So you want to explain that having $200 less at the end of the month does affect your standard of living?
Where do you live? In a third world country or what?
I live in the United States of America, where the median income is less than $52000/year. A nation where about half of the population lives paycheck to paycheck. A nation where 1/3rd of the population has nothing saved for retirement.
If you gave people below the median income an extra $200/month "free" by lowering their taxes then they'd have money to buy a "new to you" car, or pay for night classes at a university or community college, or use their vacation time to take an IT certification course, or use their vacation to actually go somewhere on vacation. Maybe these people would save it for retirement. Even if these people blow the money on beer, cigarettes, and casino chips these people are adding to the economy and not to the government.
I remember Nancy Pelosi saying something like for every $2 paid out in welfare that adds $5 to the economy. While I think that is complete bullshit let's take her at her word. How is raising their gas taxes, and then giving them welfare to make up for the lost income, any different then allowing these people to keep that money by not taxing them in the first place? If increasing the income of the poor by $2 adds $5 to the economy then I say we should do that, only I believe we should do that by reducing taxes and also the size of government. If people have enough money to pay for their food and fuel without government assistance then we don't need the people in government to hand out welfare checks.
Make no mistake that taxing fuel is a regressive tax. Just $200 extra expenses every month can put people on a downward spiral, they don't have that money to invest in a home, education, or retirement. $200/month over decades adds up to a lot of money.
How about getting rid of the spare tire for commuting cars, and rely on some service to bring a spare tire to you when you need it?
As a commuter I am quite happy with carrying my own spare, thankyouverymuch.
I can recall two times I made use of my spare and both times I was able to resolve my problem precisely because I had a spare. The first time I was headed to an appointment at the VA clinic in the next county. My plan was to head out early, grab something to eat on the way, and then go to the clinic. While driving down the interstate I hit something that punched a large hole in the tire, big enough to poke a finger through. I was able to change the tire with my spare and get on my way. I didn't have time to eat, and I ended up ten minutes late for my appointment, but generally I fixed the problem in little time and my day was not adversely affected. I had a late lunch and I ended up getting a new set of tires a few weeks earlier than planned.
The second time I had to use the spare it was a cold cold night and a tire went flat because the idiots that put on my new tires didn't seat it properly. It was late at night and I was quite likely the only person for a mile around. I was able to change the tire and be on my way in probably a half hour.
In both cases I could have easily called someone but that would have turned a half hour inconvenience into potentially hours of waiting for someone to do what I am perfectly capable of doing myself.
The service should be provided for free by all cities as a measure to reduce pollution.
Nothing is "free" when provided by the government. Why is it that so many people think the solution to every problem is more government? This would no doubt raise taxes for every resident for what would no doubt be third rate service. There are countless private services that can do this, all competing for my money to drive down prices. I have roadside insurance for things like this, and it costs me very little every year. In both cases I gave above I could have called for someone to change my tire, but I did not think that using that service for such a minor issue was necessary.
I would be interested in seeing how much removing the spare tire would actually reduce pollution. Of all the ways to reduce pollution I'd think that removing the spare tire is one of the worst ideas. In my situation I could have easily called on someone to help but had I been on a longer trip which took me further off the beaten path I could have been left waiting hours to get moving again. In the case of that freezing cold night that could have turned a minor inconvenience into a life threatening issue.
I realize you limited your suggestion to "commuters" but how does one separate a commuter from a non-commuter? This is especially relevant if the government gets involved since they will be tasked with enforcing this. I mean if the city wants people to stop carrying a spare tire to save on fuel then are people going to be fined if they are found with a spare tire while "commuting"?
On top of it all people are free to take the spare tire out of their cars to save on weight, nothing is stopping them. These same people can then purchase roadside service insurance from any of numerous private companies offering such services. We don't need government to get involved in this.
Perhaps what bothers me most about this idea is that we place more and more reliance on government. I view the government as a necessity, we need government. I also view the place of government as doing things that only a government can do. Government should not be changing tires.
And thinking on a global scale, it would add up to a save us from a lot of CO2 emissions.
That may be true but since carrying a spare has saved me many hours of inconvenience, and perhaps many hundreds of dollars from having to pay someone to bring me a tire, I'm not likely to give up my spare tire any time soon. I can imagine a lot of people died for lack of a spare tire and a strong enough cell phone signal. You can gamble on that if you like, I won't.
which part of "use that money to subsidize investments in renewable energy" didn't you understand?
The part where you think that our government consists of genius angels that won't use this tax money to fund their pet projects instead of investing it in renewable energy. Your proposal also requires these genius angels to know enough about science and technology to effectively predict the future on which technologies will pan out and which will not. I have greater faith in the market to figure this out.
no, it would force the transition to happen. the reason you didn't understand that is that you simply didn't read (let alone consider) my full proposal before launching into a blind rage.
Your "proposal" is a single sentence that requires an incorruptible government to be successful. I've seen how our federal government has invested in renewable energy and they fail often. There is a reason why they fail often, it's because asking for government money is the path of last resort, the government is where people go when they've run out of potential investors to ask for money. If they've run out of people to ask for an investment it's quite likely because their idea sucks. The people in government aren't technology people, they are politicians spending other people's money. They will spend money on this shit because it buys them votes. If their gamble pays off then they get a lot of kudos and it improves their chances of getting re-elected or getting a lucrative private consulting job after leaving office. If their gamble fails then they didn't lose anything, and with all the failed government programs out there people will not be able to keep track of which asshole voted for which money pit. Which means these assholes tend to stay in office because they were able to divert money from my pocket to the second rate con artists that were unable to con private investors.
I once thought like you. That if only we gave more money to research then we'd have better stuff. What I found out is that the government is the worst way to fund this research. The best research is done by private businesses. They will take a portion of their profits to fund the next best thing. Governments take a portion of our taxes to buy votes. They have very little motivation to actually solve the problems given to them, if they solve the problem then they can't use that same fear, uncertainty, and doubt, to keep people voting for them.
the sooner we switch of fossil fuels, the better chance we have at fixing the problem we've created.
Agreed, but getting there by artificially raising the price of energy just leaves us with fewer resources to fix the problem. If we have the government tax energy to fund this transition then we are relying on the government to be incorruptible angel geniuses that won't use that money to buy votes, give money to their buddies, or merely choose solutions poorly. That "cash for clunkers" bomb of a program should be a huge clue that these people are corruptible, far from geniuses, and certainly not angels.
By leaving money in the hands of the people then they can put that money in the market by buying stuff that makes them happy. That means people can have money to buy electric vehicles, solar panels, attic insulation, or whatever. Or, they can spend it on beer and porn. Either way the world is a better place.
the problem is not about running out of oil, the problem is all the carbon in the atmosphere is causing the earth to retain too much heat and causing the ocean to absorb a lot more CO2 which is making the oceans more acidic. even if we had a limitless supply of oil, burning it is still a problem.
I'll go with that. How does making diesel fuel, the very thing that powers trains, trucks, bulldozers, etc. that will build the infrastructure we need so expensive that people cannot afford to run them help? Making diesel fuel expensive artificially raises the costs of building the windmills, solar collectors, clearing the sites to place them, pour the concrete, and move all the parts to the site for construction.
Making fossil fuels expensive will not help in transitioning from them, it will just be a burden on the economy and prolong the transition.
If you believe we have to tax gasoline to the point it becomes $10/gallon then you are admitting you don't believe your own hype. I thought that solar power is already at price parity with coal. If the price of solar cuts in half every ten years, or whatever the claim is, then we should see solar cheaper than gasoline real soon. In 20 years we should have a solar powered society only on the basis that solar power is so cheap that it will just not be profitable to pump oil out of the ground any more.
If you believe that solar power can only win this race by hobbling carbon fuels with exorbitant taxes then you have just admitted that you do not believe solar power will ever be cheaper than coal and oil. By saying we must tax carbon fuels out of existence is admitting we will not be running out of oil any time soon.
Oh, and if you want to save all those wild animals then I have some suggestions. Do you know why we don't have cattle in zoos? Because people raise billions of them for meat. Do you know why lions are going extinct? Because without hunting licenses to fund proper management lions are pests to be killed on sight, not income. People will take care of things that bring them a better life. When the British would colonize an area they'd declare the trees and animals property of the king, which led the locals to kill animals and cut down trees just to defy the king. If you tell those same people that they can keep the produce on the trees but the king wants a small percentage for taxes then you'd see groves pop up in no time. With hunting licenses the locals saw lions as income, they'd get a portion of the fees collected for hunting "their" lions. That meant they'd not only have money to build fences around their land to keep the lions from eating their children they'd also be quite willing to report poachers.
Proper management of the ecosystem is more complex than just reducing CO2 output. It takes effort on the part of all. By removing ownership of things like water, air, and land then people just don't care about it. The people that want to "save" the zebras but banning hunting are idiots. With hunting allowed people will build habitats for them so they can hunt them. With hunting banned then they become a nuisance to be chased off, poisoned, or whatever else they can do to get rid of them quietly without violating the law explicitly or by doing so carefully to avoid getting caught.
Yes. Imagine your typical wage earner. They get X dollars per hour of work, and they work Y hours per month, leaving them with Z as a monthly income. They have to spend this income on consumables like food and fuel, to pay off long term expenses like a mortgage and/or student loans, as well as things like insurance and so forth. For the typical person that might mean something like, pulling a number out of the air, $200 on fuel each month.
Right now with $2 per gallon of gas that means their 100 gallons of fuel will take them where they need to go for the month. If fuel goes to $4 per gallon that means $200 less at the end of the month for little luxuries like movie tickets, cable TV, or however else they might entertain themselves. If fuel goes to $6/gal then that means another $200 less for food, so less steak and more peanut butter. If fuel goes to $10/gal this person that used to spend $200 on fuel every month is now spending $1000. For the average American that makes $40k per year that fuel cost is a big chunk of their income.
With $2/gal fuel that person can pay off loans, eat the occasional steak, and set aside money for retirement. With $10/gal fuel it's now living paycheck to paycheck. Spreading that increased cost over time does not change how it affects people and their standard of living, it still leaves them with less money to spend.
Of course that is a very simplistic view on how that works because the reality is much worse. Given time this worker is now left with student debt they cannot pay off, or being unable to go to college at all, which affects future earnings for that person and the population as a whole. With less money to spend on little luxuries like beer, steak, and movies, the greater economy suffers, since this one person is one of millions.
Making energy expensive artificially is taking a path that can destroy an economy. It won't die overnight but it will wear it down slowly over the years as people are unable to invest in their own future, business ventures, or even just beers and a movie.
Especially in a country where only the super rich have a nice standard of living. Can the standard of living actually be lowered for an average american?
Absolutely. If we arbitrarily decide that energy is too cheap and therefore we must tax it then people are spending money on keeping an old inefficient car running longer rather than having some money left over to save for a newer more efficient one. Even with $2/gal of gas someone can cut their fuel expense in half by trading in a junker for a new hybrid. That's an extra $100/month they can use towards paying off that car.
Cheap energy is how we reduce energy usage, not with expensive energy. It takes energy to save energy. Those aluminum blades on a windmill take a lot of energy to make, the more energy costs the more difficult it will be to raise the money to build that windmill. People would rather keep burning coal because that is a safe investment. Without money to spare people will be much less willing to risk it on such investments.
One thing I learned a long time ago is that energy is energy, if oil prices go up then so does coal. If natural gas prices go down then so does oil. A lot of this has to do with the fact that big consumers of energy have some flexibility on what fuel they can burn, utilities have power plants that can burn coal just as easily as natural gas. It also has to do with the fact that it takes energy to move energy, those coal trains run on diesel fuel for example. If we mandate that utilities have to pay solar electric producers a given rate then all electricity rates climb to meet it. If we tax gasoline so it's $10/gal then ethanol is not going to sell at $2/gal because of competitive pressures, it is going to sell at whatever the market will bear.
If someday gasoline rises to $10/gal because of scarcity then it will still suck but at least we did not impose
Have you tried just setting the BIOS to the setting it was supposed to be set at? Or do you routinely blame Microsoft for 3rd party bugs that cause a feature that was not supported by a certain version of windows to not work when enabled?
What? I was explaining how Microsoft has a history of offering half ass "solutions" to problems they created. The problems I described were on Apple computers which don't have a BIOS. I called the problem a "memory leak" which isn't quite accurate but the mechanics are similar. The bug would run up an internal OS counter that should normally be cleared, with the older MacOS version it was something like an 8-bit number which could be easily hit in a busy day working, the newer OS had this number as 32-bit which is something that no human could run up in even a month. I'm going from memory here but the problem was Microsoft released a program with bad code, they admitted it was bad code, but rather than fixing it they gave people some so called "options" all of which cost money.
I agree that this is not completely analogous to the issue on topic here as there is a no cost solution to this ASUS motherboard problem but it does show a very dismissive attitude of problems experienced by their customers. My example was to show that this attitude has existed for at least 25 years.
I feel that Microsoft needs an attitude adjustment because they've made the lives of many people like me much more difficult and stressful than it needs to be. I had some hope that Microsoft would feel some pressure to treat their customers better with more people switching to Linux and Apple but, just like back then, Microsoft rules the business PC and therefore they continue to not give a shit.
Daily I work with computers that run Apple, Microsoft, and Linux based operating systems. I'd probably be Microsoft certified by now if I'd only take the tests. I prefer Apples and Linux because they don't get in my way like Microsoft does. All of the operating systems will nag me about updates that I should probably get, and at some point likely will but it's only Microsoft that goes above and beyond to nag endlessly. I also have to fight Windows to get things like printers, scanners, video cards, network adapters, etc. to work. With MacOS and Ubuntu I can get things working without near as much effort.
But I guess it is Friday so what better things to do than bash Microsoft.
What are you talking about? I bash Microsoft every day. With any luck I will be free of this hell desk work in the next month and get back to writing code. At that point I believe I'll calm down because I won't have to deal with computers that mysteriously won't boot, missing drivers, and printers that inexplicably print gibberish on the page.
There are people that simply do not understand science and will claim "evidence" to the contrary much like how people will show "evidence" that the moon landings were faked. I don't know what drives people to do these things but it just seems that some people don't want to learn.
A few examples of how people that should know better do not understand radiation. My aunt was a school teacher, someone that people would hope have been educated in some basic science. At a family gathering I was talking with her about my work. I mentioned that my desk is in the same room as the servers and much of the networking equipment for the facility. She asked me if I was worried about the radiation that the equipment gave off.
My sister has an insulin pump to treat her diabetes, this is a very sensitive, expensive, and vital piece of equipment. She is also an educated person and knows with some degree what kinds of equipment might damage this device. She had to go through a TSA checkpoint to board a plane and she asked the agent what kind of radiation the scanner emitted. The agent said there was no radiation. Of course this scanner emitted radiation but my sister knew that one kind of scanner would not harm her insulin pump but another kind just might. She ended up getting in the scanner and the pump survived. Although I saw in the news recently that another diabetic with an insulin pump was not as fortunate. The young lady had her very expensive insulin pump destroyed by the scanner because the agent assured her the scanner was harmless.
We would hope that the people that operate the scanners at airports would be trained by the TSA on how those scanners work and what kind of hazards they pose and do not pose. Which brings to mind something else I read recently, some of these scanners emit X-rays but the people operating them do not take the precautions common to people that operate medical X-ray machines. At a dentists office the technician will leave the room before a very short burst of X-rays are emitted into someone's head. They also take the precaution of putting a lead lined apron on the patient to protect vital organs. I'd like to see the cancer rates of TSA agents after 29 years of operating these X-ray scanners. It is quite possible the X-rays do not penetrate the skin like those used to look at bones and teeth but even so the skin is still exposed since the whole point of these machines is their ability to penetrate clothing. Their skin is still being exposed.
Any 20 year plan proposed by a government entity is doomed to failure. Any action proposed by a government official that cannot be in office to see it happen means it simply will not happen.
There is a famous speech by JFK that proposed an American will walk on the moon in 8 years. I suspect that the project survived after he died because his VP was on board and was able to get elected as POTUS afterward.
That's how to make a government promise work, set a goal in a meaningful time frame, get a lot of people to support it, and make it happen yourself. If you put a goal out beyond your time in office then it's not a promise, it's happy mouth noises.
Had this been a promise to deploy a certain number of solar panels and/or windmills in 2 years, maybe within 5 years, then I might believe them. Setting a twenty year goal is meaningless. Few people can stay in office that long. Even fewer can keep a promise that long.
What you propose will lower the standard of living for millions of people. That means people will go hungry, delay medical care out of concern for the inability to pay, people won't be able to afford to go to college. I'm sure Obamacare will mean everyone gets top notch medical care. Future president Sanders will give everyone a college education. As for getting enough food for everyone I hear that the Soylent Corporation has a great idea for government subsidized nutrition supplements.
Where is this money going to come from to pay for all of this if people cannot afford to buy $10 gallons of gasoline? If people are spending that kind of money on energy then that leaves less money for other things like food, clothing, shelter, and education. I am amazed that people believe the solution to the "problem" of cheap oil is to tax it out of existence. Do you really think that will stop people? There's a lot of wells out there and I doubt the government knows where they all are. A black market will develop.
Here's a rule of thumb that I thought was a good rule for passing a law, would you be willing to shoot someone for breaking it? Think about that. Someone is desperate to keep their family from freezing to death in a North Dakota winter, would you be willing to shoot someone over bootleg heating oil?
The answer is not making oil expensive, the answer is making the alternatives cheaper. That's a much harder problem to solve but it does not involve shooting people that want to keep their baby from freezing to death.
In case my tone was lost in the text I'll end with this, fuck off and die.
Oh how could I have forgotten the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility? NRG dumps over a billion dollars of government money on this and even after charging double the going rate of electricity to ratepayers they are threatening default. Why did they build this unworkable piece of shit? Greed. Now we've got this eyesore in the desert to clean up, one that is a navigation hazard to passing aircraft by the way. This plant produced expensive power, killed hundreds of birds, disturbed the habitat of a rare desert turtle and now the government is left holding the bill.
There's a lot of people on Slashdot that love to give nuclear power a bunch of shit when it fails but ignore or excuse the failings of solar power. I'm not accusing wickerprints of being one of the solar power zealots, the comment above is only about how politicians shit on taxpayers.
San Onofre might have been a huge clusterfuck of a project but that is just one of hundreds of nuclear power plants in the world, most of which don't make the news because they operate safely, quietly, and profitably. It seems to me that solar power only serves as a means to take taxes from the poor so that rich people with connections can lobby for subsidies and walk away with more coin in their pockets, the mess they leave behind is the taxpayers problem.
When I was in college I worked as a computer tech for a print and video publishing department of the university. They had a large number of Macintosh computers running Microsoft software. This was back in the day when Apple was making their transition to PowerPC processors.
The version of Microsoft Word available at the time was known to be crash happy and a new version had just come out or was going to be released soon. An interesting bug in the program would delete open files if saved too often and it would prevent saving the file under a different name. If someone reached this save limit then the file was effectively lost. It remained in memory so long as the file was open but it could not be saved to disk. At best it might be able to print it.
This was an interesting bug when it came to me and I was responsible to resolve the problem for the people working in the department. Microsoft just told people to get the next version. As this was a bug that hit an OS limitation it was possible to reduce the probability of hitting the bug by upgrading the OS. If your computer did not meet the system requirements for the next OS version, or the next Word version, the solution was buying a new computer. Every solution that Microsoft offered was going to cost money. One might place some blame on Apple for this but the problem was that Word had a memory leak, upgrading the computer or OS just meant that it was much more difficult to hit the limit before Word locked you out of saving your files and deleted what was already on the disk. When I presented the "solutions" to my supervisor I was instructed to remove Word from the affected computers, meaning the student employees had to switch around computers to get their work done.
At around this same time Microsoft had released a new version of Office. Because of some delays in publishing Microsoft offered the old version of Office to people that bought the new version, which on some level was fortunate for me. I installed the new version of Office and tried to run Word but any attempt to open an existing file or create a new one would immediately crash the computer. Complaints to Microsoft was answered with the options of using the old version or getting a new computer that did not expose this bug. As I already had a working copy of WordPerfect I only bought Office so that I could use the latest version of Word since I was getting files that were in that format. WordPerfect was IMHO a much better program and could already open the older Word files. My only consolation was that I got Excel out of the deal which came in handy for some of my math and engineering homework. I could have used other software to get the homework done but Excel was easier at the time.
Regarding critical thinking, why couldn't we just use solar panels on the ground to make jet fuel(*)?
Jet fuel in this instance is just an energy carrier, and has a much higher energy density than lithium. While Lithium batteries may be appropriate in some cases (portable devices, ground transportation), for air flight it's more appropriate to use something else.
(*) Or perhaps a biological method such as GM modified algae or a bio-yielding plant. The Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] of crop yields indicates that Algae can yield 80,000 kg/ha/yr, with "ha" being the area of a square 100 meters on a side.
The reason we don't use solar panels to make jet fuel is because it's cheaper to pump it out of the ground as petroleum. I assume you knew that but you want to see jet fuel come from an energy source that does not contribute CO2 into the air.
Lucky for you the US Navy has been working on such a process for some time now and they've been quite successful with it. What they do is take electricity from a nuclear power plant and use that to "squeeze" CO2 from seawater and split off hydrogen from the H2O, this CO2 and H2 is processed to create oxygen and jet fuel. Their intent is to be able to fuel the aircraft that serve on ships at sea without needing supply ships to carry fuel to them. While they intend to use this at sea there is no reason we cannot use this on land with water from a lake or river.
This process does not require many hectares of land like the algae ponds you envision. As much as tree huggers hate seeing people burn fossil fuels they also hate seeing people pave over pristine land to build industry. I have no doubt that any plan to turn desert into jet fuel plants will get protests from disturbing the habitat of turtles or something. These people will protest nuclear power plants too but at least we've proven that nuclear power plants can be operated safely and at a profit. We have very little evidence that we can turn algae into fuel and do so at a price competitive with petroleum.
Carbon tax is just a fee for garbage collection. It is a perfectly valid way to pay for the necessary clean up.
I often see claims that we need a carbon tax to clean up the mess left behind by burnt fossil fuels but rarely does anyone explain how these taxes would get spent to actually clean up the mess.
At best we see taxes on carbon based fuels go towards things like subsidies for electric cars, CFL lighting, solar panels, and windmills. Spending the carbon tax income in this manner may reduce future carbon fuel consumption but it does not address the damage already done.
One possible solution to this problem of passed CO2 emissions that I saw was using ground up basalt and spreading it on cropland. The basalt contains calcium oxide and magnesium oxide which when exposed to the carbon dioxide dissolved in rain water turns to carbonates. This sequesters the carbon relatively quickly. This benefits the farmers by reducing the acidity of the topsoil and returns valuable minerals (calcium, magnesium, iron, and others) to the soil that has been consumed by the crops. This reduction of acidity also makes other minerals added to the soil (such as from animal manure which is somewhat acidic) more readily available to the crops.
I saw this proposal to use basalt from a college professor that I cannot recall the name right now. He also proposed using nuclear power to process the basalt since he believed that the crushing of the basalt would be an energy intensive process and that we should endeavor to not make the problem worse by burning coal. Basalt is everywhere and we are not likely to ever run out of it, it's what makes up the bedrock in many parts of the world. As we mine it the volcanoes of the world spit out more of it.
The problem is that it's simply cheaper and easier to mine the soft sedimentary rock limestone and then "cook" the CO2 out of it to make agricultural lime. The farmers already spread lime on their fields and this processing of limestone yields a lime of high quality. Basalt is only about 25% of the valuable magnesium and calcium oxide and so the farmers would have to carry in four times as much for the same effect, or it would have to be processed to remove what is effectively just sand so that the farmers can get the high quality lime out of it.
If I saw people propose we divert these carbon taxes to mining basalt for carbon sequestration then I could support them. Until I see that happen I can only view carbon taxes as a tax on the poor to give subsidies to rich people like Elon Musk. If we use the carbon tax to pay farmers to put basalt in their fields then we'd see farmers paid to make food, which helps a lot of people because farming is a big part of our economy. When farmers make money they buy stuff and send their kids to college. When food is cheaper then fewer people go hungry, which also leaves more money for those people to buy stuff and send their kids to college. Basalt reduces carbon by both sequestering the carbon we've produced in the past and also reduces future production because we are no longer cooking CO2 out of limestone, a process largely powered by coal and natural gas.
So the solution to our economic problems is to go around smashing windows to drum up business for glass manufacturing and glaziers. Maybe we could total a few random vehicles too, just to give the motor industry a boost.
You mean like "cash for clunkers"? The broken window fallacy turned into government policy. With government leaders that think it good policy turning perfectly functional vehicles into scrap metal it would not surprise me if we see the government frame a national disaster as an economic stimulus.
I find it odd that there is a group of people that will both say how continued burning of fossil fuels is destroying the environment while at the same time saying it will only be X number of years until solar power, nuclear fusion, or whatever will become cheap and plentiful enough to save us.
Either global warming is an imminent threat or it is not. If it is then we need to act now by using what technology we have now that can both reduce carbon output and compete with the price and availability of coal. That technology is nuclear fission.
If some new technology is coming along in time to save us from ourselves then global warming is not a real threat. We can just wait for this new technology to come along. But then technological advancement is not assured, we must have people doing research and these people will need to get paid for their work.
Here is the problem, at least in the USA, any research in nuclear power must get approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Committee. This approval usually comes with funding from its parent agency the Department of Energy but that does not have to be. The federal government does not need to spend money on projects like the Polywell Fusor, they just need to allow private entities to fund and perform the research. Since such fusion research competes with the DOE pet projects like the Tokamak the people that want to do this research must be creative in how they get finds and licensing. This usually takes the form of working under the rules of the Department of Defense which has the authority to license nuclear power research so long as it has a military application, they cannot fund pure research on nuclear physics like the DOE.
We have the means to solve this problem but the biggest obstacle to solving it is the government agency mandated to solve our energy problems. Calling it the Department of Energy is a misnomer because there is little evidence that they have been advancing the nation's ability to reach energy independence.
One solution I see to this problem is that the states in the USA should assert their authority to license nuclear reactors for research and power on their own. The federal government only has the authority to act where the states allow. The states made the federal government so they can modify the terms under which it operates as they wish. Since the DOE is failing to live up to its mandate then perhaps some states could encourage this research within their own borders.
Given that few within the catastrophic man made global warming group are not scared enough of global warming to overcome their fear of nuclear fission power plants then I can only conclude that there is very little to fear from global warming. They cannot say we must do anything and everything to avert global warming but when nuclear fission is brought up they say we can't do that. If nuclear power is a greater threat to humanity than global warming then global warming is nothing to fear.
I can see two ways to defend nuclear power in light of this.
First, while this nuclear power plant may be exceedingly expensive it is also a very large power plant that will be run for a very long time. The upfront cost is big but the cost of fuel, labor, maintenance and so forth should be minimal which makes energy from this plant competitive. I do not know if this is necessarily true for this particular power plant but in general this is true for nuclear power.
Second, like most anything there is a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. The design of the Hinkley Point reactors appears to be one that is exceedingly large and complicated which adds to the cost. There are other more affordable designs they could have used. Perhaps this cost can be addressed by spreading the engineering costs over many more power plants like it and achieving an economy of scale. An economy of scale could have been achieved on this site by building six smaller reactors with common components rather than two large ones. Claiming all nuclear power is too expensive to bother because one company over ran costs is like claiming all cars are unsafe because a single drunk driver drove a car off a cliff while failing to buckle their seat belt.
Saying that no one would pay for something when a free option exists is a bit hyperbolic since, as you point out, there are reasons that people would do such a thing. What is undeniable is that Blockbuster exists only in name right now. The only property they have of value right now is their name and some sundry office supplies. That name only exists because at one time they had a successful business model and some people recognize it enough from a decade ago that they will keep going back.
The point is that at one time video rentals was a booming business that now exists only as a niche market. Lots of things brought on this effective demise, such as ubiquitous satellite and cable TV services, high speed internet, cheap digital storage, and (IMHO the last straw) municipal libraries keeping numerous videos available for people to use for free.
Blockbuster had at one time over 5000 stores in the USA, perhaps many thousands more than that. Now they have about 50. So, yes, people will pay to rent a video even though it may be available at a library. What they are more likely to do is rent or buy it online than rent a copy delivered on physical media.
I remember in the 1990s and perhaps late 1980s when it seemed that video rentals was a side job of all kinds of businesses. I had to wonder if there wasn't some sort of background infrastructure to support these video rental side jobs. There had to be since I doubt that these stores went through the effort and expense of buying a pile of VHS tapes at retail prices hoping that someone picking up a pack of smokes would on impulse rent a video for the evening.
When I say all kinds of businesses did video rentals I mean all kinds. I recall seeing video rentals at movie theaters, filling stations, grocery stores, furniture shops, ice cream parlors, barber shops, and I probably missed a few. This faded in time when places like Blockbuster opened up to offer a selection and price that these small shops could not compete with. Of course Blockbuster had it's troubles begin with greater access to cable and satellite programming.
I believe the last nail in the Blockbuster coffin wasn't high speed internet, it was city libraries getting in the business of keeping media besides print. No one is going to rent a video from a shop when the library will let you do the same for free.
Actually their grid has had stability problems because of overproduction of electricity from wind and solar.
But perhaps you can bring up some of their arguments "why it can't work" and I debunk them for you:D
Experience tells me not to bother. Your comment that you'll "debunk" anything I give you tells me you do not seek to be educated, only to prop up straw men, knock them down, set them on fire, and then piss on the ashes. I enjoy leading people to the well of knowledge but I can't make them think.
It's not like the troubles Germany has had with solar power is secret, a quick search on the internet tells me that this is not news.
In hundred years all grids will be solar, wind and water (pumped storage and simple water power plants)... only a few backyard nations or extremely unfortunately placed on the globe will have some nuclear base load.
Pumped hydro requires favorable geography to work. Those "unfortunately placed" people will be quite plentiful, that large portion of the population will require nuclear power.
Do you really believe that over night something like 40% or 60% of Californian power production will suddenly be solar?
No, I believe the electric grid will collapse long before solar can reach 40% of power production capacity.
I've listened to experts on this topic and they tell me that the power grid cannot support even 30% of electrical capacity being solar. I have a BS in electrical engineering but my electives were in microelectronics so I have just enough formal education on the topic to know that they aren't blowing smoke.
Say what you want but I'll listen to people with masters degrees in electrical engineering and they tell me that rooftop solar is bad for the electrical grid.
Solar thermal is also good since it includes molten salt storage. It can and does produce electricity when the sun isn't shining. It can use the peak solar hours to melt the salt to provide power later. Molten salt nuclear is interesting, but we can't jump directly into it since there are open questions about the extreme corrosiveness of hot fluoride salts.
Either thermal salt works or it doesn't, solar thermal and molten salt nuclear use the same salts. Hot fluoride salts are used in aluminum refining. While I admit that there are technical problems to be engineered out to make molten salt nuclear work the problems of the salt chemistry is not one of them.
I can envision a future where current solar thermal power stations transition to solar molten salt and then to nuclear power. These sites would have the electric grid connection, a large reservoir of expensive salt suitable for thermal transfer, turbines, lots of space, etc. They'd be perfect sites for a nuclear power plant. I recall that some of the plants required preheating with natural gas before the solar power generation would work then they'd have access to natural gas for backup power and/or peaking power.
Also, solar thermal requires lots of cheap land, favorable geography, and favorable weather/climate. I believe that a lot of solar power advocates forget that there are a lot of places on this planet that don't get a lot of sun but still have large populations in need of power.
The owners of the panels will see plenty of ROI. Like I said, set the dryer and dishwasher to run at peak sun. Charge the car. Pre-chill the building.
They do now because solar power is rare and subsidized. Too much solar and the price of electricity will fall when solar panels can produce power, reducing their return. Electricity is already very inexpensive, it won't take much to make it nonviable.
The other benefit is the reduced externalities. That is, pollution.
Solar power does not reduce pollution. Producing solar panels involves all kinds of poisonous chemicals to produce and not all of them stay in the factory. China can make solar panels cheap because they don't care about pollution.
If by "pollution" and "externalities" you mean carbon dioxide then you are wrong there too. Solar panels produce power for only a few hours every day, during that time coal and natural gas plants would have to idle. By being idle they aren't producing power but they are still burning fuel, they must be kept hot to avoid thermal stress and so that they can produce power again when the sun goes down.
Natural gas turbines are often used to produce peak power, such as when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow, but they are inefficient. Turbines need twice the fuel to produce the same energy than a boiler but a boiler cannot produce peak power. Solar power means fewer boilers but more turbines, meaning more natural gas burned for the same energy. We've seen this happen already.
The only way out of this mess is nuclear power, specifically molten salt reactors that can load follow, unlike solid fuel reactors that cannot. If we get molten salt reactors then solar power would look very expensive. Just about all the cost of a nuclear power plant is in capital and labor, fuel is a very small portion of that. This means that once built the price of energy falls the more it produces.
Solar power cannot compete with nuclear because solar cannot produce power on demand. Solar power shares the feature that the more power it produces the cheaper it gets but it cannot produce when the demand is there only when the sun is shining. Solar power can force electric prices negative. Nuclear power can sustain negative electric prices because it can produce on demand, making up for when it goes negative, solar cannot.
People with solar panels might see a return on their investment for getting solar panels but their neighbors that didn't have to pay for the solar panels see a greater return. The neighbors see the price of electricity go negative for things like running the dryer, charging the car, etc. but without the cost of putting up the solar panels.
The website you gave shows a 10% growth in five years for California, it also shows nearly 25% growth in that same five years for Texas. You proved my point for me.
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So you want to explain that having $200 less at the end of the month does affect your standard of living?
Where do you live? In a third world country or what?
I live in the United States of America, where the median income is less than $52000/year. A nation where about half of the population lives paycheck to paycheck. A nation where 1/3rd of the population has nothing saved for retirement.
If you gave people below the median income an extra $200/month "free" by lowering their taxes then they'd have money to buy a "new to you" car, or pay for night classes at a university or community college, or use their vacation time to take an IT certification course, or use their vacation to actually go somewhere on vacation. Maybe these people would save it for retirement. Even if these people blow the money on beer, cigarettes, and casino chips these people are adding to the economy and not to the government.
I remember Nancy Pelosi saying something like for every $2 paid out in welfare that adds $5 to the economy. While I think that is complete bullshit let's take her at her word. How is raising their gas taxes, and then giving them welfare to make up for the lost income, any different then allowing these people to keep that money by not taxing them in the first place? If increasing the income of the poor by $2 adds $5 to the economy then I say we should do that, only I believe we should do that by reducing taxes and also the size of government. If people have enough money to pay for their food and fuel without government assistance then we don't need the people in government to hand out welfare checks.
Make no mistake that taxing fuel is a regressive tax. Just $200 extra expenses every month can put people on a downward spiral, they don't have that money to invest in a home, education, or retirement. $200/month over decades adds up to a lot of money.
How about getting rid of the spare tire for commuting cars, and rely on some service to bring a spare tire to you when you need it?
As a commuter I am quite happy with carrying my own spare, thankyouverymuch.
I can recall two times I made use of my spare and both times I was able to resolve my problem precisely because I had a spare. The first time I was headed to an appointment at the VA clinic in the next county. My plan was to head out early, grab something to eat on the way, and then go to the clinic. While driving down the interstate I hit something that punched a large hole in the tire, big enough to poke a finger through. I was able to change the tire with my spare and get on my way. I didn't have time to eat, and I ended up ten minutes late for my appointment, but generally I fixed the problem in little time and my day was not adversely affected. I had a late lunch and I ended up getting a new set of tires a few weeks earlier than planned.
The second time I had to use the spare it was a cold cold night and a tire went flat because the idiots that put on my new tires didn't seat it properly. It was late at night and I was quite likely the only person for a mile around. I was able to change the tire and be on my way in probably a half hour.
In both cases I could have easily called someone but that would have turned a half hour inconvenience into potentially hours of waiting for someone to do what I am perfectly capable of doing myself.
The service should be provided for free by all cities as a measure to reduce pollution.
Nothing is "free" when provided by the government. Why is it that so many people think the solution to every problem is more government? This would no doubt raise taxes for every resident for what would no doubt be third rate service. There are countless private services that can do this, all competing for my money to drive down prices. I have roadside insurance for things like this, and it costs me very little every year. In both cases I gave above I could have called for someone to change my tire, but I did not think that using that service for such a minor issue was necessary.
I would be interested in seeing how much removing the spare tire would actually reduce pollution. Of all the ways to reduce pollution I'd think that removing the spare tire is one of the worst ideas. In my situation I could have easily called on someone to help but had I been on a longer trip which took me further off the beaten path I could have been left waiting hours to get moving again. In the case of that freezing cold night that could have turned a minor inconvenience into a life threatening issue.
I realize you limited your suggestion to "commuters" but how does one separate a commuter from a non-commuter? This is especially relevant if the government gets involved since they will be tasked with enforcing this. I mean if the city wants people to stop carrying a spare tire to save on fuel then are people going to be fined if they are found with a spare tire while "commuting"?
On top of it all people are free to take the spare tire out of their cars to save on weight, nothing is stopping them. These same people can then purchase roadside service insurance from any of numerous private companies offering such services. We don't need government to get involved in this.
Perhaps what bothers me most about this idea is that we place more and more reliance on government. I view the government as a necessity, we need government. I also view the place of government as doing things that only a government can do. Government should not be changing tires.
And thinking on a global scale, it would add up to a save us from a lot of CO2 emissions.
That may be true but since carrying a spare has saved me many hours of inconvenience, and perhaps many hundreds of dollars from having to pay someone to bring me a tire, I'm not likely to give up my spare tire any time soon. I can imagine a lot of people died for lack of a spare tire and a strong enough cell phone signal. You can gamble on that if you like, I won't.
which part of "use that money to subsidize investments in renewable energy" didn't you understand?
The part where you think that our government consists of genius angels that won't use this tax money to fund their pet projects instead of investing it in renewable energy. Your proposal also requires these genius angels to know enough about science and technology to effectively predict the future on which technologies will pan out and which will not. I have greater faith in the market to figure this out.
no, it would force the transition to happen. the reason you didn't understand that is that you simply didn't read (let alone consider) my full proposal before launching into a blind rage.
Your "proposal" is a single sentence that requires an incorruptible government to be successful. I've seen how our federal government has invested in renewable energy and they fail often. There is a reason why they fail often, it's because asking for government money is the path of last resort, the government is where people go when they've run out of potential investors to ask for money. If they've run out of people to ask for an investment it's quite likely because their idea sucks. The people in government aren't technology people, they are politicians spending other people's money. They will spend money on this shit because it buys them votes. If their gamble pays off then they get a lot of kudos and it improves their chances of getting re-elected or getting a lucrative private consulting job after leaving office. If their gamble fails then they didn't lose anything, and with all the failed government programs out there people will not be able to keep track of which asshole voted for which money pit. Which means these assholes tend to stay in office because they were able to divert money from my pocket to the second rate con artists that were unable to con private investors.
I once thought like you. That if only we gave more money to research then we'd have better stuff. What I found out is that the government is the worst way to fund this research. The best research is done by private businesses. They will take a portion of their profits to fund the next best thing. Governments take a portion of our taxes to buy votes. They have very little motivation to actually solve the problems given to them, if they solve the problem then they can't use that same fear, uncertainty, and doubt, to keep people voting for them.
the sooner we switch of fossil fuels, the better chance we have at fixing the problem we've created.
Agreed, but getting there by artificially raising the price of energy just leaves us with fewer resources to fix the problem. If we have the government tax energy to fund this transition then we are relying on the government to be incorruptible angel geniuses that won't use that money to buy votes, give money to their buddies, or merely choose solutions poorly. That "cash for clunkers" bomb of a program should be a huge clue that these people are corruptible, far from geniuses, and certainly not angels.
By leaving money in the hands of the people then they can put that money in the market by buying stuff that makes them happy. That means people can have money to buy electric vehicles, solar panels, attic insulation, or whatever. Or, they can spend it on beer and porn. Either way the world is a better place.
the problem is not about running out of oil, the problem is all the carbon in the atmosphere is causing the earth to retain too much heat and causing the ocean to absorb a lot more CO2 which is making the oceans more acidic. even if we had a limitless supply of oil, burning it is still a problem.
I'll go with that. How does making diesel fuel, the very thing that powers trains, trucks, bulldozers, etc. that will build the infrastructure we need so expensive that people cannot afford to run them help? Making diesel fuel expensive artificially raises the costs of building the windmills, solar collectors, clearing the sites to place them, pour the concrete, and move all the parts to the site for construction.
Making fossil fuels expensive will not help in transitioning from them, it will just be a burden on the economy and prolong the transition.
If you believe we have to tax gasoline to the point it becomes $10/gallon then you are admitting you don't believe your own hype. I thought that solar power is already at price parity with coal. If the price of solar cuts in half every ten years, or whatever the claim is, then we should see solar cheaper than gasoline real soon. In 20 years we should have a solar powered society only on the basis that solar power is so cheap that it will just not be profitable to pump oil out of the ground any more.
If you believe that solar power can only win this race by hobbling carbon fuels with exorbitant taxes then you have just admitted that you do not believe solar power will ever be cheaper than coal and oil. By saying we must tax carbon fuels out of existence is admitting we will not be running out of oil any time soon.
Oh, and if you want to save all those wild animals then I have some suggestions. Do you know why we don't have cattle in zoos? Because people raise billions of them for meat. Do you know why lions are going extinct? Because without hunting licenses to fund proper management lions are pests to be killed on sight, not income. People will take care of things that bring them a better life. When the British would colonize an area they'd declare the trees and animals property of the king, which led the locals to kill animals and cut down trees just to defy the king. If you tell those same people that they can keep the produce on the trees but the king wants a small percentage for taxes then you'd see groves pop up in no time. With hunting licenses the locals saw lions as income, they'd get a portion of the fees collected for hunting "their" lions. That meant they'd not only have money to build fences around their land to keep the lions from eating their children they'd also be quite willing to report poachers.
Proper management of the ecosystem is more complex than just reducing CO2 output. It takes effort on the part of all. By removing ownership of things like water, air, and land then people just don't care about it. The people that want to "save" the zebras but banning hunting are idiots. With hunting allowed people will build habitats for them so they can hunt them. With hunting banned then they become a nuisance to be chased off, poisoned, or whatever else they can do to get rid of them quietly without violating the law explicitly or by doing so carefully to avoid getting caught.
Can you explain why?
Yes. Imagine your typical wage earner. They get X dollars per hour of work, and they work Y hours per month, leaving them with Z as a monthly income. They have to spend this income on consumables like food and fuel, to pay off long term expenses like a mortgage and/or student loans, as well as things like insurance and so forth. For the typical person that might mean something like, pulling a number out of the air, $200 on fuel each month.
Right now with $2 per gallon of gas that means their 100 gallons of fuel will take them where they need to go for the month. If fuel goes to $4 per gallon that means $200 less at the end of the month for little luxuries like movie tickets, cable TV, or however else they might entertain themselves. If fuel goes to $6/gal then that means another $200 less for food, so less steak and more peanut butter. If fuel goes to $10/gal this person that used to spend $200 on fuel every month is now spending $1000. For the average American that makes $40k per year that fuel cost is a big chunk of their income.
With $2/gal fuel that person can pay off loans, eat the occasional steak, and set aside money for retirement. With $10/gal fuel it's now living paycheck to paycheck. Spreading that increased cost over time does not change how it affects people and their standard of living, it still leaves them with less money to spend.
Of course that is a very simplistic view on how that works because the reality is much worse. Given time this worker is now left with student debt they cannot pay off, or being unable to go to college at all, which affects future earnings for that person and the population as a whole. With less money to spend on little luxuries like beer, steak, and movies, the greater economy suffers, since this one person is one of millions.
Making energy expensive artificially is taking a path that can destroy an economy. It won't die overnight but it will wear it down slowly over the years as people are unable to invest in their own future, business ventures, or even just beers and a movie.
Especially in a country where only the super rich have a nice standard of living.
Can the standard of living actually be lowered for an average american?
Absolutely. If we arbitrarily decide that energy is too cheap and therefore we must tax it then people are spending money on keeping an old inefficient car running longer rather than having some money left over to save for a newer more efficient one. Even with $2/gal of gas someone can cut their fuel expense in half by trading in a junker for a new hybrid. That's an extra $100/month they can use towards paying off that car.
Cheap energy is how we reduce energy usage, not with expensive energy. It takes energy to save energy. Those aluminum blades on a windmill take a lot of energy to make, the more energy costs the more difficult it will be to raise the money to build that windmill. People would rather keep burning coal because that is a safe investment. Without money to spare people will be much less willing to risk it on such investments.
One thing I learned a long time ago is that energy is energy, if oil prices go up then so does coal. If natural gas prices go down then so does oil. A lot of this has to do with the fact that big consumers of energy have some flexibility on what fuel they can burn, utilities have power plants that can burn coal just as easily as natural gas. It also has to do with the fact that it takes energy to move energy, those coal trains run on diesel fuel for example. If we mandate that utilities have to pay solar electric producers a given rate then all electricity rates climb to meet it. If we tax gasoline so it's $10/gal then ethanol is not going to sell at $2/gal because of competitive pressures, it is going to sell at whatever the market will bear.
If someday gasoline rises to $10/gal because of scarcity then it will still suck but at least we did not impose
Have you tried just setting the BIOS to the setting it was supposed to be set at? Or do you routinely blame Microsoft for 3rd party bugs that cause a feature that was not supported by a certain version of windows to not work when enabled?
What? I was explaining how Microsoft has a history of offering half ass "solutions" to problems they created. The problems I described were on Apple computers which don't have a BIOS. I called the problem a "memory leak" which isn't quite accurate but the mechanics are similar. The bug would run up an internal OS counter that should normally be cleared, with the older MacOS version it was something like an 8-bit number which could be easily hit in a busy day working, the newer OS had this number as 32-bit which is something that no human could run up in even a month. I'm going from memory here but the problem was Microsoft released a program with bad code, they admitted it was bad code, but rather than fixing it they gave people some so called "options" all of which cost money.
I agree that this is not completely analogous to the issue on topic here as there is a no cost solution to this ASUS motherboard problem but it does show a very dismissive attitude of problems experienced by their customers. My example was to show that this attitude has existed for at least 25 years.
I feel that Microsoft needs an attitude adjustment because they've made the lives of many people like me much more difficult and stressful than it needs to be. I had some hope that Microsoft would feel some pressure to treat their customers better with more people switching to Linux and Apple but, just like back then, Microsoft rules the business PC and therefore they continue to not give a shit.
Daily I work with computers that run Apple, Microsoft, and Linux based operating systems. I'd probably be Microsoft certified by now if I'd only take the tests. I prefer Apples and Linux because they don't get in my way like Microsoft does. All of the operating systems will nag me about updates that I should probably get, and at some point likely will but it's only Microsoft that goes above and beyond to nag endlessly. I also have to fight Windows to get things like printers, scanners, video cards, network adapters, etc. to work. With MacOS and Ubuntu I can get things working without near as much effort.
But I guess it is Friday so what better things to do than bash Microsoft.
What are you talking about? I bash Microsoft every day. With any luck I will be free of this hell desk work in the next month and get back to writing code. At that point I believe I'll calm down because I won't have to deal with computers that mysteriously won't boot, missing drivers, and printers that inexplicably print gibberish on the page.
There are people that simply do not understand science and will claim "evidence" to the contrary much like how people will show "evidence" that the moon landings were faked. I don't know what drives people to do these things but it just seems that some people don't want to learn.
A few examples of how people that should know better do not understand radiation. My aunt was a school teacher, someone that people would hope have been educated in some basic science. At a family gathering I was talking with her about my work. I mentioned that my desk is in the same room as the servers and much of the networking equipment for the facility. She asked me if I was worried about the radiation that the equipment gave off.
My sister has an insulin pump to treat her diabetes, this is a very sensitive, expensive, and vital piece of equipment. She is also an educated person and knows with some degree what kinds of equipment might damage this device. She had to go through a TSA checkpoint to board a plane and she asked the agent what kind of radiation the scanner emitted. The agent said there was no radiation. Of course this scanner emitted radiation but my sister knew that one kind of scanner would not harm her insulin pump but another kind just might. She ended up getting in the scanner and the pump survived. Although I saw in the news recently that another diabetic with an insulin pump was not as fortunate. The young lady had her very expensive insulin pump destroyed by the scanner because the agent assured her the scanner was harmless.
We would hope that the people that operate the scanners at airports would be trained by the TSA on how those scanners work and what kind of hazards they pose and do not pose. Which brings to mind something else I read recently, some of these scanners emit X-rays but the people operating them do not take the precautions common to people that operate medical X-ray machines. At a dentists office the technician will leave the room before a very short burst of X-rays are emitted into someone's head. They also take the precaution of putting a lead lined apron on the patient to protect vital organs. I'd like to see the cancer rates of TSA agents after 29 years of operating these X-ray scanners. It is quite possible the X-rays do not penetrate the skin like those used to look at bones and teeth but even so the skin is still exposed since the whole point of these machines is their ability to penetrate clothing. Their skin is still being exposed.
Any 20 year plan proposed by a government entity is doomed to failure. Any action proposed by a government official that cannot be in office to see it happen means it simply will not happen.
There is a famous speech by JFK that proposed an American will walk on the moon in 8 years. I suspect that the project survived after he died because his VP was on board and was able to get elected as POTUS afterward.
That's how to make a government promise work, set a goal in a meaningful time frame, get a lot of people to support it, and make it happen yourself. If you put a goal out beyond your time in office then it's not a promise, it's happy mouth noises.
Had this been a promise to deploy a certain number of solar panels and/or windmills in 2 years, maybe within 5 years, then I might believe them. Setting a twenty year goal is meaningless. Few people can stay in office that long. Even fewer can keep a promise that long.
What you propose will lower the standard of living for millions of people. That means people will go hungry, delay medical care out of concern for the inability to pay, people won't be able to afford to go to college. I'm sure Obamacare will mean everyone gets top notch medical care. Future president Sanders will give everyone a college education. As for getting enough food for everyone I hear that the Soylent Corporation has a great idea for government subsidized nutrition supplements.
Where is this money going to come from to pay for all of this if people cannot afford to buy $10 gallons of gasoline? If people are spending that kind of money on energy then that leaves less money for other things like food, clothing, shelter, and education. I am amazed that people believe the solution to the "problem" of cheap oil is to tax it out of existence. Do you really think that will stop people? There's a lot of wells out there and I doubt the government knows where they all are. A black market will develop.
Here's a rule of thumb that I thought was a good rule for passing a law, would you be willing to shoot someone for breaking it? Think about that. Someone is desperate to keep their family from freezing to death in a North Dakota winter, would you be willing to shoot someone over bootleg heating oil?
The answer is not making oil expensive, the answer is making the alternatives cheaper. That's a much harder problem to solve but it does not involve shooting people that want to keep their baby from freezing to death.
In case my tone was lost in the text I'll end with this, fuck off and die.
Oh how could I have forgotten the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility? NRG dumps over a billion dollars of government money on this and even after charging double the going rate of electricity to ratepayers they are threatening default. Why did they build this unworkable piece of shit? Greed. Now we've got this eyesore in the desert to clean up, one that is a navigation hazard to passing aircraft by the way. This plant produced expensive power, killed hundreds of birds, disturbed the habitat of a rare desert turtle and now the government is left holding the bill.
There's a lot of people on Slashdot that love to give nuclear power a bunch of shit when it fails but ignore or excuse the failings of solar power. I'm not accusing wickerprints of being one of the solar power zealots, the comment above is only about how politicians shit on taxpayers.
San Onofre might have been a huge clusterfuck of a project but that is just one of hundreds of nuclear power plants in the world, most of which don't make the news because they operate safely, quietly, and profitably. It seems to me that solar power only serves as a means to take taxes from the poor so that rich people with connections can lobby for subsidies and walk away with more coin in their pockets, the mess they leave behind is the taxpayers problem.
When I was in college I worked as a computer tech for a print and video publishing department of the university. They had a large number of Macintosh computers running Microsoft software. This was back in the day when Apple was making their transition to PowerPC processors.
The version of Microsoft Word available at the time was known to be crash happy and a new version had just come out or was going to be released soon. An interesting bug in the program would delete open files if saved too often and it would prevent saving the file under a different name. If someone reached this save limit then the file was effectively lost. It remained in memory so long as the file was open but it could not be saved to disk. At best it might be able to print it.
This was an interesting bug when it came to me and I was responsible to resolve the problem for the people working in the department. Microsoft just told people to get the next version. As this was a bug that hit an OS limitation it was possible to reduce the probability of hitting the bug by upgrading the OS. If your computer did not meet the system requirements for the next OS version, or the next Word version, the solution was buying a new computer. Every solution that Microsoft offered was going to cost money. One might place some blame on Apple for this but the problem was that Word had a memory leak, upgrading the computer or OS just meant that it was much more difficult to hit the limit before Word locked you out of saving your files and deleted what was already on the disk. When I presented the "solutions" to my supervisor I was instructed to remove Word from the affected computers, meaning the student employees had to switch around computers to get their work done.
At around this same time Microsoft had released a new version of Office. Because of some delays in publishing Microsoft offered the old version of Office to people that bought the new version, which on some level was fortunate for me. I installed the new version of Office and tried to run Word but any attempt to open an existing file or create a new one would immediately crash the computer. Complaints to Microsoft was answered with the options of using the old version or getting a new computer that did not expose this bug. As I already had a working copy of WordPerfect I only bought Office so that I could use the latest version of Word since I was getting files that were in that format. WordPerfect was IMHO a much better program and could already open the older Word files. My only consolation was that I got Excel out of the deal which came in handy for some of my math and engineering homework. I could have used other software to get the homework done but Excel was easier at the time.
Regarding critical thinking, why couldn't we just use solar panels on the ground to make jet fuel(*)?
Jet fuel in this instance is just an energy carrier, and has a much higher energy density than lithium. While Lithium batteries may be appropriate in some cases (portable devices, ground transportation), for air flight it's more appropriate to use something else.
(*) Or perhaps a biological method such as GM modified algae or a bio-yielding plant. The Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] of crop yields indicates that Algae can yield 80,000 kg/ha/yr, with "ha" being the area of a square 100 meters on a side.
The reason we don't use solar panels to make jet fuel is because it's cheaper to pump it out of the ground as petroleum. I assume you knew that but you want to see jet fuel come from an energy source that does not contribute CO2 into the air.
Lucky for you the US Navy has been working on such a process for some time now and they've been quite successful with it. What they do is take electricity from a nuclear power plant and use that to "squeeze" CO2 from seawater and split off hydrogen from the H2O, this CO2 and H2 is processed to create oxygen and jet fuel. Their intent is to be able to fuel the aircraft that serve on ships at sea without needing supply ships to carry fuel to them. While they intend to use this at sea there is no reason we cannot use this on land with water from a lake or river.
This process does not require many hectares of land like the algae ponds you envision. As much as tree huggers hate seeing people burn fossil fuels they also hate seeing people pave over pristine land to build industry. I have no doubt that any plan to turn desert into jet fuel plants will get protests from disturbing the habitat of turtles or something. These people will protest nuclear power plants too but at least we've proven that nuclear power plants can be operated safely and at a profit. We have very little evidence that we can turn algae into fuel and do so at a price competitive with petroleum.
Carbon tax is just a fee for garbage collection. It is a perfectly valid way to pay for the necessary clean up.
I often see claims that we need a carbon tax to clean up the mess left behind by burnt fossil fuels but rarely does anyone explain how these taxes would get spent to actually clean up the mess.
At best we see taxes on carbon based fuels go towards things like subsidies for electric cars, CFL lighting, solar panels, and windmills. Spending the carbon tax income in this manner may reduce future carbon fuel consumption but it does not address the damage already done.
One possible solution to this problem of passed CO2 emissions that I saw was using ground up basalt and spreading it on cropland. The basalt contains calcium oxide and magnesium oxide which when exposed to the carbon dioxide dissolved in rain water turns to carbonates. This sequesters the carbon relatively quickly. This benefits the farmers by reducing the acidity of the topsoil and returns valuable minerals (calcium, magnesium, iron, and others) to the soil that has been consumed by the crops. This reduction of acidity also makes other minerals added to the soil (such as from animal manure which is somewhat acidic) more readily available to the crops.
I saw this proposal to use basalt from a college professor that I cannot recall the name right now. He also proposed using nuclear power to process the basalt since he believed that the crushing of the basalt would be an energy intensive process and that we should endeavor to not make the problem worse by burning coal. Basalt is everywhere and we are not likely to ever run out of it, it's what makes up the bedrock in many parts of the world. As we mine it the volcanoes of the world spit out more of it.
The problem is that it's simply cheaper and easier to mine the soft sedimentary rock limestone and then "cook" the CO2 out of it to make agricultural lime. The farmers already spread lime on their fields and this processing of limestone yields a lime of high quality. Basalt is only about 25% of the valuable magnesium and calcium oxide and so the farmers would have to carry in four times as much for the same effect, or it would have to be processed to remove what is effectively just sand so that the farmers can get the high quality lime out of it.
If I saw people propose we divert these carbon taxes to mining basalt for carbon sequestration then I could support them. Until I see that happen I can only view carbon taxes as a tax on the poor to give subsidies to rich people like Elon Musk. If we use the carbon tax to pay farmers to put basalt in their fields then we'd see farmers paid to make food, which helps a lot of people because farming is a big part of our economy. When farmers make money they buy stuff and send their kids to college. When food is cheaper then fewer people go hungry, which also leaves more money for those people to buy stuff and send their kids to college. Basalt reduces carbon by both sequestering the carbon we've produced in the past and also reduces future production because we are no longer cooking CO2 out of limestone, a process largely powered by coal and natural gas.
So the solution to our economic problems is to go around smashing windows to drum up business for glass manufacturing and glaziers. Maybe we could total a few random vehicles too, just to give the motor industry a boost.
You mean like "cash for clunkers"? The broken window fallacy turned into government policy. With government leaders that think it good policy turning perfectly functional vehicles into scrap metal it would not surprise me if we see the government frame a national disaster as an economic stimulus.
I find it odd that there is a group of people that will both say how continued burning of fossil fuels is destroying the environment while at the same time saying it will only be X number of years until solar power, nuclear fusion, or whatever will become cheap and plentiful enough to save us.
Either global warming is an imminent threat or it is not. If it is then we need to act now by using what technology we have now that can both reduce carbon output and compete with the price and availability of coal. That technology is nuclear fission.
If some new technology is coming along in time to save us from ourselves then global warming is not a real threat. We can just wait for this new technology to come along. But then technological advancement is not assured, we must have people doing research and these people will need to get paid for their work.
Here is the problem, at least in the USA, any research in nuclear power must get approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Committee. This approval usually comes with funding from its parent agency the Department of Energy but that does not have to be. The federal government does not need to spend money on projects like the Polywell Fusor, they just need to allow private entities to fund and perform the research. Since such fusion research competes with the DOE pet projects like the Tokamak the people that want to do this research must be creative in how they get finds and licensing. This usually takes the form of working under the rules of the Department of Defense which has the authority to license nuclear power research so long as it has a military application, they cannot fund pure research on nuclear physics like the DOE.
We have the means to solve this problem but the biggest obstacle to solving it is the government agency mandated to solve our energy problems. Calling it the Department of Energy is a misnomer because there is little evidence that they have been advancing the nation's ability to reach energy independence.
One solution I see to this problem is that the states in the USA should assert their authority to license nuclear reactors for research and power on their own. The federal government only has the authority to act where the states allow. The states made the federal government so they can modify the terms under which it operates as they wish. Since the DOE is failing to live up to its mandate then perhaps some states could encourage this research within their own borders.
Given that few within the catastrophic man made global warming group are not scared enough of global warming to overcome their fear of nuclear fission power plants then I can only conclude that there is very little to fear from global warming. They cannot say we must do anything and everything to avert global warming but when nuclear fission is brought up they say we can't do that. If nuclear power is a greater threat to humanity than global warming then global warming is nothing to fear.
I can see two ways to defend nuclear power in light of this.
First, while this nuclear power plant may be exceedingly expensive it is also a very large power plant that will be run for a very long time. The upfront cost is big but the cost of fuel, labor, maintenance and so forth should be minimal which makes energy from this plant competitive. I do not know if this is necessarily true for this particular power plant but in general this is true for nuclear power.
Second, like most anything there is a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. The design of the Hinkley Point reactors appears to be one that is exceedingly large and complicated which adds to the cost. There are other more affordable designs they could have used. Perhaps this cost can be addressed by spreading the engineering costs over many more power plants like it and achieving an economy of scale. An economy of scale could have been achieved on this site by building six smaller reactors with common components rather than two large ones. Claiming all nuclear power is too expensive to bother because one company over ran costs is like claiming all cars are unsafe because a single drunk driver drove a car off a cliff while failing to buckle their seat belt.
Saying that no one would pay for something when a free option exists is a bit hyperbolic since, as you point out, there are reasons that people would do such a thing. What is undeniable is that Blockbuster exists only in name right now. The only property they have of value right now is their name and some sundry office supplies. That name only exists because at one time they had a successful business model and some people recognize it enough from a decade ago that they will keep going back.
The point is that at one time video rentals was a booming business that now exists only as a niche market. Lots of things brought on this effective demise, such as ubiquitous satellite and cable TV services, high speed internet, cheap digital storage, and (IMHO the last straw) municipal libraries keeping numerous videos available for people to use for free.
Blockbuster had at one time over 5000 stores in the USA, perhaps many thousands more than that. Now they have about 50. So, yes, people will pay to rent a video even though it may be available at a library. What they are more likely to do is rent or buy it online than rent a copy delivered on physical media.
I remember in the 1990s and perhaps late 1980s when it seemed that video rentals was a side job of all kinds of businesses. I had to wonder if there wasn't some sort of background infrastructure to support these video rental side jobs. There had to be since I doubt that these stores went through the effort and expense of buying a pile of VHS tapes at retail prices hoping that someone picking up a pack of smokes would on impulse rent a video for the evening.
When I say all kinds of businesses did video rentals I mean all kinds. I recall seeing video rentals at movie theaters, filling stations, grocery stores, furniture shops, ice cream parlors, barber shops, and I probably missed a few. This faded in time when places like Blockbuster opened up to offer a selection and price that these small shops could not compete with. Of course Blockbuster had it's troubles begin with greater access to cable and satellite programming.
I believe the last nail in the Blockbuster coffin wasn't high speed internet, it was city libraries getting in the business of keeping media besides print. No one is going to rent a video from a shop when the library will let you do the same for free.
Wow, then Germany is in grave danger now.
Actually their grid has had stability problems because of overproduction of electricity from wind and solar.
But perhaps you can bring up some of their arguments "why it can't work" and I debunk them for you :D
Experience tells me not to bother. Your comment that you'll "debunk" anything I give you tells me you do not seek to be educated, only to prop up straw men, knock them down, set them on fire, and then piss on the ashes. I enjoy leading people to the well of knowledge but I can't make them think.
It's not like the troubles Germany has had with solar power is secret, a quick search on the internet tells me that this is not news.
In hundred years all grids will be solar, wind and water (pumped storage and simple water power plants) ... only a few backyard nations or extremely unfortunately placed on the globe will have some nuclear base load.
Pumped hydro requires favorable geography to work. Those "unfortunately placed" people will be quite plentiful, that large portion of the population will require nuclear power.
Do you really believe that over night something like 40% or 60% of Californian power production will suddenly be solar?
No, I believe the electric grid will collapse long before solar can reach 40% of power production capacity.
I've listened to experts on this topic and they tell me that the power grid cannot support even 30% of electrical capacity being solar. I have a BS in electrical engineering but my electives were in microelectronics so I have just enough formal education on the topic to know that they aren't blowing smoke.
Say what you want but I'll listen to people with masters degrees in electrical engineering and they tell me that rooftop solar is bad for the electrical grid.
Where did I mention an amendment to anything?
Solar thermal is also good since it includes molten salt storage. It can and does produce electricity when the sun isn't shining. It can use the peak solar hours to melt the salt to provide power later. Molten salt nuclear is interesting, but we can't jump directly into it since there are open questions about the extreme corrosiveness of hot fluoride salts.
Either thermal salt works or it doesn't, solar thermal and molten salt nuclear use the same salts. Hot fluoride salts are used in aluminum refining. While I admit that there are technical problems to be engineered out to make molten salt nuclear work the problems of the salt chemistry is not one of them.
I can envision a future where current solar thermal power stations transition to solar molten salt and then to nuclear power. These sites would have the electric grid connection, a large reservoir of expensive salt suitable for thermal transfer, turbines, lots of space, etc. They'd be perfect sites for a nuclear power plant. I recall that some of the plants required preheating with natural gas before the solar power generation would work then they'd have access to natural gas for backup power and/or peaking power.
Also, solar thermal requires lots of cheap land, favorable geography, and favorable weather/climate. I believe that a lot of solar power advocates forget that there are a lot of places on this planet that don't get a lot of sun but still have large populations in need of power.
The owners of the panels will see plenty of ROI. Like I said, set the dryer and dishwasher to run at peak sun. Charge the car. Pre-chill the building.
They do now because solar power is rare and subsidized. Too much solar and the price of electricity will fall when solar panels can produce power, reducing their return. Electricity is already very inexpensive, it won't take much to make it nonviable.
The other benefit is the reduced externalities. That is, pollution.
Solar power does not reduce pollution. Producing solar panels involves all kinds of poisonous chemicals to produce and not all of them stay in the factory. China can make solar panels cheap because they don't care about pollution.
If by "pollution" and "externalities" you mean carbon dioxide then you are wrong there too. Solar panels produce power for only a few hours every day, during that time coal and natural gas plants would have to idle. By being idle they aren't producing power but they are still burning fuel, they must be kept hot to avoid thermal stress and so that they can produce power again when the sun goes down.
Natural gas turbines are often used to produce peak power, such as when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow, but they are inefficient. Turbines need twice the fuel to produce the same energy than a boiler but a boiler cannot produce peak power. Solar power means fewer boilers but more turbines, meaning more natural gas burned for the same energy. We've seen this happen already.
The only way out of this mess is nuclear power, specifically molten salt reactors that can load follow, unlike solid fuel reactors that cannot. If we get molten salt reactors then solar power would look very expensive. Just about all the cost of a nuclear power plant is in capital and labor, fuel is a very small portion of that. This means that once built the price of energy falls the more it produces.
Solar power cannot compete with nuclear because solar cannot produce power on demand. Solar power shares the feature that the more power it produces the cheaper it gets but it cannot produce when the demand is there only when the sun is shining. Solar power can force electric prices negative. Nuclear power can sustain negative electric prices because it can produce on demand, making up for when it goes negative, solar cannot.
People with solar panels might see a return on their investment for getting solar panels but their neighbors that didn't have to pay for the solar panels see a greater return. The neighbors see the price of electricity go negative for things like running the dryer, charging the car, etc. but without the cost of putting up the solar panels.
The website you gave shows a 10% growth in five years for California, it also shows nearly 25% growth in that same five years for Texas. You proved my point for me.