OT: regulating CO2 emissions.

echnology develops to make it practical.

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lity. Now that they don't it's cheaper to pay for research directly. And si nce none of the existing technologies have a real likelihood of becoming vi able, it make sense to restrict funding to the few projects that have a sho t at changing the map.

Wind turbines and photovoltaic cells are perfectly viable. Thermal solar po wer stations with big tanks of molten nitrate salts have been built - essen tially as prototypes - and are generating power. Your idea of viability see ms to be that if something hasn't already dominated the industry, it hasn't shown itself to be viable. No doubt your ancestors stuck to flint tools lo ng after their neighbours had moved onto bronze. The people who are adventu rous enough to try new stuff waste quite a bit of time on stuff that ends u p not working, but they win big when it does work.

Other approaches are more likely to work well; perhaps harvesting Sargasso weed and burying it, or pumping CO2 into mineral deposits which form carbonates under pressure. A proposal was to collect agricultural waste, distill it to form hydrocarbons and charcoal, then plow the charcoal into the soil as though it were a fertilizer (it can hold some moisture, and provide trace minerals).

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technology develops to make it practical.

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tility. Now that they don't it's cheaper to pay for research directly. And since none of the existing technologies have a real likelihood of becoming viable, it make sense to restrict funding to the few projects that have a s hot at changing the map.

power stations with big tanks of molten nitrate salts have been built - ess entially as prototypes - and are generating power. Your idea of viability s eems to be that if something hasn't already dominated the industry, it hasn 't shown itself to be viable.

That's a rather brainless comment.

had moved onto bronze.

yawn

Yes, but one of my points is that its not research we need, its the will ( and to a large extent ) the willingness to increase the price to offset the damage we are doing.

We dont need research, we already know how to build PV, Wind, Solar heat, chemical or thermal storage, CO2 to methanol, etc

What we have to do is put all these well known technologies together into a useful system which actually supplies power on a substantial scale. Prototypes are good to prove technology works, but they dont solve the problem.

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utility. Now that they don't it's cheaper to pay for research directly. An d since none of the existing technologies have a real likelihood of becomin g viable, it make sense to restrict funding to the few projects that have a shot at changing the map.

r power stations with big tanks of molten nitrate salts have been built - e ssentially as prototypes - and are generating power. Your idea of viability seems to be that if something hasn't already dominated the industry, it ha sn't shown itself to be viable.

Your comment was. You don't seem to be up to offering intelligent comments, or responses. Just as a matter of interest, how do you define viable?

s had moved onto bronze.

Amazingly witty ...

I have my honking V8... that means, in true fairness, that you can only have a bicycle... it's, after all, all about "CAFE" *averages* isn't it ?>:-}

(You also forgot to include the entertainment value that derives from eliminating leftists ;-) ...Jim Thompson

guzzling muscle cars.

I do have several bicycles. One here and one in Nijmegen. Sydney doesn't of fer a cycle-friendly environment, but I use the Nijmegen bicycle when I'm t here. As James Arthur points out, the fact that I fly to Nijmegen every yea r (and will fly to Hawaii next month) outweighs any good my occasional cycl ing and walking might do.

Jim hasn't worked out that a few leftists might derive a certain amount of less-than-innocent enjoyment from eliminating him. It would - of course - b e more of duty than a pleasure for them. Jim has promised to shoot some of his more left-wing neighbours "when the country falls apart" and now that T rump has won the presidency one can't really predict when Jim-out-of-touch- with-reality-Thompson might decide that the country has fallen apart. A pre cautionary liquidation might well seem called for.

They'd make nice power plant fuel. Especially the fat ones. Art

Your reply seems to match your claim. Why are these technologies unlikely to be viable? Photovoltaic solar is already producing electricity at a profit. The costs will continue to fall and installations will increase.

One nice thing about photovoltaic is that it matches the timing of the work day. That means we can stop discouraging electricity use during the day which will be business friendly. It also can provide power to charge electric cars which don't need power on demand some 90+% of the time. They can be charged at a time that best suits supply.

I agree, but it is a hard thing to accomplish. In Maryland we have a tax intended to pay for restoring the Chesapeake bay. It shows up on our property tax bills and as far as I can tell just goes into the state coffers without accountability. People don't like taxes and if a "cost" is assigned to there needs to be a way to assure the collected fees are spent on solving the problems.

Of course we need research into making them more cost effective and finding the best combinations of all the solutions for each area of the country.

Hmmmm.... do you really do your design work without building a prototype?

Yeah, and with very little substance. Reads more like a sociology textbook in one of those feegood countries.

Fact is more CO2 is produced by electricity generation than any other sector, and they want electric cars ? Good luck with that.

"Costs" are a very variable concept. IMNSHO renewables costs ought to include the cost of keeping conventional plant available for when the renewable has gone AWOL.

... in some places. In higher latitudes that is only vaguely true.

There's a little truth to that, provided you only want to drive in summer :)

There's no great point in running them on hydrogen, given that the hydrogen has to be produced in a way that consumes energy. The existing jet engine technology will pretty much run on bio-diesel out of the box, with at most a few tweaks.

Sylvia.

George Monbiot in "Heat" didn't fancy generating enough biodiesel to keep t he air tourism industry in business. Liquified methane might have better en ergy density than liquid hydrogen - practically everything does - and it d oesn't form explosive mixtures with air over quite as wide a range of conce ntrations. Flame propagation rates aren't great but gas turbines in power s tations seem to run fine on natural gas, which is mainly methane.

He's still active, and may have changed his mind - ask him. He gets paid fo r knowing stuff like this, mostly by "The Guardian". I don't.

On Tuesday, January 10, 2017 at 10:43:46 PM UTC+11, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote :

k in one of those feegood countries.

tor, and they want electric cars ? Good luck with that.

says electricity generation and heating currently contribute 41% of anthrop ogenic CO2 emissions, and transport 22%.

We've got to pretty much eliminate both of them. It's a bit easier to gener ate electricity from renewable sources than it is to find a an acceptable s ubstitute for the internal combustion engine in cars, but we don't get to c hoose which problem we deal with - both have to be fixed..

Dimbos like Jim Thompson and John Larkin think that the problem isn't urgen t because it isn't actually inconveniencing them right now, but they are ju st being idle and ignorant.

You are pretty much as ignorant, but you don't have to stay that way.

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technology develops to make it practical.

ductive.

the

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utility. Now that they don't it's cheaper to pay for research directly. An d since none of the existing technologies have a real likelihood of becomin g viable, it make sense to restrict funding to the few projects that have a shot at changing the map.

ar power stations with big tanks of molten nitrate salts have been built - essentially as prototypes - and are generating power. Your idea of viabilit y seems to be that if something hasn't already dominated the industry, it h asn't shown itself to be viable.

if / when the technology is technically and __economically__ viable, then it will be used by choice. no argument and no problem...

the point of the discussion is, should the government force these choices .

But the heating day.

Freeze at night. Good idea.

The best way to store hydrogen is to stick it to carbon.

Have you ever read a sociology textbook? I have. Everyone should. Amazing nonsense.