I heard that they stopped selling handguns, except in Alaska, but maybe I'm confusing them with Dick's Sporting Goods. I haven't been to either in while, partly because of shit rules like this, partly just because they tend to sell shit products.
Why the exception to a no handgun rule in Alaska? I'm not sure but I have a guess....
I heard that no condom rule and thought it made sense at first until I heard them talk about the "rhythm method" to having sex and not have kids. So, it's okay to have sex and not have kids so long that the means to do so does not involve a pill or condom? That's fucked up.
The Catholic church has lightened up on the "no condoms" rule in recognizing them as a means to have sex and not transmit STDs between a married couple. Not sure if this is a set rule or just being discussed.
The Church recognizes the need for a couple to have sex and not worry about children, hence the "rhythm method". Seems stupid to allow for one means of "artificial" birth control like timing intercourse when a woman is infertile but not allow others. I recall hearing that tubal ligation is popular in Latin America because it means only having to go to confession once for their "sin", as opposed to every time one takes a birth control pill.
This practice of burning kerosene in gasoline engines is a problem worldwide. I gave the example of my friend from India seeing this done as an example of it "working", if you call a stream of blue smoke out the tailpipe "working".
While searching the internet to get a better idea on how widespread this practice in worldwide I came across other similar means people use to avoid taxes on fuel. There are people that will mix crude oil with kerosene, diesel fuel, or industrial solvents to run in a diesel engine. People will collect some kind of light crude off of oil wells to run in a gas engine. Generally people will use whatever they can get cheap to keep their engines running.
To me this shows some of the futility of using taxes to drive behavior. Raising taxes to discourage behavior may not always drive people to what you intended for them to do. Raise the taxes too high on gasoline and people will burn kerosene mixed with industrial solvents.
We don't have near this problem in the USA since low taxed fuel is dyed. Road diesel is left without a dye but low tax off road diesel and fuel oil is red. If red dye is found in your truck the taxman can take the reading off the odometer and tax every miles as if you've been burning this off road fuel since the truck was "born". The people that offer red fuel don't want to get caught either so they tend to have hoops for jumping through to get it. My brother has a diesel tractor for his yard work and contractor business, he just gets fuel at a truck stop, and pays the road taxes on it.
Aviation fuels are all kinds of colors to keep the separate. This is less about taxes as there is not much to gain in switching fuels. What it does do is keep things safe and running right. Many aviation engines will burn a variety of fuel but they are optimal for one of them. Ethanol is apparently very bad for airplanes, but it's been difficult to find for people that have been used to using high grade mo-gas in their planes to find mo-gas without ethanol blended in.
Precisely. I heard this story of people putting kerosene in gasoline engines from someone that lived in India and saw it being done. It took me seconds of a Google search to see plenty of evidence of people doing this, usually accidentally, and the engine still ran with little to no ill effects, save the blue smoke from the tailpipe. Starting a gasoline engine on pure kerosene is difficult but once it is hot it will burn kerosene. Mix some gasoline with it to thin it out a bit and it will start the engine too.
What some people will do to "convert" a gasoline engine to kerosene is hook up a second tank with a valve to switch between the gas and kerosene. Start the engine on the gas, warm up the engine, switch to kerosene, and keep going with blue smoke trailing behind. Switch to gas for a bit before turning off the engine and it will start up quickly the next time.
Doing this conversion in India is just asking for trouble since it is evidence of avoiding the gasoline taxes. A blue trail behind you though could just mean the engine is burning some oil. So people keep mixing kerosene with the gas and law enforcement turn a blind eye because they don't want trouble and they probably do it too.
Yeah, that's old data. What the Mythbusters did was interesting, but it is no longer applicable. New bikes are FAR cleaner than models from just a few years ago. See my posts above for further details.
As I stated before, a modern bike with modern pollution controls will be more difficult to maintain than one without those controls. Expect the catalytic converter to be quickly sold for scrap, the electronics bypassed when (not if) they break, etc. You can try to enforce the pollution controls with things like the software not running the engine if parts are removed or something but in the end you have people with little regard for the pollution they create, a government unable to enforce many laws, and people with nothing but time to mess with the engine until they get something out of it.
Hanoi can make the sale of the heavily polluting two-stroke street scooters illegal (like we did) and provide some sort of assistance to owners to "trade up" to a scooter with a four stroke engine and appropriate pollution controls (bounty, rebate, ???). That should clear up the problem in a few years. Since they already make a lot of scooters like that, they are already producing the solution to their problem!
You mean "cash for clunkers"? As I recall that did not go very well. The people that cashed in on that had the money to buy a new car anyway, they just moved up their buy date to cash in. Sales collapsed once it ended. You do this continuously and all you are doing is taking tax money from poor people only to give it to those same poor people once they save up enough to afford a new motorbike. Only now they have to move that buy date back to make up for the taxes taken from them in the first place, and costs of administration taken out.
If you remove new cheap two cycle bikes from the market and people will then keep using their old one longer. Old ones that are less safe and pollute more than a new one. This only makes the problem worse.
In the USA it's easy to ban two cycle scooters because they are largely luxuries for most people. If they didn't have a scooter they'd find other means to entertain themselves. For the few that actually use them for transportation the extra cost of the ban is a much smaller chunk of their income, or they can choose public transportation, riding a pedal bike, or even buying a used car. Vietnam does not have much for public transportation. Cars, as you point out, take more space for parking and on the road. But they do have an abundance of used bike on the market to buy. Or steal.
I do agree with you though that banning motorcycles is stupid.
What of the EPA authority to define the penalties? Wasn't that part of the regulation? Again, if the EPA is forced to measure methane emissions but has discretion to not impose any penalties then this is not much different then deciding to not even look for violations.
Forgive my ignorance if that is not the case but as I understand it the court can tell the EPA to go out looking but the court cannot tell the EPA to impose penalties if it finds a violation.
It's obvious the EPA is not interested in enforcing this rule. It's obvious the rule will go away one way or another. If Obama wanted this rule to last beyond his term then he should have got Congress involved and made it law. Obama seemed real happy to make law through regulation and executive order. It should be no surprise if Trump is more than happy to make it all disappear.
This sounds like a badly written regulation, and the courts are just making it worse by forcing it through when they didn't have to.
Your premise that motorcycles pollute less than cars is not borne out in evidence. Elsewhere in this discussion was a link to an article on the Mythbusters team measuring pollution from modern cars and comparing them to modern motorcycles with the latest 1st world emission controls. The motorcycles did get better mileage but they also created much more pollution. If the problem is pollution, which the article says is the problem, then this is a problem that can be fixed by banning motorcycles.
While I do agree that banning motorcycles will solve the problem there is the problem of banning the motorcycles, which is not trivial. This is a poor nation where people don't have the income to just buy a car. They also don't have the income to have their motorcycles properly maintained. The government lacks the resources to even enforce a helmet requirement, so I would think that they lack the resources to clear the streets of motorcycles.
Again I give no citations and I admit that. Others have citations scattered about which give evidence of motorcycles being dirtier, even if they burn less fuel per mile, than a car. If you can give a citation on the improved pollution, not CO2 output, of a motorcycle over a car then I'd appreciate that.
I admit that I got on a bit of a tangent by discussing first world problems of insurance, licensing, and safety, but I say that to show that more motorcycles would not be a solution for the 1st world either. Assuming that a modern motorcycle is cleaner than a modern car then how long would that last in a 2nd world nation? Catalytic converters take power from an already small engine, they can be removed. This is especially true since they often contain some very valuable metals, people will remove them. Electronics cost money, are relatively fragile, and cannot be repaired by someone with only a spanner and hammer.
I will also admit that I have no solutions here, only that the solutions proposed so far do not seem practical.
Until fairly recently (20 years? I don't recall exactly) there was about 1/4 the population without electrical service. Today nearly 100% have service but it's not very reliable. Too much demand and not enough capacity. Electric bikes would make this worse.
Also, nearly all the electricity in Vietnam comes from oil and coal. I'm not sure that would be all that much of an improvement. Sure one big coal plant is easier to keep clean than millions of gas burning bikes but that would mean enforcement of some kind. People get upset now if they don't have lights, but still unreliable electric service is better than none. Imagine if emissions enforcement meant shutting down a coal plant with a city full of electric bikes. Now you have a bunch of angry people that don't have lights AND they can't get to work.
Do this on a hot day as people are trying to run fans and refrigerators? That's how riots start.
I know this story is from India but I suspect that this is also true in many other parts of the world, like Hanoi.
In India the primary means to cook food is by kerosene stoves. It seems this is even true in many large cities since electricity is either expensive and/or unreliable. People need to eat or they riot so the government subsidizes kerosene. The government wants to discourage use of motorcycles and auto-rickshaws, so they tax fuel for these highly. Do you see where this is going yet?
People that want to run their vehicles on the cheap will mix the gasoline with kerosene and get something that kind of burns and runs the engine but blue smoke and soot is produced. This is highly illegal but very difficult to enforce. Now imagine millions of these things on the road, all producing this thick smoke.
People that have the money to buy a car will want to keep it running, so they don't typically burn kerosene in them. It's also much easier to collect a fine or bribe from someone that actually has money than some poor auto-rickshaw driver that's making deliveries for pennies.
I see a solution here but I'm sure it's not popular, tax gasoline like kerosene. I don't mean raise kerosene taxes to the level of gasoline, that will lead to riots. Tax gasoline like kerosene.
I suspect that two-cycle engines can run on kerosene better than a four cycle engine. Lower taxes would lower costs. More money in the pockets of the public mean they can afford more cars and newer motorcycles. Cleaner air from lower gas taxes.
Since this requires lowering taxes this means it's not going to happen.
It's an authoritarian state so long as people get along with the state, everyone has their limits.
Imagine the state ordered police to destroy every motorcycle that was in violation of the ban. The police just destroyed that person's means to get to work, get groceries, etc. There was a reason they used to hang horse thieves. A horse in the days before the internal combustion engine was not just an animal, it's that man's means to provide for his family. If the police start busting up motorcycles then they get some irate people and almost certainly some dead police officers. On top of that they've just reduced the means for this person to be self sufficient and provide services that the state can tax.
You ask what can they do about it? They can beat the police to a bloody pulp, that's what. A few hundred such people might be controllable, perhaps a few thousand. This is a city of 5 million motorcycles with a total population of about 16 million people in the metro area. That's not something that can be controlled.
Sure, they can be "authoritative" and ban the motorcycles by force, but that would be suicide.
I thought that getting a motorcycle would mean a savings in fuel too but I looked at how much fuel a motorcycle would take compared to a small car and the savings is not that great. I don't remember the exact vehicles being compared so you could argue I was looking at the wrong kind of vehicles.
Here's the thing. I calculated that I'm already putting myself at risk in getting a motorcycle over that of a cage on wheels. I'm not going to put myself at further risk by getting one so under powered that it cannot out maneuver the people in their protective cages. Add to that I cannot simply get rid of my cage on wheels since a two wheeled vehicle is worthless in any weather beyond a gentle rain. Then there are costs like insurance, licensing, the legally required protective gear, and perhaps more. The article even says that imposing safety rules on motorcycle riders has failed due to rampant violation of the rules. You can tell a poor person that they have to buy a helmet but those cost money and are likely to get stolen or lost.
Even in tropical places like Vietnam where a little shit box on wheels could be light, cheap, and therefore a practical alternative, the savings on fuel with a motorcycle can't be that great. Motorcycles aren't that aerodynamic so they eat a lot of fuel at high speed. When idle in stop and go traffic the small air cooled engines burn just as much fuel as a larger water cooled one, or at least burn more cleanly for the fuel they do burn.
From what I've seen motorcycles just don't have the savings on fuel and pollution that many claim. I'm sure a motorcycle can be made that is cleaner than a car but I suspect it'd cost as much as a car with all the extra doo-dads like water cooling, catalytic converter, and the extra engine power to carry the extra weight that would add. In a nation where people don't have the income to buy a car I expect any ban on the continued use of cheap motorcycles to be just as openly violated as their helmet laws. What are police going to do about it? Destroy any motorcycle they see in violation? That's going to get ugly real quick.
I offer no citations, only my little thought experiment and personal experience. Feel free to rip me apart with evidence.
How much do you pay for health insurance to cover that? How much worse is your environment because of it?
Why didn't you look that up and tell me the answers? I can make big claims too without citations like that if we add up the savings on fuel costs that we can put that money saved towards better health care, and still come out ahead.
I'm not making big claims about environmental impacts and pollution, only that without the competition from natural gas electricity price will most likely rise. As people see their immediate costs of energy rise there will be push back on the self imposed ban on natural gas heating.
Tell me something, can you tell me what is a greater threat to the individual, pollution and global warming, or the inability to pay for heat?
Sure, you can subsidize heat for those unable to pay for it but socialism only works until you've spent everyone else's money.
Google tells me that one euro equals about $1.13. If the average in the USA is $0.10. then that's about 0.09 euro per kWh. Norway pays what? The chart is hard to read but it looks like about 0.16 or 0.17, with the EU average above 0.20. The US government makes sure people are warm too, you think we don't subsidize energy here? I thought energy subsidies were a bad thing, judging by so many comments on here lately.
Tell me something, what do you think would happen to our electricity prices if the government said that Americans could no longer use cheap natural gas to heat their homes? Would not rates go up? How is this not different than anticipating the electric rates would go up if people were barred from using natural gas heat in Norway? While natural gas heating is rare now the elimination of the competition from natural gas heating by government fiat will mean that the electricity sector will lose a very important incentive to keep prices low.
I'm pretty sure that people don't generally use the filling station as an opportunity to socialize either. I'm just trying to figure out the fear of going to a filling station. The only thing I can think of is some kind of agoraphobia or something.
You know what brings me peace of mind? Knowing that when I leave home every morning that I'm driving a 4WD vehicle capable of ice, snow, and rain better than any EV. I know that if I need to go a long distance on a whim that I can refill in 5 minutes at any of the multitude of filling stations around me. I know that if I keep at least a half tank that I can go somewhere between 100 and 200 miles before I'm empty, and again finding a refill is quick and easy. I know that excepting strong winds in the wrong direction that my range is not significantly affected by weather. EVs would likely be less effected by the winds but problems of heat and cold are more common. I know that if I neglect to refill for some reason but anticipate a long drive that day I can dump the fuel I keep on hand for my lawnmowers in my tank and get an extra range boost in minutes. I know that if there is a loss of electricity for some reason that my truck will still get me where I need to be the next day.
The only reason that a nightly recharge gives "peace of mind" is because it relives the range anxiety that EVs created in the first place. If people wanted the peace of mind of leaving home with a full tank every morning it can be done. It can be done without needing to run wires for a quick charger or waiting for the 120 volt slow charger every night.
Where's the peace of mind in knowing that if you run your battery flat that it could mean 10 hours to recharge to full again?
What has been replacing oil? The answer is natural gas. In 1980 natural gas made up only 3.5% of energy produced in Norway, in 2010 it was 20%. Hydro has remained steady at about 40% of energy produced. Those numbers are from International Energy Agency.
Oil is easy to export, natural gas is not. The infrastructure to distribute natural gas may not be all that large right now but it's been growing for 40 years now.
If the goal is to reduce CO2 production then continued growth in the use of natural gas is a good way to do that, since it's been displacing oil and coal. That's how the USA has been reducing it's CO2 production.
The electricity sector is not lobbying for this
I don't believe you. That's not saying you are lying or being misled. It's just difficult to imagine that the electric sector can remain silent on this and not advocate for government policies in it's favor.
After reading the dissenting opinion I think the EPA certainly has a case to do what it did. It's a lot of legalese but this is how I understand the issue, there's three flaws in the majority opinion: 1. The stay was not a "final rule" which means the court did not have jurisdiction to even hear the case. The executive has authority to create temporary pauses in enforcement and the courts can only hear cases of final rulings of the executive. I don't know if this is considered a lack of standing but it seems the effect is similar, the case should have been tossed until more time had passed. 2. The rules allow for some leeway if there is some unusual circumstances making the timely issuance of rule changes difficult. While the EPA did decide to enact the rule they have some allowance to review the rule at any time. I'm not sure if the missing of the deadline to issue a stay by a few days was explicitly part of the argument but that does seem to be what was implied. With things still being decided on how to enforce the rule, or even if the rule should be enforced, it would be wise to avoid the distraction and expense of enforcement while going through the formal rule change process. 3. The EPA has discretion on what punishment to impose. The finding of a violation and imposing no punishment is effectively no different than not looking for a violation. Since the EPA was not sure it wanted to enforce the rule it should be allowed some time to make up its mind.
So it comes down to time. The EPA missed it's own deadline by three days, wanted only 90 days to get things in order, and not enough time has passed to make this something worthy of taking the court's time.
The opinion is a pretty straightforward application of the APA to the case.
Is it? The rules allow for some "wiggle room" in things like enforcement and unusual circumstances. Seems silly for the courts to order the EPA to send out enforcement agents to measure methane emissions when there is a very high probability these rules won't even exist 90 days later and no punishment for violations would be imposed.
What does the future of Norway electricity use look like? I assume that their demand for electricity is growing. I assume that after decades of using hydro power that they are running out of good places to put dams.
A quick Google search tells me that Noway is increasingly relying on natural gas and imports for electricity. Seems to me that they've pretty much maxed out their ability to grow hydro power. More efficient uses of their existing electricity supply can stretch that out some, which includes using heat pumps over resistance heating when practical.
If trends continue Norway is going to have to burn more natural gas (and natural gas derived electricity for heat is always going to be more expensive than burning it for heat directly), import more nuclear power from Sweden or...?
The electricity sector in Noway cannot simply ban competition from natural gas because people will vote with their wallets and overturn this ban. I don't see that happening with the possible exception of nuclear power providing an out. This could be Swedish nuclear power or Norwegian nuclear power, but it will be natural gas or nuclear power to fill that gap. Personally I'd like to see growth in nuclear power but I also have nothing against natural gas.
Ground sourced heat pumps have their limits. One of my brothers lived in a house that had a ground source heat pump where he used to live, and the house had an electric resistor backup heat. When he moved in he defeated the resistance heat because he didn't want to "pay that bill". He paid for it another way in a few chilly days in his house. I have to wonder if he actually saved any money by disconnecting the resistance heat, at some point the only heat in that system is coming from the (admitted large) electric motors running the pumps.
I'm not mocking the use of heat pumps. I'm mocking the claim that they think heat pumps will replace petroleum use.
Here in the Midwest I've seen a mix of air and ground sourced heat pumps. Newer houses tend to have the ground sourced kind because installing them after the house is built is much more expensive. Air sourced heat pumps are the norm in the southern US, as far as I've seen. I assume this has much to do with the winters not being as cold as much as it does with having little topsoil in many areas. Even then you will almost always see electric resistance backup. It might be switched off like what my brother did but it's there. Wood, propane, natural gas, and so on also apply as backup based on local availability of fuel.
Apparently you think it is okay that people should push Creationism as valid education, to give an example.
I do not believe that creationism should be taught in school, public or private. I do believe that if you take my money that I have a say in how it is spent. If you don't like what I have to say about how your child is educated then DON'T TAKE MY MONEY!
As I read this it seems to me that Florida is allowing the taxpayers to have a say in how their taxes are spent, full stop.
What bothers me is children in public schools being taught that boys can have vaginas and girls can have penises. What kind of anti-science bullshit is that? If you want schools to teach your kids that then go ahead, just DON'T TAKE MY MONEY to do it.
Getting back to this...
Education is about facts and knowledge not subject to a democratic vote.
So I'm supposed to believe in man made global warming because 99.87698769876% of experts tell me it's real? If facts and knowledge are not up to democratic vote then what happens to that argument? I don't believe that children should be taught blind faith in experts, that is not how they should live their lives. If schools want to teach about global warming then teach the science, not expert opinion. Skepticism is healthy, not something to be mocked.
I did a bit more reading on this and discovered something interesting. Currently about 85% of Norwegians heat with electricity, the balance being oil, natural gas, and wood. I did not see a breakdown of how that 15% is distributed but it is quite clear that the plurality is from wood. So that leaves something like 10% of people heating with petroleum.
What I also saw was that oil and natural gas use is growing quickly. It seems that electricity prices spiked in 2003 and since then non-electric heating has found a new demand. This has lead to plans to install natural gas service to where it was not before. What happens when electric heating starts to see competition? They lobby the government to make the competition illegal of course.
The electric energy sector held a near monopoly on heating for a very long time. This no doubt made them a lot of money. This allowed them to raise prices in recent years. It got to a point that petroleum is now looking attractive for many more people than it did just a few years before. Rather than lowering prices to stay competitive the electric sector turns to the government to protect their monopoly.
The electric energy sector is only doing this now because petroleum is a threat to their profits. They can just veil this with protecting the environment because that is popular right now.
Assuming Norwegians still have the ability to vote they are going to vote to keep their heating costs low. That's what people always do, vote with their wallets. That is why I believe this effort to make petroleum heating illegal will fail.
So, you believe we should silence an unpopular minority? How undemocratic of you.
If we live in a democracy then all must be allowed to speak and everyone's vote counts. If we live in a republic then everyone still must be allowed to speak, but we don't have to listen to those that wish to use the power of government to restrict the rights and freedoms of others.
Here's an idea. If you don't want the homeless drunk in your school board meeting then create a private school and allow only those that are paying the bills to speak.
It's bullshit like this that convinced me that government should be out of the education business. There is never going to be a school policy that pleases all the people all the time, so don't even try. Every parent should be responsible for educating their own children. You expect me to pay for educating your children and not have a say in how that money is spent? What happened to no taxation without representation? I seem to recall a war fought over that.
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I heard that they stopped selling handguns, except in Alaska, but maybe I'm confusing them with Dick's Sporting Goods. I haven't been to either in while, partly because of shit rules like this, partly just because they tend to sell shit products.
Why the exception to a no handgun rule in Alaska? I'm not sure but I have a guess....
BEARS!!
I heard that no condom rule and thought it made sense at first until I heard them talk about the "rhythm method" to having sex and not have kids. So, it's okay to have sex and not have kids so long that the means to do so does not involve a pill or condom? That's fucked up.
The Catholic church has lightened up on the "no condoms" rule in recognizing them as a means to have sex and not transmit STDs between a married couple. Not sure if this is a set rule or just being discussed.
The Church recognizes the need for a couple to have sex and not worry about children, hence the "rhythm method". Seems stupid to allow for one means of "artificial" birth control like timing intercourse when a woman is infertile but not allow others. I recall hearing that tubal ligation is popular in Latin America because it means only having to go to confession once for their "sin", as opposed to every time one takes a birth control pill.
This practice of burning kerosene in gasoline engines is a problem worldwide. I gave the example of my friend from India seeing this done as an example of it "working", if you call a stream of blue smoke out the tailpipe "working".
While searching the internet to get a better idea on how widespread this practice in worldwide I came across other similar means people use to avoid taxes on fuel. There are people that will mix crude oil with kerosene, diesel fuel, or industrial solvents to run in a diesel engine. People will collect some kind of light crude off of oil wells to run in a gas engine. Generally people will use whatever they can get cheap to keep their engines running.
To me this shows some of the futility of using taxes to drive behavior. Raising taxes to discourage behavior may not always drive people to what you intended for them to do. Raise the taxes too high on gasoline and people will burn kerosene mixed with industrial solvents.
We don't have near this problem in the USA since low taxed fuel is dyed. Road diesel is left without a dye but low tax off road diesel and fuel oil is red. If red dye is found in your truck the taxman can take the reading off the odometer and tax every miles as if you've been burning this off road fuel since the truck was "born". The people that offer red fuel don't want to get caught either so they tend to have hoops for jumping through to get it. My brother has a diesel tractor for his yard work and contractor business, he just gets fuel at a truck stop, and pays the road taxes on it.
Aviation fuels are all kinds of colors to keep the separate. This is less about taxes as there is not much to gain in switching fuels. What it does do is keep things safe and running right. Many aviation engines will burn a variety of fuel but they are optimal for one of them. Ethanol is apparently very bad for airplanes, but it's been difficult to find for people that have been used to using high grade mo-gas in their planes to find mo-gas without ethanol blended in.
Someone should tell India this.
Precisely. I heard this story of people putting kerosene in gasoline engines from someone that lived in India and saw it being done. It took me seconds of a Google search to see plenty of evidence of people doing this, usually accidentally, and the engine still ran with little to no ill effects, save the blue smoke from the tailpipe. Starting a gasoline engine on pure kerosene is difficult but once it is hot it will burn kerosene. Mix some gasoline with it to thin it out a bit and it will start the engine too.
What some people will do to "convert" a gasoline engine to kerosene is hook up a second tank with a valve to switch between the gas and kerosene. Start the engine on the gas, warm up the engine, switch to kerosene, and keep going with blue smoke trailing behind. Switch to gas for a bit before turning off the engine and it will start up quickly the next time.
Doing this conversion in India is just asking for trouble since it is evidence of avoiding the gasoline taxes. A blue trail behind you though could just mean the engine is burning some oil. So people keep mixing kerosene with the gas and law enforcement turn a blind eye because they don't want trouble and they probably do it too.
Yeah, that's old data. What the Mythbusters did was interesting, but it is no longer applicable. New bikes are FAR cleaner than models from just a few years ago. See my posts above for further details.
As I stated before, a modern bike with modern pollution controls will be more difficult to maintain than one without those controls. Expect the catalytic converter to be quickly sold for scrap, the electronics bypassed when (not if) they break, etc. You can try to enforce the pollution controls with things like the software not running the engine if parts are removed or something but in the end you have people with little regard for the pollution they create, a government unable to enforce many laws, and people with nothing but time to mess with the engine until they get something out of it.
Hanoi can make the sale of the heavily polluting two-stroke street scooters illegal (like we did) and provide some sort of assistance to owners to "trade up" to a scooter with a four stroke engine and appropriate pollution controls (bounty, rebate, ???). That should clear up the problem in a few years. Since they already make a lot of scooters like that, they are already producing the solution to their problem!
You mean "cash for clunkers"? As I recall that did not go very well. The people that cashed in on that had the money to buy a new car anyway, they just moved up their buy date to cash in. Sales collapsed once it ended. You do this continuously and all you are doing is taking tax money from poor people only to give it to those same poor people once they save up enough to afford a new motorbike. Only now they have to move that buy date back to make up for the taxes taken from them in the first place, and costs of administration taken out.
If you remove new cheap two cycle bikes from the market and people will then keep using their old one longer. Old ones that are less safe and pollute more than a new one. This only makes the problem worse.
In the USA it's easy to ban two cycle scooters because they are largely luxuries for most people. If they didn't have a scooter they'd find other means to entertain themselves. For the few that actually use them for transportation the extra cost of the ban is a much smaller chunk of their income, or they can choose public transportation, riding a pedal bike, or even buying a used car. Vietnam does not have much for public transportation. Cars, as you point out, take more space for parking and on the road. But they do have an abundance of used bike on the market to buy. Or steal.
I do agree with you though that banning motorcycles is stupid.
What of the EPA authority to define the penalties? Wasn't that part of the regulation? Again, if the EPA is forced to measure methane emissions but has discretion to not impose any penalties then this is not much different then deciding to not even look for violations.
Forgive my ignorance if that is not the case but as I understand it the court can tell the EPA to go out looking but the court cannot tell the EPA to impose penalties if it finds a violation.
It's obvious the EPA is not interested in enforcing this rule. It's obvious the rule will go away one way or another. If Obama wanted this rule to last beyond his term then he should have got Congress involved and made it law. Obama seemed real happy to make law through regulation and executive order. It should be no surprise if Trump is more than happy to make it all disappear.
This sounds like a badly written regulation, and the courts are just making it worse by forcing it through when they didn't have to.
Your premise that motorcycles pollute less than cars is not borne out in evidence. Elsewhere in this discussion was a link to an article on the Mythbusters team measuring pollution from modern cars and comparing them to modern motorcycles with the latest 1st world emission controls. The motorcycles did get better mileage but they also created much more pollution. If the problem is pollution, which the article says is the problem, then this is a problem that can be fixed by banning motorcycles.
While I do agree that banning motorcycles will solve the problem there is the problem of banning the motorcycles, which is not trivial. This is a poor nation where people don't have the income to just buy a car. They also don't have the income to have their motorcycles properly maintained. The government lacks the resources to even enforce a helmet requirement, so I would think that they lack the resources to clear the streets of motorcycles.
Again I give no citations and I admit that. Others have citations scattered about which give evidence of motorcycles being dirtier, even if they burn less fuel per mile, than a car. If you can give a citation on the improved pollution, not CO2 output, of a motorcycle over a car then I'd appreciate that.
I admit that I got on a bit of a tangent by discussing first world problems of insurance, licensing, and safety, but I say that to show that more motorcycles would not be a solution for the 1st world either. Assuming that a modern motorcycle is cleaner than a modern car then how long would that last in a 2nd world nation? Catalytic converters take power from an already small engine, they can be removed. This is especially true since they often contain some very valuable metals, people will remove them. Electronics cost money, are relatively fragile, and cannot be repaired by someone with only a spanner and hammer.
I will also admit that I have no solutions here, only that the solutions proposed so far do not seem practical.
Didn't I just say I was not to be taken seriously? Do people even read an entire post before replying?
You make my head hurt. Please don't come back.
Until fairly recently (20 years? I don't recall exactly) there was about 1/4 the population without electrical service. Today nearly 100% have service but it's not very reliable. Too much demand and not enough capacity. Electric bikes would make this worse.
Also, nearly all the electricity in Vietnam comes from oil and coal. I'm not sure that would be all that much of an improvement. Sure one big coal plant is easier to keep clean than millions of gas burning bikes but that would mean enforcement of some kind. People get upset now if they don't have lights, but still unreliable electric service is better than none. Imagine if emissions enforcement meant shutting down a coal plant with a city full of electric bikes. Now you have a bunch of angry people that don't have lights AND they can't get to work.
Do this on a hot day as people are trying to run fans and refrigerators? That's how riots start.
I know this story is from India but I suspect that this is also true in many other parts of the world, like Hanoi.
In India the primary means to cook food is by kerosene stoves. It seems this is even true in many large cities since electricity is either expensive and/or unreliable. People need to eat or they riot so the government subsidizes kerosene. The government wants to discourage use of motorcycles and auto-rickshaws, so they tax fuel for these highly. Do you see where this is going yet?
People that want to run their vehicles on the cheap will mix the gasoline with kerosene and get something that kind of burns and runs the engine but blue smoke and soot is produced. This is highly illegal but very difficult to enforce. Now imagine millions of these things on the road, all producing this thick smoke.
People that have the money to buy a car will want to keep it running, so they don't typically burn kerosene in them. It's also much easier to collect a fine or bribe from someone that actually has money than some poor auto-rickshaw driver that's making deliveries for pennies.
I see a solution here but I'm sure it's not popular, tax gasoline like kerosene. I don't mean raise kerosene taxes to the level of gasoline, that will lead to riots. Tax gasoline like kerosene.
I suspect that two-cycle engines can run on kerosene better than a four cycle engine. Lower taxes would lower costs. More money in the pockets of the public mean they can afford more cars and newer motorcycles. Cleaner air from lower gas taxes.
Since this requires lowering taxes this means it's not going to happen.
Are you saying the brown people are brown because of the pollution? That they could wash that off if they just had some soap and water? I had no idea.
For the snark impaired: I'm not being serious. I'd think that I would not need such a disclaimer but past experience tells me otherwise.
It's an authoritarian state so long as people get along with the state, everyone has their limits.
Imagine the state ordered police to destroy every motorcycle that was in violation of the ban. The police just destroyed that person's means to get to work, get groceries, etc. There was a reason they used to hang horse thieves. A horse in the days before the internal combustion engine was not just an animal, it's that man's means to provide for his family. If the police start busting up motorcycles then they get some irate people and almost certainly some dead police officers. On top of that they've just reduced the means for this person to be self sufficient and provide services that the state can tax.
You ask what can they do about it? They can beat the police to a bloody pulp, that's what. A few hundred such people might be controllable, perhaps a few thousand. This is a city of 5 million motorcycles with a total population of about 16 million people in the metro area. That's not something that can be controlled.
Sure, they can be "authoritative" and ban the motorcycles by force, but that would be suicide.
I thought that getting a motorcycle would mean a savings in fuel too but I looked at how much fuel a motorcycle would take compared to a small car and the savings is not that great. I don't remember the exact vehicles being compared so you could argue I was looking at the wrong kind of vehicles.
Here's the thing. I calculated that I'm already putting myself at risk in getting a motorcycle over that of a cage on wheels. I'm not going to put myself at further risk by getting one so under powered that it cannot out maneuver the people in their protective cages. Add to that I cannot simply get rid of my cage on wheels since a two wheeled vehicle is worthless in any weather beyond a gentle rain. Then there are costs like insurance, licensing, the legally required protective gear, and perhaps more. The article even says that imposing safety rules on motorcycle riders has failed due to rampant violation of the rules. You can tell a poor person that they have to buy a helmet but those cost money and are likely to get stolen or lost.
Even in tropical places like Vietnam where a little shit box on wheels could be light, cheap, and therefore a practical alternative, the savings on fuel with a motorcycle can't be that great. Motorcycles aren't that aerodynamic so they eat a lot of fuel at high speed. When idle in stop and go traffic the small air cooled engines burn just as much fuel as a larger water cooled one, or at least burn more cleanly for the fuel they do burn.
From what I've seen motorcycles just don't have the savings on fuel and pollution that many claim. I'm sure a motorcycle can be made that is cleaner than a car but I suspect it'd cost as much as a car with all the extra doo-dads like water cooling, catalytic converter, and the extra engine power to carry the extra weight that would add. In a nation where people don't have the income to buy a car I expect any ban on the continued use of cheap motorcycles to be just as openly violated as their helmet laws. What are police going to do about it? Destroy any motorcycle they see in violation? That's going to get ugly real quick.
I offer no citations, only my little thought experiment and personal experience. Feel free to rip me apart with evidence.
How much do you pay for health insurance to cover that? How much worse is your environment because of it?
Why didn't you look that up and tell me the answers? I can make big claims too without citations like that if we add up the savings on fuel costs that we can put that money saved towards better health care, and still come out ahead.
I'm not making big claims about environmental impacts and pollution, only that without the competition from natural gas electricity price will most likely rise. As people see their immediate costs of energy rise there will be push back on the self imposed ban on natural gas heating.
Tell me something, can you tell me what is a greater threat to the individual, pollution and global warming, or the inability to pay for heat?
Sure, you can subsidize heat for those unable to pay for it but socialism only works until you've spent everyone else's money.
Electricity is not particularly expensive in the USA either.
https://www.eia.gov/electricit...
Google tells me that one euro equals about $1.13. If the average in the USA is $0.10. then that's about 0.09 euro per kWh. Norway pays what? The chart is hard to read but it looks like about 0.16 or 0.17, with the EU average above 0.20. The US government makes sure people are warm too, you think we don't subsidize energy here? I thought energy subsidies were a bad thing, judging by so many comments on here lately.
Tell me something, what do you think would happen to our electricity prices if the government said that Americans could no longer use cheap natural gas to heat their homes? Would not rates go up? How is this not different than anticipating the electric rates would go up if people were barred from using natural gas heat in Norway? While natural gas heating is rare now the elimination of the competition from natural gas heating by government fiat will mean that the electricity sector will lose a very important incentive to keep prices low.
I'm pretty sure that people don't generally use the filling station as an opportunity to socialize either. I'm just trying to figure out the fear of going to a filling station. The only thing I can think of is some kind of agoraphobia or something.
You know what brings me peace of mind? Knowing that when I leave home every morning that I'm driving a 4WD vehicle capable of ice, snow, and rain better than any EV. I know that if I need to go a long distance on a whim that I can refill in 5 minutes at any of the multitude of filling stations around me. I know that if I keep at least a half tank that I can go somewhere between 100 and 200 miles before I'm empty, and again finding a refill is quick and easy. I know that excepting strong winds in the wrong direction that my range is not significantly affected by weather. EVs would likely be less effected by the winds but problems of heat and cold are more common. I know that if I neglect to refill for some reason but anticipate a long drive that day I can dump the fuel I keep on hand for my lawnmowers in my tank and get an extra range boost in minutes. I know that if there is a loss of electricity for some reason that my truck will still get me where I need to be the next day.
The only reason that a nightly recharge gives "peace of mind" is because it relives the range anxiety that EVs created in the first place. If people wanted the peace of mind of leaving home with a full tank every morning it can be done. It can be done without needing to run wires for a quick charger or waiting for the 120 volt slow charger every night.
Where's the peace of mind in knowing that if you run your battery flat that it could mean 10 hours to recharge to full again?
I was talking in the context of energy consumption for heating buildings
So was I.
Oil has been dropping steadily for a long time.
What has been replacing oil? The answer is natural gas. In 1980 natural gas made up only 3.5% of energy produced in Norway, in 2010 it was 20%. Hydro has remained steady at about 40% of energy produced. Those numbers are from International Energy Agency.
Oil is easy to export, natural gas is not. The infrastructure to distribute natural gas may not be all that large right now but it's been growing for 40 years now.
If the goal is to reduce CO2 production then continued growth in the use of natural gas is a good way to do that, since it's been displacing oil and coal. That's how the USA has been reducing it's CO2 production.
The electricity sector is not lobbying for this
I don't believe you. That's not saying you are lying or being misled. It's just difficult to imagine that the electric sector can remain silent on this and not advocate for government policies in it's favor.
After reading the dissenting opinion I think the EPA certainly has a case to do what it did. It's a lot of legalese but this is how I understand the issue, there's three flaws in the majority opinion:
1. The stay was not a "final rule" which means the court did not have jurisdiction to even hear the case. The executive has authority to create temporary pauses in enforcement and the courts can only hear cases of final rulings of the executive. I don't know if this is considered a lack of standing but it seems the effect is similar, the case should have been tossed until more time had passed.
2. The rules allow for some leeway if there is some unusual circumstances making the timely issuance of rule changes difficult. While the EPA did decide to enact the rule they have some allowance to review the rule at any time. I'm not sure if the missing of the deadline to issue a stay by a few days was explicitly part of the argument but that does seem to be what was implied. With things still being decided on how to enforce the rule, or even if the rule should be enforced, it would be wise to avoid the distraction and expense of enforcement while going through the formal rule change process.
3. The EPA has discretion on what punishment to impose. The finding of a violation and imposing no punishment is effectively no different than not looking for a violation. Since the EPA was not sure it wanted to enforce the rule it should be allowed some time to make up its mind.
So it comes down to time. The EPA missed it's own deadline by three days, wanted only 90 days to get things in order, and not enough time has passed to make this something worthy of taking the court's time.
The opinion is a pretty straightforward application of the APA to the case.
Is it? The rules allow for some "wiggle room" in things like enforcement and unusual circumstances. Seems silly for the courts to order the EPA to send out enforcement agents to measure methane emissions when there is a very high probability these rules won't even exist 90 days later and no punishment for violations would be imposed.
What does the future of Norway electricity use look like? I assume that their demand for electricity is growing. I assume that after decades of using hydro power that they are running out of good places to put dams.
A quick Google search tells me that Noway is increasingly relying on natural gas and imports for electricity. Seems to me that they've pretty much maxed out their ability to grow hydro power. More efficient uses of their existing electricity supply can stretch that out some, which includes using heat pumps over resistance heating when practical.
If trends continue Norway is going to have to burn more natural gas (and natural gas derived electricity for heat is always going to be more expensive than burning it for heat directly), import more nuclear power from Sweden or...?
The electricity sector in Noway cannot simply ban competition from natural gas because people will vote with their wallets and overturn this ban. I don't see that happening with the possible exception of nuclear power providing an out. This could be Swedish nuclear power or Norwegian nuclear power, but it will be natural gas or nuclear power to fill that gap. Personally I'd like to see growth in nuclear power but I also have nothing against natural gas.
Ground sourced heat pumps have their limits. One of my brothers lived in a house that had a ground source heat pump where he used to live, and the house had an electric resistor backup heat. When he moved in he defeated the resistance heat because he didn't want to "pay that bill". He paid for it another way in a few chilly days in his house. I have to wonder if he actually saved any money by disconnecting the resistance heat, at some point the only heat in that system is coming from the (admitted large) electric motors running the pumps.
I'm not mocking the use of heat pumps. I'm mocking the claim that they think heat pumps will replace petroleum use.
Here in the Midwest I've seen a mix of air and ground sourced heat pumps. Newer houses tend to have the ground sourced kind because installing them after the house is built is much more expensive. Air sourced heat pumps are the norm in the southern US, as far as I've seen. I assume this has much to do with the winters not being as cold as much as it does with having little topsoil in many areas. Even then you will almost always see electric resistance backup. It might be switched off like what my brother did but it's there. Wood, propane, natural gas, and so on also apply as backup based on local availability of fuel.
Apparently you think it is okay that people should push Creationism as valid education, to give an example.
I do not believe that creationism should be taught in school, public or private. I do believe that if you take my money that I have a say in how it is spent. If you don't like what I have to say about how your child is educated then DON'T TAKE MY MONEY!
As I read this it seems to me that Florida is allowing the taxpayers to have a say in how their taxes are spent, full stop.
What bothers me is children in public schools being taught that boys can have vaginas and girls can have penises. What kind of anti-science bullshit is that? If you want schools to teach your kids that then go ahead, just DON'T TAKE MY MONEY to do it.
Getting back to this...
Education is about facts and knowledge not subject to a democratic vote.
So I'm supposed to believe in man made global warming because 99.87698769876% of experts tell me it's real? If facts and knowledge are not up to democratic vote then what happens to that argument? I don't believe that children should be taught blind faith in experts, that is not how they should live their lives. If schools want to teach about global warming then teach the science, not expert opinion. Skepticism is healthy, not something to be mocked.
I did a bit more reading on this and discovered something interesting. Currently about 85% of Norwegians heat with electricity, the balance being oil, natural gas, and wood. I did not see a breakdown of how that 15% is distributed but it is quite clear that the plurality is from wood. So that leaves something like 10% of people heating with petroleum.
What I also saw was that oil and natural gas use is growing quickly. It seems that electricity prices spiked in 2003 and since then non-electric heating has found a new demand. This has lead to plans to install natural gas service to where it was not before. What happens when electric heating starts to see competition? They lobby the government to make the competition illegal of course.
The electric energy sector held a near monopoly on heating for a very long time. This no doubt made them a lot of money. This allowed them to raise prices in recent years. It got to a point that petroleum is now looking attractive for many more people than it did just a few years before. Rather than lowering prices to stay competitive the electric sector turns to the government to protect their monopoly.
The electric energy sector is only doing this now because petroleum is a threat to their profits. They can just veil this with protecting the environment because that is popular right now.
Assuming Norwegians still have the ability to vote they are going to vote to keep their heating costs low. That's what people always do, vote with their wallets. That is why I believe this effort to make petroleum heating illegal will fail.
So, you believe we should silence an unpopular minority? How undemocratic of you.
If we live in a democracy then all must be allowed to speak and everyone's vote counts. If we live in a republic then everyone still must be allowed to speak, but we don't have to listen to those that wish to use the power of government to restrict the rights and freedoms of others.
Here's an idea. If you don't want the homeless drunk in your school board meeting then create a private school and allow only those that are paying the bills to speak.
It's bullshit like this that convinced me that government should be out of the education business. There is never going to be a school policy that pleases all the people all the time, so don't even try. Every parent should be responsible for educating their own children. You expect me to pay for educating your children and not have a say in how that money is spent? What happened to no taxation without representation? I seem to recall a war fought over that.
The USA holds about 5% of the world's population but about 25% of the world's wealth. That makes us idiots?