... if the low-lying islands of the world are swallowed by rising oceans?
Maybe you think it won't happen, but what if it does? Can you picture the relocation that will be needed? Or do you picture storms or waves suddenly devouring whole populations before any full-scale relocation effort takes place? What does the island in your mental picture look like? Does it look like Manhattan?
ADDED: Why is this on my mind? I've been reading "The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific."
November 11, 2012
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«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 272 of 272I am doing my part and creating demand in the marketplace and accelerating the development of these resources. This is not a zero-sum, maximalist game. It doesn't work that way. No sustained development or progress ever does. If you know about the economics of energy production and supply then I'd bet you actually know something about that, too.
Well, Nathan, the needlessly insulting, if presumptuously self-described "non-twit", I do all that without contributing to AGW by getting 100% of my energy through wind, and at a lower cost. That's what a truly free market can do for you; it's what "deregulation" did for me. And I don't live like an Amish, however much I do appreciate being resourceful in general. You should look into it.
I still drive, but not that much and get better mileage than you might care to. That also cuts down on my gasoline expenses and the amount of money in America that props up aggressive tyrants in parts of the world where civilation is scarce (something you can relate to, perchance?), but I'm sure you'll try to find some reason to make me feel like a jerk for that, too.
As for the rest of your dia-screed, I'll ignore it as just another uninformed bit of proud, political junk cluttering up what is otherwise intelligent and civil thread among people who don't necessarily agree on everything. But if your industry is suasion and taking things by force alone, maybe your livelihood depends on not understanding how that works.
Ah. So you are a hypocrite who refuses to live as you preach.
Got it.
Your ravings won't mean anything until you give up 100% of your hydrocarbon lifestyle.
That means you can't use utility power, because they use hydrocarbons to maintain the transmission lines.
(no plastics, too, btw)
No one should ever listen to people who don't practice what they preach.
And I am not just checking a box for an option as to what source supplies the energy. I am checking a box for the supplier. I know what their production consists of.
Stop being such a downer.
I am doing my part and creating demand in the marketplace and accelerating the development of these resources. This is not a zero-sum, maximalist game. It doesn't work that way. No sustained development or progress ever does. If you know about the economics of energy production and supply then I'd bet you actually know something about that, too.
No you're not doing your part.
Let's say you save someone from drowning. Does that mean you can go kill someone else, because your actions cancel out?
No.
You can't preach carbon footprint reduction until you eliminate hydrcarbons from your life.
Nathan believes that his ideological purism is what motivates people and leads to results.
I think he is wrong.
People will do what they can, vote with their dollars, and markets and governments respond.
But of course, his livelihood depends on not understanding that.
BTW, which forms of plastic are not recyclable? It looks like 7 are. Which ones are biodegradable?
Oh, trick question. I'm assuming you have the intelligence and integrity to know or care.
"No. Moving is a big deal financially and emotionally. Until something threatens you, you have desirable real estate and naturally wish to continue enjoying it."
Almost no one lives in the same house for their entire life anymore.
We move. All of us.
So when you move, you move inland. Simple. If you don't, the ocean waves undercut your foundations.
Nathan, go take a hike. Go tend to one of the PTSD-afflicted recruits or the attempted suicides that seem sky-high in your ranks. They seem to be a casualty of your "my way or the highway"/all-or-nothing attitude.
"...reduction until you eliminate..."
Someone doesn't know the difference between the words "reduction" and "elimination".
Maybe he needs to go eliminate.
The nitrogenous compounds are seeping into his brain.
Ritmo. I do know something about it. Not much but enough to know that you are participating in a project that makes you feel better than it makes Gaia feel.
People can buy a million electric cars for half the price to produce them but that is not an encouragement to build more. Cheerleading technology does nothing to advance the hard work that is undertaken to actually solve problems like storage. Whoever discovers the solution will be as rich as a Russian tycoon. The government might have a hand in the work but it is much more likely that a private company that has been at work for decades will be successful.
"Let's say you save someone from drowning. Does that mean you can go kill someone else, because your actions cancel out?"
That's the basis of purchasing credits, isn't it? I think that the entire concept of carbon credits is a bigger blow to the legitimacy of AGW than fudging the data ever was.
It's not complicated... if carbon production is the problem, paying someone so that you can keep on producing CO2 doesn't do anything.
The other "solutions" are just as much weak sauce as carbon credits.
If we're in a crisis some reductions here and there aren't enough, some future production of electric cars or better batteries is not enough. And of course a variable way of producing electricity, like wind or solar, results in excess power and inadequate power both. But someday... batteries!
It's doesn't take much real consideration of the "problem" to realize that a bit of reduction here or there and electric cars to plug into coal burning plants doesn't do a lot any time soon. And the celebrity scolds know it, too. Fly a private jet to Copenhagen, why the eff not? You paid for your carbon credits so you're golden while you explain to all the unwashed masses that they should live with less.
I'll trust that Boone Pickens is doing more and knows more about this than you or I do, Michael.
But the stats are there. Where does it rank on the growth curve relative to others? Why avoid putting that out there, as if it's not the salient point?
I don't cheerlead, I buy. As I assume you're a shareholder of some sort, perhaps you might understand the concept.
I know how a generator works, asshole. And for every kWh mark on my meter one kWh came from the generator that I paid to produce that from wind.
So...does the utility give you a little certificate or something that says you get your electricity from environmentally friendly sources in exchange for a slightly higher rate? Is that how it works, Ritmo?
Synova. Here is the solution! http://www.freecarbonoffsets.com/home.do;jsessionid=20C1B68A9BC5A8E6D2857F041FE24EC5
I use rhem myself and give them as gifts.
Pickens dropped his wind project.
(no plastics, too, btw)
Seems to me that non-recyclable non-biodegradable plastic in land fills is a carbon sink.
Biodegradable plastic would be the opposite of a carbon sink. Re-cyclable better but not as perfect a "sink" as the permanent land fill type.
Ritmo. High growth curve for alternatives because of very tiny denominator. Not economic without subsidies. Big ones.
My, my. We do seem to have collected a good number of binary thinkers, here. Nathan, Maguro, and now, SYNOVA! It's about time she joined the fun.
Anyway, I hasten to add that there are more numbers in the world than 1 and 0. There are numbers like 3, 4, 5, and 10 million. And Avagadro's number (Synova might have actually heard of this one). Big, big numbers.
But again, reducing something is not the same thing as turning it on or off completely. But it's good to see people show up so as to employ a version of the argument that if something isn't 100%, why do it at all? And why not? Why reduce the number of deaths with a police force when they won't prevent every one? Why prevent the number of people who die in a hospital if you can't save EVERY one? I mean, if you don't save everybody then it's like you're killing everyone.
Why do anything at all?
Because we are less lazy than them.
Begone, mindless brain-turdburglars.
Quantify them, Michael. And quantify those for coal, too. Come on, are you an investor who can't calculate or something?
Maggie, I get a lower rate. Stop being a douchebag, like I said.
There's still disproportionate growth there, Michael.
So was Pickens' new project the one with the better funded lobby?
Anyway, LNG was always part of his deal. He said that would be the component for fueling transportation.
@Ritmo, how many migratory birds did your windmills kill? How many protected avian species?
Ritmo. I dont need to "quantify" them because I am not looking for political talking points. If wind or solar worked I would invest in them. They dont on a scalable level.
I am a plunger in some things, however, things I believe in and recommend you be one too. Go all in for wind and solar it could pay off richly for you. Or not. But dont delude yourself that your power bill is low because you have opted for wind. Do you think there is a reason why every single person is not sane enough to check the same box as you checked? Have an idea of how often your lights would go on?
Pickens moved to fracking since fracking works.
They can do what the people of Galveston did after the hurricane of 1900. They raised the elevation of the entire eastern end of the island by 20 feet.
@Ritmo - So they give you a lower rate AND assure you that you're using 100% wind power, even though you really aren't? Sounds like too good a deal to be true, money in your pocket and eco street cred. LOL.
"You can only make a comparison if you propose to build thousands of earths upon which the conduct the experiment that it's already being subjected to."
Now you're beginning to see. So if we can't do the experiment, the science can't possibly be settled.
"But Crimso, who even has a professional biochemistry background (if I remember correctly) is already trying to compare the non-controlled conditions to which we're subjecting the planet to a randomized, controlled trial of people, which typically measures in the thousands."
I'm doing no such thing. My hypothetical was completely irrespective of the ability to use animal models prior to human testing. It's a very simple question you are dodging: will you accept my computer model of metabolism in humans as a substitute for animal models? Should a drug candidate be tested in humans after my computer model "proves" it is safe in humans?
Do I have such a model? Why sure I do. You can't see it, though. You can try filing a FOIA request to force me to see it, but after obtaining my emails you'll find I've been discussing with my colleagues ways to obstruct your attempts (I'll complain that you only want to have my model so you can attack it, causing Popper to spin at 5000 rpm in his grave).
Does this inspire confidence in my science?
And I noted you claimed we were subjecting the Earth to an experiment. We're doing no such thing. Or, rather, if it's an experiment it's a piss-poor one, the results of which are uninterpretable. Lack of proper controls, you see.
Pickens moved to fracking since fracking works.
Oh yes it does. As a way of igniting and polluting your drinking water it works WONDERS!!!
You do understand that there's a market for things regardless of the good they do or don't do? Maybe you don't. I don't consider everything on the basis of price alone. There is such a thing as non-financial value in this world.
Ritmo. If wind power is cheaply available why doesnt every energy user opt for it?
Fracking does nothing to the drinking water but people who live near wind farms have a litany of complaints. UK is trimming permits because of health issues and other complaints from those who live neat the turbines
Fracking does nothing to the drinking water...
Not true. Untrue assertion without any evidence. What chemicals are used for the process? BTW, hint: "None" is a wrong answer.
Your bias is for the money you get on it. The people whose lands are used or are downstream to not have as high a financial stake that is removed from the "externalities" you've internalized onto them. Are you getting paid for a safety analysis, and by whom? I wouldn't trust my safety to you.
As far as the complaints about the Ted Kennedy-types who don't like the view of windmills, they can take a hike. Why bring them up? You'd have put it on the property you owned (and lived on or just owned?) and so would I. I don't care about his hoity-toity view bs. And the cry of a "littany of complaints" from someone who claims absolute safety of fracking sounds like the most disingenous bullshit I've ever heard.
Maguro - you are a ridiculous ass. Why should I care what you think? I'm the one paying it. If you want to pay me the difference off of my electricity bill as a way to prove your point, I'll offer you that. Put your money where your ridiculous wise-cracking mouth is.
If wind power is cheaply available why doesnt every energy user opt for it?
I don't know - regional market variations? It is where I live.
If oil is cheaply available in Saudi Arabia why does anyone use coal? I can't believe you would ask such a ridiculous question. How stupid do you think I am? Wind resources aren't the strongest in the southeast U.S. Moreso on the prairies and up in the northern Appalachian range. Geez Michael if you needed a regional market analysis you could have got one.
We're doing no such thing. Or, rather, if it's an experiment it's a piss-poor one, the results of which are uninterpretable. Lack of proper controls, you see.
Which sounds like an AWESOME reason to continue it indefinitely.
Better to be sorry than to be safe.
Very few here are even trying to answer our host's question. So I'll bite, assuming for the sake of argument that global sea level rise in this century will make living where many people live now untenable.
It is simply not going to be the case that one morning people near some coast are going to wake up and find that the ocean is literally at their doorstop. There would however, be an increasing number of storm surges that would cause flooding in coastal communities. As this happens, an increasing number of people are going to move away from the coast (but only in the sense of more people leaving than moving in) and these communities would (usually slowly, but occasionally suddenly) lose population.
In most cases, this would barely be discernable from other reasons communities have lost and continue to lose population. I would expect that it would be much less dramatic than Detroit's recent population loss. Occasionally, you would get a large event like Katrina -- I don't know if New Orleans' population will ever recover to pre-Katrina levels, nor should it -- it's just too vulnerable. (Note that I am not saying that Katrina or the flooding from it were due to anthropogenic climate change, just that if there really were significant sea level rise, you would see more of these types of events.)
But in general, the flow of population away from coasts that could be expected from significant sea level rise, even if it amounts to 100 million people worldwide over a century, would be basically undetectable compared to other reasons for population movement. (Did people leave that coastal fishing village because of increased flooding or because the fishing economy became less viable?)
I will close this comment with the statement that I am extremely skeptical that the sea level rise we will see in the coming century, from whatever cause, will have any detectable societal effects at all.
re: HT:
Now the frog feels the warm water as he sits in the pot.
A fine analogy, except that here, "boiling" is just a bit of water seeping into the basement, not death. I suppose there will be some people who will try and avoid moving indefinitely by building dikes, floodwalls, etc. (see, e.g. the Netherlands and New Orleans). And that's fine -- we know it works (more or less). Most people, one imagines, will move when the water becomes inconvenient, which will be decades before it becomes so inconvenient as to render a property unliveable.
Ritmo. So everyone in your market uses wind? Cheap wind? If not, why not?
Ritmo. Complaints in England are not of spoiled views but of serious health issues occasioned by the noise of the turbines. Quite a number of complaints.
I wonder if red states support sea level rise because it would be a boon to their otherwise shitty population base. Most people tend to live on coasts so I guess the flyover has concluded that the only way to attract the sort of economy one can build off the massive influx of population and culture that thrives in coastal areas is to flood them.
Perhaps, as with pro-segregation protests they were so fond of, we should use the excess power to fuel giant hoses to turn on them and cool them off.
Ritmo. So everyone in your market uses wind? Cheap wind? If not, why not?
I have no idea, Mr. Investor. I'd imagine not. Does any company that's not a monopoly now magically not exist anymore? You sure have strange views.
11/11/12 8:49 PM
Michael said...
Ritmo. Complaints in England are not of spoiled views but of serious health issues occasioned by the noise of the turbines. Quite a number of complaints.
Gee. Sounds serious. Or something.
You sound as vague as that bleating hairpiece Trump when you go on like this. Serious consequences.
"Which sounds like an AWESOME reason to continue it indefinitely."
In order to continue it, it would have to be an experiment in the first place. And "better safe than sorry" is not an illegitimate argument, but it does have its limits. Yes, the stakes are quite high. In that case we should be spending most of the money currently diverted (in any form) to AGW on defense from asteroid or comet impacts. We know for certain those occur, and the stakes are (arguably, depending on the size of the object) much higher. Someone stated a few years ago that the number of people working on this worldwide would staff a McDonald's restaurant.
Ritmo. Why would anyone in your market area opt for anything but wind? I am very curious about how this works.
Complaints in England are not of spoiled views but of serious health issues occasioned by the noise of the turbines. Quite a number of complaints.
Gee. Sounds serious.
You sound as vague as that bleating hairpiece Trump when you go on like this. Serious consequences.
You're not curious, you're just being obnoxious.
"I wonder if red states support sea level rise"
I don't. You have built a comment on an obviously false premise.
"Perhaps, as with pro-segregation protests they were so fond of"
I remember protests against court-ordered desegregation in my school system in Kentucky when I was growing up. I also remember similar but more violent protests about the same time for the same reason in...Boston.
Ritmo. I am not the one claiming that cheap wind power is available asshole. You are. And you csnt answer why everyone is not using it because the answer would contradict your assertion, your lie. So i am curious as to why your neighbors are too stupid to opt for cheap holy wind versus dirty expensive energy.
Nathan opined:
"You can't preach carbon footprint reduction until you eliminate hydrcarbons from your life."
Unfortunately, facially ridiculous sentences like this all too often "make sense" in the universe of these comment threads.
Ritmo remarked: "There is such a thing as non-financial value in this world."
But in here, that sort of thinking falls largely on deaf ears. We have seen this to be true in the last several months.
Boston never had de jure segregation, you dolt. The forced busing that led to protests by South Bostonians (never claimed to be a socially enlightened bunch) occurred ten years after the 1963 Birmingham campaign.
For a guy who claims to love precision, you sure seem to fudge the details. And the entire point.
I am not the one claiming that cheap wind power is available asshole. You are.
Not only am I claiming it, I'm buying it. On that very basis.
And you csnt answer why everyone is not using it because the answer would contradict your assertion, your lie.
I don't know that they're not. WTF do you think I am? Some kind of inspector who breaks into people's households and demands their utility records? You are one brazenly asinine (and stupid) thug. Go ask them yourself which provider they go with and why.
Dick-head.
So i am curious as to why your neighbors are too stupid to opt for cheap holy wind versus dirty expensive energy.
Well, this is just the restatement of your previously stated asinine assumptions. Go ask them yourself. If you want me to do market research for you then you'll have to pay me for it, you cheap bastard and Pretender to Lord of the Manor.
Get a grip! Man, you are too funny and so full of yourself it's just hard to respond with anything other than a smile.
Who is your energy supplier and how do they compete?
Lol.
Ritmo. Thanks for offering the best of a lot of evidence of your economic stupidity.
Dude, there is no way that you're buying electricity that is completely - or even mostly - derived from wind. Wind power is simply not reliable enough to be a main provider to a residential electric grid. It just isn't. Either someone is lying to you or you're lying to us.
Anytime. I'm especially glad to see your rage at being uninformed of an investment opportunity. For a tool like yourself, I suppose that must be the most hurtful thing about it all.
Then I guess they're lying to me. But they seem like an honest company, and local to my region.
Maguro. Ritmo is paying a premium for wind just like everybody else who opts for alternative. As you can see from his comments
If you want specifics Mag, Green Mountain Energy has also made pretty big inroads into our market, but they're based in TX and I think offer production from a more mixed grid. The one I went with was is even cheaper and offered packages that were 100% wind or 100% wind and mixed renewables, such as hydro. They were both competitive generation rates to that offered by the supplier itself, and I'm pretty sure I went with the 100% wind option, but it might have ended up being the wind and mixed renewables for a few cents/kWh less. I can probably double-check it.
But it's definitely more than half my bill for production. Transmission charges account for less than a tenth of that total rate, distribution more, but still not up to the rate for generation.
Whatever Michael. The supplier was happy to provide a letter describing the way this is done. In our state it is called "powerswitch". Does your state even have deregulated power utilities? Maybe you're just a big government/big utility kind of guy and don't know how competition works. I know the rate for generation offered by both my supplier and by the competitors allowed on their lines by my state.
Maybe it is just like everything else in the South. They are new to capitalism (having taken a while to get rid of slavery - and NOT even by their own hand), and so they want to shove it in your face that they actually know a thing or two about it. No pride like false pride.
Ritmo. Regardless of what they are telling you, it's not possible to run a stable grid on wind alone. The reason is obvious - if the wind isn't blowing, you aren't getting any electricity. And if the wind blows too hard, they have to disengage the turbines to prevent the windmill from destroying itself, which also results in no electricity.
It's very important - paramount, really - for any electric grid to match supply to demand very closely, or else you get blackouts, brownouts, power spikes and other nasty stuff. Because the output of a wind farm can't be controlled directly by the grid operator, wind farms need to be backed up 100% by a gas turbine that the grid operator throttles up and down to smooth out the relatively random fluctuations induced onto the grid by the windmills.
So, there is really no such thing a pure wind power on a grid. It's always wind + a gas turbine of equal or greater capacity that's always spinning up or down to prevent the windmills from wreaking havoc on the grid.
Maguro. Nothing you're telling me is news. But in order to deregulate the utility, generation has to be separated from transmission and distribution. These sections are separated out on my bill. I've looked it over again tonight. Are they not separated on yours? Do you not pick your own supplier? Maybe IL is all ConEd still the way it was in Chi when I was there.
This is not about grid maintenance but where the power comes from for the amount I need generated each month. I know who provides it and the package of options they offered and I bought. I understand the problem with wind having a low capacity factor and not a good method so far for storing excess even if that could be a means for evening out inconsistent generation potential; maybe you should ask my Republican governor and the utility distributor how they worked that out.
But I doubt there is some kind of conspiracy going on here and if you think I am just a gullible consumer (as you, decently enough, seem to have finally backed away from doing), I have provided a bunch of details on how this is done. Maybe there is a conspiracy going on, but it sure doesn't look like it to me. It just looks like a couple of guys who are not stupid about energy production, physics and maintenance note an inconsistency in the set-up. (Yes, I see your point). It doesn't mean that we know everything that the utility doesn't or that they know everything we don't, necessarily. Just that we are armchair analysts here (even if better informed) and you seem to want to second-guess the way this seemingly decent, deregulated utility business is going about things in a way that seems skeptical to a much further point than I think makes sense.
In any event, wind generation in my state (in 2011) was twice what it was four years ago, and more than twenty times what it was ten years ago.
IL was still basically evenly split between nuclear and coal from what I checked last.
Perhaps you are viewing this issue very provincially - "the Karl Rove effect", and not accounting for the way regional differences work on the ground. In many parts of the country (and world), wind is still growing very rapidly - most notably of all in TX.
Captain Curt: Thanks for a good substantive wrap-up.
Just a note on subsidies for coal vs. wind -- as I ballpark it, wind subsidies are in the vicinity of $0.022/kWH, while coal subsidies are in the vicinity of $0.0001/kWH.
Wind power figure I am getting from DOE, and coal subsidies I am calculating by taking the $222 million figure for 2012 here (p. 219), and dividing by the 1.9 trillion kwh annual coal power generation (here).
Anyhow, that gives a wind power subsidy approximately 200 times the coal subsidy.
That said, when people complain that the coal "subsidy" is comparable to the wind power subsidy, they're usually building up the subsidy to coal by estimating huge externalities counting them as subsidies. But I don't know where those estimates are coming from and its kind of apples-oranges.
In any event, my understanding is that just as with solar energy, wind power projects are completely uneconomical unless the developer can sell those tax credits through a partnership flip. It might be that there are a handful of locations where wind power is reliable enough to be economical (e.g. land is super-cheap and wind blows reliably) to be profitable without massive subsidies, but those are the exception, not the rule. It's true that increasingly, people are rejecting coal power projects as uneconomical too, but that's for the reverse reason -- that developers anticipate huge regulatory compliance costs, approval delays, future carbon taxes, etc. to artificially increase the cost of coal power generation, to the point that it will no longer be economical.
Ritmo. Your "supplier" pays wind farms for energy. You might be in Mississippi and the wind farms in Oregon. The Oregon provider feeds the energy into the Oregon grid where it is managed by the local provider. Your provider gets a credit from oregon for the wind which he sells you. The power you get in Miss is from the coal, gas or nuclear plant. But, as it says on your bill, you are charged for wind.
Of course, it's worthwhile to recall that the opposite of ice ages have also happened repeatedly in the past: periods in which there were no ice caps.
It seems to me that, since there's absolutely no way we can stop NON-AGW, we ought to be thinking really hard about how to harden our civilization against ALL climate change. Not only cheaper, but certain to be required. I fully support Big Ag's efforts to come up with super-hardy edible plants... we're going to need them.
O Ritmo Segundo said...
I do understand that wind is not constant and requires back-up, but that's only a good argument for developing storage forms. The idea of using hydrogen to fuel cars gave root to the idea of using solid hydrides that would be less cumbersome to work with than gas.
Finally. A subject Ritmo seems to know something about.
OK snark off.
What kind of losses are you experiencing? I know there are the advertised outputs but people I talk to up here in the upper midwest say that if you're going to go solar , or wind, size the unit to be half again as powerful.
What type of battery storage are you using? NiCad is cheap, but from what I've read lithium gives more consistent long lasting power although expensive.
"Boston never had de jure segregation, you dolt."
I guess that means the protests against it weren't de facto pro-segregation protests, correct? So what was the big deal? My school system also did not have de jure segregation. In fact, the school I was attending was exempt from the desegregation order (can you guess why?). And yet...
"For a guy who claims to love precision, you sure seem to fudge the details. And the entire point."
I didn't miss your point, I'm noting that it is wrong. And I don't love precision, I love accuracy. A sophomore (in the true sense of the word) like you can scarcely be expected to know the difference, much less how it is germane to AGW.
And yes, I insulted you by calling you a "sophomore." You're the one who started the name-calling, so I will no longer feel bound to keep our exchanges civil.
"Anyway, I hasten to add that there are more numbers in the world than 1 and 0. There are numbers like 3, 4, 5, and 10 million. And Avagadro's number (Synova might have actually heard of this one). Big, big numbers.
But again, reducing something is not the same thing as turning it on or off completely. But it's good to see people show up so as to employ a version of the argument that if something isn't 100%, why do it at all? And why not? Why reduce the number of deaths with a police force when they won't prevent every one? Why prevent the number of people who die in a hospital if you can't save EVERY one? I mean, if you don't save everybody then it's like you're killing everyone."
Interesting that you'd see an argument about "enough" and interpret it as "all or nothing."
Pretend that the little crap is adequate? That's an admission that there really isn't any sort of crisis at all. If the little stuff had some chance of adding up to "enough" or adding up soon enough, that would be different... even if it required everyone, even China, to be forced to go along with it all.
If it were a case of adding that little stuff to a larger, rational, effort... that would be different.
Also, to let CO2 return to natural levels, or stay at whatever is a "natural" level now, Ritmo, it is all or nothing. (And that doesn't help the methane issue from rice farming either, does it. People need to eat.)
And there are things we could do; Real, possible, completely non CO2 producing things that are capable of lighting and heating all of our homes and factories and charging our electric cars, refining ore and building spaceships.
The Luddites and the Greenies are afraid of those things and would rather, ideologically, philosophically, rather that we change human nature and our lifestyles instead, to become better people.
Because that's what this is all about. The planet is just an excuse and it's an excuse that the true believers don't believe themselves.
And let me make it as clear as possible where the discussion went, Ritmo: AGW skeptic=Republican=racist. My response: bullshit. Now, do please tell me the science is settled, or that we're better safe than sorry. I will give you reasonable arguments against those positions. Give me AGW skeptic=racist and I'll call bullshit every time. So much of what you assume is demonstrably untrue.
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