later. We absolutely have to do the right thing for the American people, all of them including the poor, and it doesn't matter whether the petroleum companies decide to work on wind or geo or solar, just as long as someone does it. Some are, and new wind and solar are being built, and every now and then you find some envirowackos that are trying to keep geothermal from advancing by bitching about small earthquakes it may or may not generate, so someone most be working that too. The nonsense about bitching about the research is what needs to stop - earthquakes of that magnitude is just something to be endured - so suck it up, cupcake, that's what insurance is for. And unless you build out of adobe, it's not going to kill you.
Basically, tax retail sales and not income. It would revitalize the US economy, restore prosperity to the American people, and make plenty of money available, some of which could be used for the development of alternative energy.
I know what they're suggesting, and it will be absolutely 100% ineffective in the face of India and China digging coal without restraint. And raising the price of energy within the USA is absolutely unacceptable. It won't wreck the economy, because it is already wrecked with 49 million people in poverty. But it will make the economy worse.
And thanks for mentioning the STEP process. Note that the massive amount of money necessary for it would be available from the sale of its byproduct, elemental coal. This could be used to power coal-fired electrical generating plants, without the usual pollution from mercury and radioactive elements being cast into the air. Our biggest problem with this is where to put the carbon extracted from the atmosphere, as it would be massive.
I looked that the news report on the Harvard study you quoted, and it conveniently glosses over HOW the several states are going to use all this solar, wind, and other renewable energies to power a car down the road. All these renewable energies appear to be offered in the form of electricity, and cars do not yet run on that except for some very slippery-through-the-air, very expensive cars that most of us can't afford. What we need to utilize this energy would be a "magic battery" that stores probably 10X what a lithium ion battery stores now. There are legions of scientists working on this because finding the answer will make their companies rich, but so far we don't have what we need. A Ford F-150 powered by what's available in batteries today would probably have a 12 mile range. A semi-tractor-trailer running on electricity is currently unthinkable. Generate all the electricity you like with renewable energy and you're not going to have a solution until you make transportation run on electricity. And even if we do that, there's still India and China that give every indication of not caring even a little bit about this problem. I don't care about it either, because I still believe it is a fraud, but converting to renewable energy has other benefits that are worth it _if_ we do it without abusing the American people with higher energy costs.
And I believe there is an approach that we are not pursuing that would greatly BENEFIT the American people and that is to bring industry back to the USA. That would cause manufacturing to be done on planet earth by a country, US, that can use clean(er) natural gas to supply energy, gradually convert to 100% renewable energy, and drive emitted GHG's to lower levels while providing universal employment at good paying jobs for absolutely anyone that wanted one. What we have to do to achieve this is to abolish the income taxes. The income taxes are what really caused our jobs to go overseas, not American labor rates. American labor rates might have had something to do with that in the beginning, but now, with the high rates of automation available, it isn't a factor. If you don't believe it, look at pictures of Foxconn factories in China. They build iPhones. Note the vast array of tables where human beings stand and do this assembly by hand. That's because they are paid slave wages, but of course there are so many of them that overall, the labor can't be that cheap. No, I don't have those numbers, but imagine what that factory would look like in the USA. It would be rows and rows of machines doing these things automatically and faster, with many fewer workers that simply keep the machines running and supply them with the materials necessary to build the phones. And while there would be fewer workers, there would be workers. US auto manufacturing companies are highly automated, too, but 1000's of workers still go tromping in and out of them every day, earning a good living. That's what needs to happen all over the country, and can happen if we can prevent the US Gov;t showing up every year with its tax gun drawn, and attempting to steal 39.5% of the companies profits. Companies cannot and most often do not survive this tax abuse, and either go out of business altoge
Doesn't matter, petroleum and natural gas will eventually run out, whether it's 30 years or 300 years. We need to build nukes that can handle Uranium and Thorium and Plutonium for fuels, and breeder reactors to create more fuel and reprocess old fuel. Keep working on fusion, and someday fusion will be practical and our energy source will then be virtually inexhaustible.
No, they're not suggesting not using petroleum tomorrow. What they're suggesting is a carbon tax that will prevent millions of people from ever climbing out of poverty (there's about 49 million of them in the USA, a shameful number already) as well as hurling millions more into poverty. Poverty isn't just an inconvenience, it will take about 6 1/2 years off your life, and if you experience it as a child, that 6 1/2 years is unrecoverable even if you eventually recover to a prosperous life. We desperately need to do something about poverty, and these approaches to this arguably specious problem is costing the bottom portion of our society dearly. We need to reject these approaches, especially because not even their proponents claim that they will _cure_ the problem. 10 years ago they were telling us that we had to spend 50 trillion dollars (and you KNOW that most of this would have ended up being American money) and we could maybe avoid 1 - 1 1/2 degrees of warming rise by the year 2100. That's not good enough. We need an absolute cure for that kind of money, and nobody knows how to do it now.
So, what I'm saying is to make priority #1 the getting prosperity back to the USA, and then #2 using that prosperity to work on the problem of dwindling fossil fuels. Abusing the American public with expensive restrictions on petroleum use that will not make a whit of difference in the face of China and India and others not doing doodley squat along the same lines, and just continuing to dig coal, is unacceptable. Solve the problem for all time, or keep working on it, but don't hurt people with half-measures.
I'm all for advancing beyond fossil fuel, since it _will_ run out eventually (unless Freeman Dyson is right, and it doesn't come from fossilized plants but instead from a reaction of limestone under heat from the earth's core), but not at the expense of the lives of many Americans right now. All the approches suggested by the AGW alarmists are hideously expensive,, and so will cause millions to be cast into poverty. Poverty is deadly, and not to be promoted by the well-to-do for a goal that even they admit will not solve the problem. The temp is going up because it is flat impossible to not use oil and other fossil fuels in the near term.
The way to approach this is research into alternative energy as well as research into geo-engineering to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere. The latter approach, if successful,, could actually cure the problem much quicker than stopping fossil fuel use and sitting back and waiting for the CO2 to be filtered out of the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, defend the poor from those who would harm them with epensive solutions that won't work anyway.
The bottom line with your fertilizer response is that making fertilizer requires energy and hydrogen, and its coming from some fossil fuel that the climate fraudsters claim we have to stop using, that being natural gas. Yes, natural gas is a fossil fuel.
Your temperature control statements ignore reality. Tell you what, you go live in my home town of Fostoria, Ohio and tell me how well insulation works when the high temperature is 4 below zero like it was a couple months ago.
Farm tractors using electricity? Really? That either requires a battery or a very long extension cord, neither of which is easy or cheap. And you still didn't solve the energy needs for moving it to Krogers and Piggly Wiggly.
Your responses ignore reality.
The economy grew by 400%. That's golden in anyone's book.
I don't think that's realistic. "Me" putting in solar is a possibility, but I'm already spending $25K - $30K next fall to install geothermal heating and cooling. Even I, as a retired Navy engineer, can't afford to do both, at least not right away. And, my electricity is so cheap anyway, being anywhere from $65 / month to $150 / month in the summer when the air conditioner runs won't save me much, I think. And the poor, including the working poor that we have millions of today, won't be able to afford it either.
Solar, if it ever works at all, is probably going to have to come from the electric company setting up large facilities.
But solar reducing poverty? I just don't see it in either mode, privately owned solar systems or power company owned systems. I believe that electricity will be much more expensive than we have now.
Well, I just don't believe that abusing the American people, to prevent the relatively small amount of driving that isn't absolutely essential, in a country that has already reduced its carbon footprint more than any other, in the face of countries like China and India that don't really give a F, is going to be sufficient to solve this problem.
I believe the way to solve this problem is to keep prosperity as high as we can make it, research the problem scientifically and find a solution that the American public will buy. That solution would be something that solves the problem _and_ makes their lives better. That solution would be something like the STEP process I've been linking to, that would reduce the carbon in the atmosphere to pre-industrial revolution levels. That solution would be the electrification of transportation completely, bringing with it a dramatic reduction in the cost of transportation from everyone from the poor to the rich. Stuff like that. Building 1500 or more huge nuclear power plants and the invention of the magic battery to enable using it on the highway would have the American public kissing your feet.
But (further) crippling the economy with a carbon tax, and most likely precluding the research necessary to make these things happen I still believe to be counterproductive.
Hey, here's one thing we can do with a political solution that will improve the situation and be "bought" by the American people. Since the income taxes, and NOT "work-for-peanuts" foreign workforces is the real reason that jobs have gone and stay overseas, lets REPEAL the income taxes, get our jobs back from overseas and cross-border, build 100's of 1000's of factories that run on electricity that is produced by MUCH cleaner natural gas that will come from fracking the whole USA, and shut down those foreign factories that are running on coal. Now, THAT will have a positive effect on the carbon footprint of manufacturing world wide, as American industry does it better with cleaner energy, and incidentally results in full employment including those that never went to college. It doesn't take college to do pipefitting and welding and millwright things and electrician work or production line work or etc. in a factory. The economy would boom, we would have a positive effect on the CO2, and it wouldn't even require that those participating in the whole thing believe that they are doing something for global warming. They don't even have to believe in global warming, they can believe it is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated upon mankind, but will still cooperate because it is in their interest to do so, as would be the electrification of transportation.
These sorts of things will work because it would be good for everybody. A carbon tax won't work because it will further pauperize the American people and they will resist it, successfully, politically.