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Post by jimcripwell on Dec 23, 2008 12:41:18 GMT
To add to my thoughts. One of the advantages of cold winters is that many invading species of flora and fauna cannot survive in the cold weather. In recent years, the mountain pine beetle has devestated the forests of western Canada, due to the winters being too warm. There was thought that this pest could track through the boreal forests, and move east. We obviously wont know until next spring, but I gather the chances are that this winter will wipe out this pest.
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Post by donmartin on Dec 25, 2008 0:16:08 GMT
Acolyte: Yes
Have a good Christmas
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Post by Acolyte on Dec 25, 2008 3:11:45 GMT
Acolyte: Yes Have a good Christmas *grins* Oh, I am... *wonders which question he really answered...*
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Post by twawki on Dec 27, 2008 7:13:54 GMT
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Post by twawki on Dec 27, 2008 11:44:56 GMT
As the world cools most carbon clean technologies are rendered useless; antigreen.blogspot.com/"Old Man Winter, it turns out, is no friend of renewable energy. This time of year, wind turbine blades ice up, biodiesel congeals in tanks and solar panels produce less power because there is not as much sun. And perhaps most irritating to the people who own them, the panels become covered with snow, rendering them useless even in bright winter sunshine. So in regions where homeowners have long rolled their eyes at shoveling driveways, add another cold-weather chore: cleaning off the solar panels."
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Post by pidgey on Dec 27, 2008 17:25:10 GMT
I've been reading some interesting books on Peak Oil by Kenneth Deffeyes (also an Okie, so you can trust him at least) and came upon a curious fact: Of all the "enhanced" recovery methods tried since the '80s to recover more of the Original Oil In Place (OOIP) that didn't come up with primary extraction methods, CO2 was the big winner. It appears that CO2 is very soluble in oil and "inflates" the droplets still in the rock making it easier to push them through to the wellbore.
Can you say... "carbon sequestration"?
Gosh... does anyone think that Al Gore's trying to push this whole agenda to get the US taxpayer to make the big investment so that he can reap some profits out of the energy business?
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Post by ron on Dec 28, 2008 2:21:50 GMT
Apparently you are just going to ignore the offense taken to your remark, Pidgey?
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Post by kiwistonewall on Dec 28, 2008 3:30:52 GMT
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Post by pidgey on Dec 28, 2008 14:31:35 GMT
Apparently you are just going to ignore the offense taken to your remark, Pidgey? It's the holidays... I haven't had the chance to get on here enough to read everything. Dang it! Do I need to read back a little bit?
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Post by pidgey on Dec 28, 2008 16:12:00 GMT
Oh, now I see. Hadn't read all that afterwards, sorry! Listen, Ron, I'm a person who has an awful lot of hands-on experience with process controls and am used to thinking in systems and system failures. What all of us would like to believe is that as the availability and relative inexpensiveness of oil declines that we'll be able to scale up alternative energy sources quickly enough to only experience a moderate amount of pain to our lifestyles. I don't believe that at all. I think very strongly that oil production is going to go downhill way too quickly for us to deal with effectively in an effort to maintain our lifestyles. Part of this will happen because of the proven tendency on the part of nation-states to want to hoard the energy or attempt to maintain their supply lines at all costs: www.theoildrum.com/node/3017There already isn't enough spare energy to complete a lot of the projects that you're talking about without the bulk of the population literally "going without" to the tune of way more than they're going to be willing to do. Our current industrialized civilization hasn't been here before--where there will be less energy tomorrow than there is today. Allow me to make a new twist on an old phrase: Just because one's a doomsayer doesn't mean that doomsday isn't coming. My point with the Hitler thing had absolutely no intent of personal attack on you whatsoever. I was more pointing to the idea that when a populus is in (energy) trouble, the historical trend is to make a mess of it. Politicians are usually in it for their own good and power, and the further removed they are from true understanding of the dynamics involved, the bigger messes they tend to make. Registered voters do not take well to reductions in lifestyles and the more negative the slope, the worse they take it. They usually vote in somebody who will tell them what they want to hear and then reap the inevitable results. I know it's not a bright and cheerful Star Trek vision of the future, but it happens to be mine. It is generally the stated intention of the doomers to save as many as possible by way of education of truly sustainable lifestyles, which, by the way, tend to mirror Little House on the Prairie more than Star Trek.
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Post by jorgekafkazar on Dec 28, 2008 20:08:45 GMT
[trimming] "Amen I don't know that it was the same environmentalists, but they were a coalition of environmentalists and NIMBYs that slowed and nearly killed Seabrook. That's my point, by the way -- you can expect each and every nuke to undergo the same and that's one major reason none have been built since by the private sector. It offers a playbook for the opposition and nothing but despair for the builder." [trimmed] Basically, you may be right. In order to do nuclear plants, new legislation would be required that would minimize obstructionism. Yes, let's have some of the SciAmer article. I find their estimated cost low by orders of magnitude. But let's take a peek at it. www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan"They place a huge bet on PV and that expands the required land area by a factor of three, and also requires a technology that needs replacing every 40(?) years, maybe a bit non-pragmatic if you ask me, but it does create an industry, and hey -- who knows? Perhaps grand breakthroughs might occur in PV technology. Maybe we're missing the boat completely? How about a layer of PV somehow within a heat concentrator? Just a crazy thought -- I know PVs don't work very efficiently in the heat, but if we could split some of the photons off and keep the longer wave energies... I need to go study up on the composition of the sun's energy at ground level. " Well, thanks for putting up the link. I read as much of the article as I could handle. BTW, their figure was $420 billion, not $450 billion, BUT that was just subsidy money, not the total installed cost. (For a P.O.O.M.A. number, I still figure a trillion dollars--not cost effective) The article is not very good, to say the least. The solar industry insider authors toss numbers around in an "all ya gotta do is" way, with minimal real-world analysis, heavy on the propaganda: "Solar energy’s potential is off the chart." Oy. Yeah, it's off the chart; it's below the frogging abscissa! "Point is we don't need to have such a detailed Grand Plan, just a general direction with short term plans to power the southwest and a sure vision to power the country, and monies to fund research into the distribution backbone and a bunch of competing harvesting technologies with the dangle of big bux for the winners which has been missing from incentivizing development of solar technologies." Hmm. I generally agree with you, if those short term plans are based on solid economics and rational science. Distribution research might be minimal, though I've recently seen an interesting new maintenance method. Small potatoes, though, compared to fusion research. "Anyway, I know I sound like a zealot about it...[trimmed]" Not compared to some people! I name no names...
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Post by ron on Dec 29, 2008 1:44:52 GMT
Yeah, I was disappointed a little by the SA article, but very excited to see my thoughts in it at all, and in a very similar shape. That magazine used to be over my head once upon a time....
I do disagree that the Solar plan has to be within rational financial policy, but I do agree it can't be totally out of whack. I don't think that it is, but then again it would be a government-involved project.
The thing is, much like Reaganomics where one hopes to grow the economy out of deficit spending (which might have worked in an ideal world), the solar plant gets more and more cost effective over time assuming "raw" energy prices continue to climb, and definitely if one assumes that Fossil Fuel Taxes will be imposed. Building now with "cheap" energy prices seems prudent. Nukes maybe not so much due to higher ongoing maintenance costs, but ya know, I don't know what those costs are/will be for either nuke or large scale solar.
Building a safe total fuel-consuming Nuke next week might be good too, but it ain't happening anytime soon.
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Post by trbixler on Dec 29, 2008 3:20:56 GMT
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Post by pidgey on Dec 29, 2008 4:50:19 GMT
Not really an energy crisis so much as a liquid fuels crisis.
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bd
New Member
Posts: 11
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Post by bd on Dec 29, 2008 10:39:09 GMT
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