The downside of the Green Movement

[scooterSST]

And other vegetable oil based fuel options. Wahoo, lower gas costs! Wahoo, higher food prices.

I can only speak to how North Carolina handles things, but most of the Biodiesel available in NC is dervived from restaurant grease and animal fat. i don't know if there's enough produced nationally to meet demand for a switch.

Ethanol is not a long term solution, for two reasons, to meet the potential demand to an ethanol economy, the amount of land that would need to be clamined for ethanol plant production is astromomical, which (IMO) would defeat the purpose, as it would destroy acres of green space.

Secondly ethanol is significantly less efficient than gasoline, it takes more ethanol to create the same force inside an internal combustion engine. It along with hybrids is a band aid solution to wean the US off of petro-fuels.

We need to find a permanent solution (Hydrogen?) that will get us away from using petroleum as a fuel source.

As far as light bulbs go, I've switched to CFL's for a couple of reasons, 1) they last longer (IMO) than incandesants, and they use less energy. I don't have a medical need for any particular light spectrums, nor am I sensitive to any flicker or hum, it just needs to be bright enough for me to do what I need to do. I also have two huge skylights in my great room/office, so I get my daily dose of UV

When LED's become cost effective for me I'll probably switch to those

I think the one thing that everyone can agree on, is that we're fucking up our own planet, by regurgitating the waste from our daily lives back into the environmnent.

 

[Pellaz]

I can only speak to how North Carolina handles things, but most of the Biodiesel available in NC is dervived from restaurant grease and animal fat. i don't know if there's enough produced nationally to meet demand for a switch.

Nowhere near. There isn't a distribution system in place for getting the grease to be processed, and I haven't heard of any serious plans to initiate one.

Ethanol is not a long term solution, for two reasons, to meet the potential demand to an ethanol economy, the amount of land that would need to be clamined for ethanol plant production is astromomical, which (IMO) would defeat the purpose, as it would destroy acres of green space.

Yep. I remember reading a few months ago that even if every acre currently dedicated to growing corn for food was redirected to ethanol, it still wouldn't be enough.
(Brazil was luckier, since they can grow sugar cane in their climate and had plenty of useable land to convert from, err, rainforest.
Ooops.
Ya win some, you lose some....)

Secondly ethanol is significantly less efficient than gasoline, it takes more ethanol to create the same force inside an internal combustion engine. It along with hybrids is a band aid solution to wean the US off of petro-fuels.

Specifically, I think I heard that ethanol was 30% less efficient than gasoline.

We need to find a permanent solution (Hydrogen?) that will get us away from using petroleum as a fuel source.

Maybe electrical, powered by nuclear fusion (NOTE: not fission) power-plants brought onto the grid, but I don't see that anytime before 2050, maybe 2040 if it's better-funded.

As far as light bulbs go, I've switched to CFL's for a couple of reasons, 1) they last longer (IMO) than incandesants, and they use less energy. I don't have a medical need for any particular light spectrums, nor am I sensitive to any flicker or hum, it just needs to be bright enough for me to do what I need to do. I also have two huge skylights in my great room/office, so I get my daily dose of UV

When LED's become cost effective for me I'll probably switch to those.

I had largely switched to CFL's about two years ago -- before AlGore did, in his Tennessee mansion -- and the newer bulbs are lots better than the older ones. They "warm up" much faster now, and it seems like they last longer, too.

As for LEDs, I think they'll be fine for low-voltage applications, but they really DO throw a lot of EM. I can listen to AM radio at an LED traffic light and tell when the light will change by the signal interference thrown out by the LED walk-signals.


Speaking of AlGore's house, I thought this was pretty ironic:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp

 

[scooterSST]

Nowhere near. There isn't a distribution system in place for getting the grease to be processed, and I haven't heard of any serious plans to initiate one.



Yep. I remember reading a few months ago that even if every acre currently dedicated to growing corn for food was redirected to ethanol, it still wouldn't be enough.
(Brazil was luckier, since they can grow sugar cane in their climate and had plenty of useable land to convert from, err, rainforest.
Ooops.
Ya win some, you lose some....)



Specifically, I think I heard that ethanol was 30% less efficient than gasoline.




Maybe electrical, powered by nuclear fusion (NOTE: not fission) power-plants brought onto the grid, but I don't see that anytime before 2050, maybe 2040 if it's better-funded.



I had largely switched to CFL's about two years ago -- before AlGore did, in his Tennessee mansion -- and the newer bulbs are lots better than the older ones. They "warm up" much faster now, and it seems like they last longer, too.

As for LEDs, I think they'll be fine for low-voltage applications, but they really DO throw a lot of EM. I can listen to AM radio at an LED traffic light and tell when the light will change by the signal interference thrown out by the LED walk-signals.


Speaking of AlGore's house, I thought this was pretty ironic:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp

NC is pretty environmentally progressive, you can actually find biodiesel stations in the triangle. It's about the same cost as regular diesel, but the impact on the environment is nil. Some of the local buses are running on biodiesel, it's nice to sit behind a bus that smells like french fries instead of diesel smoke.

We kinda need to be carefull about how much of the rainforest Brazil eats up, the Amazon basin is a very significant contributor to atomspheric oxygen.

I was speaking more specifically about an alternative to petroleum based internal combustion engines, there's natural gas (also in limited supply), hydrogen, electricity (does the generation process kill any gains?).

Personally, as far as electrical generation goes, as soon as we can afford it, we're going off the grid, and installing solar panels on the roof of our house, we have a fantastic southern exposure, and should be able to very significantly reduce if not eliminate our draw from the grid.

What Bush and Gore do with their houses is there own business, economics, will proabably dictate changes to what they're doing.

 

[Pellaz]

NC is pretty environmentally progressive, you can actually find biodiesel stations in the triangle. It's about the same cost as regular diesel, but the impact on the environment is nil. Some of the local buses are running on biodiesel, it's nice to sit behind a bus that smells like french fries instead of diesel smoke.

Wow, do they really? That's kinda neet.

I was referring to a national distribution plan for biodiesel...it's cool that it's being developed in NC.

I was speaking more specifically about an alternative to petroleum based internal combustion engines, there's natural gas (also in limited supply), hydrogen, electricity (does the generation process kill any gains?).

Once running, the fusion process would not: it uses hydrogen or deuterium as fuel, the most common element in existence, and does not produce any radioactive waste. For power plants, it would be quite efficient.
After R&D, the major expense would be initial construction.

Personally, as far as electrical generation goes, as soon as we can afford it, we're going off the grid, and installing solar panels on the roof of our house, we have a fantastic southern exposure, and should be able to very significantly reduce if not eliminate our draw from the grid.

Cool. What sort of battery technology will you use?

The downside to solar (and some wind-turbines) is the necessity of having a battery backup...and battery manufacturing is notoriously environmentally unfriendly. Photovoltaic cells, which require strip-mining germanium and selenium, have downsides, too.

What Bush and Gore do with their houses is there own business, economics, will proabably dictate changes to what they're doing.

The article does point out that G.W. Bush's extremely environmentally friendly (!) Crawford house was designed that way in part to reduce costs, especially in an arid part of Texas, but still...it's interesting that it was designed that way (with geothermal heating and cooling, etc.) well before "Green design" became vogue.

 

[RonKFish]

That's the market at work. With the right incentives (the issues of building a house out in the desert) even W can be a conservationist.