Hi, Chief! My impression is that facts are of little interest to you, but on the off-chance I’m wrong Google “CO2 per capita by country” and learn that France emits only one-third the CO2 of the U.S.A. Perhaps you could spend a few days in France on one of your frequent private jet journeys and tell us if the French are “living dirt poor.”
Speaking of your private jets, I’ll admit that, frankly, I find it contemptible that with the problems facing billions of humans, you focus, over and over and over on your multi-millionaire lifestyle.
“Zillionth” is an exaggeration, but not by much. I’ve seen you post the same thing over and over and over at least 100 times – I’ve lost track. Is this what you do with your idle hours burning carbon on your private jet?
I feel guilty when I post the same link or comment 3 or 4 times, but you… Not only repetitious but the same unintelligent claim that has been repeatedly debunked in different ways.
“We can’t do anything (whine) while the same stupid liberals object to nuclear. (whine).”
You complainers would amuse if the agenda for your false argument didn’t disgust.
Well, simple to those who are intelligent, objective, and concerned about their children and grandchildren. But be sure to use words like “price” rather than “tax” or, you can bet on it, the same fiends begrudging their private jet travel and blaming everything on China will switch to their “Taxxes is eevil theft” viewpoint.
PS: See, Chief? We’re not trying to stop you from jetting to Asia just to buy golf clubs. We just ask you to pay more for the jet fuel.
The point was to deal with the subject of the OP, I was not concentrating on solar only, and that is indeed yet another drawback (besides the misrepresentations and half truths already noticed) from the Forbes article, it is omitting the contributions from Wind, Biomass and others from the big picture and so, we get once again a misrepresentation, the number is indeed 22.9 percent by the end of 2012 and the rest of the number mentioned by Bloomberg is including the numbers up to February 2013. Your say so of “the hope is that by 2050 this might rise to 25%.” is also not operational. They are already there.
Regarding Biomass, on the main issue of preventing a growth of the content of CO2 in the atmosphere, Biomass depends on how it is used (residues and waste is better, not whole trees) biomass is carbon neutral or causes much less of an impact than coal and other fossil fuels. But this does require better accounting (if trees are used, you need to plant as many trees as you take down or this does not work) and there are a lot of improvements needed to be done before going forward with biomass.
My holidays are about over, so there won’t be too many more repetitive posts.
I want to reassure you I care deeply about this world, and the world I leave behind to future generations. Even more than future generations, I care about leaving the entire natural ecosystem as unaltered as possible by man’s presence.
If we solve AGW tomorrow (and it is a solvable problem, technically-speaking), the invasiveness of our species will nevertheless ensure that we consume all of the earth in other ways. We’ll need most of it for food and housing, along with recreation. When we obsess on the wrong problem, we won’t get where we need to go. Right now we are obsessing on solving AGW when our overwhelming problem is too many people already, and way too many about to show up.
All of those people want to live comfortably. Right now, most of them don’t, and nearly everyone wants to live more comfortably than they do now. The truly dirt poor want bicycles, the wealthy want to fly first class instead of coach, and the super-rich want to jet around. When I say, “I am Al Gore,” I am not talking about my personal wealth. I’m talking about the fact that average human behaviour is to be concerned in general, but in practice not to make the kind of personal sacrifices it would take to seriously alter CO2 emissions. Mr Gore is a wonderful archetype for that sort of behaviour, and so am I. If you are familiar with the Tragedy of the Commons, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.
We could solve for AGW with nuclear. Politically, nuclear is dead world-wide, with some countries (like France) holding a different opinion about it. We could solve for AGW with intelligent new renewables (wind, solar, etc), but it will be insanely expensive. We could make all energy insanely expensive by taxing carbon highly enough, but the secondary effect of this would be to slow the economy down to such an extent that we all have to scale way back. And since we are all Al Gore figuratively, that will not happen. Beyond that, developing countries will put their populations first just like first world countries. When push comes to shove, Germany lets their CO2 levels go back up (as they have done in the past two years) and burns forests for biomass energy because we are not going to put AGW above immediacy of “need.”
My complaint with GIGObuster and others is their distortion of practical reality, and I think practical reality is the point of this thread. We are all Concerned. We are all willing to tell the Masses what they should be doing. We are all willing to share in our small part. We are all willing to blame the Government/Industry/TeaParty/Chinas… for the continuing rise in world CO2 emissions.
It’s just human nature, and it’s very hard to fix. We cannot even agree as environmentalists how to approach nuclear.
And GIGObuster-type personalities see everything through a very distorted glass. All facts fitting in with their paradigm is confirmatory from reliable Experts; all facts not fitting in come from “suspicious sources.” I don’t think I’ve seen a single balanced post from Gb, ever. He is the type of thinker who, if Forbes writes an unfavorable article, thinks, “but Forbes wrote that, so it’s suspect,” and if Forbes writes a favorable article would say, “even Forbes admits that…”. This kind of language and thinking represents a deep commitment to a Great Cause, but in the same way that folks who are deeply committed to their religious beliefs cannot reasonably evaluate alternatives, GIGObuster is trapped in a world viewed through blinders and rose-colored glasses.
We live in the real world. We are all Al Gore.
So I’ll watch the hemming and hawing with you over the following years. I’ll listen to the Great Speeches, the passionate trumpeting of the Great Cause, and the angry denunciation of Deniers. Meantime, another 3 billion are going to show up on the planet to join (mostly) the less comfortable billions already wanting to live like the developed world. I’ll watch us develop cleaner energy and spend (where we have persuaded our governments of the Great Sin) a lot of money developing alternatives to fossils.
And what will happen is that total energy consumption will simply continue to rise, sucking up all new energy sources to feed an insatiable total appetite. We cannot even replace the current grid fast enough with acceptable renewables, much less get everyone living like me and Al.
If AGW brings us a very proximate pain, the West may buy into a Germany-type effort sooner (and let us hope we choose better than they have chosen with solar). But Florida needs to start drowning very soon, and we need better hurricane seasons than this past one. We need to not look outside and see 20 below in the midwest (coldest in 20 years), and we need to forget that the Dust Bowl ever happened and see each new negative cycle as a harbinger of the deeper AGW problem. We’ll need to get everyone on board with an automatic confirmatory bias that all bad news is a consequence of AGW, and all good news represents outlier exceptions. I’m not sure that will happen to an extent great enough for us to slow down our economies and live less well.
After all, I’m one of those masses, and despite my deep concern, I am Al Gore.
With that, I’m afraid my recreational posting needs to slow down and I need to go earn a living, so I can get more Stuff (beginning with a new set of Mizunos, made in China next to the factory where they are making solar panels for the West in coal-fueled facilities ).
Perhaps you and GIGObuster can resolve the differences between France and Germany over nuclear so we can at least get a realistic start in the war against AGW.
Good news, I hope. I’m going back to work so I won’t be spending a lot more time correcting your confusion over facts. I urge you to take the blinders off so you don’t get too readily sucked up into statistics distorted by over-enthusiastic “experts.”
“The number” for solar (and you’ll see if you bother to look back that I was talking about solar) is not “indeed 22.9%” for solar’s contribution to Germany’s total electricity consumption. It is 5.3% as of mid 2012.
Trees are carbon neutral over a span of decades; burning trees right now produces pure CO2. Beyond that, burning trees destroys the natural ecosystem of a forest, environmentally speaking. Under a loophole of “biomass,” Germany is burning forests because the practical reality is they need energy for the masses, just like the rest of us, and they think nuclear is a greater sin.
The hope is for solar to get to 25% of electricity consumption by 2050. I know you want to jumble all statistics together to confuse the Deniers (all those without rosy glasses), but for me at least, it’s not working.
“Germany remains the world’s top PV installer, accounting for almost half of the global market in 2007.6 Thanks to the country’s feed-in tariff for renewable electricity, which requires utilities to pay customers a guaranteed rate for any renewable power they feed into the grid, Germans installed about 1,300 megawatts of new PV capacity, up from 850 megawatts in 2006, for a total exceeding 3,830 megawatts.7 As capacity has risen, PV installed system costs have been cut in half in Germany between 1997 and 2007.8 PVs now meet about 1 percent of Germany’s electricity demand, a share that some analysts expect could reach 25 percent by 2050.”
I’d like to help you some more, but frankly I don’t think you can be helped. You are too far down the Great Cause road to let facts get in the way of your belief system. I am afraid you are destined to preach forever, scold Deniers, and remain disappointed that reality gets in the way. But hey; with a little luck this cold snap will continue and we can put off getting warmed up for a little longer.
Yet the Chief insisted that nuclear power is “dead worldwide.”
No. What’s stupid is to witness a counterexample in France that nuclear power can be accepted, yet – because of one’s personal or political agenda, or perhaps a (possibly true :dubious:) opinion that American people are too stupid to embrace any change – insist there is zero chance of getting other countries to use effective alternative energies.
You must had been a good member of the Nixon administration, And you do ignore the timelines like the usual follower of misleading information. I’m not talking just solar so once again you are going for a strawman to make a point that you not notice is not the big picture.
As noticed even the GWPF that you cited does the same act, tell their readers only part of the truth, if you actually had read The Quixote you would had realized how deceptive that can be.
And the **Chief **is just rambling again about the same points that were already replied to and shown also to not be the complete truth, as it is mostly the case with the sources he relies on, the sources that tell him that only one conclusion could be get are just cherry picking, and leads to misleading information that allow wrong conclusion to be reached.
As **septimus **and many noticed the **Chief **does only demonstrated the contradictions that plague the followers of the merchants of doubt.
If you don’t think nuclear is dead worldwide, I’d encourage more reading.
Anyone familiar with the debate over green energy is aware of France and their position. Try getting a new nuclear plant installed in Germany…or the US.
In any case, it’s just an observation; not some kind of core principle of mine or anything. I think as solar and wind crap out on scale, and we just go on and on increasing CO2 outputs, maybe we’ll come back to nuclear. But the cycle from suggested plant to power output is insanely long.
Right now it’s dead, politically. If I ever get a sniff that it’s not, I’ll be an investor, b/c it makes sense to me despite the vehemence with which it is typically opposed.
OK; talk among yourselves. My work year is starting and hobbies like SDMB will be on the back burner.
figuratively, that will not happen. Beyond that, developing countries will put their populations first just like first world countries. When push comes to shove, Germany lets their CO2 levels go back up (as they have done in the past two years) and burns forests for biomass energy because we are not going to put AGW above immediacy of “need.”