Didn't think we would have so many 'eco warriors' on a Jag forum and no doubt owning Jag's.
Lawrence

 

Kind of reminds me of this, it's old, but it still apply's today.

 

I wouldn't call myself an "eco warrior" but I have traveled to countries like Egypt, Malaysia and China, where there are very little **enforced** environmental laws. It's just unlivable. You step outside and you can barely breath with all the pollution. Once you've seen it first hand, you might go green too. It's less to do with climate change per se, than just making sure the US doesn't turn into China, where there is a literal huge black cloud that hovers around the country from all the pollution.

 

You can't build a wall isolating the US from everywhere else. All that filth is circulating over the whole planet carried by weather patterns. And BTW, the U.S. is still the biggest carbon emitter on the planet.

 

Not according to what I just Google'ed as of Dec 2014. And, China's CO2 emissions continue to increase while the US has actually reduced its emissions.

CHINA.
China Photos/Getty ImagesChina accounts for about 30 percent of global CO2 emissions. It emits nearly twice the amount of greenhouse gases as the United States, which it surpassed in 2006 as the top emitter of carbon dioxide.Dec 5, 2014

 

That's not quite the data I got, but it's probably just a matter of when the it was published. Wikipedia has China at almost 25% of the world's total, and the United States at just over 16%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...xide_emissions

 

I'm glad to hear that my info is a little out of date, and that we're no longer #1 (percentage-wise) in that category. Obviously, our tightened environmental regulations over the last 40+ years may have produced something positive or at least slowed the amount of our increases per capita.

I wonder if our 16% share of worldwide CO2 today is actually less than the total amount of CO2 we emitted 40 years ago. In other words, as the developing world grows exponentially, we're also growing and may be responsible for a smaller percentage of the total but still dumping more than we used to.

Nonetheless, no matter how "green" the US/EU gets, it will make little difference to the ultimate fate of the planet if every other developing country follows China's example. On the positive side, if the US/EU take the lead in developing clean technology, there is some hope that others will follow.

However, the prime reason for my cynicism is that claimed "green" solutions like EVs are not necessarily all that "green."

 

That, I don't know. I'd have to do more research, and it's a sunny Sunday afternoon.

No, they're not. Battery production is probably the worst part of that, but again, sunny Sunday ...

Gonna go burn some dead dinosaurs.

 

Yes, it's nice and sunny here, 94ºF with 100% relative humidity, and I've been soaking wet outside most of the day. It's time to dry out indoors.

It's far worse than just battery production. As I said above, the dirty little secret is that in the US, 67% of their fuel (electricity) comes from the burning of fossil fuel. If I were to buy a Tesla where I live, 90+% of it's locomotion would come from coal.

 

You guys continue to miss the big picture, trying to maintain the status quo by highlighting the short comings of EV while completely ignoring the impact of the current fossil fuel industrial complex. Is EV or any "green", renewable, sustainable energy effort perfect? Of course not. But it's a path towards a cleaner future, one where we can breath the air and it's not 110 degrees in Alaska. Your alternative: none, continue digging fossil fuels and hope all the scientists are wrong about its impact on the climate.

 

I'm not missing the big picture, but I know it's hard enough to change someone's mind about cars in a car forum, let alone politics or ideologies.

Even a simple, utterly factual statement like "The Coupe looks better than the Convertible" is going to get argued. Good luck changing the minds of the coupe-deniers. The more sense you make, the more stubborn they get.

 

You're in dangerous waters there my friend. We all know the convertible is more attractive than the coupe... at least with the top down.

 

See? Some people, you just can't reach.

 

All the scientists? Really? Guess you haven't heard about the Petition Project. 31,000+ scientists have signed it to date.

 

I had to look it up. So 31,000 *scientists* have signed it? Wikipedia reports (and their own website confirms) that just over 31,000 people have signed it in total (31,487). Are they all scientists? Reportedly 39 are climatologists. How many climatologists did *not* sign it?

 

[QUOTE=... but oil, natural gas, coal, etc. all put more carbon in the atmosphere, in varying degrees, and the extraction processes for all of them are damaging to the environment. QUOTE]

Fossil fuel combustion does not put carbon into the atmosphere, unless you are talking about the black particulate that diesel engines produce, which I assume you are not. That carbon falls to the earth very quickly. Modern diesels use particulate filters to capture that carbon and then clean themselves by oxidizing it to CO2 periodically. Carbon is a black solid compound (element) and CO2 is gas at STP. These are two very different compounds.

CO2 is a colorless, odorless gas which is a by-product of hydrocarbon combustion (oxidation) from all sources including ICE's, power plants, and all living things. Great volumes of CO2 are expelled in volcanic eruptions, hot springs, and from plant decay in swamps, and these have been estimated to expel 97% of all the CO2 in the atmosphere. ICE's do pollute the atmosphere mostly with oxides of nitrogen and sulphur. But, CO2 is not a pollutant; it is a minor component of the atmosphere (just 400 ppm) which is food for plants, and necessary for all life on earth as we know it.

Since this is a V8 thread, now fire them up and your plants will love you.

 

You are good student; you looked it up. I was merely trying to correct the original OP's comment of "all scientists." You confirmed it.

Next you question how many signers are climatologists. I don't know, but the keepers of the website do, and yes, they are all scientists. They have a process to check the credentials of those who sign the petition. More than 9000 of the 31,000+ signers have a Ph.D. in science. Many disciplines study the atmosphere and climate, and it's interactions with the oceans, the solid earth, the sun, and space; it is not in the sole purview of so-called climatologists. How about meteorologists, solar physicists, geophysicists (solid earth, oceans and atmosphere), geologists (use the rock record to study past climates), glaciologists, geographers, chemists of many types, astro/space physicists, and more. All of these disciplines contribute.

 

[QUOTE=Dr. Manhattan;1297852] 1) People keep talking about large-scale hydrogen as though it's something that could actually work, and it simply can't for so many reasons. They might as well be touting fairy dust as a solution. It's actually worse than ethanol...ethanol, while a total boondoggle, at least has an existing infrastructure.

2) If we all woke up tomorrow morning and all of the deserts of the world were suddenly lined with solar panels, we might have enough excess energy to be able to consider hydrogen extraction on a large scale.

3) But backing up one step, if we did have all that solar capacity, there would be no need for hydrogen because it would be far more efficient to just use the electricity directly to charge all the transportation batteries we would ever need. People who refuse to consider the unworkable energy requirements of large-scale hydrogen extraction then look at (what they consider to be) our "limitless supply of water" as their proposed source for hydrogen. But it isn't limitless, any more than the atmosphere is limitless.

4) Back when Otto, or whoever is currently credited with inventing the ICE, fired up the first engine for the first time, he didn't consider his engine's effect on the air around him because it seemed like air was in limitless supply. We now know better, and would do well to think of our water supplies in the same enlightened way. Even without using water for fuel, we're already killing the oceans of the world. Hydrogen, environmentally-neutral? Talk about "true believers"...QUOTE]

I inserted the numbers above in Manhattan's text to address the different points.

1) Hydrogen might be partial solution. The OP assumes here that H2 is made by the electrolysis of water. That might be done on a gas station scale some day, but it does take a lot of energy to do it; the water molecule takes lots of energy to split. That's not good. It is better to use hydrocarbons to make H2; there's lots of hydrogen in hydrocarbons, hence the name. And it's relatively easy to separate H2 from Carbon. Methane gas is CH4 (natural gas), the simplest hydrocarbon, is piped though all of our cities, and gas stations could have small refineries to split off the H2 leaving the solid carbon to be disposed of. The infrastructure is there. This method is currently in research. It has been shown to work on small scales, but can we scale it up?

2) Probably true, but not likely.

3) While the earth and its water are finite, the water supply on earth acts like it is infinite. It just goes round and round. You take water molecule, and split it into H2 and O2. Then we burn (combust, oxidize) the H2 gas in our ICE's, and we get back the pure, unpolluted, water molecule. The earth will never run out of water. The water on the surface of the earth is actually increasing slightly due to volcanic and tectonic activity which brings water from the lower crust and mantle to the surface.

4) By air, I think the OP means oxygen, O2. Same for oxygen as water. We will never run out of O2. Remember photosynthesis? Plants reduce CO2 to hydrocarbons (make woody parts and leaves) and O2, as long as there are plants and the sun. And yes, we can pollute our air, water and land, and that might kill us all, but we won't die from lack of oxygen.


I know this is a little off-topic, but needed to be addressed My next post on this thread will address V8 engines.

 

I'm a scientist. To not check sources would be irresponsible.
Wikipedia said what I quoted, but their own website confirms: 39 out of 31,000.


The other scientists? A brilliant Computer Science Ph.D. I worked with said "if they have to put the word 'science' in their field, it's probably not." He was speaking of Computer Science, but it applies elsewhere. Ask a proponent of Creation Science about his scientific bona fides. I expect it'll be light on "science."


The wording of the petition itself is not consistent with scientific principles. It states categorically "the limits ... would harm the environment .. and damage the health and welfare of mankind." It later hedges its bets by stating "there is no convincing scientific evidence ..."


The petition is poorly written propanda, prima facie.


Thanks for pointing this out so I could subject it to a little peer review.

 

You still don't seem to get it. I've made at least 4 attempts, but you either don't read, you have your head in the sand, or . . .

To charge EVs, you have to keep digging more and more fossil fuels to keep the electrical grid from going black, since 67% of the power on the currently maxed-out US grid comes from burning it. If all vehicles were EVs, the demands on the grid would grow exponentially, meaning we'd be digging a hell of a lot more of it. There is no other current alternative other than to start building a whole bunch of nuclear plants quickly all over the world, but, of course, that's a whole other can of worms.