HNTFSH said:
Phytoplankton said:
It always amazes me that on a site of supposed sportsmen that words like ecology and environment are bad words.
Too funny! [emoji38]3:
He doesn't understand that as used they are not about ecology or the environment, but about government, big, giant
government and not about improving the quality of life of human beings on this planet which obviously includes but is not limited to ecology and the environment. My minor for my PhD is Environmental Engineering. I know more about the environment than 99% of the population. I also know more about economics and energy than 99% of the population. A big part of our research right now is trying to figure out how to keep the subsidized wind and solar being forced on to the grid from not wrecking the system. More than a few percent maybe 10%, you hit an absolute wall. Solar collapses prices in the middle of the day and wind collapses the prices in the middle of the night. Storing massive amounts of electricity is very expensive. Expensive is another word for consumes a ****-ton of resources which is never environmentally nor ecologically sound. Now, you can operate a system that is about 90% natural gas and 10% renewables. But if you want low carbon energy that is not crazy expensive, the only hope, and it is still a very long shot is a nuclear. If it wasn't for natural gas fracking, all this subsidized wind and solar would have trashed the system already. It is in the process of bankrupting nuclear and having it replaced with natural gas, which if CO2 is the holy grail, you are going backwards. One average sized nuclear plant produces a huge amount of electricity and if shutdown, wipes out all the CO2 reduction from a massive amount of wind and solar. It's a dead end path UNLESS they force society to live a much lower quality of life. Not a big deal for rich Americans, but quite harmful to poor Americans, and devastating to the developing world. The developing world will never develop with sky high energy costs any more than they will develop without a government and society that protects the private property rights of the individual. Something the green religion rejects and why hunters in general reject this so-called environmentalism which demands a centralized top-down command-and-control government to force society to do its bidding.
Oh, and the solution to the subsidized wind and solar, one we are forbidden from considering as government researchers, is to stop the
subsidies.
If you want to get to low carbon future, you have to figure out how to force China, India, Russia, etc. to adopt it without starting WWIII. You think the Trump tariff looks bad. Just imagine the tariff war to beat countries into submission that refuse to go along. At probably 2,000 a ton that it would take to get to the level of CO2 emissions they desire, there would be a huge economic benefit for cheating.
The only solution is one where a $0 per ton carbon tax is necessary to get there meaning people would choose it anyways. We have regulated nuclear to crazy high costs with little to no improvement in safety. We have made it nearly impossible to move to next generation plants. And wind and solar don't work beyond their niche.