OT: regulating CO2 emissions.

Airships and blimps are slow. Not only does this limit their usefulness for travel, but their slow speed reduces the number of trips they can make, increasing the cost of capital for each trip.

They have their uses, but transport is not one of them.

Sylvia.

Their short lifetimes inflate their capital costs too. When the wind kicks up, they had better be in a gigantic hangar.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

CO2 is not pollution. Overall, it's good stuff.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

What would beer be without it?

For people that can afford platinum (or other noble metal) electrodes, fuel cells have niche applications right now.

There are electrochemists tinkering with ways of making cheaper electrode materials - as there have been since 1838 - but they now have a bigger armoury of tools than they did back then, and the tinkering is getting bit closer to material design.

John Larkin does like to extrapolate from a past he knows very little about to a future that he imagines without much help from better-informed opinion.

This would be less irritating if he did it less often and less publicly.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

e

this kind of technology.

NT is happy to gloss over the price of not moving over to renewable energy sources, less happy about paying for any extra cost that might come up alon g the way.

If his waterfront property was eventually going to be submerged by the 10 m etre sea level rise that is now looking pretty much inevitable, one could s ee it as poetic justice. Since he will probably be dead before this happens , justice will probably be too delayed to be particularly satisfying.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

, is CO2 really "pollution"?

e an external cost on CO2 has been bastardized by the politicians into a m oney grabbing scheme.

ey for pure research of alternative and renewable energy, a lot more people including myself would no longer oppose it.

ryone chooses not to. That's the reality of what people want.

"What people want" has been unsubtly influenced by climate change denial pr opaganda for a couple of decades now - every last bit of it bought and paid for by the fossil carbon extraction industry, out of the profits they make out of making climate change even more dramatic.

NT seems to have absorbed every last bit of that propaganda - he seems to b e a gullible as John Larkin, if less inclined to post links to denialist we b-sites (or to any kind of traceable evidence - he's as willing to rely on his own built-in misinformation as krw).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

but CO2 really is pollution. 270ppm in the atmosphere didn't do anybody any harm -

CO2 is not pollution. If all the CO2 were removed from the atmosphere, it would be a disaster. 270 ppm in the atmosphere did everyone a lot of benefit.

Agreed too much is a problem. Just like rain. Some is essential, none is a disaster, too much is also a disaster.

Dan

y sources, less happy about paying for any extra cost that might come up al ong the way.

metre sea level rise that is now looking pretty much inevitable, one could see it as poetic justice. Since he will probably be dead before this happe ns, justice will probably be too delayed to be particularly satisfying.

I am in the market for some "distressed" beach front property. I've always wanted a beach house. The prices should be dropping since they are going to be worthless soon...

right?

m

On Thursday, January 12, 2017 at 1:49:54 AM UTC+11, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote :

rgy sources, less happy about paying for any extra cost that might come up along the way.

10 metre sea level rise that is now looking pretty much inevitable, one cou ld see it as poetic justice. Since he will probably be dead before this hap pens, justice will probably be too delayed to be particularly satisfying. .

For a very unpredictable value of soon.

What wipes out beach front property is unusually intense local storms, and global warming is allowing typhoons/hurricanes to form and grow further awa y from the equator than they used.

When the Greenland and East Antarctic ice sheets finally decide to start sl iding off into the ocean, sea levels will go up rapidly.

At the end of the last ice age, sea level rose by 120 metres, at an average rate of a about a metre per century, but the sea level didn't rise at the average rate - there were spots where an ice sheet was slipping into the se a, when it went up at 2.5 metres per century.

We've only got about 10 metres of sea level rise to look forward to, but it 's likely to happen fast when it does happen.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

:

ny harm - "it had been at that level since we moved into the current inter

-glacial. The current 400ppm is good for more intense cyclones in the tropi cs, does seem to be melting the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, an d does seem to have started moving rainfall patterns around."

t would be a disaster. 270 ppm in the atmosphere did everyone a lot of ben efit.

The fact that 270ppm isn't pollution doesn't mean that 400ppm isn't polluti on.

The dose is important. Low levels of arsenic in your diet do good things fo r your skin and don't create any problem, but higher levels of arsenic defi nitely are pollution.

s a disaster, too much is also a disaster.

Any amount of Dan is pollution. He contributions may not be disasterous, bu t they are a waste of space.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

What makes you think the only carbon involved is from CO2 from the air?

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Rick C

If you can't see the advantage of charging cars from photovoltaic power, then you are the one who is having trouble. It is only "best" to charge cars at night if those cars are being powered by excess capacity in the fossil fuel powered plants. Yeah, it is great to reduce the requirement to have other power plants, but that is a separate issue from reducing the release of carbon into the atmosphere.

Currently businesses are billed at a rate defined by their peak use. If we have more capacity during the day this won't be such a problem for businesses and they may in fact add their own solar capacity.

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Rick C

It's clear where you're coming from on this.

Some energy is used to build a biodiesel production plant, and more energy is used to run the plant. The energy used to build the plant has to be invested before any biodiesel is produced, and some energy to run the plant has to be invested before the first batch is produced. Those energy inputs therefore cannot have been derived from biodiesel produced by the plant, and may involve carbon.

Thereafter the plant *could* use part of its output to provide the energy for processing. In practice, it probably won't, but that means that more biodiesel is available to displace fossil fuel, so the net effect is roughly the same, which is that once the plant is up and running, it no longer contributes to the carbon problem.

There may be some energy input in the form of fertiliser, but a similar argument applies.

And how is that relevant to safety? I don't recall a lot of people standing in jet fuel and dropping a match. There are many, many fuel fires in aviation. Both types of fuel will ignite in the right conditions.

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Rick C

It can be relevant during a crash, and potentially during refulling operations.

You should do the calculation of how many solar panels are required to provide a full car battery.

You might care to explain why there are/were domestic tariffs that are generically called "Economy 7" tariffs. The cost of electricity during the night is /significantly/ lower.

Traditionally they were used for "storage radiators", i.e. large brick piles in the living room with electric heaters in them, plus a fan. Horrible things.

Are you sure that's the case for all businesses everywhere, or would you care to modify your statement?

That was meant to be "not clear".

Sylvia.

n any need for subsidy is over.

e power they generate essentially competitive with fossil fuel burning powe r stations. It's not as dispatchable. If we upped the volume produced by a factor of 100 - which is what would be required to let them generate enough power to supply all our needs, the unit cost per cell would be reduced by a factor of four.

of dispatchable back-up generation.

n manufacturing scale have had precisely this effect.

around 2000, and again in China more recently - but the investment was rec overed rapidly.

ig for venture capitalists. Governments are a bit too susceptible to the in fluence of people who are making a lot of money digging up fossil carbon to be all that interested in making a large investment that will cut the foss il fuel cash flow.

n research. What do you mean they're not?

energy generation on a scale that could slow down global warming.

waffle waffle it's not there really. It might be if we poured gargantual su ms of money into it. One could say that of many things.

s going to wipe out valuable real estate on a scale that beggars the invest ment that might stop it, but the market doesn't bother looking all that far ahead.

he does know is all that he - or anybody else - needs to know.

It's you who has swallowed the koolaid.

NT