Will The Global Warming Hysterics Never Tire Of Being Wrong?

[Leonhard]

You know, people would be less suspicious of the "global warming" narrative if the solution proposed by liberals wasn't to simply check off every box on the socialist/globalist social engineering wishlist.

You know I made a thread about that, where I asked conservatives on this forum what a conservative response to Global Warming would be. Aside from cap-and-trade and nuclear power, it was pretty much crickets.

I'm still curious to know what response would be consistent with a conservative ideology.

[Cow Poke]

You know I made a thread about that, where I asked conservatives on this forum what a conservative response to Global Warming would be. Aside from cap-and-trade and nuclear power, it was pretty much crickets.

I'm still curious to know what response would be consistent with a conservative ideology.

Conservation and good stewardship. I'm all in.

[seer]

You know I made a thread about that, where I asked conservatives on this forum what a conservative response to Global Warming would be. Aside from cap-and-trade and nuclear power, it was pretty much crickets.

I'm still curious to know what response would be consistent with a conservative ideology.

The free market is doing a pretty good job.

US wind farm activity by Fortune 500 breaks records

https://www.smart-energy.com/renewab...reaks-records/


U.S. Wind Power Grows a Record 8% in 2018

https://www.tdworld.com/renewables/u...-record-8-2018

Solar installations in US now exceed 2 million and could double by 2023, new figures show

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/09/sola...e-by-2023.html


Here’s Why Solar Farms Are Booming in the U.S.

https://fortune.com/2016/09/12/solar-panel-farms-boom/

[Mountain Man]

You know I made a thread about that, where I asked conservatives on this forum what a conservative response to Global Warming would be. Aside from cap-and-trade and nuclear power, it was pretty much crickets.

I'm still curious to know what response would be consistent with a conservative ideology.

As I recall, the responses were much more substantive than that.

[seer]

As I recall, the responses were much more substantive than that.

I think tax credits would help...

[Sparko]

I am all for getting away from fossil fuel and for renewable energy. I am against forcing it on people. I think there are ways to make it desirable for businesses and people to want to change and make it profitable. If you do that, then the change comes naturally. When smart phones came out, they naturally replaced flip phones because they were better. I think for example, electric cars can be better than gas cars. Better torque, fewer moving parts, etc. But if the government just forced everyone to stop using gas cars it would be a disaster and people would fight back. But if businesses can make a good quality electric car at the same or cheaper price as a gas car, and have an infrastructure in place where you can charge your car anywhere and just as fast as a gas car, then electric cars will naturally replace gas cars because they are better.

[oxmixmudd]

I am all for getting away from fossil fuel and for renewable energy. I am against forcing it on people. I think there are ways to make it desirable for businesses and people to want to change and make it profitable. If you do that, then the change comes naturally. When smart phones came out, they naturally replaced flip phones because they were better. I think for example, electric cars can be better than gas cars. Better torque, fewer moving parts, etc. But if the government just forced everyone to stop using gas cars it would be a disaster and people would fight back. But if businesses can make a good quality electric car at the same or cheaper price as a gas car, and have an infrastructure in place where you can charge your car anywhere and just as fast as a gas car, then electric cars will naturally replace gas cars because they are better.

While there are some that want to force things, it is a biased report to say the shifts to wind power, sokar power, ekecteic caes etc have happened because of the unfettered action of a free economy. No, there are goverment programs that encourage development in this direction. Not to mention a fee billionaires willing to sink a lot of their own money into the posibility things like usable sleek electric cars are possible, or that windmills are a reasonable source of renewable energy.

Like most things in this world, there has to be a balance. We cant wait for oil to run out. The decline will be to steep and too fast. We must provide reasons to develop alternatives while there is still plenty of oil and plenty of money to make it happen.

Jim

[TheWall]

I hope hydrogen power becomes more prevalent. We have some hydrogen powered cars allready
That is all I have to say on the matter.

[Teallaura]

You know I made a thread about that, where I asked conservatives on this forum what a conservative response to Global Warming would be. Aside from cap-and-trade and nuclear power, it was pretty much crickets.

I'm still curious to know what response would be consistent with a conservative ideology.

I suspect you are looking for a unicorn. You seem to be after big, wide ranging solutions to what you believe to be a problem humans can solve from people who are skeptical of the problem and don't particularly believe humans can solve it. Why, if you (general) do not think the possibility of effective human intervention exists would you devise a big, wide ranging solution?

[Leonhard]

I suspect you are looking for a unicorn. You seem to be after big, wide ranging solutions to what you believe to be a problem humans can solve from people who are skeptical of the problem and don't particularly believe humans can solve it. Why, if you (general) do not think the possibility of effective human intervention exists would you devise a big, wide ranging solution?

I don't believe its unreasonable Teal. Is tax subsidies for renewable energy really against Conservative ideology? Is there something magical about coal which has caused a lot more environmental damage than solar, wind and nuclear power (including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Windscale and Fukushima), which means that its okay for them to get tax break after tax break, and when a coal company dumps a hundred thousand tons of toxic sludge into a river bed poisoning it for hundreds of years to come, they're only hit with a slap fee.

I have a hard time believing that Conservatives can't propose solutions to climate change.

[seer]

I don't believe its unreasonable Teal. Is tax subsidies for renewable energy really against Conservative ideology? Is there something magical about coal which has caused a lot more environmental damage than solar, wind and nuclear power (including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Windscale and Fukushima), which means that its okay for them to get tax break after tax break, and when a coal company dumps a hundred thousand tons of toxic sludge into a river bed poisoning it for hundreds of years to come, they're only hit with a slap fee.

I have a hard time believing that Conservatives can't propose solutions to climate change.

I did - tax credits, also as my links showed the free market with some tax credits are making a real difference in the US. The costs for wind and solar are going down, soon they will be equal with coal (which is one of the cheapest sources of energy). Natural gas is also cutting our carbon foot print.

[Teallaura]

I don't believe its unreasonable Teal. Is tax subsidies for renewable energy really against Conservative ideology? Is there something magical about coal which has caused a lot more environmental damage than solar, wind and nuclear power (including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Windscale and Fukushima), which means that its okay for them to get tax break after tax break, and when a coal company dumps a hundred thousand tons of toxic sludge into a river bed poisoning it for hundreds of years to come, they're only hit with a slap fee.

I have a hard time believing that Conservatives can't propose solutions to climate change.

You're using three separate issues, however: energy, pollution and climate change. That wasn't what you asked in the thread.

Renewables already enjoy some subsidies - and wind farms are busily turning back conservation efforts to the 1960's. And we haven't begun to deal with what happens to all those solar panels in a few years when they are past their peak and working on being land fill. I am extremely dubious that renewables are a viable replacement for fossil fuels. They certainly have a place - but they aren't scaling up well. And of course, they aren't reliable enough to take on the entire load and unless batteries get a lot better - or we start building giant fly wheels - they never will be.

Nuclear is requiring the creation of a new signage language because we can't know if people a thousand years from now will recognize: Danger: Radiation. Do Not Enter. Trying to figure out what would stop them from opening the door of death hasn't gone particularly well, either. Nuclear and toxic landfills share the same problem - leaving deadly waste behind long after everyone has forgotten why we buried the thing.

I grant there are some promising features like being able to reuse spent fuel - but fission still has massive problems with waste disposal - and there's no way to count the poor guys that unknowingly build a city on a nuclear disposal site - and open the thing up and play with the stuff inside. Maybe they are too technologically advanced to make that mistake - maybe we abandon technology for naval study and they don't have a clue what radiation is. There's no way to predict that far ahead.

I also grant there haven't been many nuclear accidents - but I put it to you that the folks who did die in them didn't find them insignificant. And unlike toxic sites - there's no realistic way to completely clean these up. Even Three Mile Island - which was cleaned extensively - is still not perfectly safe. Radiation, unlike many chemicals, is a completely silent killer.

Which isn't to say we should leave the status quo - improving conservation and anti-pollution efforts to reduce the number of lives lost to fossil fuels should definitely be on the list of things to do right now.

For nuclear, I'm deliberately leaving out the issues of bomb materiel and terrorism. I don't think that they would be sufficient reason to avoid nuclear - but they do exist.

All that said, I think thorium might offer a good alternative - I think there's enough evidence to warrant testing to find out. The 'not gonna melt down' thing is particularly attractive, as well as not having to mine uranium. The one reactor the US built ran only for a few years before being shut down but I don't think it had any major issues. I believe India is starting a major research project - that should be interesting.

Hydro is still extremely viable - if we can limit to sites already mucked up by building a dam. I wonder, if we treated it more like a renewable - where we aren't as picky about reliability - if we couldn't extend hydro without the building of major dams? That would require testing but it should be possible small scale and maybe medium, depending on site.

Improving scrubber technology so we can safely burn a lot of the trash we are currently burying would replace some fossil fuels - and would improve fossil fuels themselves.

Keep looking at alternatives like hydrogen - maybe some day we can get that technology to viability Who knows?



Now, to the solutions you proposed. Carbon credits are counter productive - big carbon producers will just buy up what they need and, more likely than not, keep right on producing all the carbon they like - and then some. Verification would be a bear - and require a brand new bureaucracy to muck up even more. In the end, no real reduction - probably none at all - and nations like China and India just laugh at the US and Europe self destructing. Carbon credits are just another corporate shell game - looks great on paper, has nothing to do with reality.

Tax breaks - that hasn't really done the job with renewables, has it? They do help - so do massive subsidies - but at the end of the day, renewables simply aren't competitive with fossil fuels and massive tax breaks are just an invitation for more corporate shenanigans.

[Leonhard]

Renewables already enjoy some subsidies - and wind farms are busily turning back conservation efforts to the 1960's.

Coal mines have strip mined entire mountains, and stockpiled oceans of toxic slurry from the burned mineral coal. There is absolutely no comparison between wind and coal here. Wind could scale up more than a dozen times and not be significant compared to coal in comparison to environmental effects.

And yes renewables enjoy some subsidies. Its what helped accelerate the development of the technology from its infancy in the seventies to today where its shaping up to be a viable technology.

And we haven't begun to deal with what happens to all those solar panels in a few years when they are past their peak and working on being land fill. I am extremely dubious that renewables are a viable replacement for fossil fuels.

Its viable, but its more expensive. You will have to create a lot of grid storage to soak up the energy production variability. But its not so much a matter of whether its cheaper. Its a matter of whether we have any viable alternative if we forego nuclear power.

Nuclear is requiring the creation of a new signage language because we can't know if people a thousand years from now will recognize: Danger: Radiation. Do Not Enter.

The danger of radiation is massively overblown. Already within a period of fourty eight hours the radiation of the spent fuel has dropped to a fraction of what it was after being freshly removed from the reactor. After a few weeks its down to less than a tenth. That's from the burning off of the short-lived and intensely radioactive elements. That's when the spent fuel will cause water to glow blue from the cherenkov effect. After that you get longer lived elements that are still fairly radioactive, Cesium-137 and Strontium-140, and they have half-lives measured in 30 years or so. However that means that after 300 years the radiation is down to a thousanth.

The really long lived stuff like Plutonium-239 is of course really long. However its an alpha emitter. A person picking out a rod of spent nuclear fuel thousands of years from now could hold it in his hands and not feel a thing. The alpha particles would be stopped by the dead layer of skin. Or even his clothes.

We don't need to invent a new signage, or figure out how to build impenetrable fortresses in mountains. We need to store it on the surface in big solid concrete drums. That's it. Its cheap, and the foot print of those storage sites will be nothing in comparison to the places where they store the toxic sludge from coal power plants.

I also grant there haven't been many nuclear accidents - but I put it to you that the folks who did die in them didn't find them insignificant.

Its true. Chernobyl was scary (and the HBO series gives a good dramatic presentation of it). However if you count lives and damage to health its still orders of magnitude less than the effects of coal power.

And unlike toxic sites - there's no realistic way to completely clean these up. Even Three Mile Island - which was cleaned extensively - is still not perfectly safe. Radiation, unlike many chemicals, is a completely silent killer.

Three Mile Island is perfectly safe today. As is the Windscale facility, except for the reactor core.

The partially melted reactor was safely extracted. There was a miniscule leak of radioactive elements in to the air, less than at Fukushima. And its no where near the leak of Chernobyl or Kyshtym. Those represent the only two cases we have of catastrophic nuclear contamination. The exclusion zone near Pribyat which is a twenty hour drive from where I'm sitting is rather heavily contaminated, especially near the city where little sand grain sized bits of spent nuclear material from the core of Reactor 4 can still be found. But even then, you can walk around there unprotected for a couple of days and get no more of an exposure to radiation than a flight attendant does on an airplane.

It will take a couple of centuries for the Cessium-137 and Strontium-140 to decay away. After that it will effectively just be a 1000 square miles natural park.

I won't downplay the significance of this disaster, but it was a comedy of errors: The RBMK reactor had no containment facility, it was notoriously unstable, and the day it exploded it was run in a mind boggingly stupid way. It remains the only non-military nuclear reactor to ever undergo a prompt criticality event and explode.

Which isn't to say we should leave the status quo - improving conservation and anti-pollution efforts to reduce the number of lives lost to fossil fuels should definitely be on the list of things to do right now.

There is no way to run coal power plants in a way that doesn't send out a truck load of noxious particles, or leaves behind train loads of sludge.

For nuclear, I'm deliberately leaving out the issues of bomb materiel and terrorism. I don't think that they would be sufficient reason to avoid nuclear - but they do exist.

The US, Europe, China and India all have nuclear power, and all those places have nuclear weapons. They're the ones producing the most power and the most CO2, so its not a hurdle for them to build more nuclear power stations. They already have nukes. But then again nukes aren't *that* difficult to make. There's no secret any longer in their design, or how they function, and the technical means to making them is within even rather small nation states.

Even Israel managed to make some nukes using their lone nuclear power station.

Terrorists getting access to nuclear material is a legitimate concern, but its only a concern if its highly enriched fuel (95+%), and most reactor fuel is only enriched to 5-20%. Its considered unrealistic for terrorists to possess the technical facilities capable of further enriching nuclear fuel. And the prospects of dirty bombs have turned out to be no more frightening than ordinary chemical attacks. The good thing about dust is that it tends to settle unless its flung up sufficiently high and in large enough quantities.

All that said, I think thorium might offer a good alternative

I'd rather we get going now, not in thirty years.

Hydro is still extremely viable

It is, but its also environmentally destructive and we've tapped most of the places available.

Now, to the solutions you proposed. Carbon credits are counter productive - big carbon producers will just buy up what they need and, more likely than not, keep right on producing all the carbon they like - and then some. Verification would be a bear - and require a brand new bureaucracy to muck up even more.

Verification wouldn't be a bear. You can't beat the laws of physics. If a power plant consumes so much coal, it will emit so much CO2. There is no way around it unless the CO2 is funnelled somewhere (though attempts at CO2 sequestering to produce Clean Coal have largely failed). All that will have to be monitored is how much coal, oil, or natural gas is being consumed, but since that's a known quantity, what problem would there be?

In the end, no real reduction - probably none at all - and nations like China and India just laugh at the US and Europe self destructing.

Call me an idealist but I don't believe in being in a race to the bottom. Even if they're not doing anything now, we should still be doing our bit now. I don't believe doing that will cause the destruction of the US, that's hyperbole.

Tax breaks - that hasn't really done the job with renewables, has it?

How do you figure? That seems to be precisely how a lot of the technological developments for solar energy got accelerated, and how some of the successful companies like Tesla Energy has gotten ahead. At the very least renewable energy needs subsidies because coal gets subsidies. As long as coal gets subsidies the market isn't a level place.

[Leonhard]

I did - tax credits, also as my links showed the free market with some tax credits are making a real difference in the US. The costs for wind and solar are going down, soon they will be equal with coal (which is one of the cheapest sources of energy). Natural gas is also cutting our carbon foot print.

I believe something like that to be the sensible conservative response. Figuring out what adjustments can be made to accelerate renewables, or nuclear, but letting the free market largely handle it by itself.

[seer]

I believe something like that to be the sensible conservative response. Figuring out what adjustments can be made to accelerate renewables, or nuclear, but letting the free market largely handle it by itself.

Leonhard I gave you a link showing the rapid rate of renewables being created in the US, the free market taking advantage of tax credits.