Re: Retartded!!!!

On 7 May 2007 08:56:28 -0700, bpnjensen <bpnjensen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



Yes, that is certainly true at this time. So, is that a reason to
stick with it like glue? Eventually, we will have no choice but to
move beyond it - should we not be planning for that day?

Yeah. We should be drilling for oil here and mining coal.


?!?!?!? On the one hand, you grouse about solar energy having to use
toxic metals and use that as a reason not to pursue it - and then turn
around and say this?

Yeah, California has the toughest enviro laws in the world. They are
not economically sound. I brought up the toxice metals in reference
to solar power being so great.


Which is why their gas is so expensive. And guess what, Liberals have been in
charge there for decades.

Oh yeah - Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson - real
liberals.

Governers don't write laws. And when the houses of the state Senate
are damn near 2/3 liberals, Governors have little real power in CA.


Oh, no - we shouldn't value our drinking water. We should just let
those billion pounds of spent and leaking luxury electronic items wind
up in unlined landfills.

THere are common sense limits to place on things, which
evironmentalist wackos want no part of. Take MTBE. A molecule could
be found in water, so it has to be banned. Take DDT. Millions of
kids die every year in Africa because DDT may give a handful of them
cancer.

California always goes to teh extreme.


California is bordering on bankruptcy, and if it
weren't for the vast number of million and billionaires living there,
would already be bankrupt.

Our economy is still a hell of a lot bigger than yours, and we will
emerge from our present small dilemma.

Present small delimma? Are you kidding? The only reason you've even
improved is because you got a middle of the road Republican wtih some
small power in the State House. And Hollywood and Silicon Valley are
the only reason you haven't gone belly up. There are enough super
rich super liberals in those two places.


Excellent, they'll get a subsidy. You realize what a subsidy is,
don't you? It's the government paying so that a non-competitive
process can be competitive. The government forcing the people to use
something because they say so.

Subsidies come in many forms, and can be both direct and indirect.
Yeah, it's a good thing, too , that the oil industry and every other
major industry in this country gets those subsidies too, lest they go
under.

I don't recall getting a rebate when I bought my IC engine car, or if
I were to buy a Freon based AC unit. Or when I buy a gas powered
stove. What subsidies are you talking about? You mean like the ones
that corn growers and the evil ADM are getting for ethanol?




This is - what? Never heard of it.

Oh, so you're lying in this post. OK, now I understand.

What? What are you talking about? You just keep on saying spurious
crap and assuming that its true because it comes form your own mouth?
I haven't lied about a single thing yet.

I saw the announcements of these allegations on at least one major
news source - those are the ones I read. I'd have to go back and
check, but I will if you want me to. I don't read blogs, I don't read
the "Daily Kos" whatever that is.

I find it hard to believe a diehard lib like yourself doesn't know
what Daily Kos is (you seem to know it's a blog), but whatever. But,
what do you consider a major news source? One ran by devout liberals?
One that has news anchors that haven't voted for a Republican in their
life? One whose idea of equal time is 15 minutes of anti-war stories
followed by a 5 second soundbyte from Bush?


Zinc and Nickel? What the hell are you talking about? You need to
turn yourself in for carrying large quantities of heavy metals in you
pockets.

"Heavy" or not, zinc and nickel are considered to be toxic metals just
like many others. The heavy metals that you are apparently thinking
of aren't the only ones that have bad effects on living organisms.

Yeah, that's why people buy Skin Zinc and Cold-EEZE and why Centrum
has A to Zinc.

Well, I guess you're an engineer, not a toxicologist.

Regardless, I'm aware of the fact that everyone handles Zinc and
Nickel on a daily basis. Hardly the same can be said of truely bad
heavy metals.


Heavy Metals of major environmental concern are pretty much Lead,
Mercury, Cadmium, and Chromium. There are toxic compounds containing
damn near every element. Oxygen is toxic when it is part of Phosgene.

Yepp, and there are plenty of other "heavy metals" that do not have
significant toxic problems, and several elemental metals that are not
heavy (for example, s.g. less than 4.0) that DO present toxicity
issues for either humans or the environment. Nickel, for example,
being among them. This is not say that a piece of nickel in solid form
against your skin is going to affect you like mercury - but there is a
level of nickel in solution, not hard to achieve, that will cause
problems.

Yeah, it's in solution and is not just Nickel. As I said, Oxygen can
be toxic in many solutions. Sulfuric Acid is a solution containing
Oxygen. Heavy Metals are bad for you in their pure form.


I'd love to see your reference for these "gas and petroleum
*combustion* products" that have so many heavy metals in them. I
assume it will be from the same source as your other lines of ***.

If I handed you proof positive you'd call it ***. That's your way.
You ain't worth it.

Yep, as I said above, I now realize you are just lying.

I already told you about exhaust and the metals it contains from the
machinery it goes through. I don't know what else you want.

There are very small levels, not that they're spewing out like you
said. It's real easy to get most of something out of a solution. It
gets real tough beyond 99% or so. THere comes a time when you decide
do you A) want to make IC engine cars illegal because they give out
more than 0g of heavy metals or B) realize that really small amounts
aren't too bad, and set a very low, and economically obtainable level
of heavy metal emissions on IC engines. California likes to get close
to A, the rest of the country realizes B is pretty good when many
countries in the world aim for C) who gives a damn as long as we makes
things cheaper than the US.



If you take the act of producing energy by in-place facilities, my
argument is correct - however - The rest of this discussion has
basically already been had. I have no trouble going through all the
connections, large and small, that each form of energy has. I also
have no trouble understanding that many forms of energy have a way to
go before the benefits regularly outweight the deficits.

But on a relative scale, it is impossible to say that somehow
petroleum avoids the pitfalls of these other energy forms. The same
things you say about windpower or solar - that it takes energy and
resources and creates pollution at some level to operate and maintain
the equipment - is fully true of drilling, extracting and refining
oil.
On top of this, oil (along with wood and coal, other organic energy
sources) is the one energy source of this group that, in the process
of conversion, results in additional pollution.

No, they all do. Solar panels use heavy metals to be made, huge
windmills must be constructed to gather a small amount of wind power,
etc. You can't just ignore those things. It takes enormous capital
to get just a little bit of wind power. So, the captial per W of
energy is enormous. That capital means construction, it means getting
the windmills out to a remote location to be erected. All of this so
a few blades can rotate at a slow rate and make a small amount of
electricity. Multiply it by a thousand windmills, and you get a
decent amount of electricity, but not easily. Sure, once they're in
place, the energy is quite cheap, but God Himself doesn't make those
windmills appear on the top of a remote hill, you kow.


Ultimately, the whole equation of cradle-to-grave energy and resource
use and energy production and pollution must be factored, out to a
reasonable level. I am perfectly willing to accept the results of
this factoring at every point in time, and I would hope that you are
as well.

If it is purely a matter of $$$ that you apply to this, based on
efficiency of production at this moment in time, then you get no
argument from me. Oil wins hands down. As I have said before, there
are other considerations (for me anyway) besides how much it costs at
the pump.

ANd you are in a minority of about 1-2% of the population with that
viewpoint. Why on Earth should you have any sayso?


Ah, hyperbole - that last bastion of desperate conservative right-wing
dinosaurs. I know how expensive they are. I never suggested that
they were anywhere near a reasonable price point, or that their
efficiency currently lends itself to anything but experimental use.

A little hydrogen bomb - how quaint :-) You say this, of course, from
the perspective of a chem engineer, not a nuclear engineer or
physicist. By the way, and I am serious, would you expect a hydrogen
fuel cell to be more dangerously explosive than a gas tank? As a
corollary, could a hydrogen fuel cell be placed in the framework of a
car to make it no more explosive or expiosed than a gas tank? I
remember those 70's Pintos...

It takes very little Hydrogen in storage to create a massive explosive
source. Hydrogen is at least an order of magnitude more explosive
than gasoline. Add in the fact that gasoline is stored in a low
pressure tank. Properly designed, it would be a rare occassion for a
Hydrogen tank to blow, but it sure woudn't be pretty when it happened.
The cell is not the problem, it is the Hydrogen need for the cell.
Can you imagine a Hydrogen station where you go and buy Hydrogen?
Tthat's just scary. You're using a poorly designed 30 year old
vehicle to justify that Hydrogen is not an explosive concern?

And obviously, hydrogen bomb does not necessarily mean nuclear bomb.



Others, including combustion of fossil fuels and nuclear fission,
pollute. I believe that with real care, the problems with fission can
be minimized, but human error is still a problem. I would much rather
see the problems with fusion ironed out...but I'm not sure there is
any political will to really push toward this option.

Fission is most definitely the answer. Huge amounts of energy. But,
the environmentalists have soundly convinced the world that it is
super dangerous. It is, no question, but it for that danger, you get
very cheap energy. BUt in a country where you can't even build a new
refinery, I see no nuke plants anytime in my lifetime.

How would you solve the problems associated with fission? I am
serious; because, *at this point in time* it is the *only* source that
could replace or significantly augment fossil fuel.

There are two main issues with fission, the danger of making it, which
can be mitigated, but there always risk of meltdown, and of course
disposal. All of those things can be dealt with (espcially the
disposal with a large government storage area), but they will never
have the popular vote. Three mile island was a result of a minor
equipment failure and poor judgement. Chernobyl was a result of
Communism. A DCS system of today could mitigate all of that risk.
WOuld I want one less than 30 miles from my house? No. But I'm OK
with oil for now. A few hundred years from now, when oil starts
getting scarce, fission may be laughably easy and widespread. Hell,
even low-end Terminators come with 2 onboard fission fuel cells.


This isn't fair. I was in Pittsburgh several times back in the bad
old days, and the air quality truly sucked *every* time I was there.
It reeked, and you could feel your nostrils close up and your sinuses
start imploding. I could not imagine living with that crap every
day. Nowadays, we could probably burn coal - the keys are keeping the
furnaces clean-burning (which isn't that hard) and keeping the mines
from wrecking the landscape (which is a bit tougher).

But it can be done now. But our enviro laws make it such that it is
easier to mine ore, ship it to Japan for smelting, and then ship it
back here to be used. Thank you Algore and friends!



Getting past the seemingly endless stream of baseless insults - yes, I
do understand, and have for decades. The whole equation is the thing,
however, and we can talk all day about the fact that it takes energy
and resources to make energy, but is it more than what the system
produces? Numbers, please. That efficiency is final question for any
complete process - nobody expects a perpetual motion machine.

And solar panels are aroun 30% right now at best.


And I assert that one also has to factor in the costs of health and
environmental effects, which often get left out but which are being
considered more commonly in recent years.

Which is how the above steel example has become fact. We worry about
things that other countries work around and solve and deal with
reasonable risk.


BY calling [me] an engineer not a scientist, you don't have a leg to stand on.<

The funniest part of this is that you seriously think I am trying to
make a point with this statement :-D

Chemists are usually Chemical Engineers that can't make the grades
;^}.


*Of course* it takes energy to manufacture the panels and recover
materials - but it needn't be fossil fuel energy. And by the way,
does it take more energy to manufacture the panels and to recover the
cadmium/selenium/etc materials than the panel has produced over its
lifetime? If not, and I admit I do not know this (do you?) then solar
panels themselves, or wind, or water, of nuclear, could provide the
energy to make/recover the materials. It need not be petroleum.

So you don't know the answer, but you know I'm wrong, and said my
comments have discredited my education. OK, gotcha.

Once again, baseless assumptions. I never said you were wrong, and
you know it. Frankly admitting I do not know the full details, I ask
you a question that you cannot answer, and you, in your demgoguery,
turn it around and make it sound like you've got me?

I posted a few great references of the horrible economics of solar
panels in another thread today.


Rastus O'Ginga


Winner of the 2nd Annual C. Montgomery Burns Award for
Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.


"What an awful dream, 1s and 0s everywhere... I thought I saw a 2." - Bender


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