Musings on petroleum.
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Chernosoth
sothiness
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1. It runs out.
2. We stop burning it.
Ahh, the good ole days.
I have no problem with 'renewables' per se'. The problem is with politicians who think that they can pass a bill and all our problems are over. Well, no they aren't, they just create more problems and land the burden on those that can afford their pipe dreams the least.
Wind and Solar are cool except for the small problem that the wind doesn't always blow and the Sun doesn't always shine AND we have no efficient means of storing energy for those occasions. Further, both Wind and Solar have their own environmental problems. There are only two relatively 'clean' means of producing energy, Hydro and Nuclear, both have their problems as well but actually produce less pollutants than Solar or Wind.
Of course there is another solution. Return to the Hunter/Gatherer stage of civilization. The dramatic population decrease alone would solve the problem.
Champakian
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Runs out? For well over 50 years, it has been running out.
That is the message from the political Left which wants a return to idyllic pastoral life
forgetting what a hell that was for 99% of the people "enjoying" it.
However, we keep finding new sources and old wells become productive again,
so the conclusion is that there is a carbon cycle because we have an excess
and the Earth is continually recapturing it and recycling it and a lot of that
happens over 3/4 of the globe where it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
That is the message from the political Left which wants a return to idyllic pastoral life
forgetting what a hell that was for 99% of the people "enjoying" it.
However, we keep finding new sources and old wells become productive again,
so the conclusion is that there is a carbon cycle because we have an excess
and the Earth is continually recapturing it and recycling it and a lot of that
happens over 3/4 of the globe where it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
That was detailed in a series of papers started off by a Russian Geo-physicist going on 30 years ago. But that science doesn't fit the narrative.
Champakian
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It fits a political science narrative;
control energy, control population.
control energy, control population.
AlexBailey
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Ahh, the good ole days.
Wind and Solar are cool except for the small problem that the wind doesn't always blow and the Sun doesn't always shine AND we have no efficient means of storing energy for those occasions. Further, both Wind and Solar have their own environmental problems. There are only two relatively 'clean' means of producing energy, Hydro and Nuclear, both have their problems as well but actually produce less pollutants than Solar or Wind.
There are now viable clean methods of storing instantly available gigawatts of energy. We just need to invest in it instead of making rich fuckers richer by continuing to pump toxic dinosaur fluid.
Look up "gravity power storage".
Using existing hydro-power equipment and modern mining techniques we can build gigantic pumped-water energy storage systems. If we redirect the tax breaks and other incentives we now give to petroleum billionaires we can create clean and efficient means of storing large scale energy produced by solar and wind at the scale needed for electrical grid stability.
The most efficient version can use a huge deep shaft filled with water and a piston that rides on top of the water in a closed-loop system that has a round trip efficiency around 85%. These can be built on marginal lands such as old coal-fired generation plants or anywhere that is now being used as battery-based energy storage. In many cases if construction is started now the systems could be operational before the batteries that are now in use need to be replaced.
Forget the pipeline that will pump dirty-ass oil-sand crude for a few decades and invest in a simple mechanical system that will serve generations.
Green technology is viable. Why do you cling to petroleum that compromises the quality of life for our future generations?
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Chernosoth
sothiness
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"Clean nuclear" is a common fantasy of people who need to pretend they care about the environment but will gladly pollute and destroy to keep their modern luxuries, because hardship and energy conservation are for poor people. Farming with just human and animal power will be a hard life for most of the US population, but with freedom not found in the technocratic authoritarian dystopian nightmares that the cities may become for the next few decades.
Rightguide
Prof Triggernometry
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Life without petroleum is the real fantasy.
AlexBailey
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It's the future. Even according to the petro -industry. They say we have "enough for the next hundred years. "
What about after that?
Rightguide
Prof Triggernometry
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It's not the future until we can exist without petroleum. Tell me how many of these you can do without:
You can add computers and IPhones to that list as well.
That is not what the left wants. "Hard Greens" are a different thing.
The extent of our need for petroleum will not make it last longer. Quite the reverse.
But, that process does not turn the carbon into usable fossil fuels, nor into anything from which plastics or fertilizers can be made. That can only happen on a geological time-scale.
The future is not necessarily a thing that includes the human race.
Not fuel.
ll74
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Even fuel.
Yes, even fuel.
But the issue isn't whether we'll eventually run out or not. The issue is CO2 and secondarily pollution.
Even if we could go all electric vehicles tomorrow all that would happen is a new nightmare. First of all the grid can't support the load. What sort of power plants are you going to build to serve that new demand? Electric and wind aren't going to cut it. Fusion is still decades away. The manufacture of the solar panels and wind turbines create pollution of their own and both require fossil fuels in one form or another. Further, there are places in this nation and certain applications where alternatives are NOT going to work well into the foreseeable future.
Every solution so far merely pushes the inefficiency up the supply chain. Those inefficiencies are cummulative and someone's going to pay for them.
ll74
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Efficiency can be improved by r&d, as we've already seen in the short history of serious green energy efforts.
