Drill baby drill

CH4 is about as good a ratio as it gets.

Some thoughtful entity left us a lot of nice clean methane in easy reach. And plenty of oxygen to react with it.

Lots of people are not happy about that situation.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

So I guess you never go on a diet, because the only option other than consuming 5,000 calories a day of fried chicken is to cease eating food.

I do drive a pretty sweet electric car, and my electric and gas bills I pay with couch change because I don't really use that much. It's not even that hard.

Other than that, I know what I do, and when you a) become the Internet Police, b) my mother, or c) buy me a beer of at least an $8 value I would accept that I would need to "defend" myself, or owe you answers.

;-)

Sounds pretty selfish, overall.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Eh, I could talk about stuff all day long and I don't really have any illusions that anyone here is going to suddenly think "oh...my...God, what a paragon of virtue, all those lefty ideas are really great ones!"

Probably not going to happen; most people are smart enough not to walk themselves into setups, though.

PS: If I refer someone to buy a GM-made EV I get a $100 reward check. Buy a Volt today!

I'm sorry, it wasn't really a "straw man" logical fallacy, it was this one:

People really don't get it. The degree of pollution we make is related to the population of the earth. That is exponential growth. We can't fight it with linear adjustments to the constant multiplier. We have to take major steps to prevent the problems our existence creates.

In my grandfather's time they just threw the trash in a hole in the ground. In my father's time it was found to be polluting water sources. In *my* time we had to pay to clean up all those waste dumps. There's a pattern here to a problem which can't be solved by saying things like, "Some thoughtful entity left us a lot of nice clean methane in easy reach. And plenty of oxygen to react with it."

Then none of us will be around to hear the criticisms of our generation. But we *will* be criticized.

--

Rick C

NG is very clean. It makes H2O and CO2 when it burns. Both are good.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Err... no, both are chemicals in our environment. H2CO3 dissolves concrete, CO is very very toxic, and some NG with sulfur does nasty things to lungs.

A week of black fog (smog) has a higher death toll than 9-11, but that is most likely with coal and no regulation. Regulation and natural gas, is better.

H2CO3 that is what is in soda,beer and champagne

if you are making CO you should get your gear fixed you are throwing away money

So are coffee and chocolate. Not all "chemicals" are deadly.

Is water a chemical? Gosh.

H2CO3 dissolves concrete,

NG burns with no significant CO or particulates [1] or NOx. Very nice stuff. It will probably kill coal in the USA on the basis of net cost alone.

[1] except for those insane luxury outdoor "ribbon" fireplaces that are about 1% efficient in producing useful heat. Good mates for Edison filament lamps.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

It's a waste of champagne to use it to dissolve concrete. Some beers are OK.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

When you use neither, or anything made from them, get back to us and maybe we'll care.

And after you comitt suicide, you'll have a lot more credibility too.

Yes, check out the several wonderful web sites about the deadly di-hudrogen monoxide menace!

Jon

I agree entirely with you.

Unfortunately, it has not yet become politically acceptable to say "The key problem with the Earth's environment is overpopulation. The key to fixing things is to reduce the population".

I use both gas and oil (probably a good deal less than you do, since we have mostly hydroelectric power here and people here only drive SUV's if they actually /need/ them). My use of coal is pretty indirect (such as using stuff made in countries where the factories are powered by coal-fired power stations).

But that is all beside the point, which was a mere simple fact - gas and oil are cleaner sources of power than coal. There is much less in the way of sulphur, mercury, radioactive heavy metals, and other pollutants in oil, and even less in gas. And for the same energy output, less CO? is produced from oil than from coal, and even less from gas.

We are still a very long way from being able to make all the energy we need, and certainly not all the energy we /want/, from clean and renewable sources in a practical and economic way. In the meantime, using gas instead of coal is a good thing for the environment.

d

Fat chance. Krw's mind was made up years ago - before there was anything li ke as much evidence about anthropogenic global warming as there is now, and it hasn't absorbed any new information for about a decade now. He probably still thinks that Dubbya is president.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but it ends up in the ocean within a couple of weeks.

The equilibration time for CO2 is about 800 years, and the amount we are dumping into the atmosphere is pushing up the global temperature about ten times faster than it went up at the start of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

The Wikipedia page has been rewritten since I last posted a link to it - the list of references now includes a couple of papers published in 2016.

Johun Larkin's opinions in this area seem to be entirely derived from denialist web-sites, and would seem to be about as sophisticated as Donald Trump's (if less influential).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney