Global warming

[corduroygt]

That might be true if US would get all it's oil from Canada and Mexico but it doesn't

I am getting energy in return of my money in that case, and I fully support going to biofuels which will happen. slowly but surely.

Wouldn't it be even more comfortable to just get a bunch of slaves to do all the pointless jobs and have more people just sit at home doing nothing?

We'll have robots as our servants as soon as we find cheap and limitless energy.

Also, US is by no means "most powerful country in the world". To be honest I'd be rather surprised if they manage to survive the next few years considering how stupid things the government has done. Pretty much the entire country is living on a loan it took from itself. How on earth is that in any way sustainable or even survivable?

Interesting words coming from someone who used to be under a communist empire 25 years ago. AGW legislation would only make the US economy worse.

 

[hoho]

We'll have robots as our servants as soon as we find cheap and limitless energy.

Too bad we lack the software to make them do anything useful for the forseeable future.

Interesting words coming from someone who used to be under a communist empire 25 years ago. AGW legislation would only make the US economy worse.

If anything I'd say having seen the soviet union working and falling apart from the inside followed by a new country working itself up from nearly nothing to relatively good condition should give me better understanding of the subject and how economy works.

And yes, it will most definitely make it harder for US to continue with the mindless wasting of resources but it's needed assuming people want their grandchildren to live in a remotely similarly good conditions. Too bad it seems people only care about themselves and not about future.

 

[eastmen]

Unfortunately, too many people in the US feel the way corduroygt feels. They simply won't accept or just flat out ignore the consequences of their actions.

why should we have to give up our way of life , there are advancments coming down the pipeline that should allow us to continue to enjoy our life style while year in and year out reducing our power consumption both at home and on the road.

I don't see why we are going to tax people who bought because they had to and at a time when these things were not avalible or were priced out of their price brackets.

I have a 2007 torrent and it works well and i don't see the need to replace it till at least 2017 if it keeps running. why would anyone think its a good idea to tax my ass into the ground on fuel costs it wont make me buy a hybrid /electric suv any sooner , it might make me buy one even later than 2017 as i wouldn't be able to save towards it.

The prices of all these cars and techs should start coming down in price and if they don't then they aren't viable. If you tax gass so it goes to $ 5 or $10 a gallon your just going to hurt people and accomplish nothing except making someone rich .


The same goes with other forms of energy. You shouldn't be gassing electricity cause its dirty and trying to force people to move to solar or wind cause its clean. You should be working on getting the prices down so that people will move over because they would save money and they could afford to move over.

 

[Blazkowicz]

would you agree to use an actually small car? a two-seater such as the Volkswagen 1-liter.
http://www.enerzine.com/1036/5349+volkswagen-1-liter-en-edition-limitee-des-2010+.html

such a "technology" is very old, it's simply a matter of building a low lying, thin and very lightweight car, it was used in economy post-WW2 microcars, and in pre-war sports and racing car.

someone in my midly remote family has an Amilcar, from 1923 or 1924. he claims 6L/100km, or 39mpg with it, cruising between 70km/h and 80 km/h.

of course I believe that resulting savings have to be taxed. because you know, more car efficiency means more people driving the cars, longer, and faster.
fuel taxes play a part (well, with the hassle that price of cooking oil is indexed on them) but I can imagine an odometer tax as well. significant burdening tax if you drive over 10000km during a year for instance, increasing more after that. no tax below 3000km a year (or whatever the fair numbers). jail sentence if you fiddle with the odometer.

 

[corduroygt]

would you agree to use an actually small car? a two-seater such as the Volkswagen 1-liter.
http://www.enerzine.com/1036/5349+volkswagen-1-liter-en-edition-limitee-des-2010+.html

I actually like small lightweight cars, with a manual transmission as well, since they're a lot of fun to drive. However I'm not buying one when the roads are full of much larger vehicles and semi's that really should all be replaced by freight trains. I like having a lot of glass area for outer visibility, and side-impact crash test regulations mean that cars either have small windows or have to be high enough to have large windows.

If you drive more, you're already being taxed more by using more gas. Taxing by the mile would kill any incentive to switch to electric/hybrid vehicles. If I was being taxed by the mile, I'd make sure to get the most powerful and inefficient car that I could afford so that I'd maximize the enjoyment I'd get from each mile. Therefore it's a horrible idea.

 

[eastmen]

would you agree to use an actually small car? a two-seater such as the Volkswagen 1-liter.
http://www.enerzine.com/1036/5349+volkswagen-1-liter-en-edition-limitee-des-2010+.html

such a "technology" is very old, it's simply a matter of building a low lying, thin and very lightweight car, it was used in economy post-WW2 microcars, and in pre-war sports and racing car.

someone in my midly remote family has an Amilcar, from 1923 or 1924. he claims 6L/100km, or 39mpg with it, cruising between 70km/h and 80 km/h.

of course I believe that resulting savings have to be taxed. because you know, more car efficiency means more people driving the cars, longer, and faster.
fuel taxes play a part (well, with the hassle that price of cooking oil is indexed on them) but I can imagine an odometer tax as well. significant burdening tax if you drive over 10000km during a year for instance, increasing more after that. no tax below 3000km a year (or whatever the fair numbers). jail sentence if you fiddle with the odometer.

In my case alot of times a small car would require more gas mileage. Crusing around here i can get 20mpg in my torrent and house 5 6foot or taller people which is normal with my guys night out. If i got a smaller 2 seater we would suddenly need 3 cars to go the same distance so even with 3 vastly more efficent cars that got 50miles to the gallon it would still cost more and require more resources to maintain these cars and of course the cost to the enviorment for the intial production of the cars.

The only time i have less than 3 people in my car is too and from work. But i certianly can't afford two cars . In the summer i'm going back and forth from the shore every weekend with 5 people in my torrent along with towing a boat on some of those weekends and a roof rack full of clothes and a trunk full of fishing and crabbing pots and equipment.


I would certianly buy a volt like suv when it becomes avalible but i don't know when that will be. This car is almost paid off just another 8 months and i'm down paying it. I want to make the same car payment of $300 into an account once i'm done and start saving for the next car. However if gass doubles i wont be able to do that and thus in 10 years i when a volt like suv comes out i wont make the switch , i will continue using my torrent even as it becomes less efficent due to age .



My feelings are simple on the matter. We have done so much to damage the world that my way of life isn't going to push us over the edge esp since i'm making choices to limit my impact in other areas. The world can wait 10 years for me to buy a new suv because frankly my suv choices are limited in terms of more efficent gas usage most likely for the better part of those 10 years.

My gf is hoping to get another 2 years out of her 2 door car now and if she is able to she is going to pick up the volt if it drops under 30k after rebate. So the most likely route in the future when we move in is that she drives me to the train station and then drives to work and my torrent sits home until needed.

But i've done alot for the enivorment over the last 10 years. All my lights are now energy savers with a few tranistioning to led , i only have 2 lights that are not energy saver but they are barely used (a storage closet in the garage ) and they will be switched when they die.

I have moved to led monitors so that even though i have 3 now they use less power than the 2 previously did.

My parents tvs are now led tvs which are using less power than their old tvs (i measured at the wall)

We switched over to recharable batterys.

I shut my pc down when its not in use now.

We updated all the major appliances that were bought when i was 5 to brand new highly efficent enery star stuff

We just put in new central air with two zones instead of a single large one , both many times more effficent than the 30 year old one we had. Now when the downstairs is cold one of the units will shut off.

Heck i even have my led monitors on a power strip and shut them completely off when i leave the room , everything connected to my tv except the tivo and sling box are completely shut from the power source also.


I think i'm doing enough to help out that i can get a few more years on my car before the witch hunts begin.

 

[KimB]

There are inefficiencies in the systems in the first world ... but ultimately their sustainability is a problem of an increasing wealth equality combined with an increased regressiveness in taxation.

Demographic changes are just a weak argument IMO. Productivity is still increasing, automation is still increasing ... but somehow those forces are irrelevant, but a slight demographic shift is all important going forward. Bullshit. We can maintain our society with our current level of under/unemployment, clearly a few more old people isn't suddenly going to make things grind to a halt.

Sorry, perhaps you misunderstood what I was talking about. The problem with the US health system is ballooning medical costs. The demographic shift has some impact on this, but is a minor factor. The primary problem is the use of private insurance. We've made a significant step towards a sustainable health care system in the US with last year's health care reform package, but now the Republicans want to repeal that (or at least say they do), and it also doesn't really go far enough.

 

[KimB]

Also, US is by no means "most powerful country in the world". To be honest I'd be rather surprised if they manage to survive the next few years considering how stupid things the government has done. Pretty much the entire country is living on a loan it took from itself. How on earth is that in any way sustainable or even survivable?

This getting rather off topic, but that's not actually the problem. The problem is instead that we don't have any sort of workable economic recovery plan, and nobody seems to want to talk about tax increases ever happening.

The US can sustain its current deficit levels for a good decade, perhaps more, before there is any sort of problem, as Japan has showed.

Exact same things is happening in US and most other countries right now and people still don't realize that the real crisis hasn't even started yet.

Well, the "real crisis" is long-term economic stagnation. That is what we're facing going forward.

 

[KimB]

why should we have to give up our way of life

Um, nobody is asking you too. The costs of going full-bore on limiting CO2 emissions are quite minimal. Most of it just involves changing price incentives so that the full impact of their choices is reflected in the prices people pay for things. Then the market should naturally gravitate towards a more sustainable economy.

 

[Gubbi]

Where's the actual stumbling blocks? I hear the successor to ITER whatsitscalled will take years and years to complete, yet it's not any bigger than being able to comfortably fit inside the hangar of a light aircraft airfield, and that probably includes most if not all the support equipment too... Machining and assembling custom metal parts doesn't take THAT long.

Is it a money issue or what?

ITER seems to be right on the edge of science and technology. The steep temperature gradient in the plasma causes turbulent convection which both cools the core plasma and makes it harder to confine magnetically. Supressing turbulence seems to be key to sustained fusion burning.

When (if) fusion burning is achieved, ITER needs to extract the power of the fusion process. The surface of the reactor chamber is going to experience an energy flux in the 1-10MW/m² range, a large part of this in the form of high energy neutrons. Finding a material that won't lose structural strength and won't transmute into something awful is going to be hard, - if not impossible.

Cheers

 

[Grall]

Supressing turbulence seems to be key to sustained fusion burning.

Perhaps a smaller tokamak would be better then, rather than a really big one. Magnetic fields lose strength quickly across distances, so a smaller toroid cross-section would probably experience more powerful field strengths. And there would be less room to create convection in, and temp gradients would probably also be less, so that would be 3-fold improvement.

Finding a material that won't lose structural strength and won't transmute into something awful is going to be hard, - if not impossible.

You're making me think it'll turn into some kind of mutant monstrosity... Anyway, structural integrity... Surely it's not going to become the equivalent of wet tissue paper, and since a tokamak doesn't rely on physically containing the plasma, but rather magnetically, does the inner liner really have to be that strong? It must obviously support its own weight...

We've had various materials experience neutron radiation for years and years in conventional fission reactors, why's this such a big deal all of a sudden now?

 

[Gubbi]

Perhaps a smaller tokamak would be better then, rather than a really big one. Magnetic fields lose strength quickly across distances, so a smaller toroid cross-section would probably experience more powerful field strengths. And there would be less room to create convection in, and temp gradients would probably also be less, so that would be 3-fold improvement.

It is the large temperature difference between the core of the plasma and the surface that causes convection, if you make it physically smaller, you get the same temperature difference over a shorter distance, which results in stronger forces and more turbulence.

ITER is bigger, hotter and stronger magnetically than JET.

You're making me think it'll turn into some kind of mutant monstrosity... Anyway, structural integrity... Surely it's not going to become the equivalent of wet tissue paper, and since a tokamak doesn't rely on physically containing the plasma, but rather magnetically, does the inner liner really have to be that strong? It must obviously support its own weight...

We've had various materials experience neutron radiation for years and years in conventional fission reactors, why's this such a big deal all of a sudden now?

The primary difference is that neutrons in a fission reactor are thermalized, that is, they are moderated until they are in thermal equilibrium with the moderator. This means that all the energy from fission is transferred to the fission products and the moderator (as heat).

In a fusion reactor you have more neutrons, higher initial energies for the neutrons and no moderator. This means the neutron flux in the blanket is much higher and has a much harder spectrum. This means that a larger part of these neutrons will be capable of transmuting the reactor material into other isotopes. We already see the difference today where gas cooled and heavy water reactors are more expensive to decomission than light water reactors because the reactor itself ends up being more radioactive.

The blanket serves multiple purposes:
1. It needs to use the neutrons from the fusion process to breed tritium from lithium, a method to extract tritium needs to be in place.
2. It needs to absorb the energy from the neutrons. This absorption is in the entire volume of the blanket since neutrons penetrates matter easily.
3. It needs to absorb the energy from the black body radiation of the plasma. This absorption is on the surface of the blanket. With temperatures of 100MK, we're talking soft X-rays here.
4. It needs to transfer the absorbed energy to a coolant.

Cheers

 

[corduroygt]

Um, nobody is asking you too. The costs of going full-bore on limiting CO2 emissions are quite minimal. Most of it just involves changing price incentives so that the full impact of their choices is reflected in the prices people pay for things. Then the market should naturally gravitate towards a more sustainable economy.

That's just an euphemism for "we're going to raise gas prices and hike your power bill." Not only it's going to make life harder for poor-lower middle class people who use a lot of gas, it'll also help push inferior and insufficient power sources like solar and wind and make you pay more for them. It's going to make industry and manufacturing more expensive in the US, causing more jobs to go to china and india, who do not worry about such pesky things as AGW. As long as they are not doing anything for their emissions, neither should the US.

 

[KimB]

That's just an euphemism for "we're going to raise gas prices and hike your power bill." Not only it's going to make life harder for poor-lower middle class people who use a lot of gas, it'll also help push inferior and insufficient power sources like solar and wind and make you pay more for them. It's going to make industry and manufacturing more expensive in the US, causing more jobs to go to china and india, who do not worry about such pesky things as AGW. As long as they are not doing anything for their emissions, neither should the US.

Bullshit on top of bullshit.

First of all, adding some taxes to carbon dioxide emissions, implemented properly, would have essentially zero impact on trade. So your jobs claim is just specious and irrelevant.

Second, the price increase, as I've already mentioned, would be exceedingly minimal. Almost nobody would even notice. Of course, we need a much stronger support system for the poor in the US, but that is a separate issue. And conservatives don't do themselves any favors in using the poor to argue against dealing with AGW while at the same time arguing that the poor don't need any help.

Finally, if the US implemented strong carbon limits, that would give the US tremendous diplomatic capital to get other countries on board.

 

[corduroygt]

Bullshit on top of bullshit.

First of all, adding some taxes to carbon dioxide emissions, implemented properly, would have essentially zero impact on trade. So your jobs claim is just specious and irrelevant.

Please show some figures and numbers how it would have zero impact on trade and jobs.

Second, the price increase, as I've already mentioned, would be exceedingly minimal. Almost nobody would even notice. Of course, we need a much stronger support system for the poor in the US, but that is a separate issue. And conservatives don't do themselves any favors in using the poor to argue against dealing with AGW while at the same time arguing that the poor don't need any help.

Show me some numbers about the price increases being minimal. I also would like to remind you that I am all for helping the poor that's around me, because that'll indirectly benefit me as well. However I couldn't give two shits about helping the poor in another continent, because it won't benefit me at all.

Finally, if the US implemented strong carbon limits, that would give the US tremendous diplomatic capital to get other countries on board.

Military might tends to be much more effective in getting others to do our willing.

 

[3dilettante]

Wouldn't the military force necessary for forcing 5.6+ billion people into reducing their carbon emissions require some pretty large tax increases?

 

[Frank]

I'd actually say bacteria are far better at adapting. Hell, there are bacteria around today that can eat latex, a material that did not exist until we started making it.

Anyway, the way that life in general will adapt is that most things will die out. Species across the world will continue to go extinct until the reduced competition allows the remaining species to survive in the new conditions. Of course, every once in a while there will be the rare species that actually benefits, but most will die.

Now, I expect humans to not go extinct, unlike most species, because yes, we are quite good at adapting. The problem is that it will be very painful for us, with many of us dying in the interim. There is no reason to fuck up our civilization when we can avoid it.

... and strangely enough, many new species and/or breeds will come into existence as well. That's how things happen.

So, no, I don't agree that we will be responsible for the extinction of many (or even most) species. Because I don't think we have that power. And even if the global climate change (with or without human influence) would be responsible for extincting many species, we should rejoice in the knowledge and cataloguing of all the new ones that will emerge.

The amount of biomass won't change to any significant degree, whatsoever, even if the main lifeforms turn out to be humans, yeast, fungi and cockroaches.

Unless we totally nuke the place, of course.

 

[Frank]

Now you're just being intentionally ignorant. You have no interest whatsoever in actually understanding anything. You just want to throw poop at things you don't like.

I mean, when you go so far as to suppose that news reports reflect scientific consensus, news reports which routinely exaggerate and distort what scientists say, and then from the correction to the news reports extrapolate that scientists are lying to you, well, it's very clear that you aren't interested. You just want your ego stroked.

Wow. Very cool. That's exactly what I'm trying to make you understand. Only, as in what you are doing.



Ok, at least that levelled the playing field, and puts down a solid base upon which we can build. We'll start from scratch.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Bullshit on top of bullshit.

First of all, adding some taxes to carbon dioxide emissions, implemented properly, would have essentially zero impact on trade. So your jobs claim is just specious and irrelevant.

Second, the price increase, as I've already mentioned, would be exceedingly minimal. Almost nobody would even notice. Of course, we need a much stronger support system for the poor in the US, but that is a separate issue. And conservatives don't do themselves any favors in using the poor to argue against dealing with AGW while at the same time arguing that the poor don't need any help.

Finally, if the US implemented strong carbon limits, that would give the US tremendous diplomatic capital to get other countries on board.

Agreed

 

[pjbliverpool]

Unfortunately, too many people in the US feel the way corduroygt feels. They simply won't accept or just flat out ignore the consequences of their actions.

Indeed, makes my skin crawl reading some of the comments in here.