Letters to the Editor
Etrigone
Published Letters: 154 Editor's Choice: 31
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@ MacK, or more one line & attitude...
[Read the article: Winds of change]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]>Environmentalists are frequently madly doctrinal Luddites, who seem to >want the world to dress in hemp, and oppose one option or another >(wind, nuclear, tide, hydroelectric) with a determination and an >imperviousness to facts that borders on the deranged.
Er, no, but thank you for playing. I suppose if you put "depicted" somewhere appropriate in that first sentence, you'd be fine.
Much like how Reagan was able to get people to believe solar (or wind, or ...) would never produce more energy than it takes to create the machines for capture, this has become a meme repeated so often I find it nauseating. It benefits the fossil fuel industry & their cohorts so well, and it sets up a real "them" versus "us" mentality. An amazing bit of marketing it's been - even a reasonable poster like yourself seems to buy into it!
You certainly can find some fringe types who espouse it; Nixon was good at making sure freaks always got the camera, and the PTB afterwards have improved on the methods substantially. But you know what? That's a fiction. Barring those fringe lunatics, never a major percentage, there's a fierce recognition of how we'll need to pull so many different techs together to make it through this century in one piece. And yes, that may/probably will include nuclear, although with it's problems - somewhat less than oil/coal/gas, collectively - I do hope that's simply a "last resort" kind of thing.
There is also a very clear understanding of the limitations of each piece of tech. I'm a big proponent of solar & have been able to reduce my footprint substantially, but I realize it's due to my fortune in being in place & situation where it really works. It won't as well elsewhere, and that's where another selection from the smörgåsbord will be needed.
If there is an imperviousness, it's this decades old mentality that we'll solve our problems with one silver bullet, one that the "invisible hand of the market" will give us, and the immense resistance to anything that doesn't not just fully replace our old systems but is immediately better in all ways. The comment about wind & birds - as if coal & GW are nothing! - is very telling (and a thanks to that contributor).
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Honestly...
[Read the article: The United Auto Workers vs. California]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think ship sailed on TPTB that these folks work for. Departure time was probably in the late 90s when some big three exec looked at an early hybrids, emitted a condescending "cute", and pointed folks to their newest luxobarge.
I'm certainly sorry for the folks hurt by this, which definitely aren't TPTB in their respective companies. However, at this point I wonder how long it will be before "Big" no longer prefixes "Three". Probably much longer than anyone considers, barring intervention, but the mistakes made are at least a decade past and likely longer than that to fix.
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Couple O things on coal
[Read the article: Newt Gingrich's fantasy land]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]From what I've been able to find out, even if sequestering is possible - and likely it is in some way - it's going to be *pricey*. As in, all of a sudden wind and solar are way cheap. Goodell et al have pretty much summarized that's why "clean" coal hasn't happened. It would show very clearly how, once you really do start factoring in externalities, how bad things get - and that's just once you start burning it.
With regards to coal, there is also the issue that it doesn't address liquids - another problem entirely. Sure, there is CTL (Coal to Liquid) via Fischer-Tropsch, but for a few problems:
CTL uses massive amounts of water... which, IIRC, is becoming a bit of a problem.
We're getting coal out of the ground pretty much as fast as we can now, just to make electricity. There isn't "extra" for CTL.
Even if we had both of the above, producing diesel (which is the product of CTL) isn't the same as gasoline, and it's doubtful we could make much of a dent in our gas usage. This ignores the idea that it would take some time to get these plants online, let alone enough online to matter.
That "400 years of coal" is from the early 20th century, and even wrong then. We should peak our coal sometime this century, assuming we keep our usage at about current levels or less.
"Clean" coal may be cheap *eventually*, but I tend to think by that time we'll be mostly out of it - as well as having blown what time we should have spent using our fossil fuel lottery win to transition to something that won't run out.