I DO give a damn about them as they will have a say in how the U.S. is run insofar as environmental issues through the U.N. (Useless Nations), and the fact that they will use current climate bills (Cap and Trade) to neuter the U.S. economy and gain windfalls for their own economies.

(Did you know that the majority of the Rare Earth Minerals for magnets used in "Green Tech" come from the notoriously dangerous Chinese mines? China, who refuses to export most of those same Rare Earth Minerals to the U.S. or other western nations in order to keep the manufacturing jobs there, where work is often substandard and almost never up to environmental standards? Just thought I'd mention that little fact.)

Beyond that, we don't seem to disagree much (except that I'm a drunken conservative nut-job). I want clear air, clean water, and clean land, and responsible stewardship of same. The problem is letting others dictate how (the "how" gives them leverage over the U.S. via the BS bills, which once signed, make them punishable U.S. LAW under foreign control, this is how the modern trans-national progressive undermines our national Independence.) I however, don't intend to let them destroy us to get what they want by using round-a-bout methods. READ THE TEXT of the bills the world wants to impose here.

I realize this makes me sound like one of the "nuts", but you may want to check the wording of some of the proposed bills. I WANT A CLEAN ENVIRONMENT. But this is not the way, it is intended to subsume our government to the New World Order^TM, and no matter how crazy that may sound, it's the truth as I see it. YMMV. I will not allow this to happen. (<read into that sentence whatever you like, you may be closer to the militant truth than you think.) If the U.S. economy and government tanks in the next 25 years because of this (the stated objective of many left-wing nuts, thereby allowing them to re-build the U.S. into a "Socialist Utopia", the real reason they don't care if thier political life ends abruptly due to things like the bankrupting "Health-care" bills currently under discussion, of which only 38% of the U.S. population approve, yet they push forward, ignoring the people's opinions because it will further thier goals of bringing the U.S. governemt to it's knees, think I'm nuts? Read the mission statement of the ACLU, learn a little about ACORN and the SEIU,) expect CIVIL WAR [/crazy, drunken conservative rant.]

Yeah, I'm nuts. Shit happens. I didn't become a gunsmith just to amuse myself, and I'm not studying Information Security in college just because... The tipping point has come. Socialist (100 year plan) vs. Capitalalism. Choose a side.

Edit: Oh, hey, I just finished a liter of whisky... Not alone though, a few others had, uh, a shot or two out of it...
Edit2: Wow, I seem to have totally derailed this thread... My bad... Sorry... Ignore the drunken conservative nut-job... carry on...

Then you won't need to respond to this sentence from the article you linked:


My involvement in this discussion has been to emphasize that what we do know for sure is that climate change is real and that man-made emissions are a part of the equation. What we do not know for sure muddies the waters significantly. We don't know for sure how much of an effect man-made emissions is having, or even exactly how much of what gases we're emitting. The oceans act as a giant carbon sink, but we don't know what the limit is or if the absorption of carbon will slow down as the ocean saturates. We don't know for sure what effect all this carbon will have on ocean chemistry. We do suspect that a whole lot of small sea animals with shells are probably going to go extinct because the higher amount of Calcium Carbonate is dissolving their shells. We don't know if the upper layers of the oceans are going to warm just enough to start melting the huge reservoir of methane trapped in water ice in continental shelves all over the world. See this for more. Just for reference, a positive feedback loop of methane release from these deposits is the prime suspect in a massive warming episode 56 million years ago. We're talking crocodiles and palm trees in Greenland.

My point is that even though there is a lot of uncertainty, we know that climate shifts are going on all the time and have, in the past, happened extremely abruptly due to positive feedback loops in natural processes. I am not a chicken little on this topic, but it burns me when people deny anything is happening at all or cling to the absolute minimalist range of the possible consequences. We would all be better served if we picked a scenario more towards the middle of the range of possible outcomes and tried to create incentives for free-market solutions that do not cripple our economy. Speaking of which, it also burns me when people take the position that doing anything at all will destroy our economy.

Meanwhile, the common excuse to do nothing at all is that the developing world is polluting willy-nilly. True enough for the last fifteen years or so and will be true for some time to come. On the other hand, China is realizing the impact pollution is having on its own people (as we did in the 1960s and '70s) and are doing something about it. As fast as they're building coal-fired power plants, they are also embarking on a huge wind power initiative. Several of you keep tossing around the phrase "national interest" but that is a term that is subject to change for any country. China apparently thinks it's in their best interest to build coal power for the short term while investing massively in renewable energy for the longer term. What are we doing?

In SR, the Awakening seems to have short-circuited the warming trend. Huge ecological changes like massive magical reforestation in the Amazon and Central Africa, coupled with massive depopulation due to the VITAS plagues did for emissions control what politics could probably never do. We're expected to have 9.5 billion by 2050. What does the SR world have in 2072? 6 billion? Less?

One person is not going to make up 61.6MB of text data. That -would- have to be a conspiracy of NUMEROUS people making up data just to be able to acquire that much.

One doesn't even need raw numbers to make stolen data valuable. The value in this group of email, that I've read, isn't about any record of fudging numbers, interesting but not so much. It's in the emails where the individuals talk about those who are in opposition to them. They give an insight into how these people think which tarnishes their own reputability when it comes to the data they are presenting. The behavior they discussed is really no different than the way the Church treated Galileo by ostracizing him and attempting to condemn him because he expressed views that didn't conform with their world view.

Generally speaking people are more reserved about how the present themselves based on how public the medium is. People generally hold emails to be secure and private (usually erroneous) which leads to them being far more honest to their character. Forums on the other hand are significantly more public so many more people with be far more reserved about their opinions and stances.

When it comes to data stealing, emails contain a couple of valuable pieces data.

Description of processes.
Attached documents.
Raw data numbers.
Information on the character of employees.
Contacts (vendors/customers).

in the end it all looks like a bucket of crabs.

if one tries to climb out, the others will grab on and drag him back down...

Sorry for the confusion, my point was that currently the cost for green energy is more than the cost for other energy sources.

SEIU-Service employee industry union??

one start to wonder how much thats related to economies of scale, and also incumbent industries...

Semerkhet, when the rest of the world plays by EXACTLY the same rules (and I mean EXACTLY the same... no fudge factor, no loopholes, no ANYTHING) that the US is going to play under then come talk to me about Global Climate change. Until then it's just a scheme to get money from the US. I'm all for a clean Earth, but if the US has to take it in the ass so somebody else can make a buck... nope. No thank you.



Service Employee International Union

Quite a bit-there is also the effect of once you start building mass amounts of the stuff, you'll get better at it. There is also the start up cost of switching from the one technology to the other.


Using a coal electric plant and a windfarm as an example: You will still be using the coal plant while you install the new wind farm. You then need to account for the costs associated with delivering this power, as wind has to be from specific areas, that are not typically the same as the coal plant. Of course all this has to be built. Land has to be cleared and other infrastructure needs to be taken care of.


Think we've derailed the topic enough?? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

No, we haven't gotten around to antropomorphic cat girls yet.

huh? i thought those only came after the dicoated ally spirits.

*goes digging for the show schedule*

Your positions are contradictory. You can't be "all for a clean Earth" and yet set the bar for our nation to act to achieve that goal so high that it's effectively unreachable. You will never get 195 countries to agree on anything, much less something important. An earlier poster used a great analogy with WWII. I'll go a bit further. Post-WWII, the United States took on a huge and disproportionate share of the financial and military burden to defend the NATO alliance and fund the Marshall Plan redevelop and rebuild Europe. Between 1945 and 1952 the United States spent $650 billion in 2009 dollars (inflated via the nominal GDP method) on rebuilding Europe. The long-term results of this totally unfair financial outlay are generally agreed to have been positive and in the national interest of the United States. Did we wait to act until the rest of the NATO alliance was contributing exactly the same amount of money to the common defense? Of course not. The "do-nothing" crowd always insists that doing anything will bring economic ruin, never considering the potentially huge benefits of developing this technology ourselves rather than letting another country, like China, do it first.

Part of the problem with the climate change debate is this pervasive perception that if you don't agree with the global warming alarmists then you must not care about the environment. This is a common approach progressives use- take an idea that everyone agrees with in principle (like a cleaner environment or universal heathcare) and subvert it to advance a similar-appearing but different political agenda or economic policy. Then when people disagree it must be because they are shills for the rich corporate polluters or because we want old ladies to die in the street without healthcare. We are told that denying global warming is tantamount to believing the Earth is flat or denying the Holocaust. It basically just sets up one great big reductio ad Hitlerum argument so any opposition can be discounted as irrelevant. I see this nicely illustrated in this very thread. Well for the record, one of my issues with climate change alarmism is that it takes the emphasis off some very real environmental issues and posits that we should spend huge amounts of money and resources worrying about something like CO2 which may or may not even be problem.

No no it comes after the Dancing Platypii.

*Points to the schedule*

...and before the Drop bears.

I have to ask, since you didn't quote. Are you referring to my stated position or that of other posters in this topic? Because I agree with you that there are fanatic partisans on both sides of the issue that we would be better off without. As much as one can self-judge, I place myself as about a 65 on a scale of 0 = "Climate change is a hoax and any measures to combat it are a conspiracy to destroy America" and 100 = "Run! The climate apocalypse is nigh!"

actually, i'm finding this discussion to be very informative.

contributing briefly to the coal versus wind power hypothetical; Nuclear is currently a third rail in green-energy discussion; it shouldn't be.

Fission would be significantly more efficient in this nation if we did any sort of widescale civilian reprocessing effort (France would be a good guide here.) Fission* can pretty much substitute in place for any base load coal, natural gas, or oil power plant, transitioning the existing plant to cover the new running load slot that you would be building a plant for. (solar can do this too below about the 42nd parallel depending on average cloud cover.) The issue with this plan currently is DOE guidelines concerning the standards for requalifying existing plants for new purposes - it is literally cheaper to build a new plant than to re-purpose an existing one because the standards are higher for a retrofit than a new plant... (illogical? yes. byproduct of 1970's pollution scares? yes.) when you include the wrinkle that solar and nuclear fission plants don't meet the online-offline cycle time requirements for running load plants and you encounter a nasty catch-22.


Geo-Energy (Wind, Thermal, Wave, Solar) would be significantly more attractive if we transitioned to a High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) energy grid, this would be an expensive retrofit in the short term, but the grid that exists today needs to be replaced within the next twenty years or we'll be experiencing rolling brown-outs pretty much everywhere (as opposed to just in CA) as demand starts to exceed the maximum load the distribution stations can maintain. We *happen* to have several hundred billion allocated for (re)building federal infrastructure, I propose that an HVDC distribution system would be a better investment for a portion of those funds than adding even more highways to the interstate system.


*4th generation 100MW fission plants, even in meltdown scenarios, release less radiation than a typical clean-scrub stack 100MW coal plant over a fifty year period (fifty years being the standard operating envelope for a baseline powerplant without refit.) a meltdown scenario in a 4th generation plant results in an olympic swimming pool of heavy water and some melted lead casements. the heavy water can be reclaimed for military and/or scientific research purposes, or to harvest Deuterium for fusion research.

Jimmy Carter, the gift that just keeps on giving...

If someone comes up with efficient ways to store huge amounts of power for hours that helps a whole lot. Along with more efficient (lower losses - longer range) power transmission. The main issue with the current energy grid under current loads is that you can't effectively handle the peak loads that comes along a few times a year and a major base-load station going off-line on the wrong day is a disaster.

But long term, electric cars are going to require significantly more power production and that is a base load that you will see every night, Fusion is still 20 years away, just like it was in 1960, so that leaves coal, natural gas or nuclear. Or freezing in the dark, which is always an option.

Drop Bears.... DROP ATTACK!

A lot of people bring up the U235 shortage as a reason to not use fission. It's completely pointless though since they're essentially operating in the 1st generation power plant mentality. U238 is far more plentiful, I think estimated run around 150x as much U238 than U235. Later generation reactors are capable of using plutonium, thorium, and other fissionable materials.

The one thing I'm not certain of is how easy it is to increase the energy output of a nuclear power plant. That's one of the big advantages to coal plants. Let's say they have four furnaces that each equate to a smoke stack. The base load utilizes 2 of those furnaces and it's a fairly simple matter to turn on a 3rd or even 4th furnace to increase output. You really don't have that capability with wind or solar (unless your only taking power from 1/2 your panels). You can't just "flip a switch" and start increasing output.

Maybe I'm missing something. Are you saying that a coal plant having four furnaces could run only 2 until more are needed? I get that it takes longer to fire up a nuclear reactor, but I don't see how this is better than a solar plant capable of producing four coal furnaces worth of electricity.

With power plants you don't want to run at 100% output all the time. I believe it's around 50-75% of capacity is where you want to be. Also, the coal power plant will consume significantly less acreage than a solar plant that has the same output.

Using my coal example with four furnaces. If you need to do maintenance on the #1 furnace, you bring the #3 online then shut down the #1 and perform your maintenance. Or if the #2 furnace has a failure, you bring up the #4 furnace. It's the ability to minimize the impact of a failure at the generator. You can do the same thing with hydro, the damn always lets pass the same volume of water. This volume of water is always equal to or greater than the total volume that can pass through the turbines, though not all the turbines will have water passing through them.

Both of these plant designs allow for more controlled output, better ability to perform maintenance, and can easily increase output when needed. What you probably don't realize is that the hungriest power consumers are also less tolerant to interruptions (manufacturing and computer equipment). Power interruption can cause significant damage to electrical motors and computing equipment. Both these things require DC current, not AC, and the inverters and power supplies that convert from AC to DC are already violent as it is. In another fashion, interrupting the power of the devices too often will degrade the lifespan of the machines, cause the machines to require more maintenance, and in general increase the costs of operation for the electrical consumers.

Now wind obviously is very difficult if not impossible to control how many of the windmills are giving power to the grid. With solar, I suspect you could cut off a grid of panels from contributing. The problem with these, for industry and computing, is that they are entirely reliant on uncontrollable factors to produce electricity. This is a bad thing if you want to ensure that you are delivering power reliably to your customers that depend on reliable power.

The usefulness of alternative energy sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are highly variable and depend on geography, population density, wind patterns, mean cloud cover, and on and on. There are going to be some places where wind power is well-matched to meet energy demand and many places it won't. Same thing goes for the other means of energy production. We won't be relying on solar in Wisconsin anytime soon.

A carbon tax would provide incentive for the market to develop alternative energy sources. A carbon tax does not pick winners and losers among the alternative energy competitors. You let the market and the local/regional factors determine which mix of energy production is the right one. As an added bonus, a carbon tax provides a revenue stream that could be used to reduce income taxes or reduce the deficit. Emissions trading is the method favored by the U.S. A quick Google will get you pros and cons of each.

Of course, I may just have exploded the heads of any die-hard anti-tax advocates here. To them I say, your dream of tiny government is unattainable, so you'd best aim your efforts at making government less wasteful and less intrusive instead.

I'm curious, you do realize that any excise tax is intruding upon the market and interfering with it? The market really hasn't been allowed to take its own course since the Great Depression. There's been regulations, taxes, tax breaks, and other governmental interference and intrusion that has the current US economy acting like a bastardized abomination of the free market. This is typically why I facepalm whenever someone points at some US economic factor and says, "See the free market fails."

I am fully aware that a carbon tax would be intruding on the market. I do not have a problem with regulating the market, though I prefer it be done in the least constraining fashion possible. Smith's "invisible hand" is insufficient to promote the general welfare without supervision. However, I am far from a socialist. My views are best aligned, though not identical, with those of the editorial board of The Economist. I look to that UK publication to find the mixture of social liberalism and just right-of-centre fiscal conservatism to best fit my needs.