Luckily, I disagree with your pessimistic assumption that we'll end up burning all our fossil-fuel reserves.
How do you address the issue that tens of trillions of dollars of reserves have to be left in the ground?
Those reserves are priced in to the world's economy. If you were to try and force all that to stay put, you'd make the 2008/2009 crash seem minor by comparison.
The world is not just addicted to coal, oil, and natural gas, but the money attached to them as well.
Can we transition off them? Yes. Can we do it in the time we have left? No. We need to be off them by 2050, we will have a hard time doing it by 2100.
This is not a technology problem, it is an economic one.
And I'm not sure how you reconcile your agreement that carbon is a "huge problem", yet deny the many externalised social costs of emitting that carbon (i.e. the "made-up number" from your point #2).
I don't deny them, I simply don't call them subsidies. In any case, it doesn't matter. We're just debating now if we should form a bucket brigade on the Titanic or not. It is a stupid debate and misses the point. The ship will sink 2 hours before Carpathia shows up. No one is going to survive 2 hours in the freezing water. You're either in a life boat, or you're going to die.
1. Tax breaks for jobs 2. No charge for "carbon tax" which doesn't exist 3. Tax breaks for doing business in general
The only one that could be called specific to fossil fuels is #2, but that is just a made up number with a dollar sign that someone else attached to it. The IPCC for example establishes some absurdly huge number to "carbon taxes" and says that fossil fuels are getting HUGE subsidy because they aren't paying their made up number.
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The irony to all this is that I actually agree that carbon is a huge problem. So huge, that we simply aren't going to be able to stop 2 degrees from coming and going. I won't be shocked if we don't stop it at 4 degrees. A whole lot of people are living in either fantasy land, or they know exactly what the issue is, but can't do anything about it due to the problems of trying to push that hard.
The short version, 80% of proven reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas cannot be burned, or we'll overshoot 2 degrees with an 80% certainty (or as best as the experts can guess). I'll take them at their word.
However, there is zero chance that will happen. It just won't. It'll all get burned. In fact, tens of billions of dollars is being spent to find MORE reserves.
The world in 100 years is going to be different to the world today. Humans will be the cause, but the time to change it was 30+ years ago. The ship has long since sailed. We'll just have to adapt to the new world.
A proposed Shell petrochemical refinery in Pennsylvania is in line for $1.6bn (£1bn) in state subsidy, according to a deal struck in 2012 when the company made an annual profit of $26.8bn.
Quote from the link you posted.
That stuff is normal business practice between states. If Pennsylvania didn't offer it, another state would have.
Tesla was offered how many billions to build his battery factory in Nevada? That wasn't because it was "green", that was because it was "jobs".
Those items are not fossil fuel subsidies, they are jobs subsidies.
Now we could debate if we should have jobs subsidies or not, but it has nothing to do with dead dinos...
Actually there it makes the most sense, as it would obviously the cheapest.
You seriously must live on another planet... you have that completely and totally backwards...
When land is cheap, you spread out, build large sprawling cities, where you have to drive everywhere.
Surprisingly all of Europe is bike able and walkable.
All? All 100% of it? Yea, I suspect that isn't true.
Depending on how you define Europe, it is smaller than the US with far more people in it. You're also more concentrated in small cities.
That insanity that you need a car to go to a mall which is only 100 yards away only exists in the states...
100 yards? Ha! How little you know... There are few places in the US built that tight....
The suburbs simply don't work without cars. One could debate that design all day long, but that is the design we have, and future communities won't change existing ones.
The original point was that you can't turn existing communities into walk/bike ones when they weren't designed for it, stuff is too far apart.
The local mall would be a 30 min walk each way, crossing 2 major roads and a major highway. Even on bike it would be 10-15 min each way. And I live rather close to a mall, many people live twice as far.
polluting old tech shouldn't get tax deductions, it should have become so efficient by now (how decades has it taken and many more decades will it take?) to stand on its own feet. Tax advantages should be only for new tech.
That isn't how the tax code works...
ALL businesses get to deduct things from their taxes, capital investments over time, ongoing business expenses. Otherwise you'd be taxing GROSS income instead of NET profit.
This was debunked on/. already thousands of times.
No it hasn't. People love to post opinions as if they were fact, but that isn't debunking anything.
Wind does "run" all the time. The USA is far far far far to big to be windless everywhere.
The USA doesn't have a national power grid and due to political reasons, won't any time soon.
While there is wind in places, there isn't enough to power everyone across the country without overbuilding 4 or 5 times more than is needed.
Wind isn't "cheap" anymore if you have to build 400% of the required load, then completely redesign the national power grid.
A single state is already to big, to have no wind all over.
Well, you're wrong. I know you have this crazy German view of things and believe a lot of nonsense you're told, but you're just wrong.
I live in Texas, we get 9% of our total power in Texas from Wind, yet we still have to have natural gas turbines on stand-by for those times when the wind isn't enough.
At times, the wind is too much and they give the power away, other times they produce very little and that gap has to be made up with gas turbines.
That is one reason why Wind actually costs more than coal power in Texas, you have to have backup power to keep online if the wind stop blowing.
The idea that you can not run a country from wind power alone is completely idiotic.
You may think so, but you thinking so doesn't make it true.
The i3-6100 is 64% faster in single (and dual) threaded applications. Only applications that can properly use all 4 cores and all 8 threads of the i7-920 will show that gap close. But even in those cases the i3-6100 is still just as fast as the i7-920.
However, most of what people do with computers (including playing games) only uses 1 or 2 cores anyway, making the i3-6100 far and away faster.
It also does it with a TDP of 51 watts vs TDP of 130 watts for the i7. It also comes with the benefit of a much newer motherboard that has modern features from newer/faster PCI-E slots to better DMI speeds and better USB support.
I needed more cores for rendering and greater memory support.
For that type of workload, clearly an i3 would be a silly choice. But that isn't what most people do.:)
Yes, the Haswell-E CPU is the right choice for that. For gaming, the i3-6100 is actually a shockingly good choice. If concerns over future quad core needs are there, the i5-6500 would be the next choice above that one.
Point me to the spot in the 42 page paper where direct payments are made from government to oil, gas, and coal companies to make their products cheaper.
Seriously, because I did skim it and I found a lot of words that said very little. But if it is in there, I'm all ears.
Tax breaks for writing off capital investments and direct operating expenses don't count, all industries get those.
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The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused to local populations by air pollution as well as to people across the globe affected by the floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change.
Yea, this is it right here. These "subsidies" are in fact not anything of the sort... They are made up numbers for a carbon tax that doesn't exist.
Yes, you will have to give your utility power to continually monitor your electrical demand and be able to switch your major appliances on and off to match the changing supply of sun and wind.
No, just no...
Come over to my house and speak with my wife, tell her that she no longer will get to decide when she can and cannot use her appliances. See how far you get.
If you told her the choice was a 4 degree rise in global temps, or limit her appliance use, she'll take the appliance use, and she isn't alone.
Your arguments boil down to "it would take an extreme totalitarian state to accomplish this".
You make a good point...:)
Frankly, the problem is money, freedom, and inertia. I see the problem with CO2 now, but it took far too long to convince me, and plenty of others still aren't convinced.
The changes required now are too large to make without riots in the streets (or without starting WWIII). We probably could have changed course in the 80s, maybe the early 90s, but in 2016 the ship has already hit the iceberg.
Do realize you're arguing against a guy who sees this as "and we'd also get an extreme totalitarian state, so it's win-win".
No, to be honest I didn't. I try to believe that no rational person would want such a thing. Silly me.:)
Why in f***'s sake would I even consider replacing it at this point?
If you wanted to play games at 4k, you'd have to, but for 1080p, it will be ok for awhile.
The CPUs haven't changed much in the past 5 years, everything from Sandy Bridge to Skylake is just minor jumps. What Intel has pushed is power efficency, the modern chips use a lot less power than first-gen Core CPUs.
GPUs have still been going up, but at 1080p a 4 year old GPU is likely still fine.
And the coal and oil industry get 20 billions of subsidies each year, one wonders why.
Instead of just linking to it, you should try reading it.
A direct cash payment of 2.7 cents per KWh isn't remotely the same as a company writing off business expenses on their tax return.
The report noted that, in the U.S., deductions for cleaning up oil spills allows companies to claim the cost as a standard business expense. This provision allowed British oil giant BP Plc to claim $9.9 billion in tax deductions in 2010 following the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico, where the company reportedly incurred over $32.2 billion in cleanup costs.
Companies writing off expenses is not a "subsidy", it is how tax works. The company installing the Wind Farm was able to write off all their expenses as well, yet those aren't called a "subsidy".
The 2.7 cents per KWh allows them to pay you 1 cent per KWh and still come out better than turning off the turbines. But it distorts the market and makes all power cost more to the end user.
my PC is 6+ years old (one of the original i7s) and short of a GPU and SSD upgrade it's running fine too when I used to do near 2 year updates on my PC motherboard.
I too used to do rapid updates of technology.
That being said, while it still doesn't make economic sense, consider that your old i7-920 consumes double the power of a modern chip while being half the speed.
You could get a slower i3-6100 and consume 1/3 the power while still being 50% faster.
Of course there is cost in doing that and it takes time for the power savings to add up, but they are there.
It's not like we want to avoid it, peak nuclear production is expected around 2030 to 2040.
Don't be silly, that is just counting existing refined stockpiles.
Between actually bothering to mine for more uranium and using breeder reactors to make plutonium, we could make 100% of our power from nuclear for a long time if we wanted to.
Slashdot Mirror
:) Easier? I've looked at pictures of a French Press, that looks like work.
I like pressing a button and having coffee! :)
I did find a less expensive option for K-Cups, I ordered a box to see if they taste any good.
Otherwise, it'll be a Mr. Coffee drip coffee maker, because again, I can press a button. :)
Yes, yes, it isn't the best... but by the time I'm done putting cream and sugar in, does it matter? :)
Luckily, I disagree with your pessimistic assumption that we'll end up burning all our fossil-fuel reserves.
How do you address the issue that tens of trillions of dollars of reserves have to be left in the ground?
Those reserves are priced in to the world's economy. If you were to try and force all that to stay put, you'd make the 2008/2009 crash seem minor by comparison.
The world is not just addicted to coal, oil, and natural gas, but the money attached to them as well.
Can we transition off them? Yes. Can we do it in the time we have left? No. We need to be off them by 2050, we will have a hard time doing it by 2100.
This is not a technology problem, it is an economic one.
And I'm not sure how you reconcile your agreement that carbon is a "huge problem", yet deny the many externalised social costs of emitting that carbon (i.e. the "made-up number" from your point #2).
I don't deny them, I simply don't call them subsidies. In any case, it doesn't matter. We're just debating now if we should form a bucket brigade on the Titanic or not. It is a stupid debate and misses the point. The ship will sink 2 hours before Carpathia shows up. No one is going to survive 2 hours in the freezing water. You're either in a life boat, or you're going to die.
It may be beside the point if the cups keep rising in price.
Back when I started using it, the cups were quite reasonable. I'm tempted to price going back to making a pot at a time with grounds.
Can you show any evidence to the contrary?
Yes, and I have multiple times in this story...
Most of the "subsidies" are one of three things:
1. Tax breaks for jobs
2. No charge for "carbon tax" which doesn't exist
3. Tax breaks for doing business in general
The only one that could be called specific to fossil fuels is #2, but that is just a made up number with a dollar sign that someone else attached to it. The IPCC for example establishes some absurdly huge number to "carbon taxes" and says that fossil fuels are getting HUGE subsidy because they aren't paying their made up number.
---
The irony to all this is that I actually agree that carbon is a huge problem. So huge, that we simply aren't going to be able to stop 2 degrees from coming and going. I won't be shocked if we don't stop it at 4 degrees. A whole lot of people are living in either fantasy land, or they know exactly what the issue is, but can't do anything about it due to the problems of trying to push that hard.
The short version, 80% of proven reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas cannot be burned, or we'll overshoot 2 degrees with an 80% certainty (or as best as the experts can guess). I'll take them at their word.
However, there is zero chance that will happen. It just won't. It'll all get burned. In fact, tens of billions of dollars is being spent to find MORE reserves.
The world in 100 years is going to be different to the world today. Humans will be the cause, but the time to change it was 30+ years ago. The ship has long since sailed. We'll just have to adapt to the new world.
Design a new machine. People will eventually switch over, especially the vocal save-the-planet types.
They don't sell current machines, what good would a new one do?
Oh, excuse me, the 2.0 crap? Yea, not gonna buy a DRM coffee machine.
So this doesn't really help, since I'm not switching from the original.
A proposed Shell petrochemical refinery in Pennsylvania is in line for $1.6bn (£1bn) in state subsidy, according to a deal struck in 2012 when the company made an annual profit of $26.8bn.
Quote from the link you posted.
That stuff is normal business practice between states. If Pennsylvania didn't offer it, another state would have.
Tesla was offered how many billions to build his battery factory in Nevada? That wasn't because it was "green", that was because it was "jobs".
Those items are not fossil fuel subsidies, they are jobs subsidies.
Now we could debate if we should have jobs subsidies or not, but it has nothing to do with dead dinos...
Actually there it makes the most sense, as it would obviously the cheapest.
You seriously must live on another planet... you have that completely and totally backwards...
When land is cheap, you spread out, build large sprawling cities, where you have to drive everywhere.
Surprisingly all of Europe is bike able and walkable.
All? All 100% of it? Yea, I suspect that isn't true.
Depending on how you define Europe, it is smaller than the US with far more people in it. You're also more concentrated in small cities.
That insanity that you need a car to go to a mall which is only 100 yards away only exists in the states ...
100 yards? Ha! How little you know... There are few places in the US built that tight....
The suburbs simply don't work without cars. One could debate that design all day long, but that is the design we have, and future communities won't change existing ones.
The original point was that you can't turn existing communities into walk/bike ones when they weren't designed for it, stuff is too far apart.
The local mall would be a 30 min walk each way, crossing 2 major roads and a major highway. Even on bike it would be 10-15 min each way. And I live rather close to a mall, many people live twice as far.
polluting old tech shouldn't get tax deductions, it should have become so efficient by now (how decades has it taken and many more decades will it take?) to stand on its own feet. Tax advantages should be only for new tech.
That isn't how the tax code works...
ALL businesses get to deduct things from their taxes, capital investments over time, ongoing business expenses. Otherwise you'd be taxing GROSS income instead of NET profit.
The world coal price and a pile of other things confirms it.
Keep in mind the world price for oil is quite low as well, that doesn't mean it is history in a few years. :)
Supply and demand are major things...
This was debunked on /. already thousands of times.
No it hasn't. People love to post opinions as if they were fact, but that isn't debunking anything.
Wind does "run" all the time. The USA is far far far far to big to be windless everywhere.
The USA doesn't have a national power grid and due to political reasons, won't any time soon.
While there is wind in places, there isn't enough to power everyone across the country without overbuilding 4 or 5 times more than is needed.
Wind isn't "cheap" anymore if you have to build 400% of the required load, then completely redesign the national power grid.
A single state is already to big, to have no wind all over.
Well, you're wrong. I know you have this crazy German view of things and believe a lot of nonsense you're told, but you're just wrong.
I live in Texas, we get 9% of our total power in Texas from Wind, yet we still have to have natural gas turbines on stand-by for those times when the wind isn't enough.
At times, the wind is too much and they give the power away, other times they produce very little and that gap has to be made up with gas turbines.
That is one reason why Wind actually costs more than coal power in Texas, you have to have backup power to keep online if the wind stop blowing.
The idea that you can not run a country from wind power alone is completely idiotic.
You may think so, but you thinking so doesn't make it true.
The 920 slightly overclocked
If you're overclocked, that changes things. Most people don't do that, I'm comparing stock clock to stock clock.
The i3-6100 can be overclocked as well, with the right ASRock motherboard and BIOS version, but I don't count that as reasonable.
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compa...
The i3-6100 is 64% faster in single (and dual) threaded applications. Only applications that can properly use all 4 cores and all 8 threads of the i7-920 will show that gap close. But even in those cases the i3-6100 is still just as fast as the i7-920.
However, most of what people do with computers (including playing games) only uses 1 or 2 cores anyway, making the i3-6100 far and away faster.
It also does it with a TDP of 51 watts vs TDP of 130 watts for the i7. It also comes with the benefit of a much newer motherboard that has modern features from newer/faster PCI-E slots to better DMI speeds and better USB support.
I needed more cores for rendering and greater memory support.
For that type of workload, clearly an i3 would be a silly choice. But that isn't what most people do. :)
Yes, the Haswell-E CPU is the right choice for that. For gaming, the i3-6100 is actually a shockingly good choice. If concerns over future quad core needs are there, the i5-6500 would be the next choice above that one.
http://www.odi.org/sites/odi.o...
I read the link you provided.
Again, you don't understand how taxes work, which is why you complain about things you don't understand.
Page 2, 5 line items, totaling over $5 billion dollars
"Tax deduction"
What part of "Tax deduction" do you not understand?
These are not subsidies, they are not direct payments, they are not free money.
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Clean energy gets all of them as well and they also get DIRECT CASH PAYMENTS.
the prices rise and power companies start up coal plants.
If they are out of business, how do they do that?
They take time to turn on and off, if off for very long, the employees start going away.
You end up in a position of having to pay for it to keep it on standby, or you lose it completely.
China's coal use has declined for the past several years. This is a deliberate policy.
It has? All the info I see on the Internet says otherwise...
Last year was a dip due to coking coal reductions because of the drop in steel prices.
In any case, the idea that this will change by a lot in our lifetimes is laughable...
China is investing heavily in renewables as well.
Yes of course, their energy needs are growing and they don't want it all coming from coal.
China has a huge pollution problem, but don't confuse heavy renewable investment with dropping of existing power options.
The world is changing whether people who own fossil fuel stocks like it or not.
It isn't changing as fast as it needs to, and not nearly as fast as you'd wish it was.
I keep repeating it. It's very well documented in this 42 page paper:
https://www.imf.org/external/p...
Point me to the spot in the 42 page paper where direct payments are made from government to oil, gas, and coal companies to make their products cheaper.
Seriously, because I did skim it and I found a lot of words that said very little. But if it is in there, I'm all ears.
Tax breaks for writing off capital investments and direct operating expenses don't count, all industries get those.
---
The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused to local populations by air pollution as well as to people across the globe affected by the floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change.
Yea, this is it right here. These "subsidies" are in fact not anything of the sort... They are made up numbers for a carbon tax that doesn't exist.
I don't think you understand how this works. They won't go somewhere. They will die.
Tell that to the millions of people fleeing Syria...
Yes, you will have to give your utility power to continually monitor your electrical demand and be able to switch your major appliances on and off to match the changing supply of sun and wind.
No, just no...
Come over to my house and speak with my wife, tell her that she no longer will get to decide when she can and cannot use her appliances. See how far you get.
If you told her the choice was a 4 degree rise in global temps, or limit her appliance use, she'll take the appliance use, and she isn't alone.
Fossil fuels receive $5 trillion subsidy annually (according to IMF). We need to remove this market distortion.
No they don't, that is a lie that keeps getting repeated...
They get tax deductions that ever other business gets too...
Your arguments boil down to "it would take an extreme totalitarian state to accomplish this".
You make a good point... :)
Frankly, the problem is money, freedom, and inertia. I see the problem with CO2 now, but it took far too long to convince me, and plenty of others still aren't convinced.
The changes required now are too large to make without riots in the streets (or without starting WWIII). We probably could have changed course in the 80s, maybe the early 90s, but in 2016 the ship has already hit the iceberg.
Do realize you're arguing against a guy who sees this as "and we'd also get an extreme totalitarian state, so it's win-win".
No, to be honest I didn't. I try to believe that no rational person would want such a thing. Silly me. :)
Why in f***'s sake would I even consider replacing it at this point?
If you wanted to play games at 4k, you'd have to, but for 1080p, it will be ok for awhile.
The CPUs haven't changed much in the past 5 years, everything from Sandy Bridge to Skylake is just minor jumps. What Intel has pushed is power efficency, the modern chips use a lot less power than first-gen Core CPUs.
GPUs have still been going up, but at 1080p a 4 year old GPU is likely still fine.
And the coal and oil industry get 20 billions of subsidies each year, one wonders why.
Instead of just linking to it, you should try reading it.
A direct cash payment of 2.7 cents per KWh isn't remotely the same as a company writing off business expenses on their tax return.
The report noted that, in the U.S., deductions for cleaning up oil spills allows companies to claim the cost as a standard business expense. This provision allowed British oil giant BP Plc to claim $9.9 billion in tax deductions in 2010 following the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico, where the company reportedly incurred over $32.2 billion in cleanup costs.
Companies writing off expenses is not a "subsidy", it is how tax works. The company installing the Wind Farm was able to write off all their expenses as well, yet those aren't called a "subsidy".
The 2.7 cents per KWh allows them to pay you 1 cent per KWh and still come out better than turning off the turbines. But it distorts the market and makes all power cost more to the end user.
Your 17" MacBook Pro had a 1920x1200 screen. The current 15" MacBook Pro can be set to use that resolution.
I'll be impressed when you tell me how to set a 15" MacBook Pro to have a 17" screen.
my PC is 6+ years old (one of the original i7s) and short of a GPU and SSD upgrade it's running fine too when I used to do near 2 year updates on my PC motherboard.
I too used to do rapid updates of technology.
That being said, while it still doesn't make economic sense, consider that your old i7-920 consumes double the power of a modern chip while being half the speed.
You could get a slower i3-6100 and consume 1/3 the power while still being 50% faster.
Of course there is cost in doing that and it takes time for the power savings to add up, but they are there.
It's not like we want to avoid it, peak nuclear production is expected around 2030 to 2040.
Don't be silly, that is just counting existing refined stockpiles.
Between actually bothering to mine for more uranium and using breeder reactors to make plutonium, we could make 100% of our power from nuclear for a long time if we wanted to.
We simply don't want to.