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-Troika- posted:Apparently the EPA has been heavily fining fuel companies for not using biofuels that... don't actually exist What a load of poo poo. Not only does cellulosic ethanol exist, but it's being produced in the US right now. Unless by "doesn't exist" they mean "not enough of it produced", in which case the fines are entirely appropriate since the oil industry has the capacity to remedy the problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol
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Jul 10, 2012 05:19
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-Troika- posted:Apparently the EPA has been heavily fining fuel companies for not using biofuels that... don't actually exist
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Jul 10, 2012 05:46
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ductonius posted:What a load of poo poo. Not only does cellulosic ethanol exist, but it's being produced in the US right now. Unless by "doesn't exist" they mean "not enough of it produced", in which case the fines are entirely appropriate since the oil industry has the capacity to remedy the problem. Your own link proves that there is no way to meet the amount of fuel that the EPA wants. They just picked an arbitary number and expected plants to magically pop into existence.
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Jul 10, 2012 07:10
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I did a little bit of my studies in engineering in battery design for the hell of it, and one of the issues that rears its ugly head when talking about alternative fuels is energy density. On top of that, the fact that scientists are having problems with getting into nano-scale technology to store Hydrogen, although it has decent energy density, posits the fact it might be ruled out as an alternative fuel out of being impossible to store in smaller quantities. With that in mind, Lithium-air batteries might be able to get around some of this if we could work out the issue of cost for these devices. It might be worth going after subsidizing the industry if we're remotely interested in replacing gasoline in automotive with a battery that doesn't like to catch on fire.
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Jul 10, 2012 09:26
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-Troika- posted:Your own link proves that there is no way to meet the amount of fuel that the EPA wants. They just picked an arbitary number and expected plants to magically pop into existence. Abundant raw material for its creation and the ability to create it exists, it's just not currently as cost effective as paying the fines, seems like they're too low if anything. It cost approx. $120 a barrel to produce in 2006, and the price will go down faster if we incentivise research right? Strawman fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Jul 10, 2012 |
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Jul 10, 2012 12:56
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-Troika- posted:Your own link proves that there is no way to meet the amount of fuel that the EPA wants. They just picked an arbitary number and expected plants to magically pop into existence. It seems more like they expected the companies to do something well within their capability to conform to regulations instead of choosing to cynically flout them and treat the fines as a cost of doing business. Stupid of the EPA, probably, but not for the reasons you give.
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Jul 10, 2012 19:09
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-Troika- posted:Your own link proves that there is no way to meet the amount of fuel that the EPA wants. They just picked an arbitary number and expected plants to magically pop into existence.
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Jul 10, 2012 19:15
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Sounds like the dumbass argument floating around here is that the "power of the free (read: unregulated) market" is like bigfoot: You only see it when you're alone and have no way of recording empirical evidence of its existence. It's also OK to laugh at the stupid fucks who show up acting like it's real.
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Jul 10, 2012 19:58
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"The technology to do this works in labs" is not the same thing as "there are factories built to produce this stuff, and also distribution networks in place to make use of it".
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Jul 10, 2012 21:31
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-Troika- posted:"The technology to do this works in labs" is not the same thing as "there are factories built to produce this stuff, and also distribution networks in place to make use of it". Right and I'm guessing it would have cost them more than the 6.8 million (which is pennies to these companies) to comply so they just said gently caress it. Classic example of "Fine? FINE!" because the fines are so trivial to other costs of doing business. e: yep this is a law from 2007 that they basically just ignored. Doddery Meerkat fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Jul 10, 2012 |
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Jul 10, 2012 21:44
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I'm not the best at legal docs but if I'm reading the act correctly they planned for this: quote:‘‘(D) CELLULOSIC BIOFUEL.—(i) For any calendar year http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-110hr6enr/pdf/BILLS-110hr6enr.pdf It seems they either had to have production ready or expect to pay for credits if there was not enough available. Found this too on the credits: http://www.andrewskurth.com/media/article/1536_An%20Introduction%20To%20Cellulosic%20Biofuel%20Waiver%20Credits.pdf
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Jul 10, 2012 22:31
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-Troika- posted:"The technology to do this works in labs" is not the same thing as "there are factories built to produce this stuff, and also distribution networks in place to make use of it". "The technology exists end works in labs and could produce this substance on an industrial scale for $120 a barrel in 2006" is, however, equivalent to "this could be made for significantly less than $120 a barrel if the will to set up the infrastructure and research was there and the fines for non-compliance weren't so pathetically small". There's nothing preventing the airlines setting up manufacturing facilities themselves, and they'd save significant amounts of money by doing so, if they ever thought beyond the next quarter or government bailout. I'd honestly like to see your explanation of why they didn't just start manufacturing it themselves, if these fines were so absurd and excessive?
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Jul 10, 2012 23:15
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Honestly guys watch the King of the Hill Episode 13x02 - Earthy Girls are Easy. It describes the crisis quite well: alot of BS and distractions by Rich Old White Men, while nothing is ever done to address the real conflict (climate change).
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Jul 10, 2012 23:53
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-Troika- posted:Your own link proves that there is no way to meet the amount of fuel that the EPA wants. They just picked an arbitary number and expected plants to magically pop into existence. The only magical part of their thinking was to expect effort on the part of the petroleum producers. -Troika- posted:"The technology to do this works in labs" is not the same thing as "there are factories built to produce this stuff, and also distribution networks in place to make use of it". How about "the technology is in commercial production right now", because that's what we're talking about. A technology that's on the ground running as we speak. The problem is there's not enough capacity to go around, so what the petroleum companies have done in the last five years is throw up their hands and wail "If only we could have done something to save ourselves from these cruel fines! But alas, we have no experience producing and refining hydrocarbon fuels!"
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Jul 11, 2012 00:07
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The real conflict is so deep in the consumer culture, though, and climate change is just one readily-apparent irreconcilable issue with our effect on the environment. King of the Hill is fine though.
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Jul 11, 2012 00:07
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UP AND ADAM posted:The real conflict is so deep in the consumer culture, though, and climate change is just one readily-apparent irreconcilable issue with our effect on the environment. King of the Hill is fine though. If we switched the power grid to zero emission (nuclear + solar + misc), it would at least be some kind of economic driver for a little while. The idea of a mass catharsis and a major change in consumption patterns is more effective but less practical.
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Jul 11, 2012 00:19
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UP AND ADAM posted:The real conflict is so deep in the consumer culture, though, and climate change is just one readily-apparent irreconcilable issue with our effect on the environment. King of the Hill is fine though. This is it for me. Until we stop consuming everything like stoners in a Chinese buffet, it won't change. Just switching to zero emissions power sources will only affect that part of the equation. Still a big help, but not a solitary silver bullet.
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Jul 11, 2012 00:40
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Westernized, capitalist, hyper-consumerist culture has a massive amount of inertia going. I'd speculate that nearly all of us posting in here really don't have any functional clue of what life was like before the post-WW2 consumerist boom. Extrapolate that a bit and it means that you have multiple generations who don't know anything other than a consumerist culture. In the US, anyways, it's kind of like this: the whole ship is pointed directly at an iceberg, but the ship is now so large and unwieldy that you have to spin the captain's wheel like it's the loving big wheel on Price is Right to barely get the ship to move a tiny bit. There are two factions who are fighting bitterly for control of the ship, seesawing the captain's wheel back and forth endlessly, and the rest of the crew has become so polarized that the two factions have forgotten about any other goals but gaining control of the ship. I think it's pretty clear what's going to happen. We're going to hit the iceberg. Accepting that inevitability now will better prepare you for what's going to happen later (not that anyone could truly prepare for ecological collapse, but at least you won't be surprised).
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Jul 11, 2012 00:55
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It's been hypothesized that if the Titanic hit the iceberg head-on it might've survived. 
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Jul 11, 2012 01:00
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Also china has been using consumerism as a pacifier since t-square, don't expect that to stop. Without a massive global collapse of production there's really no way we aren't going straight off the cliff. There's simply no incentive to any one individual, company, or even country.
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Jul 11, 2012 01:04
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So my climate denier friend linked this poo poo as more "proof" that climate change isn't happening, normal cycles blah blah. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/10/global_warming_undermined_by_study_of_climate_change/ I believe this is the proper rebuttal. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22040-tree-rings-suggest-roman-world-was-warmer-than-thought.html Thoughts?
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Jul 11, 2012 01:12
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This is really evocative to me and I wanted to share it.quote:So do you think human existence is actually already collapsing? http://www.theecologist.org/News/ne...id_a_fifth.html I think this really gets to the meat of it. We're living in a fatally flawed narrative, one that is deeply damaging to ourselves and the world around us, and one that will ultimately prove unsatisfying to most people, if it's not already getting that way. We've got to come up with a new narrative. Hypothesizing about alternate fuel sources that allow us to keep consumerism is not a new narrative, it's just a naive attempt to give the old narrative a happy ending.
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Jul 11, 2012 02:02
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Your Sledgehammer posted:I think this really gets to the meat of it. We're living in a fatally flawed narrative, one that is deeply damaging to ourselves and the world around us, and one that will ultimately prove unsatisfying to most people, if it's not already getting that way. I think "narrative" or "story" is an overly subjective term to describe a problem that exists as a "social objectivity" (Yes it is a problem of subjective social relations between people but its very character as a problem encompassing all of society gives it an objective force). There have been plenty of "back to the earth" and "anti-consumerism" movements in the past, but no matter how convincing their new "story" is, they run up against the objective character of the system which co-opts them into meaningless bullshit like ethical consumerism or marginalizes them completely. As Marx wrote in Chapter 1 of Capital: "Karl Marx" posted:The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered. The point being that even if we have a critique of the system (A new "story") the collective force of society pressures us into carrying on in the same manner we did before. Even though I am a Marxist I still "effectively believe" in commodity fetishism when engaging in market relations (Which I am compelled socially-objectively to engage in). Even though I am an environmentalist I still "effectively believe" in the infinite plenty of consumer society when I turn on my computer in the morning expecting it to work, and continue to use it throughout the day. This is the inertia people have been referring to in this thread. It is always a case of "je sais bien, mais quand-même" or "I know very well, but nevertheless (I do it anyway)." MaterialConceptual fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Jul 11, 2012 |
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Jul 11, 2012 02:38
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-Troika- posted:"The technology to do this works in labs" is not the same thing as "there are factories built to produce this stuff, and also distribution networks in place to make use of it". Give it five years. The economic crash of 2008 was a big setback, a lot of the DoE loan guarantees fell through. But there's a pretty good deal of plants set for construction to break ground either this year or next, and the technology involved now is light-years beyond what we were working on in 2006. By then it will most likely be directly competitive with crude if RFS2 and Oil production credits stay at their current levels. Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Jul 11, 2012 |
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Jul 11, 2012 04:38
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It is not going to be directly competitive with crude anytime soon. Once the huge shale fields that are being discovered all over the US and Canada start being fully exploited, the US is going to be producing more oil than the entire Middle East and gas prices will drop like a rock.
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Jul 11, 2012 05:45
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That's the lovely part- my living room will underwater if those fields get exploited fully.
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Jul 11, 2012 06:09
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-Troika- posted:It is not going to be directly competitive with crude anytime soon. Once the huge shale fields that are being discovered all over the US and Canada start being fully exploited, the US is going to be producing more oil than the entire Middle East and gas prices will drop like a rock. I'm not 100% convinced it will be a flood on the market. If the natural gas boom taught the industry anything, it's that flushing the economy with cheap commodities will kill profit and possibly their companies if demand doesn't increase at the same sort of rate. I was working in the natural gas exploration industry at the of the big NG boom of 07-08 before I turned into the flaming loving hippie I am today, and that massive crash was a sight to behold from the inside.
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Jul 11, 2012 06:39
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With the discovery of these fields I'm 100% convinced we're never getting out of this mess.
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Jul 11, 2012 06:43
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That's very true- our top execs are saying things like "$80/bbl is a nice sustainable price point for us because when it bumps over $100 the economy goes to poo poo". Which is another reason we're not all that concerned about competition from natural gas.
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Jul 11, 2012 06:45
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Don't forget about the increased costs with unconventional oil reserves.Bastard Tetris posted:That's very true- our top execs are saying things like "$80/bbl is a nice sustainable price point for us because when it bumps over $100 the economy goes to poo poo". Which is another reason we're not all that concerned about competition from natural gas. The going philosophy that I saw at the time was that peak oil was inevitable by the end of 2010, which was a bet my former boss, his investors, and all other folks I knew in that industry at the time lost. Editing my old boss's personal blog on peak oil at the time was an exercise in dealing with hyperbole and hilarity, however. I'll look through my old computer's hard drive for any surviving BS from those days. I'm sure it's even more hilarious in hindsight than it was five years ago. Oil production hasn't gone up in several years based on the (possibly flawed) numbers I've glanced at, but these guys were way off in the immediate effects a drop in production would have on society.
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Jul 11, 2012 06:54
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Production hasn't gone up too much, but demand from emerging nations is skyrocketing- if you look at any of the world energy forecasts from any supermajor, you'll see that China and SE Asia are going to start using a shitload more energy for transportation. I know a lot of work is going into enhancing oil recovery from existing wells, since drilling new ones is getting more and more difficult. Deepwater drilling is amazingly expensive, especially when 20k+ PSI conditions are involved.
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Jul 11, 2012 07:07
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Bastard Tetris posted:Production hasn't gone up too much, but demand from emerging nations is skyrocketing- if you look at any of the world energy forecasts from any supermajor, you'll see that China and SE Asia are going to start using a shitload more energy for transportation. Not to mention hydraulic fracturing, which is happening for both gas and oil fields, but to a far lesser extent for oil. The price increase alone accounts for little more than salvage scraps unless it's an untapped well site. They still exist for crude oil, but the list of likely places has been dwindling rapidly over the past decades and especially over the last few years. If you can dig up the geological service data for your state on possible well sites compared to current wells, it's extremely sobering.
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Jul 11, 2012 07:34
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TheFuglyStik posted:hydraulic fracturing We're researching much more exotic stuff than that for EOR, but it feels like the point where we are expending more resources trying to squeeze an extra billion boe out of the earth than it's worth is rapidly approaching. Unfortunately we frequently can operate past that point, even though we shouldn't.
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Jul 11, 2012 08:12
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This article raises an interesting point. It's about LFTRs but nevermind that for now: http://www.onlinetes.com/tes0712-energy-solutions.aspxquote:It is noteworthy to point out that in 2011, 474 exaJoules of energy was used by the first world, or about 2 billion people – depending on how one defines the first world. This is equivalent to 449 quadrillion BTUs, representING all forms of energy combined (coal, oil, gas, nuclear, hydro, etc.). This is roughly equivalent to 15 billion tons of coal. If we wish to bring the other 5 billion people up to a first world standard of living, we would need to increase this energy production rate by three to five times, ignoring any advances in efficiency. If we wish to increase the standard of living beyond that of where the first world is today, bringing the energy per capita for everybody on the earth to twice that of the present level in the United States, we might need 10 times this rate of energy production. Achieving this with fossil fuels would be challenging to say the least. Even if one does not believe in climate change, consuming fossil fuels at 10 times the present rate should, at least, make one rethink that position. Regardless of our decisions, I think it is important to keep in mind that our solutions will need to be feasible for everyone and not just our own filthy rich selves if we hope to mitigate global emissions. Both renewables and nuclear suffer from fairly significant initial capital costs right now and this will need to be addressed before we can consider them viable replacements for fossil fuels. The biggest issue, I think, will be whether our power plants can produce the energies needed for cost-effective carbon neutral synthetic fuel production. Barring that we'll need some major breakthroughs in battery cost-effectiveness otherwise people will just keep using petroleum or coal as a feedstock for high-emission synthetic fuels.
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Jul 11, 2012 13:03
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The Entire Universe posted:Sounds like the dumbass argument floating around here is that the "power of the free (read: unregulated) market" is like bigfoot: You only see it when you're alone and have no way of recording empirical evidence of its existence. I'm going to have to tell you to go gently caress yourself because belief in Bigfoot or UFO's is much more rational than the any of the poo poo required to be a proponent of deregulation.
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Jul 11, 2012 14:20
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Balnakio posted:So my climate denier friend linked this poo poo as more "proof" that climate change isn't happening, normal cycles blah blah. The Register is basically a tech tabloid so expecting to get sensible articles about climate science from there is laughable. You're probably going to want to get your friend to explicitly say what he thinks that article is proving because I can't see how it is relevant in any way to modern climate change.
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Jul 11, 2012 23:05
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Chris Hedges posted:Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who question and challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster. Members of this intellectual and artistic class, who are usually not welcome in the stultifying halls of academia where mediocrity is triumphant, serve as prophets. They are dismissed, or labeled by the power elites as subversive, because they do not embrace collective self-worship. They force us to confront unexamined assumptions, ones that, if not challenged, lead to destruction. They expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They articulate the senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless growth, ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about the poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native Americans to the repression of working-class movements to the atrocities carried out in imperial wars to the assault on the ecosystem. They make us unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clichés we use to describe the nation—the land of the free, the greatest country on earth, the beacon of liberty—to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance. They offer the possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for transformation. I only included the first and last couple of paragraphs, but the entirety of this fantastic article can be found here. Hedges' insight applies to so much of what we're seeing right now, from economic instability to climate change. What it implies is a collective failure, but not the ones we like to commonly posit - a failure of governance, a moral failure of greedy corporatists, a failure of the unwashed masses to think or vote properly. On the contrary, Hedges exposes our failure as a failure of imagination. We've bought into the narrative of growth and progress so heavily that it neuters our ability to accept and understand reality. With most people, all of the grim realities of the ecological crisis get passed through a Westernized, rational-objective, growth-minded filter before the person even begins to think. I see it going on all the time, even in this thread. When that happens, the truth - that climate change represents a failure of the Western lifestyle - is rendered impotent. We've got to be willing to step out on a limb and imagine something new, or we'll never solve this problem. Don't get me wrong, either - I won't deny that greedy corporations and morally bankrupt governments have had a lot to do with climate change. The thing about those institutions, though, is that they only have the power that we allow them to have. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Jul 12, 2012 |
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Jul 12, 2012 01:28
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TACD posted:The Register is basically a tech tabloid so expecting to get sensible articles about climate science from there is laughable. You're probably going to want to get your friend to explicitly say what he thinks that article is proving because I can't see how it is relevant in any way to modern climate change. A conservative friend of mine posted the same story, only he used a link to Nature. He thinks that because this suggests that it was warmer in the Roman and Medieval periods, that "in layman's terms, global warming is bullshit". To my dumb non-scientist brain, this is a single study to add to the pile of many; we can't use it by itself to really draw a conclusion one way or the other, like my friend really wants to do, and it certainly doesn't invalidate other climate reconstructions or instrumental data. It's also funny to contrast his response to this paper with his comment from last week: "Finally, about claims “the science is settled” on global warming: “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”" (Quoting James Lovelock, and trying to suggest that since we can't know the truth, we don't have to do anything; my friend is a corporate lawyer, not a scientist.) Science can never be certain, but this time, this time it is certain, and all that global warming business is just a bunch of baloney.
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Jul 12, 2012 03:52
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dur posted:It's also funny to contrast his response to this paper with his comment from last week: "Finally, about claims “the science is settled” on global warming: “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”" (Quoting James Lovelock, and trying to suggest that since we can't know the truth, we don't have to do anything; my friend is a corporate lawyer, not a scientist.) Your friend is partially right - we can never 'prove' a thing to be true; in order to prove an observation of the universe is true, we must make an assertion that everything else that could explain this observation it is false. As the universe is infinite, we would have to prove an infinite number of possibilities are false towards that assertion - thus by logic, science cannot 'prove' something to exist, it can only disprove an already given assertation. That being said, what your friend is forgetting is that the methods of science are used to come up with a theory that stands the test of time until it can be disproven. One such tenemant is Occam's Razor - "The simplest of explanations is often the correct one (in summary)". All the other phenomena that are being observed, from ice core observations, satellite imaging, ocean pH values, lithosphere sampling, and so forth, can all be explained by the simplest phenomena of an increase in CO2 and other solar refracting gases. Yes, there could be another culprit as to why all these empirical observations are occuring - perhaps a giant space hamster is stuck in earth's core, and its farts are creating all these things at once. The problem is that it would take just about the same mountain of evidence to support an alternate theory as compared to the current, or the simplest one. Global temperatures, Ocean pH values and polar ice levels are linked to human-made emissions. It's a real bummer Carl Sagan isn't still around. He was such a jovial fellow, but man - his command of science and his sheer public charisma would cut denialists down to ribbons.
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Jul 12, 2012 05:13
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ErichZahn posted:I'm going to have to tell you to go gently caress yourself because belief in Bigfoot or UFO's is much more rational than the any of the poo poo required to be a proponent of deregulation. Well I guess unlike the bigfoot, we actually have experience saying deregulations a really loving bad idea. So I guess your right lol.
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Jul 12, 2012 07:57
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