you think people on food stamps are driving around with nothing to do now because gas is so cheap? All you’re plan will do is accelerate the national debt. We’ll then have less money to devote to solving problems.
In the mean time the people on food stamps will start burning wood to stay warm because the cost of energy rises due to carbon taxes.
:dubious:
Do you really do not know what burning wood makes? I give you a hint, its Atomic Number is 6 and binds with oxygen.
An effective carbon tax has to include all items that produce CO2. Using fossil fuels will continue but a carbon emission tax is there to make an incentive to reduce the emissions.
Yes, do you really truly not understand what I just said? If you raise the cost of heating someone’s house they will switch to a cheaper fuel. Which is going to be more efficient, a million people burning wood or a million people getting their energy from a power company burning coal? Which creates more co2?
This is mind numbingly short sighted. First it assumes raising the cost of co2 production will reduce it. Second it assumes eliminating co2 production is the cheapest route. Third it completely ignores China’s massive increase in electrical use by coal. fourth, it completely ignores the natural transition to battery operated cars which will occur rapidly when batteries become user friendly (are fast charging). In essence, you’re trying to improve rotary phone technology in the face of the digital technology.
You’re a bad solution in search of a problem to solve instead of a problem with many obvious options that are easy to implement.
This is wilfully ignoring that solar and wind are already more economical than coal and other fossil fuels once we add the real costs of using the atmosphere as a sewer.
As your first point was grossly wrong, your say so here is just silly.
And I’m on the record of supporting electrical cars (that are getting better because investors are seeing a reason to make better batteries thanks to early adopters that were willing to pay the price for the current ones) that IIRC you disparaged a lot just recently.
Are you going to answer my question? You don’t think raising gas prices will have any affect on consumption?
The real costs are what we pay. When you change those costs they alter many things. Please stop your misuse of the words “energy subsidy” and more than that, please stop thinking wind and solar driven energy is a solution. both of them are so limited by location as to make them a permanent secondary source of energy. A realistic solution is to switch from coal to natural gas and nuclear power as a primary source. If you’re not willing to deal with financial reality then the solution will never occur.
No, you’re not really on record as supporting electrical cars. If you were you’d factor them in to the equation. They’re going to happen naturally just as natural gas for energy production is going to happen naturally. You continue to ignore the natural progression of technology that favors less co2 production. It’s going to happen and it’s going to be a radical reduction and it won’t involve ANY government interference. What the government CAN do is advance the game changing technologies which in this case would be fast charge batteries and bio-diesel. Do this and we’re done. We could fund this with taxes from increased oil production from places like ANWR where the infrastructure is literally within walking distance from the additional well heads.
As pointed before: Sorry Mario, but your extremist is in another castle.
I’m on the record on supporting natural gas and Nuclear power as well.
And many places in Europe and the South West of the USA are jumping into solar and wind even if ALEC does not like that.
Nah, you are only showing selective memory, I supported the VOLT and many other electrical cars before, you did disparage them.
No because that’s not your real question. Your real question is will it affect co2 levels. The answer to that is no. If you raise the cost of living people will seek cheaper solutions. If that can’t afford the solution (buy new car) then they will seek the savings somewhere else. In this case, heating their home with wood and driving their clunker longer than they would have because of the expense of a new car.
Driving less is not a solution. Driving smart is a solution. It’s far easier for a government to advance technology than it is to advance changes in behavior.
And you’re making my point. The massive failure of the Volt was predicted. You can’t give them away. It’s literally a waste of money to produce it. GM could have fronted hybrids that were profitable. As an example, Ford is marketing their Lincoln hybrid for the same price as their regular car. That is what will sell. If the car isn’t on the road then it isn’t making a difference.
You keep backing the wrong solution in an altruistic bent on what you think should happen. The Volt will sell when batteries charge in seconds/minutes. Diesels that get 65 mpg will sell if they’re made available NOW. It would cost nothing to make the diesels available. The battery technology to make the Volt a viable car is not available now but government research could reduce the time it takes to make it happen.
All solutions should be based on the best return on investment and the least amount of social engineering. This should be the mantra of any expected changes in society.
And that is not what I said. And you are betraying here your so called “support for electric cars”.
I said that batteries are getting better “because investors are seeing a reason to make better batteries thanks to early adopters that were willing to pay the price for the current ones”. That BTW was to imply that the VOLT was part of getting what you are talking about, it is like if you do think that magic will drive change, to get to viable new batteries someone has to be early adopter (and not just leave the job to the Japanese, Koreans and Chinese) and history has shown that the early products do have flaws, but they need to exist to then learn from the experience and apply what works into other cars.
And if we do want to talk about failure, the Volt still keeps pace with other cars like the Leaf.
Point being that once gain your exaggerations only reduce whatever you are claiming. But once again that was not the point, the point I was making that those new batteries are coming because someone had to see what works and then find ways to do better next.
This question is the main thing that makes me most discouraged about there being any hope of curbing climate change long term. Even if we can get a world wide coalition together to cut down on fossil fuel use for the next 50 years, its going to be hard to keep up in perpetuity. Eventually, short term interests are going to out weigh long term goals and use is just going to ramp back up. And even if we do rein in the use long term, it will just slow down the increase in atmospheric CO2. Unless we can find an alternative energy source that is cheap and reliable enough to make fossil fuels the equivalent of whale oil, we will eventually over the next few centuries burn all of the fossil fuel in the ground.
Gigo please correct me if I’m wrong, but in terms of long term climate, if we end up at the same total concentrations of CO2, I don’t see that it makes a difference whether it occurs over 100 years or 500 years.
That is not to say that I’m against any attempt to try to slow things down, as that will a) give us a cooler world as long as possible, b) give us more time to come up with more efficient energy alternative, c) give us more time to prepare to mitigate the effects. It just makes me depressed about the long term.
Once again, it is too late to prevent some changes, but it is like with smoking tobacco: You can quit smoking but still in the future you can get lung cancer but since you know the risk and the probable outcome it is detected early and cured. Not quitting now will only lead to even more cancer risk, emphysema, hearth attack and other unpleasant things.
So yes, talking about the long term we can still make a difference even if we realize that we are too late for a few items like a few feet of an increase in the ocean level. IMHO we are talking now (we should had had this conversation decades ago as James Burke put it in the very prophetic “after the warming” show back in the 80’s(!)) about the difference of keeping many coastal cities with lots of adaptations like levies and dams vs a complete loss of them in the long term.
Yeah, but it’s in-cycle, not sequestered.
Maybe you misunderstand my concerns. I’m not saying that it is too late to do anything about it because of all the damage that has been already done, I’m saying that given human nature, sooner or later we as a species are eventually going to burn all of the carbon in the ground that we can get to. Eventually we are going to be up around 1,400 ppm. Reducing our carbon use can delay this, but in the very long term does it make much difference if this happens over 200 years or over 500 years?
I totally disagree. Driving less is most certainly a part of the solution. Driving less means less fuel burned. When gas prices spiked in 2008 the sales of SUVs dropped a significant amount. That is proof enough to me that raising prices will directly change habits (which includes driving smarter) in a way that will reduce CO2 production.
The reason why I’m cautiously optimistic is that outfits like the Communist Party in China and the government in India will find out that they have another thing coming at them if they do not clean up their act.
One big reason why I do not think all the fossil fuels will be burned is that right now in some locations solar and wind are more economical than fossil fuels, once regulations and the addition of the real cost of emissions is added to the use of fossil fuels the change will be fast, particularly when even more evidence of unwanted climate change takes place.
2008 wasn’t exactly a banner year. we were dealing with a financial crisis.
Burning less fuel is the solution you’re looking for not driving less miles. They are not directly linked. My friend’s SUV gets 35 mpg around town. That’s what you want to sell. And this has already been addressed by the upcoming CAFE fuel standards. Making the process more affordable and not less affordable keeps the economy rolling forward. The better the economy the more money to invest in research. The less money available means the economy is tanking and more people require assistance. That’s the big picture. Moving forward so that the newest fuel efficient cars are purchased. The faster they get into the market the faster they’re sold on the secondary used car market so more people can engage in the process of burning less fuel.
The alternative is to increase social spending to compensate for higher taxes which retards the process of car purchases.
There is no magic in the Volt. It’s virtually the same technology as a Prius with additional batteries. It’s an overpriced vehicle waiting for a fast charging battery. It’s not as efficient as a Prius off charge and lacks the quick charging functionality to compete in the real world.
I would be embarrassed to quote the numbers you just quoted. The Volt sales are non-existent. They’re so low that if they doubled they would still be non-existent. The car got the most free advertising of any product in the history of the world in a year long “what Would Jesus Drive” campaign of awards and attention. and nobody wants it. I’ve seen exactly one since it’s introduction. They managed to build a Corvette that does zero to 35 miles in 8 hrs (of charging).
Again, GM could have built hybrids that would have sold and reduced gas consumption but they didn’t. It’s an economic failure. It’s a fuel savings failure. Maybe they’ll redeem themselves with the turbodiesel Cruze which gets 46 mpg on the highway.
You still want to talk about the car when my focus here is the battery, I’m taking all the electric and hybrid cars into consideration here.
I would be embarrassed to ignore what was discussed before or here to score cheap points, before I pointed out that they are a niche product and I considered as such, here I do consider them a piece of what works and what does not work, it is part of trial an error, and perhaps the main problem I see on you is that you are relying a lot on the God complex on this issue.
In the sense that you are demanding already formed perfect solutions, ignoring that trial and error are part of the process to get to a solution. The volt is in my opinion part of that, I expect the (recognized by independent sources) technology from the volt to be used in better cars in the future.
It’s the same technology as the Prius. A small ice engine and 2 electric motors tied to a planetary gear transmission. It wasn’t technology advanced, it was wasted resources. It represents a car not driven. They pissed away an entire production line when they could have mass produced something that made a difference.
Ford had a hybrid SUV years ago. They’ve moved on to making a hybrid for same cost as the stock engine variant. This is what puts cars on the road that save fuel.
It’s reality versus wishful thinking.