Ahh, like folks insisting on using incandescent light bulbs . . . not that anyone would actually do that…
Holy Cow! I can’t believe I forgot this one on my list! Mark it as Exhibit
- the right is overrun with pseudo-religious nutballs who will justify any crazy behavior with their far-less-than-profound belief system, meaning they scarcely think anything, just do whatever looks good to them and justify it by claiming to understand the S-tyrant’s will.
Fukushima has not, so far as I know, had any accidents. It did have the biggest tsunami in recorded history, but everything in the area had that: It’s not something specific to nuclear plants. And most of the other things in Fukushima that got hit by the tsunami fared far worse, leading to more damage and loss of life, than the nuclear plant did. If anything, that event was proof of just how safe nuclear power is.
If it’s a choice between that and literally any other piece of energy infrastructure? I do.
Nuclear power plants use so little fuel that this problem is negligible, compared to the extraction and refinement problem for any fossil fuel source.
Back to hydrogen, the one place where it might make sense is where you need to store a whole bunch of energy in one place, such as in a vehicle that needs to be off the grid (airplanes, say). I suspect that, even there, the better green solution is to just use hydrocarbons, and either offset them elsewhere, or produce them renewably from atmospheric carbon dioxide, because hydrocarbons are much easier to store, transfer, and otherwise deal with than hydrogen.
At the risk of sounding like I’m piling on, all of this (currently) is due to the free-market. The current demand comes from wealthier people who don’t want a large vehicle. Manufacturers know they can charge more, and they know they don’t need the larger vehicles. Driving range is getting close to the range of gas-powered vehicles. As more people get electric vehicles, more charging stations will show up (we’ve got two or four at our local grocery store in the exurbs of Chicago). Free Market at it’s finest.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that all the horse shit caused periodic outbreaks of disease and poisoned watersheds, making them unsuitable for irrigation?
Would it have been acceptable for the government to push people to cars in that situation?
That’s the thing- this isn’t just some governmental thing being done to push an ideological angle. There are clear and present dangers from excessive carbon emissions both now, and especially in the future. And there are times when liberty and choice should be trumped in favor of regulations that benefit everyone- fossil fuel consumption is one place that’s very clear.
“I support a government regulation saying I can’t shoot my neighbor.”? That doesn’t sound very conservative. 
Your views actually sound more Libertarian than Conservative, IMHO.
I find that American Conservatives are a bit selective when it comes to the “free market” and “personal liberty”. They have no problem with government regulations that further a Conservative agenda. From what I’ve observed, the lens that most Conservatives seem to view the world tends to be one of white heterosexual Christian American-centric exceptionalism, largely driven by corporate interests. And like most people who enjoy a position of privilege, one of their biggest fears is to have that privilege taken away.
The automobile (which runs on petroleum-based gasoline) has long been a symbol of “freedom” in America, providing its owners with the means to affordably go where they want, when they want to.
The $2 trillion dollar (8% of the U.S. GDP) petroleum industry (which supports 10.3 million jobs) has a vested interest in continuing to sell petroleum and petroleum accessories.
Given that, it’s not a stretch to see how the petroleum industry, through Fox News and other Conservative media outlets, tapped into Conservatives fears and resentments to craft a narrative of renewable energy and green programs being just another method for Liberals to undermine American values with their woke socialist culturally bankrupt progressive agenda to circumvent the free market and personal liberties in order transfer hard-earned wealth to welfare cases, drug addicts, minorities, immigrants, corrupt foreign governments, and other useless special interest groups who are too lazy or incompetent to compete in the free market on equal terms.
This line of reasoning pretty much collapses when you look at the negative externalities of gasoline. Just to name a few, there’s pollution, climate change, war, encouragement of the worst autocracies and human-rights abusers on earth.
Gasoline is not working in the big picture. Sure, it’s working for people like you, temporarily, in the short term, so you shrug and say everything else can go to hell. That is the truth of conservatism: short-sighted selfishness above all.
(edited to remove an inadvertent quote. Sorry)
Interesting chart. Thank you. Nice that it almost adds up to 100; makes approximating percentages easier.
So, almost no petroleum goes into electricity generation. You hear “fossil fuel” and think “barrel of oil”, but it’s not - it’s natural gas. Petroleum (barrel of oil) goes primarily into transportation (gas pump), with some going to industrial uses and trace amounts still in commercial and residential.
I find it fascinating from this chart that 2/3 of energy is wasted “rejected energy”. 1/3 of that comes from transportation - OK, kinda get that. Kinda hard to capture the heat lost in that infernal combustion engine. Amazed that of all the energy that goes into transportation, only about 20% (1/5) does the actual moving part, and the rest is waste. You’d think there would be some kind of engineering work that would capture that somehow.
I am shocked that in generating electricity, almost twice the energy is wasted than is used. I could see capturing energy on a small scale (in a car) could be cost-prohibitive, but at the generating plants? Why can’t that be captured and sold - gotta be additional profits to be found there!
Which is something that was being floated since the original “oil crunch” days, back then thinking about oil exhaustion — develop large-industrial-utility-scale sustainable safe cheap energy, and then use that to make hydrocarbons out of environmental carbon and hydrogen not just for fuels but for synthetics.
(Of course the “sustainable, clean, safe, cheap, large scale industrial” energy source is always 20 years in the future…)
Nope, sorry. In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics. There are fundamental limits to how efficient any heat engine can be, and in practice, we get reasonably close to those limits. We could get closer, and we could change the parameters by using engines that run at a higher temperature, but no matter what we do, as long as we’re using heat engines, we’re going to end up with a heck of a lot of wasted energy.
One might think one could get around this by using processes that aren’t heat engines, but technically, that isn’t actually possible, either: Technically, everything is a heat engine, but the things that we think of as not being heat engines, it’s because they have a very, very high effective temperature, and so the fundamental limits to their efficiency are very high.
Of course, it also depends on how you define “waste” and “energy services”: You can argue that all of the energy used for transportation is waste, because you eventually come back to a stop, on average at the same elevation you started with, and so do zero net work. Some of the waste is in the heat of the gases going out the tailpipe, and some of the waste is in the heat in the brake pads, or in the heat of the air you passed through, or the heat of the tires as they flex. Fortunately, here, we do have considerable room for improvement: One of the advantages of electric cars is that they can reclaim most of the energy that would be wasted in braking, and car manufacturers are always tweaking their designs to make them more aerodynamic, and thus reduce losses do to air resistance.
No, I am a man of process over progress. It takes more than a beneficial end for me to conclude the means are justified. When I wrote about the transition I meant the transition.
Velocity’s hypothetical said there is no hassle; the entire point of my post was that change for betterment of society with no hassle is consistent with my brand of conservatism. To be honest I can’t think of any respectable political philosophy that would oppose a change that truly betters society with no drawbacks whatsoever.
~Max
Gotta disagree. Incandescent bulbs are less efficient than LEDs and require more power to be generated, thus increasing carbon emissions. Getting lead out of gasoline and paint are positive government regulations, as are seat belt laws. Government regulations ensure the safety of the drugs you take and the food you eat. To say 90% of regulations are bad is just silly- plucking a number out of the air and taking a stand on it. The old light bulbs and leaded gasoline worked and government regulation made things much better, not worse.
As for the conservative fetish for fossil fuels, I think it’s just a combination of ignorance and stubbornness. Those pointy-headed folks who went to college tell me it’s bad so it must be good since they live in the ivory tower and I live in the real world. Electric cars seen to stir up a special venom- there was a Facebook post I saw often that went through calculations meant to prove that EVs cost more to operate than gas-powered vehicles. Only problem was they used the cost per kW/h as being roughly 10x the going rate, using over a dollar as opposed to what we pay which is about a dime. Sure, if you fake the numbers you can prove whatever you want.
And, I gotta disagree with your disagreement here. Now, I’m playing devil’s advocate here - I was all for LED lights before the government intervention. I agree that overall, that was a positive. The biggest argument at the time was because the LEDs were much more expensive, and if they were so much better, why weren’t they already in use? I think that the government intervention was premature, and that market forces would have done most of the work for them within 10 years. Light bulbs are not the biggest energy sinks; they were the easiest target.
Now, as for the lead in gasoline, that was proper because the engineering was already there. Lead was initially added as a lubricant. The engines got better, and could easily be created no longer needing that lubricant. Easy change. Plus, they didn’t say “Thou shall not sell leaded gas”, they said “New cars can’t use leaded gas - old cars can still use the cheap stuff”. I will admit - I’m not sure if selling leaded gas is illegal; I’m certain no one does because there’s not much demand for it. You got an antique car, you add a lubricant when you fill your tank. With the lightbulbs, they said “Nope, no more.” You didn’t have to throw your car away and get a new unleaded vehicle when it ran out of gas; you could no longer use incandescent bulbs when they broke.
Nitpick – tetraethyl lead is an octane booster, not a lubricant. When leaded gas was effectively banned for use in new cars, there was an immediate power drop, as cars had to be detuned to run on the lower octane, unleaded fuel. The technology wasn’t there. Alternative octane boosters weren’t compatible with engines built to run on leaded gas, hence why leaded fuel was still available – they would explode if run on lower octane unleaded gas and deteriorate quickly if run on alternative octane boosters.
That’s why the auto industry fought so hard against the science.
I don’t know how many disagreements this is, but this isn’t quite true either. What was mandated was that newly manufactured light bulbs (like new cars) had to fulfill new standards. So, if a company made an incandescent bulb that fulfilled the new energy efficiency standards, it was fine to sell it to the public.
But also, they haven’t been banned. Even now, despite the push to get people to switch over, a large-ish percentage of bulbs sold (25-30% IIRC) are still incandescent (regular or halogen) but many of these are more efficient than the ones sold even a decade ago. We haven’t gotten to the point yet where people can’t buy old style bulbs if they really want them. The full switchover is a decade or more and still in the making.
So maybe also not the best example for government overreach vs settled science?
You’re probably right there; a LOT of people were already getting CFL lights anyway at that point, but LEDs were expensive enough that unless you had a whole lot of lights, or you had some that were extremely hard to change, LEDs weren’t economical.
I think the issue with market forces is that they drive things in the short term, but often those market forces fluctuate, and aren’t always reliable for driving long-term change. People buy hybrids and manufacturers design efficient cars when gas is high, but when it gets cheap, gas economy isn’t as much of a driving factor for buying or designing a car. So rather than rely on those little spikes to drive fuel efficiency, it’s better to have regulations like the CAFE standards to drive that stuff over time.
It’s funny but yesterday my 7-year-old daughter was watching an episode of the Teen Titans Go! cartoon that talked about regulations. The idea was that the IRS was showing up to take half of the Teen Titans’ money as taxes, so one of them used her magic powers to send the IRS into another dimension. They then found out that all of the services and regulations paid for by taxes were no longer being done, and so they faced such problems as no fire department, no health inspectors (their food was filled with cockroaches), the disgusting food they bought cost a fortune because no regulators could prevent price gouging, and there were pot holes everywhere.
The Teen Titans ended up having to take on the role of tax collectors themselves, and ran around beating people up to take a portion of their wealth. It ended with them going after corporate fat cats (which were literal fat cats they hung up and beat like pinatas until cash started falling out).
It’s weird to watch a silly children’s cartoon about superheroes preaching about the importance of tax revenue and regulations. But maybe it will get through to some on the right.
Yes, that will teach them! I’m not sure what that mixed message is actually ‘teaching’ anyone (Beat up people to take their wealth? Hang ‘fat cats’ like piñatas and look for the specie in their pockets? Become voluntary ‘tax collectors’ whether you actually work for the IRS or not?) but there are many varied if contradictory messages in this childrens’ entertainment program. For the right, it will reinforce their believe in the fundamental evil of ‘big government’, and frankly they’d be justified for thinking so in this case.
Stranger
To be fair, the violence was because the Teen Titans are portrayed in that cartoon as being awful people, much worse than the “villains” they are supposed to be protecting people against. “Beat it up” is their solution for everything. That does make it a poor teaching tool.
Except it isn’t negligible. Essentially every deactivated fuel enrichment facility in the United States is a Superfund cleanup site because of radioactive and toxic chemical leakage, and the areas where both open-pit and in-situ chemical leaching are performed there are numerous environmental contamination problems as well as chronic illness among workers. A prominent example of this is the Navajo “Uranium Widows”, the wives of mostly Native American workers who were knowingly exposed to radiation from mining processes and the unconfined tailings and died en masse from radiation-linked cancers and illnesses. Today, the United States gets most of its fuel grade uranium from overseas and specifically Africa, in part because we have few domestic sources that are really suitable but also because of the contamination effects, and we don’t even have the capacity to produce half of the low enriched fuel-grade uranium used in commercial nuclear power plants so it is purchased overseas; this nicely makes the environmental issues an ‘externality’ that we don’t have to concern ourselves with, but also means that we can’t control the exorbitant costs and are dependent upon foreign sources for energy production.
If we were to expand our use of nuclear power by the multiple hundredfold capacity using Generation III+ type pressurized and boiling water reactors to replace all hydrocarbon power production and electrify transportation we would also have to build many dozens of uranium enrichment facilities at enormous cost (both in dollars and carbon outputs) which nobody wants near their town or city, staff them with trained nuclear and chemical engineers of which our universities are currently producing in only a trickle out of a handful of active programs, and also factor in the enormous amounts of energy that go into the enrichment process that take back from the energy extracted in an inefficient once-through cycle. This isn’t to say that nuclear fission power production can’t be a valuable source of baseload power—it certainly can—but the status quo is not really suitable for broad expansion to offset the bulk of hydrocarbon power production today.
Of course, as you point, mining and extracting hydrocarbon energy sources, and then burning it to release pollutants (and in the case of coal, a lot of low level radioactivity) has massive climate and public health impacts. But swapping that for the low probability of occurrence but high consequence (in terms of both long term health impact and the incredible financial costs of INS Level 7 ‘accidents’ at Chernobyl and Fukushima that have dwarfed the economic value that those plants would have produced in their uninterrupted lifetime by manyfold) is not a great bargain. We need to develop these technologies so that the majority of energy is extracted so as to minimize pollution and net energy loss in mining, milling, separating, refining, enriching, and processing into suitable fuel for nuclear fission reactors, and minimize the hazard of resulting medium level waste stream from processing and end of life decommissioning of aged power plants.
The actual disposal of high level wastes isn’t really a major technical hurdle although finding anyone who wants a long duration geological nuclear waste depository is a massive political hurdle that was assumed to be ‘solved’ back when Nevada had no political pull to reject the Yucca Mountain Repository (even though Nevada gets none of its power from nuclear fission plants and is essentially the perfect environment for deploying solar and wind power), and notwithstanding that even if reopened and completed Yucca Mountain lacks the capacity to store even the existing ‘spent nuclear fuel’ (still containing >95% of the potentially fission energy but not formulated for reprocessing and reuse) currently sitting in dry cask storage at individual nuclear power plants around the country because nobody ever came up with a comprehensive plan of how to deal with this eventuality.
Access to, refinement and enrichment of, and disposal of nuclear cycle waste and decommissioning nuclear plants is not a ‘negligible’ problem. It is a manageable one with the right technological development and well thought out planning, but it isn’t something we can transition to in just a few years or with minimal impacts upon the existing infrastructure and industrial and residential use of energy. Hence, the genuine need for a comprehensive ‘green energy plan’ that actually addresses not only the physical costs of new infrastructure but the economic and societal impact of a massive transition of a scope unknown to human history.
Stranger