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Pollution kills millions per year

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  • #16
    Originally posted by Meh Gerbil View Post
    Except that much of our pollution is 'off shored'.
    Much of the electronic waste we produce is shipped overseas for recycling.

    I don't know how much of an impact that makes but there is a 'stream' of waste to consider here.
    Yes, it's off shored to countries with lax environmental standards. One more argument against outsourcing.
    "As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths." Isaiah 3:12

    There is no such thing as innocence, only degrees of guilt.

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    • #17
      Originally posted by Jedidiah View Post
      Especially since the majority of those deaths is outside of America (which makes them no less horrible) so using those figures to support legislation in the USA is dishonest.
      I mean from what I've heard the U.S. had some serious pollution problems prior to the 1970s, and the legislation written at the time helped clean things up. A better point one could make is that we should keep the legislation that we already have so we don't wind up like the places where the deaths are occurring.
      Find my speling strange? I'm trying this out: Simplified Speling. Feel free to join me.

      "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do."-Jeremy Bentham

      "We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question."-Orson Scott Card

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      • #18
        I can point to one thing that is a definite problem. Cobalt mining.

        What's Cobalt mining in the Congo got to do with me you ask? Well those fancy electronic gadgets we all carry around, they're powered by a Li-Ion battery that needs cobalt.

        Your phone battery has 5-10 grams of cobalt.
        Your laptop? about 28 grams (1 ounce)
        An electric car? 4.5 to 9 Kilograms. (10-20 pounds)

        The article below, which deserves way more attention than it gets, details what a mess Cobalt mining makes of the environment and some of the direct impact it's having on health, including birth defects

        https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...m-ion-battery/



        (This is one of the reasons I'm against electric cars and think we should be looking at Hydrogen cars like the new Toyota Mirai)
        Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.
        1 Corinthians 16:13

        "...he [Doherty] is no historian and he is not even conversant with the historical discussions of the very matters he wants to pontificate on."
        -Ben Witherington III

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        • #19
          Originally posted by stfoskey15 View Post
          I mean from what I've heard the U.S. had some serious pollution problems prior to the 1970s, and the legislation written at the time helped clean things up. A better point one could make is that we should keep the legislation that we already have so we don't wind up like the places where the deaths are occurring.
          Well it was multiple rivers catching fire (because they were so polluted that the substances in them could catch on fire) that forced Nixon into creating the EPA in the first place, I believe. Also the US seems to currently have fairly serious problems with lead in the drinking water across the country.
          "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
          "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
          "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

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          • #20
            Originally posted by Raphael
            (This is one of the reasons I'm against electric cars and think we should be looking at Hydrogen cars like the new Toyota Mirai)
            Hydrogen cars, heavier, far less efficient, more bulky, more complex, more expensive, requires infrastructure that hasn't been built, and at best you'll end up driving in a car with a fifty-gallon tank full of hydrogen at eight hundred times atmospheric pressure.

            Yay...

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            • #21
              Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
              Hydrogen cars, heavier, far less efficient, more bulky, more complex, more expensive, requires infrastructure that hasn't been built, and at best you'll end up driving in a car with a fifty-gallon tank full of hydrogen at eight hundred times atmospheric pressure.

              Yay...
              Concur. From a scientific point of view, hydrogen cars are largely a joke, and electric cars are where its at. The problem with hydrogen is you can't just store it sanely and there's no sign of any great improvement on it. One of the students in my office at uni was researching new hydrogen storage materials, and the long and the short of it is that there's diddly squat, and there are some good reasons to think there will never exist better storage mechanism. Whereas current battery tech is good enough to have electric vehicles, and it's improving all the time. There's also pretty demonstrable scope for some order-of-magnitude improvements being theoretically possible in the future. Yes, the current best battery tech uses lots of elements whose mining is particularly nasty for the environment, but there's a decent amount of hope that future battery tech will be able to use graphene and other elements that are much nicer environmentally.
              "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
              "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
              "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

              Comment


              • #22
                Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
                Hydrogen cars, heavier, far less efficient, more bulky, more complex, more expensive, requires infrastructure that hasn't been built, and at best you'll end up driving in a car with a fifty-gallon tank full of hydrogen at eight hundred times atmospheric pressure.

                Yay...
                Have you looked at the Toyota Mirai?



                The infrastructure is a problem, but they're having to build charging points for the electric cars to be feasible .
                Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.
                1 Corinthians 16:13

                "...he [Doherty] is no historian and he is not even conversant with the historical discussions of the very matters he wants to pontificate on."
                -Ben Witherington III

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                • #23
                  There's plenty of cobalt thankfully, and it's perfectly recyclable and Tesla plans on recycling the batteries. Everyone wants to replace cobalt with something less rare, we'll see if it happens. I think it'll work out in the end.

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                  • #24
                    Originally posted by Raphael View Post
                    Have you looked at the Toyota Mirai?
                    A 700 bar gas tank? Yup. It's an electric car, only without all the spare room you normally have in a Tesla, that's taken up by fuel-cell stacks and that enormously gigantic gas tank. If that thing ruptures it would be like letting off a bomb, and that's before the fuel has ignited. Plus its horsepower rating is half that of a Model S, even though it has a similar price.

                    It's cool conceptual tech Raphael, I'll grant you that! I just consider it inferior to battery powered electrical cars.

                    I'll rant a little more about why.

                    The infrastructure is a problem, but they're having to build charging points for the electric cars to be feasible.
                    Building charge points don't really require more infrastructure except what we have today. You plug in another thing that requires power, some collection of batteries to buffer the energy draw and a charging station.

                    Hydrogen is a hundred times worse. First of all, we have to agree how to store hydrogen, but it seems after a lot of research in trying to get various salts and metals to absorb hydrogen and release it, there's only one viable way, high pressure carbon fiber wrapped tanks. Now you have to get hydrogen gas out to the gas stations and store it there. It's much less dense than petrol, and petrol tanks can't be easily retrofitted for it. So entire gas stations have to be torn down and rebuilt. We have to transport it. The gas pipelines already existing are insufficient for it. So we need to use an armada of trucks. Now we need to make it. Hydrogen has to be made. It's an energy storage medium. You have two choices, you can crack natural gas in a high-temperature steam, or you can do hydrolysis. The former produces CO2, the latter is very inefficient.

                    A hydrogen car either runs on a degraded version of natural gas (the case today), or it runs on hydrogen made by electricity (only at a turn-around efficiency less than a third of a battery car).

                    So would you rather electricity pass through a Rube Goldberg machine of interchanges before becoming electricity again to drive the car, or should electricity simply pass into a battery that powers the car?

                    When you consider its lower performance, higher price, greater complexity, greater infrastructure, and lets say they make catalysts without platinum somehow (even scarcer than gold) ... then what advantage does the car have over a battery car? You can charge it faster.

                    The range is worse. Yes I know the Mirai has a bigger range than the Tesla, but there's nothing stopping Elon Musk from making a battery car with double the range except that it'd notch up the price another couple of thousand dollars. Battery prices are coming down rapidly. The same can't be said for the price of hydrogen or fuel cells.

                    Rant over.

                    I was a fan of fuel cells for a long time, I caved when I finally saw the numbers on the blackboard from a professor. The best possible hydrogen car, would perform worse than a lithium-ion car we could in principle build using off-the-shelf components today.

                    Fuel-cells are dead.
                    Last edited by Leonhard; 03-09-2017, 07:20 PM.

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                    • #25
                      The earth can't sustain this many people. The naturalists should consider offing themselves. It's the logical solution
                      The last Christian left at tweb

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                      • #26
                        Originally posted by Raphael View Post
                        I can point to one thing that is a definite problem. Cobalt mining.

                        What's Cobalt mining in the Congo got to do with me you ask? Well those fancy electronic gadgets we all carry around, they're powered by a Li-Ion battery that needs cobalt.

                        Your phone battery has 5-10 grams of cobalt.
                        Your laptop? about 28 grams (1 ounce)
                        An electric car? 4.5 to 9 Kilograms. (10-20 pounds)

                        The article below, which deserves way more attention than it gets, details what a mess Cobalt mining makes of the environment and some of the direct impact it's having on health, including birth defects

                        https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...m-ion-battery/



                        (This is one of the reasons I'm against electric cars and think we should be looking at Hydrogen cars like the new Toyota Mirai)
                        Yep, it's one of the ironies of "green" products like electric cars and solar panels: acquiring the products to make them is extremely destructive to the environment.

                        Although I think it's pretty much impossible at this point to wean people off portable electronics.
                        Some may call me foolish, and some may call me odd
                        But I'd rather be a fool in the eyes of man
                        Than a fool in the eyes of God


                        From "Fools Gold" by Petra

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                        • #27
                          Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
                          There's plenty of cobalt thankfully, and it's perfectly recyclable and Tesla plans on recycling the batteries. Everyone wants to replace cobalt with something less rare, we'll see if it happens. I think it'll work out in the end.
                          It's recyclable, but how many people actually recycle it instead of just throwing their dead electronics in the household trash? Yeah, I know, you're not supposed to do that, but people do it anyway.
                          Some may call me foolish, and some may call me odd
                          But I'd rather be a fool in the eyes of man
                          Than a fool in the eyes of God


                          From "Fools Gold" by Petra

                          Comment


                          • #28
                            Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post
                            It's recyclable, but how many people actually recycle it instead of just throwing their dead electronics in the household trash? Yeah, I know, you're not supposed to do that, but people do it anyway.
                            Trash is starting to be mined for rare earths since ordinary trash is starting to be denser with that stuff than ore. It's not financially viable yet, but it's getting there. When it comes to portable electronics it doesn't really matter, eventually that would only be a few percent of all batteries. The really big industrial installation of battery packs, and the electrical cars, trucks, ferries, etc.. that's where the big amounts of batteries are.

                            Yep, it's one of the ironies of "green" products like electric cars and solar panels: acquiring the products to make them is extremely destructive to the environment.
                            Eh, Cow Poke managed to convince me that there is such a thing as ethical mining. Granted the cobalt mines in Congo aren't like that. However a new mine in the US is considering opening up as the demand for Cobalt rises. There's the Cobalt mines in the philipines which are that supply the cobalt for Tesla.

                            Although I think it's pretty much impossible at this point to wean people off portable electronics.
                            In the monestary I spent a month at there was a sign hanging in the bathroom that read: "The angel said to Athanasius: 'Flee into the desert, observe silence and dwell in God's presence'"

                            You have to flee into a monastery on an island far away to get rid of the internet these days.

                            Comment


                            • #29
                              Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post
                              This is one of those funny issues, because nobody is against clean air and water. It's just that some of us don't think that checking off every item on the liberal/socialist wishlist is the best way to accomplish it.
                              Exactly.
                              The eco-heads need to divorce the concern for the environment from the naked power grab.
                              Actually YOU put Trump in the White House. He wouldn't have gotten 1% of the vote if it wasn't for the widespread spiritual and cultural devastation caused by progressive policies. There's no "this country" left with your immigration policies, your "allies" are worthless and even more suicidal than you are and democracy is a sick joke that I hope nobody ever thinks about repeating when the current order collapses. - Darth_Executor striking a conciliatory note in Civics 101

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                              • #30
                                Originally posted by Trout View Post
                                The earth can't sustain this many people. The naturalists should consider offing themselves. It's the logical solution
                                We can expand my proposed "A Week Without a Liberal" to "A World Without a Liberal"


                                (Just kidding Leonhard)

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