Oh, and #4, the subject of the whole thread is that the powers that be have decided NOT to research any such generalized solution such as sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere with machinery, but instead attempt to continue going down the impossible road of leaving the carbon in the ground. That is, of course, what would be necessary to start lowering the CO2 in the atmosphere - we have to stop putting it in the atmosphere in the 1st place, and can only do that by stopping the fossil fuel burning. We can't do the transportation sector without some dramatically improved batteries that are also cheap - it does no good to have a battery that costs too much because poor people still have to have a way to move around the USA without it costing too much, otherwise they die from living in poverty, which can take 10 years off your life - a big chunk when compared to smoking that can take up to 7 years off your life. But we don't even want to TRY to avoid having to do the impossible by researching other approaches. This still screams "conspiracy to bankrupt the USA via bogus science" to me. Its like phishing attacks in the email, they give you information designed to scare hell out of you, such as you supposedly just requested that your email be discontinued, and then give you a bogus link to click that will send the malware to your computer to encrypt everything on your drives that looks like your personal data so they can sell you the decryption key at an exorbitant price. Only this bunch is telling us we have to stop using the thing that makes modern life enjoyable, cheap energy, and go back to either farming with animal power or use expensive energy and kill some millions of folks. I call BS, and think we should study things like actually sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere by machinery - expensive, too, but at least theoretically possible without killing millions of folks.
1) We could possibly, in time, figure out how to do it cheaper, but this would be a start.
2) Is it more or less expensive than wack-job politician's "Green New Deal" that is currently tagged at somewhere around $90T and will NOT actually be capable of solving the problem? ("Solving the problem" means doing so without killing millions of people, which the raising of the price of energy would do by casting more and more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking may take 7 years off your life, but living in poverty is good for a 10 year reduction.)
3) Has it escaped everyone that we are currently adding about $1T to the National Debt every year and NOBODY has a clue what to do about it - at least nobody in Washington (Clue: The last year that the National Debt didn't go up was 1957. We've raised and lowered the income taxes numerous times since without achieving that desired result. It's blinding obvious to me that income taxes are absolutely incapable of funding the gov't, and should be abolished. The Founders set up the nation to run on consumption taxes such as excise taxes and tariffs. We should abolish all the income taxes - personal, corporate, capital gains, payroll, self-employment, alternative minimum, gift, estate, etc. etc. - and replace them all with consumption taxes once again. The FairTax is the best proposal since it is the only progressive consumption tax, but something - anything along those lines would have a better chance of funding some solutions that we need fairly urgently.)
always have kittens at the mere thought that someone might be able to solve the problem without carting trillions of dollars out of the USA and distributing it worldwide. I mean, if we were to figure out how to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and have pre-industrial CO2 levels in the atmosphere in 20 years, then they would have no reason to attempt to steal all our money and bring poverty to the citizens of the USA.
Its hard to believe that there are those that do NOT see that this movement is engineered in Moscow in order to damage their chief rival, the USA. The fact that those who beat this drum are aghast at geo-engineering is ample evidence that the whole thing has, as a goal, the diminishment of the USA rather than actually solving the CO2 in the atmosphere problem.
The reason it is too slow is that I'm personally capable of handling more speed. When they limit it to, say, 150, I know I'll never see it 'cuz I don't have the balls for that in a public road. Just one deer... track would be a different story.
Otherwise, it's said that the fire that roared thru the California forests with its "accumulated biomass" propagated at 200 mph. You're not outrunning that from an even start, but if you have a head start, the difference between 112 and "more" might be life and death. Also, the recent humongous tornadoes could have stood some outrunning on the right road, and 112 may or may not have been enough depending on the geometry, rainfall, etc. Dry straight road, it's approaching obliquely on an intercept course, you might need all the speed that the engine is capable of. Never know. And then of course there's the situation where you're being chased by criminals that want to do you harm. This is why some people pay big bucks for capable road machinery - kidnapping - and they can't do it if that can't catch you.
Sure, those are all highly unusual situations, but its like having a gun and not needing it, or needing a gun and not having it. There are good reasons to carry...
One has to be careful what one does with mandating huge sums of money for the supposed public good. $25 billion spent for what is charged to be little good effect impacts a lot of people. That money doesn't grow on trees it comes from the labors of the American people. If electricity prices go up and maybe a dozen families get evicted from housing because they couldn't afford electricity and rent and the other bills, and maybe someone dies from disease contracted from living in the family car or maybe being beaten to death by an illegal alien while living in a tent under a bridge, then the public hasn't been well served by the mercury reduction. There are always trade-offs, and you can do more harm than good if you aren't careful.
And that ends my last post to Slashdot. (Apparently) due to postings such as this, that disagree with the prevailing leftist mainstream thought, and a week or 2 ago for posts critical of the global warming nonsense, I have received another "timeout" ban to my internet posting region, but not to my account personally. Fine. One can only express popular opinion on slashdot now, so Slashdot can go fuck itself blue, as I've removed my shortcuts and will be saying goodbye. If all opinions aren't welcome, then it isn't worth reading - only 1 school of thought is tolerated, and I'm not changing mine, so, again, Sayonara. I've gotten around the ban by posting from my phone company's data package and using their network for this one final post, and so dies free thought in the USA. Not supposed to be this way.
"the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that the cost of cutting mercury from power plants "dwarfs" the monetary benefits. "
So, what does that mean? The power plant spends $25 million to "clean up" mercury, and it means that 13 people do not contract some dread disease or debilitating condition or whatever that would only cost a few hundred thousand dollars to treat? That is like the famous car safety nazis requiring $1000's to strengthen a door with a steel beam, but it would only save X people, whereas the $1000's spent on the steel beam could instead be spent on enhanced emergency medical services and save many times more people than the steel beams could.
There's a thing that's known as penny wise and pound foolish, and we have to be careful when we're mandating this and mandating that so that we don't spend money in foolish ways. Spend it the way that benefits the most people to the most degree. Beating up on power plants with expensive modifications, maybe just because you don't like power plants, could be a foolish waste.
I don't have to charge my Radio Shack AM/FM headphones with the 6' audio cable to my phone, 'cuz the phone powers them directly. That's what I'm talking about - just plug it in, and if the phone has power, then so do the headphones. F progress... some things are not better just 'cuz they're newer...
... a really long time if the only new alternative is a phone without a headphone jack. Use the H out of it, and am NOT going to buy a new set of bluetooth headphones or some cockeyed adapter. That's just the way it is. That is all...
Uh... wind produces CO2 as well. How? Its in the cement production for the massive foundations for those wind turbine towers. Many many cubic yards of cement for each one, and each cubic yard of cement produces 350 lbs of CO2:
When you search for the cubic yards of concrete in a wind turbine foundation, you get:
"The construction of 15- to 20-foot-deep concrete foundations to support all of the 328-foot-high towers with 2-MW turbines required 30,000 tons of cement. On average, each of these below-ground support systems used 60 truckloads of concrete (750 cubic yards), which was poured via a two-step process."
Soooo... wind turbines release a load of CO2 as well, during construction.
The article mentions a 2 MW turbine. The consumption of electricity in the USA is as much as:
From another google search:
3.82 X 10^15 Watt-Hours for all of 2017 for USA. Hours in the year are 24X365 = 8760. So 38,200X10^11 Watt-Hours / 8760 hours = 4.36 X 10^11 Watts = 4.36X10^8 Kw average. That's 436,000,000 Kw, or 436,000 Megawatts. If we're doing it with just 2 Mw wind turbines, then that's 218,000 wind turbines. Of course it takes a lot more wind turbines because they don't produce 100% of the time because the wind doesn't blow 100% of the time. Double that back to 436,000 wind turbines in order to ensure availability.
Anyway, that's a staggering amount of concrete and a lot of CO2 to build them. Does the concrete last forever? Can we just keep renewing the bearings of the wind turbine and run them forever on the same foundation. I don't know. But wind isn't CO2 neutral.
Yep, and since I wanted to have some land unmolested in order to sink foundations for big ham radio towers, I chose to use wells rather than a field of coiled tubes.
Wind and solar are great for the grid, keep building (although the concrete required for wind tower foundations requires an insane amount of concrete, which emits a LOT of CO2 when making cement) but we need a solution for transportation CO2, and don't have it. Love wind turbines, I think they're beautiful, and solar farms are totally innocuous and I think offer a pleasing geometry to the eye even if somewhat boring, but again, its transportation that will be the tough nut to crack.
Yeah, the 3 200' wells were about $12K. Would have been $8K but they couldn't use the big drill, and had to use the small one over 1 week. The big drill would have sunk into the soft soil here, and maybe upset. If they could have used the big drill, it'd have only taken a day, instead of a week.
I looked at it that I was soon going to have to replace my old heating and AC unit anyway as it was getting old, the oil furnace being around 20 years old, and you pretty much have to buy a new AC for a new oil furnace, and that'd have cost maybe $10K anyway, so I only spent and additional $20K. AND, I didn't actually spend an additional $20K since I got the 30% tax credit, so I actually spent an additional $11K. The only problem with that is that I had to finance the $30K to have it installed, and didn't REfinance it for $21K when the tax credit showed up. I bought a Nikon D4s camera body instead ($6,500) and pocketed the rest - mostly blew it playing poker and travelling. Soooo... the $400ish a month is a bit higher than reality for the geothermal, there's the price of a new heating and AC system of SOME sort in there anyway, as well as a new camera.
I could do that trip in comfort and for a great price in my old '69 Ford LTD, but you can't buy anything like that because it has to be smaller and more fuel efficient and safer. The 1st one makes it uncomfortable AND inadequate, the last 2 make it expensive.
Inadequate == my old '69 Ford LTD I could have installed the tape player under the dash, the ham radio pretty much anywhere since there was a lot of room, the antennas for the ham radio(s) and the CB on the rood, trunk, and even the hood, and the trunk would take all the stuff I need to bring along. The car was pretty big.
Current cars have computers and all sorts of stuff all over the place, the safety equipment (air bags) makes mounting things risky lest they be propelled such that they slice your head off when driven through the air by the air bag, we need radios where the control head is tiny so's it'll mount on the dash or a stalk coming up from the seat bolt or some strange thing like that, and everything is just basically difficult.
The Ford Edge ST I have on order will be easier to mount things, have enough room to haul stuff, place antennas, mount radios, etc. Still tough to watch out what you're doing with all the damned air bags (I'm 71, been driving since 1963, and have NEVER been in a situation where air bags or antilock brakes would have helped me) and will go from here in Virginia to the end of the Dalton highway and the north slope of Alaska comfortably. I can't get a nice, cheap '69 Ford LTD any more, and have to buy the $43K Ford Edge ST, and that's expensive enough that I can't also afford a $30K fuel-efficient something-else. No, I refuse to buy a stripper with a mouse-motor that won't get out of its own way, let alone mine, and want something that accelerates nicely onto the freeway. Sooo.. the Edge will be my only car.
Make an electric car that either goes 300 miles and recharges in 5 minutes that sells for what my Edge ST does and hauls all the stuff my Edge ST will and I'll buy it. Making such a car is how you're going to reduce CO2, not by telling people they have to live less pleasantly. Get busy, get your butt into a lab and invent the magic battery that will make such a car possible. That's how to insure the future of the planet. Passing some law will have no effect at all, unless it possibly makes things worse like the efficiency laws and the car safety laws and so forth already have.
Fuck you! We will continue to attempt to improve things for all Americans, and anyone getting in the way of that, well, they'll find out what those 300 million guns in American society are for!
Well, its $400 a month for the entire energy expense, not just heating and cooling, and oil heat is insaner, so I'm not worried about saving or not saving money. I do like not having to deal with oil heat.
My $30K geothermal heat/cool system is saving me a pile of money!!! Maybe. Payments for the initial cost are in a 30 year loan about $180 a month, and the electricity to run the entire place including heating and cooling ranges from about $85 to $160 / month for 1700 sq. ft. where, in Virginia, winters are moderate. Add the 2, and the entire cost of energy for the place runs around $400 / month. However, I now don't have to worry about getting a heating oil bill for exactly 1 month of $630. Added to the typical $85 electric bill, that's >$700. Am I saving money? Maybe, maybe not, but I definitely don't get a monthly shock of $630 for fuel.
Yeppir!!! We can mostly only afford 1 vehicle now with the prices forced so high partly because of all the pollution crap, and sometimes we want to set out on the open road and drive a couple thousand miles (you can do that easy in a country this size - planning one for 10,000 miles next summer to north slope of Alaska and back (to Virginia)) and a Mini is NOT the car to do that in. It has to be comfortable for ALL our driving situations, and that means "buy the SUV." A red Ford Edge ST will be making the trip to Prudhoe Bay with me in it. If you bozos hadn't killed the bigger-car market with the insane miles-per-gallon CAFE requirements, maybe it would be a somewhat more fuel efficient CAR I would be driving, but NO, you-all have to F-up the market by making CARS to be undesirable for some of our requirements, so we buy cars that are suitable for ALL our requirements, and drive them ALL the time so's the end up consuming gas at 26 mpg instead of 40 mpg. You efficiency and safety zealots did this TO us, not FOR us...
We are firmly dedicated to the principle that we should try to make life better for everyone. That translates to making energy as cheap as we can. The cheapest energy also emits CO2. Don't like it? Figure out ways to make and use energy that are cheaper than the fossil fuel energy. Raising the price of energy punts a bunch more folks into poverty, and poverty kills. Smoking can take 7 years off your life, but poverty can take 10. We're against that.
Plus, y'all have a credibility problem, and have from the start. People come up with alternative ways to handle the problem, such as geo-engineering, and y'all have kittens. It appears that you are way more dedicated to making life less enjoyable for people as a goal, rather than having the CO2 dealt with as the goal. You appear to simply want to control people's live, which comes with the ability to steal their money by deception. The global warming alarmism appears to be a deception. Start being reasonable about approaches that don't involve casting more and more people into poverty and I think you can expect a wider acceptance of your action plans.
Make that work, put our money in that, build 'em maybe $750 million worth a year all over the globe, and in 100 years we'll be where we need to be maybe. Certainly the world together could afford $750 million a year?
Trying to limit CO2 just makes the prices of everything go up, which punts a bunch more people into poverty, where they die. That is, poverty is deadly. Smoking will take maybe 7 years off your life, but poverty can take 10. Don't do things that make things expensive for the poor, or make middle class people into poor class people. Do something like this and then just the rich and otherwise well-to-do can finance it and leave the poor and middle-classers the hell out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and #4, the subject of the whole thread is that the powers that be have decided NOT to research any such generalized solution such as sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere with machinery, but instead attempt to continue going down the impossible road of leaving the carbon in the ground. That is, of course, what would be necessary to start lowering the CO2 in the atmosphere - we have to stop putting it in the atmosphere in the 1st place, and can only do that by stopping the fossil fuel burning. We can't do the transportation sector without some dramatically improved batteries that are also cheap - it does no good to have a battery that costs too much because poor people still have to have a way to move around the USA without it costing too much, otherwise they die from living in poverty, which can take 10 years off your life - a big chunk when compared to smoking that can take up to 7 years off your life. But we don't even want to TRY to avoid having to do the impossible by researching other approaches. This still screams "conspiracy to bankrupt the USA via bogus science" to me. Its like phishing attacks in the email, they give you information designed to scare hell out of you, such as you supposedly just requested that your email be discontinued, and then give you a bogus link to click that will send the malware to your computer to encrypt everything on your drives that looks like your personal data so they can sell you the decryption key at an exorbitant price. Only this bunch is telling us we have to stop using the thing that makes modern life enjoyable, cheap energy, and go back to either farming with animal power or use expensive energy and kill some millions of folks. I call BS, and think we should study things like actually sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere by machinery - expensive, too, but at least theoretically possible without killing millions of folks.
1) We could possibly, in time, figure out how to do it cheaper, but this would be a start.
2) Is it more or less expensive than wack-job politician's "Green New Deal" that is currently tagged at somewhere around $90T and will NOT actually be capable of solving the problem? ("Solving the problem" means doing so without killing millions of people, which the raising of the price of energy would do by casting more and more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking may take 7 years off your life, but living in poverty is good for a 10 year reduction.)
3) Has it escaped everyone that we are currently adding about $1T to the National Debt every year and NOBODY has a clue what to do about it - at least nobody in Washington (Clue: The last year that the National Debt didn't go up was 1957. We've raised and lowered the income taxes numerous times since without achieving that desired result. It's blinding obvious to me that income taxes are absolutely incapable of funding the gov't, and should be abolished. The Founders set up the nation to run on consumption taxes such as excise taxes and tariffs. We should abolish all the income taxes - personal, corporate, capital gains, payroll, self-employment, alternative minimum, gift, estate, etc. etc. - and replace them all with consumption taxes once again. The FairTax is the best proposal since it is the only progressive consumption tax, but something - anything along those lines would have a better chance of funding some solutions that we need fairly urgently.)
https://www.technologyreview.c...
always have kittens at the mere thought that someone might be able to solve the problem without carting trillions of dollars out of the USA and distributing it worldwide. I mean, if we were to figure out how to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and have pre-industrial CO2 levels in the atmosphere in 20 years, then they would have no reason to attempt to steal all our money and bring poverty to the citizens of the USA.
Its hard to believe that there are those that do NOT see that this movement is engineered in Moscow in order to damage their chief rival, the USA. The fact that those who beat this drum are aghast at geo-engineering is ample evidence that the whole thing has, as a goal, the diminishment of the USA rather than actually solving the CO2 in the atmosphere problem.
The reason it is too slow is that I'm personally capable of handling more speed. When they limit it to, say, 150, I know I'll never see it 'cuz I don't have the balls for that in a public road. Just one deer... track would be a different story.
Otherwise, it's said that the fire that roared thru the California forests with its "accumulated biomass" propagated at 200 mph. You're not outrunning that from an even start, but if you have a head start, the difference between 112 and "more" might be life and death. Also, the recent humongous tornadoes could have stood some outrunning on the right road, and 112 may or may not have been enough depending on the geometry, rainfall, etc. Dry straight road, it's approaching obliquely on an intercept course, you might need all the speed that the engine is capable of. Never know. And then of course there's the situation where you're being chased by criminals that want to do you harm. This is why some people pay big bucks for capable road machinery - kidnapping - and they can't do it if that can't catch you.
Sure, those are all highly unusual situations, but its like having a gun and not needing it, or needing a gun and not having it. There are good reasons to carry...
140. County road, late at night. 68 Vette, 327, 350 HP. Enjoyed. Wouldn't buy the Volvo.
One has to be careful what one does with mandating huge sums of money for the supposed public good. $25 billion spent for what is charged to be little good effect impacts a lot of people. That money doesn't grow on trees it comes from the labors of the American people. If electricity prices go up and maybe a dozen families get evicted from housing because they couldn't afford electricity and rent and the other bills, and maybe someone dies from disease contracted from living in the family car or maybe being beaten to death by an illegal alien while living in a tent under a bridge, then the public hasn't been well served by the mercury reduction. There are always trade-offs, and you can do more harm than good if you aren't careful.
And that ends my last post to Slashdot. (Apparently) due to postings such as this, that disagree with the prevailing leftist mainstream thought, and a week or 2 ago for posts critical of the global warming nonsense, I have received another "timeout" ban to my internet posting region, but not to my account personally. Fine. One can only express popular opinion on slashdot now, so Slashdot can go fuck itself blue, as I've removed my shortcuts and will be saying goodbye. If all opinions aren't welcome, then it isn't worth reading - only 1 school of thought is tolerated, and I'm not changing mine, so, again, Sayonara. I've gotten around the ban by posting from my phone company's data package and using their network for this one final post, and so dies free thought in the USA. Not supposed to be this way.
"the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that the cost of cutting mercury from power plants "dwarfs" the monetary benefits. "
So, what does that mean? The power plant spends $25 million to "clean up" mercury, and it means that 13 people do not contract some dread disease or debilitating condition or whatever that would only cost a few hundred thousand dollars to treat? That is like the famous car safety nazis requiring $1000's to strengthen a door with a steel beam, but it would only save X people, whereas the $1000's spent on the steel beam could instead be spent on enhanced emergency medical services and save many times more people than the steel beams could.
There's a thing that's known as penny wise and pound foolish, and we have to be careful when we're mandating this and mandating that so that we don't spend money in foolish ways. Spend it the way that benefits the most people to the most degree. Beating up on power plants with expensive modifications, maybe just because you don't like power plants, could be a foolish waste.
I don't have to charge my Radio Shack AM/FM headphones with the 6' audio cable to my phone, 'cuz the phone powers them directly. That's what I'm talking about - just plug it in, and if the phone has power, then so do the headphones. F progress... some things are not better just 'cuz they're newer...
Bad Samaritan
Ready Player One
Unsane
Annihilation
12 Strong
The list of 2018 trash would be a lot longer.
... a really long time if the only new alternative is a phone without a headphone jack. Use the H out of it, and am NOT going to buy a new set of bluetooth headphones or some cockeyed adapter. That's just the way it is. That is all...
Uh... wind produces CO2 as well. How? Its in the cement production for the massive foundations for those wind turbine towers. Many many cubic yards of cement for each one, and each cubic yard of cement produces 350 lbs of CO2:
http://greenblizzard.com/2016/...
When you search for the cubic yards of concrete in a wind turbine foundation, you get:
"The construction of 15- to 20-foot-deep concrete foundations to support all of the 328-foot-high towers with 2-MW turbines required 30,000 tons of cement. On average, each of these below-ground support systems used 60 truckloads of concrete (750 cubic yards), which was poured via a two-step process."
Soooo... wind turbines release a load of CO2 as well, during construction.
The article mentions a 2 MW turbine. The consumption of electricity in the USA is as much as:
From another google search:
3.82 X 10^15 Watt-Hours for all of 2017 for USA. Hours in the year are 24X365 = 8760. So 38,200X10^11 Watt-Hours / 8760 hours = 4.36 X 10^11 Watts = 4.36X10^8 Kw average. That's 436,000,000 Kw, or 436,000 Megawatts. If we're doing it with just 2 Mw wind turbines, then that's 218,000 wind turbines. Of course it takes a lot more wind turbines because they don't produce 100% of the time because the wind doesn't blow 100% of the time. Double that back to 436,000 wind turbines in order to ensure availability.
Anyway, that's a staggering amount of concrete and a lot of CO2 to build them. Does the concrete last forever? Can we just keep renewing the bearings of the wind turbine and run them forever on the same foundation. I don't know. But wind isn't CO2 neutral.
Retro to old house.
Yep, and since I wanted to have some land unmolested in order to sink foundations for big ham radio towers, I chose to use wells rather than a field of coiled tubes.
Well.... yeah it is, its extracting the heat of the earth. That's why its 300% - 600% efficient. That heat comes from the earth.
Wind and solar are great for the grid, keep building (although the concrete required for wind tower foundations requires an insane amount of concrete, which emits a LOT of CO2 when making cement) but we need a solution for transportation CO2, and don't have it. Love wind turbines, I think they're beautiful, and solar farms are totally innocuous and I think offer a pleasing geometry to the eye even if somewhat boring, but again, its transportation that will be the tough nut to crack.
Yeah, the 3 200' wells were about $12K. Would have been $8K but they couldn't use the big drill, and had to use the small one over 1 week. The big drill would have sunk into the soft soil here, and maybe upset. If they could have used the big drill, it'd have only taken a day, instead of a week.
I looked at it that I was soon going to have to replace my old heating and AC unit anyway as it was getting old, the oil furnace being around 20 years old, and you pretty much have to buy a new AC for a new oil furnace, and that'd have cost maybe $10K anyway, so I only spent and additional $20K. AND, I didn't actually spend an additional $20K since I got the 30% tax credit, so I actually spent an additional $11K. The only problem with that is that I had to finance the $30K to have it installed, and didn't REfinance it for $21K when the tax credit showed up. I bought a Nikon D4s camera body instead ($6,500) and pocketed the rest - mostly blew it playing poker and travelling. Soooo... the $400ish a month is a bit higher than reality for the geothermal, there's the price of a new heating and AC system of SOME sort in there anyway, as well as a new camera.
I could do that trip in comfort and for a great price in my old '69 Ford LTD, but you can't buy anything like that because it has to be smaller and more fuel efficient and safer. The 1st one makes it uncomfortable AND inadequate, the last 2 make it expensive.
Inadequate == my old '69 Ford LTD I could have installed the tape player under the dash, the ham radio pretty much anywhere since there was a lot of room, the antennas for the ham radio(s) and the CB on the rood, trunk, and even the hood, and the trunk would take all the stuff I need to bring along. The car was pretty big.
Current cars have computers and all sorts of stuff all over the place, the safety equipment (air bags) makes mounting things risky lest they be propelled such that they slice your head off when driven through the air by the air bag, we need radios where the control head is tiny so's it'll mount on the dash or a stalk coming up from the seat bolt or some strange thing like that, and everything is just basically difficult.
The Ford Edge ST I have on order will be easier to mount things, have enough room to haul stuff, place antennas, mount radios, etc. Still tough to watch out what you're doing with all the damned air bags (I'm 71, been driving since 1963, and have NEVER been in a situation where air bags or antilock brakes would have helped me) and will go from here in Virginia to the end of the Dalton highway and the north slope of Alaska comfortably. I can't get a nice, cheap '69 Ford LTD any more, and have to buy the $43K Ford Edge ST, and that's expensive enough that I can't also afford a $30K fuel-efficient something-else. No, I refuse to buy a stripper with a mouse-motor that won't get out of its own way, let alone mine, and want something that accelerates nicely onto the freeway. Sooo.. the Edge will be my only car.
Make an electric car that either goes 300 miles and recharges in 5 minutes that sells for what my Edge ST does and hauls all the stuff my Edge ST will and I'll buy it. Making such a car is how you're going to reduce CO2, not by telling people they have to live less pleasantly. Get busy, get your butt into a lab and invent the magic battery that will make such a car possible. That's how to insure the future of the planet. Passing some law will have no effect at all, unless it possibly makes things worse like the efficiency laws and the car safety laws and so forth already have.
"The standard of living must fall in the US."
Fuck you! We will continue to attempt to improve things for all Americans, and anyone getting in the way of that, well, they'll find out what those 300 million guns in American society are for!
Well, its $400 a month for the entire energy expense, not just heating and cooling, and oil heat is insaner, so I'm not worried about saving or not saving money. I do like not having to deal with oil heat.
Love it!
My $30K geothermal heat/cool system is saving me a pile of money!!! Maybe. Payments for the initial cost are in a 30 year loan about $180 a month, and the electricity to run the entire place including heating and cooling ranges from about $85 to $160 / month for 1700 sq. ft. where, in Virginia, winters are moderate. Add the 2, and the entire cost of energy for the place runs around $400 / month. However, I now don't have to worry about getting a heating oil bill for exactly 1 month of $630. Added to the typical $85 electric bill, that's >$700. Am I saving money? Maybe, maybe not, but I definitely don't get a monthly shock of $630 for fuel.
Yeppir!!! We can mostly only afford 1 vehicle now with the prices forced so high partly because of all the pollution crap, and sometimes we want to set out on the open road and drive a couple thousand miles (you can do that easy in a country this size - planning one for 10,000 miles next summer to north slope of Alaska and back (to Virginia)) and a Mini is NOT the car to do that in. It has to be comfortable for ALL our driving situations, and that means "buy the SUV." A red Ford Edge ST will be making the trip to Prudhoe Bay with me in it. If you bozos hadn't killed the bigger-car market with the insane miles-per-gallon CAFE requirements, maybe it would be a somewhat more fuel efficient CAR I would be driving, but NO, you-all have to F-up the market by making CARS to be undesirable for some of our requirements, so we buy cars that are suitable for ALL our requirements, and drive them ALL the time so's the end up consuming gas at 26 mpg instead of 40 mpg. You efficiency and safety zealots did this TO us, not FOR us...
We are firmly dedicated to the principle that we should try to make life better for everyone. That translates to making energy as cheap as we can. The cheapest energy also emits CO2. Don't like it? Figure out ways to make and use energy that are cheaper than the fossil fuel energy. Raising the price of energy punts a bunch more folks into poverty, and poverty kills. Smoking can take 7 years off your life, but poverty can take 10. We're against that.
Plus, y'all have a credibility problem, and have from the start. People come up with alternative ways to handle the problem, such as geo-engineering, and y'all have kittens. It appears that you are way more dedicated to making life less enjoyable for people as a goal, rather than having the CO2 dealt with as the goal. You appear to simply want to control people's live, which comes with the ability to steal their money by deception. The global warming alarmism appears to be a deception. Start being reasonable about approaches that don't involve casting more and more people into poverty and I think you can expect a wider acceptance of your action plans.
...stuff that doesn't work, like emitting less CO2. We can't. We continue to show it, over and over.
Instead, put efforts toward something like this:
https://www.technologyreview.c...
Make that work, put our money in that, build 'em maybe $750 million worth a year all over the globe, and in 100 years we'll be where we need to be maybe. Certainly the world together could afford $750 million a year?
Trying to limit CO2 just makes the prices of everything go up, which punts a bunch more people into poverty, where they die. That is, poverty is deadly. Smoking will take maybe 7 years off your life, but poverty can take 10. Don't do things that make things expensive for the poor, or make middle class people into poor class people. Do something like this and then just the rich and otherwise well-to-do can finance it and leave the poor and middle-classers the hell out of it.