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Rush Limbaugh: Hurricanes are a liberal conspiracy for promoting climate change

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  • Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    I'm not sure that is the case but few realize that much of the electricity these cars use comes from coal-burning power plants.
    You know, CO2 is what causes global warming right? and CO2 is TWO-Thirds Oxygen. I think we need to ban oxygen. Now.

    Comment


    • Originally posted by Bill the Cat View Post
      Wouldn't synthetic coal be a viable option to mining it?
      What would synthetic coal cost per ton compared to real coal?
      Micah 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

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      • Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
        I'm not sure that is the case but few realize that much of the electricity these cars use comes from coal-burning power plants.
        Yep... electric cars don't run for free.
        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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        • Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post
          I once read a study which concluded, ironically, that from raw materials to junkyard, a Hummer has a smaller environmental impact than an electric car.
          What study was this?

          Comment


          • Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
            I'm not sure that is the case but few realize that much of the electricity these cars use comes from coal-burning power plants.
            Well it depends on the country obviously. In the US the electricity grid is 40% coal, here it's 3% coal. But if the population are driving electric cars, then it becomes pretty easy for the government to reduce CO2 emissions nationally very quickly by phasing out coal plants and phasing in electricity from renewables.
            "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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            • Originally posted by Starlight View Post
              Well it depends on the country obviously. In the US the electricity grid is 40% coal, here it's 3% coal.
              The differences in population (New York City alone is approaching double the population of your entire country) and size (we're more than 36½ times your size) have a great deal to do with that.

              I'm always still in trouble again

              "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
              "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
              "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

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              • Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
                The differences in population (New York City alone is approaching double the population of your entire country) and size (we're more than 36½ times your size) have a great deal to do with that.
                Plus New Zealand isn't a coal rich nation. The US has the largest coal reserves in the world. 25% of total coal reserves are found in the US. With that much coal sitting around it only makes sense the US power grid would make use of it.
                "The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."
                GK Chesterton; Orthodoxy

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                • Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                  I have no problems with incentivizing people to develop new technologies, but I do have a problem with artificially decentivizing current technology with penalties and taxes before we have a solution in place. And the best incentive to develop new technologies is the free market and capitalism. The guy who invents the better mouse trap makes the most profit. You can't force inventiveness. It happens in its own time.

                  I did just come across this interesting development that will probably accelerate the adoption of electric cars:

                  Fully charging an electric car battery in 5 minutes with a 300 mile range:
                  https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/12/...-battery-demo/
                  Would you support removing the tax benefits, subsidies and artifically cheap land grants from the coal industry to make it a more true Free Market? Elon Musk owner of Solar City, has already said he'd accept having all the subsidies removed from solar power if the Coal industry had its subsidies removed as well.

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by lilpixieofterror View Post
                    What specific amount of climate change has human activity brought about and how did you reach that conclusion?
                    For your reading

                    https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-r...r4-wg1-spm.pdf

                    Here's the tl;dr from the IPCC Summary: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and closes a window in the IR emission spectrum. This cause heat to be trapped. By itself its roughly 1C per doubling of CO2 partial concentration. An increase in temperature causes an increase in air humidity as the air absorbs more water from the oceans. Since water is also a greenhouse gas, this causes a positive feedback mechanism. Taking all the various feedbacks, both positive and negative together, you get roughly 3C per doubling of CO2.

                    Since the seventies we've increased the concentration in the atmosphere from 310ppm to 400pmm (parts per million), which gives roughly 1C of heating, which is what we see.

                    Why is central planning the only solution to dealing with climate change?
                    The IPCC has in general suggested a broad spectrum of solutions, of various kinds. Basically anything that would work. Honestly, I'm not sure how Ayn Rand Conservatives could solve this problem, except to see it as inevitable and maybe mumble something about 'taxes being theft'. That wouldn't make the problem go away. The rest of the consevatives are free to propose conservative solutions, but so far they've betted on a campaign strategy of public incredulity towards the idea that the Earth is getting warmer. Or if its getting warmer that its man's fault. Or if it's man's faul, whether there's anything we can do.

                    I personally would love to see a US Conservative party that took global warming seriously, and proposed solutions that were more consistent with their free-market based ideals, but I don't see it that much.

                    It'd be quite a strong argument against free-market capitalism if it could be shown that it was incapable of dealing with global effects. If the cost of pollution isn't added into the price of the products, then companies are just off-loading cost of the items to others. I'm not sure how completely unfettered free-market capitalism can solve that problems without introducing the equivalent of a carbon tax.

                    But I'm not a conservative, its you guys who should be telling me how you'd deal with Global Warming.

                    What can be done and is it already too late anyway?
                    Again just read the IPCC Summary, it has various projections based exactly on what we do. Since the temperature is tied to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and since humans are the cause of any increase, what will happen will depend on our output. There are two extreme scenarios: No-humans, basically humans magically disappear and CO2 is cut short immediately... this is not desired, but is just there to show a baseline, as in... what is the smallest amount of heating we'd see before the atmosphere has reached equilibrium: The answer is about 0.5C. The worst case scenario is one with unlimited economic growth, only fossil fuels and a population explosion, in that case we'd see the concentration of CO2 reach 1400ppm by the end of the Century and temperature would go up by 6C worldwide (this isn't in the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers, they went with more conservative models here just to be safe, I just picked the biggest extremes). This would be a catastrophe, the Midwest would turn into a dustbowl by temperatures like that, the pine forests in Denmark would be killed (heck you could grow wine here at those temperatures), vast sections where many people live would turn quite inhospitable. Dealing with that scenario would be more expensive than WWII.

                    In between those two extremes, there's more reasonable goals, where the rich western countries, Europe, USA as well as China and Russia, transition completely to renewable by 2050. Other countries less economically blessed by 2100. For the poorest of countries the IPCC report suggests that whatever energy source is cheap and will help them transition out of abject poverty to healthier living is preferable, even if that is coal.

                    You can see the estimates of what would happen given various responses. Its why a lot of politicians have talked about the 2.5C goal, which everyone agrees ambitious but possible. Even if we don't reach that, it'd be better than the worst of the alternatives.

                    Only with dooms day alarmist and people using it to bypass the ballet box, so they could enact their dreams of socialism upon the rest of us.
                    Again, conservative leaders are free to talk about their amazing solution to these problems. The liberals are right on this one, that's not their fault.
                    Last edited by Leonhard; 09-16-2017, 02:33 AM.

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                    • Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
                      The differences in population (New York City alone is approaching double the population of your entire country) and size (we're more than 36½ times your size) have a great deal to do with that.
                      Most of our electricity comes from hydro power so it's really a question of population density. In both the US and NZ, most rivers that can reasonably have hydro power stations built on them, have been. That provides a certain finite amount of power, and is enough to sustain a certain level of population relative to land area. Once your population goes above that, you need electricity from other sources.

                      Despite the fact that we're a coal-rich nation, the government has decided to close our last coal power plants because of climate-change issues, and transition that part of our power grid to geothermal energy (being on the 'ring of fire' like the US, we have plenty of volcanoes and hot springs). Wind and solar are a bit awkward for us, because the wind at our latitude tends to be quite gusty rather than constant and so wind turbines need to be carefully designed, and we're a bit far from the equator for solar to be ideal.
                      "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


                      • Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
                        I'm not sure that is the case but few realize that much of the electricity these cars use comes from coal-burning power plants.
                        While that is true, though in the US the answer would depend on where you are, as you have hydro and nuclear, as well as natural gas (which emits significantly less CO2 than coal). However even if you exclusively charged your electric car from a coal power plant, the net emission would still be lower than a petrol car, since a coal power plant can be very efficient (41% in danish plants, and 80+% when its also used for centralized heating), while a petrol car about 12% efficient.

                        Most of the energy released in a cylinder goes out of the exhaust, into heating the air the cooler blows trying to keep the engine block from melting.

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post
                          And what about some of the destructive practices that fuel the "green industry", such as strip mining for rare minerals,
                          I'd say you'd have to be more angry at the coal industry for that. However I agree that these practices are sad, but they're unavoidable. Even in a dieselpunk world we'd still have plenty of use for rare earths for all sorts of things. We like our electronics.

                          and the toxic substances that are produced during the manufacture (and eventual disposal) of fuel cells and solar panels?
                          I'm no fan of fuel cells, you won't hear any love from me towards them, I think they're a dead end even for military applications. The only exception would be for certain space applications where you might as well take advantage of the huge storage of hydrogen and oxygen you have.

                          As for toxicity of solar cells that strongly depends on their type. I prefer silicon based solar cells which are effectively glass in comparison to thin film solar cells that do contain noxious heavy metals. However the answer here is the same for the petrochemical industry, for manufacturing, for shipping, fishing, whatever... get good environmental regulations in place, and police them. There's not much more to it than that.

                          I mean, as long as we're talking about a level playing field. I once read a study which concluded, ironically, that from raw materials to junkyard, a Hummer has a smaller environmental impact than an electric car.
                          http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/...ull-report.pdf

                          This is the study you might be referring to which looked at the CO2 cost of producing a Tesla in comparison to a Hummer. Sans the battery, the two were equivalent, with the battery, the Tesla caused 15% more CO2 in production than the Hummer.

                          All in all over a ton of CO2 to produce both cars. Quite a bit. But they concluded that the Tesla massively beat the Hummer. Why?

                          Well its simple, how much CO2 was avoiding when you drove the car, vs Hummer. Over a lifetime? They went ahead and did those calculations, even assuming that 53% of the power came from a coal power plant (realistic US scenario), the Tesla still beat the Hummer hands down. No competition. Also the battery is recycled recovering 70% of the carbon used to making it, further helping the case for the Tesla car.

                          Forbes has a tl;dr https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2.../#536fc73b6096

                          Comment


                          • Originally posted by lilpixieofterror
                            Plus New Zealand isn't a coal rich nation.
                            Originally posted by Starlight
                            Despite the fact that we're a coal-rich nation
                            One of you must be wrong.

                            Based on past experience, I'll take Starlight's knowledge over that of LPOT.
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                            • Originally posted by Roy View Post
                              One of you must be wrong.

                              Based on past experience, I'll take Starlight's knowledge over that of LPOT.
                              Seems like a safe bet. You could check out wikipedia or a government website or a national encyclopedia on the subject if you were wondering. Coal mining has long been a major source of employment in some areas of the country and is a significant export product.

                              Possibly you saw in international news when a coal mine explosion here in 2010 killed 29 miners. The right-wing government had dialed down the safety regulations sadly...
                              "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


                              • Originally posted by Starlight
                                The right-wing government had dialed down the safety regulations sadly...
                                The fish in an aquarium looking at the water filter and asking 'why do we need that, its a bother, get rid of it'.

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