Pure corn oil does not pollute when used in a diesel engine. Non food grade just means it’s not been treated like food, it might have biological impurities, not sulfur or shit like that.
I didn’t say ethanol wouldn’t mess up your rubber and such, but you can put pure ethanol in most any car and it will run on it. better adjust the computer first.
Old cars ran just fine on moonshine. It’s not the engine itself that suffers.
That’s a fundamental contradiction. If peak oil is a serious problem, then global warming is self-correcting. None of the IPCC models include a ‘peak oil’ scenario.
Basically, peak oil alarmism says that once the increase in consumption outstrips our ability to discover new supplies, the price of oil will skyrocket and cause the economy to crater as our energy costs go through the roof.
But if that happens, by definition our emission of greenhouse gases would plummet - far more so than any carbon tax would ever cause.
Another contradiction: Some of the same people that say peak oil will crater the economy believe that we can basically force a peak oil scenario through taxation, without hurting the economy at all.
What’s common between those scenarios? A demand to intervene in the market and force the adoption of alternative energy sources. That two arguments are being used that are fundamentally contradictory should be illuminating.
Another contradiction with the ‘green’ movement (and to be fair, this doesn’t include everyone on that side) is their opposition to fracking and nuclear power. Natural gas is a huge boon to global warming avoidance, because it provides a cheap widely available energy source that emits much less CO2 per btu than do other available sources. Yet there was widespread opposition to fracking from the same people who also oppose nuclear power - yet claim that global warming is the largest threat humanity faces.
Fracking is the reason the U.S. has actually met the Kyoto targets while Europe has not, despite the U.S. being the ‘bad guy’ and the Europeans all piously signing up for the treaty.
Sometimes it makes you think that the real objective is to increase taxes and control of the economy by government, and to put more power in the hands of the institutions the green movement likes.
Looking around it seems that the loudest proponent of that point that the EU has not met the Kyoto protocol and the USA has comes from WUWT, as I pointed before the problem of depending on sources that all along pushed hot air on the basics is that they are also very active on disparaging what others are doing about the issue.
http://ec.europa.eu/clima/news/articles/news_2013100901_en.htm
And as usual there is no look at the context, that site also reports that that replacement is also on the list of regulated chemicals now. The site also reports that efforts are ongoing to replace that with less harmful chemicals, in any case the reports are that the efforts did pay off, and not only on the ozone front.
http://news.sciencemag.org/earth/2007/03/dodging-warming-bullet
There are many problems with that argument, aside from the fact that “peak oil” seems to be a continuing fallacy. Obviously the amount of available oil is finite; the question is when the practical economic limits of exploration and extraction will be reached and what shape our climate will be in by then – or more accurately, because there’s huge lag in climate response, what inevitable climate consequences we will be committed to by then. Since we’re already 120 ppm above the typical inter-glacial CO2 maximum, it’s not like we have the luxury to just sit back and see what happens.
The other problem is that it’s not just oil. Coal reserves are very much larger, and even if coal isn’t convenient in its natural form, it’s convertible to other forms of carbon fuels. In short, there’s more than enough sequestered carbon deep in the earth to send the climate back to the Cretaceous. Which is quite literally where that carbon came from in the first place, and we’re cheerfully putting it all back.
If CfCs (like the current freons) are actually effective at warming the planet, then it would be possible to control the earth from entering an ice age.
What’s strange, is that even with all the CfCs, CO2, methane and land use changes, we are not seeing any drastic increase in the global mean right now.
In fact, this winter in the NH has been unusually cold. And fits the trend for colder NH winters. If, as it has been theorized, CO2 and other greenhouse gases are the cause, that an increase in greenhouse gases can actually CAUSE colder winters, there is yet another reason to do something about greenhouse gases.
One of the few benefits of “global warming” was supposed to be a reduction in winter deaths, as well as savings on fuel cost for heating. That has not happened.
Whoa, we don’t want our food-grade corn oil spoiling on the shelf, why would we want our fuel-grade corn oil spoiling in the tank? Modern engines will run on kerosene, for a little while. Same with E100, for a little longer … but my new pick-up won’t last until 2028 running E100 all the time. Another pseudo-citation.
Do you have a citation on the math here?
Yes, there has, just not often enough. We routinely recycle much of our garbage, something that was unheard of just about a generation ago; we drive relatively efficient less polluting cars and it’s no longer a status symbol to drive a behemoth that looks like an aircraft carrier on wheels; we solved acid rain and we got lead out of our gasoline and phosphates out of our detergents. Nuclear war may still be possible but it’s far less probable than it was 50 years ago. Indeed, there’s a fascinating story in an old LIFE magazine from 1953 about space flight that hammers away at its military implications, enthusiastically describing how US orbiting space stations could be, not just military observation platforms, but nuclear missile launch platforms that could unleash righteous atomic fury anywhere on earth where military leaders felt a little nuclear smackdown was called for. These were the days when the nuclear arms race was just beginning, and the biggest nuclear tests right in the open atmosphere were all yet to come – the tests that would send nuclear fallout all around the world and right into the food we eat. Although, those being the days when tetraethyl lead made all our car engines run so nice and smooth (look for the “ethyl” sign for guaranteed performance!), it’s not clear whether radioactive fallout would have killed us off before all the lead we were putting into our environment did.
We’ve recognized and met challenges to our future survival and well-being before, only never at the scale that is now required.
Wise words and very true. Further discussion belongs in its own thread, but in this one, suffice it to say that this is the basis of most of climate change denialism. When one side of the equation is some climate scientists and a hundred million average guys in the street who don’t really know what to think, and the other side is represented by companies like Exxon Mobil, a single company whose revenues are larger than the GDP of many countries, and individuals like the Koch brothers, all of whom are quite happy to tell the average guys in the street what to think, then there mysteriously seems to arise a great deal of doubt about the science.
Peak oil is not about oil “running out.”
Peak oil is not about reserves.
That’s peak oil.
Once again FXMastermind, this discussion is about what can be done and we assume that it is happening and we know the human causes that are driving the current warming.
That is the actual bottom line, as many corporations that are not the fossil fuel ones are beginning to realize that their future businesses will be affected by an increasing lack of control and extreme weather that we will get the longer we delay the concerted effort that is needed.
One of the big stumbling blocks for those corporations that want to change is coming from the old energy providers that are not reacting well to the changing environment.
It’s not a contradiction if we are already past tipping point when it comes to CO2 emissions. Worse, several sources of unconventional oil produce more GHG.
What you want to look at is not the IPCC but the IEA 2010 report.
Oil price has tripled. Crude oil production peaked back in 2005. We’re now using unconventional oil to meet increasing demand, and the IEA argues that that won’t last.
It won’t because we’ll be using coal and other sources of unconventional oil to meet demand.
By the time it goes down, positive feedback loops will start kicking in. Actually, several of them have started.
There’s no need to force such a scenario because it’s been taking place for around nine years.
Too late because the oil price has already tripled.
Peak oil is not about the “green” movement.
Fracking, natural gas, and other unconventional oil sources have lower energy returns.
Nuclear power does not provide petrochemicals.
US emissions are dropping not because of fracking but because people are driving less. They are driving less because the U.S. economy weakened considerably. It weakened considerably because of a combination of fallout from financial speculation and global oil price tripling.
Actually, the best way to increase tax revenues (not taxes) is to do the opposite, which is why the main backers of global warming denialism include Big Business and government junior partners.
That’s why IPCC results are watered down and global warming underestimated. That’s also why global unregulated derivatives have a national value of more than a quadrillion dollars. That’s why mainstream news hardly report on global warming and peak oil, preferring to state that they are hoaxes, easy to solve, or both. How else can Big Business encourage people to borrow and spend happily?
Ethanol and biofuels in general have very low energy returns.
What exactly is inhospitable to humans in the Cretaceous climate? Considering what did live and thrive in that period, there won’t be any food shortages. An abundance of food plants mean an abundance of fresh water. Of all the disasters listed above, some have been occurring these past 10,000 years, of the rest we have not one shred of evidence they have ever occurred. “Hyper-canes”, I’m sorry, there’s physical limits on how strong a tropical cyclone can get before the various frictions kick in. Typhoon Tip may not be the biggest possible over the open ocean, but you push a super typhoon up against a continental land mass and things start spinning down right quick.
Rising temperatures reduce our CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions from heating our homes. One thing we can do is outlaw air conditioners … because of all things, this is one of pure luxury.
The economic limits kicked in around nine years ago. The IEA admitted in 2010 that crude oil production peaked back in 2005. We are now using unconventional production to meet increasing demand. U.S. shale production will last for a few more years.
In 2010, the IEA reported that we need to move to renewable energy as soon as possible because we face both peak oil and global warming.
Coal has lower energy returns, especially when it has to be converted. Resources that are too deep cannot be extracted because the energy cost will be too high.
That’s why even though we’ve used up only around 25 pct of crude oil conventional production is now in a plateau, and we’re forced to use unconventional oil. That won’t last for the same reason.
The bigger issue is that oil prices and global warming, not to mention problems concerning phosphorus and other resources, is threatening food supply. On top of that, biofuels have low energy returns.
Climate Change Denialism at it’s finest … how dare you bring the real and immediate problems of today … oceans level will rise FIVE FEET in 200 years … nothing but taxing the living shit of of the middle class will solve this issue.
It doesn’t matter how much biofuels you burn, there’s a net zero increase in made-man carbon dioxide.
Some sources to consider in light of this topic:
The NAS final report on global warming:
The IEA 2010 report on peak oil and global warming:
https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/name,27324,en.html
In relation to the second link, try my list of reports about peak oil:
The government will not do that because its tax revenues are ultimately dependent on consumer spending.
The OP didn’t specify realism … and since everyone else is posting their fantasies, I thought I should too. The Middle Class is begging to pay carbon taxes, they elected Hussian el’Obama with the campaign plank of installing massive taxes on energy.
You have to admit, this would be a pretty cool way to control AGW.
Yep, indeed politics are one of them main reasons of the opposition seen here in the previous post.
Even businesses are moving away from that inaction and are becoming more active on pressuring government to act.