First, it's not an addiction. There's a lot of discussion of psychology of addiction online. And fossil fuel consumption simply doesn't fit that.
Second, fossil fuels aren't the only thing we need which we don't provide all by ourselves. A lot of vital goods, for example, food and vehicles are provided by others as well. Where's the complaint that we're "addicted" to food or to transportation?
Third, fossil fuels do useful things. Meth doesn't. Similarly, fossil fuels are cheap and meth isn't. The addiction mechanism is what gets the meth user to keep making unfavorable purchases.
Fourth, there is that unfavorable purchase you mentioned of the meth head selling their TV for the next high. That just isn't happening in the US. Sure, there are a lot of people and governments in the US borrowing and spending their future - doing foolish things, but they'd be doing that even if all fossil fuels were domestically provided.
That lack of foresight exists whether we buy foreign oil or not. At least by buying foreign oil and such, we'll be helping someone else out with their problems. As you may have noticed, a lot of OPEC countries have serious problems which oil revenue can help with.
The vast majority of research points to it being less hospitable, and there is a lot of good evidence that with rising temperatures come more heating feedbacks which will accelerate the process.
Most of that "vast majority" of research says nothing about whether global warming will be net beneficial to humanity. As to that "good evidence" that rising temperature comes with "more" heating feedbacks, we have the obvious counter that the whole system is dominated by negative feedback, radiation of heat to space which occurs at roughly temperature to the fourth power.
This is not some esoteric fact.
Indeed, it's some guy on the internet making shit up.
Getting $100,000 speaking fees from Heartland Institute shillfests(you know where they get a bunch of shills together and have them preach to the choir, and the press) in thanks for being a #1 source of purposeful misinformation about climate on the internet is like a career inasmuch as it provides his living. It's not like a career in that it involves a lifelong development of a set of skills.
If that is true (and he says it isn't BTW), then that's a strong indication that he's better and more knowledgeable at this job than the random guy on the internet. Random guys on the internet after all don't get $100,000 just for saying stuff.
Finally, call greenhouse driven climate change a "claim" if you want, but it's not true.
Note here the actual claim here was that wind power hit energy payback well inside of a year. Conflating completely different things is a typically clueless and lazy activity I see in the climate change debate on all sides. Can't you step up your game? Or is the future of Earth just not that important to you?
But their argument is irrefutable. "But the wind speed changes!! They didn't mention that!!". I only have three words. Double-U Oh Double-U.
The thing is that is really close to what's happening. The original researchers assume the existence of a low cost power generation smoothing system. When you don't have that, then the energy cost of the smoothing system needs to be included. That will increase the time to energy payback.
"New peer reviewed science study says something. But random guy on the internet says they're wrong!"
What is typical Slashdot are the dishonest portrayals of people we disagree with. Anthony Watts of WUWT is not a random guy on the internet, but a person who made a career of refuting similar claims. I see elsewhere that you wrote:
No, he's a well known denier (probably *the* most well known among lay people).
So who is this guy? A random guy on the internet? Or probably *the* most well known climate change denier among lay people? I guess it depends on your rhetorical needs of the moment.
I see the factor of ten variation in wind power that the earlier poster mentioned. Notice also that the drop in wind power happened during the day which is particularly undesirable.
it is going to cause significant problems for our technological society, especially in the transitional period when weather patterns are disrupted by changing energy levels in the atmosphere
So what? Our technological society is adept at solving significant problems. And what makes you think the climate is changing to something less hospitable?
Nor does it mean that there is any significant warming effects going on. Recall that we've had satellites capable of measuring something close to global mean temperature for perhaps 40 years.
None of the things you mentioned so far is like human addiction for illegal, expensive recreation drugs. They are often compared so, but the comparison is grievously flawed.
Guess what? You'll have neither time, nor money nor energy, nor probably political stability.
My view is that we've been in the circumstances under which the "energy trap" is supposed to hold since the 1970s.
And please tell me more about France selling PSG (Paris soccer cub), Le Louvre; Spain selling Barca and Germany selling BMW and Mercedes to Qatar not "making anyone poorer".
Sure, I'll do that request. Those things aren't making anyone poorer. Next.
Most suicide is in red states where they don't give a fuck about CO2.
Those states aren't willfully trying to destroy their future, economically and politically, even if they happen to emit a little more carbon dioxide than you are comfortable with. Coincidentally, they aren't having trouble with desertification unlike California.
There's more options. For example, we could switch over to that infrastructure when it makes economic sense to do so. In the mean time, "giving" money to oil producing countries isn't making anyone poorer.
The Germans also tend to think in terms of decades rather than fiscal quarters like many Americans seem to do.
Too bad we don't see evidence of that in this story. Why brag that the wholesale electricity generation market for Germany is so malformed that at times they're paying to get rid of it? Why shut down nuclear plants without a viable alternative to replace them? Why double the cost of electricity to the end user? There's a huge amount of next quarter thinking here.
I guess your state sucks at the teat of regulatory bliss because they seem to be fucking you in the ass.
I hate being left behind by these kinds of arguments. If only I had gotten a degree in rhetorical topology. Then I'd be able to figure out how that works.
Now take a look at the USA. Not only did we cut down whatever the natives didn't burn* and indeed burn much of it, but we outright turned it into a dustbowl, fixed it, and are doing it again. Even California is going dustbowl, right now. The drought means that many farms are getting no water allotment this year, while others are pumping their allotment and [illegally] selling it to others, and we're putting in new vineyards left and right.
Maybe you ought to actually take a look at the parts of the US that don't have a suicide pact going on. California, not coincidentally, is also the state which leads on trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. When one pursues short sighted goals at the expense of the future, this is the sort of thing that happens.
No. Global warming comes from a combination of natural and human-caused sources. The latter need not be due to bad management, but rather a consequence of having a fossil fuel-based society and its benefits.
OTOH, desertification whether from global warming or "normal" sources is IMHO mostly due to bad agricultural practices like pumping water out of the ground, depleting the ground water table, depleting the nitrogen in the soil without growing legumes or letting the land go fallow for some time, or not taking care of the topsoil and letting it blow away. It's someone cutting major corners now - a major sacrifice of the viability of that land for near term gain. There's no excuse for it.
While I suppose you can make the same claim for activities that induce global warming, going with fossil fuels and other activities that induce global warming has more short and long term gain and less long term cost. Unlike bad agricultural practices there are long term gains to using fossil fuels now such as building up the economies of the world and elevating billions of people from poverty.
There's more desert created from bad management than from global warming. For example, way back when I read some study on Slashdot which claimed a certain amount of arable land would be lost from desertification and sea level rise from 2C rise in temperature over a century. That ended up being about the same area as a year's worth of normal desertification.
I tried googling for that story, but never could find it.
Long term, and probably even medium term, the cost of electricity in Germany can only go one way thanks to renewables. Down. Less reliance on polluting and foreign sources of energy is just an added bonus.
If that renewable power is still funded by causing customers to pay more (which is currently the situation in Germany with customer-funded subsidies on renewables), then it's not going to be cheap. And if they can't come up with some way to store the power generated by the less reliable parts of renewable energy, then they will continue to be dependent on foreign sources of energy.
I'm sure the high variability of the German electricity market is great for traders. I can't see what the appeal would be for everyone else.
High capitol expenditure at the start followed by a big payoff later on is pretty much the definition of an investment.
And if that big payoff never comes, it is pretty much the definition of a loss. A project with large front-loaded costs and nebulous back-loaded payoff is a classic "privatizing profit/socializing losses" ploy.
I'm not in a position to agree or disagree with most of what you said, but cash flow != profit.
Medical insurance is not really insurance. It's a middle-man business. Hospitals and doctors don't want to be in the retail finance business (as in, getting their patients to pay up). Patients don't want to be directly on the hook for multi-$100K lifesaving procedures, much less a $20 copay for a routine checkup. So in step the medical "insurers"...
Note that the latter concern is precisely why insurers exist in the first place. Why the use of "scare quotes"?
That's all true, unless it isn't. Law and regulation can be effective, but only if people follow it. If instead, the response is widespread disobedience of that law (and other laws that just happen to be like the first), then it can actually be extraordinarily counterproductive.
A good example is the era of alcohol prohibition in the US. For example, the US government poisoned a large number of people (starting in 1926) in a futile attempt to deter alcohol consumption. The estimates of deaths from the program go as high as 10,000 (with NYC experiencing at least 1100 deaths attributed to that program).
In addition, organized crime thrived on the black market for alcohol, creating a powerful shadow force that took at least half a century to dismantle. Today's black markets in recreational drugs and similar things can directly trace their roots to that long ago period.
So sure, you can force people to make healthy choices, but only if they comply with the law. If they don't, then you can make the problems much worse.
Did you ever stop to consider that one of the main reasons that poor people eat bad foods is because they are the cheapest?
No, but only because that is completely irrelevant to the argument. Your observation also ignores that in this case, the poor of NYC can get clean tap water for only a minute fraction of the cost of buying soda. Something goes into those buying decisions other than just the need for cheap calories.
Slashdot Mirror
Good. At least you're starting to get the problem. Electricity generated by wind power at a distant location also has to be transferred via wire.
First, it's not an addiction. There's a lot of discussion of psychology of addiction online. And fossil fuel consumption simply doesn't fit that.
Second, fossil fuels aren't the only thing we need which we don't provide all by ourselves. A lot of vital goods, for example, food and vehicles are provided by others as well. Where's the complaint that we're "addicted" to food or to transportation?
Third, fossil fuels do useful things. Meth doesn't. Similarly, fossil fuels are cheap and meth isn't. The addiction mechanism is what gets the meth user to keep making unfavorable purchases.
Fourth, there is that unfavorable purchase you mentioned of the meth head selling their TV for the next high. That just isn't happening in the US. Sure, there are a lot of people and governments in the US borrowing and spending their future - doing foolish things, but they'd be doing that even if all fossil fuels were domestically provided.
That lack of foresight exists whether we buy foreign oil or not. At least by buying foreign oil and such, we'll be helping someone else out with their problems. As you may have noticed, a lot of OPEC countries have serious problems which oil revenue can help with.
The vast majority of research points to it being less hospitable, and there is a lot of good evidence that with rising temperatures come more heating feedbacks which will accelerate the process.
Most of that "vast majority" of research says nothing about whether global warming will be net beneficial to humanity. As to that "good evidence" that rising temperature comes with "more" heating feedbacks, we have the obvious counter that the whole system is dominated by negative feedback, radiation of heat to space which occurs at roughly temperature to the fourth power.
This is not some esoteric fact.
Indeed, it's some guy on the internet making shit up.
Getting $100,000 speaking fees from Heartland Institute shillfests(you know where they get a bunch of shills together and have them preach to the choir, and the press) in thanks for being a #1 source of purposeful misinformation about climate on the internet is like a career inasmuch as it provides his living. It's not like a career in that it involves a lifelong development of a set of skills.
If that is true (and he says it isn't BTW), then that's a strong indication that he's better and more knowledgeable at this job than the random guy on the internet. Random guys on the internet after all don't get $100,000 just for saying stuff.
Finally, call greenhouse driven climate change a "claim" if you want, but it's not true.
Note here the actual claim here was that wind power hit energy payback well inside of a year. Conflating completely different things is a typically clueless and lazy activity I see in the climate change debate on all sides. Can't you step up your game? Or is the future of Earth just not that important to you?
Pretty much. There's at least two coal plants in the neighborhood (northwest corner of Wyoming) and some hydro.
But their argument is irrefutable. "But the wind speed changes!! They didn't mention that!!". I only have three words. Double-U Oh Double-U.
The thing is that is really close to what's happening. The original researchers assume the existence of a low cost power generation smoothing system. When you don't have that, then the energy cost of the smoothing system needs to be included. That will increase the time to energy payback.
"New peer reviewed science study says something. But random guy on the internet says they're wrong!"
What is typical Slashdot are the dishonest portrayals of people we disagree with. Anthony Watts of WUWT is not a random guy on the internet, but a person who made a career of refuting similar claims. I see elsewhere that you wrote:
No, he's a well known denier (probably *the* most well known among lay people).
So who is this guy? A random guy on the internet? Or probably *the* most well known climate change denier among lay people? I guess it depends on your rhetorical needs of the moment.
I see the factor of ten variation in wind power that the earlier poster mentioned. Notice also that the drop in wind power happened during the day which is particularly undesirable.
it is going to cause significant problems for our technological society, especially in the transitional period when weather patterns are disrupted by changing energy levels in the atmosphere
So what? Our technological society is adept at solving significant problems. And what makes you think the climate is changing to something less hospitable?
Wind power at a distant location isn't going to help you much. And that assumes the wind is blowing there too.
Nor does it mean that there is any significant warming effects going on. Recall that we've had satellites capable of measuring something close to global mean temperature for perhaps 40 years.
None of the things you mentioned so far is like human addiction for illegal, expensive recreation drugs. They are often compared so, but the comparison is grievously flawed.
Guess what? You'll have neither time, nor money nor energy, nor probably political stability.
My view is that we've been in the circumstances under which the "energy trap" is supposed to hold since the 1970s.
And please tell me more about France selling PSG (Paris soccer cub), Le Louvre; Spain selling Barca and Germany selling BMW and Mercedes to Qatar not "making anyone poorer".
Sure, I'll do that request. Those things aren't making anyone poorer. Next.
Most suicide is in red states where they don't give a fuck about CO2.
Those states aren't willfully trying to destroy their future, economically and politically, even if they happen to emit a little more carbon dioxide than you are comfortable with. Coincidentally, they aren't having trouble with desertification unlike California.
There's more options. For example, we could switch over to that infrastructure when it makes economic sense to do so. In the mean time, "giving" money to oil producing countries isn't making anyone poorer.
The Germans also tend to think in terms of decades rather than fiscal quarters like many Americans seem to do.
Too bad we don't see evidence of that in this story. Why brag that the wholesale electricity generation market for Germany is so malformed that at times they're paying to get rid of it? Why shut down nuclear plants without a viable alternative to replace them? Why double the cost of electricity to the end user? There's a huge amount of next quarter thinking here.
I guess your state sucks at the teat of regulatory bliss because they seem to be fucking you in the ass.
I hate being left behind by these kinds of arguments. If only I had gotten a degree in rhetorical topology. Then I'd be able to figure out how that works.
Now take a look at the USA. Not only did we cut down whatever the natives didn't burn* and indeed burn much of it, but we outright turned it into a dustbowl, fixed it, and are doing it again. Even California is going dustbowl, right now. The drought means that many farms are getting no water allotment this year, while others are pumping their allotment and [illegally] selling it to others, and we're putting in new vineyards left and right.
Maybe you ought to actually take a look at the parts of the US that don't have a suicide pact going on. California, not coincidentally, is also the state which leads on trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. When one pursues short sighted goals at the expense of the future, this is the sort of thing that happens.
No. Global warming comes from a combination of natural and human-caused sources. The latter need not be due to bad management, but rather a consequence of having a fossil fuel-based society and its benefits.
OTOH, desertification whether from global warming or "normal" sources is IMHO mostly due to bad agricultural practices like pumping water out of the ground, depleting the ground water table, depleting the nitrogen in the soil without growing legumes or letting the land go fallow for some time, or not taking care of the topsoil and letting it blow away. It's someone cutting major corners now - a major sacrifice of the viability of that land for near term gain. There's no excuse for it.
While I suppose you can make the same claim for activities that induce global warming, going with fossil fuels and other activities that induce global warming has more short and long term gain and less long term cost. Unlike bad agricultural practices there are long term gains to using fossil fuels now such as building up the economies of the world and elevating billions of people from poverty.
There's more desert created from bad management than from global warming. For example, way back when I read some study on Slashdot which claimed a certain amount of arable land would be lost from desertification and sea level rise from 2C rise in temperature over a century. That ended up being about the same area as a year's worth of normal desertification.
I tried googling for that story, but never could find it.
Long term, and probably even medium term, the cost of electricity in Germany can only go one way thanks to renewables. Down. Less reliance on polluting and foreign sources of energy is just an added bonus.
If that renewable power is still funded by causing customers to pay more (which is currently the situation in Germany with customer-funded subsidies on renewables), then it's not going to be cheap. And if they can't come up with some way to store the power generated by the less reliable parts of renewable energy, then they will continue to be dependent on foreign sources of energy.
I'm sure the high variability of the German electricity market is great for traders. I can't see what the appeal would be for everyone else.
High capitol expenditure at the start followed by a big payoff later on is pretty much the definition of an investment.
And if that big payoff never comes, it is pretty much the definition of a loss. A project with large front-loaded costs and nebulous back-loaded payoff is a classic "privatizing profit/socializing losses" ploy.
With skydiving, the costs are not of hospitalization.
You can break stuff, even if your parachute opens.
Medical insurance is not really insurance. It's a middle-man business. Hospitals and doctors don't want to be in the retail finance business (as in, getting their patients to pay up). Patients don't want to be directly on the hook for multi-$100K lifesaving procedures, much less a $20 copay for a routine checkup. So in step the medical "insurers"...
Note that the latter concern is precisely why insurers exist in the first place. Why the use of "scare quotes"?
That's all true, unless it isn't. Law and regulation can be effective, but only if people follow it. If instead, the response is widespread disobedience of that law (and other laws that just happen to be like the first), then it can actually be extraordinarily counterproductive.
A good example is the era of alcohol prohibition in the US. For example, the US government poisoned a large number of people (starting in 1926) in a futile attempt to deter alcohol consumption. The estimates of deaths from the program go as high as 10,000 (with NYC experiencing at least 1100 deaths attributed to that program).
In addition, organized crime thrived on the black market for alcohol, creating a powerful shadow force that took at least half a century to dismantle. Today's black markets in recreational drugs and similar things can directly trace their roots to that long ago period.
So sure, you can force people to make healthy choices, but only if they comply with the law. If they don't, then you can make the problems much worse.
Did you ever stop to consider that one of the main reasons that poor people eat bad foods is because they are the cheapest?
No, but only because that is completely irrelevant to the argument. Your observation also ignores that in this case, the poor of NYC can get clean tap water for only a minute fraction of the cost of buying soda. Something goes into those buying decisions other than just the need for cheap calories.