I hate to do this in a Pit thread but Cite?
Methane hydrates. Not even once!
[QUOTE=YogSosoth]
I hate to do this in a Pit thread but Cite?
[/QUOTE]
You’d probably be better off asking in GQ, but I know there are huge reserves of methane in various forms…orders of magnitude more than all of the oil reserves that ever existed. Whether that translates into 600k years worth at our current energy usage I have no idea, but I’d be a bit skeptical. IIRC it was more like thousands of years not hundreds of thousands (and of course you have to make a bunch of assumptions, starting with some commercial way to harvest hydrates/clathrates from the deep oceans and going to the impacts of using this energy source on the environment, especially global climate change, since methane is a more potent GhG than CO2 is).
-XT
Scenarios like the OP are what happens when you cut out professional engineers from the decision-making process, because “engineers are just so damn negative!” Sort of like how I’ve been accused of being on this message board by Google-happy amateur “energy experts.” :rolleyes:
Yeah, humanities types don’t realize that you can’t fake it 'til you make it when it comes to science. The numbers have to add up. If it doesn’t work on paper, it won’t work in real life. Period.
Do you contend that a viable way to force the spread of green energy is to throw a ton of money at it, even when the claims made of it are fantastical, even when the providers of the infrastructure are garage inventors with no working equipment to show? Throw 2 billion at a project to save an $8 million bill?
This is ridiculous. Your position is essentially to defend anything that’s tagged green energy, no matter how ineffective, stupid, impractical, or even counter-productive.
You aren’t even helping your cause - think about how much research on, say, PV efficiency you could conduct for the 2 billion dollars utterly wasted here. Even as a blind green energy advocate, you should be able to recognize this as something bad.
The fact that you can’t shows that you are not rational or grounded in reality on the issue.
Either you are so dumb you totally misunderstood every word I said, or your distortions are motivated by malice. I’m a kindly person, so I’m going with stupid.
Or possibly you didn’t express yourself clearly, or you’re wrong.
Why would I be motivated by malice? Am I one of those goons that the Big Energy people hire to make the inventor of the water powered car dissapear or something?
People in this thread are criticizing a total waste of money as being wildly impractical. You come into the thread essentially saying “yeah, maybe the numbers don’t always add up, but someone has to do something to save the earth!!!111” more or less, right?
I’m saying your defense here is stupid. Your greater point that it may not be the most economically inconvenient thing to develop alternative energy and stuff but that it’s in our best interest to do it has merit. However, you’re applying this logic to defend an utterly absurd, impractical waste of money that’s going to do nothing but damage the green movement.
You should be pissed that this money wasn’t spent on actual practical green technologies. The guy just made shit up to try to aim for some absurd idea of making colleges a 50MW power plant. He put wind turbines in areas with no wind. He invested into a garage inventor with a miracle product that apparently outdid everything everyone else on the market could, or at least it would, if you would just fund the finishing touches…
The whole thing was a disaster. The state could’ve used that money to do real work advancing green energy like building windmills where there was actually wind, or subsidies for the adoption of solar panels, or upgrading the electrical efficiency of the college campuses. Instead it was spent on utterly impractical, silly and possibly fraudulent ideas.
So for you to come in here with a blanket defense that amounts to effectively “oh sure, it makes no sense, but he claimed to be doing this for the green movement, so let’s not criticize him” makes you look like all of the other idiots that get people’s eyes rolling in regards to wild “green” promises.
Oh, if only we could get every level of government to blow billions of dollars on windmills where there isn’t wind and garage inventors with their promises of game changers that violate the laws of physics then surely we could achieve utopia. Because you can’t do wrong as long as you claim you’re in pursuit of green.
I meant to say “it may not be the most economically convenient thing”, of course.
At no time, in no wise, did I offer any defense for this project’s failure. It is what it is. If you have such a quote, bring it. Otherwise, I offer you a cuppa.
This is an inspiring story. Maniacal maverick gets hold of budget and only manages to waste $10 million: wise administrators stymie his best efforts. Compared to the Iraq War ($3 trillion, according to Stiglitz) or the financial crisis sponsored by Countrywide, Chase, Citigroup et al., that’s peanuts. Heck the $10 million stimulated the economy, which during recession isn’t a bad thing. It’s a lot more productive than dropping bombs. If only our larger institutions had such checks and balances.
Props to Marshall Drummond, chancellor of the college district, for demanding a full account.
Oh, right, you’re just doing that cowardly thing where you never actually hold a position you have to defend. You just make statements that imply a position, but then you can just claim oh well nothing I said had anything to do with the matter at hand of course! if someone calls you on it.
Tell us, then - if you weren’t trying to deflect the criticism in this thread, what was your “How the hell do you get all of that on a spreadsheet?” post about, exactly? Was it just a totally random post on the merits of spending on green energy that just happened to have nothing to do with a thread about a huge waste on a green energy project?
That’s it? That one quote? Its the only actual quote you offer, so I guess that must be it. Seems rather innocuous, compared to the hissy fit of innuendo and slander it inspired, but I don’t have your gift for intuition, to peer past my actual words and grasp the hidden meaning. Trouble is, you grasped the one that isn’t there.
Put baldly, the question refers to the problem of quantifying, analyzing the pros and cons of things we don’t really understand. How do we proceed with a cost/benefit analysis when we don’t know either the cost or the benefit? How do we quantify the value of instructive failure? On what basis do we decide what is original and innovative thinking, and what is crackpot? Naturally, I am pleased to be able to answer a complex question without hesitation: I don’t know.
We stare into fog and darkness, and we need an answer. We need that answer urgently, if not desperately. My guess…and its only a guess, mind you, not trying to set you off into another shitfit…my guess is that the answer is something we have yet to think of. Pretty sure it isn’t corn based ethanol. Wind? Maybe, looks kinda shaky. But what we have right now not only isn’t working, its killing us.
But, boiled down and oversimplified, that’s it: we cannot meaningfully quantify things we don’t know. I hope that helps, and I promise that, in the future, I will try to be more mindful of your limitations. Its not good for you to get so upset, it curdles your chi.
Peace on you.
Are you trying to slather your bullshit in unnecesarily grandiose prose, or something? I was just referring to your original post. I didn’t want to quote the entirety of it again, so I just referred to it by that one line summary, ffs.
Your entire post is a along the same lines.
Well then, let’s throw billions of dollars at every crackpot blindly because anything in pursuit of green is worth it!
Ok, do you understand that there’s a range of practicality in pursuit of green energy? Do you understand that having leading scientists in their fields given grants to work on practical proposals for developing green technology is probably on the promising end of the scale, and installing 500 billion dollars worth of solar panels indoors is probably not on the more practical end of the scale? This incident is a lot closer to the latter. But your blanket defense of green makes no differentiation between the two.
And what major discovery did you think that installing wind turbines on college campuses that have no wind was going to reach?
We’re not talking about “should we spend any money on alternative energy”, we’re talking about “this particular misguided attempt is a complete debacle”
So if you come in here with your generalist “well we have to try SOMETHING, green is the future”, the most reasonable interpretation of that statement is that you’re trying to offer a defense of this incident. It really doesn’t make sense in any other way.
Now if you’re willing to defend the utter debacles - the comically stupid, wasteful stuff like this - what wouldn’t you defend in pursuit of green energy? That’s my point - people like you discredit the entire movement.
If someone invents something in his garage, makes claims to violate the laws of physics, has no working model - the first step is not to spend hundreds of millions of dollars installing them, it’s to see if it even works first.
Again, even if you’re a complete green energy fanatic, you should still be upset here. You should be pissed off that the state was willing to spend a lot on green energy projects and COMPLETELY PISSED AWAY THAT MONEY on something stupid, instead of funding research or subsidies or installing practical systems. Not only that, but you should be upset at the credibility hit the green movement is going to take for this incident. Everything here is bad bad bad. It’s a waste, it’s counterproductive, and it’s going to harm the green movement. And here you are defending it.
I’m not upset, you’re a dumbass. Dissecting dumbassery is what I do.
If this is the case — if the correct interpretation of your original post was not to defend the individuals responsible for this project — then I am genuinely confused as to what your point was. Were you merely taking the opportunity to describe why weening society onto green energy is worth some risk, without connecting this sentiment in any way to the particular subject at hand? (Which was, lest we forget, about an individual who failed miserably by taking far too much risk in the name of green energy.)
When someone assumes the natural interpretation of your post, you call them malicious or stupid. I feel neither malicious nor stupid, but your intentions are terribly unclear, so help me out here.
I suppose a defense of whatshisface might have been a reasonable assumption, if I had so much as mentioned whatshisface. And yes, I do seek to remind that the road to where we have to go…not want to go, have to go…is bound to involve blunders, mistakes and boondoggles.
My response was more towards XT’s (perfectly reasonable!) suggestion of a ROI inquiry, pointing out that in the larger context such quantification is not possible, we don’t even know for sure that it can be done, even less can we know what it will cost. Which provoked such calm, even-tempered responses as…
I submit that this distorts my meaning and my point beyond all recognition.
As well as:
Which I find a bit extravagant, since the article in question specifies $10 million.
I was not asked what I thought of this fuck up, my opinion was presumed, and, having been presumed, was subject to extravagant inflation. And then I get beat up on for things I never even mentioned, much less defended!
Now, I don’t mind a fair fight, I’m your huckleberry. But a fair fight, not someone constructing a caricature of my opinions and wailing away on that.
You gave no indication who you were responding to. You didn’t quote anyone. Considering your response worked as a response to the OP, it was perfectly reasonable for me to assume that was the case. Obviously I wasn’t the only one here who thought that. So you should probably take more care to specify what you’re talking about rather than jumping right to insults.
From the OP:
It got to only 10 million wasted before anyone put a stop to it, but he was planning on going ahead with what experts put at a $2 billion project. That’s what I was talking about in terms of waste.
For some reason, I find this implausible. I wonder if anyone verified that he actually attended MIT from 1970 to 1974 and graduated.
Just so. I have much to learn from your example of calm and genial discourse.