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SamH
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Considering its all about claimed anthropogenic global warming that stopped over a decade ago you can see why reaching beyond the grasp is so common.
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lynnvinc
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Not at all. And it is not so much a matter of “belief” as accepting or rejecting what the scientists are telling us. And even more than that, since scientists are very conservative in their claims, fearing the false positive; we need to be prudent and “expect the worst, hope for the best,” so to speak. Even before the scientists reached 95% confidence (.05 on the null) on GW back in 1995, at least I and JPII were thinking this could be real and really harmful and we need to do something about it.
So I started mitigating GW back in 1990 and have saved $1000s by doing so, without lowering our living standards, even increasing them somewhat.
There is absolutely NO reason for a good person who cares about life on planet earth, including their own progency, to refrain from mitigating climate change. Absolutely no reason at all. So let’s get to it, people.
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Ridgerunner
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I see nothing wrong with saving money by not wasting energy. We should not waste food either, nor money, nor time. I see nothing wrong with doing some of those things MMGW enthusiasts say will help; growing trees, for instance, turning off lights in rooms not in use, not gunning one’s engine just to be the first to pull out when the traffic light turns green, using charcoal in gardening and agriculture.
But I am not willing to tell people in Minnesota that they can’t keep their houses warm in the wintertime because of a belief that seems to many (and certainly to me) to be an ideological thing for some and an attempt to loot for others. Nor am I willing to tell somebody in Miami, Ok that he can’t drive to his neurologist in Tulsa in a car that will keep him relatively safe and comfortable on the road.
As I have mentioned before, you live in the Rio Grande Valley. Gets plenty hot in the summer there, but is pretty mild most of the winter. So the energy conservation you might adopt might be deadly for someone living in North Dakota.
I think if you have thought this out as long as you say you have, you might have some good ideas how people can save money and not waste energy. If so, you should probably share them, even with people who (like me) don’t believe in MMGW. What harm could it do? If people do what, to you, is the right thing but for what, to you, are the wrong reasons, what’s the harm?
But one must keep in mind that what’s good in the Rio Grande Valley might not be good in Alberta.
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lynnvinc
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That’s all people concerned about AGW and life on planet earth are asking.
No one is asking those things of people, nor for people to freeze in the dark or bicycle 15 miles to work in the midst of a blizzard or heatwave.
RE safer roads, studies have shown that more small cars on the road makes roads safer. Also from what I understand some of the EVs and hybrids are among the safest cars. For instance our 2012 Chevy Volt (our 2nd new car in our 43 years of marriage, a really great car that saves us lots of money and we run it on our 100% wind-generated electricity) is DOT rated 5-stars in 3 categories and 4-stars only in frontal crash, while the 2012 Ford Taurus my husband wanted rated 5-stars in only one category, and 4-stars in 3 categories, including frontal crash. You can look up safety ratings at safercar.gov/Vehicle+Shoppers (click “5-Star Ratings”).
I also remember some 15 years ago there was a small eco-friendly Chevy (can’t remember the name, and it wasn’t popular) that ranked highest in all categories and was one of the safest cars on the road.
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lynnvinc
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Well, we do like it a bit warm, but even so our AC bill is high, since it gets above 100 quite often during the cunicula (July 15 thru Aug 31), and we use AC about 10+ months of the year (sometimes even AC in day, heater in night).
Well, that’s all I would ask, but quite frankly even tho we’d been living close to work (within a mile or two) since the early 70s out of concern about leaving some resources for future generations, I had not been doing much else about environmental issues until 1990. It was when I became concerned about AGW that I was really spurred to look for solutions, and to my surprise I found that nearly every solution has saved us money (some with upfront costs, which we recouperated), and many had no costs (like reusing shopping bags).
The Basics of mitigating AGW are this: become more energy and resource efficient & conservative, since there is a GHG emissions component to neary all materials we use, including water, not just the energy we directly use. So the basics are Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and buy recycled. And then go on alt energy (wind, solar) when affordable and feasible. We’ve reduce our GHGs (and concomitant pollution) by over 60% below our 1990 emissions by doing those things, and we have much more to do.
We had to replace our shake roof, so we just replaced it with composite roof (less of a fire hazard) with “radiant barrier plywood” (plywood with aluminum foil on the bottom) that will supposedly reduce our AC & heating bill and pay for the difference in cost within a year or so.
Now that we have a new roof and are saving and saving (including from our SunFrost frig and low-flow showerheads) we can now turn to perhaps putting up some solar panels on our roof – which I understand from some who have such panels pay for themselves within a few years and go on to save.
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pnewton
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I can’t believe I would ever read this statement in a “scientic” article:
Considering the speed of climate change, isn’t this a little silly?
I have no idea how much man contributes to the climate change. I do thing the possibility warrants reasonable steps though. We have to seriousl consider economic tradeoff, but we already know fossil fuels are of limited supply. We will run out one day. Damage to the environment can take a while to repair. I think it would be foolish not to take steps that we can easily take to reduce our dependancy on oil and coal and to limit damage to the environment.
Soooooo, we are just calling folks up and asking, “Whatcha think about the weather?”
Considering the speed of climate change, isn’t this a little silly?
I have no idea how much man contributes to the climate change. I do thing the possibility warrants reasonable steps though. We have to seriousl consider economic tradeoff, but we already know fossil fuels are of limited supply. We will run out one day. Damage to the environment can take a while to repair. I think it would be foolish not to take steps that we can easily take to reduce our dependancy on oil and coal and to limit damage to the environment.
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lynnvinc
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That’s great. When people put a mind to it, and add a little prayer, it is surprising the things people can find to do.
I was willing to sacrifice, but my husband wasn’t, having grown up in poverty in India, plus we didn’t have a lot of money in 1990, plus he couldn’t tolerate the cold (we were up north in Aurora, IL then).
So we started by caulking our windows and changing the kitchen rustic chandlier (with 5 amber chimneys that didn’t give us much light for the 300 watts in 5 bulbs we had there). We looked & looked for something that would fit a 15-watt CF globe bulb, until we finally found a beautiful oak and bevelled glass fixture at WalMart – it was their last one, the floor model, so we got it cheap for $49). We installed that, and the 15 watts in that fixture gave off more light than the 300 watts in the other fixture – which was great, since he used the kitchen table as his study desk. Then we changed our showerhead with a $6 low-flow with off-on switch for soaping up; doing a bucket/stopwatch test is reduced water needed for a hot shower by half, without us noticing the difference (which has saved us about $2200 since in water & energy bills). We did lots of things like that the first year, and noticed our gas and electric bills going down some.
The next year we had some money, so with business plan in hand I talked him into an investing it in a SunFrost frig (see sunfrost.com ), which uses one-tenth the energy. It turned out to be one-twelfth the energy of our old clonker frig. Our electric bill took a nose-dive (I was comparing like months based on average temp for that month), and we discovered veggies stayed fresh a lot longer (cilantro for 3 or more weeks); only ginger didn’t do well & we’ve had to freeze it. So the electric bill & reduced food spoilage savings were enormous, and that $2700 SunFrost paid for itself within about 16 years (4 years ahead of schedule) and has gone on to save us ever since. And we had to replace our old frig with something, so why not a money-saving, food-saving, CC-mitigating, pollution reducing one. And is it extremely quiet. Along with our Volt, we now live in a quiet, peaceful world and can even hear the birds singing.
We lowered our energy bills by about one-third up north, then when we came to Texas in 2002 we got onto GreenMountain 100% wind-generated electricity. At first it cost about $5 more per month, but now it is about $5 less. And as time goes by (esp if they take away the subsidies & tax-breaks for coal, oil, and gas) wind and solar will become cheaper and cheaper.
So with our previous measures, our wind energy, and our Volt plugged into it, I figure we’ve reduced our GHG by more than 60%, and still have much more to do.
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SamH
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IF “global warming” were occurring as some would have us believe shouldn’t the entire country be warmer and wetter because of the all the moisture from warming air over the oceans? Shouldn’t there be more disturbances in the atmosphere for the same reason? Yet last summer was extremely dry for nearly the entire country and the atmosphere was one of the most stable in decades. The complete opposite of you explanation in post 10.
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gam197
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I live in the Northeast (my entire life) and our temperatures have been 0 for some time this year as it is every year. Some days get up to 20’s-30’s. It is COLD. Price of oil fuel is so high that many people keep their thermostats at 55 to 58 and it is cold even in most homes.
Because of the constant COLD, and price of oil, many have fled to the south
We do have snow. Current temperature at 12:00 on my thermometer is 6 degrees…
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Paddy_Walker
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things are going to get worse people;
St. Hildegard (born 1098 ad)
"Before the Comet comes, many nations, the good excepted, will be scoured with want and famine. The great nation in the ocean that is inhabited by people of different tribes and descent by an earthquake, storm and tidal waves will be devastated. It will be divided, and in great part submerged. That nation will also have many misfortunes at sea, and lose its colonies in the east through a Tiger and a Lion.
The Comet by its tremendous pressure, will force much out of the ocean and flood many countries, causing much want and many plagues. [After the] great Comet, the great nation will be devastated by earthquakes, storms, and great waves of water, causing much want and plagues. The ocean will also flood many other countries, so that all coastal cities will live in fear, with many destroyed. All sea coast cities will be fearful and many of them will be destroyed by tidal waves, and most living creatures will be killed and even those who escape will die from a horrible disease.
St. Hildegard (born 1098 ad)
"Before the Comet comes, many nations, the good excepted, will be scoured with want and famine. The great nation in the ocean that is inhabited by people of different tribes and descent by an earthquake, storm and tidal waves will be devastated. It will be divided, and in great part submerged. That nation will also have many misfortunes at sea, and lose its colonies in the east through a Tiger and a Lion.
The Comet by its tremendous pressure, will force much out of the ocean and flood many countries, causing much want and many plagues. [After the] great Comet, the great nation will be devastated by earthquakes, storms, and great waves of water, causing much want and plagues. The ocean will also flood many other countries, so that all coastal cities will live in fear, with many destroyed. All sea coast cities will be fearful and many of them will be destroyed by tidal waves, and most living creatures will be killed and even those who escape will die from a horrible disease.
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Ridgerunner
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But I think some MMGW people really are doing that. When Obama promises to make utility bills “skyrocket”, how can that fail to deprive some people of adequate heat, light, air conditioning? And when he takes a number of actions that make energy more expensive than the market requires that it be, it potentially increases not only the cost of utilities, but also of transportation that affects the cost of everything.
I will, however, acknowledge that there are some environmentalists who encourage changes that people can adopt, (e.g. lynnvinc above) even welcome, while there are some who want to force their own decisions on people, no matter how much pain it causes.
I have no problem with people wanting to drive small cars if they want to. But I do have concerns about it while trucks on the same roads get bigger and heavier. I don’t drive energy-conserving vehicles. My favorite vehicle to buy is a (used) BMW 7 series. (Always a bargain because the rich people who pay astronomical sums for them new take good care of their cars) Not particularly energy-saving, (21/25) but I was once front-ended by an oil truck in one of them and walked away from the experience, uninjured except for some bruises from the air bag. Having had that experience, it would take a lot of convincing to get me into a smaller, lighter weight car for the sake of a MMGW I don’t even believe in.
And I do some ranching in addition to my “day job”. I drive a full-size Chevy pickup with a 350 engine doing that. Sometimes I haul big bales on it, and you need a truck big enough to do it. Those bales weigh 1000 lb and more. Sometimes I pull 5-ton fertilizer “buggies” with it. Same there. If I used a light truck, I would have to make more trips and it would save nothing in the way of fuel.
I can’t imagine how vexing it would be to ranching or farming to be forced to use smaller vehicles. Yet there are those who would force it.
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Erich
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And yet, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Some years back, I saw something about a new requirement to use 15 billion gallons of ethanol in gasoline by 2015. So, let’s see… at 328 gallons of ethanol per acre of corn (and completely ignoring the fuel costs of planting, growing, and harvesting that much corn) that would require almost 45.8 million acres of corn just for ethanol (see CU scientist terms corn-based ethanol ‘Subsidized Food Burning’).
According to the USDA Economic Research Service, 80 million acres of land in the U.S. are planted to corn (and 20% of that corn is exported to other countries). Where’s all this additional corn going to come from?Answer: it isn’t! Our nation’s farmers, on average, are aging, and the amount of U.S. farmland is shrinking – and fewer children are interested in farming. The amount of farmland in the U.S. is only going to continue to shrink – and probably at an ever-increasing rate at that.
Case in point: Corn makes up more than two-thirds of chicken feed… and corn prices hit an all-time high in 2012, due to two reasons: last summer’s drought and pressure from a federal government requirement that mandates 40 percent of our corn crop be turned into fuel in the form of ethanol. Simply put, less corn equals higher feed costs, which means fewer birds produced. So, what happens when poultry farmers have an increasingly harder time finding chicken feed at reasonable prices? A smaller US chicken crop – and fewer chicken wings for Super Bowl parties
Who else besides me thinks it’s just plain nuts to shift major amounts of the world’s food supply to fuel use when significant elements of the human population remains ill-fed!
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SamH
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Just wondering - did you know that AFTER corn is processed for ethanol it is still used as feed for cattle? Where did you get the claim 40% of the nation’s corn harvest is mandated by the government to be used for ethanol production?And yet, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Some years back, I saw something about a new requirement to use 15 billion gallons of ethanol in gasoline by 2015. So, let’s see… at 328 gallons of ethanol per acre of corn (and completely ignoring the fuel costs of planting, growing, and harvesting that much corn) that would require almost 45.8 million acres of corn just for ethanol (see CU scientist terms corn-based ethanol ‘Subsidized Food Burning’).
According to the USDA Economic Research Service, 80 million acres of land in the U.S. are planted to corn (and 20% of that corn is exported to other countries). Where’s all this additional corn going to come from?Answer: it isn’t! Our nation’s farmers, on average, are aging, and the amount of U.S. farmland is shrinking – and fewer children are interested in farming. The amount of farmland in the U.S. is only going to continue to shrink – and probably at an ever-increasing rate at that.
Case in point: Corn makes up more than two-thirds of chicken feed… and corn prices hit an all-time high in 2012, due to two reasons: last summer’s drought and pressure from a federal government requirement that mandates 40 percent of our corn crop be turned into fuel in the form of ethanol. Simply put, less corn equals higher feed costs, which means fewer birds produced. So, what happens when poultry farmers have an increasingly harder time finding chicken feed at reasonable prices? A smaller US chicken crop – and fewer chicken wings for Super Bowl parties
Who else besides me thinks it’s just plain nuts to shift major amounts of the world’s food supply to fuel use when significant elements of the human population remains ill-fed!
If you think some parts of the earth are starving from lack of grain production you really need to open your eyes. Its the distribution process and the people that control it that cause the food shortages.
From your “source”
That’s quite the secret - I can’t think of a single farmer that plants soybeans that knew that they didn’t need to put down fertilizer.
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Erich
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From here.
Actually, that number will only get worse. The (Democrat-controlled) Congress in 2007 specified a year-by-year gallon quota for biofuels, so… “15 billion gallons of ethanol in gasoline by 2015” divided by “328 gallons of ethanol per acre of corn” = 45.7+ million acres of corn. With 80 million acres of land in the U.S. already planted to corn (and 20% of that corn is exported), that will mean 71.4% of the domestic corn crop just for ethanol!
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Erich
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One also has to look at the costs and thermal efficiencies of actually producing alternative fuels, plus the costs and energy losses associated with transporting, storing, and transferring these alternative fuels, plus the performance results of using these alternative fuels, to do a true apples-to-apples comparison of the economic viability of these alternative fuels. Personally I would think that, if there were something more economically viable than fossil fuels, the oil companies would already be using it (at least internally), to reduce their own costs and maximize their shareholder value. After all, “why burn fossil fuels to produce/transport/store/transfer fuel, if we could burn something else instead and sell all that fossil fuel we’d otherwise burn?” That the oil companies are not already doing this speaks volumes.
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SamH
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What law? All those sources reference a law without saying what law it is. Having spent more than a few years in agribusiness I’m tryingto figure out how the entire industry knows nothing about this law.
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So the goal is to make farmers poor?
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SamH
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Oil companies are not farmers and do not run ethanol plants. Its like asking why coal fired electric plants don’t use ethanol.
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Erich
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A good bit of it is due to the pinheads – on both sides of the aisle – in Washington and other seats of power, who come up with these hair-brained schemes with unintended consequences. (Remember all the wildfires that devastated the western states a couple of years ago? Well, starting around the year 1900, the federal government started to fight forest fires instead of letting them burn themselves out, and also set aside more land as national forests and parks to protect them from fires. This policy led to fewer fires, but led to growth conditions that made what fires did occur much larger and more damaging.)
The average U.S. automobile, traveling 10,000 miles a year on pure ethanol (not a gasoline-ethanol mix), would need about 852 gallons of the corn-based fuel. This would take 11 acres to grow, based on net ethanol production. This is the same amount of cropland required to feed seven Americans.
If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of about 97 percent of U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States.
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SamH
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Besides you, who said that was the goal?
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Erich
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I never said it was a goal, I was just using it as an illustration (since it’s an upper bound).
That said, I’m sure it’s a goal for some. E85 (i.e. 85% ethanol) is already the standard for flex-fuel vehicles. Regular use of E85 is low nationwide, due to lack of fueling infrastructure, but is relatively common in the Midwest.
In some places (Sweden, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Norway) they have ED95 (used in modified diesel engines). Brazil has E100.
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