BBO Discussion Forums: Climate change - BBO Discussion Forums

blackshoe, on 2013-October-11, 22:43, said:

oh? here, waste is managed by government regulation, including the recurring search for dumps for garbage. Hydro is a government owned/run business and so is natural gas. How is it inappropriate to expect the tax dollars to be used more efficiently? Futile, perhaps, but why inappropriate?

The argument is it is govt regulations, crony capitalism and political favoritism that hinders innovation. I understand many believe a lack of regulations and too little govt involvement is the problem. Hence the discussion.

Your post is an excellent example of that discussion. I put up several posts recently that discussed a possible market based innovation to battle CO2 and which is being hindered by regulations. You discuss an option based on our tax dollars. Both may work or fail but why not let the markets openly compete and choose?


btw efficently is great word, how do you define and measure it if we are going to demand science?

While the entire exposé is enlightening, at about 33 minutes in, Dr. Tim Ball explains just how the IPCC was formed and functions. Boondoggle plus...

FM75, on 2013-October-12, 14:56, said:

I never said this approach was practical. Germany employed the Fischer-Tropsch process during WWII out of necessity. That would be the only reason to do so today also.

Daniel1960, on 2013-October-14, 08:14, said:

regarding methonal...there a few recent updates in regards to chemistry.
given the costs of transportation fuel, I only request an open field of competition, not political favors. this is one and only one example of why govt is the problem not the solution.


Recent nobel prize winner Fama and his radical comments on the govt bailout of wall street is another example.

[quote name='FM75' timestamp='1381611408' post='758646']


The second law of thermodynamics rules out turning the carbon oxides back into fuel without supplying more than the energy gained from creating it in the first place. Once that is clear, it should be obvious that it is a fool's errand to try to envision ways of converting the waste into fuel. You can think of all of the earth's hydrocarbons as a store of some of the solar energy incident on the earth since it was formed.


oops clipped off the end of the post.
I cannot argue with you about the laws of thermodynamics but it seems to me you are missing the point that the waste is ALREADY created and it is going to give off methane whether we collect and use it or not.

The huge smokestacks you mention are irrelevant and unnecessary as has been shown in hundreds if not thousands of these systems in use now. Not only does the process allow us to collect the methane but leaves us with a usable waste product for fertilizers to help restore degraded lands. This is actually a process which Milwaukee has been using for decades and selling the resultant product, though as far as I know it only applies to organic waste, I don't think that there is any element of sewage involved. The problems with sewage are (aside from the obvious ones of pathogens which might survive the attention of anaerobic bacteria) but heavy metal contamination and such, so such a product is better not used on food crops but can be used for trees and parks and such.

People are collecting methane produced in low cost pits and storing it in inner tubes. I've even seen a photo which I regret not saving as I've never been able to find it again, of someone riding a motorized bicycle down the street powered by methane in a balloon. (NOT recommended!) If higher tech or more purity is wanted, it can be run through a filter of waste iron filings or steel wool and /or water, both just pieces of stuffed pvc pipe.

It seems to me to be more of a fool's errand to have the future depend on the sun's energy stored in the dead bodies of dinosaurs or whatever than from the waste which is being generated in such immense quantities every day across the planet. It's always possible to make things more complicated than they need be.

onoway, on 2013-October-16, 14:31, said:

We were not discussing garbage that still contained hydrocarbons, but carbon oxides. That can't be converted into methane or any other hydrocarbon without a net LOSS of energy.

The smokestacks are hardly irrelevant. The removal of NOx from the exhaust gas is all about prevention of acid rain. They are not relevant to carbon management, but extremely important, nonetheless.

As to the non-scaleable technology, that is like fantasy. We like to read it maybe, but it should not be taken seriously.

To determine whether your ideas scale, such as methane production from chicken farms, do the research and math to determine how many chickens/farms we could convert, how much that would produce, and compare that to real current usage. Running cars on MacDonald's used cooking oil is typical of "solutions" that don't scale.

FM75, on 2013-October-16, 18:39, said:

http://www.c2es.org/...robic-digesters quick facts:

Quote

this does not constitute scalability? (The bold lettering was mine, to focus on the pertinent points)

onoway, on 2013-October-16, 19:51, said:

Correct. It does not constitute scalability. There are probably 25,000 McDonald's franchises in this country. Powering 25,000 cars does make a case for converting a significant percentage of cars to run on waste cooking oil. 25,000 homes on some remote island would be significant. It is not in the US, Canada, or even Mexico.

When you use all of a resource for a tiny minority of consumers needing the resource, you have exceeded capacity, before you even started.

FM75, on 2013-October-16, 23:20, said:

First of all: The data about the US you referred to was not talking about running 25 000 cars on used oil from 25 000 McDonalds, they are talking about providing the energy needs for 25,000 HOUSES from 162 farms. It's an entirely different system or process than making biodiesel from used oil. It would be nice if people made SOME effort to understand what was being said - or even read the data provided!! - before they attacked it. Sheesh.

It's difficult to exceed the capacity of a resource consumers are renewing every day at a level that we cannot keep up with even when we just dump it in landfills or tow it out to sea to dump it there, not even taking into account sewage. You seem to be fixated on McDonalds and used oil, is it within your capacity to understand METHANE production...not biodiesel.. applies to all organic waste from the contents of dirty diapers to mouldy lettuce, including but not limited to, used cooking oil? Cooking oil might be better used to make biodiesel, I've no idea and it is not part of what I was proposing. Methane production from waste is being commonly done in Europe, India, China, other parts of Asia, South Africa, Australia,obviously to a limited degree in the States, probably in every country in the world now, some large and some small scale. Don't let the facts that it is scalable and IS WORKING in places around the world disturb your uninformed confidence that it won't work.

onoway, on 2013-October-17, 18:02, said:

While you guys can argue whether there are more cars or homes in this country, 25,000 of either is a miniscule fraction of the total. If either could be scaled up by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, then we some real potential. If it can, then we have a real source of energy (whether heating or propulsion). If not, then we may have a reasonable method of reducing waste.

Daniel1960, on 2013-October-18, 05:33, said:

You also managed to miss the point. You do know that electricity loses a good deal of its capacity to do work over distance, right? So at a minimum, if you have hydro being produced relatively locally by from waste produced locally, that alone cuts back on the amount of electricity that needs to be produced because it doesn't have to be pushed through lines for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles. That says nothing of the infrastructure which now needs all sorts of maintenance and fancy systems/gadgets to prevent one failure somewhere in the line from wiping out the power across a huge area, as happened a few years back when apparently something in a switching station failed and plunged most of the eastern US and a small area of Canada into darkness. That's two points.

Another point is that finding places to PUT garbage is becoming more of an issue all the time, it's being towed out to sea and dumped..hardly an environmentally sensible thing to do with plastic gyres in both the Atlantic and Pacific ocean getting larger by the day and plastic contamination now found in every ocean in the world - and that's just the plastic. The other option generally involves trucking it long distances to someplace which has exchanged " not in MY back yard" to "well ok, but it's gonna cost you plenty." It is costing every community more every year to get rid of (hide somewhere) their garbage. It's a resource we are not only wasting but we are PAYING to waste it. We are paying trucks to haul it away, often hundreds of miles and then paying more to dump and bury it.

This seems to be stupid, when instead we could avoid all of that and have the waste be producing electricity..or even simply use the methane as we now use natural gas, and have another usable product at the end which could be an excellent medium for growing food. No pollution and two high quality usable products. It would also preempt a lot of need for such things as fracking and poisoning the environment with things like the tar sands; not entirely, but to a large extent. Perhaps that alone is why we don't - we might annoy the big oil companies and cut into their profits.

If people are convinced that the processor must be the size of Mount Everest and nothing smaller deserves consideration under any circumstances then there's no point in trying to discuss anything which might suggest a variety of sizes to be appropriate, depending on location. I guess they eat only ostrich eggs. It doesn't matter if they have to come from a lot further away, cost more to produce, lead to waste because many people couldn't eat a whole one, they're bigger so must be better seems to be the conviction of the day.

onoway, on 2013-October-18, 13:38, said:

Actually neither of us missed "the point". We were discussing a question raised that was on topic. Reminder the topic is [global] climate change and what we can do about it.

Whether converting CO2 (and some form of hydrogen) to methane and some form of oxygen might help was on topic.
The question was whether CO2, a waste gas produce burning carbon and hydrocarbons in power plants and transportation could be usefully converted to methane to use as a fuel for electric generation or transportation. That question is on topic because increasing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is believed by many to be a driver for climate change by reducing the amount of incident energy received from the sun that is re-emitted back into space. In other words, there is not a balance between the energy that hits the earth and the energy that leaves the earth. If the balance is positive the earth must get warmer globally, if not locally. It is also on topic because if we could convert the CO2 to methane, there might be a hope that we could achieve energy neutrality. As was pointed out in the answers, it is possible to convert CO2 to methane, but it can't meet the thermodynamic requirement to be energy neutral. So the question has been answered.

Chicken farms, and other popular media items do not make the hurdle of being on topic.
You were offered the chance to demonstrate by proposing that chicken farms were globally significant but declined to do so for reasons we can only guess at. To be clear about it, we can now settle the chicken farm question. Can chicken farm production of methane be globally significant? What was offered was that some farmer somewhere ran his tractor or farm equipment from [only?] the waste from his chickens. Applying a bit of numeracy here, let's assume that if we could power 1/4 of the US cars on chicken manure, we would consider this globally significant. What would that mean? Well for starters half of the two car families and one quarter of the one car families would need to become chicken farmers. OK, so now what? Now the waste from the chicken is taken care of, but we have chickens that are now waste instead of manure.

Look at that! We are able to see, without even using an envelope or pencil, that the question was off topic. We did not even need to resort to knowing how much motor fuel we use each day, nor how many chickens it would take to replace some given percentage of that. All we had to do was ask ourselves a simple question and work out the answer. Not all questions are that easy, because for some we really do need to do the math and research.

How else could we have known that the chicken farm solution was off-topic for not scaling?
If one does not have the science or math skills to really work out whether an approach is feasible, the best thing is to assume that there are many smart people anxious to start their own company and make their fortunes - and investors willing to fund them to make theirs. If an idea has been published, i.e. you know about it, assume that there are a 1000 people far brighter than you that also know about it, and that one percent of those (10) are out there trying to create a startup to "monetize" the idea - even if the idea won't work!

FM75, on 2013-October-19, 12:29, said:

Quite amazing. First you insist that this must be about using oil from behind McDonalds, which had absolutely nothing to do with what I was saying. Now that has been pointed out, somehow you manage to reduce talking about all garbage to talking about chicken farms - which as far as I know were never even mentioned - and totally ignore the fact that METHANE - WHICH IS PRODUCED BY GARBAGE- organic waste - is far far more damaging than the "carbon emissions".

Organic waste is being produced in massive amounts every day everywhere.
Organic waste produces methane, (and compost) and we are paying people lots of money to put it in landfills or haul it out to sea or through sewage systems rather than use it. Maybe that makes sense to you but to me it's like running the furnace with the outside door wide open. That was the point of my original post on this aspect of climate change, and it most certainly IS on topic.

Then you pontificate that a process which is presently being successfully used all over the world in and out of cities and which you clearly have absolutely no clue about and no interest in learning about either "won't work"

Of course if you choose to focus on things which were neither said nor suggested and argue with them it seems a little like - well - let's say you clearly don't need anyone else involved for your own gratification. so, enjoy yourself.

onoway, on 2013-October-11, 20:20, said:

onoway, on 2013-October-19, 15:10, said:

As the post what is the role of government. The concern the really overriding concern is that the central govt will not allow ideas to compete and kills innovation when it comes to global warming/climate change.
If you accept this is really the main concern we advance. The central govt and I will go out on a limb and say far left liberals often too often says that competing ideas are illegitimate thus the discussion.


Far right often do the same but seem to have far less influence on this subject.



btw all of your posts are competing ideas...great and thank you. Don't stop please, I disagree with them often but they make me stop and think and you have a gift of writing clearly...thank you.

Every solution comes with its requisite problems.

As far as having an effect on climate change, the current best estimates (AR5) indicate that the modeled effects of "human influence" (GHG and/or urbanization....wishful thinking leading to the production of hot air...brainfreezes... etc. ) are somewhat disconnected and likely only slightly relevant to how the planet changes its temperature and weather.

The basic conclusion is that a couple of degrees of warming will be GOOD for us (at least no worse) and that this rise is expected, now, to take centuries and to be similar to previously experienced halcyon days of human development. In the mean time, global sea-ice continues to rise and the mean planetary temperature appears to be in a "hiatus" (like TV shows that use the same terminology = "soon to be canceled").

Perhaps investing our time and effort on a new and less fractious monetary system might be a better way of maintaining a global climate of certainty, rather than the tumult that continues to perturb our welfare.

http://www.monsanto....orporation.aspx

Now Monsanto is getting truly frightening, imo. We have had people fiddling with the weather for decades;seeding the clouds to make it rain has likely been done for over half a century. http://abcnews.go.co...id=98859&page=1 Ever since 'climate change" ideas hit the big time all sorts of exotic and weird ideas (orbiting mirrors?) have been proposed to make the weather do what we want. Some people believe some of these things are already being tried, I can't find reliable data about that.

However, when you get what is basically a chemical and bioengineering company with a long track record of believing that long term effects are of no interest or concern and a firm conviction that it can do a better job of arranging things than systems several million years in the making, as well as numerous convictions for disregarding laws regarding what is and is not allowed ...there is imo no reason at all to assume that Monsanto will soon..overtly or not..be involved with trying to control the weather.

onoway, on 2013-October-20, 16:23, said:

Maybe you should spend some time with wikipedia when you find topics of interest. I remember learning about cloud seeding back in the 1960s - probably 4th - 6th grade science class. It works. It makes it rain. Does it make it rain more than it would have otherwise? Seems that might still be an open question. But perhaps one can change where and when it rains.

http://en.wikipedia....er_modification - been done since the 50's - Is governed in some cases legally.


Drop ABC news and similar media as your source for science. All you will get is what someone with no science education worth mentioning could do with some abstract or for-press quotes - dumbed down to a sound bite or a few dopey paragraphs.

BTW. We already know your opinion about Monsanto. Does it apply to all large companies, or only chemical companies, or just Monsanto? (You don't need to answer that since it is as off-topic as my question...)

Al_U_Card, on 2013-October-20, 10:14, said:

Could you please point out the sections of the AR5 report that provide the above conclusions. I skimmed through Part 1 (at Fox "News" of all places!) and could not find the correct passages. I did find some other sections that directly contradicted some of these assertions though.