Hi all,
As an experiment I am creating two open threads. An oil and natural gas thread (coal could be here as well) and a non-oil thread for other energy and non-energy related discussions.
This thread is the non-oil discussion so you can put, renewable energy, EV, philosophy , evolutionary psychology, etc in this thread.
Thanks.
New studies deepen concerns about a climate-change ‘wild card’
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/07/new-studies-deepen-concerns-about-a-climate-change-wild-card/
This scenario (heating and resultant ice melt leading to a disruption in the gulf stream, which could then lead to dramatic cooling) is certainly possible. And no one knows what the probabilities are for this scenario, or any scenario for that matter.
What we do know is that-
1. Theoretically, the grand scale chemistry experiment that we are engaged in with CO2 and methane is highly likely to lead to global warming to a degree that will greatly impact an over-extended human population to a large degree.
2. Rapid and massive gyrations in climate are normal in the long stretch of history, and strong paleo-climatology evidence exists showing that over the past 10,000 yrs the earth has been in a very stable and warm era. The stability and mild temperatures during this time of rapid development of human civilization is unprecedented dating back over hundreds of thousands of years. This data indicates that we should not presume to live on a planet with a stable mild climate, as we have been blessed with during our exponential growth phase. Rather we would be wise to expect massive gyrations as part of the norm.
3. Our ability to predict what will actually happen to climate over the next decades and beyond has a track record of 0 (on a scale of 0-100). Our models of these extraordinarily complex systems are just very weak models. Really, we are not at all beyond the guesswork phase of climate prediction.
Given this, what we should do is_________.
you tell me
Hickory (BS,MD)
Given this, what we should do is_________.
you tell me
Hickory (BS,MD)
I think we should be preparing for a non-fossil fuel and a lower per capita consumption future, for economic and declining resource reasons. Those activities should result in lower CO2 output. Whether it will be enough to change warming remains to be seen. But we need to be thinking about the economic impacts of trends we know will happen, and will likely happen fairly soon.
I’m a native Texan. Lived here all my 51 years, save for the 4 when I was active duty USAF. I can say, unequivocally, that in all that time, Texas has experienced many thunderstorms all summer long. Big ones. Lightning, thunder, and lots of rain. But this happens every year, and just because the weather people on TV are saying we’ve had more this year than last means absolutely nothing. I can’t back it up with data proving my case that this has nothing to do with so-called man made climate change, I can only go with my gut on this, and it tells me that there is a big political movement that is really little more than left-wing alarmism about naturally occurring weather events. At it’s core, the movement provides a means of expanding the reach of the Knowing Class, the Enlightened Ones who know better than the rest of us and desire to use their wisdom to run someone’s life other than their own. To pull off this well planned con, the left uses the MSM as a willing ally and propaganda arm. I put no faith or trust in anything they say, and urge others to do the same.
“I can’t back it up with data proving my case that this has nothing to do with so-called man made climate change, I can only go with my gut on this, and it tells me that there is a big political movement that is really little more than left-wing alarmism about naturally occurring weather events.”
Good luck with this Dennis.
Well, do you climate change experts ever wonder why you are mocked? The following are a few examples…
1958, Arctic Ice Sheet Will Envelope NYC, Chicago:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/20/flashback-1958-arctic-ice-sheet-will-envelope-nyc-chicago/
1971, Scientists Predict Burning Coal Will Cause the Next Ice Age:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/03/flashback-1971-scientists-predict-burning-coal-will-cause-the-next-ice-age/
W H Science Advisor “Global Warming Saving us From Another Ice Age”:
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/23/video-wh-science-advisor-says-man-made-global-warming-saving-us-from-another-ice-age/
1972, Walter Cronkite, Coming Ice Age:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/julia-seymour/2015/03/05/and-thats-way-it-was-1972-cronkite-warned-new-ice-age
MIT Climate Scientist: Global Warming Believers A “CULT”:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/01/21/mit-climate-scientist-global-warming-believers-a-cult/
I think you’ll probably vote for Trump Dennis. His story seems to fit your world view.
Congratulations on developing a such a black and white view. It must be comfortable to be able to be able to sort things out into such neat and convenient piles.
One question- why do you even bother to read stuff on this discussion blog?
I visit here to read stuff because, as a true American conservative and patriot, I feel obligated to counter the lies of the liberal agenda and political correctness, both of which have sadly infiltrated nearly all facets of modern American society.
Dennis,
I can see your red, white, and blue cape flapping in the wind from Columbia’s wings as she glides over the Texas prairie now.
So, you are a //true// American patriot and conservative…how special….how may we learn from you, your Grace?
Pray tell, please enumerate the many and various bullet points that comprise the twenty-first century Liberal Agenda. Same request for a list of your grievances vis-a-vis political correctness. On the other hand, no, don’t do that here…please go down to your neighborhood watering hole and knock some back and regale your peeps there with your profound wit and wisdom.
You are a tremendous boor.
Which means what exactly? To you.
(Nationalist ideological indoctrination?)
“Patriotism is, as we know, the last refuge of a scoundrel. Now we’re talking about real scoundrels, like Nixon” ~ Gore Vidal
What about collapse of civilizations?
Is this where your ‘left knowing class’ fights with your ‘right unknowing class’ and the fight ends up destroying everything, including the planet?
Is this your mother of all WWE Smackdowns?
“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.” ~ Joseph Goebbels
“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” ~ Noam Chomsky
“The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself… Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable…” ~ H.L. Mencken
There have been many simulation strategy games, mostly war games, but others too. A friend of mine who played these games said that they never used nuclear weapons because they might as well douse the board with gasoline and ignite it.
I just found out there was a game produced in the 1960’s called “Nuclear War”. Can you imagine sitting down with your friends and playing that one?
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/713/nuclear-war
Probably be best played in a 1950’s bomb shelter.
Has anyone produced a civilization collapse game? How about a peak oil game? You know, fun with the family and educational too.
Why play a peak oil or civilizational collapse game with the real one playing out in realtime? Would it not be a little like listening to a recording at a live concert?
Some people like to make the decisions, not just be part of the audience or a victim.
If there is a fractional reserve banking game I want a copy of it.
There is no collapse of civilization game as such that I am aware of, but I am also the sort of person who would be the last to know if there is one.
The entertainment industry is mopping up on end of civilization themed movies. TV too I guess, but I don’t watch tv and can’t say. Don’t go to the movies either, but just one end of civilization movie has make a novice actress the highest paid woman in Tinseltown.
Monopoly probably cost whoever invented the game peanuts except for some time around a table with a few other games enthusiasts.
The time might be ripe for an end of the world game similar to monopoly.
Ask and ye shall find
TEOTWAWKI beckons.
You beat your neighbours to stock up on guns and ammo
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/162578/collapse
or you can join them to help rescue the ecosphere
http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2011/12/20/collapse-the-game-early-draft/
and
http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2012/08/12/collapse-the-game-take-3/
Guess which one made it to production.
Financial collapse is mainstream
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Market-Meltdown-Board-Game-CLA1092/dp/B008RYDG02
Try this:
http://www.amazon.com/GMT-Games-0510-14-Twilight-Struggle/dp/B0060L6EE4/ref=sr_1_1/180-2273805-8358731?ie=UTF8&qid=1441853751&sr=8-1&keywords=Twilight+Struggle+board+game
If you lose, the game ends with a bang.
Well, we are like the Austrians in 1913 arguing who our next Habsburg Rulers are going to be.
Welcome back Caelan!
We disagree about a LOT of things but anybody who quotes HL Mencken can’t be all bad. LOL.
You can convert me to your sort of politics if you can figure out a way to convert EVERYBODY ELSE as well.
Hi and thanks old farmer mac.
If we don’t ‘convert’ ourselves in ways that work in harmony with Mom Nature, Mom Nature will ‘help us along’, with the occasional ‘lightning bolts’ from Sky Daddy.
“I can’t back it up with data proving my case that this has nothing to do with so-called man made climate change, I can only go with my gut on this, and it tells me that there is a big political movement that is really little more than left-wing alarmism about naturally occurring weather events.”
Dennis, you can’t stick observe the sky for decades and know if there is AGW or not. Unless you have a PHD in climatology and pour over lots of climate data, journals, articles and engage in discussions with other climatologists with PHD’s you don’t know yea or nay regarding the state of the planet’s climate system. There is a website called Neven’s Arctic blog and thinking I knew enough about the topic to enter into their thread was a big mistake. I quickly found out no one was responding to my posts because my lack of knowledge was too obvious. Their lingo is so different I don’t even know most times what they are writing about. It’s a very specific and complex field of science and as such we need to rely on those in that field to be ethical in their analysis and take heed from their warnings.
In short Dennis, what you need is LONG series of GLOBAL data, measured with INSTRUMENTS.
Looking at the local weather for a while where you live gives you nothing. CO2 floats around all the planet so you gotta go global. And climate is not weather. So no, looking at your Texas weather is of no help.
There are even places that will go COLDER (for a while) because of global warming.
Hi Islandboy and Shallowsands,
You both had some interesting links and/or comments towards the bottom of the “EIA Data Change” post by Ron.
The threading was messed up so the conversation might work better here.
Repost those comments here if you wish by copying and pasting.
Arctic Reality: If We Want to Limit Global Warming We Cannot Drill for Oil in the Chukchi Sea
“Our results suggest that, globally, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80% of current coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050 in order to meet the target of 2 degrees Celsius,” Paul Ekins and Christophe McGlade wrote in the journal Nature earlier this year. “We show that development of resources in the Arctic and any increase in unconventional oil production are incommensurate with efforts to limit average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.” [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit]
http://ecowatch.com/2015/09/07/michael-brune-arctic-reality/
Two degrees of climate change may be too much
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
http://thebulletin.org/two-degrees-climate-change-may-be-too-much8731
There is a substantial possibility that forced climate change is already baked in, no matter WHAT we do now. Getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere looks to be an impossibly expensive undertaking barring miracles.
We are paradoxically trapped hoping that Business As Usual on the grand scale will save us before it kills us.
A new generation business as usual based on renewable resources and energy is at least technically possible, in combination with a falling population and substantial changes in our energy and resource hogging ways.
But the actual achievement of this transition -IF it is achieved- depends on our present day generation lasting long enough and ”going to seed” slow enough for the new generation to become well established.
Business as usual, the current wasteful generation, is going to kill off most off us, maybe nearly all of us.
But just MAYBE a few pockets of the potential new generation thrifty, efficient, low energy business as usual will become well enough established to survive.
There actually are some healthy looking little pockets of new generation greenery popping up here and there, quite a few of them in fact. Some of them just might grow big enough and strong enough to survive the non renewable resources crunch.
A successful transition does not have to happen in the space of a decade or even two or three decades. The dregs of the non renewable resources will be plentiful enough to keep a much reduced economy kept firmly pointed in the direction of sustainability going for decades, maybe even a century or two.
We piss away more on new sports stadiums in most states than we spend subsidizing local renewable energy industries and improving energy efficiency.The average tobacco addict spends enough on tobacco alone to buy a cheap new pure electric car in a decade or so.
Try to heat a pot of water using a hair dryer on top of the water surface. It will take a long good while. For the same reason, it takes time for the oceans to be heated up by the atmosphere. This slow down the process of heating the atmosphere, giving us a lag time of several decades.
Imagine the warming of the climate the last decades going on uninterupted for 50 years, then suddenly stopping. That is the amount of future global warming ALREADY programmed into the system by our already done emissions. Now add feed back systems into the mix. Even if we stopped all emissions today, we would likely trigger a crucial climate trigger along the way anyway. I fear it is to late already.
The EPA predicts that New Hampshire will have the current climate of North Carolina by the end of the century in the high carbon output scenario (our current reality). Since New Hampshire has a greater variability of sunlight than North Carolina, the extremes will increase.
Dennis, thanks for the invitation. One comment that I posted might have been posted after the threads got messed up and I was hoping that, people might attempt to address the questions I raised in that comment, so I want to repost that comment here as well with the questions in bold:
I spotted an article that I thought was somewhat relevant to the discussion on providing all US electricity needs with solar power only.
Is Hillary Clinton’s ambitious solar energy goal for the US workable?
What caught my attention was a graphic showing the forecast for wind and solar generation that, had as it’s source, the EIA. It was an interactive thing and not an image so, I couldn’t copy and paste it but, I was able to download the data, reproduce it and attach it to this post.
Can anybody explain to me/us, why the EIA thinks that after 2017 growth in solar and wind generation is going to just stop abruptly? Up to that point, solar will have been doubling every two years and wind every three to four years. I would appreciate any hints as to why they think neither solar nor wind will double for the next ten years after 2017?
In the meantime to get back to oil, I had a look at a post on this very web site from April 10, 2015
The EIA’s International Energy Outlook 2014
It’s amazing! They have world C+C production climbing steadily from under 78 million bpd in 2014 to just over 99 million bpd in 2040, a steady climb totaling 21.25 million bpd, essentially without a pause!
Somehow, production of a non renewable resource is going to continue for the foreseeable future but, the production of the means of harnessing renewable energy is just going to grind to a halt in the next couple of years! Yeah! Riiiight!
Honestly, I don’t know why the EIA even bothers to try extending their forecasts out more than a couple of years out. Their long term forecasts are pathetic.
On April 17, 2015, Ron Posted:
AEO 2015, The EIA’s Crude Production Expectations
The first comment was by Sam Taylor and I think he basically “hit the ball out of the park” as it relates to oil:
I’ve been reading back through some old EIA reports over the last few days, and one of the things I notice about their predictions is just how strongly the last 4 or 5 years of performance seem to influence where their predictions go. They were over optimistic early in the 2000s seemed to get more pessimistic in the mid-late 2000s, and have been vastly more optimistic in the last couple of years as US growth has taken off again. So basically this seems to cause them to miss most of the turning points, which are the most important events.
However, when it comes to solar and wind, past trends seem to have no bearing, past two to three years out as shown below!
Hi Islandboy,
Yes the EIA outlook doesn’t seem to make sense. Their thinking may be that low natural gas prices will continue until 2027 and that this will curtail any further growth in Wind power.
However, the report below indicates that wind power costs are very competitive with natural gas:
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/08/10/study-finds-that-the-price-of-wind-energy-in-the-united-states-is-at-an-all-time-low-averaging-under-2-5%C2%A2kwh/
An excerpt:
Lower wind turbine prices and installed project costs, along with improvements in expected capacity factors, are enabling aggressive wind power pricing. After topping out at nearly 7¢/kWh in 2009, the average levelized long-term price from wind power sales agreements signed in 2014 fell to just 2.35¢/kWh—the lowest-ever average price in the U.S. market, though admittedly focused on a sample of projects that largely hail from the lowest-priced central region of the country.
Islandboy, The federal tax credit for new solar installations ends after 2017. As I pointed out the Sunshot Initiative is targeting $1.50 per peak watt. At that level there should be a lot of incremental solar investments. Oh, and with utility scale installations the target is $1 per peak watt.
Don, you are implying that the growth to date is purely driven by incentives and while there is certainly a good chance that such is the case, might falling costs not be a driver as well? At any rate I subscribe to a version of Tony Seba‘s outlook, in that prices of solar technology will continue to fall, with incremental technology and manufacturing process improvements nibbling away at costs till solar becomes competitive without incentives. That point may arrive before the end of 2017, in which case why would growth in solar just virtually stop?
Even if we were to accept the EIA’s forecast for wind and solar, what would be the basis for their optimism surrounding oil production? We have oil guys participating at this site bellyaching that oil production is senseless at these prices, which implies that oil prices will have to go much higher for growth in oil production to be sustained. In that event other fossil fuel prices will likely go up in tandem, making renewables even more competitive.
Doesn’t make sense!
As if to bolster my reasoning, the following popped up this morning over at solarserver.com:
U.S. solar PV capacity surpasses 20 GW; 1,393 MW installed in Q2, 2015
“The utility PV market continues to be the bedrock driver of new installation growth. And in the second half of this year through 2016, growth will reach new heights as a higher share of what comes online stems from projects procured purely based on centralized solar’s cost competitiveness,” said Shayle Kann, Senior Vice President at GTM Research.
Solar now can power 4.6 million homes in the U.S.
The U.S. installed 2.7 GW of PV in the first six months of 2015. With significant growth expected in the second half of the year, the U.S. is on pace for a record-breaking 7.7 GW year.
Bold mine.
I get the feeling that, solar PV is developing the momentum of a freight train and is going to be very hard to slow down, much less stop!
I fully agree that costs will be falling drastically. My quoting of the Sunshot goals says where I stand on that. Hopefully the procedures for installation will also be highly simplified and streamlined. I guess my suggestion reflects on why the EIA is making their predictions about solar and wind. As far as EIA projections on oil, they have been absurd for years.
It is hard to compare prices from one country to another in a truly realistic fashion, but it seems that the German solar companies can do small scale pv jobs for just about HALF what a similar job costs here in the USA.
Most of that difference will lie in a friendlier and more efficienct regulatory environment and greater competitiveness among the installers.
Our guys will catch up fast when it comes to getting a job done quickly at low cost once we get better at the permitting process. It looks as if it might be ten years in some states before we have a reasonable and friendly regulatory system with clear cut codes regulating the electrical connections, the way panels are mounted on roofs and so forth.
Personally I believe there is inevitably a time coming – if BAU lasts- when it will be good sense for a utility to own some big solar farms just so it can shut down coal and gas plants whenever the sun is bright so as to save on fuel purchases.
The only real reason I have a compact car is to save on purchasing gasoline for my ancient four by four truck.
The EIA is oriented towards providing support for public policy/legislation by Congress.
Their baseline for any proposed congressional is current legislation. So, their median (“reference”) projections generally assume no changes at all, with an underlying assumption of BAU.
Nick, Maybe I’m too dense to make sense out of your response or maybe, in an effort to be concise, you’ve completely lost me! I’ll repeat my questions:
“Can anybody explain to me/us, why the EIA thinks that after 2017 growth in solar and wind generation is going to just stop abruptly? Up to that point, solar will have been doubling every two years and wind every three to four years. I would appreciate any hints as to why they think neither solar nor wind will double for the next ten years after 2017?”
If as you say, “Their baseline for any proposed congressional is current legislation. So, their median (“reference”) projections generally assume no changes at all, with an underlying assumption of BAU”, how does that explain the sudden change in the growth rates of solar and wind after 2017?
I was not asking why they think oil production will continue to grow steadily through 2040. I interpret your response above to be an explanation of that BAU scenario, which is not the explanation I am looking for. The graph titled “Wind and Solar Generation” just does not make sense and seems to defy explanation. No one can explain it!
The easy answer is, of course, that it makes no sense.
The longer answer is that the EIA is very, very conservative. They think of their primary audience as being the US Congress. They think of their base case projections as simply being the current situation, and then they provide other scenarios which reflect possible policy changes.
We can only guess that the EIA thinks that current wind & solar growth is due to current policy which is due to expire. That, of course, makes no sense…
islandboy said “Can anybody explain to me/us, why the EIA thinks that after 2017 growth in solar and wind generation is going to just stop abruptly? Up to that point, solar will have been doubling every two years and wind every three to four years. I would appreciate any hints as to why they think neither solar nor wind will double for the next ten years after 2017?”
Much like a department store you have to wander around the government to see all the products. In the Department of Energy they predict increases through 2050, with an end total of 404.25 GW installed. Here is there interactive mapping.
http://energy.gov/articles/new-interactive-map-shows-big-potential-america-s-wind-energy-future
The DOE has big plans for wind
Unlocking our nation’s wind potential
“Since the 1980s, the cost of deploying wind energy has dropped by 90 percent. Meanwhile, further improvements are poised to make wind economical in every state.”
http://energy.gov/eere/articles/unlocking-our-nation-s-wind-potential
So who do you believe, accountants or energy scientists?
Between them Nick and MZ have nailed it down tight. EIA guys are well aware their future paychecks and bennies depend on turning out a product satisfactory to their political masters.
Expecting them to publish results that would piss off the big boys who keep congress critters in office via campaign contributions is insanity. Keeping the BAU apple cart upright is a tricky business.
If the public were ever to get the idea that gas and oil are going to be scarce and expensive ….. that renewables might actually be cheaper than fossil fuels in the not so distant future………… hell fire and damnation, the dim rats would OWN Washington DC outright.
A shit load of bankers and industrialists would lose their asses. OF course the smartest or luckiest ones would see it coming and divest and get into renewables early.
OF course the smartest or luckiest ones would see it coming and divest and get into renewables early.
I have no doubt whatsoever that they all see the writing on the wall already! Personally I can’t see a continuation of BAU and burning oil to produce electricity or as fuel in ICE private automobiles. This morning I just happened to be reading the 2014 financial statements from BASF and it is perfectly clear that petrochemicals are just way too valuable. It is just plain stupid to continue burning them as we have been doing until now!
Here’s a note about what Citi Group and UBS think about the future.
http://www.energypost.eu/ubs-citigroup-warn-investors-massive-revolution-energy-industry/
Analysts from UBS and Citigroup, two of the world’s largest investment banks, believe the growth of solar power, in combination with advances in batteries and electric cars, will cause a huge disruption in the energy industry. UBS believes centralised fossil fuel generation will become “extinct” sooner than most people realise. Citigroup predicts renewables will replace coal and gas in power generation, which will free up the use of gas as a substitute for oil in transport.
Should have said will instead of would, poor word choice on my part.
Fred’s link is a year plus old but and I am not so optimistic as the author by ANY means when it comes to the timing of the tipping point at which renewables become incontestably cheaper in day to day terms than fossil fuels and a centrally powered grid.
But I do believe it is coming.
Optimists of the technology tribe are generally in my opinion a little on the giddy side and fail to take into account plain old inertia and habit on the part of naked apes.
Here is an excerpt from the link:
xxxxx
Leading investment bank UBS says the payback time for unsubsidised investment in electric vehicles plus rooftop solar plus battery storage will be as low as 6-8 years by 2020 – triggering a massive revolution in the energy industry.
“It’s time to join the revolution,” UBS says in a note to clients, in what could be interpreted as a massive slap-down to those governments and corporates who believe that centralised fossil fuel generation will dominate for decades to come.
UBS, however, argues that solar panels and batteries will be disruptive technologies. So, too, will electric vehicles and storage.
By the end of the decade, it says, the combination of will deliver a pay-back time of between six to 8 years, as this graph below shows. It will fall to around 3 years by 2030. Right now, the payback is probably around 12 years, enough to encourage the interest of early adopters. You can read more here on Why EVs will make solar viable without subsidies.
UBS-solar-payback-1
The UBS report is focused on Europe, where it says that Germany, Spain, and Italy will be leaders because of their high electricity and fuel costs. But it could equally apply to Australia, which has both high electricity and high fuel costs, and a lot more sun – so solar is much cheaper.
xxxxx
I am not optimistic that renewables will get to be cheap enough fast enough to displace fossil fuels quite so quickly … but maybe fossil fuels will be substantially more expensive in 2020 with prices going up than they are today.
This report by one of the biggest investment banks does support my contention that Germany’s investment in renewables is going to pay off big time over the long haul.
It is inevitable imo that they will figure out ways to use renewable power to support their economy at less expense to them than paying for ever more expensive imported fossil fuels.
I’m not sure it is even so important that we make an immediate switch to EVs. I think it is more important that we realize putting money into infrastructure for the long-term support of fossil fuels might not be wise.
Granted, EVs still use roads, so maintaining a road system goes on no matter how vehicles are powered.
But we might start making some projections to figure out what we are planning for now which might be needed in 10, 20, or 30 years.
And if we foresee the decline of ICEs, what do we need to do now to facilitate them, without propping them up beyond their usefulness?
Probably the biggest area where we can plan for EVs without making a massive investment in them prematurely are charging stations. Adding more of them is relatively easy and inexpensive.
The other way we can plan is to continue to improve batteries and also plan for the day when utilities will incorporate EV charging and energy storage into their day-to-day operations.
I don’t think what we see now in terms of EVs has to be the basis of what we see in the future for EVs.
I mean, you can see the evolution of car culture by watching what has happened over the years with shopping malls. A certain style becomes popular. Then they pop up around the country. Then shopping preferences change. We’ve gone from huge malls with department stores, to collections of big box stores, to small, walkable, family friendly malls, and so on.
Companies spend a ton of money to build shopping areas and then have them go empty in 20 or 30 years when shopping changes.
Now we have more and more shopping done online with delivery to homes, so people aren’t going to malls like they used to do.
Similarly, what we see on a small scale with EVs might indicate what we’ll need on a big scale in 20 years.
The EV link bomb post was in response to the following comment by Shallow Sand:
One company that has bad earnings aka US shale is Tesla Motors. Analysts are predicting positive earnings as soon as December though.
I still can’t tell if Tesla is going to transform things or is just a hype machine. I still just know one person who owns one. But we are in the sticks. Are they really taking off in metro areas or still a novelty?
My reply was:
WARNING! EV Link bomb!
A couple of weeks ago Consumer Reports did something quite strange. They scored a Tesla Model S P85D (85 kWh battery, performance model, dual motor AWD) 103 out of 100. Here’s the link to the story at insideevs.com
Tesla Model S Scores 103 Points On Consumer Reports’ 0-100 Rating Scale
Now Tesla easily dominates the news at insideevs, sort of what you would expect from a company who’s CEO has pronounced that the company’s mission is “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport.” The CEO has been quite clear on his vision as to how to follow the stated mission. As to whether it is a hype machine or something else, I’ll present links to some of the articles on Tesla over at insideevs over the past week. You can look at them and read them if you’d like and decide for yourself whether you think this is all hype.
Consumer Reports: Tesla Model S Rated #1 In Customer Satisfaction
Elon Musk: Second Production Line At Fremont Gets Revamped With 542 Robots
Oprah Winfrey Buys A Tesla Model S
Tesla CEO: $35K Model 3 Pre-Orders/Debut In March, Model X Deliveries Sept 29th
Tesla’s Pure BEV Approach Favored Over German Luxury Plug-In Hybrids
Tesla Model S Leads Swiss Luxury-Segment In Sales
Tesla Signs Two Lithium Suppliers For Gigafactory
World’s 500th Tesla Supercharger Now Online
Forbes Ranks Tesla As World’s Most Innovative Company
IMO while many of the stories above are definitely hype, some show that the company is executing the measures necessary, if it is to approach it’s target of mass market adoption by producing 500,000 cars a year. It is also becoming obvious that they are disruptive, with other luxury cars looking decidedly “old fashioned” in comparison. The fact is that Tesla now makes the fastest accelerating four door sedan (0-60mph) in the world, in their most recent “high performance” P90D variant (90 kWh battery, dual motor AWD), when optioned with the “Ludicrous acceleration” option. All this, in a rather conventional looking sedan that, is very comfortable and easy to drive. One ride in one is all it takes to convince most people that, this car is an impressive vehicle and many gearheads will think it’s worth the price since, the level of acceleration is comparable with cars costing several times more. Barring a major black swan event I would NOT bet against them.
Hi Islandboy,
Shallow sand responded that he took a trip to the city and didn’t see any leafs or Teslas.
I must admit I have only seen a Tesla in California (I frequently visit family in Massachusetts), but I do occasionally see a Nissan Leaf and an occasional Chevy Volt. The Tesla could work on a 600 mile trip if it is in a place near superchargers, but most people don’t have a 240 V outlet for you to plug into at your destination and most hotels don’t have a place to charge.
My Camry hybrid at 40 MPG took me on my 500 mile round trip just fine, my wife doesn’t like the Prius so that was left at home. I may get the Tesla model 3 when it comes out to replace the Prius.
My attempt to respond to SS got lost in the thread mix up but here it is again for good measure:
Looking for Teslas or other EVs might bear fruit, depending on where you are. During my last couple of visits to the US, I have seen one in Rocklin just north of Sacramento, one in San Francisco and two parked in Sausalito, when my cousin’s step-dad took us out to diner there one evening. California is the state that mandated EVs in the first place so chances of sighting an EV in the places where I did are above average. Word is that Teslas are a fairly common sight in Palo Alto and San Jose (Silicon Valley).
While plug-in vehicles make up a little over 0.1% of the US vehicle fleet, their relative density varies widely as shown in the map below so, in California it’s actually about five per thousand while, in some states it’s more than three in a thousand and in most it’s less than one in a thousand. To get an idea of the odds of spotting a Tesla you can have a look at this map showing the locations of their “superchargers”. A high number of superchargers around a metro area is a good sign that numbers are probably high in that area. Some of the chargers are located to facilitate long distance driving so, those locations just indicate routes that the company thinks people are likely to use.
An interesting part of what Tesla is doing surrounds their data gathering surrounding the use of superchargers. I found a picture attached to a post at a Tesla enthusiasts blog that shows a picture of a “supercharger dashboard” showing stats on the use of the chargers. They actually ruffled a few feathers recently, by sending emails to select customers, asking that they not use the superchargers for routine charging of their cars, indicating that they had detected usage pasterns by those customers that, were not consistent with the network’s goal of facilitating long distance journeys, outside the cars stated range.
Tesla is not a Detroit company, they are a Silicon Valley company. Big difference. Think disruption.
After I posted that, I found a Wikipedia page with lots of data including a table titled “Top ten selling all-electric vehicle (BEV) states and metropolitan areas by market share of new car sales”. The page URL is :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_the_United_States
Bravo for the oily non oily split. ——–I have less interest in the climate BS. One thing that I have learned at this site is that EV’s are generally a pathetic excuse for personal transportation, at least for me at the present time There are a small number of golf carts at my lovely two mile long California 55+ retirement community with more than 2000 residences. Unfortunately they can not legally go to the adjacent shopping center, but can get within a two block walk. There are also some bikes and trikes, suitable for carrying groceries from the shopping center. I have seen one Prius hybrid. We drive a five year old standard Prius and a Honda Accord. Range is critical for my wife’s life style.
Have you tried a Volt??
It is true that with careful management we could get by with a Volt and one decent car. I might consider that if and when we buy another car.
You seem not to consider the Volt to be “decent”. Why is that?
Poor range. Limited number of charging stations. Charging delays. An unhappy wife and especially the need to have an extension cord going to the drive-way or street.
You’re clear that we’re talking about the Chevy Volt, right? It goes 50 miles on battery, and then 300 miles on gas.
Sorry, I was confusing it with other defective evs. But I still see no reason to replace my Prius. It appears to have a better range. —
We are moving away from coal but I suspect that in the future we will return to coal, in desperation as natural gas depletes, nuclear hysteria spreads, and fairy dust fails.—
– There was an environmental saying during the 70’s; “The true environmentalist is one who is willing to freeze to death while sitting on a coal mine”. Imagine 100 million or more ev’s burning coal.
Robert, you do realize that you’re driving an electric vehicle now, right?
You have no evidence that coal is going to make a miracle comeback. Besides EV’s have a nice synergy with wind and solar: they can be scheduled to charge when wind and solar are strongest.
So, really, why so grumpy about EV’s?
Robert, It would appear that you are woefully misinformed about the latest plug-in vehicles, that is, the ones that have come to market since 2010. Cumulative plug-in vehicle sales in the US are in excess of 300,000 and are tracked monthly by my favorite EV news site at the following page:
http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/
Another interesting page shows the cumulative sales model by model up to the end of December 2014, with the Volt leading in sales followed by the Nissan Leaf, the Toyota plug-in Prius and the Tesla Model S in that order. A quick look at the monthly scorecard data reveals that as of August 2015, the Leaf has sold the most followed by the Volt, the Model S and the plug-in Prius.
Just so you know, plug-in n hybrids like the Volt and the plug-in Prius don’t ever have to be plugged in, ever, but that would defeat the purpose of buying a plug-in hybrid car.
Based on your reasoning for why the Volt is not a decent car, it sounds like you got your information straight out of the mouth of Neil Cavuto over at Fox News. Did you know that most electric cars can be charged from a regular household socket? It would just take a very long time to top up the battery if it were dead. Most EV owners spend an extra grand or two to install a special EV charging appliance/outlet that can fully charge the car overnight.
I saw something recently, might have been on the video blog “Fully Charged”, where an EV proponent was being challenged on his assertion that there was already an infrastructure of millions of charging points, to which he responded that every single household type electrical outlet is a potential “charging point”!
Did you know that the most recent variant of the battery electric (non hybrid) Tesla Model S, the 90D, has an estimated range of just over 300 miles?
Just saw this over at insideevs.com, September 12-20 is National Drive Electric Week. There will be over 170 events in 165 cities and in many cases, visitors to events will be able to look at EVs, talk to the owners and maybe even go for a ride in one!
If you are really interested in finding out what modern Evs are like, you could take a look at the events page and see if there is an event close enough to you that you could attend.
You might also find out stuff that is different from your notion of EVs by reading a couple or more of the links in my EV link bomb post further up.
My son says his business parking lot in San Jose gets more and more leafs and teslas, and keeps adding charging stations (free to user) which people keep fighting over.
All of above a bit of free comedy to him.
I keep pressing him to get a leaf. He admits the logic but keeps his corollas very long times and in fact, pays almost no attention to cars in general as long as they move him from here to there.
PS-Very odd. I am in and surrounded by those white states, but here in this little town we had an EV event, and two teslas and five leafs and some volts showed up. One tesla guy said he drove to florida, over to san diego and back to the backwoods with no problem, being lead by the nose to each charging station on the way.
We need more Wimbi’s for damned sure, not just here in this forum but in the real world. I don’t have an ev yet, but I DID run a sixty amp two forty outlet out to one of our detached carports so I can plug up a welder there occasionally.
It took me half a day and cost about a hundred bucks for the materials plus fifty bucks for a laborer to dig a shallow ditch to bury the wire for a few feet. I put the under ground rated wire thru a piece of sewer pipe to so as to give it some additional protection rather than burying it deeper.
Doing things for yourself is the REAL American way.
On the luxury car side, GM is looking to morph their Gen 2 Voltec EREV drive concept to their 2017 Cadillac flagship – the CT6 plug-in hybrid. This will be a major new Voltec-type drivetrain, as the CT6 will be front-engine/RWD. The new Voltec drivetrain probably will be configured to fit where the conventional automatic transmission fits in the conventional CT6. Lots of HP, lot’s of low-end torque, estimated 30 miles EV range. This would provide an luxury EV-like experience for most drives without the destination/range/charging limitations of a pure EV like a Tesla.
A Voltec high-HP RWD transmission that would be dimensionally identical to the conventional RWD transmission also opens opportunities to market plug-in hybrid versions of their full size RWD SUV’s and trucks with only minimal additional engineering. Imagine a full size plug-in hybrid PU with great towing capacity that averages 60 mpg between its EV miles and hybrid-gas-engine miles.
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1097889_cadillac-ct6-plug-in-hybrid-big-battery-more-electric-range
Hey, an open thread. In that case, I will mention the progress with the El Nino modeling and prediction
http://contextearth.com/2015/09/04/the-qbom-part-2/
The scientific consensus has been that prediction of the El Nino / Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is essentially hopeless, as there has been no detectable pattern to when El Ninos or La Ninas will occur.
Yet, apparently no one has really investigated the tidal connection, and how the interferences of various lunar and solar forces can impact the ocean’s thermocline to slosh in seemingly erratic ways. Very close to determining the pattern based on known tidal cycles and thus being able to model the earth’s temperature variations, and differentiate that from the global warming trend.
Thanks Paul.
Very interesting. It might be interesting to apply this to use a training interval of 1950 to 1980 and then forecast and backcast to see how well it matches up with either the ENSO/QBO model or CSALT (incorporating the ENSO model into CSALT).
Dennis,
Here is a backcast, which uses data only from 1880 to 1930 to extrapolate values from 1930 to 1980. You can see that the pattern extends.
http://imageshack.com/a/img540/1682/gXyBFH.png
There is a known Pacific Ocean disturbance that started in the late 1970’s which somehow realigned the pattern. That’s why it only extends to 1980 .
The CSALT connection is the ultimate goal on the path forward, because with this in place we may be able to predict the warming trend and all the variations.
The only difficulty left would be to predict volcanic activity, which is the other significant variable on temperature.
Hi Paul,
Is that for your most recent model? Is your current model able to handle the disturbance in the Pacific from the 1970s?
The problem with such “unexplained” disturbances ( as in not explained by the model ) is that it makes forecasting a problem, we never know when these will occur. Of course predicting volcanic eruptions in the future is the same sort of problem, they are essentially random events and such oceanic disturbances could be treated in the same manner.
The model is certainly a big step forward, uncertainty can never be eliminated.
Right, I think the disturbance or shift in the Pacific around 1980 is what has prevented scientists from discovering the underlying behavior all this time. I am currently working the disturbance — it looks as if that the response lasted until about 1995, and then the behavior reverted back to what is was prior to 1980.
Hi Paul,
Any clues as to what may have caused that anomaly? Or will it just be left unexplained for now.
Dennis,
No real clues on the 1980 transition, but I have a technique that I will experiment this weekend where I can follow the change of the forcing as it crosses this transition.
BTW, I am getting crazy feedback from the climate skeptics. Check it out because it’s pretty funny:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/cheeky-pukitee-nicking-knowledge-without-acknowledgement/
Hoping to make driving more convenient for owners of electric vehicles, Burbank has installed eight curbside charging stations throughout the city..
Burbank Water and Power crews installed the stations during July, part of a project funded largely through a grant from the California Energy Commission. Last week, the utility hosted state and local officials at a dedication ceremony and demonstration of the technology.
The stations provide charging capability for 16 electric vehicles at public spaces with a two-hour limit while charging. Energy Commissioner Janea Scott said it’s one of the first curbside projects in the state she’s aware of, if not the first, and “for sure the first CEC funded.”
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-electric-car-stations-20150907-story.html
The Southern California Regional Plug-In Electric Vehicle Plan (SoCal EV) is a regional collaborative among cities, utilities, automakers, local and regional government agencies, businesses and others in the Southern California region who are actively engaged in supporting and building the necessary infrastructure for the commercial launch of electric vehicles.
SoCal EV’s mission is to foster the plug-in readiness of the Southern California Region by coordinating education and outreach; building necessary infrastructure, offering financial incentives such as rebates and rate discounts, streamlining permitting requirements, and other collaborative efforts that support PEVs in the region.
http://www.socalev.org/
Washington/London, September 8, 2015: New research from the New Climate Economy finds that investing in public and low emission transport, building efficiency, and waste management in cities could generate savings with a current value of US$17 trillion by 2050. These low-carbon investments could also reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3.7 Gt CO2e per year by 2030, more than the current annual emissions of India.
With complementary national policies such as support for low-carbon innovation, reduced fossil fuel subsidies, and carbon pricing, the savings could be as high as US$22 trillion.
“The steps that cities take to shrink their carbon footprints also reduce their energy costs, improve public health, and help them attract new residents and businesses,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change. “This report can help accelerate the progress cities are making in all of these areas, by highlighting smart policies and encouraging cooperation through efforts like the Compact of Mayors.”
The report recommends that cities commit to low-carbon urban development strategies by 2020. It also recommends cities commit to the Compact of Mayors, a global coalition of mayors and city officials pledging to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions, enhance resilience to climate change, and track their progress transparently. More than 130 cities – representing more than 220 million people – have already committed to the Compact of Mayors and will be setting ambitious emissions reduction targets and reporting publicly.
http://newclimateeconomy.net/content/press-release-low-carbon-cities-are-us17-trillion-opportunity-worldwide
Kind of way off topic, but since it is an open thread. I was listening to a report on this, this morning on Democracy Now.
A French secret service diver who took part in the operation to sink Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior 30 years ago has spoken publicly for the first time to apologize for his actions.
Jean-Luc Kister, who attached a mine to the ship’s hull, says the guilt of the bombing, which killed a photographer, still weighs heavily on his mind.
“We are not assassins and we have a conscience,” the former agent told investigative website Mediapart. “I have the weight of an innocent man’s death on my conscience … It’s time, I believe, for me to express my profound regret and my apologies,” Kister said.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/06/french-spy-who-sunk-greenpeace-ship-apologises-for-lethal-bombing
From the archive, 24 September 1985: French inquiry into Rainbow Warrior bombing
Read more
He said he wanted to apologise to the family of the dead man, Fernando Pereira, “especially his daughter Marelle … for what I call an accidental death but what they consider an assassination”, to the Greenpeace crew aboard the ship and the people of New Zealand where the Rainbow Warrior was sunk.
Kister was one of two divers serving with the French intelligence service, the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE), who attached limpet mines to the hull of the vessel moored in Auckland in 1985.
The Rainbow Warrior was heading for the Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific in French Polynesia where France was planning a series of nuclear tests.
A temperature increase of less than one degree has already disrupted the global climate system, and this is only the beginning. Will the Anthropocene bring a totally new climate regime?
http://climateandcapitalism.com/2015/09/07/anthropocene-climate-the-new-deadly-normal-2/
So far I am really liking the split discussions.
I think the quality has gone up, especially in the non-oil topics, and it is easier to follow along. I am interested in both the oil and the non-oil discussions, so I plan to follow both.
What I see happening here (at least so far) is that people who want to know more about renewables and EVs and climate aren’t spending so much time getting bogged down in responding to the naysayers. Of course, they may yet come.
I concur, Doctor.
Methinks this oil/non-oil split thread dealio is a good deal for both ‘tribes’, as well as for those who are interested in both domains.
I already perceive that the ‘oil’ thread aficionados probably will be far less tolerant of perceived ‘non-oil’ posts than the ‘non-oil’ aficionados will be for the logical oil production/reserves/economics relevant ‘add-on’ posts to the various sub-threads over here.
The two ‘Magisteria’ provide a simple separation of the ‘oil and water’ components and provide two broad focuses vice the balkanization of some sites which have numerous specialized/specific topic threads.
A worthy experiment which I hope Dennis/Ron/whoever continues.
But, are we preaching to the choir?
Yes, most likely. Although any discussion of climate seems to bring out the Heartland folks.
But if we bury the peak oil discussions, we’ll lose those who come just for that.
Discussions with 500 comments on a variety of topics are hard to follow unless you are someone like me to tries to read everything shortly after it is posted.
Maybe we need to have more specific categories related to oil, and then to what do when the oil gets scarce or how to prevent the oil from becoming scarce.
I think we’ve at least made a little progress in that I don’t read “drill, baby, drill” anymore. Even the oil folks aren’t advocating that because many of them are the ones getting hurt by a flooded market.
I don’t think the Paris talks are going to amount to a dam thing.
http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/climate-talks-are-stuck-in-the-slow-lane-to-paris/
No if our coal lobbyist friends continue influencing policy.
“South Carolina….too small for a country, too big for an insane asylum”
lol. caught that quote on Ken Burn’s Civil Ware rebroadcast.
“If not you, then who? If not now, then when?” – Martin Buber
What We Are:
Go 100% is a global community that shares the vision that supplying our electricity, heating, and transportation energy needs with 100% sustainable renewable sources is urgent and achievable. Anyone curious about, striving for, or who has achieved this aim is welcome.
What We Do:
We aim to inspire each other and others to reach the 100% renewable energy goal locally and globally by
•building a movement of Supporters to Go 100% renewable energy
•building an interactive map of 100% renewable energy-related projects and goals around the world.
•publishing relevant news and editorials.
•announcing 100% renewable energy related events.
•providing educational tools, like a library of 100% renewable energy related studies, book and film tips, and videos.
•catalyzing a virtual discussion where the Go 100% community can help develop best practices, forge partnerships, and build strength in numbers.
http://www.go100percent.org/cms/
Why We Are Doing It:
The conventional energy system has led to multiple convergent existential crises. These include climate change, air and water pollution, destruction of the oceans, the threat of mass extinction, water and food shortages, energy poverty, nuclear waste pile up, nuclear weapons proliferation, fuel depletion, and geopolitical tension.
If we do not change this energy system to a sustainable one based on conservation, efficiency, load management, and ecologically sustainable forms of renewable energy in the near future, humankind risks diminished planetary habitability for many generations.
Gloom and despair are not healthy options. Focusing on solutions is.
About Circle of Blue
Founded in 2000 by leading journalists and scientists, Circle of Blue provides relevant, reliable, and actionable on-the-ground information about the world’s resource crises.
With an intense focus on water and its relationships to food, energy, and health, Circle of Blue has created a breakthrough model of front-line reporting, data collection, design, and convening that has evolved with the world’s need to spur new methodology in science, collaboration, innovation, and response. To document emerging and recognized crises, Circle of Blue collaborates with leading scientists and data experts. Through its partnerships, Circle of Blue then dispatches top journalists to map and define the region where the change is occurring. Making connections from localized occurrences to global trends, Circle of Blue publishes these reports online — free of charge — to inform academics, governments, and the general public, catalyzing participation across disciplines, regions, and cultures.
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2015/world/slowly-with-earth-pushing-hard-a-confederacy-of-concern-develops/
From an article at Think Progress
“The government is also trying to keep energy demand low — last month, Energy Minister Piyush Goyal committed India to replace all conventional streetlights with LEDs within two years. This will cut demand almost to almost a third of current levels — 3,400 megawatts to 1,400 megawatts. Fortunately for them, LED streetlight prices have dropped almost by half in the last year.”
This is probably an achievable goal, given that streetlights are not hard to work on at all and need routine maintenance anyway. Changing out the bulb fixture doesn’t take very long at all once the technician is on the scene.
I read somewhere a while back that the lighting industry as a WHOLE in the USA has still not even achieved three percent penetration with LED’s although some other types of light are about as cheap to run, and changing out industrial lighting is an expensive chore.
Most of the people I know now are buying LED lights. I have only a few CFL’s left – ones in spots not often lit up. As they go bad, in goes a new LED.
My own little guerrilla environmental war consists of mostly not even mentioning CO2 or anything of that nature and just bragging about how long LED’s last and how cheap they are when the subject of the electricity bill comes up and having a guest wrap his hand tight around the one in my reading lamp which is generally on and easily reachable. It is obviously a powerful bulb, a so called forty watt equivalent, but it is cool enough to hold it tight. I point at the air conditioner across the room and say it runs a lot less with the cool running bulbs in the ceiling fixtures and floor lamps.
Then I just give my guest one, out of a box full I keep handy, as casually as giving away a soft drink or a beer to guests, with the suggestion they put it in the most used fixture at their house, such as as outside night light.
It’s amazing how effective this technique is. I have not kept any account but my guess is that eighty percent of the people who once install a good brand name LED with good color switch as soon as they realize how long they last. People who keep a lot of lights on most of the time have told me they have seen their monthly electricity bill drop ten to twenty bucks.
The potential for energy savings from changing from incandescent lighting to LEDs in the USA is huge. The average LED bulb use less than one fifth of an incandescent with similar output. I used to hear that Americans had issues with the quality of the light from CFLs, too flickery, too white or too cold or whatever. If that is the case then, LEDs solve those issues plus, they light up the instant you flick the switch. The only issue is costs, which keep going down. If the US makes a big shift from incandescents to LEDs, the reduction in electricity demand should be significant.
Who knows? Some households might be able to save enough to charge an EV with the savings, granted that would need changing about forty 100 W incandescents to LEDs and those forty incandescents would have to be run at least eight hours a day! At any rate, if reduced consumption from lighting goes towards charging an EV then, increased lighting efficiency would be helping to reduce oil consumption.
Just about everybody I know except some old diehards has switched to compact CFL lighting within the last two or three years. The problems with flicker and color are history – EXCEPT for some CFL bulbs that just REFUSE to die. I have one that makes a harsh blue light that is kept as a night light that is probably ten years old now.
The move to LED’s is on and going strong for the last year among savvy cost conscious householders.
Princeton University psychologist Sander van der Linden reports that even brief exposure to a conspiracy theory regarding climate change was enough to shift people’s attitudes away from the scientific consensus. He also found some evidence that such misinformation may impact our behavior in other, negative ways.
Van der Linden found that, even on a topic that has engendered much public discussion, brief exposure to the concept of a conspiracy shifted people’s thinking. Specifically, he reports, those who saw the clip from the conspiracy video “judged the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change significantly lower” than those who did not.
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/conspiracy-theories-hamper-fight-against-climate-change
A pdf, so if you don’t want something chewy, move on.
(a good read)
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5000/mccright_2011.pdf
The top half of Table 2 reports the percents of conservative
white males and all other adults espousing climate change denial
views for each of our five indicators. Across the five items,
significantly greater percentages of conservative white males than
of all other American adults report denialist views. For instance,
while 29.6% of conservative white males believe that the effects of
global warming will never happen, only 7.4% of all other adults
believe so. Also, 58.5% of conservative white males but only 31.5%
of all other adults deny that recent temperature increases are
primarily caused by human activities. The pattern for these first
two items demonstrates that conservative white males are more
likely than other adults to rejectthe scientific consensus on climate
change—stated as early as the IPCC’s (2001) Third Assessment Report
and the NRC’s (2001) Climate Change Science. Not surprisingly then,
the pattern for the third item indicates that conservative white
males are more likely than other adults to deny the existence of a
scientific consensus (58.8% and 35.5%, respectively). Further,
slightly more than twice as many conservative white males
(65.1%) than all other adults (29.9%) believe that the seriousness of
global warming is generally exaggerated in the media. Finally,
39.1% of conservative white males but only 14.4% of all other adults
do not worry at all about global warming
Analysis of 2014 Gallup Poll concerning American’s view on climate change:
Conclusions:
“Most Americans believe global warming’s effects will occur during their lifetimes, though this sentiment is no
higher than it was 17 years ago, and is down from a peak of 75% in 2008. At the same time, although Americans
largely do not view global warming as a likely threat to their way of life, they are more likely to believe this now
than in the 1990s.
Americans’ belief that global warming is not a serious threat to their way of life may help explain why they see it
and the environment more generally as a lower priority for government than issues that affect them more
immediately, like the economy and healthcare. However, Americans’ average concern about global warming may
shift in the future, even if there is no obvious change in environmental conditions, as today’s more skeptical older
Americans are replaced by younger Americans who are more likely to view global warming as occurring and as a
potentially serious threat to their way of life.”
http://www.climateaccess.org/sites/default/files/Gallup_Threat%20March%202014.pdf
Yep-
We discount the future, think heuristically rather than critically, live by story and myth rather than by observation, etc.
This brought genetic fitness in the past, but is now a liability.
Clueless rapacious apes we are.
Let’s get right to the point. People do not like being manipulated. If there was an effort to use common sense here rather than sensationalised media hype, perhaps things could be different, to some degree. But it has become apparent that a few people have taken it upon themselves to denigrate entire segments of society for the sole reason of self service. The climate maths don’t exist, the sky is not falling. Worse is that when people do hit upon verifiable reasons for concern, such as flourene releases and the like the ideas tend to be binned immediately along with all the other sensationalised stories constantly repeated on the internet.
Yes be concerned, but if you’re not willing to give up ALL your amenities, why call others names and flame out the world against the same skepticism they afforded you? Be mindful. The poles are shifting, we have only just begun to exit the last ice age within the last few centuries, we are only just beginning to understand gravitational heating and really, we know very little about this planet, let alone the massive sun that powers it. No rash statements, no disruptive law, no more follower’s mentality, and that goes both ways. Nasa has some who like the attention, they know how to manipulate the press. There never was an uptick in two headed snakes in Patagonia. All people are driven by their biases, most have a level headed sense of can and cannot be. Bye bye Ross Ice Shelf, we will learn a lot watching the morphism of our most southern continent over the next millennium. Meanwhile, no reason to send bathing suits to the large contingent of researchers down there. Maybe get on the radio instead and start trying to intercept their maydays.
What I find really interesting about posts like the one above is that the individuals posting often seem to be unfamiliar names on this web site, strangers if you will, definitely not regulars. A common theme in their posts is that climate change mitigation is some sort of assault on their personal rights and freedoms.
One theme that I find somewhat puzzling is that, they ascribe an ulterior motive to the scientists who are warning us about the threat of global warming, while totally ignoring the extremely strong possibility of wealthy, vested interests being involved in a well funded campaign to discredit the work of the majority of climate scientists. So, scientists working for government agencies or university research departments are supposed to be manipulating public opinion through compliant, liberal media outlets, while corporations with a vested interest in the continued use of fossil fuels? Nah, they could never be involved in any attempts to mislead the public, despite having access to significantly more money than the vilified scientists and access to corporate (Murdock) owned media outlets!
If global warming turns out to be as serious as most climate scientists predict and such so called skeptics are still alive, will they feel any sense of outrage that they have been duped or will they continue to think as they do and come up with some new theory that, climate scientist did something to cause global warming to occur, just as a means of backing up their positions?
In a comment to Ron’s previous key post, I opined about the management level people involved in shale oil and their ability to invest other people’s money in an enterprise that will likely never pay back that money. It would seem they share a ability with climate skeptics to be able to look at reality and through some twisted mental process, massage it to conform with some view that they hold, be it that they will somehow be able to generate enough money to pay the debts they have incurred or that the observations of climate scientists are either contrived or caused by some factor other than that proposed by the scientists.
For me, Peak Oil and Global Warming are better explanations for the events and circumstances I am observing than some of the crackpot theories I hear coming from certain quarters.
Warning, conspiracy theorist.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, so I don’t think there is a secret room with cigar smoking evil men coordinating or planning climate change research. I think it was sort of similar to authorising mortgages with liar loans, it was something many thought, here is a disaster waiting to happen but there was so much money, the mainstream and elite jumped in to capture their share of the action.
So it is pseudo-coordinated by complimenting ulterior motives, governments love the idea of having a reason to exert more control over the ‘evil’ fossil fuel industries, the developing world loves it as it promised them a load off the top, unis loved as it brought massive funding, a new generation of ‘scientists’ liked it as it gives them something to spend time on, the media loved it as it was something they could pull out anytime they had a story involving unusual weather or natural disasters, an on-going story that never ends and has endless ‘examples’.
The problem they have is there is disagreement from the one source that can’t be contested–nature. Nature has not agreed with the climate change models, it has not agreed with the doom & gloom predictions of past decades, and it does not agree with the any of the so-called hypotheses of the climate change theory.
So since the groups I mentioned above realised they wouldn’t be able to go off on nature, the tact now is to go off on anyone who happens to agree with nature and is questioning the science and the politics wrapped up into the theory of climate change.
governments love the idea of having a reason to exert more control over the ‘evil’ fossil fuel industries,
But why would you think that?
Governments like growing economies. If fossil fuels can keep economies growing, without polluting the hell out of cities, why would governments interfere? They certainly haven’t tried to shut down the fossil fuel industries in the past.
Now, why are there laws limiting how much pollution can go into air, how much crap can go into water, and why gasoline has to be lead-free? Because there were significant health reasons without some regulations.
But control for control’s sake? Why do you think that?
The fossil fuel era is coming to a close because of declining resources and pollution. Not because governments are trying to stop them.
I reread your initial post and was going to quote a few of your conspiracy statements. But there was too much, so just re-read it.
Here are a few highlights.
“But it has become apparent that a few people have taken it upon themselves to denigrate entire segments of society for the sole reason of self service.”
“Yes be concerned, but if you’re not willing to give up ALL your amenities” way over-used and nonsensical
“The poles are shifting, we have only just begun to exit the last ice age within the last few centuries” Wow, luckily I like fiction.
“we know very little about this planet, let alone the massive sun that powers it” Sure if you are talking about the we in the medieval age.
Here is how climate change deniers sound to normal people.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-climate-change-deniers-sound_55f05a3ce4b093be51bd05eb
MZ if you post such a SHORT comment ( your six o six am ) in a long thread it is hard to know which comment you are addressing.
WHO do you think is or may be a conspiracy theorist?
I cannot decide from context since there is none and the string is long and several people have made comments that could be interpreted as conspiracy theory comments.
It would make the thread more readable by a mile if we all make it clear which comments we address in making one of our own. This is why I usually include somebody’s name when I comment.
Good point OFM. But in this case the reply is direct. So just take a straight line up, direct replies line up one inset to the right.
Hi MZ,
Sometimes things don’t line up so it is a good idea to start with “Hi X” to make things easier to follow, IMO.
E Pac breaking all records:
Linda is 8th major hurricane of the NE Pac (to 180W) season, breaking the record of 7 MHs by 9/8 set in ’93 & ’14.
Liberal Lies?
(Sarc)
This could go in the oil thread, but it is more in keeping with what we are discussing here. There are more immediate reasons to curtail fossil fuel use than global warming.
Beijing Bans 2.5 Million Cars, Residents See Blue Skies For First Time In Ages
If you look at the original CNN article (click on photographer’s name) there is a completely different take on the subject.
The CNN article appeared to be from 2013.
But there is this from the LA Times.
After ‘military parade blue’ skies, pollution returns to Beijing
Published on Oct 2, 2012
Mount Holyoke College professor and climate researcher Dr Alan Werner shares some of the facts, data, and research conducted on climate change and global warming particularly with his area of research on sea ice and glacial melt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlgSZnHn9DQ
Imagine what could be done with room-temperature superconductors…
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/how-does-lexus-hoverboard-actually-work-scientist-explains
There’s something to be said for splitting the conversations into oil and non-oil threads. This way we get all the Heartland folks here rather than throughout the forum.
It kind of feels like a bug (or should I say troll) trap here.
“It kind of feels like a bug (or should I say troll) trap here.”
Dead on Boomer!
But we do tend to mistake honest comments for trolling quite often in my judgement.
A man’s brain and the thinking he does with it really ARE a lot like a computer and the output thereof in some critical respects. Computers provide good results in proportion to the quality of the programs you run on them and the quality of the data you you feed to the programs.
A lot of the folks who comment here have been in contact with poorly educated people, sometimes for a long periods, but methinks I am the ONLY regular in this forum who actually GREW up in a semiliterate and extremely backwards society and still lives among people who know ESSENTIALLY NOTHING about science and technology except by the direct experience of enjoying the fruits thereof.
This does NOT mean such people are STUPID. I for instance have a good friend who is a BRILLIANT self taught engineer who knows pretty much nothing about math beyond simple addition and subtraction. When I got to talking to him about the whole world economy just seizing up and the economy collapsing he got it almost instantly and came up with this analogy almost immediately,paraphrased.
xxxx
What you’re saying is that the world is like a trucker going up a long steady grade with everything working ok but then he has a breakdown and has to stop. And then when he gets ready to go again, he finds out he has lost first second third fourth gears ( out of nine or more typically ) in his transmission and he CANNOT get started again on the upgrade and maybe not even on the level.
The people who know how to make trucks the old way, are all dead and gone and so are the machinery and the skills used to run the machinery. If every thing ever just STOPS for some reason there ain’t going to be any way to get things started up again. No blacksmiths, no carpenters who are used to using nothing but hand tools, no loggers who know how to log with mules, no mules for them to log with.
This man grasped immediately that the links in the technology chain that reach back to all the way to the Industrial Revolution are all mostly physically GONE now.He is NOT stupid.
But he believes in the KJB as the literal revealed word of GOD. WHY? Well, because he wants to, and because he comes from a place and time where this belief was the norm, of course.
But at a deeper level, he has every reason to believe this way for the very simple reason that he never really had an opportunity to learn enough science to think differently.
His mental computer is sound and fast but life has provided him with a very poor quality set of programs and data set.
We ALL of us think and talk in terms of “us and them” as evidenced by this excerpt from Island Boy’s comment upthread:
”One theme that I find somewhat puzzling is that, they ascribe an ulterior motive to the scientists who are warning us about the threat of global warming, while totally ignoring the extremely strong possibility of wealthy, vested interests being involved in a well funded campaign to discredit the work of the majority of climate scientists.”
The answer is simple as dirt, so simple is hard for most of us to accept it.
Such people know SO LITTLE about science that they literally think climate scientists are just like everybody else and that everybody has something to sell and is ready to lie in order to sell it.
There is absolutely NOTHING intrinsically wrong with such thinking.They ARE smart enough to understand that most convincing lies contain elements of truth and so they confuse their own layman’s level of knowledge for expertise enabling them to sniff out lies. ( For instance most of them know enough science to know history repeats, ice ages come and go with warm periods alternating. )
The problem lies in the thinkers lack of scientific literacy and there is essentially NOTHING that can be done about THAT problem except to wait for reality to eventually slap such a person upside the head with a brick in the form of an unprecedented super storm wiping out HIS home town or something along those lines.
Loading a flesh and blood human computer with good programs and good data is an exceedingly slow and tedious and expensive process that takes at least a couple of decades. Our current education system is not getting the job done and turns out mostly scrap quality thinking machines.
Old Farmer said “The people who know how to make trucks the old way, are all dead and gone and so are the machinery and the skills used to run the machinery. If every thing ever just STOPS for some reason there ain’t going to be any way to get things started up again. No blacksmiths, no carpenters who are used to using nothing but hand tools, no loggers who know how to log with mules, no mules for them to log with.”
Not that that is important since we don’t want to just step back on the very same path, but there are quite a few people who know blacksmithing around here, some have knowledge of spinning, hand building and definitely a lot with basic survival skills.
We have steam locomotive re-builders and some very nice old machinery still in use that will handle such large mechanical devices. Not too far from here people are farming with horse power and building with hand tools.
But to get down to just making a bridge from grass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dql-D6JQ1Bc
Nice community project and think of the extra status the bridge engineers get within the community.
Ditto around here. I am constantly surprised to find some ragged hillwilliam walk into my shop having heard about the things I am trying to do, and reveal all sorts of good things- like how to eat any kind of road kill or make a windmill that works or use a potty chair to advantage to home and garden with no smell in between.
I think that people here tend to VERY FAR underestimate the incredible resilience of humanity, especially the “underprivileged” part of it.
I attribute this to their misfortune of having made some money moving poker chips around somewhere, which makes them think that’s what god intended people do.
Yes there are a few of the people around who still know how to do things the old ways.
But NOT ENOUGH of them by a factor of a hundred or maybe a thousand to get society back to a workable economy based on century old or older technology.
A sudden transition backwards is impossible, nearly everybody would starve or die of exposure, thirst, epidemic disease, or violence in a month or two if the modern economy were to just stop dead in it’s tracks for some reason.
Fortunately the only remotely likely scenario that I can think of wherein this might happen is a super massive solar storm that wipes out the grid and nearly every computer controlled ice engine in existence or a war involving the use of very powerful EMP bombs.
A flat out nuclear war would stop things dead too of course but enough infrastructure might be left usable in some places for some people to survive living a modern industrial life style under extremely austere conditions most likely.
I could still plow a mule for an hour even today and teach a young man the basic skills involved, except shoeing , in a few days, so he could work and care for a mule.
But mules are EXTREMELY scarce considering the three hundred million people in this country dependent on food produced with tractors instead of mules.
In the event the shit really hits the fan fast and hard, the millions of pleasure horses in this country will mostly be horse roasts and steaks within a few weeks. Not burger, not many people have meat grinders but plenty of people have axes machetes hand saws and big butcher knives.
Anybody who has a pleasure horse and a horse collar and a few antique implements could train it to pull the implements well enough to grow a little food – If he lives in a place with suitable weather and soil and he can locate some seed and can find something to eat for a year until he gets in a crop.IF he knows something about gardening etc etc.
Now here is a question for a somebody who knows a hell of a lot more than I do about astronomy and things along that line.
IF there have been numerous extremely powerful solar storms over time say a half a dozen or more in the last thousand years , is there any way we could know about them?
We can find impact craters, and do find them, and we found the iridium layer, indicating a super massive impact, and we have isotopes studies that tell us approximately the temperatures at particular places at particular times. We have excellent tree ring studies that tell us how much it rained in some places for a thousand years back.
But I have not heard of any known signatures geological or astronomical for really big solar storms.
The fact that there has been only one REALLY big one ( Carrington event iirc) since the dawn of the electrical age is comforting but might just be good luck. A bigger one might wipe out the grid tomorrow.
The necessary spare parts that would be needed to get it up and running again do not exist. Things would go mad max in a matter of hours in big cities and out in the country in a couple of days.
I would have water and with help could chop enough wood to keep from freezing but starvation or a marauding gang might get me before I could get in a crop.My basic plan- to stock up ahead of the crowd would not work. I would have no truck capable of making it to town and if I did the farm supply the big box store and malwart would all be closed.
The highway would be blocked by wrecked vehicles
But my old diesel tractors would run and I can start them with a hand crank, no electricity needed at all, just fuel.
If I DID succeed in getting to town with a tractor and a wagon and getting it loaded with a few tons of livestock feed the odds are high I would be murdered for my load before I got back home.
A few thousand canning jars and lids are looking like a bargain safety net and the price of them is has been edging up over the years and will continue to go up. Storage on a farm is dirt cheap and nobody will steal canning jars, they are not easily resold.
They can be had for nine dollars a dozen retail quart size and there would be plenty of cows around – for a while- to slaughter and can. With a younger helper I guess I could get a hundred quarts a day or more into canning jars.
Hopefully somebody will know something about the odds super bad solar storms happening. I can guess at the odds of EMP bombs being used as well as anybody.
Sounds like you realize we have been sucker trapped by our own ingenuity.
And it won’t effect the bridge people much at all. They already know how to live and do things without mechanical support.
Well over half of the people in the bridge people video appear to be wearing factory made clothing.
While they are no doubt still much better positioned to survive an industrial and economic collapse things would most likely go VERY hard for them.Odds are they are now using a LOT of modern goods and have forgotten a LOT of the old ways except for a few old men..
My guess is that they are also now in population overshoot due to improvements in health care, especially of the public health factors, and food production based on use of fertilizers and some pesticides, this being the usual case in developing economies.
Around here people get together couple of times a year to make apple butter and molasses for old times sake. But we still buy nearly all our apple butter and molasses in jars at the supermarket.
There is a broad smooth paved highway within sight of that hand built bridge. The significance of that highway cannot be overlooked.
There was also a video camera taking the film. All that logically implied guessing about their knowledge and abilities has missed a huge factor that was the most important point of the video. These people know how to work together and they are trying to preserve tradition. That is a huge jump above people in developed areas. They already have basic skills and abilities. I am sure they are far closer to the “old” ways than people in the developed areas.
As far as population overshoot, I guess one could look that up and assess their area. In a fallback situation, more hands means more agriculture and more help when the machines stop. It also means a supply of defenders.
I looked over the satellite photos of the area. They do have single story buildings and a few roads. I saw no evidence of machinery or vehicles at most of the farms. I think there were three or four trucks in town, but nothing on the road. There was even a multistory building in the one town (about 150 buildings total). They probably keep all their high tech hidden away from sight for the touristos benefit, change out of their rough peasant clothing and down a brew in front of the 52 inch plasma TV when the tourists are not around.
I thought I saw someone outside shaking rattles at the passing satellite. 🙂
OFM said “IF there have been numerous extremely powerful solar storms over time say a half a dozen or more in the last thousand years , is there any way we could know about them? ”
Here are some possible pre-modern occurrences:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/space/stories/ancient-tree-rings-might-be-proof-of-worst-solar-storm-in-history
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/251895733_Intense_solar_storms_corroboration_of_prehistory_rock_recordings_and_themis_multispacecraft_observations
http://plasmauniverse.info/downloads-petros/Peratt&YaoAurora-PrehistoryPhys-Scr-T131,2008c.pdf
Yair . . .
OFM. I am curious to know what diesel tractors you can start with a hand crank?
Cheers.
Most any of the smaller gasoline tractors built up to about 1950 or so came equipped to be hand cranked.
Come to think of it I can’t remember seeing any diesel tractors that came new with hand cranks but otoh I am not a collector and all of the really old tractors I know much about are gasoline fueled.
I fabricated the necessary dog for our seventy two thirty five horse power Ferguson to go on the end of the crankshaft but the crank I took down off the wall. The necessary hole thru below the radiator was already there, lined up perfectly with the crankshaft – put there so as to allow the installation of a front mounted hydraulic pump in addition to the internally mounted pump. Sometimes a high volume auxiliary pump is necessary. The hole is there for that purpose on lots of tractors right up until today.
I couldn’t start her with the hand crank ten years ago but my occasional helper who weighs about two forty all muscle and young can do it. He uses both hands to turn her over a quarter of a turn at a time pulling up on the crank. She fires right up with the slightest whiff of starting fluid for him.
I put the dog on because a new starter cost a hell of a lot of money which we did not have on that particular day. This work around took only a couple of hours and getting a new starter would have taken that long just to go after it plus probably waiting a day or two for it to be delivered.
I long since replaced the starter of course but since we don’t need a front mounted pump I just left the dog on there. The threaded bolt holes for it are factory standard features as well as the hole for the pump drive shaft.
I doubt even a pro body builder could crank a low speed four cylinder diesel engine over fifty horse power by hand unless some arrangement were made to get it spinning such as using a compression release.
Some big stationary antique diesels are started that way, you set the compression release and get the engine spinning by hand and the great weight of the flywheel will carry it thru the compression stroke to start it up when you trip the release.
I have only seen this arrangement at an antique show but it used to be pretty common. Big stationary diesels antique diesels are very rare in this part of the world and I have never seen one in actual use or even still in the place it was actually used.
Some big diesel off road trucks used to have air motor starters. You could hear the air motor five miles away under favorable conditions on a v12 Detroit diesel such as the ones used in fifty ton Euclid trucks back in the sixties and seventies.
If the air supply ran short without the engine starting you brought up the mechanic’s service truck and refilled the air tanks but the truck had its own compressor used for braking as well as starting.
The usual way to start a tractor in my part of the world if it has a bad starter is park it on a steep slope and roll it off, or otherwise tow it with another tractor or a truck.
I remember helping my grandfather hook up his mule to tow start a balky tractor a couple of times. The mule was handy but a few bucks for a new battery back in those days could be a problem.
Just checked with an old friend who is a tractor mechanic and he says he does NOT know of any diesels that came ready to be hand cranked. So there probably aren’t any.
I am not surprised, it is obviously beyond the strength of a typical man to hand crank a fair sized diesel without a compression release- a costly option and probably not practical for a farm tractor.
Yair . . .
Thanks for reply OFM.
Are your Ferguson 35’s the three or four cylinder versions . . . it is interesting to me they can be hand started although the four cylinder Standard engine was a very easy starter.
You may not be familiar with the Gardner diesel an English design with the selling feature of being hand startable right up to fifteen hundred cubic inch 230hp straight eight.
Smaller versions with which I am more familiar were the standard engine in most of the Australian pearling/trochus luggers as there were no on board electrics to maintain.
I do enjoy your insights into the regional American way of life and hope Ron will see fit to maintain this separate thread so such (to some) inconsequential little snippets can be exchanged.
Our Ferguson is the four cylinder.
I have used a few old construction machines over the years with small diesels that could be hand cranked, maybe ten to fifteen horsepower. They were all low speed with heavy flywheels and you could spin them starting at the beginning of the exhaust stroke a bit to help get them started.
These engines were used on water pumps , soil compactors, and similar equipment.
I have never seen a Gardner engine to my recollection, even at a show. They may not have been sold in this country.
I am non surprised that hand cranked diesels were popular in your country, reliability and simplicity are trump cards the farther you are from a dealer and a garage. Not to mention a lot cheaper to buy.
Have you ever seen anybody use a front wheel drive car as a stationary power plant for a sawmill or other purpose?
I knew a guy once who used a Nissan auto engine that way out of a wreck. He just built a framework to support the engine, transmission, axles and hubs and brakes etc using as many of the car parts as he could. He took a five groove v belt pulley to a machine shop and had it modified to bolt on just like the car wheels and welded the spiders in the differential so both axles turn locked together.
He was unable to get the original cruise control to work just right to maintain engine speed but he fitted a belt driven governer on the serpentine belt to the throttle and that worked fine. The whole rig up was ugly as sin but he told me he got the wreck as a gift and being an enterprising sort in need of a power plant he got this monstrosity going in a couple of weeks for a total of under five hundred bucks.
A comparable power plant horsepower wise would have cost him new at least five thousand for a new eighty horsepower engine even back then. The car motor apparently has the necessary eighty horse power at about three thousand rpm at which speed it will live forever used a few days a year.
Another local guy built an awesomely powerful air compressor out of a four cylinder auto engine by disabling the exhaust valves in two cylinders and blocking off the intake manifold between the carburetor and the cylinder head on those two and just leaving the intake port open to the atmosphere.
He took out the two plugs and replaced them with short lengths of properly threaded pipe fitted with one way ball valves and from there to a sand blaster hose.
When you got her revved up you had to be careful to keep a tight grip on the hose and nozzle. This outfit was all right under the car hood and the old car could still be pushed from place to place.
An occasional gallon of gasoline was a LOT cheaper than a suitably large air compressor. He used it to sandblast truck and car parts for restoration.
I don’t know what became of it, but he died of old age sometime back.
I could rig up a similar compressor in a couple of days easily for a few dollars in parts plus the car of course. It is easy to buy a running older car here with a bad transmission for little more than the price of scrap metal, a couple of hundred bucks plus hauling it home.
Might do it someday to pass the time and maybe sell it.
Yair . . .
Gotcha OFM, thanks for reply.
There is a lot of ingenuity around in remote areas. I have seen several pumps and saw-benches being run from vehicle wheels mostly with flat belts over tyres.
Speaking of starting engines. On one station they had a number of diesel powered pump-jacks run by Lister Diesels
that were a bit to much for the owners wife/daughters to start so he rigged up a roller and chain drive so they could crank them up with the motor bikes.
Following is a picture of a Gardner engine, the hand crank tackle clearly evident . . . all cylinders are decompressed/injection stopped and then started one by one once engine is rolling over.
First picture I’ve posted here and it has come out in the wrong place but I thought it may be of interest.
Well the picture WAS there until I edited post
Cheers.
The thing about climate and weather is that they are happening whether or not we have good tools to predict them.
If we are headed for more frequent and more severe natural disasters, they are going to keep coming no matter the current debates. So I know the conspiracy folks aren’t actually going to change that outcome. And therefore, no matter what they say, it isn’t going to make a difference in natural disaster events in the near or immediate term.
What I do find irritating is how many of them jump in here only to post their conspiracy and political theories. They aren’t regular members of this community, so I find them to be unhelpful intruders.
I can also understand their frustration seeing the life around them changing. But I think they are blaming and are encouraged to blame the wrong people. World economics and resource depletion are working against them.
Some folks look longingly back at the 1950s when life seemed simple and the future looked bright. In terms of lifestyle, the environmental folks could embrace that, too. One car families. Houses no more than 1000 square feet. No air conditioning. No air travel for average folks. And so on.
many are “sent here” because of trigger words. CATO and Heritage have developed a network of trolls including Brietbart, Savage Nation, etc. that use search routines that look for the triggers and this sends them a trolling. Note that there are prepackaged links and diatribes. I see these on many other sites and blogs and they are all very similar.
This is very intentional and it is meant to sow discord, confusion, misunderstanding and the appearance of uncertainty.
appropriate article from Politico the other day.
Top Republican lawmakers are planning a wide-ranging offensive — including outreach to foreign officials by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office — to undermine President Barack Obama’s hopes of reaching an international climate change agreement that would cement his environmental legacy.
The GOP strategy, emerging after months of quiet discussions, includes sowing doubts about Obama’s climate policies at home and abroad, trying to block key environmental regulations in Congress, and challenging the legitimacy of the president’s attempts to craft a global agreement without submitting a treaty to the Senate.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/gop-congress-climate-pact-paris-213382
Funny. So the GOP plans to get foreign governments, many of them the GOP hasn’t been friendly toward, to listen to the GOP about blocking climate change agreements.
more about this from Think Progress
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/09/11/3700163/gop-leaders-embrace-climate-change/
What’s radical is the nakedly immoral and self-destructive greed underlying McConnell’s strategy, which includes one of his aides “informing foreign embassies about GOP plans to oppose Obama’s strategy on global warming.”
I still can’t imagine any country being impressed by this. Do they really care what the GOP thinks?
And that got me thinking about the Kochs, who seem to be supporting attempts to block legislation and climate research. While their money has been influential in American politics, they don’t have a lot of clout beyond the US and Canada, do they?
Yes, it is obvious that they are trolls.
This isn’t a winnable audience in this forum, so I don’t know why they bother here unless they hope their comments turn up in Google searches.
Also, as I keep saying, it doesn’t matter what they say.
A lot of what is going to happen with climate is already set in motion. Disputing the data won’t matter.
And a lot of the lifestyle changes are also already set in motion. People will pare down, not because of laws, but because they can’t afford to do otherwise.
They can keep driving those big trucks, but we all know that at some point those trucks may be sitting in driveways when fuel prices go up again.
Further, if these “freedom” folks were thinking logically, they might realize that if they can get everyone else to drive tiny cars, that would leave more gas and diesel to fuel their own big trucks.
If they want the oil used up as soon as possible, it’s going to hit them as hard or harder than it is going to hit the conservationists.
http://theconversation.com/astroturfing-the-climate-wars-five-ways-to-spot-a-troll-19011
Most of them are trolls no mistake but occasionally one is serious, I know numerous people who think just like our in an out trolls.
They post here partly because there are always new audience members and they don’t want any of their like minded fellows to be converted to a new way of thinking.
If it helps, think about a preacher going into a bar to talk about the sins of drinking. A few ”backsliding” church members can always be found in such places and may be shamed into leaving.
Furthermore anybody who is reading this forum with at least a partially open mind may be convinced that climate scientists really are crooks out for the money and environmentalists really are power mad socialists.
It would NOT do to allow us to have an EXCLUSIVE shot at a potential voter.
The KEY thing to remember is that the TYPICAL person in the street is utterly and abysmally ignorant of the hard sciences. Just about everybody has to take the word of the scientific establishment on faith.
Since just about all of US here in THIS forum are scientifically literate it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE TO REMEMBER how utterly IGNORANT the public really is.
This forgetfulness bordering on ignorance is perfectly illustrated by the words of some comic posing as a professor at a small liberal arts college in New England, smoking a pipe and wearing corduroys with elbow patches etc.
“I can’t understand how McGovern lost. Everybody I know voted for him.”
The average man on the street is only vaguely aware that oil comes out of holes in the ground.
He is ready to believe in dilithium crystals and any sort of to unobtianium when suits his prejudices to do so.
Being wrong on a particular factual issue, especially a complicated technical one, is not nearly so big a mistake from a social point of view as betraying the norms of one’s in group.
It is EXTREMELY unfortunate for us all collectively l that as the result of liberal versus social conservation in respect to cultural matters that environmental and scientific issues have come to be INEXTRICABLY associated with the liberal wing in the mind of the conservative wing.
WE ALL as a general rule go along to get along. I know hard core union guys who will look you in the eye and insist that the dim rats are NOT interested in eventually gutting the Second Amendment.
Only a fool who has NO understanding of the liberal establishment could possibly believe such bullshit.
These same guys own small arsenals of their own and make enough money to go hunting in Wyoming and Colorado and even overseas MOSTLY because their unions control access to certain very highly paid jobs. These jobs pay so well precisely for the reason that employers have no choice because of the unions controlling the industry which in turn depends on the democrats keeping the unions strong politically.
I used to be qualified to do some of those jobs and got some of that very high pay myself once in a while by getting in temporarily when the relevant unions were shorthanded. Mostly I was frozen out due to being unable to get into the union on a permanent basis.
(I am not antiunion, I just try to tell it as it is as I see it without blinders on. My Daddy the farmer kept a “part time” job in a factory forty hours a week his entire working life. He was a proud TEAMSTER the entire time and on the plant negotiating committee for the last twenty years he worked. IN NORTH CAROLINA no less. We live just across the state line in Virginia. A small farm never generates enough income to really support five kids and a wife in need of health insurance etc but we sure as hell always ate well. As a kid I would have swapped pork chops and roast beef for weenies any day. We seldom had weenies. )
So – redneck union guys who own arsenals are perfectly ready lie their asses off looking you right in the eye about their political allies. If you listen in the lunch room you will overhear them talking about some pinko commie getting their guns by prying them out of their cold dead hands.
In this overall us versus them context, facts do not matter ( short term to medium term) because PERCEPTIONS rule.
A social liberal IS a THREAT to the social order preferred by a social conservative and the fight is a fight to the death.
There is plenty of blood in the water and the liberals smell victory and are insisting they WILL control everybody in the name of equal rights to live as they please -EXCEPTING social conservatives who might want to earn a living without selling a wedding cake to a couple of men or women for example.
Let there be no doubt about it, both sides see this as a fight to the death and neither side is going to cut the other any slack if doing so can be avoided.
Expecting technically ignorant social conservatives to support environmental initiatives that they see as dubious to ridiculous on their own merits IN ADDITION to furthering the growth of the liberal wing is utterly naive.
Technically literate social conservatives generally keep quiet about environmental matters in public if they do not outright lie about such issues.
Being a libertarian sort of social conservative and technically literate, I never argue environmental issues from any pov with social conservatives except as they relate to their own best interests at a level they can understand.
Hence I just say that keeping poisons and trash out of a river in the first place is a damned sight cheaper than paying to clean up the water so people can drink it downstream.
I just say I remember buying gasoline for thirteen point nine by the GALLON not the liter, and that you can drive a LEAF forty miles on a dollars worth of electricity without ever having to change the oil or rebuild the transmission or pay out a couple of thousand to fix a blown head gasket.
I leave it to my audience to ponder how much gasoline will sell for in another ten years.
When they start bitching about the subsidies I agree but remind them that they get subsidies themselves – collecting fifteen grand in public school spending for two kids locally while paying a third of that or less in the property taxes that fund our schools if they have kids etc. Or that the government used to buy up their excess tobacco production . Or spent millions on the local flood control reservoir where they fish for the piddly contribution of a fishing license to help pay the game wardens salary.
OR loaned the fifty grand at a give away interest rate for forty years to buy a farm ( never actually farmed ) worth five million a few years ago at the peak of the local real estate market.
Separating environmental issues from social issues is not impossible but it IS sort of tricky unless you are careful.
I don’t pay nearly as much attention to the climate data as the pro or con folks. I have no reason to doubt the science, so I don’t.
But I also see the worst effects not coming until the future so I focus on more immediate concerns.
I have been interested in environmental issues for nearly 50 years. Why? Because I think some damage can’t be undone, so I want us to think carefully before we start tinkering with the natural landscape.
I am also very interested in human health issues. I have watched certain products deemed dangerous years after they have been used commercially because the data accumulated to show the dangers. Asbestos is an example. Therefore, I try to steer clear of products like herbicides and pesticides because if they are designed to kill things, I worry about their affect on the organisms they aren’t supposed to kill.
My concern with fossil fuels are these: (1) Environmental damage in areas where they are mined, shipped, processed, and so on. (2) Pollution in the areas where they are burned. (3) Wars fought over them. (4) Resource depletion. (5) Political power concentrated in those who own the resources.
I want people to begin to think about what happens when fossil fuels get too expensive for them. This isn’t a liberal/conservative issue.
I want people to think in terms of their own health issues if they don’t have any regulations concerning the use of polluting products.
As for the doomer/survivalist mentality, I’m not of that ilk, but I do like the self-sufficiency mentality and love reading about homesteading, farming, and so on. I’ve done some of it, on a small scale, but I have never prepared for a total life without society because I don’t have the resources nor do I expect to need to. However, I really admire those who have huge gardens, make their own compost, live off grid as much as possible, and so on.
Most of my positions aren’t political as such. I think there could be a pretty good meeting of the minds among the survivalists/self-sufficient types and among the organic/health nut types. There are certain issues that work across a wide political spectrum.
You can see some of the ideas working their way into conservative groups. We’ve got Tea Party types in favor of solar. We have conservatives happily driving their EVs in retirement communities.
We are also going to see capitalism kick in with full force in terms of energy technology very soon. The old political money that is tied to fossil fuels and fossil fuel infrastructure is going to be outgunned soon. The climate trolls who drop in here are on the wrong side of the bigger battle because the resources and lifestyles they want to protect are disappearing precisely because they done their best to use them up.
Place me into the camp here among you guys completely worried about climate change. It all started for me on January 26, 2006. That day, I was watching the foremost climate scientist of all time, Al Gore, proclaiming on TV that we would only have ten years left of planet earth if we did not change our habits. Well, the 10 year anniversary of that enlightened proclamation is only 139 days away now! Sure America has reduced our emissions by around 10% thanks to the miracle of the natural gas fracking revolution but China has increased theirs by 1000% so I guess we’re all going to be dead soon, better get your coffin prepared. Do liberals get a special place in heaven so they don’t have to mingle with the riff-raff?
“Al Gore, proclaiming on TV that we would only have ten years left of planet earth if we did not change our habits.”
In the original American version, Gore was not a scientist, let alone the foremost, and he didn’t say we only have 10 years of earth left. Were you watching the Faux News version? It loses a lot in the translation; like real science
UN climate deal will be too late to save Kiribati, says leader
President Anote Tong told the UN General Assembly on Monday his country had already embarked on a plan to evacuate some of its 32 atolls, adding: “We don’t have a lot of options.” But he urged countries to use Kiribati’s plight as inspiration in Paris to develop an ambitious deal to avert further consequences from rising temperatures.
http://pacificguardians.org/blog/2015/07/03/un-climate-deal-will-be-too-late-to-save-kiribati-says-leader/.html
“Do liberals get a special place in heaven so they don’t have to mingle with the riff-raff?”
What makes you think climate deniers will be allowed into Heaven?
Sea level now dropped over 25cm in W.Pacific and risen over 25cm in E.Pacific.
http://bulletin.aviso.oceanobs.com/html/produits/indic/enso/welcome_uk.php3
Boomer II said “Some folks look longingly back at the 1950s when life seemed simple and the future looked bright. In terms of lifestyle, the environmental folks could embrace that, too. One car families. Houses no more than 1000 square feet. No air conditioning. No air travel for average folks. And so on.”
Yes the media and movies did portray the 1950’s as carefree and the future looked bright. In reality it was very much different than that.
I remember hunkering down in the hallways behind the block wall (all the classrooms had large glass windows) as part of our nuclear war drills. The jets going by with the sonic booms rattling the glass. Sometimes the fighter jets would come over the town so low and slow we could look right into the rear of the engine. Everybody loved it because it was demonstrating someone was protecting us (no reality to that and we knew it, at least I did).
Sure things look good in the 50’s, cool cars, that new modern kitchen with automatic appliances, great stuff that would be burnt and melted in a few seconds by that H-bomb burst 50 miles overhead. Yes, we were and still are under constant threat of instantaneous death. Add to that the increasing industrial pollution and atmospheric radiation levels.
Fast forward a few years when I am studying nuclear weapon strategy and deployment tactics. At that point I knew there was no real survival in a full scale nuclear war.
So the 1950’s and 60’s were great times to learn to ignore the fact that the major governments in the world did not care one iota about our survival or the environment. That the political ideology was more important than life on earth. Basically I learned the inmates had taken over the asylum.
If you could ignore all that and the wars and the race wars it was a great time to live, mostly because if we didn’t launch those weapons there looked like there might be a future. Only if you wandered around with blinders on your brain though, which many did. Can you blame them?
After settling the WWII debacle everything got progressively worse and more dangerous. Now we find ourselves and the world environment facing further dangers from insidious creeping changes that are inherent to our civilization. The nuclear threat is still there and the threat from peaceful nuclear use has grown steadily.
The 1950’s looked great because nobody much gave a damn, they smoked, drank, had bbq’s, swam in their pools, had canasta parties, clubs, fun, fun, fun in the sun sun sun. Why even polio got conquered. Heady times, if you kept your mind off the guys sitting in those bunkers ready to jump in a nuclear bomber on short notice. A dream set in a nightmare.
And we worry about bringing some refugees on board, while we ignore the real problems and push them down the road to nowhere. I don’t think the world has it’s head in the sand, I think it has it’s head up it’s collective ass.
“Some folks look longingly back at the 1950s when life seemed simple and the future looked bright”
It was simple and bright if you were white, and had a TV to watch “Ozzie and Harriet”. If you were black in Miss., and had to correctly count the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to vote, it wasn’t the best of times.
Well, Zep, I remember one morning walking across the beautiful campus to give my dreaded thermo lecture with the thought that we would all be dead before I had finished it. We weren’t.
Luck? Yes, but more than that, I think.
In those days I had a habit of doing wargaming in my head, and had long since decided that no sane person would ever hit the H button under any circumstance whatsoever.
If he did hit it the other guy might retaliate and then who has what?
And if the other guy had hit it first, he was dead anyhow and no sense to do ditto to him just out of spite.
Besides, I had known a few Russians in grad school and they were funnier and smarter than I was and didn’t seem to me to need killing.
So after a lot of churning around I came to the conclusion re war that I still have today:
If you have a real disagreement about something, first try logical discussion, after all, you may be wrong, which is easy to fix.
If that doesn’t fly, then try bribery, picking the briberees with great care and finesse in fitting the personality to what’s offered.
If that too is nogo, then consider selective culling of leadership, merely assisting, of course, their fellow countrymen act on real grudges.
Right now, the bribe in my mind is pretty attractive. Knock off the war stuff, put those resources into a clean way of life, and work hard everyday to
“Make here the place I would rather be”.
Wimbi, if only sane people were running the show, those weapons would no longer exist and we could work on our little paradise’s without the axe hanging over our necks.
In a sane world when the long list of predicaments are brought forward, as has happened lately, group action would start immediately to reduce or disrupt future effects from the problems. So far, only small, disjointed efforts are being made. The market is supposed to fix it, but it doesn’t because the market is not there to fix things, only make money. So down the road we go, with possibly some mediocre fiddling by governments that will fall short of the mark by far.
Small disjointed efforts of the world UNITE! You have only the dooms to lose, you have the world to win.
Around here, doing it. Fun, friendship, good potlucks!
The other places, the dooms cubed, the madmen? Working on it.
For those interested in politics I remind them that reading and studying the enemy is worth more in terms of understanding than sticking to one’s own party line thinking.
Read this if you are either a hard core social conservative OR a commie tree hugger with lots of pink underwear. In either case you will gain insight.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/08/31/america-youre-watching-beginning-end-republican-party.html?intcmp=ob_article_footer_text&intcmp=obnetwork
A great documentary on electricity generation and distribution in Iraq:
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2012/06/2012618132430953572.html
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Capitalism is a system that enriches 1 percenters and immiserates the masses, and it uses the weakest members of the masses to enforce and maintain the system through policing and waging its wars.
Obviously some will see the system for what it is and seek to overturn such a fundamentally unjust establishment. The 1 percenters know that, and they take steps to guard against any potential revolution. Knowledge is power, and the 1 percenters seek control through keeping their politicians in decision-making positions — of critical importance is education/indoctrination. Another key lever is ownership of mass media.
Their polices make the situation in Iraq what they are.
In light of the climate change discussion, this simple presentation might be of interest here: Rethinking the “greenhouse effect”
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/pdf/Rethinking_the_greenhouse_effect.pdf
maybe I should post on the oil thread but I suspect it would be met with hostility, so…
from Richard Heinberg at PCI
Environmentalists are accustomed to thinking of fossil fuel industry as the enemy; but they must eventually confront the inconvenient truth that, for the next two or three decades, oil and gas will still be necessary. That’s partly because we currently need fossil fuels for building, transporting, and installing renewable energy infrastructure (panels, turbines, electric cars, energy storage, grid upgrades, public transit). If oil becomes less readily available, then existing users will be bidding against new users in the rapidly growing renewable energy sector. It would be terrific if renewables could bootstrap themselves, providing the power for their own manufacture and installation, but they’re not profitable enough (they still require subsidies) or versatile enough (we’re a long way from being able to use solar or wind electricity for mining, high-heat industrial processes, container ships, and heavy trucks). So we will need to do some energy triage, using taxes or subsidies to direct our remaining fossil fuels preferentially toward transition efforts as our use of them declines over all (ideally through the implementation of carbon caps). That will require some clever policy design.
In short, we need fossil fuels to go away, but in a measured and predictable way. And we need them to do some important work for us on their way out the door.
Why would anyone resist the idea of fossil fuel production caps? A lot of people just don’t like the idea of a managed economy. Others are leery of directly reducing fossil fuel supplies because doing so could lead to economic contraction. But we’re headed for the end of fossil-fueled economic growth in any case. It’s just a question of whether we make the shift in a coordinated way, or through a series of escalating crises.
Right now climate policy negotiators are hammering out an agreement to be signed in Paris late this year. Of the policy measures being discussed, some (carbon taxes) do not entail actual caps. If caps are approved, there are further decisions to be made: should we limit carbon dioxide emissions (which can be complicated: do you account for offsets, which can be gamed?) or actual fossil fuel extraction at the mine or wellhead (which is likely to be much simpler)? Then, how should remaining production amounts be allocated? A promising idea that has gleaned far too little attention is the use of rationing, via Tradable Energy Quotas.
http://www.postcarbon.org/cap-fossil-fuel-production-now/
TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas) is an electronic system for fairly reducing consumption of carbon-intensive energy, at the national scale.
http://www.teqs.net/
With strategic support and public-private cooperation, thousands of unemployed oil workers and coal miners could potentially land wind and solar jobs.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32680-greening-the-us-energy-workforce
Jimena’s demise ends the longest continuous period of TCs >=35 kts in Cent Pac (180-140W) history (18 days).
https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/COeyqReUAAA4rxx.mp4
From an article in Think Progress about the coming desertification or dust bowls across Mexico and Central America and the ensuing migration.
“But the unprecedented multi-year drought that preceded the Syrian civil war is mild compared to the multi-decade megadroughts that unrestricted carbon pollution will make commonplace in the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, and Central America, according to many recent studies.
Given the current political debate over immigration policy, it’s worth asking two questions. First: if the United States, through our role as the greatest cumulative carbon polluter in history, plays a central role in rendering large parts of Mexico and Central America virtually uninhabitable, where will the refugees go? And second: will we have some moral obligation to change our immigration policy?”
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/09/08/3699165/refugees-dust-bowl-mexico/
From WIRED,
A long article well written and REALISTIC , about the nature of high speed rail and when and where it will work and what American cities and states will have to do to make it work.
The key to this thing working from the individual’s pov is to figure out exactly where it will eventually be built and buy property very close to stations so as to reap the maximum benefit from it.
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/america-can-learn-europes-high-speed-trains/
Much as I like trains, high speed rail makes no sense economically or energetically. Much like the moon landings, it’s an expensive show piece. Even the moderate speed Amtrak trains are a financial loss and they are cheaper to run and maintain. As far as the efficiency of passenger trains, that is very dependent upon the passenger density in both directions. It works somewhat in areas that have high population densities and business density since the trains are mostly aimed at commuting. However that leads to some trains running back with near empty cars. In general a hybrid car with 2 passengers is far more efficient than passenger trains. There is also a huge amount of energy and materials that goes into the building of high speed train lines.
Next is the competition with airlines. With extremely expensive infrastructure and trains to build and maintain, high speed trains cannot compete financially with aircraft. Aircraft do not need any infrastructure between airports. With the next generation of very efficient aircraft (up to twice as efficient) already starting, there is no economic hope for high speed trains, they will always be on the public till to operate and compete with other modes of travel.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-true-cost-of-a-high-speed-rail-for-the-us-is-more-than-500-billion-2009-5
The paper I linked to point out pretty much the same shortcomings as MZ just mentioned in his five fifty three am.
The paper is mainly about what we will need to do in the USA to make high speed rail work for us as well is it does in more compact European and Asian cities and countries with higher population densities.
The one big advantage of HSR in my estimation is that in the case of intercity travel up to maybe five hundred miles it is quicker and potentially cheaper DOWNTOWN to DOWN TOWN than a car to the air port and from the air port to down town.
The second big advantage is that high speed rail can be and will be electric and can be operated to a substantial extent on renewable electricity.
But my preference would be reasonably fast conventional trains on conventional tracks with elevated or below grade crossings and double tracks. In the end if BAU survives this model would reduce highway congestion enormously while saving enormous amounts of oil as well.
I have traveled a couple of times by air on short hops. Down town to down town for a three hundred mile trip never took less than three hours. A ninety mph train with a reasonably priced ticket would have been a MUCH better deal for a three hundred mile hop.
If you already have a car and are up to driving it, driving for three hundred miles is generally cheaper and no more time consuming than getting a ride to an airport, getting a ride where you are going , hiring a cab if you need one, etc .You may be an hour or two longer on the road but as likely as not you make that up by going when you please, returning when you please, and not waiting around for expensive transportation at your destination.
You have to be making pretty good money for air travel to be more attractive cost wise and time wise than driving your own car up to five or six hours one way unless you are getting cheap shuttle tickets and your are close to the airport at both ends of the trip.
I personally never went any place I wanted to be stuck on foot so as to have to eat and sight see by either eating only in my hotel or hiring a cab. I managed to get lost as often as not in the subways in NYC and learned to avoid them unless accompanied by my former Big Apple wife when we visited there.
IF I lived there I most likely would not own a car though.
I used to travel on real trains, with comfortable seats and berths and good meals and lots of time to think and read and stare at the other people. Very relaxing to know you had two days all to your own thoughts and nobody could get at you with some goddam bad news or other.
Edward Teller and other people in the atom project during the war said the same thing in their biographies. The trip from Princeton to Los Alamos was a place where real creative thinking could get done.
Think of it, no cell phones! Free at Last!
We need to get regular train travel in the US back to where it was in 1940 before advancing into High Speed Rail.
We probably won’t have the resources and capital available after that, but who knows?
Having followed a number of rail projects in my area, it is very unlikely that a major extension of the rail system will happen, let alone a huge increase in passenger runs.
Railroads are a for profit business, passenger runs are generally losers so the passenger line must be publicly subsidized.
It would take a major loss of highway and air transport to stir the pot and build back the railroads. Most of the old right of ways are broken by development. Others have been privatized. So we are stuck with the current corridors.
If the political calculus works out in favor of railroads the right of ways can be restored the same way we got right of ways for roads and utilities- eminent domain.
I do not personally expect much improvement in passenger train services in this country for the easily foreseeable future.
But I do have hopes for fast and efficient long distance freight by rail with good service between cities only a few hundred miles apart.
Now that we have good computers and computerized communications, I believe rail freight can be made to work extremely well. With parallel tracks and plenty of room, it should be possible to add and detach cars to a train just like merging cars on the highway – by using a pusher engine to get them out on the track behind a moving train and coupling them up. They could uncouple and be steered onto a siding at the next city down the line automatically.
The possibilities are many, the problems manageable.
A locomotive could run on wind or solar power with tram line power and switch back to it’s diesel engine if the wind quits blowing or it clouds up.
A coal train could just be diverted onto a siding until wind and solar power recovers in some cases at least. Coal doesn’t rot and power plants keep a couple of months supply on hand. Delaying a delivery a day would not be that big a deal.
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/microsoft-kisses-tim-cook-front-millions/
I read this as powerful blow to the gut of proprietary software.
For anybody who knows, how long might it be before you could do just about anything you might want to do with open source software?
I know you can do a lot already.
The article is about the iPad. The only way to install software on an iPad is through the App Store. Open source apps under the GPL license are explicitly forbidden from the App Store, not to mention the fact that iOS itself is extremely locked-down. How did you make a connection from that article to open source??? The iPad is the ultimate anti-thesis of open source.
I had the same question. I think Mac is thinking about iOS apps being cheaper than desktop. Though I’m not sure that’s the case with the subscription MS-Office apps.
Not thinking about just iPads and Apples. I expressed myself poorly but the marriage or even holding hands of APPLE and MICROSOFT is significant in the long run. The trend is toward common technology and imo eventually toward open source.
I have a mac mini but will soon give it away to an old friend who is mac proficient. Personally I am going back totally to bilgates stuff because everybody knows how to use it. I can get a dozen MS experts on the phone tonight for FREE. Nobody I know is mac proficient AND free to talk to me anytime.
And while the mac is REALLY nice in some respects- the MS stuff is FINE for my needs and a hell of a lot cheaper.
At some point it time maybe ENOUGH patents and copyrights will expire and ENOUGH free software and generic hardware will be available to enable us to quit paying high prices for brand names and status.
If I were a powerful politician in a country just now modernizing I would try to make sure all school kids learn to use open source software such as linux and make it a CONDITION of government employment that all new hires be open source proficient. This would cost each kid coming along a couple of hundred hours extra learning basic computer technology but it would save my country megabucks in a hell of a hurry- megabucks that could be better spent on things such as more tech classes rather than lining the pockets of the owners of MS and APPLE.
IIRC each annual renewal of a MS commercial license runs into a good bit of money and that bit adds up to an enormous sum over the working lifetime of any person using a computer professionally.
I am NOT knocking paying for particular programs that can increase a workers efficiency so as to repay the cost of that program many times over. Premium quality tools are often bargains. But my old Ford gets me to town just as efficiently as a brand new Cadillac. I doubt there is a single patent any part of my FORD that is still in effect or if so it has less than a year to run. The patents on my old Chevy truck have been expired for at least nine years. It still runs just fine although it IS a gas hog.
I think Europeans and most likely Asians resent the idea of having to pay the Microsoft tax, just for the OS to be able to use their computers. Worse the additional tax to actually do most business related work through licenses for the Office software suite. I believe that is why the Open Office software project was based primarily in Europe and it’s derivative Libre Office is administered through the Document Foundation, headquartered in Europe.
I use Linux (Ubuntu 14.04) on my laptop most of the time and miss windows, like a bad headache! If people only knew what it’s like on the other side! As far as specialized programs go, there is a Digital Audio Workstation softtware that would find use in recording studios that ran on Linux or Mac OS but NOT Windows until spring 2015. The Windows version is not officially supported!
An area where Linux absolutely rules, is in the movie business for animation and special effects rendering. Weird, isn’t it? There is good reason however. The movie studios cannot afford the risk of their software being orphaned and ending up with no technical support. With Linux they have access to the source code and have better control over what happens with their software. For example if a software issue comes up, they can put their own programmers on it rather than wait for a vendor to come up with a solution. /off topic
Plug-In Electric Car Sales On Pace To Double Hybrids In First Five Years After Introduction
“With 350,000 plug-ins under the belt, and still a few months before we fully close out the first five-year period, EVs are on track for 400,000, which would be double the sales result for hybrids in their first five years.”
2016 Nissan LEAF: 107 Miles EPA Range – Full Specs/Pricing
Nissan has taken the wraps off the 2016 Nissan LEAF, and the company did not disappoint on earlier range expectations as both the SV and SL trims now come equipped with a 30 kWh battery, giving the LEAF 107 miles (172 km) of EPA rated range,….”
The 2016 Chevy Volt will be on sale soon in select markets and the Tesla Model X crossover deliveries start September 29 so, we should be seeing an uptick in sales to end the year. Will 2015 top the 123,049 units sold in 2014? How soon before all these plug-ins start to affect US national oil product sales or electricity consumption, without a corresponding drop in vehicle miles traveled?
Toyota has upgraded and redesigned the Prius for the 2016 model also.
Personal observation from someone who cruises the LA freeways everyday. I see a lot of Prius’s out here. 40-50 everyday in my 1 hr commute, although they may be the same ones! I see about 2-3 Volts and only the occasional Tesla. Saw my first Leaf yesterday. It seems almost all of the cabs out here are now Prius’s.
I am also seeing some hybrid delivery trucks esp for Coke.
I like my Prius but my more recent purchase was a Honda Accord. I was largely influenced by my long time independent mechanic who believes that the Accord is the most trouble free sedan. Is it not a waste of material resources to have two engines?
That’s why one of the links in my EV link bomb post up top says, “Tesla’s Pure BEV Approach Favored Over German Luxury Plug-In Hybrids”.
It depends on how many miles you drive.
I only drive 800 miles per year, so I don’t spend the money and resources on a new (hopefully EV) car.
If you drive the normal 150k+ miles, the extra materials would be paid back in energy savings many times over.
from LA Times..
With all the fanfare of a Las Vegas show, Toyota unveiled the fourth generation of its Prius hybrid on the rooftop deck of the Linq Hotel & Casino on the Strip on Tuesday night..
The automaker estimates a 10% jump in fuel economy, to about 55 mpg, but that may be less important to sales growth than improved driving dynamics and normalized styling.
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-new-prius-20150909-story.html
I always use Consumers Reports as my guide when considering a used car purchase. Priuses rank very high. Not just high for a hybrid, but high for any kind of used car that size. Therefore, if you are looking for a reliable used compact or subcompact car, the Prius is going to be in the mix.
I will be in Anaheim, California next week, for the Solar Power International trade show. It will be interesting to see how many hybrids and plug-ins I can spot. One problem is that out of the 22 models listed on the insideevs monthly scorecard, only 8 are unique in appearance, the Leaf, the Volt, the Model S, the i3, the i8, the Prius, the ELR and the i-MiEV. The rest can hardly be distinguished from their conventionally powered counterparts.,
I read that US vehicle sales are on track to 17 million units this year. Cumulative five year world sales must be well into nine figures. Why are ev sales such a tiny percentage?
Think back to your post further up where you give your reasons for not thinking the Volt is a decent car and you have part of your answer. The public perception of EVs as golf carts added to the expense. They are not cheap compared to their conventional powered counterparts. The Nissan Leaf costs considerably more than the Nissan Versa and the EV versions of the Ford Focus and VW Golf both cost considerably more. It will be interesting to see the sales of the New Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV when it hits the US. In all the markets in which it is sold, the PHEV sells for the same price as the diesel powered variant.
In the luxury segment the Tesla Model S is competitive with other cars that offer similar performance (acceleration). The goal of Tesla and I suppose, their competitors is to produce EVs that can compete with conventional cars on size, features, performance and most importantly price. The Chevy Bolt, with a range of 200 miles, due for release in late 2017 as a 2018 model may come closest to achieving that goal, if they can hit their target price, about 35k.
The public perception of EVs as golf carts added to the expense.
That’s why the Tesla is important, even if it remains a niche product.
The Nissan Leaf costs considerably more than the Nissan Versa
Sigh.
Go to Edmunds.com and look at Total Cost of Ownership for both cars. You’ll see that they’re almost identical at the moment, with low fuel prices. With the US tax credit the Leaf is insanely cheap. If buyers are put off by higher capex and lower opex then they can get a lease. So, high capex isn’t the explanation for low sales.
the Tesla Model S is competitive with other cars that offer similar performance (acceleration).
The Tesla is the fastest production sedan in the world, ever. It has better performance than two passenger sports cars that cost twice as much. It’s far better than cars in it’s price class.
In marketing it is all about creating perceptions and the perceptions about EVs have been created and considerable efforts will have to be made to alter those perceptions. The average car buyer has a maximum figure that they want to spend and if you go over that, you’re toast. Even if the car ran on free sunshine or pixie dust, the average buyer is still going to look at the purchase price first.
Even a Tesla is a remarkably economical car compared to the cars in it’s price range. I worked out that a Tesla in my country would cost less than half as much to fuel as it’s rivals and that is with electricity costing 40+ cents a kWh!
But people don’t buy Teslas because they’re really economical to operate, they buy them because they think they are really cool cars!
If more people though Leafs were cool they would sell better but you have to be kind of nerdy to think a Leaf is cool. It looks unusual (weird?). I think the Tesla Model 3 might be the car that changes the perception that the broader market has of electric cars. For them to succeed, they have to.
I think Shallow Sand put it well in the previous Ron Post:
Paid $23.00 for a total of fours hours of parking. Compare that to gasoline cost of $61 for over 600 miles in a gas guzzling GMC Sierra.
Heck , the cost of eating out made gasoline look like nothing. Only one sit down meal and not a fancy place. Mostly fast food, mall food court. For four for 5 meals that ran over $200.
Folks, gasoline is dirt cheap. I know all the arguments about pollution, wars, conservation, etc. I don’t necessarily disagree.
However, 99+% of this country is not going to be bothered thinking about that stuff. To that group, plugging in a car all night or not running the air conditioner when it’s 90 degrees, like this weekend, is something they don’t want to mess with. “
The price of EVs and hybrids (with tax benefits) is just low enough to attract the market that wants them. And that market appears to be just big enough to keep the innovations coming. If EV technology can keep progressing so that when EVs are truly needed as a mass market vehicle they are ready, it should work out all right at some point.
Chevy Bolt. 35K. Range 200 miles. Honda Civic 18K. Range 400+. The Bolt will probably fail to meet my standard of a decent personal vehicle. Nor would we like an extension cord in the driveway.
Well, the Volt has a range of 420 miles (I just checked). With the tax credit it’s far cheaper to own and operate than the Honda. And, it’s a much nicer car than the Civic, and has better performance than the Accord.
Imo it is the higher up front cost of a Volt or a Leaf that has the most to do with their slow sales.After that, fear of low resale value and lack of range.Plus fear on the part of dealers that there will be little or no highly profitable service work.
People who focus on the cost of driving rather than status – people like me- drive older cars, bought used.
Insurance and tags are cheap where I live and my experience may not apply to places where insurance is really expensive, but I could easily own TWO very nice low mileage middle aged cars including gasoline and routine maintenance for less than the depreciation alone on a nice new car for the next five years.
Given that gasoline is so cheap now and likely to stay cheap for a year or two I may sell the ESCORT and start driving the land yacht BUICK going to waste in the back yard. It’s old but it has all the nicer bells and whistles such as electric seats available when it was new.
Depreciation hardly matters as a car gets older if you plan on keeping it.
And if you really give a shit about managing your money, then you ought to be able to find a way to profitably invest the ten thousand dollar difference in price between a cheap conventional new car and a new electric and make more than you could save. .
People who are moderately strapped for money – meaning the typical new car buyer considering sixty month credit arrangements- are mostly focused on the MONTHLY payment and short term operating cost.Gasoline is not that expensive , most people driving small cars spend only thirty bucks or so on gasoline per week these days. You really do not expect to spend much at all on repairs on a new car.
Financing, insurance and taxes correlate closely with the price of the car.
I have NEVER once in my entire LIFE spent a dime on financing a car or on “full coverage”insurance. Accident liability coverage and medical coverage is all I need.
I would personally be more interested in putting that ten grand in TESLA stock myself. If it triples again over the next five years, that would be enough profit to buy myself a new electric by then. GRIN
Yes, I fit pattern you describe. I usually buy a car that is at least three years old and then keep it until I finally concede the repair bills are getting too high.
I don’t drive much, so I don’t need the most fuel efficient car, but I do want something reliable. However, I recently got rid a car that was getting about 20-25 miles to the gallon for something that gets between 30-35 miles to the gallon.
I would like to have something that contributes minimally to fossil fuel burning, but since I haven’t yet bought a car that doesn’t use any, I try to leave my car parked most of the time and walk everywhere.
I suppose whether I get an EV or just don’t use the car I have, I am accomplishing the same thing.
The new Volt does appear to have an adequate range. See pictures. I would not like managing the extension cord in the driveway day and night. Nor would my wife. It is unfortunate that a subsidy is necessary. http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car.html?&seo=goo_%7C_GM+Chevy+Retention_%7C_GMNA%7CUS%7CHV%7CGOOG%7CS%7CBP%7CA%7CEX%7CRTN%7CVOL%7CELV%7C0%7C0%7CGG-RTN-Volt-RS-Exact%7CNA%7CNA%7CNA_%7C_Volt_%7C_chevy%20volt
Note that’s the 2015 – the 2016 has greater electric and gas range.
Extension cord? You don’t have a garage?
Yes, it’s too bad the tax credit is necessary. We really ought to have a proper gas tax, that reflected the actual costs of oil. But, we don’t, so tax credits are a poor but necessary substitute.
I believe Robert WIlson is at the age at which he will soon be giving up driving altogether and well enough off that he need not be bothered with a cord. IIRC he is an MD. They mostly have plenty of money.
As far as the way subsidies are passed out, I believe in them as they are effective in getting the transition to ev’s moving faster- but they ought to be distributed at random. It would cost the government the same amount of money.
I might get lucky and win one in the ev lottery and be able justify buying a new Leaf or Volt. I am NOT hard up but have almost no taxable income given the way I live.
Why in hell should my government treat some scumbag lawyer better than it does ME?
Never mind, I know the answer. The lawyers control the government even more effectively than the bankers. Damned every legislator in my state and half of all congressmen are lawyers.
You don’t need taxable income to take advantage of the tax credit. If you do a lease, you get the benefit of the tax credit.
No usable garage. We park both cars outside.
No garage, period.
I do have a barn though.
At some point in the development of EVs, inductive charging (IC) will arrive. It will add more cost, both for hardware and more electricity, because it is not as efficient and inexpensive as the plug.
In the end as costs decline, convenience and possibly a small improvement to safety, the charging technology will move to IC.
Interesting new start up with new battery tech.
http://www.ambri.com/
from Gar Alperovitz
With President Obama’s announcement of the Clean Power Plan, almost 50 new fronts are going to open up in the battle for energy democracy. It’s time for an all-out mobilization with potentially far-reaching consequences.
Following the landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2014 affirming the Environmental Protection Agency’s right to reduce carbon pollution, President Obama has introduced a major program in the lead-up to the Paris climate talks at the end of this year that seeks to significantly reduce carbon emissions from US power plants, targeting a 32 percent drop from 2005 levels by 2030. This is a substantial executive action in a hostile legislative context, although many climate activists rightly demand far more ambitious targets.
What few have noticed is that the implementation phase of the Clean Power Plan is where things could start to get very interesting as there are almost certainly going to be very important opportunities for powerful local organizing.
Basically, the EPA will be mandating reductions on a state-by-state basis, and then each state will be responsible for hitting those targets – or the federal government would step in, via the proposed Federal Plan, and do it for them if they refused or were unwilling to meet the targets. In certain ways, the approach resembles the Affordable Care Act, but given the flexibility in the strategies states can pick to cut their emissions, there is going to be a great deal of unexpected room to begin demanding, at the state level, plans that get the climate job done while also moving toward a more democratic economy.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32742-the-clean-power-checkerboard
I don’t know how many of you remember the media coverage of the HDTV. This was quite awhile ago and Japan was taking the lead. The general feeling was that if the US didn’t start rolling out HDTV technology, we were falling behind.
Now, HDTV is not a need item. And yet it was being pitched as something this country needed in order to be on par with Japan.
I am surprised there hasn’t been more talk of the US needing to be a leader in energy technology.
Trying to sell the country on CO2 restrictions seems to me to be a harder sell than saying the US needs to stay current in energy technology or it will be left behind. Seems to me that in Paris the rest of the countries should be working together, with or without the US.
And the advantage of moving forward with new energy technology is that it is more accessible to more countries than fossil fuels. Once countries implement solar and wind, they won’t be held hostage to buying fuel from the countries that have it.
“And the advantage of moving forward with new energy technology is that it is more accessible to more countries than fossil fuels. Once countries implement solar and wind, they won’t be held hostage to buying fuel from the countries that have it.”
Amen, Brother!
Paradoxically industries that sometimes appear at first glance to be dug in and in control of existing technologies and markets don’t always WANT to maintain the status quo.
At first when the heating and air industry came up against the proposal to get rid of FREON the opposition was furious. But pretty soon the players realized this was going to work out beautifully to their own advantage- which DID indeed happen. The industry made countless millions scrapping out old systems still in good condition and upgrading their customers to the newer FREON free systems a lot sooner than they would have otherwise.
Ditto the tv industry. Noboby with any real power was opposed because the players almost all of them saw the upside- scrapping their customers existing sets and infrastructure and selling them all new stuff.
The fossil fuel industries are DIFFERENT. They are NOT going to be the ones selling their old customers the NEW STUFF.To the extent that renewables succeed, they lose.
And the FF industries DO have enough political clout to slow down the adoption of renewables to a very substantial extent.
The fossil fuel industries are DIFFERENT. They are NOT going to be the ones selling their old customers the NEW STUFF.To the extent that renewables succeed, they lose.
In theory they could be the ones selling the new stuff. Remember when BP was going to be “beyond petroleum”?
They could have been using their money to transition to alternative technology rather than looking for more oil.
But I suppose the mentality of the two industries is too different. The Silicon Valley folks are better at understanding concepts like distributed generation.
What they have is a sure thing if they can hang onto it and stall renewables.
The problem with renewables is that most of the companies in the field today are going to go broke or get swallowed up in buyouts and mergers. It is hard or maybe impossible to know which ones will succeed.
I was sort of tied up and unable to get out to Silicon Valley when I first heard the term. BUT if I HAD managed that move, I could have bought ANY HOUSE in the area and made a KILLING on it in a few years. I could have done better with a few select stocks of course – but how would I have known WHICH ONES?
Test.
I have a response to OFM and it won’t post.
Nope, the retry didn’t work.
I wonder what words get banned. I’ll try to rewrite it and repost.
I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to break up my original response into small segments and see if parts of it will get through and isolate the parts that won’t.
Part 1
The problem with renewables is that most of the companies in the field today are going to go broke or get swallowed up in buyouts and mergers. It is hard or maybe impossible to know which ones will succeed.
True, and that has been the case for other new technologies, too. Hard to know what will work. Many ideas and companies will fail. Which is why the argument that a lot of renewable and alternative energy projects will fail is kind of beside the point. There are a lot of failures on the way to success and we pretty much need the failures to learn anything. One of the mottoes of Silicon Valleys is “fail fast, fail often.”
Part 2 (I already posted this once, but then I tried to edit it by adding part 3 and it was marked as spam and deleted.)
What a big energy company could do is what Microsoft used to do: let others innovate and then use its money to buy them out.
But now it is the wealthy Silicon Valley types, not the fossil fuel types, who will use excess cash to invest in new energy technologies.
Okay. Part 3 is considered spam by the software. I need to rephrase it somehow.
What I said was that since both the fossil fuel and the alternative energy/EV industries need fuels to rise in price, in theory they could work together. While the gas/oil/coal folks might want no competition so that they can charge huge prices, that isn’t going to happen anyway.
There is likely a price point high enough to keep the FF folks in business and also make alternative energy attractive. As long as demand is sufficient to keep both in business, there is no reason for the FF folks to try to impede the alternative energy/EV folks since they likely can’t meet all the demand anyway at an affordable price. No reason for them to be greedy.
Bingo. The rewrite went through. All I can figure is that the spam software decided I wrote fossil fuels too many times in one comment and blocked it.
Hi Boomer,
Sorry about that. I have no idea how the spam filter woks exactly, and I am not going to try.
Well, in the future, I am going to do what I did in this case. I’ll break down my blocked messages into pieces to identify the problem and then rewrite the section that won’t go through.
It’s interesting that a thread where someone made a typo and accidentally used a crude word for a woman’s anatomy got through, but some of my own non-offending comments get blocked. But again, I am guessing that if any words (other than words like “a”, “an”, “and”, etc.) are used too often in one comment, the spam filter blocks the comment.
from Connecticut….
The EPA’s new Clean Power Plan offers an opportunity to jump-start our new climate strategy. The Clean Energy Incentive Program will support early investments in renewable energy projects and energy efficiency in low-income communities. That’s exactly the directional shift we need for our energy policy.
Meeting our greenhouse gas emission reduction targets will require heavy lifting, but it can also provide important benefits for the people of our state. Phasing out polluting fossil fuel facilities will contribute to improved public health, especially in the low-income communities most vulnerable to such pollution.
A new energy strategy will also provide good, stable jobs in a growing climate protection sector: manufacturing jobs, jobs for those who have been marginalized in the current labor market and jobs for skilled union workers in the construction trades. The governor’s council should prioritize creating Connecticut jobs, providing a just transition for any displaced workers and ensuring sustained, orderly development to prevent the boom-and-bust cycles that are devastating for workers and vendors.
The greatest climate protection plan will be pointless if it is not backed by a broad public determination to implement it. Since working families and low-income urban communities face the greatest potential impacts from climate change, the council should ensure the voices of environmental justice communities and labor are fully represented in climate policy deliberations.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/11/clean-energy-strategy-must-map-way-climate-goal
“The continuous torrent of rain water is complicating the already difficult situation in Fukushima where, according to an operator of the Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the drainage pumps are not able to evacuate all the water that is pouring into the plant, becoming contaminated and damaging the ‘surrounding environment. Since 2011, the Tempco has been in charge of storing tons of radioactive water used to cool the reactors at the plant, destroyed by the tsunami. Prime Minister Abe, speaking to the press, assured that “the government will remain united and will do its best to deal with the disaster, making the saving of human life our highest priority.”
http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/site/index.php?pageid=event_desc&edis_id=ED-20150910-50029-JPN
Nuclear power is probably a good idea, except humans build and maintain the plants.
If we were to pass laws – enforceable laws that WOULD BE ENFORCED – to the effect every engineer and bureaucrat that signs off on the siting and design of any nuke that melts down or suffers other catastrophic failure would be air dropped onto the reactor site without a parachute , we could have reasonably safe nukes. sarc light blinking but not brightly.
Feds Cancel Study of Cancer Risks Near US Nuclear Facilities
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32752-feds-cancel-study-of-cancer-risks-near-us-nuclear-facilities
Press release 10 September, 2015
Countries can make the transition to low-carbon economic growth, overcome poverty and raise living standards, if they both recognise the great opportunities available and embrace an ethical approach to managing climate change, Nicholas Stern will tell senior representatives from the Catholic Church at an international meeting on environmental justice and climate change in Rome today (Thursday 10 September).
Speaking at the Istituto Patristico Augustinianum, Professor Lord Stern will criticise the practice of heavily “discounting” the lives of future generations when considering the impacts of climate change.
He will say: “Discounting future welfare or lives means weighting the welfare or lives of future people lower than lives now, irrespective of consumption and income levels, purely because their lives lie in the future.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/an-ethical-approach-to-assessing-the-risks-of-climate-change-will-help-countries-to-both-overcome-poverty-and-develop-sustainably/
Cut to junk water utility:
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2015/09/brazil-water-utility-cut-to-junk-by.html
Yes things are a bit dire here in the Terra da Garoa (land of the Drizzle) however the last week it has been raining quite a bit. I’m in the southern portion of Sao Paulo and our water comes from the Gurapiranga reservoir currently at 72.5% capacity. Rain is forecast for all of next week!
Here’s a link to a chart of all the reservoirs that supply this city of 20 million inhabitants.
It is in Portuguese but Google translate can help a bit…
http://www.apolo11.com/reservatorios.php
On this date:
1973 — Chile: CIA overthrows the democratically elected government, ending nearly 150 years of democratic rule. Murders Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Salvador Allende, folk singer Victor Jara, American IWW journalist Frank Teruggi, & many others. Over 5,000 die, & many others “disappear.” Orchestra conducted by Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Henry Kissinger?
16 years of repressive military terror follows under Pinochet.
“Should you ask me where I come from, I must talk
with broken things,
with fairly painful utensils,
with great beasts turned to dust as often as not
& my afflicted heart.”
— Pablo Neruda
(when 911 happened, my mind first thought the Chileans were after revenge)
And as William Faulkner so famously said: “”The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
I see where a Brazilian ambassador is accusing the CIA, FBI and DEA of being busy in Brazil, handing out $10 million a year to bribe and corrupt the higher-ups in Brazil’s Federal Police. To wit:
According to ambassador Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, one of the leading figures of Brazilian diplomacy and PT ally, the Dilma government has been left “lethargic, dizzy, and intimidated” by the offensive of the Right and the mainstream media…
The crisis of the judicial system is part of the country’s institutional crisis. The Federal Police act against the accused “with extreme bias, in the style of the media, making the individuals they arrest seem like highly dangerous individuals, and depriving them independent state power,” says Pinheiro Guimarães.
According to the ambassador, based on the statements of a senior Federal Police official in Parliament, [the Federal Police] “regularly receive funds from the CIA, FBI, and DEA amounting to $10 million dollars annually, deposited directly into the individual accounts of individual members of the police force.” This is the police-judicial climate of the Brazilian crisis.
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/16164
George Orwell claimed that “it was not possible” for the British aristocracy “to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust priviliges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs.”
I think probably, however, the British aristocracy has gotten over its qualms by now. As Boomer II points out below, the new pax mafiosa has no country. And while the British, the French, the Spanish, the Germans, the narcos and the local oligarchs may be junior partners in this enterprise, with the US being the majority partner, they are nevertheless partners.
I’ve read a lot of Orwell but never ran across that particular quote. Even though am somewhat of an Anglophile, I have never had any illusions about the ethics of the English ruling class.
The best anybody could ever truthfully say of them is that they have probably on average not been as bad as other people who managed to get to the top of the heap when it comes to the way they have treated their own lower classes and conquered people and countries.
I owe the fact that I am a (semi free ) southern flavor Yankee to their starving my people out of Ireland.
Nevertheless they took the lead on some issues such as abolishing slavery and customs such as burning wives at their husbands funerals.
In late times they have behaved rather well as naked apes go.
They DO allow homeless people to sleep under bridges on the same terms as rich people.
old farmer mac said:
The best anybody could ever truthfully say of them [the British] is that they have probably on average not been as bad as other people who managed to get to the top of the heap when it comes to the way they have treated their own lower classes and conquered people and countries.
Spoken like a true partisan.
The greatest achievement of the British was to, in the 19th century, substitute evolutionary “science” or putative humanist concerns for “doing god’s work” as the rationale for terrorism, genocide and mass murder.
When it comes to terrorism, mass murder and genocide, no one has ever done it better than the Anglo-Americans, or been better rhetoriticians in dressing it up as science or humanism.
There’s a very hard-hitting documentary that BBC, of all people, did which sets this all out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdBDRbjx9jo
“Spoken like a true partisan.”
Lol, I declared my partisanship right up front.
Perhaps you know of some countries that once had empires that treated their subject colonies or conquered territory noticeably better than the English.
Taken all the way around, I cannot think of any,EXCEPT the USA, and we are late comers with the eyes of our own citizens and the world better focused on our collective actions due to vastly improved communications in recent times.
There is little doubt, none actually, that my grandparents ten generations removed would have murdered any so called “Indians” in this immediate neighborhood when they got here- but as it happened other Europeans who got here sooner murdered them or drove them away.
English troops murdered kin of mine in the process of driving my ancestors out of Ireland and to some extent Scotland as well.
As bullies go, we Yankees are real pussy kittys.
VERY BIG kitties, very powerful, but not very mean as cats go.
This is not to say we are sinless by ANY means but only that we are not as hard on other peoples as other very powerful countries have been in the past.
Imo the sins of the English are modest in comparison to the Spanish or the nazis or the commies or characters such as King Leopold of Belguim.
And while the end does not necessarily justify the means, it is indisputable that in a number of countries where the English ruled for a long time, the rule of law took firm root and those countries are now much more likely to be modern democracies than otherwise. These include the USA, Canada, India, and Australia.
Somebody will no doubt accuse me of racism or worse for saying so but it is a perfectly obvious fact to ME at least that there are millions of black people living relatively safe, prosperous and reasonably free lives here in the USA because their ancestors were kidnapped and sold into slavery in this country. I doubt VERY seriously I have even met even one black person that would really want to move to SOMALIA or sub Saharan Africa.
History takes many strange turns. I own a nice little farm and have lived a far more prosperous life, most likely, myself, than if my ancestors had stayed in Ireland and some of them in Scotland.
Family legend has it that one of my grand fathers was so poor when he arrived here that all he had to do to break camp was pee on his fire and call a stray dog that attached itself to him.
old farmer mac,
As the books I recommended on the Spanish and Dutch empires (below on this thread) explain, all empires have their national mythologies which depart significantly from factual reality.
These can rely more on traditional religious belief systems, as was the case with Spain and the Netherlands, or, in the post-Enlightenment era, more on secular religious belief systems, as was (and is) the case with England and the United States.
But even if you are wrong about factual reality, which I believe you are, you might be right about practical reality. For as the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson notes in Darwin’s Cathedral: “Even massively ficticious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world.”
He adds this caveat, however: “It is likely that practical realism must be anchored in factual realism to remain practical over the long term.”
None of the world’s great hegemonic empires to emerge after the Renaissance, however, have been able to successfully make the switch from practical reality to factual reality, at least not while remaining the world’s leading empire. Some theorists posit this as one of the major causes of their decline.
Here’s some more empirical data you might find interesting:
The number of contemporary ‘disappearances’ in Guatemala over the past 10 years—25,000 people, or 2,500 per year—is already the same as the estimates of those who disappeared during the height of Guatemala’s civil war. In Honduras, more citizens have been disappeared, tortured and murdered by police and military forces since the 2009 coup than during the entire 1980s, when the CIA-trained ‘Battalion 3-16’ death squad kept the population in terror.
This means that for the average Central American citizen, ‘boots on the ground’ doesn’t mean security, it means terror.
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/15371
All this is done by the United States and its junior partners in the name of spreading democracy and free market capitalism.
Very important shift if emphasis from science to ethics in argument for climate change thinking.
My own view- my grandkids are MORE important than I am. Seems damned obvious (again!).
I think I am in the majority here.
Crushed: the US and the WTO demolish India’s solar energy ambitions
“400 million Indians – one quarter of India’s population – have no electricity.
But as far as the United States and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are concerned, they can keep sitting in the dark.
Last month, the news was leaked that a WTO dispute panel had found that India’s subsidies for solar power contravene WTO trade rules. India must now remove the subsidies or face trade sanctions.”
“India’s National Solar Mission will survive: the WTO decision only strikes down the NSM’s domestic content restrictions. ”
It reminds me of Ukraine: Ukraine desperately needs to build wind and solar power, to replace Russian natural gas, but it’s renewable installations have gone nowhere because of it’s domestic content requirements.
The larger problem here is that you have a supranational authority — the WTO — which has powers above and beyond those of sovereign states like India.
This supranational autority is not democratic. In fact, it is about as anti-democratic as one can get. It is run by technocrats, who in turn answer only to the world’s most powerful transnational corporations.
From this example one can certainly see what its priorities are, and they have nothing to do with the welfare of the Indian people or doing something about global warming.
All of this is done in the name of “free markets” and “democracy.” These are the new secular gods, the new holy grail, the new alpha and omega. But these new secular gods are no better, at least for the subject races, than what the Spanish empires’s old god was, the one that reigned over the Spanish empire during the 16th century.
The trick is to gleen what, in reality, is being done in the name of the gods. And it certainly has nothing to do with their declared principles and objectives. Perhaps no one ever articulated it better than Machiavelli, when he charged there could be no greater proof of papal
decadence than the fact that the nearer people are to the Roman Church, the head of their religion, the less religious they are. And whoever examines the principles on which that religion is founded, and sees how widely different from those principles its present practice and application are, will judge that her ruin or chastisement is near at hand.
It is run by technocrats, who in turn answer only to the world’s most powerful transnational corporations.
Yes, I think that is today’s political reality. While people may still think in terms of countries, the power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of multinational corporations which don’t have loyalty to any specific country.
In fact, I don’t think the US military exists so much to protect the US as it does to serve as a market for defense contractors, who are happy to sell to whichever country is buy.
Yes corporations are a quasi state, some have compared them to artificial intelligence.
Unfortunately the old paradigm of nation states still dominates public psychology
I must say that Wikipedia seems to have done a thorough job of discussing and presenting both the history and future changes to the CAFE system of fuel efficiency in motor vehicles. It’s a strange and twisted path but does seem to now push once again for higher efficiency standards in the US so we can catch up somewhat to the rest of the developed world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy
Everybody ought to read this , it is relevant to just about any topic discussed here.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/clashes-break-out-as-venezuelans-await-end-of-opposition-leaders-trial/2015/09/10/468fceda-50f3-11e5-b225-90edbd49f362_story.html
For the record, I am with Fernando on commies in Cuba and Venezuela. They may not call themselves commies anymore, but the family bloodline is distinctive and obvious enough to a farmer who has made a point of reading the news for a lifetime.
Yea!
Maduro needs to take a page out of Mexico’s playbook. The Mexican government knows how to take care of trouble makers like Lopez:
Espinosa, 31, was found dead in a Mexico City apartment on Friday, alongside four women. All had been beaten, tortured, then shot in the head. The killings came just two months after Espinosa had fled the gulf coast state of Veracruz following death threats over his work….
Espinosa was the 13th journalist working in Veracruz to be killed since Governor Javier Duarte from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) came to power in 2011. According to the press freedom organisation Article 19, the state is now the most dangerous place to be a journalist in Latin America….
Espinosa – who specialised in covering protests and social movements – had reported threats dating back to 2012 but two recent stories particularly angered authorities, according to friends and colleagues….
After a string of threats, Espinosa left Veracruz in early June – joining more than 30 other journalists who have fled the state after receiving threats, according to Article 19.
But in the end, Mexico City offered no safe haven: the five bodies were found late on Friday in the apartment in the middle-class neighbourhood Narvarte – considered one of the safest in the capital.
One of the women was Espinosa’s friend Nadia Vera, a social anthropologist and activist, with whom the photographer had been staying while looking for somewhere to live.
Vera, 32, was an active member of the student movement #YoSoy132 whose protests against political corruption Espinosa had regularly covered. She had also left Veracruz for security reasons.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/04/journalists-mexico-press-freedom-photographer-ruben-espinosa-murder
Such is life, and death, in a client state of the United States.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-el-nino-20150910-story.html#getslug
Non non oily oil
Anyone who is tired of Donald Trump’s ridiculous nonsense, please raise your hand.
If there is one Democrat with the will to lead and be a US President, it would be Joe Biden.
He might be a bit clueless, although, he would try to do a good job and at least try to lead.
You can’t have some phony baloney blowhard rocking the boat all of the time as a president, wouldn’t be prudent.
Maybe Joe would be compliant, however, the American people would be comfortable with Joe Biden as President.
If the Democrats could finally get a clue, Joe Biden would be drafted at the convention and probably would win in November of 2016.
Since the Democrats are completely clueless, it ain’t gonna happen.
I see some signs that “man on the street” democrats are finally bringing themselves to admit that HRC is their gift to the republicans that keeps on giving.
Personally I have moved from one end of the spectrum to the other a couple of times as I got older and I know a LOT of dyed in the wool democrats. The large majority of the ones I know personally were tickled pink that the OBUMBLER came out of nowhere and gave them a chance to vote for “anybody but Hillary”. A handful of feminists of my acquaintances were solidly for her, but I know only a few people of that sort since I fled the city decades ago.
Joe Biden might be a mediocre to good prez, I never paid much attention to him. Right now I would vote for him rather than any republican I know of. I doubt if Sanders is electable but he would be a good counterweight to the banking and mic monsters.
If the election comes down to HRC of Cattle Gate and Email versus the CHUMP, no further description needed, I will get REALLY drunk and try not to think about the future of my country on election day.
I never knew how good we had it when Eisenhower and Carter were in office, back in those days, but I do now.
Now finding this comment at the tail end reminds me of a problem I have to deal with.
It’s time to deal with the stink bugs trying to get inside for the winter. If any of the regulars here have knowledge of any really effective stink bug traps that can be used INDOORS I want to hear about them.
In the meantime, the disrupting technologies are disrupting themselves. Of course we call that competitive R&D. Everybody fighting for the battery market share as EVs and power storage continue forward into the market. Should be a quite interesting battle as companies jockey for the forward positions.
http://fortune.com/2015/04/27/gigafactory-obsolete/
I expect the giga factory will pay for itself well before any competing technology is apt to be brought to market and scaled up sufficiently to put Tesla in the hole in the battery market.
It’s a good LONG way from a lab demo to capturing a mass market. Ten years is a conservative estimate unless the new tech is simple. It is not apt to be simple or it would be available already. I can’t recall ever even seeing an aluminum air battery, never mind one that is rechargeable.
And Tesla will be making some incremental improvements all along , you can bet on that. IF BAU lasts ten years Tesla will make a KILLING manufacturing batteries for stationary use and in house electric autos and maybe even an in house light truck eventually.
Yes, very close to my thoughts. Battery development and testing alone will take 5 to 6 years. However, if they make it work a gain on the order of 5X or more in energy density would be a major breakthrough for batteries. We do not know the eventual economics of the system which might take another few years to bring down to practical levels.
More than likely the real competition for Tesla and other EV’s are very high mpg ICE vehicles and a reasonably priced synthetic fuel.
Battery technology is still early 1990’s Japanese Lithium-ion, for anything that scales.
It has been a while, and a major roadblock.
If gasoline drops to $2.50 a gal out here in Cali, it is going to really hurt ev, ev-hydrid, hydrid car sales right at a most crucial time when new and upgraded models are coming out.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-exxon-refinery-pollution-20150911-story.html
If gasoline drops to $2.50 a gal out here in Cali, it is going to really hurt ev, ev-hydrid, hydrid car sales right at a most crucial time when new and upgraded models are coming out.
So low gas prices are going to kill both EVs/hybrids and oil companies. Maybe it is a sign that cars of any kind aren’t such such a good idea anymore. 🙂
Abstract
The Antarctic Ice Sheet stores water equivalent to 58 m in global sea-level rise. We show in simulations using the Parallel Ice Sheet Model that burning the currently attainable fossil fuel resources is sufficient to eliminate the ice sheet. With cumulative fossil fuel emissions of 10,000 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC), Antarctica is projected to become almost ice-free with an average contribution to sea-level rise exceeding 3 m per century during the first millennium. Consistent with recent observations and simulations, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet becomes unstable with 600 to 800 GtC of additional carbon emissions. Beyond this additional carbon release, the destabilization of ice basins in both West and East Antarctica results in a threshold increase in global sea level. Unabated carbon emissions thus threaten the Antarctic Ice Sheet in its entirety with associated sea-level rise that far exceeds that of all other possible sources.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/8/e1500589.full
Salinity values in the far N Atlantic have been dropping recently. Short-term blip or weakening thermohaline?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/COo7rVjVEAAbM7O.png
artic / Greenland ice melt?
Yep–
Greenland mostly
And just how long did these peer review experts think the antarctic Ice Sheet was going to last in our post ice age era anyway? Note also how in the full report the authors do in fact brush over the fact there are several large ice shelves, others than the one studied, and these ice shelves are very big like the size of france. Notable along with it is that allthough the authors made a point to show the ice may be thinning on one of the many ice shelves in antarctica they somehow FAIL to mention or explain how the ice has in fact been thickening on other ice shelves around the continent for many years. Last when I first read the write up about this study in a scientific blog, it had a red circle around the affected area and it was small compared to the all the rest of the antarctic.
Remember the antarctic is a dynamic region, but exists in a slow motion. Sure you can be concerned about pollution, but let’s be reasonable, it would not be such a bad thing if a Coast guard crew went down there and dynamited the ice off, just think about it, because California could use the fresh water if only it were plausible to drag the ice shelf up there. In seriousness though let’s all agree how silly it is to think we can defile mother nature’s natural wishes and win, just like its silly to say it’s gonna be a blizzard when a little breeze moves through, and even sillier to think that a little bit of warmth in the Antarctica is something signalling the end of the world. It is not, for antarctica is at the bottom of the world, but in total, the climate is just being the climate and keeping on with the dynamic processes which have been at work for millennia.
IF you really think we cannot upset Nature’s apple cart you are either abysmally ignorant or abysmally stupid.
Give ya just ONE example.
The Colorado River doesn’t make it to the ocean anymore except once in a while.
Two, I am feeling generous. The oyster harvest in the Chesapeake Bay near where I used to live is down to almost nothing.
There is an ENTIRE inland sea in the old USSR that is basically dry because all the water has been diverted from it to irrigate nearby land.
I could go on all day but explaining things to idiots and trolls is a waste of time.
But I will mention one more. The woods around my house used to have more giant chestnut trees than any other species . They’re all gone now. EVERY LAST ONE of them.
Anybody who knows DO DO from apple butter could go on all day with examples of this sort.
Oh yeah-I have a bunch of relatives who died in coal mine accidents in nearby West Virginia. The mines in the community they lived in are all closed now- not because of a war on coal but because the mines were worked out decades ago.
The local papers in nearby towns tell us the rest of the mines will have to close within another twenty years – they will be worked out too.
Since we don’t talk about coal much here, this discovery of anthracite will probably be new to you.
http://newsitem.com/news/unknown-vein-found-in-mine-near-trevorton-1.1530205
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/ordovician/ordovician.php
How Antarctica got there.
ColoradoBob posted this over at Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice blog earlier this year.
Richard Alley is a remarkably good presenter. This presentation is well worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCunWFmvUfo
Hi Ezrydermike
Antarctica will mostly melt off but even the paper you presented said it would be hundreds of years. So we have plenty of time to move the cities and ports. Unless it does it in jumps, then this century will see a lot of action. I am still sticking with the 2 meter sea level rise maximum this century. That will be devastating enough to ports, cities and towns along the coast.
Hi EzriderMike,
There are not 10,000 Gt of economically recoverable carbon (as far as emissions of carbon as CO2 to the atmosphere) a more reasonable number is 1,500 Gt of carbon emissions from 1750 including land use change and cement production and natural gas flaring (along with coal, oil and natural gas). See Steve Mohr’s Thesis:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6782
His best guess scenario(case 2) result in about 1500 Gt of carbon emissions, the highest scenario (case 3) would result in no more than 2500 Gt of carbon emissions (and case 3 is very close to a cornucopian scenario). The 10,000 Gt choice of carbon emissions is a cornucopian fantasy.
I understand that you and Fernando both think we won’t come close to the cumulative emissions presented as worst case scenarios. I will also state that I had a but of trouble following the TOD post because of the size.
What I have found is that by 2013 we had about 535 GT and annually we are putting out about 36 Gt, so right now we are about 600 Gt.
The troubling aspect of this is that almost all of this is over the last 50-75 yrs and we appear to be growing at around 2% per year.
How long will that growth continue? I don’t know but even if there is now growth in 10 years we will be at close to 1000 Gt.
In 10 years.
I think 1500 GT is low.
http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/14/hl-full.htm
Hi ezridermike,
Fossil fuels will peak before 2025 if Steve Mohr’s medium coal case (case 2) and my medium oil and medium natural gas cases are correct. The growth in carbon emissions will not continue at the present rate for very long.
Unlike Fernando, I think this will be a problem even at 1000 Gt if equilibrium climate sensitivity is above 3 C for a doubling of CO2 (to 560 ppm).
If renewables ramp up and population follows the UN’s low variant (which is more plausible), along with continuing improvements in energy efficiency we can keep carbon emissions under 1000 Gt for the scenario in the chart below total carbon emissions are 940 Gt through 2130 (by which time carbon emissions will be negligible.)
Units on vertical axis are millions of tons of oil equivalent per year.
Note that if there is higher population such as the UN’s medium scenario and/or there is no ramp up of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, nuclear power, and improved energy efficiency and we burn all the fossil fuel then it will be about 1400 Gt (I checked back and I had estimated from memory earlier on the high side).
Still a problem, but very far from 10,000 Gt, fossil fuels are not as abundant as some seem to think.
A link to another summary of Steve Mohr’s thesis
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2010-07-20/projection-world-fossil-fuel-production-supply-and-demand-interactions-paper-exce
The full thesis can be found by a search on steve mohr thesis (at university of Newcastle)
“It was right around 1970 when the increase in the number of scientific papers published in the world—a figure that had doubled every fifteen years since, roughly, 1685—began leveling off. The same was true of books and patents.
Toffler’s use of acceleration was particularly unfortunate. For most of human history, the top speed at which human beings could travel had been around 25 miles per hour. By 1900 it had increased to 100 miles per hour, and for the next seventy years it did seem to be increasing exponentially. By the time Toffler was writing, in 1970, the record for the fastest speed at which any human had traveled stood at roughly 25,000 mph, achieved by the crew of Apollo 10 in 1969, just one year before. At such an exponential rate, it must have seemed reasonable to assume that within a matter of decades, humanity would be exploring other solar systems.
Since 1970, no further increase has occurred. The record for the fastest a human has ever traveled remains with the crew of Apollo 10. True, the commercial airliner Concorde, which first flew in 1969, reached a maximum speed of 1,400 mph. And the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144, which flew first, reached an even faster speed of 1,553 mph. But those speeds not only have failed to increase; they have decreased since the Tupolev Tu-144 was cancelled and the Concorde was abandoned.”
http://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit
I would suggest that 1970 was the height of the oil age. We just landed a man on the Moon in late 69. It only required a single person working to pay the bills. There was more great music from 65-75 than any other 10 year period, partly because people didn’t have to work so hard to pay bills there was more time to do other things like art, music and movies. You could take your engine apart in the garage and rebuild it. Think of all the movies in that 10 year period – amazing! It was like humanity was blooming. Even baseball cards were dramatically different and interesting from year to year in that period.
Now most movies begin with the ending so you already know what will happen after sitting there for 2 hours. Music is a child’s lullaby with words. It takes two working their asses off to pay the bills and not add too much to credit cards. You can’t start to understand autos due to multiple sensors so you take it in and it cost a lot to fix. People don’t socialize as much because they are distracted with tech devices. You can’t offer people a drink at your home because if they get in a wreck on the way home you’re responsible. Random sex is too dangerous because you might get Aids. A college degree loads a person up with debt unheard of in 1970. I’m just extremely thankful to have lived during the height of the oil age and am now coasting towards retirement.
Stilgar Wilcox said:
The question which always concerns me, however, is this: Just how much of the US’s decline is due to peak oil, and how much is due to other factors?
Sometimes it seems that peak oil is just too easy. It serves as a scapegoat onto which other causes of our decadence — many which perhaps could be solved — can be projected.
To paraphrase James Tobin’s review of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s Monetary History, where he chided the authors for taking the importance of money too far: “Consider the following three propositions. Oil does not matter. It does too matter. Oil is all that matters. It is all too easy to slip from the second proposition to the third.” And he added that “in their zeal and exuberance” Friedman and his followers had too often done just that (speaking of the importance of money, of course, and not oil).
As a person who had a highly successful and lucrative career in the oil and gas business, I would of course like to believe the third proposition, as it is extremely flattering and self-regarding to people like me. But is it realistic?
One also cannot fail to be haunted by the famous passage by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace:
It doesn’t matter whether it oil, Ipods, Tv’s, food or shampoo; the cause of most of the problems is simple amoral greed with no real loyalty base to where they are parasitizing.
The capacity to sacrifice self-interest for the sake of common good is the necessary condition for cooperation. Without it, concerted collective action is impossible… To ancient and medieval thinkers such as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and, above all, Ibn Khaldun, it was obvious that it was cooperation that provided the basis of social life. Beginning in the early modern period, however, this certainty was gradually abandoned by most influential social thinkers. By the end of the twentieth century, the “rational-choice theory,” which postulated that people behave in entirely self-interested manner, became the dominant paradigm in the social sciences. Any theories that invoked cooperation as moving force of history were ridiculed as unscientific
— PETER TURCHIN, War and Peace and War
Unlike the cooperation in a tribe or small village, modern times has moved cooperation and assistance externally to certified professionals and volunteers. In some ways it is better, in other ways it undermines the local community.
At one time, if there was a car accident, the locals had to care for the injured and move them to doctors or hospitals. Now we call 911 and either trained volunteers or professionals with advanced equipment and techniques come to the scene along with police to assist and control traffic.
The old movies show civilians assisting the police in catching bad guys or investigating, now they would be arrested for interfering in police business.
The role of the private citizen has been reduced within the society and in government affairs and been given over to organized agencies and outfits.
yep—
In war and peace and football, who wins? The team that cooperates.
I heard someone say that what made homosapiens a success was two things- missile weapons and cooperation.
One dog might have a hard time with a big coon. Two dogs- coon is doomed.
“Environmentalists blame the setback on the energy industry. But others suggest that the 50 percent petroleum target might define an upper limit for what even green states like California are willing to do on climate change. In particular, if policies threaten to dramatically reshape driving habits – or force people to buy cars they don’t want – there can be blowback.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2015/0911/Did-California-try-to-go-too-far-in-fight-against-climate-change
There are probably other ways to accomplish the same goal. Seems to me that the best way is probably to find ways to reduce the amount of driving people need to do. They don’t necessarily have to switch cars if they don’t use the ones they have.
Of course, enabling people to live closer to their jobs isn’t always easy when there isn’t enough affordable housing near jobs.
But still, finding other ways to reduce petroleum use is worth exploring.
Looks like the oil industry and the “want my cake and eat it too” people are slowing down the California initiative to reduce dependency on oil and reduce carbon emissions.
It’s stupid because that amount of change could be made without using one electric vehicle. The change will come eventually on it’s own. Best to be ahead of the curve and have your changes in place beforehand.
Common sense in the end does sometimes win out.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices
Through the logic of neoclassical economics and its neoliberal cohort, research paid for by the taxpayers and conducted by non-profit-seeking researchers is somehow, magically, converted into proprietary information?
The alchemists of old, in their perennial quest to convert lead into gold, would be envious.
A hopeful sign that predatory capitalism has finally run its course and is running up against some opposition?
And I suppose this is as good a place as any to resume a debate between Dennis Coyne and myself which he said was inapproriate for the “Oil & Gas” thread.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-oil-and-natural-gas/comment-page-1/#comment-537323
The debate has to do with values and how we humans derive them.
Dennis variously said:
I think it’s fairly easy to arrive at such a view — that “personal preferences” are what give us the “demand function” — in a post-scarcity economy like that of the United States or western Europe. However, many people throughout the world do not live in a post-scarcity economy.
For instance, I saw this article in one of Mexico City’s dailies yesterday which helps to bring one back to reality. Despite the deeply held tenets of the neoclassical economic faithful, not all human needs are mere “personal preferences.”
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ultimas/2015/09/11/se-agudiza-la-falta-de-agua-en-zonas-de-iztapalapa-9449.html
The title of the article is “Se agudiza la falta de agua en zonas de Iztapalapa” (The lack of water in zones of Iztapalapa grows more severe) and the caption below the photograph reads “Habitantes de la colonia Paraje de Zacatepec señalaron que desde hace tres meses la falta del líquido se volvió crítica. ‘Dan ganas de llorar de impotencia; no hay ni para lavar trastres’, expusieron.” (Residents of the neighborhood Paraje de Zacatepec say that over the past three months the lack of water has grown critical. “It makes you want to cry from the feelings of impotence; there’s not even water to wash dishes,” they say.)
Does anybody know of any Mexican newspapers that publish online editions in English? I would like to read them.
Ditto any other papers published online in English in non English speaking countries.
Thanks in advance.
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/english
And in Latin America the values (or alleged absense of values) proselytized by neoclassical economics concerning the value of water have clashed head-on with other, more traditional value systems.
One of the best examples of this was what is known as the “Water War in Bolivia.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Cochabamba_protests
A joint venture involving the Bechtel Corporation bought the municipal water distributor in Cochabamba and took it private, dramatically increasing water rates.
In order to make water scarce, and following Dennis’s market logic that “If you have none it is worth a lot, if you have a lot it is worth very little,” the Bechtel joint venture was successful in persuading local lawmakers to craft a law which made it illegal for residents to install a gathering and cistern system to collect and store rain water.
There was actually a movie made about this.
In the past, in the United States things such as water, electricity, and basic telephone service were considered to be essential necessities. The rate structures crafted by regulators therefore entailed cross-subsidies which were paid by industrial or commercial users, or through high-priced long distance telephone service, to provide minimal “life-line” service to poor households.
All of this, however, went out the window in the United States in the 1980s, but not in poorer countries, when neoclassical economics and market fundamentalism — the belief that the market is the one and only source of sure truth — became the rage.
https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=libMCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA455&lpg=PA455&dq=cross+subsidies+of+residential+users&source=bl&ots=cwbn6PBG06&sig=05WorxZkh4BptHNhTwugAgRioOs&hl=es-419&sa=X&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAmoVChMIlta17ebxxwIVgwWSCh1AWQni#v=onepage&q=cross%20subsidies%20of%20residential%20users&f=false
Hi all,
An interesting discussion of value theory and the Hills Group is on the oil thread and I am trying to move it here.
Link to the start of the thread below:
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-oil-and-natural-gas/comment-page-1/#comment-537021
Glenn Stehle and Cracker had some interesting comments that I will respond to here.
Hi Glenn,
You are correct that I am the one who discussed value theory initially, not you. Normally such comments are ignored, my initial discussion was an “energy theory of value” as used by the Hills group where they assume the value of a barrel of oil is determined by its net energy content (“embodied energy” in Marxian lingo). You took the discussion in a direction I did not expect.
I agree with David Kotz (who I know well), that the neoliberal “market fundamentalist view is flawed. Note that the regulated capitalism school of thought of Paul Samuelson and others (Paul Krugman) is one I agree fully with. That view holds to the basic neoclassical microeconomic theory.
On Price and Value theory, if one assumes a value theory is required, then Price and Value theory are conflated as you say. If an objective theory of value (one that asserts that the value of a good is independent of its relative scarcity) is required for economic theory, you would be correct. I assert that an objective value theory is unnecessary and that a price theory can exist without one. A backup position is that if a value theory was necessary, a subjective value theory would do nicely. Not really important either way as it does not really change the analysis one way or the other except perhaps on a philosophical level.
Both neoliberals and traditional liberals use the same underlying economic theory for microeconomics. For macroeconomics I am a Keynesian, and the neoliberals have some other theory which I have never fully understood, but essentially argues that government intervention of a fiscal nature is bad.
°°°°Dennis Coyne said:
But this is true only if one accepts the quasi-religious tenets of “theoclassical economics,” as Michael Hudson calls neoclassical economics.
I argue, as every school of economics and philsophy did up until the advent of theoclassical economics, that a theory of value, distinct from a theory of price, is absolutely necessary.
How do we know this? We know this by what is known as the “paradox of value,” or the “diamond-water” paradox.
°°°°Dennis Coyne said:
I agree.
Price theory is pretty straight forward. In its most rudimentary form it boils down to supply and demand.
But when we get into talking about ultimate causes — what causes supply and what causes demand — that’s when things start getting complicated.
°°°°Dennis Coyne said:
I don’t think so. Can you show me where, for instance, Adam Smith ever said a theory of value, distinct from a theory of price, is not necessary?
It is, after all, Adam Smith who is often considered to be the classic presenter of the paradox of value.
Hi Glenn
I don’t think of liberalism starting in 1776. I am thinking more of krugman.
so what determines the absolute value of a good?
Dennis,
What determines absolute values?
I would just stipulate that values — at least some values, some of the time — are real and natural.
This does not mean, however, that I buy into the pure naturalism espoused by Sam Harris in his recent book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. I do not believe that all values, all of the time, are natural.
Instead I promote an ethics involving the here and now: lived, worldly lives as the basis for what is right and wrong.
So how do I answer the moral cynic who asks why he should be moral?
Kant, and here I’m quoting Susan Neiman, says you do it by talking about heroes: those who risk their lives rather than resign themselves to injustice. “Here virtue is worth so much because it costs so much.”
When we engage in such discussions each of us will imagine one person, at least, whom we believe defied death to do what was right. For that one we will reject every attempt to trivialize her motives as resentful or petty. Such examples provide a glimpse of human dignity nothing else can replace—and lift us out of the world of sense into realms more exalted.
“What’s absolute,” says Cornel West, “is what I’m willing to die for.”
This is one thought experiment anybody can perform; ergo, the moral law. It’s the universality of the experiment that carries its weight. For it’s an answer to conservative critics, today as in the past, who believe the mass of humanity is driven by crude desires. Perhaps, they argue, a few great souls act on moral principles. But most of us have nothing more noble in view than bread and circuses. Our appetites for refinements of gluttony and varieties of entertainment remain nearly insatiable, and nothing else really moves us. If our lives revolve around consuming the objects of these simple passions, a benevolent despotism which manages those passions is the best form of government. We care about getting stuff, and distraction from pain; they care about getting it to us. Who could possibly complain?
This argument was used to defend despotism in the 18th century, and then as now it depended on the premise that people don’t want to be challenged, but happy. If Kant’s thought-experiment works, the consequences are great. As part of the good life we want all kinds of pleasure, but we want something else as well: a sense of our own dignity that allows us to deny pleasure itself if it violates something we hold higher. Of course wanting dignity isn’t the same as having it; many a sweet lazy dream of something grander remains just that. But if most of us can imagine wanting to be Kant’s hero, even for a moment, then a government that appeals to our best instincts can’t be dismissed out of hand. If each of us can imagine a moment in which we want to show our freedom by standing on the side of justice, each of us should work towards a world in which freedom and justice are paramount. The bread and the circuses — the “personal preferences” of the neoclassical economists — would take care of themselves.
Hi Glenn,
You are using “value” in a very different sense than most economists would use. I think there are many different meanings of values, you are using it in a moral sense. It may be there are some morals that are universal, for example killing other people is generally frowned upon, though killing in the name of religion or the state is usually rationalized.
I have not studied ethics in detail, but I imagine there is a huge literature on the topic and about as many nuanced opinions as there are authors.
It seems that you are saying that value is a relative thing and is not absolute. I would say that how much someone thinks a good is worth depends on the individual’s preferences for most goods. For necessities the worth of a good depends on scarcity. Clean air and water are absolute necessities, but in most cases they are relatively abundant so the price is either very low (clean water) or zero (clean air in most places). The diamond-water paradox is handled just fine by Walrsian Theory.
Somehow you fail to realize that there is a neoclassical synthesis of Walrasian and Keynesian economics such as the vies of Paul Samuelson and others. This view is no longer dominant in economics, but it is closer to my view and is in sync with the regulated capitalism view in your quote by David Kotz. I also do not assert that this view is necessarily correct in any “absolute” way. If their is an absolute truth, only an omniscient being would be aware of it, there are only relative truths (except perhaps in mathematics and logic). The synthesis of neoclassical economics at the micro level and Keynesian economics at the macro level is the best current theory of economics in my opinion. Regulation by government by the taxation of externalities to take account of the full social cost of producing goods, and curbing monopoly power fits very nicely with this view. How such questions are resolved (appropriate tax levels and policy) is mostly a political question informed by economic analysis.
°°°°Dennis Coyne said:
You are using “value” in a very different sense than most economists would use.
You can say that again.
“The price is righteous” is the theory of value lauded by orthodox economists and their neoliberal cohort.
That’s quickly followed by their theory of price, the hallowed “law” of supply and demand.
The end result is that, if the “law” of supply and demand puts a price on something, it must be righteous, self-evident and beyond dispute.
The “law” explains not only how the produce of society tends to be distributed but how it should be distributed. And that is that.
No further investigation as to what causes demand or what causes supply is deemed to be necessary, or desirable.
One might not neceessarily like the result, but it is apparent that this result is the natural outcome of society’s dynamics: there is no personal ill-will involved nor any personal manipulation. Economic laws are like the laws of gravitation, and it is nonsensical to challenge one as the other.
To conclude, neoclassical economics and neoliberalism are what George Kateb calls the “repertoire of untruth” — simplification, witholding of knowledge, denial, construction of stories — whereby facts are denied and alternative realities created, and facts are reduced to simply another opinion.
°°°°Dennis Coyne said:
It seems that you are saying that value is a relative thing and is not absolute.
Not entirely.
If what you mean by “absolute” are those values which can be explained by natural causes — ethical naturalism — then those certainly exist. These are objective features of the world which can be explained using individual-level selection evolutionary theory. These include things like rational egoism, inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism.
But there are other values which people exhibit and act on, such as strong reciprocity and unconditional altruism, which entail self-sacrifice and where it is implausible to expect their costs will be recovered at a later date.
“Strong reciprocity in humans seems rooted in a deep sense of fairness and concern for justice that is extended even toward strangers,” Joan B. Silk explains in “The Evolution of Cooperation in Primate Groups.”
These are objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), which are true to the extent that they report those features accurately. However, evolutionary theory struggles to explain these. It may get there someday, using multi-level selection theory, but I’ll remain agnostic until more solid evidence comes in. Moral realism therefore is my position on these values.
Can these values be “absolute”? Well if one uses Cornel West’s definition of absolute, they certainly can be.
Dennis Coyne said:
Clean air and water are absolute necessities, but in most cases they are relatively abundant so the price is either very low (clean water) or zero (clean air in most places).
Well that’s what the god of the market has willed today, that clean air and clean water are of little value. But as we all know, this potentia absoluta is capricious, mercurial and indifferent, that is, he recognizes no natural or rational standards of good and evil that guide or constrain his will. What is good is good not in itself but simply because he wills it.
Hi Glenn,
If there is not adequate clean water, government can intervene to provide it. If it is scarce there can be tiered pricing so that a certain low amount needed for drinking and washing is available at a low price an an water use above that amount is available at a high price. Properly regulated markets work very nicely.
Do you have a viable alternative? Micromanagement of the economy by the government was not particularly successful in the Soviet Union. If you want to replace a social system, or an economic theory, you need a more desirable alternative.
Cooperation and human desire to do so could well be a part of individual preferences.
The source of supply and demand are well modelled by Walrasian theory. The theory is not perfect, just the best we have.
°°°°Dennis Coyne said:
If there is not adequate clean water, government can intervene to provide it.
Not if we keep going down the road we’re currently going down, because there will be insufficient supplies of clean water in the future to do what you say.
°°°°Denns Coyne said:
If it [water] is scarce there can be tiered pricing so that a certain low amount needed for drinking and washing is available at a low price an an water use above that amount is available at a high price. Properly regulated markets work very nicely.
But that’s not what neoclassical economists and their neoliberal cohort advocate, or actually do, is it? No, quite the opposite.
Der Spiegel did an excellent article where it juxtaposed the two competing value sytems, that of the neoclassical economists and that of the opposition.
Here’s a concise articulation of the value system (or should I say no-value system if your view of economics is correct?) espoused by the neoclassical economists and its neoliberal cohort, and which is being imposed (quite violently I might add) by the long arm of the transnational corporations:
Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citibank, summed up his industry’s assessment in a strategy document four years ago, writing: “Water as an asset class, in my view, will eventually become the single most important physical commodity — dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities, and precious metals.”….
The rise in the share price of Veolia shows how lucrative the water business is. Within the last 12 months, the stock, which is traded in Paris, gained 64 percent, almost three times as much as France’s benchmark index, the CAC 40. The roughly 15 water funds, most notably the Swiss fund Pictet Water, have achieved annual returns of up to 22.5 percent in the last three years….
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that it would take $1.3 trillion in annual investments to develop and expand the necessary water supply infrastructure worldwide. These investments would not only make sense, they would also save lives. Some 842,000 people die each year because they lack clean water for consumption and hygiene.
In light of these numbers, Western economists tend to advocate an idea similar to that promoted by Nestlé’s Brabeck: Allow market forces to act. Institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) make it a condition of their lending that public utilities, such as water companies, are privatized. This is currently the case in Greece, where the IMF is acting in concert with the European Union.
Here, on the other hand, is a description of the value system espoused by those in oppositon to that of the neoclassical economists, quoting from the same article:
Responding to pressure from the World Bank, Bolivia began to privatize its water supply, leading to a subsidiary of US corporation Bechtel taking control of the water system in Cochabamba, the country’s third-largest city….
Bolivia has been severely affected by global warming, with glaciers, which normally provide snowmelt in the dry season, steadily shrinking. Plus, there is even less rainfall than in the past.
The private water supplier increased prices overnight by up to 300%, and it even demanded payment for rainwater that residents collected themselves. “We ordinary people had to spend a quarter of our income for water,” says trade union official Oscar Olivera, an older man wearing a leather cap and a baggy shirt. Standing on Plaza Principal, the main square of Cochabamba, he points to bullet holes in the walls. “Believe me,” he says, “we were prepared to die.”
Of course things like proven, demonstrated performance, or the level of violence necessary to implement their theories, are meaningless to neoclassical economists, who live in their own little abstract ivory tower of mathematical formulations, completely oblivious to the world in which real, live, flesh and blood human beings live in. As the article goes on to explain:
Olivera was one of the leaders of the resistance movement at the time. Citizens erected roadblocks, threw stones and burned their water bills. When then President Hugo Banzer brought in the army, five demonstrators were shot to death and hundreds were injured. After a four-month struggle, the government finally conceded defeat, and privatization was revoked.
Five years later, Bolivians elected Evo Morales, a man of indigenous descent and a representative of coca farmers, as president. He created a Water Ministry and he enshrined the right to water in the country’s new constitution. Unlike his predecessors, Morales knows what it means not to have access to water.
‘A Public Good’
“When I was a child, we lived a kilometer away from the nearest well,” says Morales. “My mother had to carry the water home in a clay jug.” Sitting in an armchair in a dazzling room at the government headquarters building in La Paz, he says: “Water cannot be a business. It must be a public good.”….
Today 83 percent of Bolivians have access to clean drinking water, compared to less than half the population in 1990.
Similar stories, albeit not quite as dramatic, are unfolding in many countries. Expectations that private companies would be more capable than the government in providing citizens with clean, affordable water have rarely been met.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/global-water-shortage-exacerbated-by-droughts-and-misuse-a-1047527.html
“But that’s not what neoclassical economists and their neoliberal cohort advocate, or actually do, is it? No, quite the opposite.”
You do Dennis a disservice when you try to paint him as being a simple minded markets fundamentalist.
Every sort of theory that involves the behavior of men, as opposed to the behavior of non living atoms and molecules in the hard sciences , needs a little tweaking. Even hard science theories such as the ones involving conservation of mass and energy must be modified as new evidence accumulates. I have read some old science books that were written before Einstein wrote his papers.
I expect if I went looking for them I would find plenty of articles written by market theory economists about tweaks that will allow markets to work under various conditions.
Remarks such as the one I copied are more about “gotcha”and winning arguments than about understanding reality.
old farmer mac,
I agree it would not be fair to put Dennis into the “neoclassical economists and their neoliberal cohort” box, insofar as that refers to market fundamentalism.
He has, after all, already said that “Properly regulated markets work very nicely.”
That statement disqualifies him from being a market fundamentalist.
Where we continue to disagree is on the moral question. Dennis seems to adhere to a meta-ethical moral relativism, which holds that in moral judgments, nobody is objectively right or wrong. This is part and parcel of the teachings of neoclassical economics.
Amitai Etzioni wrote a book on the subject: The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics:. Here’s some of what he had to say on the subject:
The neoclassical paradigm does not merely ignore the moral dimension but actively opposes its inclusion. Thus, it is stressed that various individuals may have different rankings of preferences over a field of choice, but none can be deemed to be better. Indeed, Crouch adds that “Unwillingness to accept this conclusion has been and still is a source of much mischief in the world.” Winrich responds: “And how lucky we are that such mischief abounds; complete relativism justifies all choices no matter how ditorted, perverse or destructive.” Other neoclassicists, we shall see, belittle the role of values, or see them as but one source of “tastes” among many others. We [Etzioni and fellow travelers] hold that moral commitments deeply affect all behavior, economic included….
[B]ecause the neoclassical paradigm is part of the modern mentality, and not merely an academic field, it affects the way people see their world and themselves, and the way they behave. Brennan and Buchanan face the question squarely. They ask “is Public Choice immoral?” because of its effects on the public’s behavior….
At the same time, one should not deny that pleasure and self-interest constitute a major motivating force, and — in their place — a legitimate one. Socio-economics is hence to view pleasure and self-interest within the broader context of human nature, society, and ultimate values, rather than either ignore the self-oriented force, or build a paradigm, theory, and morality focused entirely on self.
Hi Glenn,
There are some fairly universal moral constants that can be found in part by looking for commonalities in religious texts.
There are also many areas where cultural differences cause differences in what is or is not considered “moral behavior”. These ethical questions are resolved at a political level within societies.
Many economists (i.e Paul Krugman) do not fit in the market fundamentalist box. When properly applied in an attempt to maximize social welfare by using proper tax policy, Walrasian economics will point towards the most efficient allocation of resources that maximizes social welfare.
I have noticed that you have not proposed a better alternative than regulated capitalism, of which Walrasian economics is an integral part along with Keynesian economics. Until you do, I will remain silent.
Diamonds have little intrinsic value, they are a medium of exchange and an art form. They are primarily a symbol of excess wealth. The wealth is embodied elsewhere.
Hi Jim (aka Cracker),
The Hills group assumes that oil will not be produced if it becomes an “energy carrier”. essentially that it will have no value. Electricity is an “energy carrier” and as far as I know most people pay for electricity.
Clearly for society as a whole the energy has to come from somewhere in order to perform work. My main point is that the oil industry does not exist in isolation. For society as a whole as long as the net energy of all forms of energy (coal, natural gas, oil, hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels,etc) is sufficient to keep society running, then those forms of energy that can be produced profitably will be produced.
The prices of the various forms of energy will be determined by supply and demand, not by their net energy.
Any analysis of the economic system based on the second law of thermodynamics will be inaccurate if it does not consider all energy flows in the economic system. The Hillsgroup analysis fails to do that, it considers only the petroleum production system and is therefore an incomplete analysis.
One more thing to consider is that a gallon of gasoline contains a certain quantity of energy, this is unaffected by the amount of energy used to produce that gallon of energy, so it is unclear why the price would go down, unless the growth in supply was greater than demand growth (as has been the case since July 2014). Lower oil prices will tend to reduce supply and increase demand so that eventually oil prices will rise, probably by 2016. The Hillsgroup maximum oil prices will be pretty far off in 2018 (when oil prices will be over $90/b).
Hi Caelan,
Do you know how much energy is used to produce each unit of energy that you purchase?
I don’t and I am pretty sure nobody else does either.
Let’s say the amount of energy used to produce a gallon of gasoline is 90% of the energy content of that gasoline and that the value of that gasoline depends on the energy used to produce it (an energy theory of value). Wouldn’t that gasoline be worth more than some earlier period where it may have only required 50% of the energy to produce it? It certainly would be more costly to produce if it required more energy and generally the way the world works it would only be produced if the price were higher (or the oil supplier would lose money).
Do we assume that demand for oil will decrease? Why? Other fossil fuels can provide the needed energy to produce the oil, along with wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, and geothermal energy. As long as there is demand for oil at an oil price where the supply can meet the demand at a profit for the producer, then oil will be produced.
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2015/09/energy_storage_mine_joshua_tree.php
I have mixed feelings about this but overall the growth of pumped storage enabling us to use wind and solar power more economically and efficiently seems to be worth the sacrifice of some land that could be returned to the park system in degraded form.
I would not have any problems with this land use, except for this:
“Conservationists at Joshua Tree are concerned because that water is all coming from the aquifer under the Chuckwalla Valley. In an already parched region of the state…”
One Billion Gallons required for the pumped storage reservoirs…in an area with little rainfall and where water evaporation rates are very high.
One Billion Gallons…replenished at some significantly high rate…not using rain water, but fossil water.
So…it is not about the sacrifice of some land (that is butt ugly and doesn’t appear to be supporting much life anyway (former mine..land stripped and desiccated)…it is about the mining and evaporation of the fossil water.
There are ways to reduce evaporation, placing floating spheres all over the surface is one. Claims of reduction in evaporation by 90 percent.
Interesting.
Has this or any other evaporation techniques been fielded in operational use?
Even if 90% of the evap losses could be prevented 10% evap losses off of a Billion Gallons of Fossil water is not trivial.
Yes, it was lately floated on an Los Angeles reservoir.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150812-shade-balls-los-angeles-California-drought-water-environment/
I will probably get flamed for suggesting it, but sometimes you need to pollute in one spot to AVOID polluting on a much larger scale at some OTHER spot.
Methinks that a pumped hydro reservoir built in a place where the water supply is critical and evaporation is a major problem could be FIXED to prevent excessive evaporation by just pouring the RIGHT kind of oil on the water.
This would have to be a synthetic oil, most likely, that is non toxic and extremely resistant to breakdown that would not cling to the walls of the reservoir but remain on the surface of the water.
Evaporation problem solved. The oil would be on the surface of both reservoirs and with the water going in and out from below the surface it would mostly stay in place rather than getting constantly churned into the water.
It would appear at first glance that some mix of larger and smaller flattened out anti evaporation balls would work best,thus minimizing the amount of materials needed to manufacture them- when they ARE used.
The local town has a small river in a big flood plane, hills on both sides. Easy to visualize the whole flood plane a lake, full of solar panel islands and people fishing, with the hills full of high storage islands ditto full.
The people fishing, up and down, get a slow ride down and up as storage varies with sun/wind. Charge a premium for such great vacation spots.
Very many such places, after all, towns tend to be built along rivers, great and small.
Right on. I am strongly of the opinion that LOTS of small pumped storage hydro is going to be built before we run out of affordable ff needed to build it as the price of gas goes up- as it must as it depletes.
There are PLENTY of small valleys in private hands with streams down in the bottom and side valleys or canyons branching off. An impoundment used strictly for pumped hydro at a fairly small scale would not need to be built to ordinary super safe standards due to being isolated from lots of people and not holding a huge lake behind it- and incidentally being EXTREMELY easy to drain and not subject to overfilling due to floods etc.
Such an impoundment might not be very useful for fishing with the water level going up and down a lot every day, but it would be perfect for load balancing locally produced wind and solar power..Some recreational use would be possible no doubt, especially if it is policy to maintain a minimum water level at all time except maybe for maintenance or repair activities.
Actually a soil and stone dam would be satisfactory in any location with the right kind of soil and stone. No need most likely for thousands of yards of concrete other than the lines carrying the water up and down.
Such a dam could be easily and thoroughly inspected on as frequent a basis as prudent. It would be emptied on a daily basis, no problem at all to inspect it.
And – if it DOES have a small stream flowing into it- it could be emptied in the event of expected flooding to help control the flooding, serving for a few days as a flood control reservoir in case of need.
Evaporation would hardly matter at all in most places since there is plenty of water in rivers and streams most places. It does not have to be TREATED water to use it for hydro storage.
The evaporation worries me too. But maybe there are ways to control it and maybe there is a way to bring enough water to the area from outside to compensate for evaporation.
To be clear I have no idea how far away the nearest feasible supply of water is located and getting it there would probably cost a fortune making delivery uneconomic..
It would be better to have clean water in the reservoirs of course but salty ground water or partially cleaned waste water would work.
In the last analysis , the ground water is going to be depleted ANYWAY if bau survives in my estimation.It would probably then be the lesser of two evil options to use it for pumped storage, on a collective basis, than to use it for household and industrial use. If it is used domestically and industrially ( for other than pumped storage) this may well result in people moving into this arid landscape.They will have to move right back out when the water depletes.
I am under the impression that at the depths oil wells are commonly drilled there is a hell of a lot of brine to be found almost anywhere. Brine is simply ground water containing many dissolved minerals. Brine would mean a dead reservoir at both ends but it would still drive turbines just fine.
The aviation industry is researching electric power for light/general purpose aircraft as well as commercial airliners. The electricity would be provided by batteries or in some cases perhaps fuel cells. I would not be surprised to see thin flexible printed PV cells applied to/built into the wings, control surfaces, and body. The electric power would, in some cases, be the sole power for the aircraft, and in some cases, would augment FF engines.
Even if only achieving limited success, the big take-away is that aircraft require MUCH higher energy densities than automobiles and thus the aerospace industry will push the development of energy storage technologies.
http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/airbus-establish-light-electric-aircraft-family
http://aviationweek.com/technology/airbus-proposes-electric-aircraft-technology-consortium
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-11/airbus-electric-aircraft-takes-flight-across-english-channel/6612224
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_aircraft
NASA and ESA are also pushing the boundaries for using solar power further away from the Sun than ever before. Their upcoming JUNO and JUICE missions to Jovian space will be solar powered vice RTG (Pu 238) powered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_%28spacecraft%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moon_Explorer
NASA and ESA are also looking into using solar PV power for future spacecraft missions to Saturn Space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronos_%28spacecraft%29
Solar PV and battery technology are in use today, have been in-use for decades, and are evolving. Compare and contrast to the ‘promise’ of fusion-generated electricity.
Just some more of that ole’ “wind and solar song and dance” per someone’s remark on the oil thread!
Yes, humanity is in for one helluva rough ride with the depletion of remaining FFs…but we are clever apes sometimes, and there exists some potential options for a much lower-energy (and lower population) humankind in the future.
Obvious extension – solar lighter than air craft. Flapping wing propulsion. Lots of room for PV, low speeds ok, travels around the world at the right wind latitude all the way. Fun vacation!
Same ideas with big solar/wind passenger catamaran, race with the others, place bets, win money. Stop off in exotic places, lose money. Fun, fun, fun.
A vacation I would gladly take.
As long as the lighter-than-air craft uses hydrogen. The Earth has an extreme;y limited supply of Helium and its use needs to be restricted to serious uses that absolutely require it. Once it is released out into the wild it rises to the top of the atmosphere after a fashion and is gone. Using Helium for party balloons is a secular sin. For lighter-than-air transport craft in any large scale it is unfeasible.
Yep. I know that, hydrogen is the only way. There are ways that might keep it from going bang even in the worst case. Worth trying.
I once discharged a hydrogen-charged engine, not thinking there was any ignition source around. Got my head right in the middle of the fireball, which had so little energy that while it made a huge bang, hardly singed me.
All auto stirling engines were hydrogen charged. Everybody knew that helium was a deep no-no for anything in large numbers.
Elon Musk briefly discusses what he thinks would be needed for a battery electric aircraft in this 1 min.48 sec. video clip.
People have been thinking about the idea of aircraft/airliners taxiing out to the hold line using battery power to turn in-hub electric motors in the landing gear, to save FFs. If the weight can be made acceptable for that kit.
A more out of the box idea would be for aircraft to be launched from runways using EM catapults, again, to save some FFs. Too much complexity in that idea, I’m afraid…large RDT&E, contruction, and O&M costs for the catapults, and airliners would have to be built to take those stresses, which would add an exorbitant weight penalty.
Even so, visionaries are conceiving of airliners that could use half as much fuel per seat mile out in the 2040s and beyond.
By that time, if the World has held it together somewhat, most automobile/bus/truck transport will be EV or Hybrid and maybe some NG or NG-fuel cell powered. Individually-owned vehicles may be the minority report, with future evolutions of on-demand short-duration rentals and vehicle-sharing being the norm…along with more buses and light/heavy (not high-speed, with precious few exceptions in the U.S.) rail.
“A more out of the box idea would be for aircraft to be launched from runways using EM catapults, again, to save some FFs. Too much complexity in that idea, I’m afraid…large RDT&E, contruction, and O&M costs for the catapults, and airliners would have to be built to take those stresses, which would add an exorbitant weight penalty.”
I remember bringing this up before Might not have been peakoibarrel but, I think it was.
http://www.gizmag.com/airbus-unveils-smarter-skies/24055/
It seems inevitable that all commercial vehicles will include PV on any spare surface at some point. They spend most of their time outside, are busiest during the day, and planes spend a lot of time above the cloud line.
Plus, fuel on the road or in the air is far more valuable than it’s market price. Mid-air military refueling requires 5 gallons for every gallon delivered. Every gallon not needed on a plane is a gallon that doesn’t need to be transported for on every flight, that frees up payload capacity for passengers, etc.
All vehicles use a significant percentage of their fuel to generate electricity for instruments, pumps, lighting, HVAC, etc. PV can provide that far more cheaply than liquid fuel, even now. That disparity will only grow.
—————————————————
Liquid fuel can be synthesized right now, with existing tech, for $10/gallon or less. If aviation becomes twice as efficient, then the effective price of fuel is only $5/gallon. That’s obviously viable, and again, that’s with current synthesis tech, which will certainly improve over time.
You have a good grasp of how it works: It takes more fuel to carry more fuel…increased weight=increased fuel burn, all things being equal. You are also correct that aircraft hotel load power is a significant drain on fuel economy, as it comes from engine-coupled generators…that is why Boeing put the Li-Ion battery packs in the 787…and they moved away from (engine-powered) hydraulics to electrical-driven controls…to eke out a lower fuel burn. They experienced growing pain with the battery pack fires, but that appears to be behind them now. To the extent that the aerospace and defense sectors pursue more robust and pervasive electric power applications, they will drive the technology even faster than the automotive sector would by itself. The same can be said for the use of composite materials, ceramics, composite-ceramic combinations, additive manufacturing, and more…all of which will flow down to civilian applications, including automotive.
I had wondered if the increasing cloudiness of the Arctic region would cause a negative forcing but apparently the clouds have a primarily positive radiative forcing.
Cloud Radiative Forcing of the Arctic Surface: The Influence of Cloud Properties,
Surface Albedo, and Solar Zenith Angle
An annual cycle of cloud and radiation measurements made as part of the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) program are utilized to determine which properties of Arctic clouds control the surface radiation balance. Surface cloud radiative forcing (CF), defined as the difference between the all-sky and clear-sky net
surface radiative fluxes, was calculated from ground-based measurements of broadband fluxes and results from a clear-sky model. Longwave cloud forcing (CFLW) is shown to be a function of cloud temperature, height, and
emissivity (i.e., microphysics). Shortwave cloud forcing (CFSW) is a function of cloud transmittance, surface albedo, and the solar zenith angle. The annual cycle of Arctic CF reveals cloud-induced surface warming through
most of the year and a short period of surface cooling in the middle of summer, when cloud shading effects overwhelm cloud greenhouse effects. The sensitivity of CFLW to cloud fraction is about 0.65 W/ m2 per percent cloudiness. The sensitivity of CFSW to cloud fraction is a function of insolation and ranges over 0–1.0 W/m2 per percent cloudiness for the sun angles observed at SHEBA. In all seasons, liquid-containing cloud scenes dominate both LW and SW radiative impacts on the surface. The annual mean CFLW (CFSW) for liquid-containing and ice-only cloud scenes is 52 (-1) and 16 (-3) W m22, respectively. In the LW, 95% of the radiatively
important cloud scenes have bases below 4.3 km and have base temperatures warmer than 2318C. The CFLW is particularly sensitive to LWP for LWP , 30 g m/2, which has profound implications in the winter surface radiation balance. The CFSW becomes more negative as surface albedo decreases and at higher sun elevations.
Overall, low-level stratiform liquid and mixed-phase clouds are found to be the most important contributors to the Arctic surface radiation balance, while cirrus clouds and diamond dust layers are found to have only a small radiative impact on the Arctic surface.
URL for above paper:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0442(2004)017%3C0616:CRFOTA%3E2.0.CO;2
Electric Vehicles, Solar Energy and Net Metering
In 11,000 miles of driving the i3, I figure we’ve saved about 500 gallons of gas that we would have bought to cover the same distance in our 2007 X3 which averages about 22 mpg in combined city/hwy driving. What I didn’t expect was the benefits of having solar while having an electric car. The i3’s impact on our electric usage has been far less than I was anticipating, in part because the i3 is the worlds most efficient electric car with a rated 124 MPGe.
Being able to harness the sun’s power costs of course isn’t free. There is an upfront installation cost. We figure that the of our solar system will pay for itself in about 12 years assuming that electric rates do not increase. Given that we are also using it to power our i3 going 1,000 miles a month, our payback will be sooner. There are some people that lease their solar systems which is another way to get solar without out the large upfront costs.
First hand account from an EV owner, showing how EVs and solar can reduce the demand for oil in particular and FF in general.
Exactly my experience, on top of which my the feeling that I am not doing as much messing up the biosphere with all my trotting around.
Also, I did the needed PV buying used and installing in the usual local appalachian style with types who work fast and cheap and don’t bother with things like rules. I checked, nobody is gonna get killed.
I myself am totally convinced that EV’s are going to take over- quick. Even with the rules — some of them.
In addition to the ongoing struggle to deal with supplying energy in the quantities that we are used to at prices that we are used to *a losing proposition), we also will continue to face, more and more, having fewer jobs do to structural changes due to increased automation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/09/upshot/restaurant-of-the-future-service-with-an-impersonal-touch.html?rref=upshot
Maybe we are headed towards the situation described in the first part of this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-ebook/dp/B007HQH67U/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1442113449&sr=1-1&keywords=Manna
This book is an interesting read…the first part seems to be a somewhat plausible dystopian future, at least in some scale and form, while the second part is an enlightening look inside the mind of an ‘in the ozone’ cornucopian.
Turning over a new leaf
With time, he said, it’s just a matter of planning out your journeys. As for daily driving, Hodges thinks it’s the perfect commuter vehicle for Jamaica despite the lack of a public charging infrastructure as in the First World nations.
“It feels like a regular car.”
According to Hodges, it takes seven hours to charge to 80 per cent using the car’s port that can detect 240v or 110v. One full charge is the equivalent to three quarters of a gallon of fuel, and to keep things even more cost-effective he uses solar power to recharge the vehicle. His daily route to work and then home, up and down Red Hills, a total distance of 20 miles is little problem for the Leaf. In traffic, the instant torque of the electric motor is hugely positive.
Another account of an EV owner’s experience living with the car. This time much closer to home for me! Completely missed in this article were the implications for oil imports using EVs ,charged from renewable sources on a small island. If Jamaica were change all vehicles to EVs, without changing the electricity generation from petroleum based fuels at all, oil imports would probably drop by a significant amount. Given the preponderance of small (high mpg) Japanese cars in Jamaica, relative to say Hawaii, the savings in Hawaii would probably be greater. Increase the amount of electricity generated from renewable sources and “we’re cooking with(out) gas”!
As for range anxiety, the smaller the island, the less of a problem that is. For somewhere like the Cayman Islands you’d have to drive around in circles all day to exhaust the range of a typical modern (post 2010) battery EV.
How long before people living on small islands figure out that EVs are perfect for their standard commuting?
Jeju island in South Korea – a small island with a lot of EV’s.
A map of Jeju’s electric vehicle public fast charging stations.
I had heard about the EV program in Jeju Island but, this is the first I am seeing this map. What fast charging standard do these chargers use? Is it Chademo, CCS or some other (Korean?) standard? What are the EVs that are currently being encouraged? I cannot imagine a Korean province being particularly enthusiastic about encouraging widespread adoption of EVs when the offerings from Korean auto manufacturers seem very limited as of 2015. The only Korean manufactured EV that is being sold in the US is the Kia Soul EV.
There appears to be zero interest in battery electric vehicles(BEVs) from policy makers in Jamaica. According to this rate sheet (PDF), the aggregate taxes and import duties for an individual importing a diesel with a engine capacity of 1 Liter or less or a hybrid are 40% while the aggregate for an electric vehicle is 52%. A car with a gasoline fuelled motor no larger than 1 Liter attracts aggregate taxes and duties of just 2% more than an EV at 54%. So, the policy makers apparently think that hybrids and small diesels should attract less importation charges than BEVs!
As a result, no dealers are considering importing BEVs and the gentleman in the story above is totally on his own in terms of dealer support. AFAIK his car is the first and only mass produced BEV in the island and is probably the only BEV on the island that is not a golf cart. We’ve got a long way to go!
Korea is agnostic when it comes to fast charging standard. The fast chargers all come with three connectors – a Mennekes, a Chademo and a Combo plug.
The relevant issue is that 99% of cars here have Korean batteries. Kia, Renault, BMW and General Motors.
Judging from your previous comments regarding your local government, it seems pretty obvious that your political leaders are in bed with your established business as usual business men.
Breaking up such a political machine is going to be slow and painful and might take decades or even centuries.
But just maybe with good luck reality will smack your little country upside it’s collective head with a “Pearl Harbor Wake Up Brick” which phrase I ought to try to copyright.
If the brick arrives soon enough, your country can break its dangerous and expensive addiction to imported gasoline at least. That would go a hell of a long way to breaking the OVERALL oil addiction as well.
When you take a look at the daily trajectory of the average american, buzzing around within a quite small circle, you can say “Every man is an Island”, right?
Meaning of course, as IB says, that EV is perfect for most people, Real island or equivalent island.
OF COURSE, you have to have access to other vehicles as need arises. But isn’t that what car clubs do?
I am interested in getting back to the topic of gold and silver in the Spanish colonial era.
I agree with Nick that the Spanish were in effect basically counterfeiting money by bringing so much gold and silver into the money system of that day – but otoh maybe that was a GOOD thing overall, given that there was simply not enough coined money to permit businesses and industries to grow.
All thoughts on this topic will be welcome on my part.
You might want to take a look at John Kenneth Galbraith’s Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went.
Most of chapter II deals with the consequences of the rivers of gold and silver that came pouring into Spain and, as a consequence, the rest of Europe after the conquest, and the consequences thereof:
If you’re interested in exploring in greater detail the causes as to why Spain was not the principle benificiary of all this booty, but the rest of Europe, you might take a look at
Imperial Spain: 1469-1716 by J.H. Elliott
The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806 by Jonathan I. Israel
The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600-1800 by C.R. Boxer
This article is the best one I have seen so far about the current refugee crisis in terms of actually dealing with it as opposed to hand wringing and moralizing.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/germany-merkel-refugee-asylum/405058/
If Germany is going to survive they will have to discover some of their old strength. I don’t think the current generation has it in them. Europe is dying and is being replaced by Islamic migrants from the Middle East, and everybody celebrates it. Interesting, isn’t it, to see a whole culture, a whole civilization from which the modern world arose, and they don’t even want to live or defend their land anymore.
A “whole culture, a whole civilization from which the modern world arose” is that of the Germans?
I hate to break it to you, but Mesopotamia is almost universally accepted as being the cradle of civilization.
One only has to look at some of the sublime artworks created by these people some 3000 B.C. to understand this.
I remember seeing a graphic somewhere, maybe on TOD, or on a link from a TOD post, showing a figure of some oil ‘reserves’ (of some category) of 18 Billion barrels in the entire Atlantic continental shelf.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/09/10/3700223/businesses-against-atlantic-drilling/
Even if that 18B number is correct, that is a drop in the bucket given World oil consumption per year, and even more important, I would bet all my money that such oil is found in widely scattered small fields, making production very expensive.
Wouldn’t our time and money be better spent on other energy technologies…not only solar and wind, but also including more gas-fired plants and high-efficiency super-critical coal-fired plants and perhaps advanced modular mass-produced nuclear fission plants with much higher safety factors?
A little bit of good news:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/09/11/3700777/epa-pesticide-court-ruling/
The public is gradually growing more aware of the noxious side of coal and coal fired electricity.
This paper from Duke researchers breaks new ground in understanding the radioactivity associated with coal ash.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150902111835.htm
The recent rupture of a coal ash reservoir in NC polluted a long stretch of a local river, resulting in some unexpectedly tough regulatory action on the part of the business friendly state government.
NC incidentally is a leader among the states in solar power farms.
From the science daily article “Until now, metals and contaminants such as selenium and arsenic have been the major known contaminants of concern in coal ash,” said Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “This study raises the possibility we should also be looking for radioactive elements, such as radium isotopes and lead-210, and including them in our monitoring efforts.”
“The study found that levels of radioactivity in the ash were up to five times higher than in normal soil, and up to 10 times higher than in the parent coal itself because of the way combustion concentrates radioactivity.”
It has been known for a very long time that coal carries radioactive elements. In fact I found a USGS advisory paper from 1997 saying fly ash had 10 times the radioactivity of coal.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
Had a large ash reservoir spill from a coal fired power plant into the Delaware River about a decade ago. The reservoir was placed up on a hill with levees retaining the waste, levee disintegrated and most of it went downhill into the river. Not a leak here, a flood, into a very clean river. Big cleanup. Coal fired plant was shut down and removed. More natural gas fired generators were installed to take up the slack.
Another power plant further upstream was under fire because it was pouring out large amounts of SOx into the air (along with the rest of the toxic stuff). After 15 years of public outcry, two states suing them and the EPA saying they couldn’t do anything because it was across state lines, it finally got shut down. Scrubbers would have been too expensive apparently. Also the coal plant was near the end of it’s life anyway so all the moaning by the owners was mostly hot air.
Disturbances 93L and 94L Little Threat; All-Time Record Heat in the Caribbean
Record heat and drought has been widespread over the Caribbean this summer, with the worst drought conditions occurring over Haiti, Eastern Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Reuters reported last month that Cuba began a two-month cloud-seeding campaign in September over the eastern part of the Caribbean island in hopes of easing its worst drought since at least 1901. The atmospheric circulation associated with the strong El Niño event in the Eastern Pacific has brought warm, sinking air and high pressure to the Caribbean, and has contributed to many cities recording their all-time highest temperatures on record. Another big factor in Saturday’s record highs, and the record highs all across the Caribbean this year, is the fact that the year-to-date period of 2015 has been the warmest on record for the globe as a whole. Here is Mr. Herrera’s list of cities in countries bordering the Caribbean that have set all-time heat records this year:
I wonder what kind of reception global warming deniers would get in the countries and cities bordering the Caribbean Sea right now? The man in the street senses something unusual and even the farm hand who looks after my rural property and who cannot read or write has his own way of putting it. With the amount of not so wild fires that I have seen scorching the steep hillsides of my little island, I’m a little concerned that when the rains do come, there will be little vegetation left to prevent serious erosion. If only those most affected were those responsible for the fires, maybe that would quench their apparent lust for fire. Alas, those worst affected, may turn out to be the innocent.
Excellent opinion piece in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opinion/sunday/the-next-genocide.html?_r=0
It is an interesting piece but gets the ultimate story wrong.
I’m not interested in kumbaya or saving the 7 billion people walking this planet. Too late. I’ve been hearing this all of my life and I’m sick of it.
Live or die. I will use as much as I possibly can, and grab as much as I possibly can before this whole thing implodes.
I thought it was not about saving the planet or the 7+ billion humans on it per se, but about simple personal responsibility. Of course, adding your own rationalized bent to the personal irresponsibility circus may work by helping to smash the ‘irresponsible’ human population to numbers the remaining flora and fauna can handle.
Coincidentally, I mention this positivism thing over here.
Caelan
I don’t see anything wrong with what dh said, behavioral change only makes sense if it benefits you or your own community.
Somehow I too can’t relate to the idea of saving the planet or humanity, these ideas are too abstract to motivate anyone seriously and frankly sounds a bit preposterous, the planet and humanity will be fine IMO. The planet has seen far worse in it’s 2-3 billion years of existence and I rank humans right up there with cockroaches when it comes to survival.
All these fluff pieces on “save the planet”, “save those kids in africa” ultimately do a disservice to people. I mentioned this before as well, Europeans should not be worried about whether some remote pacific island will go under due to rising sea levels, they should be worrying about whether their culture will survive the next 200 years. It sounds selfish but it’s true. Same for my countrymen, we are so poor that we cannot afford to save anyone other than ourselves.
I see a multitude of problems converging in future
1. Global warming
2. Antibiotic resistance
3. Resource depletion : Although this will get masked for some time by economic depression
4. Rising pollution and it’s affects : Mostly affecting the developing world
5. Economic depression : Mostly affecting the western world
Well I see the theology of Positivism is still alive and well on the pages of the New York Times.
All religious belief systems require significant departures from reality, and Positivism is no exception.
Let’s take these passages from the article cited, for instance:
The rhetological strategy employed here is what is called “lying by omission.” George Orwell said that “Omission is the most powerful form of lie.”
What is missing, for instance, is this:
The Nazi’s cornerstone precept of “racial hygiene” gave birth to their policy of “racial cleansing” that led to the murders of millions. It was developed by German physicians and scientists in the late 19th century and is rooted in the period’s Social Darwinism….
Although notions of race have a long history, it was ironically the Scientific Revolution followed by the Enlightenment and then the Age of Reason, emphasizing science and rationality, that were the wellsprings for biologically based racism… This concept of intrinsic value or defect (popularized in the 1860s as Social Darwinism) was clearly articulated by Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) in “The science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race (8).” He coined the word “eugenic” (relating to or producing improved offspring) and proposed that“races”were in a struggle for survival of the fittest. German Darwinists argued that innate racial inequalities gave each individual life a different value, and extermination of “inferior”races was not only appropriate but unavoidable (9). Their model placed the German (i.e., Aryan) Race at the pinnacle and initiated the medical framework supporting the concepts and implementation of racial hygiene.
–Frncois Haas, “German science and black racism—roots of the Nazi Holocaust, The FAESB Journal
http://www.fasebj.org/content/22/2/332.full.pdf+html
Some good news:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/14/us-australia-politics-turnbull-idUSKCN0RE0I120150914?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
Abbott is a Denier Nut Case, and toxic to Australian interests.
Quite a few people believe it is better to deny Darwinian theory – sound science – than to run the risk of it being used to justify aggression and discrimination- a sub category of aggression to my way of thinking.
I understand this reasoning well, and the historical justifications for it.
But it is unnecessary because the more actual evidence that accumulates, as the results of real ( 😉 warning this is a smiley cultural reference to the REAL thing ) honest to Jesus scientific research , the more obvious it becomes that we are basically all virtually identical on the inside as far as our brains and intellects and programmed in morality is concerned.
We do as a matter of fact have some relatively minor variations that help us better survive in some environments. A tall skinny guy is better suited to tropical heat and sun than a more barrel shaped guy who lives in the land of eternal ice and needs to conserve body heat rather than shed it.
Biology sets the broad outer limits to behavior and intellect and these limits are known to be pretty much identical to all humanity. CULTURE on the other hand determines when fighting and stealing are “good” or “bad”.
Culture determines whether homosexuality is approved or punished. Ditto many other behaviors.
(Incidentally since homosexuality is always with us, it MUST be a natural phenomenon rather than a result of “bad “culture. People are born either hetero or homo in nearly every case and maybe in EVERY case.
So punishing a person for being homo is about the same as punishing him for being born with big ears or a fondness for drinking alcohol to my way of thinking. )
People in the mood to fight can always find plenty to fight about. Variations in skin and hair and facial appearance will always be handy reasons of course but life styles, religious beliefs, ways of earning a living, dietary customs and tons of other extraneous factors can always be found to distinguish between US and THEM.
US and THEM IS basically what just about every conflict comes down to in the end- all the way to brother against brother when two brothers are trying to make sure their own sons inherit Daddy’s farm.
Denial of sound science for any reason contributes to the denial of sound science taken all around and is a dangerous mistake.
Climate science denial for instance might result in killing more of us by a factor of a hundred than all the wars in history. The reasons are different, in one case noble, in the other base, but the end result could be disastrous even with noble intentions.
I know many honestly motivated preachers who not only want to save souls but also to prevent marital violence,stop child abuse, eliminate hunger etc etc etc.
Virtually all of the ones I know personally deny evolution,given that I now reside in the backwoods of the Bible Belt.
The consequences of this denial, extrapolated, result in tens of millions of people believing man does not have the power to ruin the environment. If these tens of millions swing the vote to the chump trump into office…… get the picture?
old farmer mac,
I don’t think anyone around here is trying to “deny Darwinian theory.”
Quite the contrary, the goal is to:
1) Prevent the abuse and misuse of Darwinian theory, since in the past no scientific fields of enquiry have been more abused and misused than Darwinian theory and economics, and
2) Stay abreast of the most recent advancements in Darwinian theory, as it has evolved rapidly due to breakthroughs in brain imaging and other technologies in the 21st century.
Can you imagine being in the oil business these days while continuing to use the same backward drilling technology we did back in the 1980s?
Since David Sloan Wilson did such a superb job of articulating a response to your comment in Evolution for Everyone, I’ll quote him:
I think that this subject could be an interesting thread in it’s own right.
“Though a circular economy may sound idealistic – if not like a fantasy – the truth is that the existing way of doing things is reaching the end of its utility.”
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32769-our-prosperity-is-in-peril-unless-we-shift-from-a-wasteful-world-to-a-circular-economy
thank goodness, now I don’t have to buy a Tesla…
Porsche is jumping into the electric car business.
The German sports car company has announced its all-electric Mission E sports car. The concept vehicle, which will be on sale within five years, boasts a 600 horsepower engine, a range of more than 300 miles, and a recharging time of under 15 minutes.
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-porsche-electric-sports-car-20150914-story.html
The Leap Manifesto: A Call for Caring for the Earth and One Another
‘This our sacred duty to those this country harmed in the past, to those suffering needlessly in the present and to all who have a right to a bright and safe future.’
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/15/leap-manifesto-call-caring-earth-and-one-another
https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/
This link is about a Mercedes concept car that uses active aero dynamic tech to improve fuel economy. This sort of tech will likely find its way into a lot of cars in the future.
http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1100024_mercedes-benz-looks-to-the-future-with-transformer-intelligent-aerodynamic-automobile-concept-live-photos
Mercedes used a completely digital process which allowed the company to develop the IAA in just 10 months instead of the usual 18 for a concept car. Digital prototyping accelerates the development of new generations of cars—but more than that, it also raises their quality and offers opportunities for increased diversity. This is because it allows the development team to simulate and optimize the design from the earliest stages.
“Before we let a new car anywhere near our wind tunnel, it has already successfully passed a barrage of digital tests as a complete data model,” Mercedes R&D boss Thomas Weber explains.
It used to take 5 years…
“Our leaders, religious, political, and business, mostly accept supernatural explanations of the human existence. Even if privately skeptical, they have little interest in opposing religious leaders and unnecessarily stirring up the populace, from whom they draw power and privilege. Scientists who might contribute to a more realistic worldview are especially disappointing. Largely yeomen, they are intellectual dwarves content to stay within the narrow specialties for which they were trained and are paid. ”
-Wilson
Politicians are not especially religious. They do what their campaign contributors want.
Contributors are not religious – they do what benefits their wallets. That includes misleading religious folk into opposing things that might hurt their wallets.
Scientists are not any more interested in getting into the gun-sights of the vicious hired guns of those contributors.
Michael E. Mann
Director of Penn State Earth System Science Center; Author of ‘Dire Predictions’ and ‘The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars’
The ‘Fat Tail’ of Climate Change Risk
One of the most under-appreciated aspects of the climate change problem is the so-called “fat tail” of risk. In short, the likelihood of very large impacts is greater than we would expect under typical statistical assumptions.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-e-mann/the-fat-tail-of-climate-change-risk_b_8116264.html
Oh no!!! You want me to read about yet another Michael Mann Tree Ring Circus hockey stick? Oh, lordy, lordy, the sky is falling. Let’s all tunnel under those mountains of coal where it’s safe. Don’t forget your SPF-15 CO2 screen lotion.
Repeat after me: O <– this is a square, O <– this is a square, O <– this is a square, O <– this is a square. What is this "O"? Did it work yet? Huh? Did it?
99.99945% of all scientists in the entire universe replied to a single question not even having to do with their version of sceince, so then according to the media the entire science must be true.
"If they replied, so shall it be!" from
"Book of Disciplines" 23 verse 666
They say nobody ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the public. LOL.
No doubt Muledo will think I agree with him.
Remember a popular song from some years back with a line in it, “You think this song is about you, don’t you, don’t you?”
So, you got struck in the mouth with a hockey stick?
I bet it hurt!
I think we can all agree here that Michael Mann’s greatest contribution to humanity is his appearance in the Hide the Decline music video. Five years later and it’s still a classic. 😀
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqc7PCJ-nc
What do out wing pawn denier friends have against Mann?
He sure pushes their buttons.
I know they think Capital is God, and The Free Market is the Chosen Path.
Simpletons like simple stories.
Well at least their responses are well thought out and professionally presented. 🙂
Michael Mann is the Man of Perdition the Bible speaks of. I truly believe that. He’s a heartless unflinching elitist who is hurt from the pain of his mother and father abandoning him. The guy knows absolutely no restraint on what he and his cabal at the UN want to do….ENSLAVE US ALL TO COMMUNISM!!!
Many, perhaps most of us are slaves to the crony-capitalist plutarchy.
Tyler—
Bronze and Iron Age fiction is not a good place to root your foundations in reality.
Of course, you could ask the Talking Snake?
Cthulhu commands you to use less coal!
For Nick about heat pumps.
I have been buying air source Goodmans, for my tenants, the bottom of the line models, which work quite well in my local climate , given that we do not usually have a whole lot of extremely cold days most winters.
I know that IF I had the ready cash, or was borrowing money long term at low interest rates, it would be more economic to buy far more efficient – and also far more expensive heat pumps.
But my cash resources are limited and I stink at the bank. Shit has happened to me due to some bad luck with family affairs and the death of a business partner, and while I am living quite comfortably, I cannot borrow money at low rates for a couple more years at least.
The cheap Goodman heat pumps give excellent service according to ALL the local contractors, and I am putting my limited cash into other investments that will pay me sooner and better than a top of the line heat pump. So I buy Goodmans for my tenants who are happy with their utility bills, considering I supply water and sewer included in the rent.
The difference in the cost goes into other personally managed hands on investments. It costs me only three hundred bucks to have a local guy change out a heat pump for me lock stock and barrel excepting any new duct work. I make it VERY easy for him, I have the new unit sitting there and take the old one away and hang around to help.
If it weren’t for the warranty and insurance issues I would just hire a helper and put them in myself. A basic heat pump is actually quite simple to install, you just set it in place, hook up the thermostat and power supply, attach the lines, silver solder the joints, pull a vacuum on any thing open to the atmosphere,and crack the valves.
If you want the warranty and fire insurance this sort of work is best left to licensed professionals.
OTOH, this is all pretty much routine for an old gear head and certified welder. Any truly well qualified all around tradesman can do this sort of thing. I had to do only about six ac jobs on cars to pay for ALL the necessary specialist tools needed to do basic heating and air work.Stuff like electrical meters and metal working tools I have always had around. Any time you can avoid a contractor for a day you can afford to buy five hundred dollars worth of tools. There are not many that are ever useful to a mechanic or building contractor I don’t own, half or more of them bought used dirt cheap. I have some I have owned for ten years or more that I have never yet used even ONCE , but hey, I got them for ten cents on the dollar and can sell them for fifty cents on the dollar if necessary.
The problem with buying the BEST or a really good heat pump is that I can probably save more ( indirectly via tenants rents ) over the next eight to ten years on the price of the cheap one than I could save in electricity with the more expensive one.
This current cost savings versus declining price issue is basically why I do not yet have a pv system of my own. The price of the pv system I want is declining more every year than it would save me annually in reduced electricity costs and I have ample back up generating capacity – so long as I can buy gasoline and diesel fuel. I keep a LARGE stash of both on hand.
When these current units go out of warranty, I hope to replace them with much better ones at advantageous prices ten years down the road. If I am still around. LOL.
Heat pumps seem to be like computers in that every year you get more for your money although it probably takes eight to ten years for the value per dollar to double instead of the legendary eighteen months.
I have not looked into the glass question. I will though since you have mentioned it.
The ROI on window improvements, glazing, is pretty low. There are better places to put your money when it comes to home energy efficiency.
I did put storms on fairly new double glazed double hung windows, but this was done to prevent condensation at very cold temperatures, which should improve the longevity of the windows. Condensation leads to rot.
Laminated glass is fairly cheap, and Mac can install it himself. It should pay off quickly, as windows are the primary source of heat loss once you plug air leaks.
I use 3/8″ lami on movable glass ( IIRC I used 1/4″ on some large movable windows to prevent sagging) and 1/2″ on fixed glass.
It also blocks sound beautifully, which is a big advantage for us city dwellers.
Announced at SPI PV Trade show .. HD Wave PV Inverter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylj6natXzjI
Some place recently upthread here or in the last few days there was a comment about the cancellation of studies of radiation induced cancer near nuclear power plants.
This link throws a lot of light on this issue.
http://www.theenergycollective.com/rodadams/2270328/nrc-calls-expensive-search-witches
Don’t be fooled by the click bait headline of the link.
An editors primary job these days is to alarm or piss off a potential reader rather than make sure reporters and authors have their ducks in a row.
I have some training in the risks and control of environmentally hazardous materials and there is zero doubt in my mind that the no thresh hold for harm argument is complete and total bullshit for all practical purposes..
For one, background radiation varies by orders of magnitude from place to place and lots of people live where the natural exposure is several times higher than exposure near a nuke- unless it malfunctions of course.
Consider this. You use a stove to stay warm. Nobody has ever proposed that the small amount of radiant heat you are exposed to at ten feet will harm you.
But as you get closer and closer to the stove- eventually you will unquestionably suffer a burn.
A smoker can flick his BIC for a lifetime without suffering a burn to his fingers.
Near zero exposures to environmental hazards are nothing to get excited about- at least not so long as we suffer the same sort of exposure for natural reasons at orders of magnitude higher levels without clear evidence of harm.
It may be that an extremely small number of people ACTUALLY DO get sick as the result of farmers using pesticides properly tested and properly applied according to regulatory guidelines in a country such as the USA. If so , nobody has been able to prove it, excepting in a handful of cases involving allergies.
The evidence relating improved nutritional status and health on a population wide basis due to having plentiful and well varied foods available at very low costs is on the other hand absolutely overwhelming.
About the only thing that scares me MORE than nukes is a lack of them. Nuclear accidents are one thing, radiation exposure at near zero above background levels is another.
Sustainable investing: are companies finally moving money away from fossil fuels?
Wall Street’s big banks are starting to realize it’s possible to drop oil without dropping returns.
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/sep/16/goldman-sachs-morgan-stanley-merrill-lynch-fossil-fuel-divestment
Energy storage overall is a small market but set to grow quickly, according to not only Manghani’s research but other industry watchers. “What we’re seeing is aggressive equity players putting money and liking the return profiles and the performance of storage systems,” says David Fennema, a managing director with CohnReznick Capital Markets Securities who works on mergers and acquisitions in the renewable energy space. “And now we’re starting to see lenders really wake up and get excited, and when that happens, you know you have something that passes the numbers test.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/16/why-using-solar-energy-at-night-is-closer-than-you-think/
Global renewable giant SunEdison announced Wednesday that it would supply advanced battery technology for nine Southern California homes that will generate and store their own energy..
The first of the project’s so-called zero-net energy homes, which are being built in Fontana, is expected to be completed by the end of September with the remaining eight finished by the first quarter of 2016.
A zero-net energy home is supposed to generate as much energy as it consumes.
SunEdison, which develops, finances and installs equipment for renewable energy sources such as solar, designed a system that will monitor and control how energy is used in the homes. SunEdison partnered with builder Meritage Homes and Southern California Edison to develop the project.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-net-zero-home-pilot-20150915-story.html
Meritage Homes was the first national builder to make every home built 100% ENERGY STAR® certified. We consistently exceed the minimum ENERGY STAR® requirements, build homes that achieve HERS scores as low as 61*, and introduced the first cost-effective NET ZERO home by a national builder.
http://www.meritagehomes.com/whybuy/energyefficient/#.VfnrSajn9Mw
California
New Residential Zero Net Energy Action Plan 2015-2020 June 2015
http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/92F3497D-DC5C-4CCA-B4CB-05C58870E8B1/0/ZNERESACTIONPLAN_FINAL_060815.pdf