Re: Who was it said the planet was cooling?

TOG@Toil wrote:
On 10 Dec, 14:21, "J. Clarke" <jclarke.use...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
TOG@Toil wrote:
On 10 Dec, 04:36, "don (Calgary)" <hd.f...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
While I agree with most of what you are saying Kyoto had nothing to
do with taxing the US. It was all about reducing GG production.
Granted reducing GG production to 6% below 1990 levels would have a
life changing impact on citizens of your country, it was not about
direct taxation.

If you want people to change their habits, hitting them in their
wallets is a time-proven means of doing that[1].

If you can think of another way of getting people to cut back on
their energy consumption and thus CO2 emissions (the two are
virtually inseparable), we'd like to hear it. Simply saying: "Think
of the planet!" won't work for most.

[1] Average traffic speeds in the UK fell when oil, and thus petrol,
prices peaked last year. People drove more slowly to save fuel.
Interesting.


As for your notion that energy consumption and CO2 emissions are
"inseperable", that's just plain bullshit. Nuclear emits no CO2.

I really meant 'present' means of energy.

It _is_ a "present means of energy". The first power reactor went online
well over half a century ago.

I know nuclear emits no CO2
(unless you count the emissions involved in mining the uranium,
building the plant, etc etc) but it really doesn't produce a
significant amount of the world's power.

Nuclear counts for 6 percent of the total energy production and 16 percent
of the electric power production. In the UK it provides about 20 percent of
the electric power, in Japan more than a third.

Electrolytic hydrogen produced from nuclear sources emits no CO2.
Gasoline synthesized from electrolytic hydrogen and atmospheric CO2
is completely carbon-neutral.

Can all this be done on a big enough scale, at a resonable cost?
Interested here.

Those are the hard questions. Here's a study of making methanol that way
(note the typical greenie approach--he's going to get the CO2 from coal
fired power plants and then use nuclear to unburn it instead of just
building a nuclear plant to replace the coal fired plant).
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V3F-47N7D97-F&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1130807584&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=b8f0c42bf32e6585e70a43fb887f46ac
or http://tinyurl.com/yjwwz8k (note--that's the abstract--the article will
cost you 30 bucks unless you have access via a library or the like--I really
wish that these scientific journals would get over themselves and quit
charging more per article than a paper copy of the entire journal issue).

Once you have methanol there's a catalytic process for making gasoline out
of it that shouldn't cost any more than refining crude does now.

How the whole thing would scale I have no real idea. I can say with some
confidence that synthetic gasoline from electrolytic hydrogen is going to
cost more than gasoline from fossil oil, but how much more your guess is as
good as mine.

I wouldn't see synthetic gasoline as a long term solution though--fuel cell
electrics will run on the hydrogen directly at higher efficiency, so they
would be the preferred way to go in the long run, but the synthetic gasoline
would be useful as a transition fuel that can be distributed with the
existing infrastructure and on which existing vehicles would be able to run,
with the high cost providing an incentive to retire vehicles that run on it
in favor of fuel cells vehicles.

Energy consumption is linked to CO2 right now because the
greenies pulled down the nuclear power industry to "save the
planet". Oops.

Agreed. Silly buggers.

<snip>

There should be no free ride for the Third World--if they want to
grow their economies they built nuclear, or solar, wind, geothermal,
and all the other happy horeshit the greenies say is so practical,
or they buy power from someone else who produces it by those means,
or they just plain stay poor for a while--they've been poor since
Jesus was a midshipman so why do they all of a sudden have to be
rich _now_? And yeah, this sucks for their people, but if this is
the dire, world-threatening emergency that the greenies make it out
to be then the alternative is that they all die in the global
meltdown.

This is facile, cynical, politically incorrect, inflammatory, and I
agree 100%.

I'm sorry, but if you think that Kyoto was about "saving the planet"
and not just politics as usual then I have a nice bridge here that
you might be interested in.

I don't, actually, and haven't mentioned Kyoto at all.

I thought you were agreeing with Don on Kyoto. My mistake.

.

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