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Global Warming Policy Discussion

angrysoba said:
I'm pretty ignorant about biofuels although I can say with complete certainty that they are bad. Always! I don't need to have researched it to know any better, but I, and I am sure anyone here, can see I am not alone.

Okay, now kids, keep your eye on the claim:





Aha! A counterclaim. A very clear and unambiguous one. It is this:

Brazil does not have a sustainable biofuel economy because it can only create enough biofuels by eradicating areas of forest that cannot be replenished. If true this disproves the claim that Brazil has a sustainable biofuel economy. Can WildCat's argument hold?

Well, apparently Brazil's sugarcane biofuels are NOT grown in the Amazon and instead on sustainable land. This is a bit of a body blow but WildCat strikes back with an argument from incredulity(1), and a quick special plead(2):



But Zap! WildCat's refusal to believe the Brazilian government turns out to be a red herring as the source of the evidence given wasn't the Brazilian government. So, WildCat strikes again with an Almighty Distractor!(3)



But Spin0's having none of it as he reminds WildCat of his earlier claim (in bold originally). So WildCat makes another attempt with a sneaky quotemine about an entirely different country. (4)



But dammit! Someone's spotted that WildCat has been bluffing and hoped that no one would figure out it wasn't about Brazil at all! There's only one thing for it. WildCat is going to pretend that Brazil is entirely irrelevant in the first place. (5)



But D'oh! Again WildCat's flailings and prevarications have been noticed. This would certainly ruin reputations for honest arguing in others, but fortunately WildCat still has one trick up his sleeve. Make a brazen attempt to pretend that biofuels was irrelevant to the discussion(7) and a nice cheap attempt at ridicule into the bargain(8).



Ho ho! I love that one about claiming that Brazil exists. Unfortunately, while his opponents steadfastly refuse to fall into that trap, they still persist with their boring insistence that WildCat has spectactularly failed to support his own claim above. And so, with a final flourish, WildCat makes an even more audacious claim that he has a pie chart which proves him right (despite proving him wrong) and links to it.(9) And why not bet the house at this stage, anyway?



Of course, following the link shows no mention of biofuels at all.

Wow!:covereyes
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th_n121391_citizen20kane20clap.gif
 
China's Solar bubble collapses under the weight of massive state interventions, cheap loans, subsides and kickbacks. Makes the Solyndra debacle look like nothing. Those who think we need to "catch up" to China's Green crony capitalism with Green crony capitalism of our own should reconsider.

Though worldwide demand for solar panels and wind turbines has grown rapidly over the last five years, China’s manufacturing capacity has soared even faster, creating enormous oversupply and a ferocious price war.
The result is a looming financial disaster, not only for manufacturers but for state-owned banks that financed factories with approximately $18 billion in low-rate loans and for municipal and provincial governments that provided loan guarantees and sold manufacturers valuable land at deeply discounted prices.
China’s biggest solar panel makers are suffering losses of up to $1 for every $3 of sales this year, as panel prices have fallen by three-fourths since 2008. Even though the cost of solar power has fallen, it still remains triple the price of coal-generated power in China, requiring substantial subsidies through a tax imposed on industrial users of electricity to cover the higher cost of renewable energy.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/b...a-new-test-for-china.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Unfortunately you can't make wind and solar competitive just because you wish it to be. Market forces gonna get ya.
 
Virus said:
China's Solar bubble collapses under the weight of massive state interventions, cheap loans, subsides and kickbacks. Makes the Solyndra debacle look like nothing. Those who think we need to "catch up" to China's Green crony capitalism with Green crony capitalism of our own should reconsider.



http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/b...a-new-test-for-china.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Unfortunately you can't make wind and solar competitive just because you wish it to be. Market forces gonna get ya.
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are you gonna respond to the posts at you? or will you simply ignore them and keep on trolling with your innaccurate drive by posts?
 
Interesting:

A shockingly simple blueprint for big cities to save the planet without wrecking the economy

Yet in a report that will be released on Thursday, the nonprofit Urban Green Council makes the case that the country’s largest population centers needn’t rely on a federal breakthrough. Specifically, the 51-page report, titled “90 by 50,” finds that New York City could slash its emissions by a whopping 90 percent by 2050 without any radical new technologies, without cutting back on creature comforts, and maybe even without breaking its budget.
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Sounds almost too good to be true.

To get those emissions under control will require three main steps, all difficult but none inconceivable. The first is probably the most ambitious and innovative: gradually retiring the city’s massive, aging steam heat system and replacing it with high-efficiency electric heat pumps. Low-rise residential buildings would get individual mini-split pumps, a relatively easy fix, while high-rises would need to convert from steam to central geothermal heat pump systems. That’s an expensive proposition, but it would also save staggering amounts of energy over time, with cost savings that would help offset the capital outlay. And the retrofits wouldn’t happen all at once—they’d be done as each building comes in for renovations that it would need anyway.

Heating the city’s buildings and water electrically would make it far easier to draw that energy from renewable sources. (The alternative is to run the steam system off biomass, but it’s not clear how feasible that would be.) The Urban Green Council’s report doesn’t prescribe exactly how New York should do that, but it’s a standard part of any serious carbon-cutting plan. Today the city gets about one-third of its electricity from natural gas and one-tenth from coal. The more it can replace those with nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, or solar power, the deeper the emissions cuts will be. Solar panels on every roof might be a nice supplement.

It’s the third step, though, that may make the above possible: energy conservation. Here, the report isn’t asking residents to cut back—it refers to stripping waste and leakage to the bare minimum. Tweaks that seem small—insulation, plugging air leaks, heat-recovery ventilation, fluorescent lighting—loom big. New buildings in the city already include some of those measures. But the Urban Green Council’s plans would carry these standards to unprecedented levels—not just double-glazed windows, but triple-glazed windows—and apply them to existing buildings as well whenever they’re updated. That’s an awful lot of work, but the potential payoff is bigger than you might expect. Think of how much a heater has to run just to keep a room at a constant 70 degrees on a 35-degree day—and then imagine instead that the room is so thoroughly sealed that it can stay near 70 for much of the day on its own.
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More details at the link.
 
Puppycow said:
Interesting:

A shockingly simple blueprint for big cities to save the planet without wrecking the economy

Sounds almost too good to be true.

More details at the link.
Click to expand...

Actually it goes right to the heart of national building code issues I have long promoted as one of the essential keys to addressing climate change, both from a resolution and an adaptation perspective. Adopting measures that encourage energy efficiency in new construction and remodels, point-of-use alternative energy generation integrated into local area networks tied to the main grid, and the end of urban road-side parking in conjuction with enhanced mass transportation and cycling lanes would have a major impact on the amount of energy typically wasted in our country.
 
angrysoba said:
I'm pretty ignorant about biofuels although I can say with complete certainty that they are bad. Always! I don't need to have researched it to know any better, but I, and I am sure anyone here, can see I am not alone.

Okay, now kids, keep your eye on the claim:





Aha! A counterclaim. A very clear and unambiguous one. It is this:

....
Click to expand...

Good tracking. But, you know, this wildcat poster is just another serial opinionator with little background -probably just a background in used car sales- one of those that swarm by dozens in these fora, who are basically typical acquiescent personalities that will never learn and will only remember firm hands that steamroller them.
 
DC said:
are you gonna respond to the posts at you? or will you simply ignore them and keep on trolling with your innaccurate drive by posts?
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Edited by Locknar: 
Edited, breach of rule 12.


We may engage in discussing fine policies to control AGW but Virus is going on with its post-dropping, not only with promotional intention but also to provide an appearance of "state: unsettled/controversial".
 
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IMO a carbon tax would be by far the best way of reducing emissions, as even a report from the Congressional budget office noted

A tax on emissions would be the most efficient
incentive-based option for reducing emissions and
could be relatively easy to implement. If it was
coordinated among major emitting countries, it would
help minimize the cost of achieving a global target for
emissions by providing consistent incentives for reduc-
ing emissions around the world. If other major nations
used cap-and-trade programs rather than taxes on
emissions, a U.S. tax could still provide roughly com-
parable incentives for emission reductions if the tax
rate each year was set to equal the expected price of
allowances under those programs.
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http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/89xx/doc8934/02-12-carbon.pdf
 
Greetings, and apologies for not reading all the posts in this thread. I've been away, on a one month, all expense paid vacation, courtesy of jref.

I must wax redundant in this thread, in support of advanced technologies.
I remain one of very few cheerleaders here, as per radical design altering on energy consumption profile.

There is almost no avenue of energy useage that we couldn't cut 90%, given what we know now.

True, it would take some time to implement.

I'm not oppossed to thorium reactors in the meanwhile. I almost alway agree with Ben Burch.

Technology includes population stability measures, which are always emotionally unpleasant.
Ignore that for now...

We know enough now to create structures that require no heating or air-conditioning.
We know how to move people around, from point "A" to point "B" for 1000 mpg, if not more.

We are stuck in a silly pattern.
We need to freeze micro-waveable food, wrapped in plastic, that travels emmense distances, before we manage to crap out the left-overs, into an antiquated sewage system...one that could easily become a net energy gain.

We are no where near understanding how stupid we have been, or how smart we can be.

Examine, if you will, your personal energy consumption chart.
What aspects of that are seriously 'cluncky'?

We proudly waste 90% or more, of our energy needs.

This pointless waste has never had anything to do with a high standard of living.
It has always had everything to do with making salesmen very wealthy.

It's time to put a stop to this, or, at least, address the issue.

I welcome the argument.
 
Interesting opinion but given that this is a policy discussion thread, what sort of policies, whether personal, social, commercial, governmental or economic, would you suggest to

1) ensure the creation of structures that require no heating or air-conditioning,

2) introduce transport systems that "move people around, from point "A" to point "B" for 1000 mpg, if not more."

3) IMO the most difficult of all, stop the system/culture whereby "We proudly waste 90% or more, of our energy needs."
 
bobwtfomg said:
Interesting opinion but given that this is a policy discussion thread, what sort of policies, whether personal, social, commercial, governmental or economic, would you suggest to

1) ensure the creation of structures that require no heating or air-conditioning,

2) introduce transport systems that "move people around, from point "A" to point "B" for 1000 mpg, if not more."

3) IMO the most difficult of all, stop the system/culture whereby "We proudly waste 90% or more, of our energy needs."
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sanity and intelligence.

The technology already exists, with no problem.
 
quarky said:
I'm not oppossed to thorium reactors in the meanwhile. I almost alway agree with Ben Burch.
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Although THTR-300 fuel pebble event was not that serious accident it shows that more design and testing are needed to create safer thorium pebble bed reactors with easier, less dangerous and cheaper decommissioning. The development work probably needs public policies to provide incentives as there has been little interest by private companies alone. Currently China (Tsinghua University) and Norway are developing thorium reactors using public funding (+private in Norway's case).

quarky said:
We need to freeze micro-waveable food, wrapped in plastic, that travels emmense distances, before we manage to crap out the left-overs, into an antiquated sewage system...one that could easily become a net energy gain.
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We already do that in cities&towns here in Finland (and it's done in other countries too): sewage water is used as a energy source providing heat to buildings, biogas to powerplants and buses, and sludge to burn in powerplants.

Here in Finland the investments have been made by public and private funding. Nowadays it's part of climate strategy policies, and it saves money and resources in the long run ("free" energy!), is less polluting than coal or oil, cuts carbon emissions, and the processes make discharges to the enviroment much smaller. And it's possible to extract useful stuff from sewage, e.g. phosphates with bacteria/fungus or a chemical process.

They also export the tech: Outotec to build the largest and most advanced sewage sludge thermal treatment plant in Switzerland

There's also EU projects such as publicly and privately funded P-Rex: Sustainable sewage sludge management fostering phosphorus recycling and energy efficiency. Just for an example extracting phosphates from sewage could cover up to 60% of Germany's yearly usage of phosphorus.

In US New Jersey seems to be big on sewage utilization: Watts from Wastewater
New Jersey is already a top-ranked state in on-site utilization of biogas produced by wastewater treatment plants, but ongoing research could help craft incentives to push it even higher.
Thanks, Toxic Avenger!
 
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quarky said:
Well,
Do you remember "The Decider"?
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you mean

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irMeHmlxE9s

??? insane??? unintelligent hmm maybe that was his image but I suspect that was just a carefully crafted PR image to make him appeal to the average joe.

anyway it's besides the point so let me ask the question again

Do you think the problem is simply that decision makers, in general, lack sanity and intelligence?

and if your answer is yes, how can we ensure that decison makers (not just politicians) do not lack sanity and intelligence?

And if they didn't lack sanity and intelligence, what different policies would they be following? specifics please!
!
and if no, what, in your opinion, prevents sane and intelligent decision makers moving society to one where we don't "proudly waste 90% or more, of our energy needs"?
 
bobwtfomg said:
you mean

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irMeHmlxE9s

??? insane??? unintelligent hmm maybe that was his image but I suspect that was just a carefully crafted PR image to make him appeal to the average joe.

anyway it's besides the point so let me ask the question again

Do you think the problem is simply that decision makers, in general, lack sanity and intelligence?

and if your answer is yes, how can we ensure that decison makers (not just politicians) do not lack sanity and intelligence?

And if they didn't lack sanity and intelligence, what different policies would they be following? specifics please!
!
and if no, what, in your opinion, prevents sane and intelligent decision makers moving society to one where we don't "proudly waste 90% or more, of our energy needs"?
Click to expand...


Gosh.

You're asking me to do what all our leaders seem unable to do.
I'd have to be megla-manical to even give it a shot.

Fortunately, I am.

We need to re-think and re-design everything; starting with the corruption that is endemic in our culture.

Banks and hospitals and insurance companies need to show some accountability; probably through new laws, as they sure aren't likely to volunteer for the job.

Education and transparency are essential.
Corporations that have zero allegiance to any country need to be limited in their campaign contributions. They shouldn't be put in the position of buying elections.

The U.S. would do well to follow other countries that are doing well.
Our health care system accounts for 20% of our economy. It is corrupt and stupid, beyond belief.

Our war machine (Defense Department) is larger than all the globe's militaries combined. We are heavily invested therein, to put it lightly.

All this has brought us to our knees, and it will soon get lower.

So,

How to rise up from this?

It's not a math problem; that's for sure.
It's a guts problem.
 
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