Excel goof officially a global menace
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@blakeyrat said:
I'm confused on the usage of Carbon Neutral here. Ignoring the process of Artificial Gasoline -> Power (I've never heard of it until now, I assume it's like normal gasoline but clean?), you said it was created from Nuclear Power and waste? Wouldn't the process to convert waste into this Artificial Gasoline offset a ton of Carbon into the atmosphere?The real solution to all our problems is artificial gasoline, created from nuclear power and organic waste. There's been some promising developments in this area. Why is that the only workable solution? It's the only one that's backwards-compatible. Sure it doesn't reduce carbon in the atmosphere, but it's carbon-neutral and that's a good start. Also, if you had enough energy, it might be worth it to actually yank out atmospheric carbon to feed into it.
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@Adanine said:
Wouldn't the process to convert waste into this Artificial Gasoline offset a ton of Carbon into the atmosphere?
No.
Coal and oil are formed deep underground when large volumes of stuff that used to be alive are subjected to tremendous heat and pressure. It takes a hell of a long time - generally millions of years - for large enough volumes of stuff to get buried deep enough for this to happen naturally, but the chemical reactions involved work equally well under industrial conditions that, with the right equipment, can be set up in minutes.
If the organic feedstock for the conversion process is stuff that would otherwise be rotting in landfill, and if the heat required for the conversion process itself makes use of energy that's either embodied in the feedstock or supplied from other non-fossil sources, then the production of artificial crude oil is at worst climate-neutral and at best a considerable climate win.
Though most of the artificial oil so produced will indeed be burnt and its carbon therefore end up in the air as CO2, that's carbon that has (a) all been in circulation in the global carbon cycle anyway, as opposed to fossil carbon that adds carbon to that cycle and (b) is mostly not in the form of methane as would be released by landfill rot (methane being a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 for the few decades it takes the atmosphere to oxidize it back to CO2).
There are various processes for making usable hydrocarbon fuels in this way. Plasma pyrolysis will eat just about anything organic and turn it into something resembling natural gas; it needs large amounts of electricity to make it work, which is probably why blakey thinks nuclear energy is a pre-requisite (blakey being blakey, this is of course ill-considered nonsense). Catalytic conversion more closely mimics the natural reactions that occur underground but in a sped-up form, making something very like crude oil. You can make a hobbyist-scale wood gas producer and run engines off it as was commonly done during WWII. It's all good.
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@flabdablet said:
If you truly believe that solar PV won't scale, there are a few points you've probably missed:
1. Most Australian houses have enough equator-facing rooftop area to accommodate 4kW of solar panels, which is more than enough (if grid-tied) to make each household a net energy exporter.
2. Household-scale solar panels are a mass-produced item, and mass production is something the industrial world is very, very good at.
3. Uptake of rooftop solar is increasing rapidly in China, which is also the world's major supplier of PV panels. This is going to drive costs down. I fully expect that in under ten years it will cost less to generate a kilowatt via solar PV than via burning Victorian brown coal. I also expect to see rooftop solar and community-scale micro-grids deployed in the developing world instead of conventional power stations and poles and wires, in the same kind of leapfrog move that cellular phones have made over landlines all over Africa.
4. Even with no form of government subsidy, and even at today's prices, grid-tied solar panels in my state pay for themselves in reduced energy bills in 10 years or less. That's a return on investment of the order of 10%pa - better than rental property and better than most shares. The carbon tax makes these numbers even more attractive.
In fact the main issue that limits what rooftop solar power can do is not scale, but availability: if the sun doesn't shine the juice doesn't flow, so you still need that grid tie-in to keep your household working. But total grid generation capacity is currently sized to avoid blackouts during times of peak load and is therefore at least five times the size it needs to be for baseload. Peak load in this state happens in the middle of a few hot days in summer when all the air conditioners go on, and this coincides very neatly with peak output for solar PV. Quite clearly we can displace a lot of coal with PV before running into availability trouble.
tl;dr: solar doesn't suck as much as you seem to think, and it's getting better really, really quickly, Where it is now, in my view, is about where cellular telephony was maybe 15 years ago.Solar does suck and you mention why: Because you can't control availability combined with the fact that there is no way in storing large amounts of energy to overcome longer periods with low sunhsine, not even huge barrier lakes. This leads to situations were you do not have enough power and need to turn on backup-coal plants. Hence solar and wind is not CO2-free!!! The second even worse problem is the case were too much power is used. You can't turn of a PV panel, at least not easily. If the power is not used (likely to happen in AU on a sunny day at noon if you fully rely on solar) the panels will overheat and eventually break. You will need to cool the panels.
Second thing was already mentioned. current grids are not made for this kind of power production. To make it feasable the whole grid would have to be built from scratch and that must be included in the costs. Hence solar in this way is not economical at all. Much better to build some large plants and no not with PV panels but thermic solar plants like Andasol. Still they are very inefficent in space/watt and resources/watt (resources are materials to build the plants).
Summarized Solar (and Wind) are just not practical for large scale Usage. In countries like Germany they are highly subsidized by the state, expecially PV. Else it would not be economical feasable.
@flabdablet said:
@Adanine said:
Wouldn't the process to convert waste into this Artificial Gasoline offset a ton of Carbon into the atmosphere?
No.
Disagee. this fallacy is often used for heating with wood. It is not CO2 neutral because a tree takes much longer to fully rot (decades) and release all the CO2 than it takes to burn it. So burning a lot of wood releseas much more CO2 compared to letting it rot and instead use electricity produced by nuclear plants.
I recommend everyone this site:
http://bravenewclimate.com/
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@beginner_ said:
there is no way in storing large amounts of energy
So solve that problem and you're set.
All our energy currently comes from the sun anyway, with the exception of geothermal plants-- which have been a "promising" technology for quite a long time now, so I don't have much hope for it.
The science fiction lover in me is infatuated with the idea of nuclear fusion, but it'll be at least 30 years before we'll see something practical come from that direction.
Then there's the amount of rare metals used in the production of PV cells. That's a pretty limited resource.
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@dhromed said:
Then there's the amount of rare metals used in the production of PV cells. That's a pretty limited resource.
"Rare Earth Metals" is a misnomer. They're pretty damn common; it's just that they're hard to separate from the other rock.
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@dhromed said:
@beginner_ said:
there is no way in storing large amounts of energy
So solve that problem and you're set.
There's ways, some more practical than others. Water pumps are one. When you have excess energy, you pump water uphill. When you need energy, you release the water and run a turbine. If you happen to put your town next to both a large lake and a huge mountain with room for most of a lake on top, you're good. If you don't have that geography, too bad!
Compressed air is another idea-- take air. Take containers. Spend energy cooling the air until it liquifies, then stuff lots of the liquid air into the container. When you want energy, heat it until it releases the air and blow a turbine. There's work being done on this, but last I checked it was only about 23% efficient. Better materials, better cooling methods can bump that above 50%, possibly to 70% in a commercial/industrial setting. Using liquid nitrogen is one idea, since it boils at -195.8C.
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@Lorne Kates said:
@dhromed said:
@beginner_ said:
there is no way in storing large amounts of energy
So solve that problem and you're set.
There's ways, some more practical than others. Water pumps are one. When you have excess energy, you pump water uphill. When you need energy, you release the water and run a turbine. If you happen to put your town next to both a large lake and a huge mountain with room for most of a lake on top, you're good. If you don't have that geography, too bad!
Compressed air is another idea-- take air. Take containers. Spend energy cooling the air until it liquifies, then stuff lots of the liquid air into the container. When you want energy, heat it until it releases the air and blow a turbine. There's work being done on this, but last I checked it was only about 23% efficient. Better materials, better cooling methods can bump that above 50%, possibly to 70% in a commercial/industrial setting. Using liquid nitrogen is one idea, since it boils at -195.8C.
Spend energy to procreate. When you need energy, eat the baby.
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@beginner_ said:
Solar does suck and you mention why: Because you can't control availability combined with the fact that there is no way in storing large amounts of energy to overcome longer periods with low sunhsine, not even huge barrier lakes. This leads to situations were you do not have enough power and need to turn on backup-coal plants. Hence solar and wind is not CO2-free!!!
You're arguing against a straw man. I am not advocating immediate replacement of all existing fossil fuel infrastructure with solar PV; I am advocating increased uptake of distributed rooftop generation to reduce the rate at which we build new coal plants, perhaps to the extent of not needing to replace those we decommission.
There is plenty of scope, even assuming indefinite continuation of today's sub-optimal electricity consumption patterns, for a massive increase the presently tiny proportion of variable-availability supplies. Because while it is undoubtedly true that an increase in that proportion also means an increase in the usage of compensatory peaking generation, (a) peaking generators are generally gas-fired because coal-fired plant can't be spun up as quickly, (b) gas-fired plant generally emits less CO2 per MWh generated than coal-fired even though it costs somewhat more per MWh and (c) the primary effect of a large increase in the proportion of electricity generated by wind and solar will be a substantial reduction in fossil fuel consumption regardless of all these second-order effects.
@beginner_ said:
The second even worse problem is the case were too much power is used. You can't turn of a PV panel, at least not easily.
That's odd. I wonder what that "DC Isolator" breaker next to my inverter is for then?
@beginner_ said:
If the power is not used (likely to happen in AU on a sunny day at noon if you fully rely on solar) the panels will overheat and eventually break. You will need to cool the panels.
With all due respect, this is complete horseshit. If you expose a PV panel to the sun and leave it disconnected, no current flows and no power is generated; until you create a path for current to flow between the two terminals, the panel simply fails to convert sunlight to electrical energy. A disconnected panel generates no electrical power; it merely exhibits the panel's rated open-circuit voltage between the terminals.
If you connect a panel to a load that draws less power than the maximum the panel is able to supply, that lower amount is all that the panel does supply. There might be a slight increase in panel temperature due to the fact that the portion of incoming solar energy that would otherwise have left the panel as electrical energy is no longer doing so, but the idea that unused electrical power somehow "builds up" in the panels and overheats them fatally could only come from somebody who completely fails to understand how these things work.
@beginner_ said:
Second thing was already mentioned. current grids are not made for this kind of power production. To make it feasable the whole grid would have to be built from scratch and that must be included in the costs.
Again: horseshit. Virtually nobody who installs rooftop solar is going to over-invest so massively as to make their house push energy out to the grid at a rate disproportionate to that which it used to consume. Losses in wires and transformers depend only on the total current flowing; the direction of power transfer is irrelevant. If my house has a standing consumption of 2kW and is fitted with panels good for 4kW peak, the wires connecting my house to the street pole will see power transfer somewhere between 2kW inward and 2kW outward, both of which cause exactly the same heating in those wires. There is enough headroom built into the design of these things that even if my house was completely turned off and my panels were pushing out their full 4kW, nothing bad would happen. In fact, most of the time my panels will not be operating at their peak (due to sun angles, clouds and whatnot) but will be reducing the amount of power the grid needs to supply to my house, and the net effect on the grid will be a reduction in grid load and supply demand.
If half the houses in my street had 4kW panels and the other half didn't, and everybody was using their 2kW and all the panels were operating at peak capacity, then the wires between houses and street would be loaded to the exact same extent as they would be with no panels, as would some of the wires running along the street; the fact that power is flowing in some of those wires in the opposite direction from the no-panel case makes no difference to wire dissipation. The transformer and wires supplying the street as a whole, though, would see a substantial reduction in load.
The grid is a hierarchy, and the wires at each level and the transformers that connect the levels are sized to deal with the appropriate aggregate current flows. The same considerations as apply to individual houses apply equally well to streets and blocks and neighbourhoods: the net effect of distributed solar generation is to reduce grid loads and therefore grid losses. Which, if you think about it, is the natural consequence of power being generated close to its end use - you simply don't have to move as much of it over long distances.
Apart from the overall reduction in demand, the only other grid-visible difference between a suburb randomly dotted with solar PV and one without is the fact that disconnecting that suburb at the substation doesn't necessarily black it out. Or at least this would be the case, were it not for the fact that every grid-interactive inverter ever made has automatic grid voltage sensing to deal with this exact circumstance, shutting off the outward feed from the house when it sees the grid go down.
@beginner_ said:
Much better to build some large plants and no not with PV panels but thermic solar plants like Andasol. Still they are very inefficent in space/watt and resources/watt (resources are materials to build the plants).
...as opposed to coal fired plant, I suppose, which "efficiently" turns entire mountains into greenhouse gases while "efficiently" consuming entire rivers for cooling?
I have no objection at all to the construction of large-scale solar generators where it makes sense to do so; solar thermal plant is particularly interesting because it can store heat and release electrical energy on demand, making it functionally equivalent to peaking gas generation from a grid point of view. But we should be building that stuff as well as encouraging the uptake of rooftop solar, simply so that we won't need massive grid re-engineering to cope with the rise in new and interesting loads like plug-in pure electric cars.
@beginner_ said:
Summarized Solar (and Wind) are just not practical for large scale Usage. In countries like Germany they are highly subsidized by the state, expecially PV. Else it would not be economical feasable.
There is already plenty of scope for increasing the proportion of both solar and wind generation to a far higher number than what's deployed today, and as I've already argued, the main issues have nothing to do with scale - mass production will easily take care of that - but power availability and public policy.
There are lots of things that can be done on the demand side to help deal with the availability issue: it doesn't all need to be brute-forced with spinning reserve and electric storage. For example: a vast amount of electricity ends up being used for keeping food cold and rooms at comfortable temperatures. Storing electricity is hard but storing heat is easy, especially if the temperatures involved make water a suitable storage medium. If electricity simply cost a hell of a lot when in heavy demand and almost nothing when not, then local generation coupled to heaters and coolers with inbuilt heat storage could make an enormous contribution toward reducing overall system cost.
In fact it may well happen that grid-interactive electric storage, like grid-interactive generation, evolves using a partially distributed model: a parked electric car with enough energy storage capacity to give it the same kind of range we're accustomed to getting from our present cars also has enough capacity to run a whole house for a week, and it should not be beyond the wit of humanity to devise payment schemes that make it attractive to trade off some proportion of that range for profit.
Looking at German state support for solar PV as "subsidy" strikes me as very, very short sighted. I see it as economic pump priming. The main obstacle to commercial feasibility of solar PV today is its relatively high up-front cost (it's already far cheaper than coal if you look at total benefit vs. total cost over panel design life) which creates an early-adopter disadvantage. German state support has helped create a solid market where none used to exist, which is increasing engineering and manufacturing innovation and driving cost down, which will increase market size, which will further drive down cost in a very effective virtuous circle.
@beginner_ said:
Disagee. this fallacy is often used for heating with wood. It is not CO2 neutral because a tree takes much longer to fully rot (decades) and release all the CO2 than it takes to burn it. So burning a lot of wood releseas much more CO2 compared to letting it rot
This is true on a time scale of decades. But the thing about the greenhouse effect is that it doesn't really operate on that time scale. The biosphere as a whole is a big, slow system and everything we do to it needs to be considered based on the effect it will have over centuries.
In roughly one century, we have dumped about as much formerly sequestered carbon into the terrestrial/biological carbon cycle as the total amount in circulation before we started digging it up. We need to stop needing to do that as quickly as we possibly can. If we do manage to stop doing that, then carbon emission peaks and valleys on decade time scales will scarcely matter. If we don't manage to stop doing that, policy based on decade-scale effects really is just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
Huge amounts of what keeps us going currently depends on the liquid fuels that power our transport fleet, the overwhelming majority of which currently come from fossil sources. We need to attack that issue from multiple angles - reducing our reliance on transport generally, increasing fleet fuel efficiency, finding alternative ways to power parts of the fleet and finding non-fossil sources for the liquid fuels required by those parts that can't yet be feasibly powered any other way. Every ton of liquid fuel we manage to extract from the existing carbon cycle is a ton we're not digging up and adding to it, and that can only be good.
Fast-growing softwood tree farms are a perfectly sane thing to use for a non-fossil crude oil production feedstock. In some places and some climates, a highly productive annual like switchgrass or kudzu could work even better. People are doing interesting things with pig shit and algae. As long as it's not displacing food production and we can get the cost down fairly quickly, it's all good.
@beginner_ said:
and instead use electricity produced by nuclear plants.
New nuclear plant is too expensive and too slow, regardless of what Barry Brook has to say about so-far nonexistent "fourth generation" tech. Every dollar put toward new nuclear plant that might come onstream fifteen years down the line would save at least three times the carbon emissions if spent on quickly deployed gas-fired co-generation instead, even allowing for the fact that most of the gas will still be coming from fossil sources for the next several decades; spend that dollar on end use efficiency and it could save three times as much again.
The bang for buck on both wind farms and rooftop solar PV is somewhere between end-use efficiency and cogen. We need to get emissions down as fast as possible, so we should not be fartarsing about with tech that really doesn't scale because it can't be mass produced.
We might also consider not subsidising the fossil fuel extraction industry as heavily as we continue to do.
If we're doing site recommendations, here's mine.
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@Adanine said:
I'm confused on the usage of Carbon Neutral here. Ignoring the process of Artificial Gasoline -> Power (I've never heard of it until now, I assume it's like normal gasoline but clean?), you said it was created from Nuclear Power and waste? Wouldn't the process to convert waste into this Artificial Gasoline offset a ton of Carbon into the atmosphere?
No, because there's no new carbon, you're just recycling carbon already on the surface. The problem isn't "we put carbon in the air", the problem is, "we take carbon that's been sequestered underground and is no longer part of the standard weather cycle, and introduce it into the standard weather cycle." i.e. adding new carbon.
Like I said, that wouldn't *reduce* carbon in the atmosphere, but it would certainly help reduce the amount of new carbon entering the atmosphere.
The thick-black-smokiest, nastiest-smelling, locomotive in the universe is 100% carbon-neutral if it's running on waste oil from restaurants, or bio-diesel made from corn. (It's still smoky and nasty, but at least it's not a net polluter.)
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BTW someone showed me this article yesterday: Fridges could be switched off without owner's consent to reduce strain on power stations. (Obligatory British people telling me the Telegraph is trash, nobody trusts it, it's all lies, etc etc. Since the UK has about 27 national newspapers and no matter which one you quote from there's always someone to come along and tell you it's junk.)
That's why I support nuclear power. The capacity doesn't change month-to-month, it doesn't change day-to-day, it doesn't change based on the weather. It's solid, reliable, non-polluting, doesn't kill miners, and if we reprocess fuel we could stop mining the shit and wouldn't even need to worry about another fuel source for centuries. We have the knowledge to work safely and reliably: our Navy runs on it, and it's loaded with trained experts.
The biggest obstacle is idiot 1960s hippies who thing it's "scary" (but burning coal, which puts more radiation in the atmosphere is somehow not "scary"), and politicians who want the plants to be privately-owned and -run so they get huge kick-backs. Fuck that. Grab the best from the Navy, which we need to downsize anyway, have those guys run Government-owned plants in perfect safety. That's what we ought to be doing.
VOTE BLAKEY 2016!
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@blakeyrat said:
BTW someone showed me this article yesterday: Fridges could be switched off without owner's consent to reduce strain on power stations. (Obligatory British people telling me the Telegraph is trash, nobody trusts it, it's all lies, etc etc. Since the UK has about 27 national newspapers and no matter which one you quote from there's always someone to come along and tell you it's junk.)
That's why I support nuclear power.
That's why I support a smart grid where my appliances know the instantaneous price of power and regulate their consumption so as to minimize my bill.
To make this work in a fridge would require a microcontroller with the approximate processing power of a musical greeting card, a rather thin tank of saturated salt water (freezing point around -20°C) forming the back of the freezer compartment, and another of fresh water (freezing point 0°C) forming the back of the main compartment. The compressor would kick in to freeze the tanks whenever (a) there was liquid present in either one and (b) electricity was cheap; the melting ice would hold the storage compartment temperatures very close to constant for as long as any ice remained, without the need for additional heat extraction by the compressor.
Fully demand-driven elecricity prices would most likely vary in a daily cycle, so you'd want the fridge to be able to get all the energy it needed for one day in one hit while the price was near minimum, and store that. The latent heat of fusion for water is about 330kJ/kg. A decent refrigerator heat pump's CoP will be somewhere around 3, which makes that latent heat translate to 330/3 = roughly 110kJ/kg electric storage equivalent. A typical modern fridge eats about 1kWh of electricity (3600kJ) in a day; to store that would therefore require 32 litres of ice tanks, which doesn't add enormously to the space taken up by a 350 litre fridge.
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@flabdablet said:
That's why I support a smart grid where my appliances know the instantaneous price of power and regulate their consumption so as to minimize my bill.
ME TOO IT TURNS OUT THE TWO THINGS AREN'T MUTUALLY-EXCLUSIVE AT ALL AMAZING!
Do you support the EU bill described in that article then? Where the *government* can turn off your appliances remotely without permission or compensation?
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@flabdablet said:
To make this work in a fridge would require a microcontroller with the approximate processing power of a musical greeting card, a rather thin tank of saturated salt water (freezing point around -20°C) forming the back of the freezer compartment, and another of fresh water (freezing point 0°C) forming the back of the main compartment. The compressor would kick in to freeze the tanks whenever (a) there was liquid present in either one and (b) electricity was cheap; the melting ice would hold the storage compartment temperatures very close to constant for as long as any ice remained, without the need for additional heat extraction by the compressor.
Fully demand-driven elecricity prices would most likely vary in a daily cycle, so you'd want the fridge to be able to get all the energy it needed for one day in one hit while the price was near minimum, and store that. The latent heat of fusion for water is about 330kJ/kg. A decent refrigerator heat pump's CoP will be somewhere around 3, which makes that latent heat translate to 330/3 = roughly 110kJ/kg electric storage equivalent. A typical modern fridge eats about 1kWh of electricity (3600kJ) in a day; to store that would therefore require 32 litres of ice tanks, which doesn't add enormously to the space taken up by a 350 litre fridge.
*sneaks off to the patent office*
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@blakeyrat said:
BTW someone showed me this article yesterday: Fridges could be switched off without owner's consent to reduce strain on power stations. (Obligatory British people telling me the Telegraph is trash, nobody trusts it, it's all lies, etc etc. Since the UK has about 27 national newspapers and no matter which one you quote from there's always someone to come along and tell you it's junk.)
Your pre-emptive rejection of complaints about the source of the article makes it tricky to respond without falling into a "I told you they'd say that" trap. It's safer to assume that all of our papers print outright lies, give undue prominence to stories that will animate their paticular readership (and bolster traffic & advertising revenue), and will overlook stories that reflect negatively on their editorial views. Accepting that all of our papers are politically biased & can be disregarded, I'd like to point out that that article is there to generate advertising-friendly traffic from a readership that thinks Europe is a dictatorship & the UK should return to running an empire.
None of the other 4 serious papers have given it any serious coverage; the EU is not going to switch fridges off.
Anyway, I entirely agree. If people object to the safety of nuclear power then they don't understand it, or the relative risks it presents. I spoke to people at work about this recently and most of them think there was a nuclear explosion at Chernobyl.
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@nosliwmas said:
& the UK should return to running an empire.
So... alternative reality fan-fix writers? Seriously how would that happen? Are they aware the wizards in Harry Potter were fictional?
@nosliwmas said:
None of the other 4 serious papers have given it any serious coverage; the EU is not going to switch fridges off.
So are you saying the Telegraph made-up this story from whole cloth? I'm confused. Either this EU bill exists or it does not, yes?
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@nosliwmas said:
Anyway, I entirely agree. If people object to the safety of nuclear power then they don't understand it, or the relative risks it presents.
It seems the general populace is more concerned about "big" events than relative danger. The Boston bombing killed a handful of people and wounded maybe a few hundred, but started an uproar; meanwhile the hundreds who died in automobile accidents the same day went unreported by the media. People are more likely to be afraid of flying than driving, not because flying is less safe, but because plane crashes are big scary incidents. The same applies with nuclear meltdowns; they're infrequent, but when they happen they're terrible.
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@blakeyrat said:
So are you saying the Telegraph made-up this story from whole cloth? I'm confused. Either this EU bill exists or it does not, yes?
It doesn't exist. Note the word of the word "could" in the article title, and the fact that this is a proposal, not a bill.
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@PJH said:
@blakeyrat said:
So are you saying the Telegraph made-up this story from whole cloth? I'm confused. Either this EU bill exists or it does not, yes?
It doesn't exist. Note the word of the word "could" in the article title, and the fact that this is a proposal, not a bill.
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@PJH said:
It doesn't exist. Note the word of the word "could" in the article title, and the fact that this is a proposal, not a bill.
Bingo. And by the same logic, the Guardian reported at length on the German proposal that English should be the official language of the EU (Europe is great) but the Telegraph skipped it (Europe is bad).
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@blakeyrat said:
Do you support the EU bill described in that article then? Where the government can turn off your appliances remotely without permission or compensation?
No.
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@joe.edwards said:
@PJH said:
Not new at all and not necessarily restricted to 'Science Journalism.'@blakeyrat said:
So are you saying the Telegraph made-up this story from whole cloth? I'm confused. Either this EU bill exists or it does not, yes?
It doesn't exist. Note the word of the word "could" in the article title, and the fact that this is a proposal, not a bill.
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@nosliwmas said:
Was the article dated April 1st, and based off this (or one of it's variants floating around)?@PJH said:
It doesn't exist. Note the word of the word "could" in the article title, and the fact that this is a proposal, not a bill.
Bingo. And by the same logic, the Guardian reported at length on the German proposal that English should be the official language of the EU (Europe is great) but the Telegraph skipped it (Europe is bad).
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@flabdablet said:
Substitutes for fossil fuels are only ever going to arrive piecewise. It's not like somebody is going to have a Eureka moment next week and we'll all be off coal and oil the week after. What we need to be doing right now is adopting public policy that makes both the deployment of existing substitutes and the development of new ones more rewarding than business as usual.
If you mean funding research into new technology, then I'll agree with you. Subsidies and other sorts of policies are counterproductive. Firstly, you're causing people to be more inefficient. Secondly, they'll figure this out and become more skeptical of new technologies, which will slow adoption when it's actually worth while.
@flabdablet said:
Also, the Australian carbon tax as presently arranged is not making us poorer. Yes it's resulted in an increase in direct household energy costs and knock-on costs that flow from increased energy cost elsewhere in the economy, but the overall effect on household expenditure is small (certainly much smaller than the cost increases due to privatisation of formerly state-run utilities) and much of the revenue it's raising is being given back to households as compensation; in fact this is a slight over-compensation for most households. Households that choose to reduce their own fossil fuel consumption (by installing e.g. solar hot water collectors and/or grid-tied solar photovoltaics) still get the compensation even though they ultimately contribute less toward the carbon tax; the incentive to do these things is therefore increased, which is the whole point of the tax.
Wow. You should just turn over all of your income to the government and allow them to send it back to you, then. Think of how much better off you'll all be! Choosing to use solar or other boondoggle energy instead of fossil fuels is generally a bad idea, economically. I mean, it might work for you personally, if you're getting subsidies, but someone else has to pay for that.
@flabdablet said:
In fact the main issue that limits what rooftop solar power can do is not scale, but availability: if the sun doesn't shine the juice doesn't flow, so you still need that grid tie-in to keep your household working. But total grid generation capacity is currently sized to avoid blackouts during times of peak load and is therefore at least five times the size it needs to be for baseload. Peak load in this state happens in the middle of a few hot days in summer when all the air conditioners go on, and this coincides very neatly with peak output for solar PV. Quite clearly we can displace a lot of coal with PV before running into availability trouble.
This all assumes things about power plants that aren't true, like you can quickly and easily switch them on and off. But that doesn't mean that you wouldn't be better off using your cheap coal for now.
I think that the future for stuff like solar will come when we get more efficient at splitting water and getting the actual electricity from a fuel cell. Or creating artificial gas. Or just better batteries. Even then, it will likely be of relatively limited application, since the energy input is so diffuse. The idiots in California can't even agree to take a few square miles of the Mojave desert to devote to solar energy. That's about as desolate as anywhere in the Australian outback. And that's from the people most enthusiastic about energy boondoggles. Well, aside from the Massachusetts knuckleheads who have been refusing to build an offshore windfarm for decades.
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@boomzilla said:
Wow. You should just turn over all of your income to the government and allow them to send it back to you, then. Think of how much better off you'll all be!
I honestly cannot see how you get from the imposition of an emissions tax on Australia's 500 largest emitters to my "turning over all my income to the government". Ordinary Australian citizens don't pay the carbon tax to the Government; we get Government compensation for the knock-on effects of those who do pay it passing its costs along to their customers. The carbon tax is essentially a charge that the public as a whole imposes for the privilege of adding carbon to the biosphere, an activity detrimental to that public; it's an offset against the invisible subsidy that emitters have enjoyed for years in the form of the ability to pollute at no cost, and its effect is to decrease the economic attractiveness of being an emitter.
@boomzilla said:
Choosing to use solar or other boondoggle energy instead of fossil fuels is generally a bad idea, economically. I mean, it might work for you personally, if you're getting subsidies, but someone else has to pay for that.
The carbon tax is also a completely separate policy issue from subsidies for solar PV generation. Early adopters of solar PV in this country did indeed score a sweet deal on generated power, and are able to sell it back to the grid at a little over twice the retail rate; that incentive was needed to kick-start widespread panel installation and it did that quite effectively. But now that the prices of panels have dropped as far as they have, the standard grid feed-in tariff has dropped to something very close to the wholesale rate. The only way to score the a retail rate for power coming out of your panels is to have that displace power you'd otherwise be buying from the grid, which means that the most economically effective quantity of panels to install is whatever it takes to run your own house during daylight hours, which means that the main effect of panels on the grid at large is reducing load and losses. And even under these conditions, where there is no effective subsidy in place any more and exported panel power costs the distributors pretty much the same amount as coal-derived, we're talking around 10%pa ROI on panel installation cost. How is that "generally a bad idea, economically" and what is it that "someone else" is paying for?
@boomzilla said:
This all assumes things about power plants that aren't true, like you can quickly and easily switch them on and off.
You don't have to do most of that particularly quickly. Insolation is indeed variable, but it's also relatively reliably predictable, especially when averaged over a whole city. Weather forecasts are already used to help schedule power generation because there's a correlation between air temperature and power demand; it's not a huge leap to add insolation to the existing scheduling formulae in order to compensate for the presence of a known aggregate amount of PV solar.
@boomzilla said:
the energy input is so diffuse
Yeah, but the end users are also diffuse. Rooftop solar PV is an electrical interface to the oldest and most widespread wireless power distribution system on the planet. It's a good, safe, robust, human scale technology and in no way a boondoggle.
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@flabdablet said:
I honestly cannot see how you get from the imposition of an emissions tax on Australia's 500 largest emitters to my "turning over all my income to the government". Ordinary Australian citizens don't pay the carbon tax to the Government; we get Government compensation for the knock-on effects of those who do pay it passing its costs along to their customers.
Yes, I didn't expect you to grasp this. Remember: corporations don't pay taxes, people pay taxes. Having those corporations collect from their customers just adds another stage in the laundering cycle.
@flabdablet said:
The carbon tax is essentially a charge that the public as a whole imposes for the privilege of adding carbon to the biosphere, an activity detrimental to that public; it's an offset against the invisible subsidy that emitters have enjoyed for years in the form of the ability to pollute at no cost, and its effect is to decrease the economic attractiveness of being an emitter.
Carbon dioxide is not pollution.
@flabdablet said:
And even under these conditions, where there is no effective subsidy in place any more and exported panel power costs the distributors pretty much the same amount as coal-derived, we're talking around 10%pa ROI on panel installation cost. How is that "generally a bad idea, economically" and what is it that "someone else" is paying for?
I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but I'm skeptical of such a high ROI figure. This sort of figure typically assumes that the panels are well maintained, kept clean and that their output does not degrade. I will admit to not being fully up on Australian incentives and subsidies. It's common in the US for states and the Feds to offer tax breaks for installing solar panels.
@flabdablet said:
@boomzilla said:
the energy input is so diffuse
Yeah, but the end users are also diffuse. Rooftop solar PV is an electrical interface to the oldest and most widespread wireless power distribution system on the planet. It's a good, safe, robust, human scale technology and in no way a boondoggle.
There are other challenges to scaling solar PV, especially when it comes to raw materials. Not to mention the headaches that will come from outages due to wind / hail / etc. Having everyone generating their own power is much more fragile than the current grid, even with all of its problems.
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@flabdablet said:
@boomzilla said:
Carbon dioxide is not pollution.
Wow. That's hilariously awful. You must be very sad to see tax dollars wasted on those guys.
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@boomzilla said:
Remember: corporations don't pay taxes, people pay taxes.
For anyone wanting to explore this intriguing phenomena, you could do worse than read Tim Worstall. Basically the tax comes from either (1) the customers (in increased prices), (2) the employees (in decreased wages due to increased employer taxes) or (3) shareholders (reduced dividends.)
Companies (corporations) don't pay tax. (I'd recommend TW for other government related stealing of money. In any country - he primary talks about UK stuff, but not [now] based there, and the principles apply to most countries.)
However I get the impression from my time on here that this is a topic that isn't naturally interesting to most around here, and any discussion is likely to generate more heat than light.
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@PJH said:
Basically the tax comes from either (1) the customers (in increased prices),
...and acts as a price signal, making the products offered by the corporations so taxed less attractive relative to those offered by their non-emitting competitors The increased prices are the point.
Some see this as the dead hand of Gubmint daring to distort the Holy Free Market. I see it as a long overdue first step in addressing a particularly egregious market failure that's been allowed to persist for way too long and is currently fucking up the climate to the extent that we will all me much worse off than if it were not addressed.
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@flabdablet said:
making the products offered by the corporations so taxed less attractive relative to those offered by their non-emitting competitors
It's going to happen anyway, regardless of government interference. Fossil is going to run out, and then it'll automatically become expensive, and entrepeneurs and consumers will look elsewhere.
The question is whether that automatic effect will be just too late or just in time. There's some disagreement on that, I believe. ;) ;) ;)
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@dhromed said:
There's some disagreement on that, I believe. ;) ;) ;)
Not among people who have actual Clue. Yes peak oil yadda yadda yadda, but there's enough coal left for a couple more centuries and if we burn all that we're fucked.
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@flabdablet said:
@dhromed said:
There's some disagreement on that, I believe. ;) ;) ;)
Not among people who have actual Clue. Yes peak oil yadda yadda yadda, but there's enough coal left for a couple more centuries and if we burn all that we're fucked.
Of course, then there is natural gas, not to mention methane hydrates and uranium and thorium. I get that people need something to panic about, but we're a long ways from that as far as energy is concerned. At least, so long as we don't decide to fuck ourselves over by forcing use of not ready for prime time sources.
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@boomzilla said:
@flabdablet said:
... there's enough coal left for a couple more centuries and if we burn all that we're fucked.
Of course, then there is natural gas, not to mention methane hydrates and uranium and thorium. I get that people need something to panic about, but we're a long ways from that as far as energy is concerned. At least, so long as we don't decide to fuck ourselves over by forcing use of not ready for prime time sources.
Way to miss the point, dude. Let me spell this out nice and simple: if we burn all that coal, we're not fucked because we've run out of coal; we're fucked because the greenhouse effect of pushing all that sequestered carbon back into the active carbon cycle will alter global climate enough to cause a massive cull of our species, among others. This is not "panic"; this is what anybody who has been paying attention to climate science, as opposed to using it as a political football, knows for a fact.
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@flabdablet said:
we're fucked because the greenhouse effect of pushing all that sequestered carbon back into the active carbon cycle will alter global climate enough to cause a massive cull of our species
Ah. The Warble Gloaming conspiracy again.
Whatever happened to the Global Cooling catastrophe that was being predicted in the 70's?
Or is that part of why it's been renamed "Climate Change" (hint to the pseudo-scientists out there - the climate has been changing for millennia) - because they can't decide which way the thermometer is going this decade?
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@flabdablet said:
Let me spell this out nice and simple: if we burn all that coal, we're not fucked because we've run out of coal; we're fucked because the greenhouse effect of pushing all that sequestered carbon back into the active carbon cycle will alter global climate enough to cause a massive cull of our species, among others. This is not "panic"; this is what anybody who has been paying attention to climate science, as opposed to using it as a political football, knows for a fact.
No, if you were paying attention to the science, you would know that the theory depends on a lot of very uncertain things, the biggest probably being the effect of clouds. The theory is that the enhanced warming from the extra greenhouse gasses cause more water vapor to be in the atmosphere, and that the water vapor has a positive feedback, leading to catastrophic warming.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of this theory. The models upon which the sky is said to be falling are horrible at predicting things. The idea that current warming is unprecedented is based on a lot of bad statistics and flawed methodologies (and that's being generous and assuming the perpetrators are just stupid, not malicious). Current measurements are not even as good as most people think they are. If the system is so precarious that a little bit more of a trace gas can cause such a runaway effect, why hasn't it happened before? Even if the temperature predictions have some basis in reality, how do we really know it won't be a net benefit?
When I read something like what you wrote, and am told how all right thinking people know it to be a fact, I am reminded of this wise
quoteparaphrase, "Well, the trouble with our catastrophic anthropogenic global warming friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so."
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Hmmm, why do we care about how we are going to be extinct if that is going to happens anyways? May as well go with a bang!
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@blakeyrat said:
That's why I support nuclear power. The capacity doesn't change month-to-month, it doesn't change day-to-day, it doesn't change based on the weather. It's solid, reliable, non-polluting, doesn't kill miners, and if we reprocess fuel we could stop mining the shit and wouldn't even need to worry about another fuel source for centuries. We have the knowledge to work safely and reliably: our Navy runs on it, and it's loaded with trained experts.
There is the problem of turning it on and off though. It can take a fair amount of time to ramp power production up/down with most nuclear reactor designs, compared to fossil fuels. You need both types of plant to have both stable supply and the ability to deal with the millions of kettles suddenly turning on at the end of Days Of Our Lives.
Incidentally, the Telegraph is one of the good ones... it has a right leaning bias (e.g. centre-left of US politics).
The basic deal with British papers is: never read the tabloids (they're glossy bollocks), stick to the broadsheets for the news (which will be facts usually without gloss) but avoid the opinion pieces (also glossy bollocks).
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@eViLegion said:
There is the problem of turning it on and off though. It can take a fair amount of time to ramp power production up/down with most nuclear reactor designs, compared to fossil fuels. You need both types of plant to have both stable supply and the ability to deal with the millions of kettles suddenly turning on at the end of Days Of Our Lives.
No problem, we just keep it going 100% all the time, pump the extra electricity into the ground and then air-drop the killer mutant worms on North Korea. Everybody wins!
@eViLegion said:
Incidentally, the Telegraph is one of the good ones... it has a right leaning bias (e.g. centre-left of US politics).
The basic deal with British papers is: never read the tabloids (they're glossy bollocks), stick to the broadsheets for the news (which will be facts usually without gloss) but avoid the opinion pieces (also glossy bollocks).And being from the US, I tell them apart... how? Assuming by "glossy" you literally mean "printed on glossy paper" well, I hate to break it to you, but we only see the online edition. (Plus what the fuck is a "broadsheet"?)
The bigger question to me is why the fuck does the UK have so many national newspapers? We have one, and we're like 37 bajillion times the size of your tiny island. How didn't they all put each other out of biusiness like 50 years ago?
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@blakeyrat said:
The bigger question to me is why the fuck does the UK have so many national newspapers? We have one, and we're like 37 bajillion times the size of your tiny island. How didn't they all put each other out of biusiness like 50 years ago?
A national newspaper is just one that's available in the entire country.
I am really surprised that the US has only 1. Really? That can't be right.
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@dhromed said:
I am really surprised that the US has only 1. Really? That can't be right.
Would it surprise you to learn that it is indeed not right? (LA Times, WSJ, Washington Post being three that I've heard of/read myself.)
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@PJH said:
@dhromed said:
I am really surprised that the US has only 1. Really? That can't be right.
Would it surprise you to learn that it is indeed not right? (LA Times, WSJ, Washington Post being three that I've heard of/read myself.)USA Today is the only newspaper that claims to be a national. As far as I am aware.
The others are just regionals that happen to have wide distribution. The LA Times is LA, obviously, Wall Street Journal and New York Times are New York, and the Washington Post is Washington, D.C.
You could make a pedantic dickweed point that a newspaper that has national distribution is a "national newspaper" even if it doesn't claim to be and isn't really written for that purpose. But fuck you.
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@blakeyrat said:
Plus what the fuck is a "broadsheet"?
Quite literally, a newspaper printed on a big sheet of paper. Originally, the broadsheets (Guardian,Independent, Telegraph, Times) all had 2 foot long pages. Not that that's apparent online, or is even still the case.
And you may only have one national newspaper (USA Today? WSJ?) but that's because pre-internet etc if you printed the paper on the west coast you'd have a struggle to get it to the east coast before it was badly outdated. We don't have that to the same extent. You have things like the New York Times, which aren't nationwide but do get state wide distribution.
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It's super, super weird that there's only one newspaper that reports on the entire nation.
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@blakeyrat said:
You could make a pedantic dickweed point that a newspaper that has national distribution is a "national newspaper" even if it doesn't claim to be and isn't really written for that purpose. But fuck you.
I could, but since that point was made before your childish attempt at "no true Scotsman," it would be rather pointless wouldn't it?
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@dhromed said:
It's super, super weird that there's only one newspaper that reports on the entire nation.
All newspapers have a "national" section, but only one of them (USA Today) is only a "national" section.
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@PJH said:
I could, but since that point was made before your childish attempt at "no true Scotsman," it would be rather pointless wouldn't it?
Wikipedia's criteria is shit. It's like saying: "Volkswagen Bug is a 30,000lb truck." "Volkswagen says it's a compact passenger car." "No but look it has a 5 star safety rating so it must be a truck."
If the paper itself doesn't claim to be a national, it's not a fucking national. I don't care what Wikipedia says.
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@dhromed said:
It's super, super weird that there's only one newspaper that reports on the entire nation.
That's not really what it means. Most of them report on the entire nation / world to some extent, even if only through reproducing wire service reports. But USA Today doesn't have any sort of local focus at all. The Wall Street Journal also doesn't really have a local focus, except for the preponderance of financial market activity in NY. Also, the WSJ has the largest circulation in the US. It's possible to get many of the largest papers in various parts of the country (mainly WaPo, LATimes, NYTimes).
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@boomzilla said:
No, if you were paying attention to the science, you would know that the theory depends on a lot of very uncertain things, the biggest probably being the effect of clouds. The theory is that the enhanced warming from the extra greenhouse gasses cause more water vapor to be in the atmosphere, and that the water vapor has a positive feedback, leading to catastrophic warming.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of this theory. The models upon which the sky is said to be falling are horrible at predicting things. The idea that current warming is unprecedented is based on a lot of bad statistics and flawed methodologies (and that's being generous and assuming the perpetrators are just stupid, not malicious). Current measurements are not even as good as most people think they are. If the system is so precarious that a little bit more of a trace gas can cause such a runaway effect, why hasn't it happened before? Even if the temperature predictions have some basis in reality, how do we really know it won't be a net benefit?
When I read something like what you wrote, and am told how all right thinking people know it to be a fact, I am reminded of this wise
quoteparaphrase, "Well, the trouble with our catastrophic anthropogenic global warming friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so."I am humbled by your rhetorical prowess.
