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Monday, May 7, 2012 | 2 a.m.
As a doctor practicing family medicine, I see the unfortunate results of exposure to airborne pollution, including carbon pollution.
While there may be many factors behind the growth in the number of children with respiratory illness, exposure to carbon pollution like that produced by coal plants is a significant contributor.
I was very pleased to see Assemblyman Tick Segerblom’s recent guest column, “Court decision, rules help state all around,” that noted the successes Nevada has had in developing a clean energy economy and supporting the ability of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions. It is very important to the health of children and our communities that the government have a role in controlling industrial carbon pollution.
Another liberal hiding behind children and her medical degree to defend a bankrupt energy policy which undermines America's independence and economic strength.
There is no doubt my father's occupation of being a mechanic for oil and coal heating systems in the 1950's-60's significantly contributed to his early death at age 51. Let's face facts; prior to the new technological developments of "clean coal", this was nasty stuff. Coal soiled everything it came into contact with and created huge environmental problems. From harmful and hazardous underground mines, to mammoth mounds of coals ash and dust, the carbon dioxide emissions just continued on its path to environmental destruction.
But, times have changed, and technology has made great progress. I'll be the first to agree with the majority of Democrats that the old way of producing coal greatly contributed to climate change concerns we face today.
However, today coal companies are attempting to work with the Obama administration. These "clean coal" technologies reduce harmful emissions to extremely low levels. These new methodologies capture and safely store carbon dioxide. Oh, here we go. I can see it now, another debate and political standoff similar to Yucca Mountain. The fact is, clean coal provides a reliable supply of inexpensive electricity. Like it, or not, nationally, coal is America's most abundant produced fuel.
Should near complete elimination exist of harmful emissions in the production of clean coal, is it not in the best interests of the Obama administration to promote this economic boosting, affordable and plentiful energy of "clean coal" to the American people as our viable solution to our energy problems?
Houston we have a problem- no energy policy !
Earth to Houston : there's no such thing as clean coal and carbon dioxide absorbs and emits infrared light.
Energy policy right now just like W's all the money goes to Houston !
Dennis the dipstick. Happy to begin your day with some enlightened wisdom. Read Brad's comment. You need some updating . Get in step with reality. Green energy has its place, but is no panacea as you wish it were. Obama and his failed energy policy are damaging America. Not only is he off base,he is corrupting the spirit of American policy and undermining our future.
Earth to Houston there is no energy policy !
Renew the Renewable energy subsidies; kill the ones for oil and coal.
Dennis; thanks for the comment on my father. The process to his death from predominately his occupation in oil and coal was absolutely horrific.
I'm not one who believes in government intrusion of private businesses, however, the production of coal is definitely an exception to this rule.
Coal producing companies / corporations must be strongly regulated and inspected constantly for compliance by politically independent inspectors. Simply because, if this is not in place, we have looming environmental and human safety factors surface just like you referenced back in the state of Virginia.
These coal producers who fall from environmental provisions should be immediately shutdown, and the federal government should seize all company assets, without question.
There is no doubt "clean coal" technology exists. However, you'll never hear me say that I trust these same coal producers to remain in compliance with environmental laws on their own.
I opine the USA gov't should spend all the taxpayers' money to devise a huge HEPA filter vacuum that will purify the whole atmosphere to 99.99 percent purity. Cost is no object.If we can do it for households we can do it for the entire universe.
BTW, the air we breathe in our homes is far worse than the outdoors.
Carmine A. DiFazio
"Another liberal hiding behind children and her medical degree to defend a bankrupt energy policy which undermines America's independence and economic strength."
Statements like that above are typical of the conservative playbook. That requires the rejection of new knowledge and science by immediately labeling it a "liberal" conspiracy.
Ignore the rising occurrence of asthma in children. That couldn't possibly be caused by the benevolent providers of "cheap" energy. That energy is cheap provided, of course, that you ignore the cost of treating astthma and related diseases. And how dare someone with a medical degree even raise this issue!
The biggest threat to "America's independence and economic strength" may just be the negative knee-jerk reaction to real science and new information.
Comment removed by moderator. Personal Attack
Exposure to carbon pollution is causing repiratory illness in "the children". Go back to school doctor.
70% of mercury is naturally occurring. 1% is from power plants. But lets get our 'science' from dipstick. LMAO!
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/07/27...
One really good way to supplant the coalrelated issues is solar panels. The cost has fallen dramatically in the last decade and the efficiencies are right near the point where solar and coal are at parity, about $1.00 a watt for solar, around 6 cents a kilowatt hour, the same as coal.
PV panels typically come with 25 year warranties and they produce no air-borne crap to goof up the lungs.
Here are some more facts related to the issue...
http://www.examiner.com/article/solar-as...
Dipstick...
Thanks for starting my day with a HOOT!
Hey FINK...
Of all your many, many diatribes that defy logic, your 5:50am post stands as a testament to your subjective reasoning.
*(plural of crisis is crises, jer, but thanks for the funny).
Joe Lamy for Energy Secretary.
One of my buddies who spent his short life as a boilermaker, travelling all over the US to clean coal fired plants and do the maintenance they require, told of fly ash, a new term to me.
So I looked it up... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash
Another thing he told me was how one plant, a coal fired plant, required a special job... a detail requiring several staff members whose role it was to determine where the wind was coming from and to move the cars of the employees.
The reason is that when the wind blew the wrong way, the PAINT on the cars was GONE by the end of the shift.
Now tell us again Houstonjock how wonderful a thing we have in burning coal that causes all kinds of issues like fly ash and fly rock and rusty new cars.
So what's fly rock? ..the hurtling rocks that coal miners launch on their way down to fetch their little black rocks that burn...
http://www.ohvec.org/newsletters/woc_200...
Environmental policies are out of control and they're not working. What the layman fails to understand is the permit process and the cost related to the permits. Permits are given when all said and done, it's how much is given to some liberal group when it's said and done.
If the permit process was real and not for sale then I for one would believe in the liberal agenda on this subject and would support the process. Sad to say, it's about lining their pocketbooks, nothing more, and nothing less.
In reality, it's about the money, not the environment. They just don't speak of this aspect, it's their dirty little secret that is accepted and widely practiced.
Tim has a point. The checks and balances required for massive pollution and potential catastrophes need to be re-visited. Take Fukushima for an example. The meltdowns happened. the releases happened. there is no way to un-ring that bell.
Japan is now one plant away from being nuke-free. That plant will shut down soon and the country that had planned on 50% nukes by 2015 will be nuke-free because of what Tim points out - failing to plan.
They have learned to apply conservation practices and to use alternatives as in wind and sun that do not pollute or create catastrophic tsunami-like aftershocks to our civilization as Chernobyl or TMI.
With reason and forethought, our energy policy might embrace our values, and our world would see better health as a result of simple recognition that distributed energy can undo much of the harm we currently are creating with our antiquated central power plants, our Investor-Owned Utilities (IOUs) and our fossil base.
We really don't 'need no stinkin transmission lines' when the sun would provide us what we need.
When we multiply the actual efficiencies in fossil-fired electron transmission we end up with a pretty dismal number:
getting the coal costs a bundle
moving the coal costs a bundle
burning the coal is inefficient
making electricity from the burning costs some efficiency
transmitting the electrons to your scree or fridge ain't free
net efficiency is around 3 - 5%, not counting the cost of rising seas, health issues as the good Dr. points out, the clean up,.. the list goes on
Contrast this current (!) picture with simple and clean solar applications avoiding almost all these detriments of antiquated technology that sap our potential, threaten our environmental balance and weaken our health. What we have here is just a failure to acknowledge the potential in our own backyard, so to speak.
Dip: Wiki? Was it written by a 'warmer'? Should we start looking for bodies? Enjoy your indoctrination.
The most likely scenario of "bankrupting coal" is reduced grid reliability. Think rolling brownouts and blackouts, most likely to occur during a heat wave. The one benefit of losing AC will be a net reduction in the elderly--think chicago heat wave in 95.
There is no one being harmed by ambient air quality in America and the EPA cannot produce anyone that has been harmed.
Joe Lamy I'm not an engineer and I'm not sure the transmission line loss' are as great as you say. I think Steven Chu should remain at the Energy department and think he ought to take over treasury too !
Many of the comments here expose the flawed logic of the Flat Planet Society which is based on ignorance. A medical doctor, dealing with children who are ill because they were exposed to carbon dioxide, is literally told to go back to school. The basic ideology of the radical right is to deny facts and reality regardless of the source. The idea of possibly being incorrect or wrong doesn't exist in their Bizarro world.
Vernos, if the doctor believes the children are ill on CO2 and is to old to go back to school then maybe retirement is the answer.
Dip, what point was that? In the future, please let us know when you have one, so difficult to tell otherwise.
"carmen; did you bother to read BChaps posts? what world are you living in?"
No to the first question. The greatest country in the world: The USA to the second. Where even you can ask and be enlightened.
Carmine A. DiFazio
I'm with YOU and CHU on this hookershaky. An engineer I am NOT.
My numbers come from multiplying:
the efficiencies of mining the coal
times the efficiency of transporting it
times the efficiency of combustion
times the efficiency of generation
times the transmission down the line to you house or office.
here's where I started - the list of stuff ya need to get AT the little black rocks that burn plus the cost of running them divided by how long they last...
http://coal.infomine.com/costs/
Moving the coal takes time and money. When Philips Petroleum found anthracite coal under one of our farms, we built a coal conveyor belt for them to dump it from the mine to the river. Sometimes they truck it or ship it but the conveyor belt saved them gobs of time and money ( we built it and sold it to them for a cool $20M) and added to our significant windfall so we engineered it with the help of an MIT architectural Engineer, my uncle.
The combustion to electricity process is pretty bad in our country where our typical coal-fired plant is 50 years old and makes juice from the available fossil at a rate of around 23-30%.
The transmission down the line is another 17 -20% loss or an efficiency of 80 -83%.
Coal hovers around 3-5% efficiency; natural gas a bit higher - up to 15%.
But these numbers are misleading in that they do NOT include the back side - the impacts of CO2, of fly ash, fly rock, spills, ash depositories washing into towns, health-related items that Dr. Leovy touches on, lost habitat for critters due to global climate change, shifting entire populations from their low-lying islands or beach fronts being inundated.
No I do not claIm to be perfectly accurate. WHAT I DO KNOW IS THE PATH WE ARE STAYING ON COULD USE A BIT OF SCRUTINY, particularly in light(!)of what solar advancements are being made.
bBack a few years this thing they call computers WERE GREAT BIG AND DUMB AND EVEN NOISY. Today, well...everybody's got 'em and feeling some independence in research, communication, job opportunities, etc.
Cell phones when they first came out were heavy as bricks and not much good. Now with model$s, we have 400,000 apps, replacing land lines, cameras, computers, video editors, etc.
Not saying solar is everything; good God, some lady DIED last week trying out a diet of SUN only, an in Switzerland where some of the best cheese and also some of the finest chocolate s are made and enjoyed by millions.
Let's not make that mistake again. But let's also not overlook some possibilities that are falling abundantly ON us, especially when so much is at stake and the benefits are so great.
Chu for Energy Secretary, and gmag39 for Assistant Picker of Energy Gurus!
Jokers and idiots...unite! OMS for awhile, Jimbo
The planet we are living on has this abundant solar byproduct known as carbon. When it burns in air we get a blend of carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2) plus other stuff.
The trouble with the CO is that it kills people, makes 'em goofy and screws up their memory. The trouble with CO@ is that it acts like a heat trap, letting sunlight come through but holding the heat inside the atmosphere.
That is the reason some scientists are calling for a bit of conservative respect for the combustion of stuff with carbon in it like coal, oil, methane, etc - fossil fuels as we know them.
Since we as a race started in somewhere between 125,000 and 654,894 years ago we didn't make much CO2. But in the last hundred years or so we did. And it is growing in the atmosphere all the time.
CO2 is measured in parts per million(PPM). Today our atmosphere has about 389 PPM of CO2; according to ice core samples the content of our atmosphere in 1832 was around 284 PPM of CO2. In other words Jim "Life is just a JOKE" Reid, what you and I and our previous 5 or so generations have done to this place is dump billions of tons of CO2 into our air. And this gob of crap has begun to melt polar ice caps, glaciers,and wipe out species, shift growing conditions and increase desertification all over this planet, the only home we'll ever know.
This article from a doctor who sees children with goofed up lungs and failing health as a DIRECT result of our goofing up the air identifies some of the ill effects the CO2 has on our bodies.
Make jokes about it if that's the best you can do. And enjoy the rest of your life making jokes about healthy kids getting screwed up. Turn up the A/C and start your car. Leave it running if it makes you laugh...Turn on the heat and the air. Turn on all the lights..Build a fire in the fireplace with the room air conditioner on. Go ahead and make a mockery of culture. That seems to be your pastime, now that life has nothing else to offer you but 9 Billion tons of CO2 this year!
Jim,
Here's is a couple of website and an article that reveals that the whole global warming subject/data is made up by a bunch of environmental loons.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesd...
http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/news.ph...
The greenhouse effect is the process by which absorption and emission of infrared radiation by gases in the atmosphere warm a planet's lower atmosphere and surface. It was proposed by Joseph Fourier in 1824 and was first investigated quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.
Naturally occurring amounts of greenhouse gases have a mean warming effect of about 33 C (59 F). The major greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36--70% of the greenhouse effect; carbon dioxide (CO2), which causes 9--26%; methane (CH4), which causes 4--9%; and ozone (O3), which causes 3--7%. Clouds also affect the radiation balance through cloud forcings similar to greenhouse gases.
Human activity since the Industrial Revolution has increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to increased radiative forcing from CO2, methane, tropospheric ozone, CFCs and nitrous oxide. The concentrations of CO2 and methane have increased by 36% and 148% respectively since 1750. These levels are much higher than at any time during the last 800,000 years, the period for which reliable data has been extracted from ice cores. Less direct geological evidence indicates that CO2 values higher than this were last seen about 20 million years ago. Fossil fuel burning has produced about three-quarters of the increase in CO2 from human activity over the past 20 years. The rest of this increase is caused mostly by changes in land-use, particularly deforestation.
Per capita greenhouse gas emissions in 2005, including land-use change.
Total greenhouse gas emissions in 2005, including land-use change.
Over the last three decades of the 20th century, gross domestic product per capita and population growth were the main drivers of increases in greenhouse gas emissions. CO2 emissions are continuing to rise due to the burning of fossil fuels and land-use change. Emissions can be attributed to different regions. The two figures opposite show annual greenhouse gas emissions for the year 2005, including land-use change. Attribution of emissions due to land-use change is a controversial issue.[
Emissions scenarios, estimates of changes in future emission levels of greenhouse gases, have been projected that depend upon uncertain economic, sociological, technological, and natural developments. In most scenarios, emissions continue to rise over the century, while in a few, emissions are reduced. Fossil fuel reserves are abundant, and will not limit carbon emissions in the 21st century. Emission scenarios, combined with modelling of the carbon cycle, have been used to produce estimates of how atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases might change in the future. Using the six IPCC SRES "marker" scenarios, models suggest that by the year 2100, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 could range between 541 and 970 ppm. This is an increase of 90--250% above the concentration in the year 1750.
"Here's is a couple of website and an article that reveals that the whole global warming subject/data is made up by a bunch of environmental loons."
Just say for arguments sake, what if they aren't wrong? What then? Will science be able to reverse the process, or will it be too late?
If anything we should have learned, propaganda can alter any subject matter. The Earth was the center of the universe at one time and if you thought other wise you could be burned at the stake. I'd rather trust in science and scientists than some mealy mouthed talking head. Which brings us back to the Flat Planet Society comment I made earlier. Pretending there isn't a problem doesn't make it vanish.
All the national science academies from all the developed countries of the world are not LOONS!
People who say so are the loons, the flat planet society and the flunkies who joke about kids dying from bad air.
My grandfather died from black lung disease due to working in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. He was in his mid-40s.
The Chinese have to bring bottled water to 120 million people a day because of the mess they're making due to industrialization and coal-fired power plants.
The Chinese have allocated $5 trillion to build hospitals and clinics all over the country to deal with the myriad of diseases and cancer clusters that are popping up all over the place.
My son has severe asthma and the $332.00 a month he pays for Singulair and Asthmanex is no joke. I could fund his retirement with that kind of money.
This issue is one of the reasons I think that intelligence may be an evolutionary dead end.
Climate change happens. And some of the most drastic changes have been brought about by life itself (think about why we have such a large percentage of oxygen around now.) Without getting into the debate over how much effect mankind has, it might well be the case that we as a species are simply playing a natural role in the process.
If one grants that we do have a controlling effect, then the only real solution to reducing that effect to a non-harmful level is going to be another Black Death that wipes out at least a third of the human population on the planet.
Look at the population growth in the last 200 years and then look at what it will be in just 20 years.
That explains dipsticks posts, the air most be heavy and toxic in Illinois,,,
As a Republican Fascist-Conservative, I believe the Koch Brothers-Rush Limbaugh-Fox "news" when they say there is no such thing as air pollution. There is no such thing as water pollution, either. There is no such thing as radiation poisoning, either.
Once we save the unborn fetus, we should expose the child to as much air-water-radiation pollution as possible, to toughen them up so that they will serve us well as a colonial soldier in our never-ending petro-socialist oil wars.
Yours in Christ,
Rob Whitetrash - Proud dittohead scientist
Population growth in developed countries is stable, Jim.
It's the developing countries that feel the need to exercise fertility, and their reasons are darn good ones - lots of them die young, they need lots of hands because they are primarily rural and the hands, especially males, are needed at least 3 and 6 is way better.
The solution is, believe it or not, clean water. By eliminating bad water issues which draw hundreds of hours per week from productivity and educability, we could impact the water problems.
Enter the Slingshot...check out this water machine
http://noobsensei.blogspot.com/2012/03/f...
It's a population control device disguised as a water fountain, runs on a Stirling Engine with cow dung, wood, electricity, etc. and makes 250 gallons a day from 'anything wet'
The water issue makes the need for extra kids a thing of the past. Our population would reach stability. The problems we face are essentially information and distribution problems, and technology may well be the cure, just in the nick of time.
Joe,
The current number is about 7 billion people with a growth rate of a little of 1%. The total population is projected to double in about 61 years at that rate. We simply can't support that many people and avoid harm to the planet. We can't support what we have without harm.
It doesn't matter if developed countries have a stable population growth or not. It is the raw number of bodies on the planet that matter.
I will agree that sooner or later fresh water will be a limiting factor.
And now for a "pie-in-the-sky" moment. Imagine using a "space tether" to support what would effectively be a chimney so all exhaust gases from power plants and other industry could be spewed directly into space beyond the atmosphere.
At the same time the tether could support transmission lines to bring power down from orbiting solar collectors or nuclear plants.
Science fiction? Maybe, but no reason not to dream big.
That would one hell of a straw, carrying our juice down and our crap up and away to await some space storm and have it all come down on us .. like Dylan's A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fa - aalll
Let's dream big with old songs in the background...
Back on Earth, we lose 2.2 million people a year to bad water, most of them in rural Africa. That's why they wander around 4-6 hours a day looking for wood to burn to boil it. And that's why they have no time or energy for schooling, industry or childraising.
That link to the Slingshot is quite good. That Kamen guy invented a few other things you'll recall like the Segue for one. he lives on a little island off Connecticut. He has a science fiction background and some science too. If you take a minute to check it out, you'll be glad ya did.
You'll see why I like this other book I'm into, Abundance by Diamandis and Kotler, the X-prize CEO and a journalist. I am now a Futurist. I believe in technocrap and tomorrow's possibilities, space straws and DIY philanthropy as saviors of an otherwise wasted experiment in life potential on the little blue ball.
Many know that methane is much worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Joe has mentioned the many benefits of recycling methane produced by livestock.
With that in mind, this story that just came across the AP wire falls into the "You Can't Make This Up" category: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2012/may...
Current liberal energy plans fast forward to a future time frame in which our society fails to exist. To survive we must use today's energy technologies and resources. Green technologies are in the future except for an important but minor fringe component which operates in the present. The near term is the critical time frame for our society which
draws life from hydrocarbon based energy which is the vital resource that fuels the present day needs of society .. Both our predominant energy resources and the infrastructure that supports it are hydrocarbon in nature and are the basis for meeting our energy needs and our national security. Regardless of how we would prefer it, this is the realism that we are confronted with today.
boftx - "This issue is one of the reasons I think that intelligence may be an evolutionary dead end."
I'm inclined to agree. Back in the days of the space race scientific advances expanded by leaps and bounds, but since the resistance of conservative groups (I use the term loosely) towards discoveries, it appears we as a nation went brain dead. We've fallen behind what were once third world countries such as China, India, Brazil, etc. Each of those nations has invested in their infrastructure while we engage in huge expenses on warfare in lieu of our infrastructure.
That's a good story.
Our Confined Area Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are worse though, even than dinosaur farts and droppings decaying into methane building up in the atmosphere because of the concentration of our effluent.
Methane is about 19 times worse than CO2 in the atmosphere.It's better to burn those dinosaur farts, Jim! Just be sure to wear jeans over your boxers, use a Bic and have the kids stand back when it blows! :)
Simple methane digesters reduce this methane output and deliver usable fuel in 30 million farms in china, 4 million in India and fewer than a hundred in the US.
Vernos,
You completely missed my point with that statement.
To put it bluntly, we, as a species, have used our intelligence to create many ways of destroying our species. We have created an environment that has placed tremendous evolutionary pressure on not only our own species but almost every other to adapt to rapidly changing conditions.
It is an open question as to whether or not we be able to survive our "advances." We simply lack the wisdom needed to apply our intelligence over the long term.
To put it another way, think of Mankind as being the ultimate example of the Peter Principle.
What's next from these radical leftists? Smoking causes lung cancer? Stoopid sientists, derp!
EARTH TO HOUSTON : lets just keep riding horses them trains are just too fast and God would be against it. besides; daddy owns the pony monopoly !
"cos according to THEM, AIN NUTTIN WROMG W MY LUNGS!"
If you talk as much as you write, you're right.
Carmine A. DiFazio
"cos according to THEM, AIN NUTTIN WROMG W MY LUNGS!"
Things have changed a tad since '55, you old geezer.
New EPA regs are all buck, no bang.
Reid, I believe the 99% of scientists who all agree on the global warming issue. You agree with the 1% of 'scientists' who have somehow debunked the other 99%. LOL.
The overwhelming majority of scientists around the world, totally unrelated, all concluded the same thing from their scientific research. But alas! The teabaggers have the real answers. Everyone else is just playing out the global liberal agenda, hahaha.
I am pretty confident that I am on the right side with the 99% of scientists who all agree on the facts. You believe the 1% of naysayers and conspiracy theory loons. Probably the same 'scientists' who believe that Jesus was riding around on dinosaurs and the earth is only a few thousand years old. Best of luck with that Reid.
According to Jim "life is just a JOKE" Reid...
"You will note nothing is ever written in the liberal media dealing with the death blow that will be the result of entitlements."
uh oh, Joker...facts!
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/us/eve...
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/...
Let's go over this again...Jim "Life is just a goddamn JOKE" Reid says and i quote "You will note nothing is ever written in the liberal media dealing with the death blow that will be the result of entitlements." while the list of items related to one teensy weensy newsy organization has over 3 MILLION articles available in less than a third of a second of time sitting there behind Jimbo's screen...but what's truth got to do with it, got to do with it?
Getting back to the subject after rude interruptions and getting to the heart of the matter of Carbon dioxide production, our race of critters, i.e. homo sapiens, donates 4 or 5 tons of CO2 per person per year, for a total of around 27 billion tons to our atmosphere.
This contribution has pushed that CO2 content in the atmosphere from roughly 284 parts per million (PPM) in the early 1800s to about 390 PPM today. According to serious projections we have around 20 years before we hit what many scientists view as the tipping point, 450 PPM.
The good doctor Leovy has raised a serious concern about health of children. In fact this production of CO2 is bound to wreak more havoc before we are through. and facing facts, we can not realistically expect to move to clean alternatives in time to avoid this tipping point without a reliable and safe energy source that produces no more CO2.
Though my background as an anti-nuke person is well-documented, i must say i have come to a realization. With Generation IV reactors we have a way out of carbon-based energy supply. They are self-contained, safe, and can utilize our existing stockpile of stored nuke wastes to power our growing economies with ZERO outside mining of materials for 1000 years, according to Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Diamandis.
Myhrvold's company, TerraPower, is projecting a 2020 timeline, 10 full years ahead of all competitors, and is saying that the cost of production of electricity from Generation IV nuclear reactors will be competitive with burning coal.
Does this mean 'energy too cheap to meter?'...not quite. We need a serious conservation effort in our transportation models to parallel this source of power. Not saying electric cars or bikes aren't very cool...I'd take a Tesla in a heartbeat... but phasing out the internal combustion engine will take some serious internal modifications in the jeans and the genes of our world as we know it.
And that transportation piece is nearly a third of the electricity production in terms of CO2.
Lucky for us there is new technology in electricity storage that will soon hit the market, a real game-changer - LMBs - Liquid Metal Batteries. They can store gobs of power so efficiently that solar and wind power can supplant power grids except for long periods when they could be used as a stand-by operation to ramp up in order to prepare for dense weather appearing to last a long period.
Technology and expertise based on scientific understanding may well save the day, but only in the very NICK of time as the CO2 production has truly gotten far out of hand due to lack of education, applied understanding within culture and by a fairly extravagant life-style which Las Vegas accurately epitomizes - bright lights seen from miles away and low-graduation rates of our children. CO2 good...IQ bad...Vegas, baby!
CO2 issues remind us of how small our planet has grown to be. As a result of the Information Age, we are connected to all parts of the globe with split second communication that relates issues and happenings from half a world away like a shout at a community meeting.
Witness the impact cell phones had on revolutionary upheavals in North Africa - Arab Spring as it was termed. Instant wireless communication enabled groups to coalesce around a unity that despots tried in vain to disperse. The international problems which we have created by failing to respect our planet with some appreciation of what we have here and what we have done to her can only be addressed on a worldwide scale as well.
What China does to its air is what we breathe. What the earthquake and tsunami did to Japan is washing ashore in Oregon. And the combined CO2 deposits from ALL our driving and generation facilities is impacting not just the children whom Dr. Leovy treats, but kids in Budapest and Athens, in the San Juans and in San Jacinto as well.
From my geezer perspective, i wish there were one problem we could isolate like Jim "Life is just a JOKE" Reid continually rants about, one person's election to one seat of power. The problem is bigger than one person, one country or one issue. We have a cluster to deal with. Economies can't grow without available energy sources, energy sources are being wasted by entrenched investors, and entrenched investors are hoarding in order to invest wiser with what they have stashed away.
Nobody seems willing to offer much of a solution except more noise about why...'their side is righter and the rest of those noisy bozos are clearly very wrong idiots who intend to subvert our own self-righteous plans'... Gosh does anybody else see that we need some commonsense in international respect for the way we are headed??
What appears abundantly apparent is the driven urge to take what we want and give as little as possible as if progress were a tug-of-war, a zero-sum game. Progress actually depends on having abundance of clean air, clean water, healthy food, stable environmental factors that enable our education that makes understanding of how we can empower specialization to support our growth intelligently, rather than this 'everyman for himself' banter we hear coming from too many self-interested elements whose collective whines do nothing but clutter the airwaves and threaten our potential in making our way to a better environment.
CO2 is emblematic of our situation. We have all the potential in the world, we have abused it selfishly, and its effects are coming home to roost and roast.
We deserve the hell we are creating on this little blue ball in a big black sky, the only home we'll ever know.
Okay I stole most of that last line from one of my friend's songs...
http://www.songsforteaching.com/environm...
And you can click on the link on the left near the top and hear Stan, The Eco Troubadour, play and sing the last verse or hook up to his other stuff. Google Eco Troubadour' ... there's only ONE
Did you ever notice the old big dipper
And wonder what he dips all night
He's dippin out wisdom,dippin out love,
Dippin'out a way of life
And if you notice the ol' big dipper,
You're gonna' see all the other stars
And if you look around to where the light comes down,
You're gonna' see just where you are
Chorus:
You're gonna' see you're on a little green speck,
On a little blue ball in a big black sky all alone.
And you know we gotta take good care of that little blue ball
Cause you know it's the only home we'll ever know
Did you ever see a little wild flower
And wonder why she smiles so bright
She smiles because she's the bloom of love
In a world thats made just right
And each little leaf of every wild flower is a work of art you see
But if we mow'em all down and tear up the ground
We ain't livin' like we oughta' be
Chorus
Did you ever hear a little spring peeper
And wonder why he peeps so loud
He's happy 'cause he made it through another winter
He's smilin' and he's feelin' proud
And if we take good care of the things we share
The forest, and the water, and the sky
We can all be proud, we can laugh out loud
And that peeper he's tellin' you why
Chorus
SickOfSomeOfU; Got smug I see. I will feel bad when the result of "bankrupting coal" is summertime blackouts with loss of AC. Then we'll really have to stack some bodies.
Perhaps if we build enough NG plants...but you know how that goes.