An Inconvenient Truth

[SkinBasket]

I actually agree with the little blue slut. These hybrids are not the way of the future and are a wate of time and energy that could be focused on moving in another direction, like H3.

Hybrids are like moving from screwing your sister to screwing your cousin. Is it better? Yes. Is it still a bad idea? Yes.

[MJZiggy]

You two have been arguing for 10 pages now. I've created peace and harmony.

[SkinBasket]

You two have been arguing for 10 pages now. I've created peace and harmony.

I don't see this discussion as arguing. It's the way people are supposed to talk about these things. Imagine this thread back at JSO.

[MJZiggy]

I know. I was just happy to see you agree. This discussion is on jso, but I'm afraid to look because I know that by the end of page one it disintegrated into "lefty" and "righty" and a whole lot of nasty name-calling and I must commend you guys on having an adult, intelligent discussion that I've been able to read through in it's entirety with good points made on both sides of the issue.

[mraynrand]

Good luck figuring out what is real or unreal in this political science environment (puns intended).

But the truth (or some approximation of it) IS going to come out. Only a question of time. Every year more data is collected, models are refined or discarded. "Climate Science" is a relatively new field of study, growing exponentially.

Interesting choice of words there huck. It will grow exponentially. A bunch of scientists sat around a table and decided by committee what the data meant and allocated 1.8 billion dollars to global warming research (Imagine if they had allocated the same 1.8 to fission research in 1970??). Hey, that's good science! From now on, instead of actually doing experiments in the lab, I'm just going to do them at a conference table. I really don't give a shit what side of the debate you're on huck, the way decisions are being made about global warming is the most shameless science I've seen since cold fusion or since the lies promulgated about the benefits of human embryonic stem cell research.

Any significant changes will have to await the Republicans independently deciding to make them. There is NO WAY this problem could be addressed by just half the country. It is much easier to block change than it is to make change.

I'm not that upset that nothing is happening now. I think what needs to happen is a MASSIVE switch from hydrocarbon to nuclear. Nobody is even thinking about it yet.

Actually, you're pretty much wrong on both points, Huck. I checked with a couple of LLC sources, and found that a number of companies have started in just the past two years to make biodeisel. Many other companies have sprung up recently to make next generation solar panels, wind turbines, etc. Also, the first nuclear plant license in 30 years was just issued to process more nuclear fuel (under the Bush administration, no less). The economic forces of higher fuel prices will drive innovation, just so long as the greenies don't try to interfere and protect us from all the horrible dangers of nuclear waste, etc. and the government doesn't try to stop them by doing research at a conference table. The Republican-led congress is your best bet to just get the hell out of the way and allow new companies to innovate, but as with any self-promoting, self-serving, and self-congratulatory politicians, you just never know - they might *uck it up, just to get free Red Sox tickets.

[mraynrand]

As an aside, I read an article about the new Hiawatha light rail line in Minneapolis. The rail line is a favorite of lefties, who want everyone to ride trains to work, but the cost was so extreme, that they could have leased a mercedes SUV to every rider and it would have cost the government fewer dollars. Imagine if they had leased hybrids. Lower cost AND lower fuel emissions. I brought it up as a simple illustration of how idealology trumps logic for the environmental crowd.

As a second point, I love how the greenies want to get everyone into hybrids, but don't realize that their second favorite group, "the poor" can't afford to go out and buy or lease one of these 16,000 dollar (or more) autos. "The poor" in Cleveland typically move from one beater to the next, paying a few hundred dollars a year to keep their car running, until the move to the next one. Maybe the next time someone wants to build light rail, they could just give some hybrids to "the poor" instead.

[MJZiggy]

This should solve everything.



By DAVID GRAM, Associated Press Writer Fri Jun 30, 7:58 AM ET

BRIDPORT, Vt. - The cows at the Audet family's Blue Spruce Farm make nearly 9,000 gallons of milk a day — and about 35,000 gallons of manure.
ADVERTISEMENT

It's long been the milk that pays, but now the Audets have figured out how to make the manure pay as well. They're using it — actually, the methane that comes from it — to generate electricity.

With the help of their power company, Central Vermont Public Service Corp., the Audets have devised a way to extract the methane from the manure and pipe it to a generator.

They make enough electricity to power 300 to 400 average Vermont homes. It's renewable energy, and they're not the only ones interested in it. Four other Vermont farms now have similar projects in the planning or early construction stages, power company officials said.

The Audets "deserve to be congratulated. They're the pioneers among Vermont farmers," said Dave Dunn, a senior energy consultant with CVPS who worked with them on the cow power project.

Elsewhere in the country, farmers are using similar technology to make energy, said Corey Brickl, project manager with Wisconsin-based GHD Inc., which built a device that the Audets use to harvest the methane.

One in Washington uses tomato waste from a salsa factory and waste from a fish stick plant as fuel, Brickl said.

For the Audets, the electricity has created an important new income stream at a time when low wholesale milk prices have squeezed their margin. The utility pays 95 percent of the going New England wholesale power price for electricity from the Audets' generator.

In addition, the utility charges customers willing to pay it a 4-cents-per-kilowatt-hour premium for renewable energy and then turns the money over to the Audets. So far, more than 3,000 CVPS customers have signed up to pay the premium to support the renewable energy effort.

The bottom line is more than $120,000 a year from electricity sales. When they add in other energy savings enabled by the project, the Audets expect their $1.2 million investment in project equipment to pay for itself in about seven years.

The program has piqued interest.

Marie Audet, who describes herself as wife, bookkeeper, and milker, has become a tour guide, showing people from the United States and a handful of other countries around the farm's cow power operation.

Managing the hundreds of milking Holsteins — as well as young stock — is a high-tech operation.

In their stalls, cows munch contentedly on a mix of hay and silage while they make an occasional contribution of fuel for the Audets' power plant. An "alley scraper," which looks like a big squeegee on wheels, comes by to push their manure down the row and through grates to a conveyor belt below.

From there, the manure goes to an anaerobic — meaning oxygen-free — digester, a 100-foot-by-70-foot structure similar to a covered swimming pool built by Brickl's company. The manure spends 20 or 21 days in the digester, being pushed slowly from one end to other as more is added.

Three products result: a liquid that contains enough nutrients that it can be used as fertilizer for the farm's feed crops; a dry, odor-free, fluffy brown substance that is used as bedding for the cows and some of which goes to a local firm that bags and sells it as fertilizer on the home-and-garden market; and methane.

The methane is piped into an adjacent shed that contains a big Caterpillar engine that powers the 200-kilowatt generator.

Audet said the farm was saving the $1,200 a week it formerly spent on sawdust bedding for the cows, as well as some of the cost of heating the milking barn. A study by agricultural scientists from the University of Vermont found that the bedding produced from the manure was better than the sawdust. "Wood harbors a lot of bacteria," she said.

With the success of the 200-kW unit, the Audets are expanding by adding a new, 75-kilowatt hour generator. And Audet said she's even grown to like giving the tours.

"It's bringing a lot of people to the farm who are normally very removed from food producers," she said.

___

On the Net:

Central Vermont Public Service: http://www.cvps.com

[Harlan Huckleby]

I actually agree with the little blue slut. These hybrids are not the way of the future and are a wate of time and energy that could be focused on moving in another direction, like H3.

Sorry to spoil our tender moment, but I wasn't criticizing hybrids. Altho of course you are right that they are at most a temporary solution. If they can be bypassed, fine.

Is Hydrogen fuel a promising option? My impression is that is so unlikely and unsafe, and so far off in the future (at best) , that it is just an excuse for postponing more practical choices.

I am for any energy source - nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal - that doesn't involving burning shit. Hydrogen fuel is exception to my burning jihad, natch.

[Harlan Huckleby]

From an emissions standpoint, yes, hybrids do run cleaner, but the question still remains, what do you do with all those spent batteries?

Can't they recycle the chemicals somehow? Then refill-um?

If not, I say pile them up inside gated communities.

No wait, that was my idea for storing spent nuclear fuel.

Ya, disposing of batteries could be a problem, but certainly simple compared to spent nuclear fuel! Stick-um wherever they put recycled computers.

[MJZiggy]

I actually agree with the little blue slut. These hybrids are not the way of the future and are a wate of time and energy that could be focused on moving in another direction, like H3.

Sorry to spoil our tender moment, but I wasn't criticizing hybrids. Altho of course you are right that they are at most a temporary solution. If they can be bypassed, fine.

Is Hydrogen fuel a promising option? My impression is that is so unlikely and unsafe, and so far off in the future (at best) , that it is just an excuse for postponing more practical choices.

I am for any energy source - nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal - that doesn't involving burning shit. Hydrogen fuel is exception to my burning jihad, natch.

No, they're not burning the shit, just extracting the methane.

Hydrogen is a promising option but there are safety concerns, according to Peter Hoffmann's book Tomorrow's Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet Geothermal energy is also listed and doesn't include burning anything. I haven't actually read this book yet, but Hubby's in the middle of it and sometimes likes to paraphrase for me.

[Harlan Huckleby]

Interesting choice of words there huck. It will grow exponentially. A bunch of scientists sat around a table and decided by committee what the data meant and allocated 1.8 billion dollars to global warming research

Come on now. Climate Science is VERY difficult stuff. But these are not fools. They propose models, and those models are tested against emperical evidence, over time. And the fact that many thousands of people around the world are investigating the problem is a good thing.

I would compare Climate Science to study of the human brain. It is an attempt to model a system that is complex beyond comprehension. Understanding comes with trial & error & misfires, but it comes.

If you want to dismiss the world wide community of climate scientists as a bunch of pointy-headed bumblers, what do you propose we replace them with? Personal observation?

The economic forces of higher fuel prices will drive innovation, just so long as the greenies don't try to interfere and protect us

Notion that environment could be adequately protected by market forces is absurd. Look where air quality was at and heading in 1970, and how dramatically it improved as the result of EPA regulations. The EPA created by Richard Nixon, BTW.

[MJZiggy]

Is it my imagination or did I read that Bush was trying to get rid of the EPA?

[mraynrand]

Come on now. Climate Science is VERY difficult stuff.


Look where air quality was at and heading in 1970, and how dramatically it improved as the result of EPA regulations. The EPA created by Richard Nixon, BTW.

Somehow, although climate science is very difficult, you are able to understand that the conslusions made by a committee are correct. Maybe YOU could serve on the board that decides which science is right and wrong. Hell, with the new model of how to do climatology being the convening of a committee, you could probably just do the 'experiments' at home in your head and send the 'results' directly to 'Science' and 'Nature' magazines.

Some EPA regulations may have helped, but if you check, you'll actually find that most improvements in the environment were actually made as a result of engines and processes being made more efficient as a cost-cutting technique or just as a general improvement in the process. A lot of the cleaner burning fuels and engines are used today because they work better (it's called innovation), not because some governmental bureaucrat mandated it. I'm not against the EPA, monitoring pollution, etc. - but to give them sole credit for reducing pollution from factories and autos would be absurd.

And who cares whether the EPA was under Nixon? Nixon was more liberal in many ways than JFK. If JFK were around today, he's be a Republican and Nixon would be a Democrat. Dubya is more liberal by far with regard to governmental spending than JFK was. The only difference really, is that Dubya is more conservative with respect to social issues - but that should be obvious since he isn't using the Secret Service as pimps.

[mraynrand]

And the fact that many thousands of people around the world are investigating the problem is a good thing.

Really? How many thousands should study the problem? Is 1.8 billion enough to spend? Perhaps if Al Gore is elected pres in 2008, he'll dedicate several more billions to the study of specifically the global warming problem. I wonder who will determine how much is enough? Perhaps the climatologists? Of course, they are unbiased scientists and would only ask for the bare minimum to understand the problem, right?

[mraynrand]

I would compare Climate Science to study of the human brain. It is an attempt to model a system that is complex beyond comprehension. Understanding comes with trial & error & misfires, but it comes.

I'm confused here. If a system is 'complex beyond comprehension' then how can understanding come? And I would think that a 'trial and error' approach would be an especially wasteful and inefficient manner in which to understand a process that is 'complex beyond comprehension.' Perhaps we should just convene a committee of climate scientists to claim that global warming is a fact, that the debate is over, and that we still need 1.8 billion more to study a known fact.