OT: "Cap and Trade"

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But not back to their energy consumption. The hidden assumption in this fatuous argument is that the only way to generate energy is to burn fossil carbon and vent the carbon dioxide produced to the air.

Solar, wind, hydro-electric and nuclear power can all be produced without burning fossil carbon, and it is possible to burn fossil carbon and put the carbon dioxide produced back into the ground - ideally, back into geological structures that originally stored natural gas for a few hundred million years or so.

Carbon-neutral power costs more per kilowatt-hour - at the moment - than power produced by burning fossil carbon, but the usual economies of scale are expected to make the various sorts of carbon-neutral generation cheaper than fossil-carbon power generators before 2050, and the extra cost won't be anything like as high as the spike we dealt with during the 1973 oil crisis, when the price of oil quadrupled over a few months.

In fact it is the argument that is absurd - there will be winners and losers, and Questar will obviously be one of the losers, and their CEO is thus fighting a desperate rear-guard action to allow them to milk the economy for a little longer. Confusing energy consumption with carbon combustion is the kind of intellectual sleigh of hand that you'd expect from somebody trying to sell a weak case.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

On a sunny day (Fri, 5 Jun 2009 01:22:19 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in :

Well, we all knew what you were going to say, and you can just post with an empty page, as 'Bill Sloman' in the 'From: ' header says it all.

You gottabee realistic, there is currently no real substitute possible for energy source. And I think nobody gives a dime either. As soon as the large cars come down in price, people will start buying again. The whole 'CO2 changes climate' hoax is bull from beginning to end without any scientific basis. Climate change has always happened, and recently tropical forests were found below the antarctic, so that all changed while there were hardly any humans around, or maybe you believe in the earth was once inhabited by other species who then got the f*ck out of here after producing tons of CO2, and now live on Mars beneath the surface, but that has no proof either.

You are, Bill Sloman, just a playing ball in the CO2 business game . Your CO2 pseudo science crap is no good, never was any good, and never will be any good.

There are a lot of 'green' people who try to stop humanity... sure humanity will make mistakes, fatal ones if they can, but until they go the way of the dinosaurs, or maybe *unless*, then they will have to seed other planets ... The same idiotic greenies stop nuclear engines for space travel. Here is a nice link you can spend quite some time reading about travelling to mars, it is well written, and nicely done:

This document is computer generated.

Trying being realistic like the Danes, who generate 19.7% of their electricy with windmills

ain.

A claim that can only be made by somebody who hasn't looked into the science involved.

her

In other words, you can't be bothered to find out what actually did happen in the geological past and you think that exhibiting your ignorance is a valid form of counter-argument.

ll be any good.

You'd like to think so.

ty will

inosaurs,

Reducing anthropogenic global warming by decreasing CO2 emissions isn't "stopping humanity" - persisting in driving up the CO2 level in the atmosphere, on the other hand, could provoke run-away warming like the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum some 55 million years ago

This didn't produce a global extinction, but if we managed to provoke a similar excursion we'd probably experience a population crash of fairly epic proportions.

Project Orion was "stopped" before Rachel Carson did her thing - I don't think you can blame the greenies for that. The Nerva project hung on until 1972

and was cancelled mainly because there was no mission in prospect that needed it, though the fact that the engines tend to be easy to break may have had an influence. Again, the greenies didn't make much of a contribution to the decision.

g to mars,

I get the IEEE Spectrum every month, like every other member of the IEEE - note that my e-mail address does show me to be a member of the IEEE. As you could have worked out if you used your wits, I read the article when it was first published.

I didn't find that it contain anything new or surprising - people have been thinking about going to Mars for most of my adult life, and there only interesting question left to answer is how to pay for the trip.

You really are a little too stupid to be entirely credible.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

On a sunny day (Fri, 5 Jun 2009 07:02:18 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in :

It is wasting resources, so stopping thing that really need to happen, like mars settlements.

Oh, sorry I forgot you already know everything. I personally ;learned a few thing from it, but then I find the subject fascinating, so I read with a bit more attention perhaps.

No, that is not even the issue, it is the political will. Money is no issue, look how the FED prints what they need :-()

Well, do you have any mirrors around?

Your academic bull excrement on global heating, OIC global heating melted the glass :-) LOL.

Having failed to set up a sustainable civilisation on one planet, we are going to be able to set up a sustainable colony on another? This might well be trying to run before we can walk.

lin=3D

There's a gap between knowing everything and knowing enough to recognise that a journalist hasn't found anything new to say. I do happen to know more than you do, but this merely puts me in a position to be aware of how many things I don't know much about.

Or hadn't read much about it before.

Money - of itself - doesn't do anything. Agreeing how to pay for the trip is the way we document the political will do the job. When the FED "prints what they need" they are expressing a political will to avoid avoid a 1930-style great depression.

The economic theory that claims that this is a bad way to behave is the same economic theory that said that the government shouldn't interfere with the free market that inflated the property value bubble whose implosion got us into the current mess.

I'm not surprised to see that you still beleive in it, while taking a sceptical stance on anthropogenic global warming. Stupid people are always sceptical about the wrong things.

A rather bizarre mixed metaphor. But if you had the wit to construct a coherent metaphor you'd probably also be able to understand and appreciate the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

• Solar "generation" is not a realistic option: 1) cost of energy to

• Wind is worse in that regard.

• Hydro-electric has been with us for at least a generation (no pun intended) and it is hard enough to keep / protect dams that do exist from "environmentalists".

• Nuclear power is a good answer, but try to "sell" it to the populace.

• Yes, CO2 *can* be put back into the ground - and in a way that it helps to produce more oil in the ground; this is being done *now* and at a small but growing profit. BUT. Not enough stable places..

• There is no "confusion" in that over 80 percent of energy generation is from "carbon combustion".

any good.

will

dinosaurs,

mars,

Forests generate a LOT of pollution, much of it being TOXIC. But do not tell that to a "tree hugger" if you want to remain in one piece...

• Lessee...Humans have been on this ball of dust for many thousands of years...too short to be called sustainable...therefore ANY attempt is useless???

• BUT..government DID interfere; it took away almost all limits on commercial (includes banking) funnybusiness with finances. It is clear that GREED (mostly by dishonest bankers and their cronies) was the path used, because the way was cleared by their cohorts in government.

On a sunny day (Fri, 5 Jun 2009 15:53:45 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in :

We have not failed, population has boomed.

LOL But that what you know may not be that what you should know :-)

We have failed. In about 15 billion years, we won't be able to live here any more. You can't call it sustainable when you know there is a finite life.

Only if you think semiconductor forms of solar generation. Arizona Public Service has a model plant functioning that simply solar heats some "freon-like" gas (APS isn't talking) that runs a turbine. It's output is currently powering about 10,000 homes in Yuma County.

Agreed.

You can no longer drive across Hoover Dam. A bridge was constructed and the highway re-routed.

The "populace" is not a problem, the greenie weenies that elected King Obama are.

...Jim Thompson

On a sunny day (Sat, 6 Jun 2009 08:02:32 -0700 (PDT)) it happened MooseFET wrote in :

I do not see what you are trying to say. In 15 billion years the earth and maybe the whole galaxy will be gone?

Then we better, before that time, seed other galaxies, universes if those exist. We have not failed until we are extinct, so you must be speculating.

Playing greenie does not really help us survive changes like climate change and comets, what not, we need to have the energy generating possibilities, like nuclear power etc.

This is all if you specify 'success' and 'failure' as the continuation of this species.

If you look at a personal level however, for me the formula is much simpler: efficiency (in percent) = (seconds_happy / second_lived) * 100. So if you score a 100 %, then you had great success. You can extrapolate that to the species, and yes, then some questions arise. It seems to me that - to get closer to 100% - is much more important for everybody right now then green shit.

Huh? The one-time investment in energy to make a solar cell isn't large than the power it can generate over twenty years of service. In

There's plenty of space, but not all that close to the places that need the power. Current long-distance power transmission techniques aren't up to bridging the gap, but super-conducting cable may do better, and using the power to generate hydrogen gas and piping that to where itwas needed is somethig we could do today.

The wind does blow at night, and it is usually blowing somewhere, which does put it ahead of solar power - both are going to need some kind of storage system if we are ever to use them as our main energy sources. There are lots of ways that might work, but we haven't done enough work on the subject to be able to choose just one.

A generation is usually taken to be 25 years - the first hydro- electric generator was set up in 1882 which is rather earlier.

The "environmentalists" don't like new dams, but they've yet to blow up an old one.

There are also experts who aren't too happy with our cuurent schemes for dealing with highly radioactive nuclear waste.

The ocean depths contain enough places that look to be quite stable enough - you can disolve a lot of CO2 in water if the local pressure is high enough (and it's high enough in the depths of the oceans) and the water deosn'ts eem to be going anywhere in any hurry.

And that's going to have to change - if for no other reason than that there's only a finite amount of carbon in the ground to be dug up and burnt. We are going to have to find and develop other energy sources eventually, and anthropogenic global warming is a compelling reason for doing it sooner rather than later.

An argument based on the proposition that there are no other energy sources is terminally stupid.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The way we live now is not sustainable; earlier civilisations weren't all that sustainable, but they were small enough that it took them thousands of years to run through the resoucres they were squandering. We are now more numerous and getting through more stuff per head, and we are startig to see when our current civilisation will run out of resources.

That is "not interfering" isn't it?

A lot of economics theory does seem to have been devised to justify the sort of economic advice that rich right-wingers want to hear. This makes the economists responsible flatterers, rather than allies or cohorts - the evidence suggests that these economists didn't have clue about the actual consequences for the real economy of their economic advice been taken seriously.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

This doesn't make the larger population sustainable - arctic lemming populations boom every few years, then collapse when they've eaten everything in sight.

Try reading Jahred Diamond's "Collapse" which documents a few earlier civilisations that exhibited the same effect.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

exist.

ge and comets,

The lunatic fringe of the green movement isn't helping anybody to survive anything. The rational majority is interested in avoiding an unnecessary human-induced climate change - they prefer to have a functional high-tech civilisation around when the next natural disaster turns up, so that we are in a position to anticipate the disaster, rather than having to try and survive an unexpected catastrophe.

this species.

er:

So shoot yourself the moment that you start to feel unhappy and die a success.

se.

everybody right now

Right now it certainly could look more important. As the situation develops this approach may come seem a little short-sighted.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Robert Baer's claim that manufacturing a solar cell costs 20 times the energy such a cell can generate over a 20 year operating life doesn't seem to apply to the current generation of solar cells.

He's wrong here too - night covers half the planet, but wind varies from place to place and is usually blowing somewhere within the span of a modern transmission grid.

They happen to be the majority, which makes Jim and his ilk the problem. Happily, stupidity is a fatal disease, so this problem does seem to be pontentially self-correcting.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I am sure that you are going to remind us in 15 billion years with "i told you so"???

..Betcha efficency is at lest twice that of solar panels, and a lot less expensive. Best "working fluid" i know of for that is ammonia(!).