The other point is that humans eat LOTS of plastic every year already. Increasing this by a few % would make no difference to us. In addition since even with all that plastic eating, humans are living longer and healthier seems to suggest that perhaps plastic's inert qualities will not affect fish either.
Its the thin edge of the wedge. Pretty soon they will ban other things too. If dummy parents want to pay & send their kids to schools that teach trash, then let them. Otherwise you are in 1984. Its been a long wait, but it actually looks like its coming.
People who buy electric cars in the USA do it for one reason only. To show off. Almost all of them have SUVs in the garage that they pull out for weekends and trips, with the electric for driving to work. There is no net benefit to the environment. Its all about showing off.
Tesla gets a $50,000 subsidy on each car. Since they don't sell gas cars they don't have the whole mandated price problem.
Electric cars may work one day but the current Tesla is a horrible car. Most of the owners of the Tesla use it as a third car. They have an entire SUV parked in the garage for actual road trips. Tesla's range and recharging requirements are a joke. Tesla is almost done selling to all the rich types who consider them a status symbol. Who will they sell to next? Think any soccer mom is gonna wait an hour to gas up?
Tesla - no clearance. No winter performance. 1 hour to put the equivalent of 5 gallons of gas in. $1000 to run out of charge (perhaps less if you live in SF area). No repairs at all in most states.
Poor people, both in the USA and elsewhere in the world are already paying dearly for alarmism. In Germany hundreds of thousands have no electricity due to crazy pricing. More people die every winter when they have no power. In Africa, instead of reliable electricity, wells and hospitals, wind turbines are being installed.
As Richard Lindzen puts it "Stated briefly, I will simply try to clarify what the debate over climate change is really about. It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is. It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is. It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should. The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest." Ref: http://judithcurry.com/2012/02...
You need to store enough electricity to run the USA for about 3 days - or more. That will cost trillions. In fact not doable, even in theory at any price. Or you could build 1000 GW of biomass which would need every tree in the US to keep it burning, and cause widespread pollution, not to mention there are certain environmental concerns with turning the entire USA into a monoculture. Look up Drax and North Carolina for the start of that wonderful invention of the Green Industrial Complex.
If the cost of panels drops to 0, the cost of grid solar only drops by 1/3 - panels today are not the main cost.
"Eventually we'll have enough surplus renewable to exact co2 from the environment, process it into CH4(methane) and pump it back into the ground, waiting for a cloudy/windless day.." if you can quote that out at less then $2/kWh then power to you. In reality its all pipe dreams at this point. There are no prices.
“The truth is that the Energy U-Turn (“Energiewende”, the German scheme aimed at pushing the “renewable” share of electricity production to 80 % by 2050) is about to fail” - Sigmar Gabriel, acting vice-chancellor of the German government, Secretary of Commerce with responsibility for the said Energiewende”.
I don't know why these Koch fellows are all up in arms. They are an energy company, like any other and so stand to make huge amounts of money as more super expensive renewable energy comes on line. Guess who owns all these renewable projects - GE, BP, Shell, Suncor, NextEra, etc. If it sounds like another company, it probably isn't.
The only reason that the Koch brothers are doing all of this is - wait for it - they have a conscious.
A wholesale turn to the Greenpeace vision of No Coal, No Gas, No Nukes, Wind + Solar + Biomass, would mean $2/kWh power, and laws to prevent people from unplugging from the grid (as a home depot generator running on $4 gasoline is well under a $1/kWh). It would also mean the end of things like schools and healthcare and road maintenance, as all of your money would be going to the green industrial revolution.
You can't fix a field of broken turbines 20m up in the air at -60C. The link I found shows the real way power is made - the most reliable method they have - which is a fuel station with multiple redundant generators in a shirtsleeve environment. The maintenance of a sea bound wind turbine is double or triple that of land ones. how much at lat -90?
If all the linuxy types out there could stop arguing and build a machine that does WAY LESS but actually works we would all be better off. Google OS looks like an attempt at that. All people want to do is surf, email and text, etc. They don't want to backup/install/unitstall/decontaminate. The iPad is what they want. Suck it up and accept it.
The average person WANTS AND NEEDS a surfing machine that is 'Locked down'. Why the OSS movement can't figure out how to do that is beyond me. Just require all software to be signed in order to execute on a consumer 'surf only machine' by both the OSS (through a peer process) and the developer. Developer types and others can continue to use un signed software - they apparently 'just know' when to trust an installer.
It should actually be easier to do this than continue on the Ubuntu path. Drop entire systems (both hardware and software). Think Firefox vs Mozilla - which one had fewer features? Which one won?
The FCC person is wrong. Flat wrong. Without new bandwidth being opened up he is wrong. Essentially, the amount of data that can be transmitted over say a city is determined by two things: 1) The frequency bands available. 2) The power of the transmitting device. The lower the power the more bandwidth we have. By factors of millions.
So in the old days (like now), a single TV channel covered a city, and gave 6 Mbits (or whatever the rate is) for the whole city. ie close to zero. The transmitter is 100,000 watts. Now, imagine two 0.01 watt transmitters on the same channel. You can have literally millions of these pairs using the same channel in the same city, since they only have a range of say 100 m. The result is millions of times the bandwidth, along with lower powered devices.
Chips that do exactly that are being developed now. Its sort of like the ethernet protocol, in ethernet, the channel just wait for blank air time on the wire, while with devices, they just look for clear frequencies. Combine that with advances that use reflections and ghosting to improve signal, and you have an era where wireless wins. Wires will still be handy for backbone, etc. Perhaps even one to your house if its easy.
The reality is that it does not matter how you are going to get paid. Tax breaks, overpriced electrical contracts, no property taxes. It really does not matter.
I was not trying to show how they get paid, but rather the return they will need based on capital invested. This return needs to be 20% or so due to the uncertain nature of the tax breaks, contracts, etc for Wind. I did not include maintenance, as wind argues that this is very small. If you add in any kind of depreciation and a little maintenance, my 20% return works out to closer to 10 - 15% or so. The way the companies are chasing Wind development right now shows that this is a high return 'gold rush' scenario.
Taking the return that capital needs and dividing it by the amount of electricity produced returns the true price. The 'contract' price is an illusion cooked up by government and business to hide the massive subsidies that are the reality of Wind Power.
Ontario does have cheaper power than Texas. But not that much cheaper. Ontario gets 25% of power from hydro, 50% from nuclear with coal, gas, etc for the rest. Yes its likely cheaper than Texas power - but coal and nuclear are close in price.
Spot prices are not what is paid to coal and nuclear, they are on a contract at about $50/MWh. They can sign contracts cause they can produce electricity on demand. The value of wind energy is reflected in the spot price.
Yes the spot price for electricity can be high - but it rarely is. Furthermore the spot price usually always dives to close to zero (or even negative!) during periods of high wind. The utility HAS to buy wind when its windy, plus it has base load generation going, so if those two numbers add to demand (or more), then the spot price collapses.
Of the say $500 million spent on a wind power project, about $400 million has to come from taxpayers - either in taxes or in overpriced electricity - which is a tax since electricity is a monopoly.
If the governments pulled out of Wind subsidies, installation costs would magically fall, wind would only be installed in really windy places (doubling the average wind speed produces triple or more the power), and there would be a real industry. What you have right now is pure socialism.
Wind power is very expensive to produce. Just add up the numbers for investment. Sticky Widgets numbers are ok, if a tad low: So about 500 million for these turbines. So in order to get any kind of ecomic return - which better be on the order of 20% per year given the political uncertainty with wind, means that you need to charge about 100 million per year for the electricity. How much juice? Easy. 100 turbines x 365*24*1.5MW * 30% of the time its windy, means $253 per megawatt hour. Or 25c per kwh. This is about 5x the price for nuclear or coal, and nuclear and coal can be called up on demand. The 'real' price is higher still, as you need a 450MW (likely gas fired) plant built to cover the times when no wind is blowing.
Right now in Ontario, power is selling for a spot price of about 1/12 that - $17 US/Mwh. Wind energy needs to be priced at the spot market value, since it is not predictable. (Unless you also build the 450 MW gas plant, and add that to the cost). http://www.theimo.com/imoweb/marketdata/marketToday.asp
Wind power is a run for your wallet arranged by big business, demanded by the populace (who can't add) and approved by the government who gets elected by city people who don't have to live with it.
Say hello to tripling your elecric bill, while not measurably lowering carbon output.
We won't need to mine uranium for 300 years, and we will burn up almost all nuclear waste as well. See Tom Blees Prescription for the Planet. Looks good to me.
Colder climates - If you can't get Natural Gas, then you are stuck with Propane, Heating oil, or electric. Heat pumps usually produce about 3x - 5x the energy that you put into them. Work best with heated floors. Unfortunately the installers have been installing oversized systems - it is best to make one that can't keep up on 10% of January days, and supplement with propane on those days. We stopped using approx 1ton propane/month for the winter big three months - which is about a 15 ton CO2 reduction for the house per year. Also air conditioning is just about free. Almost all buildings use it in some places in the mountains. (Propane is very expensive on a mountain). Nat gas costs 1/3 that of Propane, oil or electric.
If you have 72 subjects, and you do a paper like this, you absolutely have to publish the data. This paper is unscientific and a lie.
I would bet 10 bucks that if you saw the results for all 72 subjects in a nice table it would become obvious that nothing happened. It was likely that a few people with the radio transmitter on took 30 mins longer to go to sleep, But when you say "
"Under the RF exposure condition,
participants exhibited a longer latency to deep sleep (stage 3, meanRF=0.37, (SD=0.33), mean-
Sham=0.27 hours (SD=0.12); F=9.34, p=0.0037)." Hey it sounds technical.
"During the sessions participants carried out performance and memory
tests, scored self-reported symptoms and state of mood." This gives you an idea of what was tested for. They, as usual, did not find anything where they were looking, so they report on something else. This widely used trick in the medical sciences artificially increases the chances of finding 'significant' results. Another way of saying this: If you do an experiment on 72 people and measure 72 variables, all you get is a mess.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, Please take a look at Michael Mann's Twitter stream if you think for a moment that he is a victim in any of this.
https://twitter.com/MichaelEMa...
$250 damages for ATI
The other point is that humans eat LOTS of plastic every year already. Increasing this by a few % would make no difference to us. In addition since even with all that plastic eating, humans are living longer and healthier seems to suggest that perhaps plastic's inert qualities will not affect fish either.
Its the thin edge of the wedge. Pretty soon they will ban other things too. If dummy parents want to pay & send their kids to schools that teach trash, then let them. Otherwise you are in 1984. Its been a long wait, but it actually looks like its coming.
Who will tattle? The students?
The people who don't complain are getting the bill paid by a government agency.
The real target of these rates is not the individual, but rather government workers who can just shrug.
They can't have 'special rip off pricing for government workers only' though, as that would be unfair.
People who buy electric cars in the USA do it for one reason only. To show off. Almost all of them have SUVs in the garage that they pull out for weekends and trips, with the electric for driving to work. There is no net benefit to the environment. Its all about showing off.
Tesla gets a $50,000 subsidy on each car. Since they don't sell gas cars they don't have the whole mandated price problem.
Electric cars may work one day but the current Tesla is a horrible car. Most of the owners of the Tesla use it as a third car. They have an entire SUV parked in the garage for actual road trips. Tesla's range and recharging requirements are a joke. Tesla is almost done selling to all the rich types who consider them a status symbol. Who will they sell to next? Think any soccer mom is gonna wait an hour to gas up?
Tesla - no clearance. No winter performance. 1 hour to put the equivalent of 5 gallons of gas in. $1000 to run out of charge (perhaps less if you live in SF area). No repairs at all in most states.
Poor people, both in the USA and elsewhere in the world are already paying dearly for alarmism. In Germany hundreds of thousands have no electricity due to crazy pricing. More people die every winter when they have no power. In Africa, instead of reliable electricity, wells and hospitals, wind turbines are being installed.
As Richard Lindzen puts it
"Stated briefly, I will simply try to clarify what the debate over climate change is really about. It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is. It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is. It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should. The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest." Ref: http://judithcurry.com/2012/02...
You need to store enough electricity to run the USA for about 3 days - or more. That will cost trillions. In fact not doable, even in theory at any price. Or you could build 1000 GW of biomass which would need every tree in the US to keep it burning, and cause widespread pollution, not to mention there are certain environmental concerns with turning the entire USA into a monoculture. Look up Drax and North Carolina for the start of that wonderful invention of the Green Industrial Complex.
If the cost of panels drops to 0, the cost of grid solar only drops by 1/3 - panels today are not the main cost.
"Eventually we'll have enough surplus renewable to exact co2 from the environment, process it into CH4(methane) and pump it back into the ground, waiting for a cloudy/windless day.." if you can quote that out at less then $2/kWh then power to you. In reality its all pipe dreams at this point. There are no prices.
“The truth is that the Energy U-Turn (“Energiewende”, the German scheme aimed at pushing the “renewable” share of electricity production to 80 % by 2050) is about to fail” - Sigmar Gabriel, acting vice-chancellor of the German government, Secretary of Commerce with responsibility for the said Energiewende”.
I don't know why these Koch fellows are all up in arms. They are an energy company, like any other and so stand to make huge amounts of money as more super expensive renewable energy comes on line. Guess who owns all these renewable projects - GE, BP, Shell, Suncor, NextEra, etc. If it sounds like another company, it probably isn't.
The only reason that the Koch brothers are doing all of this is - wait for it - they have a conscious.
A wholesale turn to the Greenpeace vision of No Coal, No Gas, No Nukes, Wind + Solar + Biomass, would mean $2/kWh power, and laws to prevent people from unplugging from the grid (as a home depot generator running on $4 gasoline is well under a $1/kWh). It would also mean the end of things like schools and healthcare and road maintenance, as all of your money would be going to the green industrial revolution.
You can't fix a field of broken turbines 20m up in the air at -60C. The link I found shows the real way power is made - the most reliable method they have - which is a fuel station with multiple redundant generators in a shirtsleeve environment. The maintenance of a sea bound wind turbine is double or triple that of land ones. how much at lat -90?
Its not merely 'a bitch' if it breaks down its freezing in the dark with no planes able to land due to a storm. IOW without diesel you die.
I don't understand.
How does solar help at all if power demand peaks in the winter and a 6 monthx0.12MW battery would be 'fairly large' to say the least.
How does wind help if the turbine - on which your life depends - is located up a tower at -60C with a 60 km/hr wind?
Well - if you take the time to look at both articles, you would see the utter smallitude of this silly wind system.
If all the linuxy types out there could stop arguing and build a machine that does WAY LESS but actually works we would all be better off. Google OS looks like an attempt at that. All people want to do is surf, email and text, etc. They don't want to backup/install/unitstall/decontaminate. The iPad is what they want. Suck it up and accept it.
The average person WANTS AND NEEDS a surfing machine that is 'Locked down'. Why the OSS movement can't figure out how to do that is beyond me. Just require all software to be signed in order to execute on a consumer 'surf only machine' by both the OSS (through a peer process) and the developer. Developer types and others can continue to use un signed software - they apparently 'just know' when to trust an installer.
It should actually be easier to do this than continue on the Ubuntu path. Drop entire systems (both hardware and software). Think Firefox vs Mozilla - which one had fewer features? Which one won?
The FCC person is wrong. Flat wrong.
Without new bandwidth being opened up he is wrong. Essentially, the amount of data that can be transmitted over say a city is determined by two things:
1) The frequency bands available.
2) The power of the transmitting device. The lower the power the more bandwidth we have. By factors of millions.
So in the old days (like now), a single TV channel covered a city, and gave 6 Mbits (or whatever the rate is) for the whole city. ie close to zero. The transmitter is 100,000 watts.
Now, imagine two 0.01 watt transmitters on the same channel. You can have literally millions of these pairs using the same channel in the same city, since they only have a range of say 100 m. The result is millions of times the bandwidth, along with lower powered devices.
Chips that do exactly that are being developed now. Its sort of like the ethernet protocol, in ethernet, the channel just wait for blank air time on the wire, while with devices, they just look for clear frequencies. Combine that with advances that use reflections and ghosting to improve signal, and you have an era where wireless wins.
Wires will still be handy for backbone, etc. Perhaps even one to your house if its easy.
It really is the power thats the factor.
The reality is that it does not matter how you are going to get paid. Tax breaks, overpriced electrical contracts, no property taxes. It really does not matter.
I was not trying to show how they get paid, but rather the return they will need based on capital invested. This return needs to be 20% or so due to the uncertain nature of the tax breaks, contracts, etc for Wind. I did not include maintenance, as wind argues that this is very small. If you add in any kind of depreciation and a little maintenance, my 20% return works out to closer to 10 - 15% or so. The way the companies are chasing Wind development right now shows that this is a high return 'gold rush' scenario.
Taking the return that capital needs and dividing it by the amount of electricity produced returns the true price. The 'contract' price is an illusion cooked up by government and business to hide the massive subsidies that are the reality of Wind Power.
Ontario does have cheaper power than Texas. But not that much cheaper. Ontario gets 25% of power from hydro, 50% from nuclear with coal, gas, etc for the rest. Yes its likely cheaper than Texas power - but coal and nuclear are close in price.
Spot prices are not what is paid to coal and nuclear, they are on a contract at about $50/MWh. They can sign contracts cause they can produce electricity on demand. The value of wind energy is reflected in the spot price.
Yes the spot price for electricity can be high - but it rarely is. Furthermore the spot price usually always dives to close to zero (or even negative!) during periods of high wind. The utility HAS to buy wind when its windy, plus it has base load generation going, so if those two numbers add to demand (or more), then the spot price collapses.
Of the say $500 million spent on a wind power project, about $400 million has to come from taxpayers - either in taxes or in overpriced electricity - which is a tax since electricity is a monopoly.
If the governments pulled out of Wind subsidies, installation costs would magically fall, wind would only be installed in really windy places (doubling the average wind speed produces triple or more the power), and there would be a real industry. What you have right now is pure socialism.
Wind power is very expensive to produce. Just add up the numbers for investment. Sticky Widgets numbers are ok, if a tad low: So about 500 million for these turbines. So in order to get any kind of ecomic return - which better be on the order of 20% per year given the political uncertainty with wind, means that you need to charge about 100 million per year for the electricity. How much juice? Easy. 100 turbines x 365*24*1.5MW * 30% of the time its windy, means $253 per megawatt hour. Or 25c per kwh. This is about 5x the price for nuclear or coal, and nuclear and coal can be called up on demand. The 'real' price is higher still, as you need a 450MW (likely gas fired) plant built to cover the times when no wind is blowing.
Right now in Ontario, power is selling for a spot price of about 1/12 that - $17 US /Mwh. Wind energy needs to be priced at the spot market value, since it is not predictable. (Unless you also build the 450 MW gas plant, and add that to the cost). http://www.theimo.com/imoweb/marketdata/marketToday.asp
Wind power is a run for your wallet arranged by big business, demanded by the populace (who can't add) and approved by the government who gets elected by city people who don't have to live with it.
Say hello to tripling your elecric bill, while not measurably lowering carbon output.
We won't need to mine uranium for 300 years, and we will burn up almost all nuclear waste as well. See Tom Blees Prescription for the Planet. Looks good to me.
Colder climates - If you can't get Natural Gas, then you are stuck with Propane, Heating oil, or electric. Heat pumps usually produce about 3x - 5x the energy that you put into them. Work best with heated floors. Unfortunately the installers have been installing oversized systems - it is best to make one that can't keep up on 10% of January days, and supplement with propane on those days. We stopped using approx 1ton propane/month for the winter big three months - which is about a 15 ton CO2 reduction for the house per year. Also air conditioning is just about free. Almost all buildings use it in some places in the mountains. (Propane is very expensive on a mountain). Nat gas costs 1/3 that of Propane, oil or electric.
If you have 72 subjects, and you do a paper like this, you absolutely have to publish the data. This paper is unscientific and a lie. I would bet 10 bucks that if you saw the results for all 72 subjects in a nice table it would become obvious that nothing happened. It was likely that a few people with the radio transmitter on took 30 mins longer to go to sleep, But when you say " "Under the RF exposure condition, participants exhibited a longer latency to deep sleep (stage 3, meanRF=0.37, (SD=0.33), mean- Sham=0.27 hours (SD=0.12); F=9.34, p=0.0037)." Hey it sounds technical. "During the sessions participants carried out performance and memory tests, scored self-reported symptoms and state of mood." This gives you an idea of what was tested for. They, as usual, did not find anything where they were looking, so they report on something else. This widely used trick in the medical sciences artificially increases the chances of finding 'significant' results. Another way of saying this: If you do an experiment on 72 people and measure 72 variables, all you get is a mess.