Do conservatives think there is something intrinsically good about gasoline/fossil fuel?

Politics & Elections
41

Actual Conservative Here.

There’s nothing intrinsically good about gasoline as opposed to any other method of fueling cars that provides the same versatility of gasoline. You have to view this all through the lenses of conservatism, specifically:

  1. 90+% of Government Regulations are bad, one or more combinations of making things more expensive, unnecessarily messing with the free market, and infringing on personal liberty. I support a government regulation saying I can’t shoot my neighbor. I disagree with a government regulation saying I can’t buy an incandescent light bulb.

  2. Any attempt by the government to improve something that’s working, or at least somewhat working, is much more apt to make it worse than to improve it.

I have no problem with the idea of filling my car up with hydrogen instead of gasoline, provided of course fueling is not more expensive and the cars are not more expensive, except that this is not the way things are moving. Instead we’re moving to electric cars, which have serious trade-offs vs gas cars, at least at the moment in terms of purchase price, range, charger availability, and the limited larger pickup-minivan-SUV type vehicles available.

42

Thankfully, I guess, there were no conservatives around to bemoan the serious trade-offs of horses vs gas cars.

43

It wasn’t an issue because there wasn’t a government trying to force them away from horses until gas cars were cheap enough for the masses and good and ready.

44

I do appreciate you wading into the lions den here to reply, but if you’ll indulge me yelling into the void for a sec…

It’s great that we can mostly agree that firing a single bullet into a single person is reason for government. It’s not great that we can’t agree that collectively firing hundreds of billions of bullets into the sky that will float around for decades before raining down in increasing numbers on future generations causing untold death and suffering is bad. It’s literally the tragedy of the commons.

Likewise, knowing that our dependence on fossil fuels is going to cause untold death and suffering for our children and grandchildren means that the system is not working, or even somewhat working. The system is a goddamn disaster the likes of which we’ve literally never seen.

45

Hydrogen isn’t a fuel. Almost all of the hydrogen on Earth is already “burned”. In order to use hydrogen as a fuel you first have to break the chemical bonds, which takes energy. You get back some of that energy when you then use the hydrogen as a fuel, but of course there is also waste heat (you just can’t beat the laws of thermodynamics).

Fossil fuels are a fuel. Sunlight, dead plants and animals, etc. have already put the energy into the fuel. You need to extract it from where it’s at and refine it, but unlike hydrogen, the energy is already there.

Assuming we don’t want to use the current steam and fossil fuel method of generating hydrogen, you could use large scale electrolysis of water, powered by a nuke plant. But then you have the nuclear waste issue (which doesn’t have a good solution). There is also the issue that if you are going to use electricity as the ultimate power source for your vehicle, you have less waste if you just use the electricity to charge up batteries and use an electric vehicle instead of using hydrogen as the energy transport mechanism.

You can also generate hydrogen using a photocatalyst, which is a fancy way of generating hydrogen using a process kinda sorta similar to photosynthesis. Currently this is still in the research phase as current catalysts degrade quickly, which makes current large scale production too expensive and resource-consuming to be practical.

In short, there’s nothing intrinsically good about hydrogen.

Electric vehicles don’t solve our energy problem. All they do is shuffle the problem around. The majority of our electricity comes from fossil fuels. If you need a lot of electricity, realistically your only choices are fossil fuels and nuke plants. Fossil fuels destroy the atmosphere. Nuclear plants have accidents like Chernobyl and Fukashima and even plants that don’t create huge environmental problems still have the issue of nuclear waste, for which no one has yet come up with a good solution. Renewables don’t produce enough power.

In the U.S., the power grids in the northeast and southwest are both very heavily loaded. You aren’t going to add more power load for electric vehicles in either part of the country without doing some major infrastructure improvements, which is going to cost some big bucks. Oh, and by the way, who wants a nuke plant in their back yard? Because otherwise you are talking about wrecking the already damaged atmosphere with more fossil fuels, and the whole point of switching to electric vehicles is to get away from fossil fuels.

It’s not an easy problem to solve.

46

Well, it is a fuel once you have it, but I presume the point you’re trying to make is that the earth has virtually no free hydrogen, and making it takes energy, particularly if using methods like electrolysis. But as you point out, there are numerous ways of generating it. Some of them are perfectly clean, such as electrolysis using solar energy, and quite possibly using generators powered by fusion reactors in the future.

I’m no expert on the subject, but the reality is that hydrogen fuel stations are popping up here and there to support a growing fleet of experimental vehicles, and I’d say the jury is still out on whether it has a long-term future, either in ground vehicles and/or in aviation.

https://www.vicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/16223041_web1_htec_pump.jpg

47

And the reality is that most of that hydrogen was created by burning fossil fuels.

Environmentally, they would have been better off burning gasoline in those vehicles.

I’m sure we’ll have working fusion reactors in the next 20 years or so. :wink:

(for those that don’t get the joke, the folks working on fusion energy have been promising that it’s only 10 to 20 years away for decades now, to the point where it is now a common joke to say that it will always be 20 years in the future no matter what year it is now)

48

Except that uncontrolled climate change, which threatens the very lives of millions of people through extreme weather and starvation and the quality of life of almost everyone, along with major and irreversible damage to the global ecosystem, has absolutely nothing to do with Big, Bad Government and absolutely everything to do with basic physics and biology. If not government, who is supposed to manage this problem? Certainly not the conservatives’ much-vaunted “free market”, since the free market, mostly in the form of the fossil-fuel industry and related heavy industries, have been the biggest culprits in greatly exacerbating the climate problem, and then engaging in massive disinformation campaigns to “prove” that it wasn’t their fault.

49

Well, what else are conservatives supposed to do? Actually work to solve the problem? Conservatives as a political entity don’t do that anymore.

Their repertoire is concentrated on, first, denying the existence of the problem, and second, blaming liberals for not having solved the problem in the teeth of all-out conservative obstructionism.

50

Third, all of our problems would be solved by massive deregulation, tax cuts, and eliminating public schools.

51

If people didn’t know so much they wouldn’t ask so many awkward questions. Duh!

Stranger

52

What exactly is the nuclear waste issue? We have unlimited storage space on this planet in desolate desert areas.

That aside, I agree there isn’t anything good about hydrogen. It’s a waste of energy to produce and we’re right back in the same boat of complex mechanical engines for cars. Nobody wants that. It also requires another node of distribution. There is zero value in going down this path.

Car companies are tripping over themselves in the race to electrify. They can’t build them fast enough.

53

There may be cases where that’s true, but certainly not universally true, even considering that most commercial hydrogen is produced from steam methane reforming using natural gas as the raw material. Similar arguments have been made about electric cars, which arguments always assume the dirtiest possible electricity source (coal plants) with no scrubbing or carbon capture, and even then may not be true, because of the efficiencies of scale related to the incremental output of a few power plants vs millions of cars spewing GHGs.

As I’ve often said, here in Ontario well over half of all electric power is from nuclear plants, and much of the rest is from hydro-electric plants. For years now, there have been no coal-fired plants at all.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the emissions from steam methane reforming to produce hydrogen vary a great deal depending on implementation. A fair amount of heat is required, so one question is what is the source of heat, and does it create emissions? Aside from that, CO2 is a byproduct of the process itself. Is it released into the atmosphere, or is it captured and sequestered? As an additional twist, it turns out that net-negative-emission technologies are possible for converting captured CO2 into synthetic fuels.

I agree with your earlier conclusion that climate change is not an easy problem to solve, but all kinds of promising solutions are emerging, including electric vehicles. The fact that so much power production in the US still comes from fossil fuels is a separate problem in its own right that urgently needs fixing. And even there, many coal-fired plants have switched to less polluting natural gas. They’ve mostly done it for economic rather than environmental reasons, but they’ve done it.

54

Storing high level nuclear waste in “desolate desert areas” is about the worst possible plan given that deserts are generally very porous and feed into fossil aquifers. The secure way to store nuclear waste are in impermeable strata that will resist water intrusion for the many tens of thousands of years before it decays into less harmful isotopes. Of course, it would be better yet to take the ‘waste’ of the once-through uranium power cycle and actually extract the maximum amount of energy possible and then use excess neutron emission to ‘burn up’ the residual actinides into short-lived radioisotopes by using advanced Generation IV reactors like the Molten Salt Reactor or High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor concepts.

The real problem with nuclear fission power production isn’t the ‘expended’ fuel waste; it is the energy consumed and pollution produced through the extraction, chemical milling, refinement, enrichment, and processing suitable radioactive ores into usable fuel, and the end-to-end lifecycle cost of nuclear fission power plants that have a limited lifetime and then have to be remediated at great cost at end of life because of the contaminated materials. Of course, conventional boiling water and pressurized water reactors also use an enormous amount of steel and concrete, resulting in a massive carbon footprint before the facility produces the first watt of electrical power. Even though nuclear fission is lower carbon than natural gas, diesel, or (especially) coal over the entire lifecycle, it has a huge upfront carbon emittance that makes nuclear fission unsuitable as an all-in-one replacement for hydrocarbon energy sources.

Nuclear fission is a good baseload energy supply, suitable for generating power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, but the advocates who promote it as being absolutely safe, completely non-polluting, and net zero carbon emission are glossing over a lot of real issues. Nuclear fission should be one part of a total energy portfolio that includes the cheaply and easily deployed renewables as well as synthetic hydrocarbons from net neutral sources, all balanced to allow a transition from unsustainable fossil hydrocarbon energy without crashing the economy.

Will we do that? No, of course not; instead, corporations will go all in on carbon credits and CC&S because profits trump prophets, amirite? We’ll keep fucking off on renewables even as they become every cheaper while fracking for increasingly unprofitable but subsidized oil because people don’t remember how the Netherlands ended up with so much land below sea level.

Stranger

55

We have the technology to fuse radioactive material into glass. I worked for a company that had an office in Richland, WA which did that sort of thing. I was the IT guy for all of Washington in that company so I was responsible for supporting this particular office, and got to go on-site a few times to see the equipment. (The lab in the article linked below is also in Richland, which isn’t a coincidence.)

I assume we’re not ready to do this on a large scale, but it seems to me there’s hope for it someday.

ETA: The facility at that Richland office, which my company had acquired, was called “GeoMelt”. Sure enough they are still in operation, but not under my old company.

https://www.vnsfederalservices.com/solutions-technologies/using-geomelt-treat-reactive-metal-us

My supervisor at that old company had a chunk of glass, it looked like obsidian, sitting in his office. It had nuclear waste trapped in it.

Oh and look here, I found a video from my old company AMEC about the GeoMelt process. In 2008 when this video was made I still worked for them.

At the end of the video there is a picture showing a big chunk of the rough glass and there is a trailer in the background. That trailer is where I used to go to work on their computers when I visited the site. That brings back nostalgia!

56

I don’t know that “conservatives” think there is anything intrinsically superior about fossil fuels, but there is a definite contingent of Bible-thumpers that seem to truly believe that everything on Earth was given to us by God, that it we are almost obligated to make use of these gifts, and that it is impossible for piddling little humans to screw up the perfection that is God’s creation. The obvious conclusions from this worldview are that climate change is impossible and that there is no reason at all to stop using fossil fuels.

I don’t know why I haven’t seen this pointed out anywhere, but to me it has long seemed like a super obvious ploy by Musk. Tesla has already convinced everyone on the left to buy EVs. They don’t need to be coddled any longer. Tesla has way more demand than they know what to do with already.

The right is not there yet. But Trump proved that Republicans are trivially easy to manipulate. Spout some “own the libs” type bullshit, and you’re in. Texas Republicans are even easier–just wear a cowboy hat, giant belt buckle, and spout some anti-California nonsense.

The strategy just might work. And, well, Biden is somewhat aligned with the unions, while Tesla/Musk is not. It might make sense for them to care less about pandering to the left at this point.

Anti-capitalist Texas still does not allow buying a Tesla online, which means you have to go out of state. This is not a problem in California or other freedom-loving states. But nothing will change without getting Texas politicians on their side, so they do what they have to.

57

The hydrogen vehicles on the market are FCEV, not ICE.

Still complex though.

58

This Sankey diagram from LLNL may clear things up. But it’s not always intuitive so holler if it just muddies things.

59

What’s “Rejected Energy” and “Energy Services”?

60

Rejected is waste heat. Services is energy that actually gets used.

E.g. if you burn a hydrocarbon, there’s some energy associated with rearranging chemical bonds, but a good chunk of that is just released to the environment. Think those big cooling towers associated with nuclear plants (see Simpson’s intro) but also used for other thermal plants.

There are also losses to moving the electricity and using it and the end point.