So, pioneers in covered wagons risked Indian attack, deadly bad weather, rain-swollen streams, and so forth to build this country, but you can't possible stand a pipeline in your yard to further the country's competitiveness and prosperity, eh?
Maybe I should say, "Anti-American environmental obstructionist leaders, followed by their supporters and useful idiots, are again attempting to block any significant progress in the United States, and putting the country closer to economic disaster."
Look, I believe the leadership of these groups are enemies of the country, attempting to sabotage its prosperity and people, so that is the reason for the pejorative. If they were ever reasonable, that'd be one thing. But they cannot be serious in their demands given all the facts, so I think they are simply equivalent to another branch of Al Qaeda, people to be defeated.
They're AMERICAN oil refiners employing AMERICANS that refine the oil, and then AMERICANS load the petroleum products onto the ships to be exported. We desperately need to export to help the balance of trade, too.
Are there any non-environmentally sensitive areas? Of course not. The definition of "environmentally sensitive" is that someone wants to build something there.
There was that premise early-on by someone that we should leave the oil in the ground. That implies a 100% "something else" solution that we do not have. Yet.
"I love it how the goal-posts keep on moving - and how a solution has to solve 100% of the problems or it is a complete fail."
Its because y'all want to leave the oil in the ground. To do that, you have to have a 100% "something else" solution. We're talking electricity. So, you need batteries to be able to run everything that normally runs on oil right now.
Next time I can afford a $100K car, I'll buy a Tesla.
It has to be as fast a gas/diesel or it isn't a solution, people would still buy the gas/diesel. What we need to do is make electric so good, that people choose it over gas/diesel. That's the only way to do the change-over.
You gonna build rails everywhere trucks go? Your envirowacko friends going to protest the new rails? (Sure they will...) If rail could be economically electrified, it would be,;cuz the rail companies are all about doing things with least cost. But erecting overhead wires to power locomotives everywhere, and building nuclear power plants to run them are both so expensive that its not happening, plus envirowackos won't let it happen even if it gets cheap.
No point in trying to clean it up. It was there when the wooden ships first arrived from Europe. Early explorers found tar balls on the beaches of what is now Texas. Oil happens, that's all there is to it. Recent spills just are more of the same.
And since we don't do asinine things like attempting to clean up the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, the cost is $0.
BTW, no oil company, or any other sort of company, pays for anything. Their CUSTOMERS pay for whatever-it-is through higher product prices.
Getting you to work and around town is not a solution. Getting me from Virginia to Tucson to Colorado, up Pikes Peak and back, then to St. Louis and then back to Virginia in a space of 3 weeks, as I did early last year with my gasoline powered car, is (part of) a solution. A solution has to include 18-wheelers, merchant ships, railway locomotives, aircraft, etc. etc. And there is no electrical solution to replace jet aircraft, period. Best we have is electric motors spinning propellers, and that's 400 mph or so, not 600 and up for military aircraft. IOW, you're dreaming. All this is not going to happen probably for decades, until someone invents the magic battery that charges in a couple minutes and will power a non-rollerskate vehicle, like maybe a Jeep Cherokee, for 300 miles at 70 mph. And THEN we will need more power plants than we can build.
We're going to need oil for a very long time.
And, BTW, just 'cuz you're in Phoenix and can do this, that doesn't mean someone in Toledo, Ohio can do it. I'm from that area, and have seen the sun go behind the clouds in late November and not be seen again 'til mid-January. Its cloudy there, a lot. And the days are really short in the winter, too.
Problem with solar is that its hard to run cars on it. Fix that, and we're walking in tall cotton. As much as you might like, we just can't leave this stuff in the ground. Yeah, cheap oil is possible, its called fracking. We're accessing billions of barrels in N. Dakota alone, and there's more in lots of other places. Too many of those places are on gov't land, which "O" is obstructing from being explored / exploited. We need to do everything we can to make oil production cheap, and rely on industry to research cheaper ways to make solar into electricity, and run cars on electricity. As soon as someone invents the magic battery, the devil will be out for breakfast in terms of building new electrical generating capacity.
Electricity: See if I can work this math again. Chevy Volt gets 35 miles on 7.5 Kwh of electricity, so use that as an efficiency for cars. 4.6 miles per KwH. There are about 3 trillion vehicle miles driven per year in the USA, so that's ( 3 X 10^12) X 4.6 = 13.8 trillion KwH or 13.8 X 10^15 watt-hours. Our largest nuke is in Arizona and has a capacity of 3,875 Mw or 3.875 X 10^9 watts. So, you have to run a plant this size for 13.8 / 3.875 X (10 ^ (15-9)) hours per year to power all the cars in the USA that have the efficiency of a Chevy Volt. That'd be 3.56 X 10 ^ 6 hours per year. Unfortunately, there are only (24 X 365) = 8,760 hours in a year, so you'd need 3.54 / 8.76 X (10 ^ (6 - 3)) = 0.404 X 10 ^ 3 or 404 new nuclear plants the size of the one in Arizona to be built to power these electric cars. But wait, almost all cars are far less efficient than the Chevy Volt in terms of size, weight, and frontal area, and then we need to include trucks. Multiply the need for new, giant nuclear power plants by a factor of 4, ballpark. 1600 new giant nuclear power plants the size of our largest one in Arizona. 32 per state on average. What do you think the chances of that happening are? Probably more likely than being able to afford the construction of enough wind machines and solar farms that produce seriously expensive electricity. The Arizona nuke produces at 6.33 cents per KwH, according to Wikipedia:
You can do the math for the wind machines and solar panels to generate that same amount of electricity. Think we'd have any birds left after all the wind machines knock them out of the sky with their whirling blades occupying probably every square foot of the country that has any significant wind? Cost comparison for electrical generation shows Wind and Solar putting up some really ugly numbers:
So, solve the envirowacko opposition to new nuclear plants, envirowacko opposition to new power lines, the hideous cost of solar and wind energy, and then we can talk about leaving the oil in the ground. But until then, we NEED it - we simply cannot support the size of our population without it. People have to get to work, get back, go to the store and buy things, and yeah, recreation is necessary. Trucks and trains and airplanes have to bring us things. You probably couldn't cut the transportation required by more than a few percent, and doing so would make everyone miserable waiting for buses to arrive and trains to depart and force them to live like sardines in a can in some high-rise apartment complex, which would be miserable enough for me to contemplate suicide. I've got an acre on which I have a really fine ham radio antenna system, with another tower / antenna planned, and not being able to do that hobby, with my other hobbies also requiring lots of transportation (I have 70K miles on my car for 21 months of driving due to my other hobby) and without being able to do them, I'm miserable.
If we built a PRT that handled automobiles instead of just people, we could get millions of cars off roads, run transportation more on electricity which is cleaner and cheaper, and avoid millions of auto accidents that kill and injure people and animals (deer, dogs, cats,skunks, & possums, mostly.) With cars carrying families, it would be far cheaper than airlines, and at an operating speed of 80 mph, would be fairly efficient and fast enough to get coast-to-coast in about 40 hours, with their own cars (no renting) and with the luggage in the trunk, and not "handled" to wind up in Acapulco when you're in Anaheim.
One's enough, since the arguments against building pipelines are simple obstructionism, and not rational. If the whiners had an alternative, they would at least be reasonable. But they can't say, "Do this instead of a pipeline" because they just don't have a "this" to do. They want to cast the whole country into poverty by strangling it of cheap energy. Cheap energy is life for millions of people. Obstructing it should be chargeable as murder.
The US has a freight rail system that is unmatched in the world. Other countries do passenger rail just fine, but nobody beats the USA at freight rail.
Do you drive a car, ride a bus, ride a train, ride an airplane? If so, you couldn't be doing it by leaving it in the ground. We don't have an alternative to oil yet. We just don't. We can't do what we need to do without oil. Yet. And we don't simply need to be able to run on electricity or some other energy (what?), we need to do it at the same price as oil, or we'll throw even more people into poverty. Poverty will take about 6.5 years off your life. IOW, poverty kills. You want to leave it in the ground? Fine, get your PHD, get your a** into a lab, and invent an alternative that won't cost more than what we have already.
GREEN POWER ISN'T READY, duh! Its expensive, expensive, expensive and yeah, that does make a difference. We've already 50 million people in poverty, and poverty takes about 6.5 years off your life. That's 330 million person-years less life for the American people, and "green" energy will add millions of people to the poverty roles because of its expense. Its happening already, electricity prices are at an all-time high. You want green energy? Get your PHD, get your a** in the lab, and make it cheap. Simply whining about it and expecting someone else to provide it for you is a non-starter.
Those bereft of the little Saturday morning morality plays aimed at kids from the late '50's wouldn't have been exposed to the idea that it doesn't matter who you steal from, stealing is stealing. Our favorite programs like "The Lone Ranger" and "Sky King" and those sorts of programs would instruct kids between right and wrong. And they were right, BTW, it _doesn't_ matter who you steal from, if you do it, you are a low-life thief.
... More envirowacko nonsense to control the people, "You will buy what _I_ SAY", with no consideration of the poor. The replacements are _all_ significantly more expensive than the incandescants they supposedly replace, and for a double whammy, they are all made overseas, and so have almost certainly thrown out of work those Americans who were making incandescent light bulbs.
It is becoming of increased interest that studies estimate that living in poverty will subtract 6.5 years from your life, and if you do it as a child, those 6.5 years can't be recovered by more affluent living later. Since there are 50 million Americans in poverty, that is potentially 330 million person-years of less life. How many person-years of life is using these supposedly less-power-hungry light bulbs going to save us through less emissions from coal-fired power plants that are being phased out anyway, again at an icreased price, to be replaced by more expensive but cleaner-burning natural gas?
"Saving the planet" is great, but only if it means that the planet can nurture humans better, and allow them to live better and longer. This doesn't do that.
>The FCC's job is to determine if they are safe, so people calling for _them_ to ban them because of the annoyance factors are just assholes.
Exactly. Society is currently plagued with people who seem to believe that they have the right to control everything that happens all the way out to their horizon. That's how we get our industries costing several times what they should, and having jobs go overseas, when the idiots sue everyone in sight about new highways, new power lines, new rail lines, new factories, new anything.
If we let these people have their way, cell phones will be banned in retail stores, on public sidewalks, in restaurants, in bars, in cars, in trains, on boats, and basically everywhere other than home. I say they need to get an attitude adjustment and just mind their own damn business, and treat it like construction noise or traffic noise or even the sound of the jet's own engines, which we all are pretty successful at ignoring.
The autonomous car detects a cat in the road, and then what does it do? Does it slam on the brake even tho you're doing 65 mph and there's an 18 wheeler 3 feet from your rear bumper? Does it try to brake and swerve even tho there's a glaze of ice on the road?
Slashdot Mirror
So, pioneers in covered wagons risked Indian attack, deadly bad weather, rain-swollen streams, and so forth to build this country, but you can't possible stand a pipeline in your yard to further the country's competitiveness and prosperity, eh?
Maybe I should say, "Anti-American environmental obstructionist leaders, followed by their supporters and useful idiots, are again attempting to block any significant progress in the United States, and putting the country closer to economic disaster."
Look, I believe the leadership of these groups are enemies of the country, attempting to sabotage its prosperity and people, so that is the reason for the pejorative. If they were ever reasonable, that'd be one thing. But they cannot be serious in their demands given all the facts, so I think they are simply equivalent to another branch of Al Qaeda, people to be defeated.
They're AMERICAN oil refiners employing AMERICANS that refine the oil, and then AMERICANS load the petroleum products onto the ships to be exported. We desperately need to export to help the balance of trade, too.
Are there any non-environmentally sensitive areas? Of course not. The definition of "environmentally sensitive" is that someone wants to build something there.
There was that premise early-on by someone that we should leave the oil in the ground. That implies a 100% "something else" solution that we do not have. Yet.
OK, we'll reduce the population just because you don't like oil. You first.
"I love it how the goal-posts keep on moving - and how a solution has to solve 100% of the problems or it is a complete fail."
Its because y'all want to leave the oil in the ground. To do that, you have to have a 100% "something else" solution. We're talking electricity. So, you need batteries to be able to run everything that normally runs on oil right now.
Next time I can afford a $100K car, I'll buy a Tesla.
It has to be as fast a gas/diesel or it isn't a solution, people would still buy the gas/diesel. What we need to do is make electric so good, that people choose it over gas/diesel. That's the only way to do the change-over.
You gonna build rails everywhere trucks go? Your envirowacko friends going to protest the new rails? (Sure they will...) If rail could be economically electrified, it would be, ;cuz the rail companies are all about doing things with least cost. But erecting overhead wires to power locomotives everywhere, and building nuclear power plants to run them are both so expensive that its not happening, plus envirowackos won't let it happen even if it gets cheap.
No point in trying to clean it up. It was there when the wooden ships first arrived from Europe. Early explorers found tar balls on the beaches of what is now Texas. Oil happens, that's all there is to it. Recent spills just are more of the same.
And since we don't do asinine things like attempting to clean up the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, the cost is $0.
BTW, no oil company, or any other sort of company, pays for anything. Their CUSTOMERS pay for whatever-it-is through higher product prices.
Getting you to work and around town is not a solution. Getting me from Virginia to Tucson to Colorado, up Pikes Peak and back, then to St. Louis and then back to Virginia in a space of 3 weeks, as I did early last year with my gasoline powered car, is (part of) a solution. A solution has to include 18-wheelers, merchant ships, railway locomotives, aircraft, etc. etc. And there is no electrical solution to replace jet aircraft, period. Best we have is electric motors spinning propellers, and that's 400 mph or so, not 600 and up for military aircraft. IOW, you're dreaming. All this is not going to happen probably for decades, until someone invents the magic battery that charges in a couple minutes and will power a non-rollerskate vehicle, like maybe a Jeep Cherokee, for 300 miles at 70 mph. And THEN we will need more power plants than we can build.
We're going to need oil for a very long time.
And, BTW, just 'cuz you're in Phoenix and can do this, that doesn't mean someone in Toledo, Ohio can do it. I'm from that area, and have seen the sun go behind the clouds in late November and not be seen again 'til mid-January. Its cloudy there, a lot. And the days are really short in the winter, too.
No, it isn't ready, and the expense of it results in killing people.
Problem with solar is that its hard to run cars on it. Fix that, and we're walking in tall cotton. As much as you might like, we just can't leave this stuff in the ground. Yeah, cheap oil is possible, its called fracking. We're accessing billions of barrels in N. Dakota alone, and there's more in lots of other places. Too many of those places are on gov't land, which "O" is obstructing from being explored / exploited. We need to do everything we can to make oil production cheap, and rely on industry to research cheaper ways to make solar into electricity, and run cars on electricity. As soon as someone invents the magic battery, the devil will be out for breakfast in terms of building new electrical generating capacity.
Electricity: See if I can work this math again. Chevy Volt gets 35 miles on 7.5 Kwh of electricity, so use that as an efficiency for cars. 4.6 miles per KwH. There are about 3 trillion vehicle miles driven per year in the USA, so that's ( 3 X 10^12) X 4.6 = 13.8 trillion KwH or 13.8 X 10^15 watt-hours. Our largest nuke is in Arizona and has a capacity of 3,875 Mw or 3.875 X 10^9 watts. So, you have to run a plant this size for 13.8 / 3.875 X (10 ^ (15-9)) hours per year to power all the cars in the USA that have the efficiency of a Chevy Volt. That'd be 3.56 X 10 ^ 6 hours per year. Unfortunately, there are only (24 X 365) = 8,760 hours in a year, so you'd need 3.54 / 8.76 X (10 ^ (6 - 3)) = 0.404 X 10 ^ 3 or 404 new nuclear plants the size of the one in Arizona to be built to power these electric cars. But wait, almost all cars are far less efficient than the Chevy Volt in terms of size, weight, and frontal area, and then we need to include trucks. Multiply the need for new, giant nuclear power plants by a factor of 4, ballpark. 1600 new giant nuclear power plants the size of our largest one in Arizona. 32 per state on average. What do you think the chances of that happening are? Probably more likely than being able to afford the construction of enough wind machines and solar farms that produce seriously expensive electricity. The Arizona nuke produces at 6.33 cents per KwH, according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station
You can do the math for the wind machines and solar panels to generate that same amount of electricity. Think we'd have any birds left after all the wind machines knock them out of the sky with their whirling blades occupying probably every square foot of the country that has any significant wind? Cost comparison for electrical generation shows Wind and Solar putting up some really ugly numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
So, solve the envirowacko opposition to new nuclear plants, envirowacko opposition to new power lines, the hideous cost of solar and wind energy, and then we can talk about leaving the oil in the ground. But until then, we NEED it - we simply cannot support the size of our population without it. People have to get to work, get back, go to the store and buy things, and yeah, recreation is necessary. Trucks and trains and airplanes have to bring us things. You probably couldn't cut the transportation required by more than a few percent, and doing so would make everyone miserable waiting for buses to arrive and trains to depart and force them to live like sardines in a can in some high-rise apartment complex, which would be miserable enough for me to contemplate suicide. I've got an acre on which I have a really fine ham radio antenna system, with another tower / antenna planned, and not being able to do that hobby, with my other hobbies also requiring lots of transportation (I have 70K miles on my car for 21 months of driving due to my other hobby) and without being able to do them, I'm miserable.
If we built a PRT that handled automobiles instead of just people, we could get millions of cars off roads, run transportation more on electricity which is cleaner and cheaper, and avoid millions of auto accidents that kill and injure people and animals (deer, dogs, cats,skunks, & possums, mostly.) With cars carrying families, it would be far cheaper than airlines, and at an operating speed of 80 mph, would be fairly efficient and fast enough to get coast-to-coast in about 40 hours, with their own cars (no renting) and with the luggage in the trunk, and not "handled" to wind up in Acapulco when you're in Anaheim.
One's enough, since the arguments against building pipelines are simple obstructionism, and not rational. If the whiners had an alternative, they would at least be reasonable. But they can't say, "Do this instead of a pipeline" because they just don't have a "this" to do. They want to cast the whole country into poverty by strangling it of cheap energy. Cheap energy is life for millions of people. Obstructing it should be chargeable as murder.
The US has a freight rail system that is unmatched in the world. Other countries do passenger rail just fine, but nobody beats the USA at freight rail.
Do you drive a car, ride a bus, ride a train, ride an airplane? If so, you couldn't be doing it by leaving it in the ground. We don't have an alternative to oil yet. We just don't. We can't do what we need to do without oil. Yet. And we don't simply need to be able to run on electricity or some other energy (what?), we need to do it at the same price as oil, or we'll throw even more people into poverty. Poverty will take about 6.5 years off your life. IOW, poverty kills. You want to leave it in the ground? Fine, get your PHD, get your a** into a lab, and invent an alternative that won't cost more than what we have already.
"Because pipes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_River#2011_oil_spill"
Zero fatalities.
"are always - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalamazoo_River_oil_spill"
Zero fatalities.
"safe - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Mayflower_oil_spill:
Zero fatalities.
GREEN POWER ISN'T READY, duh! Its expensive, expensive, expensive and yeah, that does make a difference. We've already 50 million people in poverty, and poverty takes about 6.5 years off your life. That's 330 million person-years less life for the American people, and "green" energy will add millions of people to the poverty roles because of its expense. Its happening already, electricity prices are at an all-time high. You want green energy? Get your PHD, get your a** in the lab, and make it cheap. Simply whining about it and expecting someone else to provide it for you is a non-starter.
Those bereft of the little Saturday morning morality plays aimed at kids from the late '50's wouldn't have been exposed to the idea that it doesn't matter who you steal from, stealing is stealing. Our favorite programs like "The Lone Ranger" and "Sky King" and those sorts of programs would instruct kids between right and wrong. And they were right, BTW, it _doesn't_ matter who you steal from, if you do it, you are a low-life thief.
I hate thieves of all kinds.
... More envirowacko nonsense to control the people, "You will buy what _I_ SAY", with no consideration of the poor. The replacements are _all_ significantly more expensive than the incandescants they supposedly replace, and for a double whammy, they are all made overseas, and so have almost certainly thrown out of work those Americans who were making incandescent light bulbs.
It is becoming of increased interest that studies estimate that living in poverty will subtract 6.5 years from your life, and if you do it as a child, those 6.5 years can't be recovered by more affluent living later. Since there are 50 million Americans in poverty, that is potentially 330 million person-years of less life. How many person-years of life is using these supposedly less-power-hungry light bulbs going to save us through less emissions from coal-fired power plants that are being phased out anyway, again at an icreased price, to be replaced by more expensive but cleaner-burning natural gas?
"Saving the planet" is great, but only if it means that the planet can nurture humans better, and allow them to live better and longer. This doesn't do that.
'Cuz without windows our houses would be too dark...
>The FCC's job is to determine if they are safe, so people calling for _them_ to ban them because of the annoyance factors are just assholes.
Exactly. Society is currently plagued with people who seem to believe that they have the right to control everything that happens all the way out to their horizon. That's how we get our industries costing several times what they should, and having jobs go overseas, when the idiots sue everyone in sight about new highways, new power lines, new rail lines, new factories, new anything.
If we let these people have their way, cell phones will be banned in retail stores, on public sidewalks, in restaurants, in bars, in cars, in trains, on boats, and basically everywhere other than home. I say they need to get an attitude adjustment and just mind their own damn business, and treat it like construction noise or traffic noise or even the sound of the jet's own engines, which we all are pretty successful at ignoring.
Machines - robots driving cars - don't have a measurable reaction time. Microseconds.
My car:
http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/sedans/1302_2013_subaru_impreza_wrx_special_edition_first_test/
"Braking, 60 - 0 MPH, 106 ft."
Cadillac Deville Concours, "Braking, 60 - 0 mph, 142 ft"
Lincoln Town Car Touring Sedan, "Braking 60 - 0 mph, 133 ft."
http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/112_9712_cadillac_deville_concours_vs_lincoln_town_and_country/viewall.html
The autonomous car detects a cat in the road, and then what does it do? Does it slam on the brake even tho you're doing 65 mph and there's an 18 wheeler 3 feet from your rear bumper? Does it try to brake and swerve even tho there's a glaze of ice on the road?