My point being that unless oil prices touch stratospheric levels, it's not going to happen. And oil prices are in reasonable territory today, historical average notwithstanding.
Global warming
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My point being that unless oil prices touch stratospheric levels, it's not going to happen. And oil prices are in reasonable territory today, historical average notwithstanding.
Well, bear in mind that they're largely in reasonable territory today only because the economy of the world is depressed, which has reduced oil consumption. This has bought us a little bit of time before oil prices shoot through the roof. But not a whole lot.
It really gets to me that we aren't doing more to get off of oil.
But shouldn't we be on the cusp of using less and less oil as the years progress ? Right now we are about to have an explosion of electric cars ( volts , leafs , fusions and others) solar and wind continue to drop in price and will be used more and more. Gas is going to continue to rise , its up around 32cents here in jersey since this time last year and regular is almost at $3 again . I don't doubt that this time next year it will be close to $3.25 for regular and by the middle of the decade i can see it pushing close to $5 for premium so the incentive is there for new cars
My question is this. If we were able to snap our fingers and make every car in america a full electric vehicial what would that do for global warming ? Will we see any effect at all ?
I see it as a way to end our dependence on other countrys for oil. Personaly I'd love to see the USA get rid of corn subsidarys and start switch grass ones and switch over to that or at least get to a point where ethonal and canadian oil makes up almost all our oil consumption
That would be nice. I'm just not so sure. Yes, we have efficiency gains on the horizon. But economic growth in the past has always outstripped past efficiency gains.
Yes. But these new cars take time to develop. And cars aren't the only thing that use oil.
The real concern, however, is hoarding. If no nation hoards oil, we will be looking at a gradual, if painful, increase in oil prices as time progresses. But once one nation decides that it can no longer afford to export oil, as it will itself soon be too low on this resource to even support its own economy, there will be a sudden drop in the global oil supply. If enough nations do this, we could be looking at a supply shock in oil of crisis proportions.
So it makes sense to be as aggressive as we possibly can be in reducing our oil usage. The less oil usage we have when such hoarding inevitably occurs, the less painful it will be.
Basically, it'd slow the increase in temperature. The first thing you have to recognize, however, is that changing to electric would mean that coal power would now be supplying these cars. So you've, in part, just traded one fossil fuel for another. However, electric cars still, on average, result in much less CO2 emissions, even when powered by coal plants (especially if they're charged almost exclusively at night). So there would be an improvement, but it wouldn't be terribly dramatic.
Fighting global warming really requires broad initiatives tackling every form of greenhouse gas emissions, from transportation to power generation to factory farms.
BTW that isn't necessarily true. The best scenario for any specific country is for other countries to do it as aggressively as possible so they pay an extra price to lower the demand and hence price of oil. Of course this leads to a waiting game where everyone hopes someone else deals with it. There was actually a similar type of thing in the early era of wind power, but it got cheap enough we passed that point long ago.
Well, not really, because whoever does it first will have the most experience with the technology. This, in turn, means that whoever does it first will have the most companies and people most skilled in producing the required products for whatever initiative it may be, which, in turn, builds a nice export market to any other nation that wants to come on the scene second to do something similar.
Why do you say that? The US currently has the largest wind power capacity, for instance.Well not really
Like I said look at wind power. The US pushed it way harder than the Europeans in the 80s. What happened with that? Righto. The first mover doesn't always win out. Sometimes it is better to let someone else make the boneheaded moves and enter the market next.
But when you look at the rate of installation you will see we far outstripped Europe in the 80s now we are quite close. Also the US companies that started out in the 80s doing wind are not powerhouses. GE, Vestas, Siemens and so on are bigger players now. I actually did some research on it awhile ago and it was really interesting. The US installed way more turbines early, but they were small units. The europeans started installing later with far larger units so they built up capacity way faster and spent a lot less to do it. I am not sure where you got your numbers, but here are the cummulative wind capacity installed in EU and US. I attached the chart I made that is the number of units installed. The capacity factor difference could explain differences in annual production. But installed capacity is obviously different.
The estimate is based on AWEA and EWEA plus Heymann, Matthias. 1998. Signs of Hubris: The Shaping of Wind Technology Styles in Germany, Denmark, and the United States, 1940-1990. Technology and Culture 39 (4):641-670.
The estimate is based on AWEA and EWEA plus Heymann, Matthias. 1998. Signs of Hubris: The Shaping of Wind Technology Styles in Germany, Denmark, and the United States, 1940-1990. Technology and Culture 39 (4):641-670.
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I guess, the real question is what reduction of CO2 emmision (percenage wise) would be neccesary to stabilise athmospheric CO2 at certain level. (let's say 400 ppm?).
All that alternative energy rush is cool and trendy (and neccesary in the long run), but i cant help but feel, we all go dramatic "Let's unite and do all we can to save Mother Earth, let make sacrifice for future generations". Seems like we know direction but not location of the target
All that alternative energy rush is cool and trendy (and neccesary in the long run), but i cant help but feel, we all go dramatic "Let's unite and do all we can to save Mother Earth, let make sacrifice for future generations". Seems like we know direction but not location of the target
Except they would already be spending more money for the house to pay for increased efficiency. The payoff and hence expenditure in other areas wouldn't come until at least 3-5 years down the track. That can coincide with a ramping up of more expensive alternative energy sources so the hit is somewhat mitigated with retrofitting of present homes as well as higher standards for new homes and appliances etc.
Given the fact its a trillion? dollar industry, there'll be plenty of money invested looking for the next big thing with or without government intervention. We aren't talking about the timescales of something like nuclear fusion.
LIES!
JKIm pretty sure that subsidies for CFL lightbulbs and retrofitting/installing better insulation could eat up a significant chunk. Thats less than $5000 per household, retrofitting could easily take up a good 1/3rd of that per year for 5 years. Then with the money saved in electricity and a load taken off the grid they could simultaniously move to renewable energy sources without causing people to incur too many additional charges. I don't believe they should target any renewable without first setting in motion a massive reduction in household energy use. Reducing power use could mean the worst offender coal mines are shut down for good.
Thats why higher ROI projects would fly better with them than low ROI renewable projects wholesale. Also its much easier to sell to the American people, $X per year, saves $T per year puts Y into work and reduces dependance on foreign energy by Y amount and would save the nation $Z in health care costs given the fact that most of the money would stay local. It would also employ the most vulnerable groups in America and give them jobs. Not everyone can do a technical engineering job like installing wind farms or running them. It would make good use of latent trade skills and economically displaced individuals with few valuable skills in the modern economy. Besides, aren't republican voters all hicks?!
There is reason to go for the easier sell first before trying to change how energy is produced.
The thing is, in this situation there are massive political forces at work. With the US, for instance, there was a dramatic shift against environmentalism in the 90's that may well have stalled the adoption of wind power dramatically. I don't see any evidence that the early adoption hurt at all.But when you look at the rate of installation you will see we far outstripped Europe in the 80s now we are quite close. Also the US companies that started out in the 80s doing wind are not powerhouses. GE, Vestas, Siemens and so on are bigger players now. I actually did some research on it awhile ago and it was really interesting. The US installed way more turbines early, but they were small units. The europeans started installing later with far larger units so they built up capacity way faster and spent a lot less to do it. I am not sure where you got your numbers, but here are the cummulative wind capacity installed in EU and US. I attached the chart I made that is the number of units installed. The capacity factor difference could explain differences in annual production. But installed capacity is obviously different.
The estimate is based on AWEA and EWEA plus Heymann, Matthias. 1998. Signs of Hubris: The Shaping of Wind Technology Styles in Germany, Denmark, and the United States, 1940-1990. Technology and Culture 39 (4):641-670.
But the Republicans in congress really don't give a rat's ass about return on investment. They want to set fire to economy. They want things to get as bad as they possibly can, and then blame it all on Obama, so that they can earn even more seats and possibly the presidency.Thats why higher ROI projects would fly better with them than low ROI renewable projects wholesale. Also its much easier to sell to the American people, $X per year, saves $T per year puts Y into work and reduces dependance on foreign energy by Y amount and would save the nation $Z in health care costs given the fact that most of the money would stay local. It would also employ the most vulnerable groups in America and give them jobs. Not everyone can do a technical engineering job like installing wind farms or running them. It would make good use of latent trade skills and economically displaced individuals with few valuable skills in the modern economy. Besides, aren't republican voters all hicks?!
Sure, putting money towards things which we are very sure will improve our financial outlook makes for a more solid argument. I'm just very cynical that the Republicans will ever go for it. Remember, after all, the Republican party line is, "Government bad! Must kill government! Reduce taxes! Reduce spending! Except the military, we have to keep killing brown people or else we'll be cowards!"
But yes, a very large fraction of Republican voters are hicks who have been duped into voting against their own interests.
Actually in the paper I did on it my argument was about consistency. If you check out opinion polls there was actually more support in the US than the EU. So either our political system is non-responsive to public opinion, or something else was the problem. I said the PTC wavering in and out had a lot to do with it. You can see the waves from it when you look at the data.
I don't make the argument that early adoption hurt, but I also say it did not help. The evidence doesn't show it. And it costs more to adopt early. So why bother? Expertise and all that is the usual argument, but US companies can theoretically invest elsewhere where subsidies make it more worthwhile. I am not actually of the personal opinion that we should not make an effort. I am just saying that the economic argument is not as straightforward.
Making new technologies cost competitive is not a waiting game. It is capital intensive as well.
We won't see thorium reactors without massive investment in the technology. We won't see lower cost solar without full scale trials. Same with wind power.
Wind power is an excellent example. Every new generation of wind turbines has lowered per KWh production cost with an average of 5-8% compared with the prior generation. The result is that wind power has halved it's production cost every 15 years for the past 3½ decades, - a trend that is not about to end. Money has been spent on new turbine/generator technology and grid development, and a lot of money has been spent on new production methodology. The reason wind power is relatively competitive today is exactly because of the massive investments the U.S. did in the 80s and Denmark, Germany, Span and others did in the 90s.
You can argue that the U.S. could have saved a lot of money if they had let somebody else do the initial heavy lifting. Then again it did create one world class wind turbine producer, GE Wind. That's a lot of jobs and revenue.
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Mintmaster
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No it won't. At some point, the cumulative CO2 emissions released while waiting for cost reductions will have a greater cost than your savings. We are not remotely close to that point today, but it will come.
We already are investing now to the tune of $100B+ per year ($200B expected for 2010). Cost reductions aren't going to come from expanding manufacturing scale even more, they're coming from technology advancements. We're never going to reduce the cost of glass and aluminum for CSP, for example, or concrete/steel for wind. Efficiency advances in thin film solar or high altitude wind are examples of possibilities for drastic cost reductions. Cheap and plentiful energy storage, like Isentropic is promising, will be complete gamechangers in the true cost of renewables if they pan out.
What kind of strawman argument is that? The whole point of this line of reasoning is that for equal cost, we can either reduce X today or 2-3X in 10 years. Fifty years from now, the latter will pay far, far greater dividends.
Seems I didn't even have to discuss the "always" in your point #1, as your point 3 contradicts it.
Well, it is. Just witness the inability of congress at the time to pass health care reform, for instance, or the inability of the current government to repeal don't ask, don't tell despite broad popular support.
PTC? Not sure what you mean.
Well, I say we should, naturally, first go all-out for the low-hanging fruit. And with a need for some $700b/year or so worth of economic stimulus at the moment, I'd be highly, highly surprised if that soaked up all of the low-hanging fruit where global warming mitigation is concerned. So why not use whatever remains to go for more speculative projects?
Actually I agree that was why I said either it is non-responsive or "?". It seemed pretty clear that it isn't as responsive here.
PTC is the production tax credit. A federal subsidy per amount of energy from wind turbines. That is actually a good subsidy in that it directly subsidizes the goal instead of a bad subsidy that does installed capacity or something like that. (In other words incentives are aligned unlike the ARRA subsidy for battery size in PHEVs). (whether the PTC makes sense can be argued, but at least is subsidizes what was desired instead of something else)
There is plenty of low hanging fruit. There is still tons to be done on energy efficiency. This stuff pays back quickly. Heck even corporations have started doing it (skylights to diminish lighting needs, insulation etc), but private and rental especially doesn't make good decisions b/c once again the incentives are not aligned if you don't think you will be in the house for long, or are renting it and someone else is paying utilities.
PTC is the production tax credit. A federal subsidy per amount of energy from wind turbines. That is actually a good subsidy in that it directly subsidizes the goal instead of a bad subsidy that does installed capacity or something like that. (In other words incentives are aligned unlike the ARRA subsidy for battery size in PHEVs). (whether the PTC makes sense can be argued, but at least is subsidizes what was desired instead of something else)
There is plenty of low hanging fruit. There is still tons to be done on energy efficiency. This stuff pays back quickly. Heck even corporations have started doing it (skylights to diminish lighting needs, insulation etc), but private and rental especially doesn't make good decisions b/c once again the incentives are not aligned if you don't think you will be in the house for long, or are renting it and someone else is paying utilities.
Right. Now the question is: how do we get government to actually do anything about it?
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