Global Warming Update: Hell Freezes Over!

[pErvinalia]

But the key issue in AGW is whether WE can continue to survive.

What an anthropocentric viewpoint! What makes humans more valuable than any other species - or for that matter, than any species that will come into being as a result of a major ecological shift?

Where did I say humans are more valuable than any other species?!? [redacted by request] THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT of humans making policy is for humans to survive. It doesn't matter what species allegedly is or isn't more important. As a species our primary concern (like ALL FUCKING SPECIES (loosely speaking)) is our own survival. What the fuck is strange about that???

Any comment on my reply to your dumb comment about ecosystems adapting??? Anything? Bueller?!?

[macdoc]

tick tock...

2014 preview: Hydrogen SUV ready to hit the road

27 December 2013 by Rowan Hooper
Magazine issue 2948. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Energy and Fuels and Cars and Motoring Topic Guides
Read more: "2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year"

Did you know that the Empire State Building's spire was designed as a mooring point for hydrogen airships? That proved too dangerous, though, and then a deadly fire on the Hindenburg in 1937 brought the hydrogen fad to an abrupt end. Now the lightest of elements is making a comeback as the first mass-market hydrogen car gears up to hit the road.

Whereas airships harnessed hydrogen's buoyancy, the Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell, an SUV, uses it to make electricity. Its fuel cell combines hydrogen from the tank with oxygen in the air, creating an electrochemical reaction that generates current to supply electric motors. Water is the only waste product, making the cars green. Unlike battery-powered vehicles, which need hours to charge, refuelling takes minutes – and a full tank should last for 480 kilometres. Hyundai says the Tucson can hit 160 kilometres per hour.

Starting in spring next year, the firm will lease the cars for $499 a month in southern California. Home to nine of the US's 10 existing hydrogen refuelling stations, and committed to building 100 more, the Golden State is ahead of the hydrogen curve. Honda and Toyota plan to follow Hyundai's lead with fuel-cell cars in 2015. By contrast, a 2006 BMW offering burned liquid hydrogen but it was inefficient and never mass-produced.

Is the Tucson safe? If the tank springs a leak, fuel vents up into the air rather than pooling below, as in ordinary, gasoline-powered cars. Extensive crash and fire tests make Hyundai confident its offering won't go the way of the Hindenburg. The cars may just be the start of an environmentally friendly, 21st-century hydrogen economy.

[NineBerry]

But the key issue in AGW is whether WE can continue to survive.

What an anthropocentric viewpoint! What makes humans more valuable than any other species - or for that matter, than any species that will come into being as a result of a major ecological shift?

Objectively, humans have no value. But from our subjective perspective, this is certainly different. I have sympathy with the people living around me and I have sympathy with all future human beings. I wouldn't care if from today to tomorrow suddenly all humans stopped existing with a quick puff. But a possible extermination or decimation of human beings by the results of climate change means billions of people suffering. I want to prevent that. Also because yes I am so selfish and want to prevent myself suffering in the future needlessly.

And you (goes to all people on here) should be aware that you will not be unaffected.

You know, fight against climate change is not based on worrying whether there will still be human beings in a thousand years. It is about worrying about the individual humans of this and the following generations.

[cronus]

....also building space mirrors is pure good old fashioned 'boys toys' fun, good for economy and even if it doesn't work might leave a clue for other smarter species from elsewhere why Earth did the full Venus oven thing?

[macdoc]

Here is the nub of the matter.

If a company knowingly pollutes the environment or harms others should it bear responsibility to remove that pollution and pay for that harm.

If miners die or are left in ill health in a mine from poor air quality control should the mining company be responsible.

If a manufacturing plant lets pollutants into a river that damages the biome ......

just follow on from there.....

If an Exxon tanker crashes in a pristine enviroment and pollutes are they responsible for the clean up and to take steps to mitigate further risk,,

The head of Exxon acknowledges his products have altered the climate and has made billions doing so......

Big Coal ....made billions doing so....should they not be held as accountable as you pissing over your neighbors fence into his swimming pool.

It's not like these fossil fuel companies are broke or anything....they have record profits and insane subsidies picked up by the taxpayers....

why the free fucking ride....

[piscator]

Here is the nub of the matter.

If a company knowingly pollutes the environment or harms others should it bear responsibility to remove that pollution and pay for that harm.

If miners die or are left in ill health in a mine from poor air quality control should the mining company be responsible.

If a manufacturing plant lets pollutants into a river that damages the biome ......

just follow on from there.....

If an Exxon tanker crashes in a pristine enviroment and pollutes are they responsible for the clean up and to take steps to mitigate further risk,,

The head of Exxon acknowledges his products have altered the climate and has made billions doing so......

Big Coal ....made billions doing so....should they not be held as accountable as you pissing over your neighbors fence into his swimming pool.

It's not like these fossil fuel companies are broke or anything....they have record profits and insane subsidies picked up by the taxpayers....

why the free fucking ride....

.



A trespass of that scale could be considered a tortious act against the public. But other parties are the primary tortfeasors ahead of XON, because it's the end user's choices that determine how and where the fossil fuel carbons are desequestered and liberated into the public's air and water supplies.

Should the public have some sort of ownership interest in the planet's climate?

[piscator]

...

[Seth]

Er, what the fuck would you know about ecology, Seth??

Rather a lot, actually. It's just that I don't worship an unchanging ecology for selfish reasons. I embrace change because it's inevitable.

and civilized infrastructure are going to have to adapt anyway, one way or another, and trying to stop the inevitable will WASTE those trillions, so let's just get on with it and use the next century or so to adapt to how it's going to be rather than trying to fix what's already happened.

It's not inevitable, Seth, that's the point.

Yes, it is, according to "climate scientists." Then again they've been wrong for the last 17 years now, which could just as easily mean they've been wrong all along and there is no crisis at all.

It's also the degree to which it happens. Smaller changes are going to be more manageable and cost less.

Nobody "manages" the climate. Climate happens. Get used to it.

The more we transition our energy economies now, the less it will cost us in the long run.

Not if in the process we waste our capital and resources on stupid ideas like windmills and solar panels and shutting down power plants because the useful idiots in government think there's some big emergency that requires instantaneous response.

In fact, we stand to make economic growth from green and sustainable technologies. It's win-win.

Horseshit. All of the "green" energy sources that exist produce less than 2 percent of our energy budget. Every windmill farm is government subsidized and cannot function economically independent of government subsidies. The same is true of solar, which is so costly on a per-watt basis that the government, in order to make it economically feasible for people to install solar panels, must regulate the power industry by imposing "net billing" schemes that require power companies to buy excess electricity at retail, not wholesale rates, which means that for every square meter of solar panels installed, the power company has to increase costs to every other consumer so they can support the net billing scheme. It's great for the individual who has the cumshaw to spend 15 or 20 grand installing panels and associated equipment, but it costs everyone else, and it will cost them more and more with every additional square meter of solar panels and every coal-fired power plant that's closed by Obama. "Under my plan, energy prices would necessarily skyrocket," Barack Obama, during his first campaign. That's what he's doing...artificially jacking up energy costs to consumers in order to achieve his Marxist Progressive goals.

You want sustainable energy and less CO2, lift the regulatory burden imposed on building nuke plants. The technology has matured and the safety record is very, very good with the new designs, like the French plants.

Until then we need coal and natural gas power plants and there is simply no other viable option. Period. End of story.

[Seth]

tick tock...

2014 preview: Hydrogen SUV ready to hit the road

27 December 2013 by Rowan Hooper
Magazine issue 2948. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Energy and Fuels and Cars and Motoring Topic Guides
Read more: "2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year"

Did you know that the Empire State Building's spire was designed as a mooring point for hydrogen airships? That proved too dangerous, though, and then a deadly fire on the Hindenburg in 1937 brought the hydrogen fad to an abrupt end. Now the lightest of elements is making a comeback as the first mass-market hydrogen car gears up to hit the road.

Whereas airships harnessed hydrogen's buoyancy, the Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell, an SUV, uses it to make electricity. Its fuel cell combines hydrogen from the tank with oxygen in the air, creating an electrochemical reaction that generates current to supply electric motors. Water is the only waste product, making the cars green. Unlike battery-powered vehicles, which need hours to charge, refuelling takes minutes – and a full tank should last for 480 kilometres. Hyundai says the Tucson can hit 160 kilometres per hour.

Starting in spring next year, the firm will lease the cars for $499 a month in southern California. Home to nine of the US's 10 existing hydrogen refuelling stations, and committed to building 100 more, the Golden State is ahead of the hydrogen curve. Honda and Toyota plan to follow Hyundai's lead with fuel-cell cars in 2015. By contrast, a 2006 BMW offering burned liquid hydrogen but it was inefficient and never mass-produced.

Is the Tucson safe? If the tank springs a leak, fuel vents up into the air rather than pooling below, as in ordinary, gasoline-powered cars. Extensive crash and fire tests make Hyundai confident its offering won't go the way of the Hindenburg. The cars may just be the start of an environmentally friendly, 21st-century hydrogen economy.

Notably missing from this puff-piece of propaganda is the cost of a) producing hydrogen from water in the first place; and b) the cost and labor of building the necessary hydrogen storage and handling facilities nationwide to make it vaguely possible to refuel a hydrogen-powered car conveniently. The cost of the gasoline distribution system in the US must be in the trillions to quadrillions considering how long it's taken to develop it and how much it's cost. It'll take a lot of money to convert the gasoline/diesel distribution network to handle hydrogen, not to mention a lot more space since hydrogen is nowhere near as energy-dense per pound or square meter as gasoline is.

If gaseous fuel for autos was viable we'd all be driving CNG-powered vehicles today. They were invented long, long ago and are currently used in local fleet operations nationwide, but only for local uses because for a company to maintain a CNG fleet requires them to maintain a CNG refueling facility because there is virtually no CNG available outside of large metropolitan areas, which makes CNG vehicles useless for long-distance or cross-country travel.

The CNG distribution system would be far cheaper to develop than a hydrogen system, which requires much tighter tolerances in fittings because of hydrogen's propensity to leak because of it's tiny molecule size. But even with abundant natural gas sources all over the country, and an enormous distribution network that serves both industry and private heating needs, natural gas, which is far more abundant and cheap to produce than hydrogen, is still not a viable fuel source for the general public's transportation needs...after nearly 50 years of trying to make it so.

Gasoline and diesel powered vehicles aren't going to go away for the next 100 years. Even the idiots in government claim it'll be at least 40 years, and they are engaging in rosy WAGs for political purposes.

Try again.

[Seth]

Here is the nub of the matter.

If a company knowingly pollutes the environment or harms others should it bear responsibility to remove that pollution and pay for that harm.

Yup, unless the product thereby produced is more important, valuable or in demand than the impacts of the pollution. Producing electricity produces byproducts like sulphur dioxide and CO2. That's not good, but it's not nearly as bad as not being able to provide electricity to meet the demands of society at a cost that society can afford. Like government, environmental impacts of human technology are a necessary evil that we tolerate because the benefits far outweigh the costs.

If miners die or are left in ill health in a mine from poor air quality control should the mining company be responsible.

I have to agree here. There is no excuse for adequate ventilation and respiratory protection in mining.

If a manufacturing plant lets pollutants into a river that damages the biome ......

Depends on the nature and impact of the pollutants and the need for the product created.

just follow on from there.....

If an Exxon tanker crashes in a pristine enviroment and pollutes are they responsible for the clean up and to take steps to mitigate further risk,,

If it's negligence, certainly. If it's an "act of god" it's part of the cost that we all pay to have oil from Alaska delivered for the production of fuels.

The head of Exxon acknowledges his products have altered the climate and has made billions doing so......

Argument by authority fallacy. You alter the climate by existing, so I'd suggest that in order to live your ideals you immediately step outside and slit your belly in shame for presuming to exist. We'll recycle your body by vulture, bacteria and other small creatures, leaving it where it falls as an object lesson to hypocritcal ass-hats who have the temerity to bitch about "altered climates" while sitting in their comfortable house expounding on the whichness of the why on a computer connected to a system created by a technological society that "altered" the "climate" they are bitching about, after driving their fossil-fueled car to and from work and the grocery store, where they buy food that's only available because companies like Exxon provide the fuels and chemicals and equipment to plant, grow, harvest and distribute that food.

Big Coal ....made billions doing so....should they not be held as accountable as you pissing over your neighbors fence into his swimming pool.

You piss over my fence every single day that you continue to exist and are not being broken down into component parts and recycled by the "biome." "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Pogo

They mined coal at your demand so you can bloviate here in comfort, so you're more responsible than they are for whatever effects that coal burning has on you.

It's not like these fossil fuel companies are broke or anything....they have record profits and insane subsidies picked up by the taxpayers....

why the free fucking ride....

Indeed. Why are YOU getting a free ride on their energy? You want clean air, then prepare to have your power bill quadrupled to pay for the scrubber, capture and sequestration technology needed to make power plants "carbon neutral."

Quit your bitching until you can demonstrate that you're not part of the problem. You can start by recycling your computer and disconnecting your house from the grid and living by candle light and kerosene...oh wait, both of those depend on fossil fuels and produce CO2 as a byproduct. Sorry, you'll just have to stop breathing completely, since YOUR metabolism is responsible for excess CO2 emissions.

[pErvinalia]

I can't take the stupid any more. He's all yours, Mac.

[macdoc]

Just move on until he talks some sense....instead of right wing drivel

This guy has it correct about business getting on with it

Mining insider: 'Leave the coal in the ground'

16 December 2013 by Michael Slezak
Magazine issue 2947. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Interviews , Energy and Fuels and Climate Change Topic Guides
Executive-turned-environmentalist Ian Dunlop says that mining corporations will have to abandon much of their coal to avoid climate and business suicide

You now champion a low-carbon economy. Why do you want a seat on the board of BHP, the world's biggest mining company?
If I got on it, I would hope to spark a much more extensive discussion on climate issues. We need emergency action if we are going to stop the worst outcomes of climate change becoming a reality.

Corporations have been waiting for government to develop the right policies. But it has become clear that governments are never going to provide that leadership, so if we want to see serious action then business is going to have to lead it.

that's exactly the situation in Canada with the oil companies wanting a carbon tax and the government too stupid and ideology driven to even consider it....

It's not going to be the government alone that moves this process along.

•••

So MM...

Code: Select all

Exxon's Rex Tillerson sees climate change as risk managment ...
www.cleveland.com/business/.../exxons_rex_tillerson_see_clima.html‎
Jun 14, 2013 - Exxon Mobil CEO Rex TillersonThe Associated Press ...[b] Previously Exxon did not acknowledge the possibility of climate changes[/b],

is he wrong on climate change or you?? His company knew in the 90s and denied and denied and spent millions trying to convince gullible people the risk and reality of fossil fuel induced climate change did not exist.

Now they finally cave and move on to managing it....better late than never tho

you got there to the acknowledging bit ???

[mistermack]

Macdoc, you're getting more and more ridiculous, with all this ''he said this'' and ''she said that''.

Is that really what convinces you about AGW? I suspect it is. People tell you something, and that's good enough for you. That's your evidence, right there. And all these biased blogs that you keep quoting confirm it.

It means fuck-all to me what the boss of Exxon said. They will now say whatever shows them in a good light, so that they won't get passed over, when applying for mining or oil concessions.
It's a good policy. If you keep shouting that climate change is natural, you are likely to lose out on contracts. So they will go with the flow. So long as someone ELSE is paying the extra, why should they worry?
They will be quite happy to invest money in renewables, so long as they have a guarantee that the consumers and taxpayers will be forced to subsidise it all for years to come.
That's actually better than gambling on the oil and coal prices. Easy money.

[Seth]

I can't take the stupid any more. He's all yours, Mac.

Don't kill yourself rEv, you're not that stupid. Ignorant maybe, but not stupid. And ignorance is fixable.

[piscator]

...But rising insurance rates will be with us for the foreseeable future.