The Gaming Den

Tzor, I know you are pathologically incapable of arguing honestly, but let's talk real simple:

Cap-n-Trade is already American Law. It was American Law for several years before Enron came into existence. Whether Enron made a profit off of Sulfur Dioxide trading or not (and I see no evidence that they did), the fact is that Sulfur Dioxide emissions are lower now than they were before Cap-n-Trade was implemented.

Whether a particular European program was successful or not is completely irrelevant. The American program is already successful. And that's what is being discussed for expansion.

There are lots of other ways to reduce Carbon Emissions. I'm quite fond of "If you don't reduce your emissions we will put you in fucking jail for property crimes" - but those aren't on the table. Because this is America and we do things the most Capitalist possible way. And while I will stand up and fight that in places it makes no fucking sense (healthcare, tap water, power grids), I am just going to let it go in places where it seems to function.

Enron is a total nonsequitur. We're talking about the Clean Air Act proposed in 1989 and signed into law in 1990. It had a Cap-n-Trade portion that was predicted to reduce Sulfuric Acid in the rain that falls out of our skies. And it has met those goals. SO2 emissions are down 40% since Cap-n-Trade was instituted. There is no reason that expanding the program from SO2 to also include CO2 should not achieve the same results.

I could ask for bigger reductions, and I do. But I'm not going to get them. And seriously Tzor, you were just bullshitting us with the old Canard that Carbon Dioxide is not destabilizing, so why the fuck are you suddenly ranting that a 40% drop in 20 years isn't enough? It's almost as if you were just throwing random things at the wall searching for an accusation that would stick and cause people to think that we should delay implementation of the program in order to discuss it more.

-Username17

Enron in 2002, post-collapse, arrests, etc? That they supported a plan means... Well, it means dip squat, honestly.

You might as well be mad at Starbucks because OJ Simpson goes there.

-Crissa

Frank, the person who is incapable of arguing honestly is you. So with that in mind let’s get this straw man of Sulfur Dioxide burnt to the ground so that you won’t keep waving it all the fucking time.

First, let’s be clear about what SO2 cap and trade was about and what it was not about. SO2 cap and trade was about limiting SO2 emissions from specific sources (Natural sources of sulfur dioxide include releases from volcanoes, oceans, biological decay and forest fires. The most important man-made sources of sulfur dioxide are fossil fuel combustion, smelting, manufacture of sulfuric acid, conversion of wood pulp to paper, incineration of refuse and production of elemental sulfur.)

In Phase I, half the total reductions were required by January 1, 1995, largely by requiring 110 electric power generating plants (261 units in 21 states) to cut sulfur dioxide emission rates to 2.5 lbs/million British thermal units (mmBtu). Each of these generating units was identified by name and location, and a quantity of emissions allowances were specified in the statute in tons of allowable SO2 emissions per year.

In Phase II, all fossil-fired units over 75 MWe were required to limit emissions of sulfur dioxide to 1.2 lbs/mmBtu by January 1, 2000. Thereafter, they were required to obtain an emissions allowance for each ton of sulfur dioxide emitted, subject to a mandatory fine of $2,000.00 for each ton emitted in excess of allowances held. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) distributes allowances equivalent to 8.95 million tons each year (the emissions cap), based on calculations of historical Btu usage for each unit, and may allocate various small "bonus reserves" of allowances.

So let’s see what we have here. SO2 is generated from fossil fuel combustion, smelting, manufacture of sulfuric acid, conversion of wood pulp to paper, incineration of refuse and production of elemental sulfur. Cap and Trade limited SO2 production initially in 100 electric power plants and then to all plants over 75 MWe; in short, in a limited number of cases of SO2 generation (admittedly the largest sources).

“One of these things is not like the other; one of these things just doesn’t belong.”

To even compare the limited scope of SO2 cap and trade (which only traded among the sources in Phase I and II and which could be measured and verified) with the unlimited scope of CO2 cap and trade (which considers all possible sources, is almost impossible to measure and verify, and also includes all possible sinks) is … well it’s just fucking stupid.

Oh did I mention that you can, in theory scrub SO2 out of the exhaust of coal fired power plants? Scrubbing CO2 out of those plants? That’s a pipe dream!

Now if you want to propose a CO2 cap and trade system like the SO2 cap and trade system, and if you had a possible (but expensive) way to scrub CO2 out of coal fired power plants, then you might be justified in comparing SO2 cap and trade with CO2 cap and trade, but you don’t and you can’t so it’s moot!

This is why CO2 cap and trade fails. SO2 mitigation was possible but very expensive. People could justify it by doing it early and selling the credits to those who did it slow. The costs, however, were constant because everyone had to do the exact same thing. We didn’t add various other sources like smelting and paper manufacturing to the mix nor did we add natural sources or natural and artificial sinks. The cost of the cap could be directly compared to the cost for the fix for cost benefit analysis and made to be an offer they could not refuse. CO2 cap and trade is too open ended; the cost for mitigation varies widely with the source of the emissions and with non CO2 emission competition. You didn’t see nuclear power plants getting kudos for not emitting SO2 which they then sold to coal powered plants.

What part of that didn’t you get?

P.S. Want to read something really scary? U.S. Half Way To Kyoto Goals With No Government Regulation By Dick Morris December 11, 2009

The facts are startling. In 1990, the year chosen as the global benchmark for carbon emissions, the United States emitted 5,007 millions of metric tons of carbon (mmts). Kyoto specified that emissions must be reduced to a level 6% lower than in 1990. For the U.S., that means 4,700 million metric tons.

American carbon emissions rose year after year until they peaked in 2007 at 5,967 mmts. But, in 2008, they dropped to 5,801 and, in 2009, the best estimate is for a reduction to 5,476. So, in two years, U.S. carbon emissions will have gone down by more than 500 mmts - a cut of over 8%.

President Obama has pledged to bring the U.S. carbon emissions down by 17%. He's halfway there.

A combination of the recession and an increased emphasis on cutting emissions is working and may make onerous regulation unnecessary and even redundant.

Very importantly, allusions to Bernie Madofff and Enron mean absolutely nothing because neither of them werre in the business of actually making money. They were in the business of convincing investors that they were going to make money on something the investors did not understand. And then pocketing the money from the investors.

So if you say Cap-n-Trade may create new Bernies and Enrons all you're really saying is that people who do not know any better will think there is money to be made even though there really isn't. In short, what you're actually saying is that people like you are going to spread disinformation about how much money there is to be made in this new frontier and that gullible people will believe the lies that you are spreading, leaving them open for con men.

It's... not even wrong. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. You're right, but it doesn't even suggest that we shouldn't continue to expand the cap-n-trade rules to include Carbon Dioxide.

-Username17

I don't understand tzor's argument.

1) There isn't global warming, so there's no worry.

2) CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, so it isn't at fault.

3) Because there are 1000 things we can't control, like breathing, we shouldn't control the 100 things we can.

4) It's bad to trade credits because Enron said so, so we shouldn't try.

5) SO2 comes from lots of things, we shouldn't have tried to stop the majority of things it did come from, because a minority of things still exist.

6) We're partway there because our economy sucks, so we shouldn't try.

Wheel of morality, turn turn turn, what is the lesson we should learn?

-Crissa

tzor wrote:This is why CO2 cap and trade fails. SO2 mitigation was possible but very expensive. People could justify it by doing it early and selling the credits to those who did it slow. The costs, however, were constant because everyone had to do the exact same thing. We didn’t add various other sources like smelting and paper manufacturing to the mix nor did we add natural sources or natural and artificial sinks. The cost of the cap could be directly compared to the cost for the fix for cost benefit analysis and made to be an offer they could not refuse. CO2 cap and trade is too open ended; the cost for mitigation varies widely with the source of the emissions and with non CO2 emission competition. You didn’t see nuclear power plants getting kudos for not emitting SO2 which they then sold to coal powered plants.

That is the entire fucking point of cap and trade. While, like Frank, I am all in favor of actually jailing people for poisoning humanity (or at least hitting them with billion dollar fines), cap and trade actually has some decent arguments going for it, and the best one is this:
It does not matter who reduces their carbon footprint by how much, all that matters is we get total emissions down. Set a cap and then let the market work it out. And it doesn't even matter whether a coal power plant buys their credits directly from the government, from a chinese banker or from an anarcho-communist hippie community.

Crissa wrote:I don't understand tzor's argument.

That is because he isn't making an argument. He is throwing out random facts, anecdotes and lies. Any connection between his sentences is, as far as I can tell, purely coincidental. Just look at his post above.

Paragraph 1: "Frank you are wrong. Let me demonstrate why your SO2 example is wrong."
Paragraph 2: "Let me quote a dictionary entry."
Paragraph 3: "Random mixing of words from above dictionary entry."
Paragraph 4: "We can't even compare SO2 with CO2 because of, well, there is, next to, no, impossible, stupid."
Paragraph 5: "Unrelated anecdote."
Paragraph 6: "Well, look, there is this thing that you can do with SO2 that you can't do with CO2."
Paragraph 7: "Nonsense about CO2 mitigation being flat out impossible."


If you want to be charitable there is some stream of consciousness you may be able to follow, but I say it is mainly random bullshit. Single paragraphs make sense (he is still wrong, but he is coherent) but multiple paragraphs mostly don't.

Crissa wrote:I don't understand tzor's argument.

You don’t want to understand Tzor’s argument. If you tried you could.

The question of whether we are currently at the start of a global cooling cycle is an interesting but almost moot point. Global warming effects will continue in the deep ocean for decades because of the general lag in the deep ocean as a heat sink and this will have impacts on global atmospheric CO2 levels as well.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas but it is not a major greenhouse gas and its impact given the current variations in concentration is mild compared to other factors including the effects of the solar wind against the earth’s magnetosphere.

SO2 cap and trade was successful because it identified a specific small set of sources and demanded that they all cut by a specific amount; those who succeeded their quota were allowed to benefit from those who did not. Unlike most CO2 proposals it was not a case of finding all sources and sinks and allowing sinks to profit off of sources. If you could do an equivalent for CO2 it would probably also work, but no one is proposing such a system.

There are a number of ways to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels (because there are far many reasons why such use is bad that has nothing whatsoever to do with CO2) through natural economic incentives without enslaving ourselves to a world communist “share the wealth” oligarchy that makes profit off of the suffering of others.

The use of the Al Gore inspired “Global Warming” panic, created by Margaret Thatcher, leads to one and only one logical conclusion; nuclear power. I do not want to go there; I simply do not consider the long term storage of nuclear waste a problem we can ignore. Yet, if you “worship” the Global Warming theory you must go there; you have no choice. A typical nuclear power plant can out power even the largest solar array one can reasonably propose, and you can create dozens of these plants. Even NPR (not known for being a conservative leaning news source) has been suggesting that the only long term solution to Global Warming will require nuclear power in the energy mix.

Wow. Look at him go. I'm still stuck on the fact that he is continuing to bring up his Margaret Thatcher conspiracy theory despite the fact that the last time he brought it up the basic temporal impossibility of that was brought up and people pointed and laughed. For the kids in the cheap seats: Thatcher did not say that anything should be done about Global Warming until the late eighties, at which point actual legislation referencing global warming had already occurred in several countries. She jumped on the Global Warming train in 1988. Germany, which is a bigger country than the UK, had beaten the GW Skeptics and accepted Global Warming in 1987. And of course, the fact that the government fully accepted the dangers in no way indicates that that was the beginning of the movement to accept those dangers. Global Warming concerns are written into the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency in the US from 1970. Which is 18 years before Thatcher made a statement accepting that Global Warming is real and years before she even became the head of the Conservative Party.

It's hard to even get to the part where despite the fact that Methane is over sixty times the power of Carbon Dioxide as a greenhouse gas, that the concentrations of Carbon Dioxide are over two hundred times that of Methane. I mean, the whole idea that Carbon Dioxide is a weaker greenhouse gas (per kilogram) somehow means that the entire output can't be a problem is just crazy talk. Carbon Dioxide emissions are just massively, massively larger than Methane emissions. That Methane is 62 times more powerful than CO2 on a per-particle basis doesn't even come close to making up the difference.

But yeah. Tzor's screed has more than a lie per sentence. And since so many of them have been effectively disproven already within this ongoing discussion, it's really perplexing trying to figure out what he thinks he is accomplishing. I believe it's that he thinks that if he spams enough bullshit that refuting all his "points" would be a TL;DR wall of text, that he "wins" by having his "points" go unanswered.

-Username17

Tzor, she can't understand your argument because it's fucking stupid as shit.

You claim that because something is not the main or worst source of something, that changing it is immaterial. That is fucking retarded.

If you make 50,000 dollars a year and you spend 25,000 on housing, that doesn't mean that as long as food is under 24,000 it doesn't matter what food costs.

Things add up, and not being the biggest source of X doesn't mean we should ignore the sources of X we can control.

As for Nuclear Power:

1) Oil is going to fucking run out anyway, even without global warming, we are going to need to resort to nuclear power at some point.

2) The storage of Nuclear waste is not a big deal at all, if people like you weren't retarded. We can build large repositories that store it for a period of time longer than civilization has existed. We could do that very easily.

We could even use subduction zones to remove nuclear waste from concern totally.

I'd rather spend the next 200 years operating on Fission power until we develop a fusion reactor somehow, than spent the next 20 on oil, if lucky, and then suffer repeated fucked up recessions trying to find new sources, failing, and then resorting to a solar/wind infrastructure that requires more money and land than nuclear power, and also isn't advanced because fuckers like you want to pretend that oil is infinite.

Well, except we're pretty much proven that nuclear is not a market solution.

It's just not something you can do with the lowest bidder. Oil spills are bad enough, but at least you can clean that shit up.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Well, except we're pretty much proven that nuclear is not a market solution.

It's just not something you can do with the lowest bidder. Oil spills are bad enough, but at least you can clean that shit up.

-Crissa

Nuclear is not something you can do if you are thinking short term. But the fact of the matter is that a Nuclear Power plant built tomorrow has a high fixed cost, followed by infinite energy. Literally infinite. That pays itself off in time. Especially with everything else slowly going away, it's going to pay itself off in shorter and shorter time periods.

The fact that people are unwilling to use a system that continues to output energy because they themselves are not going to see the benefit has nothing to do with what is an economically feasible option. And corporations are at least theoretically able to think longer term than the CEO's duration, and so could genuinely do it.

The problem is:

1) We aren't free market enough to let corporations build plants.

2) We aren't socialist enough to man up and actually think longer term than 8 years.

Kaelik wrote:Nuclear is not something you can do if you are thinking short term. But the fact of the matter is that a Nuclear Power plant built tomorrow has a high fixed cost, followed by infinite energy. Literally infinite. That pays itself off in time.

This is factually incorrect. Nuclear power plants have a shelf life after which they have to be decommissioned. Exposure to alpha, beta, and gamma particles is a stress on the materials of the plant, which over time causes it to become elementally unstable and thus unusable. The casings, the coolants, and even the shielding become useless and toxic. The entire plant eventually becomes irradiated waste and has to be disposed of and replaced.

Nuclear power does have a place in our future, but not as the sole or even primary power source for humanity. And no one does themselves or the planet any favors by repeating the hopeful and totally falsified predictions from the nineteen fifties about how nuclear power was going to be an unlimited well from which to draw. Every nuclear plant has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The fact that most of the cost comes at the beginning and the end (when coincidentally, no power is actually coming out) puts a disproportionate political cost to its true cost over its entire productive life - but the true cost is still relatively high. And it always will be.

Because broken windmill parts can be recycled.

-Username17

Frank wrote:The entire plant eventually becomes irradiated waste and has to be disposed of and replaced.

This happens on a timescale of hundreds of years, though. The USS Enterprise, for example, is well on track towards being operational for 50 years and people are still running around in it.

The main problem with radiation flux is that it weakens materials over time and causes them to become brittle which does require frequent replacement, but NOT that it activates them. Water/gas-cooled plants (which is what is used in the West except for experimental reactors) coolant does not remain activated for very long. Seriously, N-16, the main source of radioactivity from water, has a half-life in the seconds.

Particulants in the coolant stay radioactive for quite awhile after shutdown, but if you leave the plant shut down for a few months you can seriously rub your genitals against the vessel without much harm. Now the actual core is ridiculously radioactive for millions of years and it does cause permanent environmental harm. Which is why even though the harm of fission power is overstated I'm not very keen on having it spread as soon as we get this global warming thing licked. Solar and wind power is the way of the future--assuming that we have a future.

Or if that's too abstract, imagine if you were the head of a large extended family in the middle of the Great Depression. Faust rolls on up to you and says that he can guarantee that he will keep your family fed and healthy throughout the entire period no matter what... but he gets to chop off your legs. Is this a valid trade? It depends on whether you're Ma Joad or the Vanderbilts. If you're the former (global warming with a concerted conspiracy to sink alternative energy so it's either this or fossil fuels) then it's a good deal. If you're the latter (alternative energy just around the corner) then don't take the deal.

Kaelik wrote:Literally infinite.

The infinite stocks of fuel are where? Even breeder reactors eventually end up with an increasing portion of junk isotopes.

The fact that the USS Enterprise is still functional doesn't mean a whole lot. She has 8 reactors, and those have all been replaced since she set to sea. The old girl is 48 years old, but her reactors are not (nor is her radar array). She gets a new set of cores every decade or so.

As for nuclear reactors on the ground, they usually have a shelf life of 35 to 40 years. And that's a long time, but it's not long enough to be called "infinite" in any meaningful sense of the term.

-Username17

Yeah, the last figure I saw was that with a nuclear component to the energy needs of the world, nuclear could last another hundred years past oil before peak nuclear.

Even so, nuclear power creates tons of waste. Everything that touches gamma radiation is now radioactive, and we have no way to make it un-radioactive. Safety suits, water pipes, containers, mops, buckets, everything. For every ounce of refined fuel there's like ten tons of trash.

And that's not even why we shouldn't do it. We shouldn't do it because the capitalist market has actually created more nuclear dispersals than military, more spills, and cannot handle the safety needed at a cost to even meet the weakest of clean energy sources.

Yet we pour more money into the money pit known as nuclear, because it exists now as a major source of power.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Yeah, the last figure I saw was that with a nuclear component to the energy needs of the world, nuclear could last another hundred years past oil before peak nuclear.

We have had this debate before and I outlined the fuel thing.

If I recall, and I think I do, the extra hundred years is about how long we have fuel for with existing demand.

If it replaces coal or oil its more like it lasts about a decade longer than oil. Maybe.

It's a bit more complex than that. There are a hundred years worth of current uranium demands that can be mined at the currently acceptable costs. There are also a lot of low-grade deposits, deep deposits, underwater deposits, and deposits under important parks and buildings that genuinely exist. And while mining them would drive the cost of nuclear power up even higher than it already is, it would be totally possible. I haven't seen a really good study on that.

The claims that there are enough Uranium deposits to keep us going for a billion years or something are laughable - they include Uranium that is in the core which we will never ever ever mine. "Total Uranium" includes Uranium that not only costs more money than can be justified, but even Uranium that takes more energy to mine than can be juiced out of it. But the problem remains that a country's "Uranium Reserves" are defined as the amount of Uranium that can be mined (with current technology) at a specified cost. So if the value of Uranium rises such that mining at a higher cost becomes worthwhile, all major countries will spontaneously have more Uranium reserves. If mining technology advances such that more Uranium is reachable for the same money, the Uranium Reserves of all interested countries rise again.

So the important chart, the one that shows Uranium Reserves estimated at different price points, is a chart I can't find. The total current "Uranium Reserves" and the "Total Uranium" are not relevant pieces of information as far as the "peak Uranium" scenario. Still, it should be sobering to anyone contemplating a leap to nuclear that we can't sustain current costs for more than a century because we'll have run out of Uranium that can be mined at current costs.

-Username17

Crissa wrote: Even so, nuclear power creates tons of waste. Everything that touches gamma radiation is now radioactive, and we have no way to make it un-radioactive. Safety suits, water pipes, containers, mops, buckets, everything. For every ounce of refined fuel there's like ten tons of trash.

Nuclear power creates a ton of waste because it's more politically expedient to just declare anything that comes into contact with nuclear stuff radioactive and throw it away. Decontamination of common objects is actually easy; we did it all of the time when we had to repair something that couldn't be worked on in the reactor room.

The problem is that no one wants to be the guy who has water pipes recycled from said reactor room even if it's safe. No one wants to have mops that cleaned up water from the reactor room in their junkyard even if the mops have been decontaminated. So rather than deal with all of that bullshit they just declare everything radioactive waste, do nominal decontamination if that, and then throw everything away. It saves them/us the two or three hours required to meticulously clean, rescan, reclean, etc. the stuff that is probably going to end up in the junk heap anyway because no one wants it.

Frank wrote:It's a bit more complex than that. There are a hundred years worth of current uranium demands that can be mined at the currently acceptable costs. There are also a lot of low-grade deposits, deep deposits, underwater deposits, and deposits under important parks and buildings that genuinely exist. And while mining them would drive the cost of nuclear power up even higher than it already is, it would be totally possible. I haven't seen a really good study on that.

Then again, the fact that we actually have to mine that much for Uranium is a good enough reason to look for something else if at all possible, considering the environmental damage mining does.

There are a couple of breakpoints of cost where significant new reserves would open up (mainly extraction from phospate) that the exact size of is unknown but are suspected to be extremely large indeed.

Anyway it doesn't matter, even if you go nuclear heavy it's only going to be 20% of the mix and solar is the key to the future energy needs.

The lover of irony in me is wondering if we won't be complaining about how CO2 unfriendly solar power is. Think about it for a minute, solar power systems prevent the sun from reaching plants below. Currently most plants are still far better at capturing solar energy so at best they are CO2 net emitters because they are preventing potentially large areas of CO2 sinks into the soil.

Optimal locations for Solar Power are areas of the lowest vegetation, and typically have very shallow top soils. Also the area of solar plants you need is realistically not that great.