Thank You, America. - by Nicker
Azaran on 10/11/2012 at 06:01
He also gave 1.7 million to Romney's campaign, money he could have used to keep those workers. It shows well what rich conservatives really care about
Peanuckle on 10/11/2012 at 08:17
Quote Posted by Azaran
He also gave 1.7 million to Romney's campaign, money he could have used to keep those workers. It shows well what rich conservatives really care about
Obama outright stated that his goal was to bankrupt the coal industry. Of course they're going to oppose him. And now that he won the election, they know they're in for a rough time, so there building up a war-chest to last at least 4 years. They won't just shrivel up and die.
Not only that, but he's also shutting down oil sites. Apparently his big dream for America is to run on solar and wind power.
Gotta love those 15% efficient solar cells. That'll keep the brownouts away.
CCCToad on 10/11/2012 at 08:26
Quote Posted by Peanuckle
Not only that, but he's also shutting down oil sites. Apparently his big dream for America is to run on solar and wind power.
Gotta love those 15% efficient solar cells. That'll keep the brownouts away.
Doubt it. Even though our "green energy" spending has increased, proportionally it still lags far behind Europe's. More likely is that Obama's goal is to protect OPEC and the petrodollar.
jay pettitt on 10/11/2012 at 11:58
Quote Posted by Peanuckle
Not only that, but he's also shutting down oil sites.
Sorry Peanuckle, but someone has been telling you porkies.
Obama has been shutting down oil sites that were squatting (and not producing) on Federal land. What he did was introduce a use it or lose it system of leasing. Which, as it happens, is why production of liquids
on Federal land is up. Leases are down. Production is up - up a direct result of that policy. And your energy prices are lower than they would otherwise be as a direct consequence of that policy too. Leases are not production. Unused leases especially so. Romney either knows this and was lying through his teeth in the hope that common people don't understand energy policy and would be duped or he and his team don't understand simple things pertaining to energy policy - in either case he had no business running for president. Republicans need to do better than just make stuff up and use sleight of hand to get you to look at the fluffy squirrels while they rifle through your pockets.
Quote:
Gotta love those 15% efficient solar cells. That'll keep the brownouts away.
The fuel is free, efficiency hardly matters - unless you're shopping and wondering which solar panels to buy. The reason certain people like to cite efficiency is because it's the one metric that you can (if you're monumentally gobsmackingly daft, or have been duped) compare renewables and coal/gas and not make coal/gas look bad. You can run coal and gas turbines at full tilt, but renewables tend to run at part capacity because you only get maximum sun and maximum wind sometimes.
So you've sort of got a number that says my turbine is better than your turbine. Sort of. Now if only coal and gas were free, didn't need extracting, transporting or storing (ie if only reality didn't exist) they'd be on to something.
What you want to look at is net production, energy return on investment and additional costs. In short, how much for how much and when. The technical (ie doable) capacity for net production from solar in the US is staggering. One day we'll have fusion. 'Till then you have solar. You'd have to be monumentally, gobsmackingly daft not to do it. So yes - basic physics and economics says wind turbines and solar plant especially is what you need to keep your brownouts away.
Climate Change is reality too. And the projected costs of even mild impacts like changes in precipitation run into tens of trillions by mid century. CCS will happen and will change everything in your energy mix, because you can't capture CO2 for free with magic fairy dust. Coal without CCS doesn't have a future. Coal with CCS is going to find it hard to compete because CCS is expensive and margins are already tight even without it. The sooner you get on with it and create jobs in other industries that coal workers can transition to the better off you'll be.
scumble on 10/11/2012 at 12:03
The comment about the Coal Industry muppet got me thinking about political contributions - The only thing that's clear cut really is where the unions are putting their money, according to this: (
http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/topcontribs.php) http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/topcontribs.php
CCCToad on 10/11/2012 at 20:01
Another column I liked. And I agree with him, Republicans really shouldn't be as butthurt as they are.
(
http://blog.syracuse.com/opinion/2012/11/cheer_up_republicans_youre_goi.html)
Quote:
Cheer up. The guy we just re-elected is a moderate Republican
Yes, Obama began his presidency with bailouts, stimulus, and borrowing. You know who started the bailouts? George W. Bush. Bush knew that under these exceptionally dire circumstances, bailouts had to be done. Stimulus had to be done, too, since the economy had frozen up. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts. Once the economy began to revive, Obama offered a $4-trillion debt reduction framework that would have cut $3 to $6 of spending for every $1 in tax hikes. That’s a higher ratio of cuts to hikes than Republican voters, in a Gallup poll, said they preferre d. It’s way more conservative than the ratio George H. W. Bush accepted in 1990. In last year’s debt-ceiling talks, Obama offered cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in exchange for revenue that didn’t even come from higher tax rates. Now he’s proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and Republicans are whining that he hacked $716 billion out of Medicare . Some socialist.
Azaran on 10/11/2012 at 20:33
Quote Posted by CCCToad
Another column I liked. And I agree with him, Republicans really shouldn't be as butthurt as they are.
They only feel that wa,y because right wing media keeps skipping those facts, and instead parrot the myth that Obama is a socialist.
CCCToad on 10/11/2012 at 21:04
Quote Posted by Azaran
They only feel that wa,y because right wing media keeps skipping those facts, and instead parrot the myth that Obama is a socialist.
Yeah but....you sure its a "right wing" media? FOX maybe. The rest of them are bound less by ideology than by the worship of political power.
Another column:
(
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/26/journalism-vanity-fair-obama)
Quote:
The central function, the religion, of the US establishment media is adulation of those who wield power, especially military power as personified by the inaptly referred to "commander-in-chief". Brinkley conducted the interview in the Oval Office from his knees because - with some significant exceptions - that's the posture which US media culture assumes in the presence of the royal court.
What makes this most ironic, and most destructive, is that this function is the exact antithesis of what media figures claim they perform and what pioneers of press freedom protections envisioned. The political media is designed to be adversarial because it is supposed to serve as a scrutinizing check on the claims of those in power, not serve as worshipful, propagandistic amplifiers of those claims.
Peanuckle on 10/11/2012 at 21:37
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
Sorry Peanuckle, but someone has been telling you porkies.
The fuel is free, efficiency hardly matters - unless you're shopping and wondering which solar panels to buy. The reason certain people like to cite efficiency is because it's the one metric that you can (if you're monumentally gobsmackingly daft, or have been duped) compare renewables and coal/gas and not make coal/gas look bad. You can run coal and gas turbines at full tilt, but renewables tend to run at part capacity because you only get maximum sun and maximum wind sometimes.
So you've sort of got a number that says my turbine is better than your turbine. Sort of. Now if only coal and gas were free, didn't need extracting, transporting or storing (ie if only reality didn't exist) they'd be on to something.
What you want to look at is net production, energy return on investment and additional costs. In short, how much for how much and when. The technical (ie doable) capacity for net production from solar in the US is staggering. One day we'll have fusion. 'Till then you have solar. You'd have to be monumentally, gobsmackingly daft not to do it. So yes - basic physics and economics says wind turbines and solar plant especially is what you need to keep your brownouts away.
Except efficiency is INCREDIBLY important, because if your power plant is doing poorly, you're going to need lots of them, and they're not cheap. Just because the fuel is free doesn't mean you can ignore the cost of construction, maintenance, and infrastructure. You make a point to talk about the cost of transporting coal and oil, but neglect to mention what goes into running a solar plant. Additionally, not every location is suitable for solar or wind power, so sometimes you're just SOL for renewables.
Current solar-cell technology gives us a 10-25% efficiency. That is, for each photon of light that impacts the cells, 10-25% of its energy can be converted to electricity. That's abysmal. The solution is to build lots and lots of solar plants. The largest solar facility (consisting of SEVERAL solar plants) in America covers 1600 acres and can power 232,000 homes. By contrast, a single coal plant can put out twice the power while occupying a fraction of the space and being much, much cheaper as well. So if you wanted to power America with solar plants, you'd need to build so many plants that you'd bankrupt the country even more than it already is. And then you'd need to pay money for maintenance on the things as well. The cost of putting up solar plants is currently MORE than building a conventional plant, but thanks to government subsidies, it could be cheaper. Then again, that major solar power company out west failed even AFTER getting a hefty government handout.
Now there's some cutting-edge technology that promises to bump solar cells up to an
astonishing 44% efficiency, but that's still nowhere near coal or oil power (let alone nuclear). The fact is, solar technology is just impractical for electricity generation. Coal and oil remain the most accessible choices right now. So no, the laws of physics do NOT support your particular political ideology.
Personally, I'm a nuclear power advocate. A handful of major disasters like Three Mile Island and Fukushima have people scared (Germany deactivated all their nuclear plants!), but modern plants are much safer, and frankly NOTHING can be expected to survive a combination earthquake/tsunami, so as long as we stick to our own standards and don't build on fault lines, nuclear power could set us up without poisoning the air. As for radioactive waste, we've already found several ways to deal with it, perhaps the most impressive being breeder reactors which actually use it to generate power.
I got my numbers from wikipedia and a few hits on google.
DDL on 10/11/2012 at 23:59
Coal: expected global supply? Limited.
THE FUCKING SUN: expected global supply? ....less limited.
Fossil fuels are super efficient when compared to solar, sure, but that's because they're basically solar power condensed over millions of years. Also, they will run out, because they took millions of years to lay down and only hundreds of years to burn right the fuck through. Possibly they will run out soon. If we DON'T have suitable alternative architecture in place by the time that happens, then WHOOP WE BE FUCKED.
The sun, on the other hand, is not going to run out soon, and let's be honest, if it did then "power supply" would be the least of our problems.
Nuclear is of course also a great idea, but there really is no reason we can't use both.
