I have an idea

[Twrecks]

Why not use the stimulus money to build new safe nuclear power plants to produce hydrogen gas for car fuel, and extra cheap/clean electricity for American homes and businesses?

After all, nuclear technology today is like 1000 times better than 10 years ago. France, India and even Iran are building NPP's.

But oh no, we have to burn oil or natural gas to make more juice. Why burn Hydrogen when all it does is give off water vapor? Why actually invest in our future when we can drive up our debt? Just make more battery operated cars that have an effective CO2 foot print bigger than a Humvee to make, and carry around toxic rare earth elements that can't biodegrade. Buy another big screen Asain TV and watch America hit double digit inflation while we continue to kill manufacturing.

Hey, our trade deficit is 800 billion, fix that asshats.
I'm going to become an astronomer just so I can find an uncharted black hole and name it "Bamas800billion"

 

[QUALTHWAR]

does someone need a hug?

 

[QUALTHWAR]

People usually don’t like change, so they resist. Companies have to figure a way to make as much or more money from the change. If they can’t, they have no incentive. Besides being responsible to their shareholders, the CEOs and people who make the decisions are usually making a butt-load of money and don’t want to rock the boat.

So lots of big companies may creep into a new venture slowly and back out of their norm slowly. Just like inertia, it takes some doing to get something going, or stop it once it gets going.

I worked at Sears as a kid and found out if they paid a buck for something, they marked it up to $1.99, almost double. A 5-dollar item would get marked up to 9.99 and they made about 5 bucks off the sale. If one person sells an item to 20 people each day and makes a buck off of each sale, they make 20 a day. Another person does the same but makes 5 bucks a day from each and they make 100 bucks each day.

Maybe energy costs are similar. Maybe oil has a big profit margin compared to nuclear power, etc. Maybe the company would make 100 each day from 20 people selling nuclear power compared to 500 each day from the same people if they sell energy from oil or coal.

 

[Twrecks]

If we keep consuming oil at the current rate, we'll bleed the planet dry in less than 50 years. Yea, go ahead and bury your head in a bucket of cash because your 60 and don't give a rat's a$$ what happens after you're dead!

Wouldn't be better to slow the rate, and save some crude for plastic bags, rubber tires, asphalt for raods, and the other million things we do with oil besides burn it for fuel?

Sure, big money, oil companies, don't want change. They'll really suck us dry when the REAL shortages start and gas prices go ballistic. But so will the cost of almost every consumer good we buy, they all have plastic bits and pieves in them, or rely on processes that use oil in one form or another.

Hey, it's going to be interesting, hopefully not in a Mad Max kind of way. But that would be cool too...

 

[QUALTHWAR]

Well, I’m confused. I’m not sure if you think I don’t care, or you’re saying big oil doesn’t care... or maybe both. If I gave you the impression that I don’t care, I’m sorry.

I saw the show Earth 2001 a couple weeks ago about the possible state of the earth if we continue on our present course. I watched it because I care. The sad part is it’s very possible that most people who watched the show were people who already have some idea what will happen if we don’t change and they care. Most people who don’t care probably didn’t watch the show and they are the ones who should be watching it so they might begin to change their minds about our planet.

I’ve known for many years that we’re going down the wrong road and have posted about it here. Probably 15 years ago, I was watching some college educational channel on TV and they showed a chart about the CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. Scientists started taking readings on the top of a mountain in Hawaii years ago. They talked about the escalation of greenhouse gases since we started burning lots of fossil fuels in the Industrial Revolution.

Any time after that when I heard politicians and others say there is no proof that burning fossil fuels is raising the temperature of the earth, I think back to that show and think why don’t they get their heads out their asses.

I don’t look at it so much as how many years of resources we have left, but rather how using those resources is destroying us. There’s a great cycle of ocean currents that start at the equator and go to the poles. Well, they go to the Arctic, for sure. The Gulf Stream helps deliver heat to the Arctic and as it gets closer it gets colder. Between a combination of water temp and salinity the current starts to sink at the pole and takes cold water with it. Over many years, the returning, cold water slowly creeps along the ocean floor to the equator. The cold conveyor water heats up on its journey and rises at the equator. When the water rises (wells up), it helps to cool the regions around the equator, because it’s not completely warmed up. Simultaneously, the warmer water heading up the Gulf Stream helps to moderate the northern regions. Hell, it helps to balance the entire global climate; helping the earth to become more comfortable and safer to live in.

Ice in a glass of water that melts does not raise the water level. But if the ice is fresh water and the glass contains salt water, the salty water gets diluted, obviously. If we keep heating up the planet from burning fossil fuels, we melt glaciers that dilute the ocean currents. When mountain ice caps and other regions of the earth melt snow, that further dilutes the ocean currents (and raises oceans levels). If we keep diluting the currents that head up north, there won’t be enough salinity to cause the water to sink and do the conveyor belt thing to the equator. The water doesn’t sink just because it gets colder, but also because it’s heavier from the salt.

If we stop that conveyor belt, we are in for a world of hurt. European countries will no longer have moderate temps. Regions will see temperature extremes, droughts, floods, and bad **** will start to happen. Hurricanes will get crazy powerful because the oceans waters that normally convey the warmer waters up north will cease to flow. People live closer to the oceans than ever before. All climate and people will be affected.

Then there’s another whammy! As snow melts it exposes darker earth beneath it, the sun rays are absorbed more into the earth as heat instead of being reflected. There goes even higher temps. Crap on a stick!

Hell yes, I care. I may not see these extremes, but my children and grandchildren may. We’ve taken some steps at the house to help such as replacing regular light bulbs with efficient florescent bulbs, and installing a low water volume toilet, and low-flow shower heads. We unplug stuff if we’re not using it, and turn other things off. I’ve also been thinking about trading my mini SUV in on a hybrid.

A little off subject, but if you’ve ever wondered why florescent bulbs are more efficient and don’t burn your hands like regular bulbs, here’s why. Florescent bulbs put out almost 4 times the light as a regular bulb with the same wattage because of the density of atoms. In a regular bulb, the atoms in the filament are all jammed together and most of the light they emit can’t escape. Emitted light ends up generating heat trying to escape as it hits other atoms. We don’t see heat; we see light. All that heat energy is wasted. Fluorescents bulbs, on the other hand, use electrodes to heat gas that is spread out. Since atoms in the gas aren’t jammed together, the light can easily get out without running into stuff. More light gets out, so they are more efficient. Less heat is generated, so less waste, and you can touch them with your hands.

You remember Three Mile Island? That event threw a big monkey wrench into nuclear power in the US. People got scared and lost confidence. In case some people don’t know what happened, we almost had a nuclear power plant meltdown. The nuclear pile actually did start to melt down, but we had containment shells that kept the radiation from escaping.

So what happened? People! That’s what happened. A water value went bad and the safety system that was engineered into the plant worked. It did what it was supposed to do in such an event. However, workers at the power plant got confused and started doing the wrongs things. If they would have left everything alone and allowed the engineering to do its job, the partial meltdown never would have happened. Same thing when flying in jets on airlines; most jets crash due to pilot error.

 

[Chrysaor]

Q, you've always got interesting info. I hadn't read that about the salinity and the reasoning on compact flourescents.

I do think the current economic climate is the perfect situation for investing in long term, clean energy solutions. And I wouldn't give up on Obama to succeed in promoting them, not just yet.

I read an interesting book recently, titled The Omnivore's Dilemma. It really helped me think about how corporations and the global market are intimately necessary in our daily lives. Specifically with this book, the food industry. But every industry which needs change has to have support within itself. It won't find the impetus from outside and conform to it, because there's no money in that, as Q said.

Anyway, the route you can take is to provide a more sustainable life for those in your household, doing the kinds of things he stated, making your energy usage more efficient mostly. But even this has a limited effect. Dick Cheney has said that, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." He's certainly not a pundit for the greenies, but there's some truth to what he said. Conservation at home, does little effort in a worldwide market.

I read an article that highlighted two different ways to make changes for sustainability. One, was from the thinktank at Ford, which decided to put a grass (read "green") roof on one of their plants in Rouge, Michigan. This amongst other superficially green measures was supposed to make this plant the flagship of green manufacturing sites. Well what Ford obviously should have done was invest in electric hybrid autos, and then they wouldn't be bankrupt.

Walmart on the other hand, after considering putting solar panels on the roofs of some stores, decided instead to mark down compact flourescents to lower than the incandecents, and also give them primo placement in the store. So now, they sell next to no incandescents, sell millions of efficient compact flourescents, and have helped in the extinction of an inefficient item. And to boot, they make plenty of money selling lightbulbs, while Ford has no future and their ****ing roof leaks.

All I'm saying is, it doesn't help to antagonize big business or government, it's impossible to effect global change without them. But on our own, you can pursue efficient energy use and organic food and hybrid cars, and whatever else makes you personally feel better. Just don't let yourself feel to comfortable, you won't save the world on your own.

 

[Cat Fuzz]

GREENY WEENYS!

 

[QUALTHWAR]

I realize that putting a florescent bulb in a bathroom light is like trying to raise sea level by pouring a bucket of water in it. But good things can come out of these small changes. People start talking about on forums like this one, or you mention to your friends that you did something conservative. This triggers some people to do the same and even start watching shows about improving our planet. Eventually, people are practicing conservation as a norm and not as a sideline.

These people teach their children these good habits and eventually more people start putting their foot down about excessive pollution and conservation and are emailing their congressmen that we need reform, and when enough people say we need a change, the congressman press for a change to keep their jobs.

It’s not just about conserving and using nuclear power to pollute the air less. We are pouring a huge amount of plastic into the environment. Some plastic can take hundreds of years to break down. I saw a show about this huge region in the oceans where the currents basically run around in a loop. Plastics that get caught up in the currents start breaking up into smaller pieces, but that’s not the same thing as disappearing completely. Scientists have taken water samples to see how much plankton is in these regions and discovered that the plankton is swimming around with all this plastic. It looked like there was as much plastic pieces in the water as there was plankton. Plankton is the start of the food chain, so I was a little concerned when I saw the show.

I just googled “plankton plastic pieces” and there are articles about it. This site http://www.acfnewsource.org/environment/plastic_plankton.html
says: Plastic in the North Pacific outnumbers zooplankton, causing concern for scientists.

 

[Chrysaor]

That is a scary article, kind of wonder if when DDT came out as destructive in the late 60's or whenever, if we just took the same attitude that created the problem and assumed we fixed it. By that I mean, we treat nature like a machine, and if we have weeds, we input a pesticide and kill them. So if DDT is bad, all we simply need do is remove it and it's fixed, but there's just so much more happening in an ecology. Plastic is coming from so many sources, how could you ever manage it?

I won't say personal efforts to conserve aren't useful, they create a grassroots impact that is fundamental. But word of mouth and teaching our children are pretty slow ways for effecting change, and most scientists say that we need to make significant changes by 2020 or 2050, or we're ****ed by 2100. I just worry it's too little too late.

I do find it one of the ultimate ironies, that we conservationists and promoters of sustainability can't even form up our sides evenly. Somehow there are groups of people who support energy efficiency and carbon emission standards, but don't support the use of wood for building because it hurts trees, and don't buy leather because it hurts animals. Yet they are perfectly sustainable materials. And I kind of wonder if this cultural blindness hurts the whole nuclear power thing, which is a highly viable alternative energy from what i hear.

We live in a world where free speech is taken for granted, but sometimes there are so many voices and opinions that accomplishing anything, getting any sort of message out is such a total flustercluck.

 

[QUALTHWAR]

I think what I was trying to say was the more people we get focused on saving the planet the better. A child could be 16 when the parents begin to practice good habits, and in 2 years that kid is old enough to vote and make a difference.

But it seems to me people are ok with something if it doesn’t change their direction and size of their wallet. I have 2 good examples of this.

The first one is we used to have state-mandated car inspections each year for safety. They had you roll your vehicle onto a machine and slam on the brakes to test them. Your horn, wipers, lights, etc. It was either that inspection or the next one I’ll tell you about that got canceled because the governor couldn’t get his car to pass. So, he changed the law; no more inspections.

The next inspection was for emissions, and that got canceled. Either because of the governor, or people complaining, or probably both. In both cases, it was causing people to take their cars to repair shops to get them to pass. They would lose work, or it would be a pain in the ass because they had to change their daily direction (habits) and get a ride, or a loaner car, or whatever.

I worked as an auto mechanic for over 20 years. People would bring their cars to us because they wouldn’t pass inspection. We had a 4-gas analyzer that could check the emissions. Other shops would bring us cars from their customers because they didn’t have an analyzer and couldn’t get the cars to pass.

I adjusted many cars so they could pass inspection. Then I’d bring them back to the shop and adjust them back to their inefficient state. For example, a car might fail inspection because it was running too rich (more gas than air ratio). We could do things like unplug a vacuum hose so the engine was sucking more air to balance out the extra fuel. Or adjust the timing, or both.

The funny thing was lots of times these cars could hardly run well enough to get them to the inspection station. We’d drive them down there ourselves. We’d get them passed then set everything back to the way it was and the car ran ok again, but the machine showed it was polluting too much.

The problem was the cars usually needed repairs that people couldn’t afford. And we couldn’t leave the cars adjusted where they didn’t pollute much because they were dangerous. They would cough and backfire and couldn’t get out of their own way. The people were on fixed incomes, or single moms, or transvestites who spent an inordinate amount of money on woman’s shoes. You know, people just like you and me.

Anyway, no more emissions. People said the hell with this and the inspection stations closed. Single moms were happy, transvestites were happy, governors were happy, and shop owners lost income with less people coming in and still had to pay on the 4-gas analyzer for 3 years that cost them 4 thousand dollars; even though it was mostly collecting dust. That meant shop owner couldn’t give out Christmas bonuses so guys like you and me could buy lady’s shoes. Cruel, cruel world.

 

[Chrysaor]

Maybe this world doesn't need lady's shoes.

For myself, it's a matter of economics, I don't want anything I can't maintain myself. I don't know everything, so I don't own everything. Don't know **** about cars, so I don't own one. Perhaps specialization has gotten out of hand in society. Think about all that wealth that it takes to move and change a system that doesn't work, if that wealth were spent on fewer things that people themselves actually needed and could maintain themselves, it would be a more fluid thing, we could actually see some change.

The problem is that humans are completely incapable of recognizing when they have "enough". It's always more more, bigger, faster, stronger.

 

[Cat Fuzz]

It's pretty much impossible to fake a car through emissions testing in this state. Especially 96 and up model years. They don't even sniff the tailpipe anymore on 96 and newer cars. They just plug into the computer and it tells them everything they need to know. Any sensor that is even slightly out of spec is going show up.

The stupid part is the waiver limit. If you spend $150 and the car still won't pass, you can get a waiver. Replacing a single O2 sensor can cost that much. Then, the shops around here have a special "$150 emissions inspection" where they don't fix anything, they just find out what is wrong and then you have your waiver.

 

[Twrecks]

I just donated my 91 accord wagon cause it wouldn't smog. Case was warped at 225,000 miles and it would cost too much to fix, or replace the engine (already had the head milled for $1100 and still burnt a quart of oil every 300 miles). Plus the AC was dead and you can't get the old refrigerant locally anymore, power steering leaked like a sieve, power windows were shot and fell down all the time, tires were bald, door and window gaskets torn/missing, paint flaking or showing primer, and the freakin radio didn't work anymore! Funny thing is it still got over 20 MPG and it was over 18 years old.

I really want to buy American to replace it as I need a commuter car now. Jusy really pissed off at US car mfg's for letting their management and unions ef'em up so badly that they've shock waved the industry. I don't feel like rewarding or supporting greedy idiots, so am feeling less reluctant to buy an Asian import and push our trade deficit further into the red...

 

[Cat Fuzz]

Buy a nice used S-Series Saturn. 2002 or older. That's before GM took total control of Saturn and shut down Spring Hill. I've had three Saturns that were all great cars and all had over 200K miles. I got 30mpg CITY in my last one. It had 252,000 miles on the clock.

 

[QUALTHWAR]

saturns look like they would get terrible gas mileage

 

[Chrysaor]

Yeah, but isn't buying from Saturn also increasing our trade deficit?

I just don't understand your logic, Oh Liberal One.

 

[Cat Fuzz]

Yeah, but isn't buying from Saturn also increasing our trade deficit?

I just don't understand your logic, Oh Liberal One.

How do you figure?

 

[Cat Fuzz]

saturns look like they would get terrible gas mileage

That's not a real Saturn. That's a GM platform car. Real Saturns don't share a platform with any other car.

 

[Chrysaor]

I'm just saying, if we import cars all the way from Saturn, look at how much fossil fuel does it takes to get them here? And from what I've heard the people on Saturn don't much drive American cars. Maybe a Chevy Nova here and there, but that's it. If we can't buy American, we should atleast buy Earthling.

 

[Cat Fuzz]

Saturn doesn't make Saturns. They make Earths. They're an SUV type thing.