Energy and the Environment

[Brian Ellis]

As most of you know, I've been heavily involved in the environment, how our use of energy affects it and how we are destroying nature, for many years, on both a high-level professional basis and one of personal conviction. I'm quite aware that many of you do not agree with my views and we must agree to differ. I've been attempting for some time to gel my views into something fairly concrete and the result of this can be found in My Credo along with a linked discussion forum. Please feel free to look at this document and, if you feel like it, comment.

[Brian R.]

Your goals are admirable, but there is a considerable gap between imagination and implementation, particularly for nuclear power, alternative renewable power, and vehicular restrictions.

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Encouraging transportation by rail faces significant barriers. The lack of a standard rail gauge in Europe (if I have heard correctly) will be one. Also, the currently avialable rail lines are inadequate to meet the needs of the near-by delivery of goods. The branching out of rail lines to currently un-visited areas will use significant amounts of land currently used by agriculture. Not a good trade-off in my book. I believe that rail has significant disadvantages in mountanous regious compared with road vehicles. This would limit the use of rails in many areas, and connecting many areas directly.

You encourage rapid implementation (obviously), but there has to be a balance between the speed and safety of some of these goals. Fast, good (safe), and cheap are only doubly inclusive.

I disagree with your discounting or discouraging of large-scale hydroelectric projects, if moderately confined and safety is adequately considered in their location and design

On the other hand, encouraging Telecons at the expense of face-to-face meetings is a often sought goal by many.

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I didn't see topics that would encompass the following:

Encouraging workers to have at-home offices for twice or three-times a week working at home.

Minimizing wasting of fossil fuel byproducts (e.g., burn-off of gaseous petroleum distillation fractions, etc.)

Use of geothermal energy (also using thermal ground/aquafir energy for heating and cooling houses via an in-ground heat exchanger for a heat pump system)

Encouraging the actual development of more energy-efficient applicances, vehicles, etc.

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I think you should define your terms/abbreviations at least once - the first time you use them for those who don't have the same background as yourself.

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A typo:

Stopping no transport of goods by road vehicles:

I tried to PM you for this but you have this disabled.

I will think about your goals some more when I have more time....

Brian

[Nowhere]

...
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Encouraging transportation by rail faces significant barriers. The lack of a standard rail gauge in Europe (if I have heard correctly) will be one. Also, the currently avialable rail lines are inadequate to meet the needs of the near-by delivery of goods. The branching out of rail lines to currently un-visited areas will use significant amounts of land currently used by agriculture. Not a good trade-off in my book. I believe that rail has significant disadvantages in mountanous regious compared with road vehicles. This would limit the use of rails in many areas, and connecting many areas directly.

You encourage rapid implementation (obviously), but there has to be a balance between the speed and safety of some of these goals. Fast, good (safe), and cheap are only doubly inclusive.

I disagree with your discounting or discouraging of large-scale hydroelectric projects, if moderately confined and safety is adequately considered in their location and design

On the other hand, encouraging Telecons at the expense of face-to-face meetings is a often sought goal by many.

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...

Not as big problem as you think - basically there are just two gauges (yeah, there are several small ones - but those are local things used for local transport/as buses/for turism), with everything east of PL having the broader one. And even this isn't such a problem - changing chassis/wheels part of the train takes less than 1h on the border (yes, with passengers inside), and cargo trains are not that much of a problem.

Also, rail system here is much, much denser than you think - basically, using existing lines, you can get, using rails, in few/dozen max km distance to your "target" (in reality - almost nobody does it, it's cheaper to use trucks all the way... :/ )

And actually, in mountains rails have advantage - snow/frost won't stop it.

[Umfriend]

1. Although the rail grid may be dense, the capacity of the rail network is far to limited and it is far less flexible than carrying by truck.
2. As Nowhere said, it's not the Gauge. It's the power though. The new train from Amsterdam to Paris has a driver with a length about 1.5 times a carriage in order to cope with three different power feeds.
3. Dude, I live in the flatest country in the world and snow and frost DO stop trains running.

Brian, I got 3 kids. Can you advise me a car that'll allow me to drive my family at less than 4l per 100 km?

I believe we should consume less.

[Nowhere]

1. Of course, but so is road network - and in opposition to it, rails are enormously underused.
2. Yep...but I think that's also not that big of a problem - not that many trains have to cope with it. BTW, we have some number of "dual voltage" drivers, but usually, in train Berlin<->Warsaw, they simply change the driver at border, much lees hassle overall and takes few minutes.
3. For some reason - not here (note that I describe everything from mostly local perspective). The worst frost/snow does is limit the speed of fastest trains (by the way such train (driver) looks like, I'd guess it's mostly power feeding issue But who knows, perhaps also safety precautions when it comes to braking...). Besides I was mostly saying this in relation to mountains - where there could be other problems, easy to deal with this (yes, it's currently working line on Czech-Poland border, and yes, it's normal gauge) and this

[KRSESQ]

we shall have to stop all electricity generation from natural gas, coal and oil in the very shortest time frame. This will be necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to an acceptable level.

This will be water under the bridge when some brainiac invents a way to extract carbon from waste gases and sequester it on an industrial scale. I can see energy industries developing just such a technology for no other reason than to prevent the elimination of their cash-cow (I'm working on it. Give me time).

large scale projects, similar to Three Gorges, Grande Dixence or Hoover dams should not be entertained.

In fact IIRC nearly all economically viable locations for large-scale hydroelectric projects have already been exploited. Three Gorges will probably be the last.

for heating or cooking, clean carbon-free electricity will do the job more efficiently. Where feasible, solar water heating should be implemented

Gas vs electricity for heating and cooking in the US is a strong bone of contention among people with a preference to one or the other. I know my wife would oppose on the strongest terms any attempt to force her by law to use electricity over gas, and she'd have lots of company. A better strategy would be to switch to a low-carbon fuel source to replace natural gas. Hydrogen would be a good choice, but large-scale production is still problematic.

North of the 40th parallel, we found out in the '70's that solar water heating is not feasable.

all sports events (athletics, football etc.) must be performed in daylight

A non-starter for more reasons than I can list here. It would limit school athletic events to the weekends, and that would be impractical in the extreme due to schedule conflicts (personally I believe school athletic programs receive far more attention than they are worth). Then there are all the folks who work during the day and would resent being shut out. Attendance of those events would fall to the point that ticket prices would drop into the basement and stars wouldn't be able to command their ridiculous salaries...okay, maybe that's not a negative. Still not going to fly, though.

we should scrap ALL subsidies and duties, world-wide, in all sectors but especially in energy (including food production)

Perhaps a noble goal but there would be far too much resistance to such a plan in the US. American farmers are far too dependant on govenment subsidies to control production costs for elimation of subsidies to happen. Perhaps this is an indictment of the inefficiency of the American farmer, and perhaps family farms should be replaced entirely by corporate farms which can do things far more efficiently. But I can tell you that in the US it just isn't going to happen anytime soon. Any politician who suggests it would not be a politician for long.

Otherwise the rest of your stated goals are laudable, if they can be made palatable to the voter and the consumer.

Kevin

[az]

Re subsidies: The EU is not better than the US in this regard, probably worse. What I don't understand is: 50% of the EU budget went into farming subsidies (this was a few years ago, might well have changed, though I don't believe it; there is too much lobbyism going on). On top of that, we put money into development programs for third world countries, then shut them out of our markets with import taxes and unnaturally low prices (due to subsidies). If we just cancelled our agricultural subsidies and bought our food from them, we would save money, these people would have an income, and we wouldn't grow tobacco in germany. Yeah, it's probably not that easy, but still, why do we have to spend so much money to support farmers? If anybody else loses their job because the trade they are working in isn't feasible in their country anymore (due to cheaper work elsewhere or technological advance or less demand or whatever), we don't throw billions and billions at them just to artificially secure their jobs. Except for farmers (and coal miners). Why?

Sorry for the OT, Brian.

Umfriend: Toyota Prius, Audi A1 (discontinued), VW 3l-Lupo (discontinued)... I think at least as important would be to encourage people to use public transport, by providing good public transport for cheap.

[Dr Mordrid]

For the record all US carmakers, including DCX, are coming out with multi-fuel (mainly gas or ethanol) cars as a major part of their mix. Automotive propane adapters have been available here for ages, but haven't been economically practical for most people.

Dr. Mordrid

[dZeus]

(in reply to Az' post)
hmm let's see... yeah, great idea! let's get rid of our agricultural sector altogether because they can't compete with Brazillian farmers (afaik African farmers can compete either) and become dependant on far away countries for something as unimportant as food.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should subsidize farmers for competing in other markets than our own (i.e. export), and probably cut back a bit on subsidizing for products sold our own market. Cutting out all subsidies sounds bloody stupid to me though...

[az]

I don't think we'd survive a theoretical embargo anyhow. Apart from the fact that we need oil almost as much as food now, I don't think we're completely autarkic regarding food, either. And even if I'm wrong and we would somehow manage to harvest enough crops without using oil to feed every european during some unrealistic world-vs-europe horror scenario, how long do you think we'd survive, anyway? Don't you think the people who managed to put a food embargo against us in effect (which seems entirely unrealistic to me - where there's money, there's always a way, whether we like it or not) would use even more drastic measures, if necessary? I don't think Autarky is necessary or even possible anymore in our globalised world, at least not for a "developed" country. Nobody manages to keep the market out of a continent if there's money to be made.

But for the warm gut feeling, let's subsidize wheat and rye farming so we won't starve in the next world war. If nobody burns our crops. And if we can harvest without consuming oil (because the people who isolate us from the market also blew up the pipelines, of course). Not that I think it would make any difference in a war that would manage to completely isolate europe.

[Wulfman]

If anybody else loses their job because the trade they are working in isn't feasible in their country anymore (due to cheaper work elsewhere or technological advance or less demand or whatever), we don't throw billions and billions at them just to artificially secure their jobs. Except for farmers (and coal miners). Why?

in addition to what dzeus said: because a lot of what we see around our countries is a "cultivated landscape", which would dissappear. a lot would change without agricultural use - and that's not restricted to some mountain farmers in the alps.

mfg
wulfman

[dZeus]

I don't think we'd survive a theoretical embargo anyhow. Apart from the fact that we need oil almost as much as food now, I don't think we're completely autarkic regarding food, either. And even if I'm wrong and we would somehow manage to harvest enough crops without using oil to feed every european during some unrealistic world-vs-europe horror scenario, how long do you think we'd survive, anyway? Don't you think the people who managed to put a food embargo against us in effect (which seems entirely unrealistic to me - where there's money, there's always a way, whether we like it or not) would use even more drastic measures, if necessary? I don't think Autarky is necessary or even possible anymore in our globalised world, at least not for a "developed" country. Nobody manages to keep the market out of a continent if there's money to be made.

But for the warm gut feeling, let's subsidize wheat and rye farming so we won't starve in the next world war. If nobody burns our crops. And if we can harvest without consuming oil (because the people who isolate us from the market also blew up the pipelines, of course). Not that I think it would make any difference in a war that would manage to completely isolate europe.

I'm not talking about a 'us vs. them' war, but there are many reasons you wouldn't want to be dependant on your food supply coming from far away countries (most likely south american countries in a completely free 'world food market'). Regional political problems, civil war, natural disasters (what if some catastrophic heat hit south america and all of their crop failed?), etc.

Just arguing that because you're dependant on oil for a large part of the food production here is good enough reason to get food from somewhere else as well doesn't sound very logical to me.

[Umfriend]

Oh boy. Az is completelty right and you dZ and Wulfman are wrong.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was instigated in 1958 and it was a cold war instrument. The thrat was of a USSR-blockade across the Atlantic so that the US would not be able to provide Western Europe with food in case of war and shortage.

Agriculture would not dissapear if we cut subsidies. What would happen is that our overproduction would dissapear and our agriculture would become more efficient (albeit uglier at the same time until we'd be prepared to pay for less efficient grown stuff "ecologically" grown stuff etc). We would probably become net-importers of foodstuffs, true, but what kind of image of the world must one have to argue this is bad and stupid while we have actually been making Aficra dependent on our food production?

Brazilian farmers basically use slave-labor. To fight that, instead of subsidizing our own food production, I would suggest:
1. Political pressure
2. Import tariffs justified by the fact that there is no level playing field due to the use of slave-labor, something the WTO would rule in our favor on.

Why don't we? Becuase of our CAP we are immunised from (mostly) anything that occurs outside of our (agricultural) world, so why bother?

Meanwhile, we pay to much for our food, we pay a lot in taxes that goes to the agricultural industry and we pay more taxes to support 3rd world countries just because we obstruct their means to make a living for themselves.

Oh, and I think we could do with a bit more forest and less "cultivated landscape". That'd be change for the good. Agriculture destroys quite a bit in bio-diversity when it occupies lots of land.

[Umfriend]

Regional political problems, civil war,

My position is that the CAP helped cause just this in Africa.

How would you define "dependent"? As being net importer of foodstuffs or as starving if they do not sell you food anymore for some reason? There is a big difference between the two and I wonder how you show that without EU-Subsidies we would get all our food from South-America?

[Umfriend]

Interesting article on the effect of our CAP

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1509560,00.html

Note how the very last line of the list points to this issue:

http://eurostep.antenna.nl/detail_pub.phtml?page=pubs_position_coherence_jamaicad

Please find me an analysis that says that EU food production will decline by more than, say, 20% if we abolish all subsidies.