Voting closed TODAY Jan 13 at 5PM Eastern, 2PM Pacific time.
Preliminary ending numbers are available here
Thanks to everyone who participated. The results won’t be final until reviewed by the judges/operators. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. – Anthony
Why is it so important for some people that things be bad?
It sells lots of newspapers and television advertsing time.
Nichole,
I hope you don’t kiss your Mom with the same lips that spout all that invective.
Mike
Nichole: your
and you cut off the second half of that sentence to make me look like hitler. i put a qualifier on the end there, jackass. you didn’t even put an ellipsis.
Well, you qualified it by disparaging the public at large. Which doesn’t really qualify it. Rather, it reinforces the first part.
see, you truly think that an ad hominem is just an insult which is one example of why you are an idiot. okay, let me spell it out for the mentally impaired:
ummmmm….yes, an ad hominem is indeed, an insult. That’s the definition. If you attack the man, not the data, its an ad hominem.
You have yet to attack the data.
Oh, that’s right, you don’t want the facts. Carry on.
To the moderators
Why are the pathetic posts by Nichole calling people jackasses and idiots being allowed?
anna v (13:02:57) :
You are wrong here. The EU, which was mired in this idiotic cap and trade policy is fast changing its mind, due to the economic necessities that have arisen. I will be very surprised if Obama does not hold his peace too, putting priority on the economy. He does not look gullible to me.
Ah, Anna V, what a wonderful insight. So many folks think the USA is the whole world…
And add to that international lack of consensus the Russians who have lots of gas and oil to burn, the Chinese who are building coal power plants and coal to liquids plants as fast as humanly possible, and the Indians who are buying cars as fast as their push to modernity will let them. The Europeans talk a good game, but threaten their wallet and they roll in a heartbeat. Germany just did.
If the USA wants to do silly things like cap and tirade and hobble their industry, well, the rest of the world will happily pick up the slack. There will be about 6% economic growth next year in China. We are expecting them to loan us the money (via purchase of treasuries) to fix our mess. Add the AGW agenda to the mix and all we are doing is handing the world economy and our own destiny over to China.
Nothing will change in terms of CO2 emissions in any case. They will just move from coking plants in Ohio to coking in China.
If things are not dramatically better in 2 years, expect a voter revolt. Gutting our economic competitiveness and raising gas prices back to $4/gallon will not be seen as ‘better’. I think 2 years worth of rope is enough…
eco friendly policies are fine. Suicidal policies are to be discouraged.
Well said! Waste is never a virtue. AGW agenda policies are terribly wasteful. How many Rocket Stoves could be built instead … How many teachers in the third world could be funded? How many rain forests bought and turned into parks…
If the gods are looking kindly on the human race another winter or two like the present and the last one will bury the AGW horse in ice.
I’m still hoping for a frozen Jan 20th. TWC shows lots of cold headed that way. It just needs to slow down a bit (presently scheduled to warm on 1/19 to somewhere in the high 20’s to low 30’s for the highs.)
Sunspot 1010 has faded, we are back at zero spots though there may be a plage or sunspeck on the backside. The PDO flip argues for 30 years of colder. Just Dandy. I’d would expect a several year battle ground between residual ocean heat and colder land / poles like we have this year; but with the cold gradually winning. By 2011 DC ought to be nicely frozen. I can wait. Luckily the government can’t do anything very fast…
E.M.Smith (12:01:44) :
personally, i think coal-to-liquids is a good solution, but it will not be as cheap as naturally-derived petroleum products as long as the demand for them is low or the supply is long. in the mid-term, i think this could be a good bridge to electric- or other-powered vehicles.
since you all insist on misunderstanding me, when i say the public is dumb i don’t mean that they can’t tie their own shoes i mean they don’t grok big numbers and no one really understands statistics. 3000% increase sure sounds impressive. whether risks are relative or not is never stated on quality programs like faux news. they’re undereducated and misled. casting doubt does nothing positive. if you want to play the science game, go back to school, change your career and then you can be widely derided and ignored in the professional scene.
you all realize that everyone thinks this blog is a laughingstock, right? all this guy’s claims get thoroughly debunked and you people just ignore it. look, straight up graph:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/02/weblog-awards-duped-by-deniers-again/
sea levels are rising. deny your faces off.
Philip:
Why do people still respond to nichole? She clearly is not going to change her mind no matter what you say. Like many people on this planet, she is immune to logic. She’s admitted she’s a troll, and she thrives on the negative attention she gets. Just ignore her now and in all future posts she makes.
You are right. She is obviously not here to learn, but to hurl insults, taunt, and basically to tell us we should all just shut up. With her most recent post calling people “jackass”, “idiots”, and “moron”, I do believe it is time for her to go. Others have been banned here previously for her behavior.
Take a look in a mirror..
And not using proper grammar, or even attempting to, makes you look like a 5 year old…
since you all insist on misunderstanding me
i don’t think nic ‘hole has made a single coherent argument to be misunderstood! 🙂
“i totally said something about…”
“totally“? Tee hee.
i am aware of the difference between an engine and a battery.
Impressive! ~snip~
Nichole,
“you all realize that everyone thinks this blog is a laughingstock, right? all this guy’s claims get thoroughly debunked and you people just ignore it. look, straight up graph:”
Uh, I went to your link… did you even read the comments? It seems that the poster himself was the debunked and laughed at.
I’m through with you, Thanks for stopping by.
Love and kisses,
Mike
Stefan (13:13:41) :
Question is, just how realistic is it to expect that we will get off of oil anytime soon?
Define ‘soon’? Less than 5 years? Zero. 10 years? 5%. etc.
Define ‘get off oil’. No use? Domestic ok? Substitute carbon source OK?
I’m going to help nichole out. The shortest possible time to eliminate oil in the US economy is 10 years. That would be with a WWII style all out push. It also would require using coal to liquids for vehicles. Some large commercial vehicles can be converted to CNG / LNG. All other paths take longer and cost more (money we don’t happen to have, BTW).
If we are to ‘get off’ of both coal and oil (i.e. can not substitute coal for oil) the time required runs out to about 20 years. In that time the trucking and train fleets can be converted to CNG / LNG and the car fleet turned over to a lot of hybrids and electrics and especially flex fuel plug in hybrids. You will need to build a lot of new generation capacity to feed them electricity, though. Biodiesel can also be used for the diesel ships, trains & trucks. Expect a large increase in prices for food. You still need a few percent of gasoline to make E85 work, but that can come from existing US oil fields or natural gas fields. To eliminate coal use in electric generation will take about 30 to 40 years. It takes a long time to build a bundle of nuclear plants, especially with the law suits and protests.
If you want to go “all green all the time” with only wind, solar, geothermal, waves & tides; then you are still in the 30-40 year range for completion. First you have to upscale the industry (10 to 15 years), then it can start building volume (the next 10 to 20). You must also solve the ‘storage’ problem. Expect electricity dependent industry to move to China. Aluminum, for example, depends on astounding quantities of low priced electricity. Alcoa would be toast…
The only potential “out” from this that I can see is algae. It is still somewhat experimental. If upscaling to production is shown to work, you could have a 5 to 10 year ramp to sufficient biodiesel to replace a lot of the ship, truck, train, farm demands. Add another 15 years for the non-Diesel car fleet to swap to Diesels and you are at about 20 to 25 years. But it is all predicated on that “if”.
The key takeaway here? You don’t rip out the core of your economy or replace several major industries in anything approaching ‘fast’ timescales.
To those who think we could do wind, solar, et.al. in less than 10 years: And just what bank will loan the few trillion dollars it would take to build the solar & wind fabrication factories knowing that in less than 10 years they would be shut down due to demand halting as the build out finishes? You can build 1 windmill fast; a country worth takes decades – plural.
nichole
I hope we aren’t making you late for face painting workshop.
Pearl And Aggie,
You pipped me to it. 🙂
Nichole
Here I go, guys. Crossing swords with Nichole. Cover me. (deep breath)
“sea levels are rising. deny your faces off.” nichole wrote.
Interesting that Boulder sea level data does not concur. At least since 1994, and on the U.S. west coast. The trend line is definitely down, approximately 6 cm by my eyeball in 14 years (1994 – 2008). There is an even more dramatic drop since 2006. Using data input of Latitude 31, Longitude 239.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/wizard.php?dlon=239&dlat=31&map=v&fit=n&smooth=n&days=60
Even their totalized graph shows an inflection point starting in 2006. A line connecting the peaks of the 60-day smoothing line (the blue line) no longer trend upward, but trend slightly down.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
I deny. Did my face just fall off?
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
Jeff Alberts (14:37:15) :
We actually know how the depletion curve is shaped. It’s basically a bell curve. We might be able to compress the downside a little bit with advanced oil recovery, but not much. This means that the entry time to peak will be about the same as the exit time. Roughly 100 years from here.
See any of dozens of write ups on Hubbert’s Peak for further exposition. I think we will have plenty of time to taper off and there will be no crisis.
I think this sentiment is only valid if it’s not being forced upon us for no good reason. For something to replace oil it has to be at least as good as oil, preferably better. We’re not there yet.
But we are. There are at least 3 workable alternatives, two of them ‘existence proofs’ on a country sized scale. It’s not about the technology, it’s only about the costs. Periodically OPEC likes to drive oil cost low enough to put the alternatives out of business. Kind of like now… Two countries chose to say “We don’t want to play” and set policies to replace oil with little regard to low prices.
The first is coal to liquids. CTL. This has been done in South Africa since the ’70s as the major fuel source. The company doing it is Sasol (ticker SSL). Their economy has benefited from the stable energy cost and foreign exchange retention (i.e. not sending gold to OPEC). They are the most industrially advanced economy in Africa.
The second is biofuels. In particular Brazil and sugar cane. Cozan is a large player there (ticker CZZ) and make hugh quantities of cane sugar, much of which is converted to ethanol. Flex fuel cars are the norm there. They, too, have an advanced technological society. In fairness, they recently discovered a lot of oil off their cost (PBR is the oil company) but the ethanol mandate began during the embargo years when they had no oil.
We can easily make CTL and almost as easily make biofuels. (No, not the food to fuel kind, that is a political solution…). VRNM Verenium along with a couple of others are doing start up scale cellulosic ethanol. PSUD and OOIL are both doing algae oil biomass.
There are also vast quantities of natural gas in America. Several companies have built GTL, gas to liquids, plants. Expect to see more of them.
You are correct that non-carbon alternatives are not ready yet, especially for things like winter heating and vehicle power; but there are viable alternatives using carbon when oil is over $50/bbl.
I’m all for making OPEC go pound sand
The easy way to do this is to tax imported OPEC oil such that it is over $50 to $80/bbl and to exempt domestic & NAFTA energy from taxes. You will be up to your eyeballs in non-OPEC energy and liquid fuels in no time flat… But our government puts taxes on all fuel sources and discourages them all while leaving the OPEC leverage on prices intact.
Ops. Paragraphs 2 & 3 above ought to be non-italic. i.e. mine.
An opinion — FWIW
I think that nichole is actually a very clever AI construct designed to carry on seemingly intelligent and certainly provocative conversations.
If so, she [it] certainly has elicited many very informative and lucid responses from many posters, but since this construct is unable or unwiling to learn from these replies and doggedly maintains its often questionable points of view, it is my opinion that it fails the Turing test.
Nice try though.
*****************************
Perhaps nichole =
neuro–intelligent–cybernetic–holistic–omni–logic–engine or some such.
Wattock Hunt (14:12:02) :
Mods, how did THAT comment get through??
I was mainly referring to non-CO2 producing alternatives. Not that I think CO2 is a problem…
Benjamin P. (16:50:57) :
I am very curious, if it is all some great energy control conspiracy, what is the end game? […] “What is the agenda of the conspirators and what do they hope to gain?” I asked.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, one isn’t needed to explain it. Lust for power, money, and control has been with us since the beginning of time… See the history of the Hostmen and coal taxes in England for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_tax_post
http://www.internalcombustionbook.com/Hostmen.php
A side-note to all. All fossil fuels, all uranium, and every other non-renewable source of energy is just that…non-renewable.
So? Non-renewable does not imply that there is any problem.
Oil starts to be an issue at Hubbert’s Peak ( that may be now, or may be in another decade or two). The slide down the backside of Hubbert’s Peak is roughly the same shape and duration as the rise. About 100 years.
Coal is variously estimated at 250 to 400+ years worth. So in about 200 years call me and we can start making the alternatives…
Ah, Uranium… though you really need to conflate Thorium with it. The two are functional substitutes in our present reactors.
See: http://www.thoriumpower.com/default2.asp?nav=technology_solutions&subnav=tech_pub
So, for Uranium we have about 10,000 years worth in mines on land. Thorium somewhat more, though folks have not bothered looking for it much. I make that 20,000 years+. So, maybe in 19,900 years you can give me a call? No? Ok, then I’ll give you the trump card now…
Uranium is not renewable, but it is functionally unlimited. This clever scientist in Japan made a polymer that absorbs it from sea water at a price of about $150 / lb. Not competitive with the land based U by a few dollars, but certainly cheap enough to make cheap electricity. And if we powered the whole planet on sea water U, we would extract slightly less each year than washes into the ocean via erosion… We run out of energy when we run out of planet. Literally. See:
http://www.taka.jaea.go.jp/eimr_div/j637/theme3%20sea_e.html
and /or just google “Uranium polymer adsorption japan” for more examples. (both adsorption and absorption are good search terms… why? don’t ask why…)
So I make that about a few billion years before we might have an energy problem with non-renewables. Call me in 500,000 and we’ll work on it…
I think it is in all of our interest to be working on alternatives
Yes. Though the work is largely done. Lots of proven technologies at oil equivalents of $50 to $80 / bbl. It’s an economic issue not a research one. THE problem is oil less than $80/bbl. Nothing more.
because one day we wont have a choice.
No.
But that cheap energy is running out,
In a few hundred years… for carbon energy…
and we need to be prepared.
And we are. GE makes wind turbines, as do several other world scale companies. A dozen or so major companies make solar (and a few dozen minor companies). There are several wave and tidal companies making products. Biomass? About a half dozen in which I own stock… My bias and my conflict of interest is for alternatives companies. But I must be realistic about their economic prospects.
Global warming, global cooling, or otherwise I think we can all agree we need to develop renewable energy.
No, we don’t. We need to implement renewable energy where it is cost effective. It’s developed already. From here on out it is incremental improvement largely aimed at cost reduction. I’d expect a few breakthrough moments are still in the wings, but the heavy lifting is done.
BTW, one of my favorites is Rentech RTK who have a trash to liquids demonstrator running. I don’t think we’re in any danger or running out of trash any time soon…
nichole and joe romm sitting in a tree……
totally, nichole is joe romm.
for some time i have thought of it as a machine. a broken, but still barely functioning junk food dispenser. it has made a lot of people ill as they rush through life in need of substance, but settle for grease and sugar. it needs to be decommissioned.
Roger Sowell says:
For some value of work, yes they do, but not for me. For example, recently my family and I drove from Mountain View to Las Vegas. We stopped in Bakersfield for gas and a feed. We managed each direction in about 8 hours of driving. Could we do that with solar?
Also, The only place I have seen a hint of solar panels around here at parking lots are at Foothill College and Google and we have had plenty of days recently were it was overcast enough to reduce the output to zero, I should think.
John McDonald (07:33:57) :
I really enjoy reading the comments. EM Smith great comments among many others. Anthony, GREAT JOB on the unofficial win.
Pearland Aggie (07:55:41) :
i second the accolades for EM Smith.
BLUSH! Golly, a ‘2 fer’! My French teacher always taught me that we don’t ‘remerci’ but, I just have to… Thank you for letting me know that I’m doing well.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m being a bit too repetitive or wordy… But the truth, politely stated, shall set you free…