Trump and coal mines

[Hermit]

Your arguments are exactly the kind if moronic liberal econut claptrap that I'm talking about. You take a data point and go all hysterical about what you see without looking at the big picture. All climate change conspiracy alarmists do the same thing. "Oh dear, Kiribati will be swallowed by the sea in 200 years, we must spend 800 billion dollars a year to save the inhabitants!" Fuck that. I'll send one of them ten cents towards the price of a plane ticket to Tibet, where they will never, ever have to worry about being "swallowed by the sea."

Thanks for your hysterical rant, but once again you are attacking mister strawman. All I have done is

1. to point out that animavore has not claimed that island nations have been swallowed by the sea.

I merely challenged anyone to show evidence that any island had been swallowed by the sea, which task you failed at too.

Not "merely". You quoted Animavore saying that island nations are being swallowed by the sea, called it "hysterical hyperbole" and then challenged him to "show us even one island nation that has been swallowed by the sea", as if that was what he claimed.

2. to provide evidence that island nations are indeed being swallowed by the sea.

Except that they aren't. They have (allegedly) seen sea levels rise.

Now you are making me laugh. The sea level rises are not mere allegations. The height of mean tides is increasing. Land is being swallowed. Kiribati is indeed being swallowed by the sea, and as long as there is no evidence pointing to an end or a reversal of this sea level rise it is perfectly reasonable to state that the Republic of Kiribati is being swallowed by the sea. Only when evidence pointing to an end or a reversal of this trend can we no longer reasonably say that.

[pErvinalia]

the island nations being swallowed by the sea

I want to focus on this bit of hysterical hyperbole. Show us even one "island nation" that has been "swallowed by the sea" please. Just one.

Kiribati has been evacuating for a couple of years now.

Wise move, but not because it's been "swallowed by the sea" or even because it's going to be "swallowed by the sea" within the next five generations.

Bzzzt. Wrong.

Adapt or die.

Aderpt or derp.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Er, the only problem is wind can never replace coal or gas because it's not reliable. And it's ugly. And it takes an enormous investment in land that cannot be used for anything else.

And the most compelling reason is because it can never supply the necessary amount of electricity to keep a technological society running without festooning every square foot of the country with giant, ugly towers.

Wind is only one of the energy sources that will help with the inevitable replacement of fossil fuels. The price of solar is dropping, and looks to continue to do so. The work continues on developing nuclear fusion as a power source as well. Fossil fuel will be with us for a while yet, but it's on its way out, whether you ever acknowledge that or not.

[Tero]

I've seen lots of cows grazing right under wind mills. Most of the land around them, in the prairie, is farmed in some way. The land is not wasted, Seth

[pErvinalia]

Yeah, but the cows have headaches from soundwaves. Seth cares about cows. And birds and all the creatures on earth. He's very caring.

[JimC]

And, over a whole distributed network, a combination of wind and solar, with appropriate storage (increasingly cheaper, BTW) will do a good combined job. If the wind isn't blowing at farm A, it may well be blowing at farm B 500 km away. When the sun isn't shining, then a combination of night winds and/or storage will come into play. Realistically, this will not replace burning fossil fuels overnight, but will steadily reduce the amount needed per year, if the infrastructure is added at a reasonable pace.

[Tero]

Gas cheaper than coal

Now coal country is reckoning with an inconvenient truth: Experts say Mr. Trump’s expansive campaign promise to “put our miners back to work” will be very difficult to keep. Yet as he prepares to move into the Oval Office, Appalachians are eyeing Washington with a feeling they have not had in years: hope.

The American market for coal is shrinking, industry analysts agree. Utility companies have drastically reduced their reliance on coal, in part because of President Obama’s aggressive regulations to cut emissions from power plants, but also because natural gas is cheaper.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/us/do ... untry.html
link there to

In addition, utilities have been slow to build new coal-fired power plants in recent decades because of air-quality concerns over the burning of the other type of coal — thermal coal — that is used for power plants and is mined across the country.

Mr. Trump campaigned to help both kinds of coal recover.

But natural gas may prove unbeatable. The hydraulic fracturing boom in shale fields that began a decade ago flooded the market with cheap natural gas that continues to erode coal’s market share. As recently as early 2008, coal was the source of roughly half of the electricity generated in the United States. Now it is down to about 30 percent.

[JimC]

Also, per Megajoule of energy, gas produces considerably less CO2 than coal, as well as less of other pollutants. However, if the gas is sourced by fracking, there may be other issues, and the leakage of methane during production can be an issue, given methane's high Greenhouse potential.

[Seth]

Your arguments are exactly the kind if moronic liberal econut claptrap that I'm talking about. You take a data point and go all hysterical about what you see without looking at the big picture. All climate change conspiracy alarmists do the same thing. "Oh dear, Kiribati will be swallowed by the sea in 200 years, we must spend 800 billion dollars a year to save the inhabitants!" Fuck that. I'll send one of them ten cents towards the price of a plane ticket to Tibet, where they will never, ever have to worry about being "swallowed by the sea."

Thanks for your hysterical rant, but once again you are attacking mister strawman. All I have done is

1. to point out that animavore has not claimed that island nations have been swallowed by the sea.

I merely challenged anyone to show evidence that any island had been swallowed by the sea, which task you failed at too.

Not "merely". You quoted Animavore saying that island nations are being swallowed by the sea, called it "hysterical hyperbole" and then challenged him to "show us even one island nation that has been swallowed by the sea", as if that was what he claimed.

At which task he, and you, utterly failed. The best you or he could produce was a chart showing a 140+ year record of sea levels that absolutely does NOT support the AGW hypothesis.

2. to provide evidence that island nations are indeed being swallowed by the sea.

Except that they aren't. They have (allegedly) seen sea levels rise.

Now you are making me laugh. The sea level rises are not mere allegations. The height of mean tides is increasing. Land is being swallowed. Kiribati is indeed being swallowed by the sea, and as long as there is no evidence pointing to an end or a reversal of this sea level rise it is perfectly reasonable to state that the Republic of Kiribati is being swallowed by the sea. Only when evidence pointing to an end or a reversal of this trend can we no longer reasonably say that.

Sea levels rise, sea levels fall and it's all part of a natural process man has absolutely no control over or way to change and for which man is not responsible. Get over it. Adapt or die.

[Seth]

Er, the only problem is wind can never replace coal or gas because it's not reliable. And it's ugly. And it takes an enormous investment in land that cannot be used for anything else.

And the most compelling reason is because it can never supply the necessary amount of electricity to keep a technological society running without festooning every square foot of the country with giant, ugly towers.

Wind is only one of the energy sources that will help with the inevitable replacement of fossil fuels. The price of solar is dropping,

Not really. The short-term cost of panels has dropped because the Chinese are dumping solar panels onto the world market but that won't last. While solar is far less intrusive than wind farms it suffers from the same failure that wind does: it's cyclical and the energy cannot be stored for use when demand is high. Oil and gas, by the way, are nothing more than stored solar energy, or had that fact escaped you?

and looks to continue to do so.

Not once the Chinese wipe out panel production elsewhere and then it either jacks the prices or simply stops exporting panels in order to wage economic warfare, something it has a long, long history of doing.

By the way, you misread this citation, which says that the PRICE of solar energy, which is to say the price that is paid to the individual who owns the solar system, is in decline, not the COST of building and maintaining a system:

The continued decline comes even as the price of photovoltaic modules – commonly known as solar panels – which represent one of the highest single equipment costs in solar energy systems, have remained relatively steady since 2012.

This fact makes it far less economically feasible to spend the huge initial investment required to put in a solar system for homeowners or anyone else. The up-front costs for a solar system are huge, particularly for the individual homeowner, and that investment cannot be justified UNLESS excess solar-generated electricity can be sold back to the grid at a price that amortizes the capital costs involved in a reasonable amount of time. When the price you get for selling back electricity to help pay for the system drops it makes it a waste of money to install it in the first place and you're better off not doing so and continuing to buy retail power from the grid. That's why "net metering" is such a big deal. Power companies hate net metering because in net metering the homeowner "sells" excess capacity back to the power company at the same retail rate that he buys grid power from the power company. Power companies naturally don't want to buy what they produce at wholesale prices at a retail price, much less do they want their customers to not only be able to avoid buying THEIR power at retail rates (which funds their staying in business) but to also force the power company to pay more for the customer's excess electricity that it costs them to produce it themselves.

The ONLY way individual home-based or commercial solar is economically feasible today is due primarily to two factors, both of which are government mandates that affect the profitability of the power companies: net metering and capital-cost subsidies to the homeowner. And that's not economically sustainable and therefore solar is out as a permanent "renewable" energy source.

The work continues on developing nuclear fusion as a power source as well.

Yeah, fusion is cool and I'm all for it, but it's not a "renewable" energy source because technically it consumes the matter used as fuel, so it doesn't count. But I fully support fusion power plants.

Fossil fuel will be with us for a while yet, but it's on its way out, whether you ever acknowledge that or not.

It's going to be with us for hundreds of years at a minimum and probably thousands because even when not used to fuel fixed electrical generation it's the most energy-dense portable fuel for vehicles known to man...short of "Mr. Fusion" converters in your Delorean. But just try to find a damned flux capacitor these days...

So, since fossil fuels ARE going to be with us for generations there's no need to cease using them immediately...or ever...until they run out.

[Hermit]

Sea levels rise, sea levels fall...

Since we started keeping records of tides sea levels kept rising. Fact.
Land is being swallowed. Fact.
Kiribati is indeed being swallowed by the sea. Fact.
As long as there is no evidence pointing to an end or a reversal of this sea level rise it is perfectly reasonable to state that the Republic of Kiribati is being swallowed by the sea. Fact.
Only when evidence pointing to an end or a reversal of this trend can we no longer reasonably say that. Fact.

Feel free to ignore them.

If you wish to discuss AGW with me, be so kind to quote what I have said about it. Your addresses to mister strawman are getting tedious.

[Seth]

Also, per Megajoule of energy, gas produces considerably less CO2 than coal, as well as less of other pollutants. However, if the gas is sourced by fracking, there may be other issues, and the leakage of methane during production can be an issue, given methane's high Greenhouse potential.

Most methane "leakage" is caused by termite farts in the Amazon. Therefore it is prudent to kill all termites in the Amazon to prevent global warming.

However, it's perfectly reasonable for our federal government to prohibit "gas flaring," which is the practice of burning natural gas produced during oil extraction or other operations that is more expensive to transport to market than its worth. This is a very common thing in the US and elsewhere, but since the gas is being extracted largely from federal lands under lease, the government is fully justified in requiring the companies to transport and use that gas rather than simply wasting it as a part of the cost of doing business on federal lands.

Likewise, requiring companies to seal wells and prevent methane leaks on federal land is appropriate "exported harm" regulation, and that can be extended to private land as well since methane is harmful both to the atmosphere and to people.

Those are regulatory areas where the police power of the government comes appropriately into play in its role of preventing the export of harm.

And I won't begin to dispute that natural gas is a better source than coal because it is. It's far less energy-dense than coal of course, so transport and storage costs are multiplied, but it does, as you say, produce fewer other pollutants (other than CO2, which isn't a "pollutant" regardless of what the EPA says). But new technologies for "clean coal" use, including gasification and conversion hold promise for extracting the concentrated solar energy in coal in far less impactful ways. Of course those new technologies will not be developed if the coal industry is simply banned and shut down...which is of course what the econuts are trying to accomplish.

The good news about coal is that there are huge reserves in the US and they will stay right where they are and will be available for mining at any time in the future that the greenies and the government pull their heads out of their asses and quit being Luddites...or until the rest of us shove their heads up their asses until they disappear and re-open the coal mines.

So, for every coal mine that shuts down today, that's one coal mine that will be reopened when people run low on "renewables" and tell the greenies to go fuck themselves.

[Seth]

Sea levels rise, sea levels fall...

Since we started keeping records of tides sea levels kept rising. Fact.

Anthropocentric bilge. Evidence of Indian villages have been found 300 feet underwater in the Puget Sound region. Archeological evidence in the Mediterranean of civilizations are commonly found under water. Geologic evidence shows that sea levels have fluctuated widely depending largely on global temperatures. The colder it gets, the lower the sea level goes because more water is locked up in ice, and vice versa.

But there is an important fact you have failed to consider: There is an absolute limit to how high sea levels will go, and that elevation is both calculable and has been calculated many times. Once all the ice melts the seas can't go any higher than that, period. According to scientists the maximum sea level rise possible is about 70 meters, or 230 feet. That's not much at all and mankind is perfectly capable of moving uphill 230 feet over the next couple of hundred years, and should do so. That will simply eliminate any complaints about sea levels forever.

Land is being swallowed. Fact.

Always has been, always will be...until it's vomited back up when sea levels decline during glaciation.

Kiribati is indeed being swallowed by the sea. Fact.

It's gonna suck to be a resident of Kiribati in two hundred years. I recommend against investing in beach-front property in Kiribati or anywhere else if you have long term investment plans. Other than that, it's a big "meh."

As long as there is no evidence pointing to an end or a reversal of this sea level rise it is perfectly reasonable to state that the Republic of Kiribati is being swallowed by the sea. Fact.

Ooooh! Biggest Loser! As I said above, there is a point at which sea levels reach their physical maximum, about 230 feet higher than they are now. Time to sell the Miami Beach time share and move to Georgia.

Only when evidence pointing to an end or a reversal of this trend can we no longer reasonably say that. Fact.

Wrong. See above.

[pErvinalia]

Sea levels rise, sea levels fall and it's all part of a naturalGod'sprocess man has absolutely no control over or way to change and for which man is not responsible. Get over it. Adapt or die.

Aderpt or derp!

[pErvinalia]

Er, the only problem is wind can never replace coal or gas because it's not reliable. And it's ugly. And it takes an enormous investment in land that cannot be used for anything else.

And the most compelling reason is because it can never supply the necessary amount of electricity to keep a technological society running without festooning every square foot of the country with giant, ugly towers.

Wind is only one of the energy sources that will help with the inevitable replacement of fossil fuels. The price of solar is dropping,

Not really. The short-term cost of panels has dropped because the Chinese are dumping solar panels onto the world market but that won't last. While solar is far less intrusive than wind farms it suffers from the same failure that wind does: it's cyclical and the energy cannot be stored for use when demand is high. Oil and gas, by the way, are nothing more than stored solar energy, or had that fact escaped you?

More like that fact has escaped you, as you don't seem to realise that it is stored as captured carbon. When the energy is extracted, the carbon is released, leading to global warming.

And it's perfectly possible to store renewable energies in molten salt, batteries and/or gravitational potential energy. And don't blather on about cost, you ignoramus, as you don't seem to understand the extent to which the fossil fuels industry is subsided and environmental costs externalised.