Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science ...

That may have been true in his day... not so much these days. This country has lost its compass.

 

I plan to put them to work, building, and installing solar panels. I do understand that it will be tough to get coal miners to give up the luxurious job they have for one so much less glamorous, but I am sure they will be willing to sacrifice for the good of their children.

Of course the whole thing is a strawman, they said the same thing about every advance in history.

 

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.​

-Neil Tyson
There is an essential fact about man and ghg, A->B. You breath out carbon dioxide converted from carbon in your body and oxygen in the air. To have your home, the odds are you or a human ancestor deforested the land, reducing natures ability to convert the carbon dioxide to oxygen and plants. Since this was a thread about denying science, it is important to understand where the scientific conflict is and is not. Science could care less about whether you care about it or believe in it, so I don't see the point of your not caring so much that you felt the need to post something wrong. How do you propose that man start reducing the temperature, and why do you want this. We know we can spew out pollution to blot out the sun, or other ugly ideas. I will leave you with a clip of Tyson debating Lutz to bring this back to prius chat, and how to properly refute unscientific ideas on tv
Neil DeGrasse Tyson blinding Bob Lutz with the incontrovertible truth of science

I don't care if you want to blame yourself. I find blame is an effective way to get government to do bad things. How many trees have you planted? You read my whole post where I suggested transition to a more sustainable future. We will never get there if people want to never compromise, only point blame. Its true of both sides. If you want to reduce pollution in American you can remove grandfathering of the most pollution coal plants. You can stop playing politics and sneaking a scooter subsidy - something with no hope of really helping - into a fiscal cliff deal.

 

No straw man here. We can transition away from coal, but when people start talking about leaving it all in the ground, that really is ridiculous. If we say drop coal use to 20% by 2025 - from 45% in 2010, there are reasonable ways to do it. If you choose to ignore the fact that china is going to burn more anyway and want to kill your economy today, you need to look at some facts.

Coal miners can't just get retrained tomorrow for other jobs. Solar jobs in the region they live in are scarce. Killing coal tomorrow would cause a shock to the economy, so I'm not sure why more money would go to coal miners than the other 5% extra people you just got fired in energy intense companies that moved to another country. Solar was only 0.11% of US power in 2012, I doubt the Chinese factories would be able to ramp up enough to supply all the displaced coal, nor would we have a place to put them, or money to pay for them. Maybe 5% solar by 2025 in the US and that is stretching it. Solar is much more expensive than wind and natural gas.

So you propose an unworkable idea, and any critism is called a straw man. Look at Europe that tried to say solar = jobs. Those jobs were temporary. Many were layed off. We can move from coal to renewables and natural gas, but at a reasonable transition time. NO one should still be fooled that things like solyndra are going to be the new employers. Many of the Euro solar manufacturing jobs have moved to china. I don't think that is a bad thing, as solar prices have dropped.

 

Not sure what went wrong in that conversation, but really I am not finding any connections between what I meant, and how you responded.

I will try again: I don't care if someone blames humans or not, so long as they are working to improve things, not make them worse. Does that sound reasonable to you?

 

Yes, that sounds much better. I'm sorry if I misinterpreted the meaning.

 

"The question then is who is going to tell the coal miners, auto workers, oil drillers, they all need to be fired and go on welfare because they are breaking the sustainability rules."

Read more: Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science ... | PriusChat

This is conflation of the first order. It is not an either/or absolutist issue. For example, the job loses from coal miners might be made up in jobs created by PV installers. The jobs lost in Auto workers might be offset by building wind generators, jobs lost in oil drilling could be offset by battery builders.

It is NOT a zero sum game! It is not just heads I win, tails you lose!

Icarus

 

There is no conflation here, and I think I explained my position already in this thread. If you are going to stop taking coal out of the ground cold turkey, there is going to be massive negative effects to employment. This will not only stem from the loss of coal related jobs, but jobs lost because of export of high power use industries. Now many of these jobs might just move a little South to Mexico, or they could move to Asia. If they move to Asia, it might mean even higher ghg levels. Some auto jobs might move to Germany, where they are building more coal power plants right now.

Spain talked about all the green jobs that renewables would create. It ended up creating jobs for a couple of years, then a crash with higher unemployment. China is the only country that actually has sustained the green jobs they promised, but their circumstances are very different than the US. The US is in a world wide manufacturing community, and most of the green job rhetoric assumes that energy costs don't matter and that construction jobs for a year are as good as manufacturing jobs for decades. We need to be honest about how many jobs really get created. Solyndra didn't create any permanent jobs.

Now we can slowly transition out of coal, but that can be done in a manner that does not kill the economy. Somehow we have institutionalized much of the coal pollution with grandfathering laws, and making it tough to build a more efficient plant. We can look to the german's for some lessons good and bad on what to do. Kill the oldest most polluting plants, but don't make it impossible to replace them. On that German thread I put my calculations that we could add about 20% renewables to the US grid - 15% wind and 5% solar - by 2025 and increase price by less than 2 cents/kwh. For reference wind in 2012 was 3.3% solar only 0.1%. That seems something worthwhile.

When you define sustainability as leaving all the fossil fuel in the ground everyone loses. That was the definition that I was replying to in that post. Its easy to see why when some put it that way, people get very upset about renewable subsidies. I'm a big proponent of cleaning up the grid and adding renewables. This will likely reduce employment. Once wind turbines and solar panels go up they require very little maintenance. Less coal pollution probably means fewer health care jobs. But we should lose these jobs at rates the country can afford.

It needs to be done in a different way than that house cap and trade bill though - big giveaways to some politically connected companies, very little progress on unhealthy pollution. I'm sure you have seen my posts about adding much more wind and fast cycling ccgt natural gas and removing coal.

 

By the way, somewhat unintentionally, USA has been making great strides in reducing CO2 in 2012. If we keep up at current pace, we are much better than expected. Problem is so far we don't plan, we just take what we get. Quite a lot of bi-partisan sentiment in 2103 to finally develop energy policy, which starts to make more sense now that the major changes of the last 6-8 years are behind us. I am quite sure the approach many want to take is "all of the above" which is a quote from Pres Obama, quite well adopted on a bi-partisan basis. I do think different folks have different interpretations of what "all of the above" really means.

 

Overpopulation of the Earth - of the human variety - think about it.

DBCassidy

 

We hqve reduced US CO2 largely due to Nat. gas and the fracking to get it. The issues is very double edged. Aside from much of the down side of fracking including grund water and. Helical issues) recent reports suggest that methane leakage is estimated to be MUCH higher from fracking wells than is being advertised. As an FYI for those that may not know, methane is a much more insulating greenhouse gas than is CO2, so ergo uncontrolled releases of methan tend to counteract the gains made using Nat. Gas in lieu if coal.

Icarus

 

If you get beyond the politicians, most of the people seem to like all of the above. All of the above really has benefited from natural gas and oil technology that the government had little to do with. At least the government other than on the Keystone pipeline has stayed out of the way.

Now to the FHOP commentary. Many in the environmental movement, Al "jazera" Gore chief among them have constantly criticized Obama on his climate change record.
Al Gore Blasts Obama On Climate Change For Failing To Take 'Bold Action'

It is definitely true that Obama delegated to Pelosi and Reid the climate change bill, and they royally poked the pooch in it. There were massive give always to big supporters, and very little reduction compared to business as usual. There has not been presidential leadership. I doubt though that any substantial climate change bill with make it through congress.

 

Do you have a scientific study that states how much is leaked, compared to say the mountain top removal for coal?

There is a bad natural gas story in the Dakotas oil play. They are flaring it instead of spending the time and money to capture it. This is burning a great deal of natural gas just to get to the oil. In texas this is illegal, but not in many states.

 

I don't know of such a study, comparing moutain top mining methane vs fracking methan releases. What I read today was the stat about the real numbers regarding leakage vs the published numbers. I will try to find what I read and post a citation.

I am with you on the ND flaring issue, and I believe I started a thread on that very same subject. Criminal flaring IMHO! All the down side of burning gas with NONE of the benefit!

Icarus

PS there are thousands of links to recent studies about methane leaking.

methane leaks from fracking - Google Search

 

I know we have division in our society but I was hoping if we adopted "all of the above" we could rally around that. Commentator Larry Kudlow thinks Obama will approve Keystone and pour a lot more money into green energy simultaneously. I am not so sure Kudlow is reading the tea leaves correctly, but I thought I would warn everyone all-of-the above may be coming.

 

Thanks. There are those in the environmental movement that strive for zero pollution on new methods, and I find these folks to be counter productive. What typically happens is the new stuff is shut down and we keep feeding the much higher polluting technology. We can't put up wind turbines because they kill birds, we can't do solar thermal because it takes up environmentally sensitive habitats, we can't use natural gas because fraking will kill us all. But at the same time, taking away those options seems to mean that that we can do mountain top removal to feed 50 year old coal plants without scrubbers and we can subsidize poor people to use a fraction similar to diesel to heat their homes.

Now I'm all for making fracking less harmful to the environment including requiring capturing the methane burp. We can set up wind turbines that are safer for birds, and maybe we can use solar pv instead of thermal. But these things normally are much more environmentally friendly than home heating oil and grandfathered coal plants. Somehow I hear much more about how fracking is bad, than about government action to reduce pollution that is much worse.

I know but they seem to contradict each other. Maybe in 20 years pipeline leaks and fracking methane might contribute 8% of us ghg, or maybe much less than 1%. I haven't read one that seemed to peg a number that another study found very bad in methodology.

 

I don't watch Kudlow, nor know if he has any insight, but there is a good chance for approval of Keystone.
Page 2: Keystone Pipeline Decision Tests President Obama on Jobs, Climate Change - ABC News
The majority of the senate, house, American people are in favor of it. All the states it runs through and the state department are for it. The EPA has no objections. Obama doesn't have to worry about bill mckibben attacking him since he doesn't have to run for office again. I don't see the down side from Obama's point of view.
Keystone = Jobs and less dependence on OPEC
No Keystone will anger many democrats, and the oil likely will just get refined in Canada or China, so vetoing it will not affect ghg, unless he talks Canada out of using the oil sands.

The only clear winner of killing Keystone is Opec. Voting for keystone can be that small token to the interests that may allow him to pass other environmental interests. Wyden was already paid off with the scooter tax credit. Bernie Sanders seems like the only strong voice against it.
Section 1: Recent Economic Policies, Keystone Pipeline | Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

 

Keystone would reduce global dependence on OPEC. It would reduce US dependence only to the extent it is used (combusted) domestically and not 'shipped out of Houston'. I am not sure that proportion is knowable now.

Blocking Keystone would not effectively block tar-sands extraction. That seems clear, as alternative shipping strategies are in planning. The way to block tar-sands extraction is to convince Canada it is not in their national interest, broadly defined. I can't see that at present, what with being a recent 'de-signer' of Kyoto and all.

 

Well you should be happy to note that America has aborted 55 million babies in the 40 years of RoeVsWade.

 

I'm happy that the women that chose to have an abortion were able to have a legal abortion. It would have been better if they had used birth control, but they didn't.