The environment thread

[lostfan]

When I get into it with you guys on here I don't really consider it fighting, more like "sparring."

[kapkomet]

Funny that is exactly how I felt arguing with you in the finance thread.

 

 

+1

[Balta1701]

You know the sad thing? You guys scream about how terrible it is that taxes go up, that the government takes over everything, and you never bother thinking what the end result of the climate change we're talking about is going to be. What do you think is going to happen if a corn crop fails? Or if water becomes more scarce out west? Or if the sea genuinely encroaches on people's land. Who is going to wind up paying for all that? Who's going to be making the decisions about who gets to keep their house and who has to move? Who's going to wind up paying for the things we say are coming? Rebuilding New Orleans, that evil government didn't spend any of our tax dollars on that, right? Hell, guess who's butting in on snow removal in D.C.? FEMA!

 

That evil, expansionist Demycrat government you guys are so scared of, that health care bill you're so terrified of is going to be nothing compared to how much the government is going to wind up controlling people's lives and taxing you silly to try to mitigate the effects of what we say is coming.

[kapkomet]

You know the sad thing? You guys scream about how terrible it is that taxes go up, that the government takes over everything, and you never bother thinking what the end result of the climate change we're talking about is going to be. What do you think is going to happen if a corn crop fails? Or if water becomes more scarce out west? Or if the sea genuinely encroaches on people's land. Who is going to wind up paying for all that? Who's going to be making the decisions about who gets to keep their house and who has to move? Who's going to wind up paying for the things we say are coming? Rebuilding New Orleans, that evil government didn't spend any of our tax dollars on that, right? Hell, guess who's butting in on snow removal in D.C.? FEMA!

 

That evil, expansionist Demycrat government you guys are so scared of, that health care bill you're so terrified of is going to be nothing compared to how much the government is going to wind up controlling people's lives and taxing you silly to try to mitigate the effects of what we say is coming.

 

It's because the only solution doesn't have to be government to every single answer that ails us.

 

NO ONE has ever said we shouldn't try to achieve solutions to issues. But, we don't have to listen to "government saves" as the only answer.

[StrangeSox]

 

3.0 to 4.5 million years ago, something happened. In 10 years, the same thing that took thousands of years will happen, and we will all DIE~~~~~~D

 

That's hilarity and instanity for you.

 

We've released a millions of years worth of stored carbon/ energy in about 150 years.

[StrangeSox]

It's because the only solution doesn't have to be government to every single answer that ails us.

 

NO ONE has ever said we shouldn't try to achieve solutions to issues. But, we don't have to listen to "government saves" as the only answer.

 

Bulls***. A good percentage of Americans and most conservatives don't even believe it is a real issue. They envision grand, global plots by scientists to enrich themselves and leftists to control everyone.

[BigSqwert]

Peek-a-boo-ologist...brilliant

 

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[Cknolls]

We've released a millions of years worth of stored carbon/ energy in about 150 years.

 

 

So we still have 2 to 3.5 million years worth to release?

Edited February 11, 2010 by Cknolls

[Balta1701]

So we still have 2 to 3.5 million years woth to release?

Actually, there's enough CO2 sitting in fossil fuels to push us back up to the levels that we last saw 45 million years ago within the next 90 years easily, if we keep burning at current rates.

[Balta1701]

Vancouver just finished the warmest January on record, and they're literally having to airlift in snow using a helicopter to prepare for the olympics.

[vandy125]

Vancouver just finished the warmest January on record, and they're literally having to airlift in snow using a helicopter to prepare for the olympics.

 

I was talking to some guys from Toronto who were saying that they didn't have very much snow. I told them to send their snow budget surplus over our way

[Balta1701]

In 2 years, the Chinese will be operating 42 separate high-speed rail lines, connecting virtually all of their major urban centers.

 

In 4 years, the U.S. may have a high speed rail line running from Tampa to Orlando.

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

[Balta1701]

The world's number 1 export commodity is starting to do serious damage to the world's number 2 export commodity.

[kapkomet]

In 2 years, the Chinese will be operating 42 separate high-speed rail lines, connecting virtually all of their major urban centers.

 

In 4 years, the U.S. may have a high speed rail line running from Tampa to Orlando.

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

This is one thing that I don't understand.

 

Why don't we develop this? Is it because the airline industry and auto industry will get pissed off?

[Balta1701]

This is one thing that I don't understand.

 

Why don't we develop this? Is it because the airline industry and auto industry will get pissed off?

That could certainly be part of it. But one other part is that no private sector entity is ever going to put up the funding for this type of project (the Chinese have put up something on the order of several hundred billion dollars in stimulus funding to build up their system). For the U.S. it'd be the same level of funding, but on top of that, we're already several trillion dollars behind on paying our infrastructure construction bills on the stuff we've already had. And as you've told me repeatedly, tax cuts are more useful than infrastructure construction. And deficits are always bad.

 

Oh, and building a line linking Vegas and L.A. is evil and sinful and can never be done.

 

It's also worth noting that our government just doesn't think in terms of how to develop rails. They think "people are living here, so we need to mandate a certain amount of parking", and that thinking actually reduces the ability of mass transit to be profitable, as you really need to maintain a certain level of population density around these type of centers for them to be anything better than our current Metra-type systems. As long as we're so heavily subsidizing highway construction, compared to rails, economically it makes sense to own a car in most metropolitan systems.

 

When you think of the decision makers in the country, the politicians, the media...how many of them genuinely take public transit? The million people in L.A. who take the bus system every day, there are very few politicians among them; the politicians can afford cars. The people writing on the op-ed page of the Washington post don't take the train in after they leave the Bush administration. The guys appearing on CNN every night probably aren't taking the subway in. Aside from Biden, there's very few decision-makers who even think along the lines of what it would take to develop a rail system that would actually be useable.

 

Its real easy to make government policies that wind up favoring the automobile and strongly disadvantaging mass transit without even meaning to do so, and so if your political class is adapted to the automobile and mass transit is left to the lower classes, your mass transit system winds up having to find a way to work itself in without interfering with the automobile, and in a lot of cases that's just not possible.

[BigSqwert]

The TreeHugger archives are filled to the brim with stories about ocean acidification and the potential future effects of it, but here's a quick one on just how fast today's oceans are changing and how it fits into historic (and catastrophic) ocean changes. Yale Environment 360 details some new research into what happened 55 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, the last time the world's oceans acidified quickly:

 

At that time some 6.8 trillion tons of carbon entered the atmosphere over a period of 10,000 years. The exact cause isn't known for sure, but it caused temperatures to rise 5-9°C and many deep-sea species to go extinct, possibly because the water's pH became too low.

 

Wanting to compare the conditions during the PETM and today, scientists from the University of Bristol set up simulations of the conditions now and then and adjusted the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere: 6.8 trillion tons over 10,000 years and then 2.1 trillion tons over a few centuries to represent conservative estimates of modern carbon emissions.

 

In doing so they determined that acidification is happening ten times faster today than it did during the PETM. In the past 200 years ocean pH has increased 30%, an increase of 0.1pH units.

 

As for future impact, lead author Andy Ridgwell states with typical scientific understatement, "We can't say things for sure about impacts on ecosystems, but there is a lot of cause for concern."

 

LINK

[Y2HH]

LINK

 

Maybe the dinosaurs left their cars running after they all went extinct, which caused it back then.

 

And the cavemen of that era were known to abuse aerosol hair sprays.

[StrangeSox]

Obama giving out the big bucks to Vogtle to build two new reactors:

 

http://www.ajc.com/news/vogtle-nuclear-pla...ear-308302.html

Edited February 17, 2010 by StrangeSox

[Balta1701]

Obama giving out the big bucks to Vogtle to build two new reactors:

 

http://www.ajc.com/news/vogtle-nuclear-pla...ear-308302.html

Well, as an energy program I obviously disagree, but franky, as a jobs program, which is what we really need right now, if it gets people employed int hat area for the next few years, it's acceptable.

 

Of course, what's probably more likely to happen is that the government will guarantee the loans, private financing will never come through completely, nothing will ever get built as the price keeps going up and up, and the government will lose a couple billion on the deal to wall street investors.

[StrangeSox]

They're already building them.

 

Explain to me again why nuclear is so expensive and unreasonable and relies on government subsidies and how wind and solar would be so kick-ass if only....they had government subsidies.

[NorthSideSox72]

They're already building them.

 

Explain to me again why nuclear is so expensive and unreasonable and relies on government subsidies and how wind and solar would be so kick-ass if only....they had government subsidies.

Straw man, right there. No one is saying that. What some of us ARE saying is, if you have to subsidize something, it might as well be a lower risk, lower security issue, more sustainable solution.

 

Nuclear is a good part of the puzzle in the short term.

 

[StrangeSox]

No, Balta talks out of both sides of his mouth on this one. On one hand, he likes to point out "subsidizing" nuclear plants by paying for long-term fuel storage because the government never got around to doing something about that as a negative point against nuclear. On the other hand, he likes to accurately point out the boondoggle that is the government funding of wind and solar development as a reason why they're not where they could be.

 

Now, I completely agree with his point on wind and solar subsidies being ridiculous. But he uses federal support as a negative against nuclear and as a positive for wind and solar. You cannot have it both ways.

 

Wind and solar aren't lower-risk and more sustainable because they cannot provide baseline power supply for any time in the foreseeable future. For that sort of power, outside of locations where geothermal or hydro are possible, you're stuck with gas, coal or nuclear. The more-sustainable wind and solar still require more conventional backups, and I'd much rather have nuclear backups than coal or oil.

 

 

[Balta1701]

If you think I talk out of both sides of my mouth here, that's fine, but there's still an easy answer. Pass a bill putting a substantial and increasing-with-time price on carbon emissions and let the markets sort it out. (oh, and end the coal and oil subsidies too).

[lostfan]

In 2 years, the Chinese will be operating 42 separate high-speed rail lines, connecting virtually all of their major urban centers.

 

In 4 years, the U.S. may have a high speed rail line running from Tampa to Orlando.

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is just sad.

[StrangeSox]

If you think I talk out of both sides of my mouth here, that's fine, but there's still an easy answer. Pass a bill putting a substantial and increasing-with-time price on carbon emissions and let the markets sort it out. (oh, and end the coal and oil subsidies too).

 

I would support such an action.

 

I just don't like that a lot of the environmentalist crowd freaks out over nuclear while ignoring what impacts come with other alternatives. You know what you're talking about here, but any time I hear a anti-nuclear argument in the US start with "Chernobyl" I want to punch that person in the face.