I thought Who was on first?

And then I read an article the other day about laboratory grown red meat and how it is supposed to replace your steak from an animal. Apparently the methane produced by all those farting cows is a significant contributor to 'emissions' and is 100x (or some number like that) worse at trapping heat and contributing to global warming.

Respectfully, I don't believe that data is accurate. Transportation is ~26% of the total, with road verticals being a highly significant portion of that at around 60%.

Hi.

It is burping that is the issue actually, and methane is no joke. It is a powerful climate forcer, fortunately with a fairly short lifespan compared to CO2. You also have to consider the total land/feed/distribution supply chain. Some of us may not like it, but livestock as practiced today is terrible for the environment.

Um, your kids, and their kids, and literally billions of other people care. You may not care, but the people we are leaving the planet do because they have to.

Struggling a bit to reconcile these two statements.

Hydrogen has huge potential to help keep ICE on the road IF you can generate it with a net-reduction in CO2, Porsche and others are doing a trial of this now. Fingers and toes crossed, not on if it works since we already know it does, but on getting to the point where you can drive the process with renewables quickly,

I am doing my part. I eat steak at least once a week and hamburger in some form on another day of the week. One cow at a time baby.

If came from a movie, I'll have to look it up.

But globally transportation is 15%, with about 4% being personal vehicles.

In the US 26% sounds right for total transportation but in the movie they quoted 10% for just personal vehicles.

Transportation includes boats, trains, planes, freight trucks, shipping boats, etc.

But still, experts are saying we don't have the minerals to build even half the 1B cars with batteries. So everything else won't be battery powered.

Also batteries are not tech, it's chemistry, and battery chemistry so far has taken an average of 20 years to evolve to the next better thing. Lead acid > nicad > nimh > lithium based > ??

This also made me think that Cats also don't like the high ZDDP we put in our flat tappet engines.



This happens to be my peculiar area of expertise. Like most everything else, it's complicated and this isn't the place to go into it. I'll just say that it's true that global livestock production is pretty devastating to the environment and it's true the way we raise beef in this country add a -ton of unnecessary environmental costs (and threatens food security). But... if you care about wildlife and healthy ecosystems, one of the most guilt-free meals you can eat is grass fed and finished beef or bison raised on native range land from anywhere the buffalo once roamed. Those areas NEED to be grazed to support native plants and animals and it's a damn delicious way to do your part

Food for thought. Last week the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the ivory-billed woodpecker officially extinct. The habitat that contained the last uncontested breeding colony of ivory-billed woodpeckers is now a soybean field.

recycle it,,, by a bicycle... in the end that is
actually is worse..

yep, think you might be right @Tdskip .

graph from BBC might be a simplification but generally speaking trustworthy.
(figures for jet travel refer to economy class seats, business is by a factor of 4 worse and don't ask re first class - is there such a thing as first class air travel anymore?). whichever way you look at it road transport is a big contributor.

but the truth is we are not doing many miles.
one plane trip to europe (from aus) return = 1/2 the miles my 914 has done for its entire life as a piece of anachronistic recreational equipment.

i'm not up on the amount of imbedded energy in a car due to manufacturer.
off the top of my head i think it takes something like 10 years to offset that.
but my memory could be out. any car that gets junked under the period where its imbedded energy has been offset is not good. which gets back to mr. b's original point.
the best iphone is the one you have got.



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Fully agree, Tom!

If anyone wants to watch the drama live, take a look at Germany. Energie prices exploding, several times a year close to a blackout. Carbon emmisions sharply on the rise - not despite, but because of the so called "Energiewende" (Turn to green energy.) By the end of next year shutdown of the last remaining 6 nuklear power plants. "We will all drive electric, yeah."

I am happy to drive my 20+ year old vehicles. Long been paid for, good gas mileage, smaller footprint. And reliable, too.

Arno (going to by candles…)

The media in this country is keeping the mess in Europe out of the news as much as possible. The US does not have anywhere near the infrastructure to power an all electric fleet. People have no clue how close we come in the heat of the summer to problems. No new power plants being built and no new electric grid being built or upgraded to handle the power needed. Sorry, with todays technology windmills and solar won't cut it. Now Hydro is a different story.

What is often overlooked and what energy companies fear is that if you don't like the price of electricity you can now make your own. With few months of research and reading, then buying a few tools about anyone can install an array. This puts a cap on how much they can charge in the long term. Solar, wind and batteries can also be distributed, as well as modular.
If your half your neighborhood installs solar and in some case batteries not a single thing needs to done to the grid. You are reducing the power you are taking from the grid.
Technically you could build and expand your system a piece at a time.

Phoenix alone with solar on every rooftop and parking lot could power the whole country with power to spare. It would be the completely wrong way to design it, but we would welcome the shade.

On the utility scale solar and wind starts producing power within weeks of breaking ground they just turn it on as they go. It is modular they don't have to spend a decade building it before they get any power.

You may want to double check your data;

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Empirically speaking that is not an accurate statement;

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Wife and I did our 5 year stint in Seattle, lived and worked around the downtown area. Walked, biked or Bussed to work and had just one car that we hardly drove.

That was a great time (before homeless overran the area).

I still believe a persons carbon footprint is mostly a choice of lifestyle.

I say this while now owning 6 cars, an airplane and 2 stroke yard machines along with riding mower. Sheese, clearly I know what my carbon footprint has become!

@TomE - it is a substantially inaccurate assertion to suggest renewables caused the Texas mess.

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There have been at least two admins editing Mate's posts, is my guess.
Zach

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This is as close to politics as I care to go but I strongly believe the failure of the environmental community to acknowledge nuclear as an important part of the carbon emissions solution has dragged this crisis on longer than it should, and guaranteed greater environmental consequences. I like renewables (getting ready to put solar on our house), but there are no silver bullets here. Even renewables take their pound of flesh from the environment.

And our electric grid works just fine through Montana winters. The Texas fiasco was simply a failure to harden the system.

Texas happened because the Gas provider was on a program to reduce electricity use during peak times and the system automatically cut their power thus resulting in a supply shortage.

The problem in our world is nobody provides unbiased data. The highly promoted "news" is someone controlling the narrative.

A lot of people miss this both on the full renewables and low carbon fuels sides. Particularly those H2-fueled power plant crazies...(I say this in the nicest way as a guy who has spent nearly my whole career on hydrogen and emissions reduction technology)


Also The Texas grid (electric and NG) is a mess. It's my understanding that it's uncertain that NG supplies can even keep up in a winter storm of 2021 magnitude, even without cold-related failures.

From what I've seen/heard, MT and SD in particular are both pretty good, as is most of that north-central portion of the country. Though full disclosure NWE does effectively pay a good bit of my salary.

x 1000

The whole situation is

Never in the history of the world has so much information been available and people so ignorant about what's actually going on. And yes, I include myself in that statement. I wish I had the time and energy to become an expert on every topic but I don't.

To top that off, the "experts" are not trustworthy either.

Takes 10x longer than it should to assess data becuase you have to question who privided it in the 1st place and then cross correlate it to servaral other independent sources before you even have any hope of taking it at face value.

That is not factual accurate, and I don’t believe spinning into conspiracy theory is helpful in any manner.



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TomE - it is a substantially inaccurate assertion to suggest renewables caused the Texas mess. It is substantially inaccurate to suggest I said renewables caused the Texas mess? LOL Not sure where you read that into what I said but are about as wrong as you can be. Not enough capacity to handle the sharp change in temperature is what caused the mess in Texas and YES renewables were absolutely part of that! We can't sustain our grid by having just enough. Peaking plants run by natural gas and dare I say it? Oil are absolutely necessary because they can be brought up to full power very quickly.

Sweet!

... and, even though personally I find many of these posts humorous, if it's truly the desire of admins to restrict gettin' political, half or more posts in this thread fit that description, yet have not been edited. Really gives a newcomer the feeling of a certain political bias around here.

Dan

In Admin's defense, it's a hard balance. I've pushed some boundaries pretty hard and I don't think I've ever had a post completely deleted or edited.

Yeah, it’s all a big conspiracy by those in the shadows against conspiracy thinkers, you nailed it.

good one. As a new guy around here, just kinda like to know where the lines are drawn so I don't offend anyone. When ya see inconsistency, it makes feeling out the lines a bit more difficult.

Dan

That is correct. Texas also has their own grid and not tied into the eastern or western grid. That may have averted what happened but there are some who even question that. Texas would still benefit from being part of one of the grids. All I was trying to say is we do not have the capacity to go full electric in ten years.

Ok last of any comments on this. That was an extreme drop in temperature and ERCOT being their own grid and not tied to the eastern or western grid could not handle it. Could it happen again? Yes. Not just in Texas.

Absolutely, and anyone asserting this was a renewables-driven issue is ill informed, ignorant, or being deliberately misleading. None of those a virtue if you want to live in a functional democracy.