OK, well that's good for you then and probably explains our disconnect. As a frequent reader here, I already knew that cars continue to rely on gasoline and that electricity generation had largely migrated from coal to gas, with renewable energy recently making huge gains. I made the (mistaken) assumption that most people on Slashdot were coming from this position.
Since you did not have this information, I'm going to assume that you also may not be aware that fuel source can be very misleading. For instance, the data in TFA shows a gradual recent decline in "carbon intensity" in the transportation sector. The source article (not TFA) says that this is due to the use of ethanol. Ethanol does indeed burn more "cleanly", but if you map out the carbon used in its manufacture, it is not really any better than gasoline (diesel for farm equipment and processing, natural gas used to produce fertilizer). So if you thought that you could take away from the chart that recently, transportation has improved - that is not actually true.
As an extreme and unrealistic example, I could reform coal into methane gas, sell it to an electrical plant, and they could burn that gas. It would show up as lower carbon than coal on these charts, despite being worse.
I'm not complaining that people might be interested in showing that coal is "dirtier" than natural gas - there is indeed a place for that sort of thing. But it is a constant, not something you would graph. A headline such as "Carbon Intensity is Falling in Industrial, Electric Power Sectors" is retarded, because it is meaningless by itself. It gives you no information about, well, anything other than using some new jargon to say they have switched from dirty to clean sources of fuel. The opening line of the article is full of retardation:
Over the last seven years, the electrical power sector has gone from being one of the most carbon-emitting sectors of the American economy per unit of fuel consumed to one of the least carbon-emitting sectors. That’s according to new data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Despite the good news, the EIA’s numbers show that, since 1975, the carbon emissions of the US transportation sector per unit of fuel used has hardly changed at all.
Why in the world is it "good" news? The only way it would be good news is if you also looked at total carbon emissions (or even emissions per unit of work done) to make sure they went down. If carbon still went up, it's not good news.
I usually like Ars, but this seems to be their B team.
It may talk about primary fuels, but it does not consider them. If you burn ethanol in your car it just measures the amount of CO2 that comes out of the tail pipe - it does not consider the CO2 that went into the creation of the ethanol. If you burn coal in your power plant it just measures the amount of CO2 that comes out of the power plant, it does not consider the energy that went into extracting and transporting the coal.
They even have a chart (for some reason?) that shows just how constant their assumptions are. You are giving them way too much credit. This "analysis" is asinine.
Jesus, at least go read the article before you fellate the guy. Electric cars exist, but the reason that the graph is so flat is that they don't yet exist in significant quantities to sway the numbers. The article does not consider CO2 emissions from electric cars at all - it just treats them as zero. YES, IT IS THAT STUPID.
Jesus you are calling me a moron and you can't even read. Reread the article - it has nothing to do with efficiency - and in fact I made an error by even mentioning it. My mistake. The article just says that burning a given amount of fuel in 2017 emits the same amount of carbon as it did in 1975. Wow, that's startling, isn't it?
You call me dingus and then you just repeat the same stupidness as the original author? Cars still use gasoline, just like in 1975. And except for some ethanol added recently, a gallon of gas still pretty much has the same amount of carbon in it as in 1975. It's a very dumb measure of carbon usage, as it is just restating the obvious - cars still burn gasoline, trucks still burn diesel. Why make a pretty chart?
The original paper says it is mostly ethanol that moved the needle on transportation. If you think about it, hybrids won't change it - same mistake I made in my original post. Ethanol by some measures is just as bad as gasoline when you include the entire supply chain, so that illustrates just how bad this number is as a CO2 measure.
You are right - I'm a dunce and did not think the efficiency part of my post through. With that said, burning a gallon of gasoline in 1975 produced about as much carbon as burning a gallon of gasoline does in 2017. It's a constant.
And yes, it's as bad as that. If you open the source website, it even includes a chart with no x axis showing the "trend" of coal and other fuel sources. Why make a graph of constants?
And no, they aren't considering supply chain. Just the average number of CO2 molecules emitted when burning the source fuel. So ethanol consumption has improved the transportation sector's rating despite probably being no better when considering the supply chain.
Society can reduce the amount of CO2 by doing any number of things: car pooling, transitioning to public transit, improving efficiency, etc. Fuel source is only one part of the pie, and isolating it is both obvious and stupid.
By this measure, reforming coal into methane and then burning that as a separate step would improve their rating. Using diesel equipment and petroleum fertilizers to create ethanol to burn in cars improves the rating. All that counts at the end of the day is how much CO2 is cranked out per unit of work done. This "measure" is silly.
It almost certainly does not. Fossil fuels are just laying around waiting to be exploited - there is absolutely no way to beat free with current technology.
With that said, if the market were more ideal such that those impacted by climate change had a way to seek damages from those who dump the carbon into the atmosphere, the free market would do a wonderful job. Without such a mechanism, we need to set such a mechanism up. The "carbon credits" system would probably work well if we had universal buy-in - it has worked well with other pollutants and is a pretty efficient market-based system that should make libertarian-market-types fairly happy.
Actually, it isn't a retarded measure, you just need to understand what it is sayig.
I disagree. Creating a measurement for something that is a constant is pretty dumb.
At the end of the day, all we care about is the ratio of _something_ to carbon output. For transportation that _something_ can be people-miles. For electricity it is kW-h. You don't need a study to determine that coal has xxx carbon atoms and ethane has fewer - that's interesting, but it can't change over time.
I would be interested in seeing the same sort of measure of the other pollutants out our tailpipes,
What exactly is the expected result when the fuel is the same and the efficiency of the heat engine is already at or near the practical limit? As long as the fuel used is gasoline or diesel, there will be a practical limit to how far this can go. If they had picked 1930 as their arbitrary date they would get different results. If we all switched our cars to CNG, we'd have much higher "intensity", if we used coal it would be lower. Not sure what the point is.
No, I mean so long as the GUI is set up to work with a keystrokes (best) or mice/touchpads so I don't have to move my arms and poke the screen. Apple and Chromebook touchpads show how much of the touchscreen advantages can be had on the touchpad (pinch to zoom, rotate, swipes, and especially scrolling). If the GUI makes significant compromises to accommodate touch, then I am being "forced to use it".
I build my own cars, too, and for half the price of a new one. 1) Start with a solid chassis (strong engine and drivetrain) that's a few years old (used). 2) Put new wheels on. 3) Sweet ground effects. 4) At least 3 bobble heads, depending on how I'm feeling that day.
Soooo much cheaper than the exact same thing new. Didn't even need to go to school to learn how to build cars - I guess it's just a gift.
It's never been a consideration for me, but now that you mention it, this laptop appears to be covered in fur. I imagine that will pick up some general yuckies over time.
I'm all for reducing taxes so long as we also reduce spending. I'm trying to be pragmatic and keep overall revenue neutral in eliminating the corporate tax. I'm far more opposed to deficit spending on recurring costs than I am opposed to high tax rates.
I'd like to abolish the corporate tax to eliminate this silliness. Treat corporations all as pass-through economic entities and end this corporations as people crap. Raise the capital gains and special dividend rates to match full income tax levels and tax the people who own and work for the corporations, not the corporation itself. As long as corporations can pit the best accountants and lawyers in the world against your tax code, you will lose this battle. Wall Street and K Street are smarter than Congress - full stop.
It's a goal on the level with advancing the art of keeping trout alive in deep space. Or Snails. Or gerbils.
Well, we sent dogs and monkeys up before humans, so I'm not getting your point.
We also generally agree that those are good things to do. We don't agree that lobbing trout into space is a good use of our money.
No one is suggesting that as a goal. The goal is not to send trout to Mars, it is to send humans to Mars. If, for some reason, sending trout to Mars somehow advances the goal, then so be it - but you are using the strawman technique in this case; the only person mentioning trout in space is you.
You also paid for that yourself. If you want to lob canned humans at mars you are welcome to do so - if you pay for it yourself.
I'm actually sympathetic to this argument. I think that if our society did more of this kind of thinking, we might be better off. With that said, it is not the reality that we live in. People use the government as a giant piggy bank, and we all compete to have our own pet causes funded - be it something noble like a cancer cure, something misguided and self-defeating like highway improvement, or something straight-up frivolous but awesome like a trip to Mars. I can opt-out of this system on general principle, but that seems like a denial of reality. Like paying more than you owe in taxes because you think everyone else should, too. Ideology vs pragmatism.
The issue is that even the irrational reasons are not convincing or compelling.
To you. We are firmly in the realm of opinion here. You'll find people who don't want to pay for public art, people who think keeping neighborhoods nice through zoning is a form of Marxism, people who think it should be illegal to own pets, etc. But we go with, as you say, "general agreement". And so far, people generally agree that space is worth spending money on. I happen to think it is very compelling.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I prefer matte as well - but it's not a deal killer for me.
I won't have much choice when next I need to upgrade my computer :)
OK, well that's good for you then and probably explains our disconnect. As a frequent reader here, I already knew that cars continue to rely on gasoline and that electricity generation had largely migrated from coal to gas, with renewable energy recently making huge gains. I made the (mistaken) assumption that most people on Slashdot were coming from this position.
Since you did not have this information, I'm going to assume that you also may not be aware that fuel source can be very misleading. For instance, the data in TFA shows a gradual recent decline in "carbon intensity" in the transportation sector. The source article (not TFA) says that this is due to the use of ethanol. Ethanol does indeed burn more "cleanly", but if you map out the carbon used in its manufacture, it is not really any better than gasoline (diesel for farm equipment and processing, natural gas used to produce fertilizer). So if you thought that you could take away from the chart that recently, transportation has improved - that is not actually true.
As an extreme and unrealistic example, I could reform coal into methane gas, sell it to an electrical plant, and they could burn that gas. It would show up as lower carbon than coal on these charts, despite being worse.
I feel like we are sliding into semantics and grammar. Let's shift direction a bit - being honest, did you learn anything from the article?
I'm not complaining that people might be interested in showing that coal is "dirtier" than natural gas - there is indeed a place for that sort of thing. But it is a constant, not something you would graph. A headline such as "Carbon Intensity is Falling in Industrial, Electric Power Sectors" is retarded, because it is meaningless by itself. It gives you no information about, well, anything other than using some new jargon to say they have switched from dirty to clean sources of fuel. The opening line of the article is full of retardation:
Over the last seven years, the electrical power sector has gone from being one of the most carbon-emitting sectors of the American economy per unit of fuel consumed to one of the least carbon-emitting sectors. That’s according to new data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Despite the good news, the EIA’s numbers show that, since 1975, the carbon emissions of the US transportation sector per unit of fuel used has hardly changed at all.
Why in the world is it "good" news? The only way it would be good news is if you also looked at total carbon emissions (or even emissions per unit of work done) to make sure they went down. If carbon still went up, it's not good news.
I usually like Ars, but this seems to be their B team.
It may talk about primary fuels, but it does not consider them. If you burn ethanol in your car it just measures the amount of CO2 that comes out of the tail pipe - it does not consider the CO2 that went into the creation of the ethanol. If you burn coal in your power plant it just measures the amount of CO2 that comes out of the power plant, it does not consider the energy that went into extracting and transporting the coal.
They even have a chart (for some reason?) that shows just how constant their assumptions are. You are giving them way too much credit. This "analysis" is asinine.
Jesus, at least go read the article before you fellate the guy. Electric cars exist, but the reason that the graph is so flat is that they don't yet exist in significant quantities to sway the numbers. The article does not consider CO2 emissions from electric cars at all - it just treats them as zero. YES, IT IS THAT STUPID.
Jesus you are calling me a moron and you can't even read. Reread the article - it has nothing to do with efficiency - and in fact I made an error by even mentioning it. My mistake. The article just says that burning a given amount of fuel in 2017 emits the same amount of carbon as it did in 1975. Wow, that's startling, isn't it?
You call me dingus and then you just repeat the same stupidness as the original author? Cars still use gasoline, just like in 1975. And except for some ethanol added recently, a gallon of gas still pretty much has the same amount of carbon in it as in 1975. It's a very dumb measure of carbon usage, as it is just restating the obvious - cars still burn gasoline, trucks still burn diesel. Why make a pretty chart?
The original paper says it is mostly ethanol that moved the needle on transportation. If you think about it, hybrids won't change it - same mistake I made in my original post. Ethanol by some measures is just as bad as gasoline when you include the entire supply chain, so that illustrates just how bad this number is as a CO2 measure.
You are right - I'm a dunce and did not think the efficiency part of my post through. With that said, burning a gallon of gasoline in 1975 produced about as much carbon as burning a gallon of gasoline does in 2017. It's a constant.
And yes, it's as bad as that. If you open the source website, it even includes a chart with no x axis showing the "trend" of coal and other fuel sources. Why make a graph of constants?
And no, they aren't considering supply chain. Just the average number of CO2 molecules emitted when burning the source fuel. So ethanol consumption has improved the transportation sector's rating despite probably being no better when considering the supply chain.
Society can reduce the amount of CO2 by doing any number of things: car pooling, transitioning to public transit, improving efficiency, etc. Fuel source is only one part of the pie, and isolating it is both obvious and stupid.
By this measure, reforming coal into methane and then burning that as a separate step would improve their rating. Using diesel equipment and petroleum fertilizers to create ethanol to burn in cars improves the rating. All that counts at the end of the day is how much CO2 is cranked out per unit of work done. This "measure" is silly.
It almost certainly does not. Fossil fuels are just laying around waiting to be exploited - there is absolutely no way to beat free with current technology.
With that said, if the market were more ideal such that those impacted by climate change had a way to seek damages from those who dump the carbon into the atmosphere, the free market would do a wonderful job. Without such a mechanism, we need to set such a mechanism up. The "carbon credits" system would probably work well if we had universal buy-in - it has worked well with other pollutants and is a pretty efficient market-based system that should make libertarian-market-types fairly happy.
I really tried to drink the Kool Aid and use 8 when it came out. I put up with it for a whole year before giving up and reinstalling 7.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean.
Actually, it isn't a retarded measure, you just need to understand what it is sayig.
I disagree. Creating a measurement for something that is a constant is pretty dumb.
At the end of the day, all we care about is the ratio of _something_ to carbon output. For transportation that _something_ can be people-miles. For electricity it is kW-h. You don't need a study to determine that coal has xxx carbon atoms and ethane has fewer - that's interesting, but it can't change over time.
I would be interested in seeing the same sort of measure of the other pollutants out our tailpipes,
We only talk about global warming now :)
Indeed, it's even dumber than I first thought.
"Per unit of fuel used"
What exactly is the expected result when the fuel is the same and the efficiency of the heat engine is already at or near the practical limit? As long as the fuel used is gasoline or diesel, there will be a practical limit to how far this can go. If they had picked 1930 as their arbitrary date they would get different results. If we all switched our cars to CNG, we'd have much higher "intensity", if we used coal it would be lower. Not sure what the point is.
No, I mean so long as the GUI is set up to work with a keystrokes (best) or mice/touchpads so I don't have to move my arms and poke the screen. Apple and Chromebook touchpads show how much of the touchscreen advantages can be had on the touchpad (pinch to zoom, rotate, swipes, and especially scrolling). If the GUI makes significant compromises to accommodate touch, then I am being "forced to use it".
To get all that I just roll down the windows while driving home from the dentist.
I build my own cars, too, and for half the price of a new one.
1) Start with a solid chassis (strong engine and drivetrain) that's a few years old (used).
2) Put new wheels on.
3) Sweet ground effects.
4) At least 3 bobble heads, depending on how I'm feeling that day.
Soooo much cheaper than the exact same thing new. Didn't even need to go to school to learn how to build cars - I guess it's just a gift.
It's never been a consideration for me, but now that you mention it, this laptop appears to be covered in fur. I imagine that will pick up some general yuckies over time.
I have no problem with a touchscreen on a laptop as long as I'm not forced to use it.
And if it adds any cost to the laptop, I'm likely to pick up the cheaper version without it.
I'm all for reducing taxes so long as we also reduce spending. I'm trying to be pragmatic and keep overall revenue neutral in eliminating the corporate tax. I'm far more opposed to deficit spending on recurring costs than I am opposed to high tax rates.
I'd like to abolish the corporate tax to eliminate this silliness. Treat corporations all as pass-through economic entities and end this corporations as people crap. Raise the capital gains and special dividend rates to match full income tax levels and tax the people who own and work for the corporations, not the corporation itself. As long as corporations can pit the best accountants and lawyers in the world against your tax code, you will lose this battle. Wall Street and K Street are smarter than Congress - full stop.
It's a goal on the level with advancing the art of keeping trout alive in deep space. Or Snails. Or gerbils.
Well, we sent dogs and monkeys up before humans, so I'm not getting your point.
We also generally agree that those are good things to do. We don't agree that lobbing trout into space is a good use of our money.
No one is suggesting that as a goal. The goal is not to send trout to Mars, it is to send humans to Mars. If, for some reason, sending trout to Mars somehow advances the goal, then so be it - but you are using the strawman technique in this case; the only person mentioning trout in space is you.
You also paid for that yourself. If you want to lob canned humans at mars you are welcome to do so - if you pay for it yourself.
I'm actually sympathetic to this argument. I think that if our society did more of this kind of thinking, we might be better off. With that said, it is not the reality that we live in. People use the government as a giant piggy bank, and we all compete to have our own pet causes funded - be it something noble like a cancer cure, something misguided and self-defeating like highway improvement, or something straight-up frivolous but awesome like a trip to Mars. I can opt-out of this system on general principle, but that seems like a denial of reality. Like paying more than you owe in taxes because you think everyone else should, too. Ideology vs pragmatism.
The issue is that even the irrational reasons are not convincing or compelling.
To you. We are firmly in the realm of opinion here. You'll find people who don't want to pay for public art, people who think keeping neighborhoods nice through zoning is a form of Marxism, people who think it should be illegal to own pets, etc. But we go with, as you say, "general agreement". And so far, people generally agree that space is worth spending money on. I happen to think it is very compelling.