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filkertomHow many more oil rigs have to go BOOM before people figure a cleaner, safer alternative to oil?
ETA: Interesting. Other reports say it was a natural gas rig. There seems to be a difference of opinion as to whether or not it was producing, and whether or not there's a mile-long sheen of oil in the Gulf from the rig.
Some hardcore factifying would really help right about now.
ETA: Interesting. Other reports say it was a natural gas rig. There seems to be a difference of opinion as to whether or not it was producing, and whether or not there's a mile-long sheen of oil in the Gulf from the rig.
Some hardcore factifying would really help right about now.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 06:08 pm (UTC)There is not one sadly, only major changes in the way we live.
More walking and more public transit and only after there is not more oil.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 06:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 06:36 pm (UTC)The system that depends on the oil is so entrenched, it's a matter of survival to perpetuate it. How do we break it?
(disclaimer: this is not a why bother to try, it's an honest question. I'm fortunate enough that we were able to move to be closer to my husband's job after a few months. I can afford organic, local food and have the skills and tools to cook from scratch. I compost, garden, recycle, use reusable flipping toilet wipes. But I have no illusions that all of my eco-conscious lifestyle choices are a matter of privelidge.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 06:51 pm (UTC)Medevac for critical cases.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 07:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 06:57 pm (UTC)You’re absolutely right, we need solutions that will ease up into going without oil but that can still support the culture we have built or it will NEVER work. But we need to move more steadily in that direction and allow for such technologies to become readily available as opposed to the oil companies buying up the patents for these projects and then sitting on them. I think that’s what Tom was saying.
The health care/health insurance debate is not up for this post, but it’s another solid question. Cheers!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 07:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 12:57 am (UTC)The ones that get me are the ones that don't care at all.
We try. We're lucky enough to have a home with a guaranteed long term rental agreement, long enough that it was worth it for us to invest in a half dozen fruit trees (we have a total of 8 on our property, 2 are mature enough to be good producers) and a big raised bed garden. We eat almost exclusively local perishables, almost no processed food, organic, and vegan. We drive less than 200 miles a week. We use almost nothing disposable- our weekly trash is less than what a paper grocery sack holds. We vermicompost and recycle. Other than my husband's uniforms for work and my pants (I'm a hard to find size) almost all our clothes are secondhand. Cars, computers, furniture, all secondhand. Our electric bill is half what is standard in our area.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 07:19 pm (UTC)It's a mess, is what it is.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 07:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 08:39 pm (UTC)That's a big what if, though. If I have my numbers right....
On broad average (like, including that there's nighttime, but not including clouds), the sun provides about 250 watts of power per square meter. YOur standard 2-story, 3 bedroom house has a footprint on the order of 700 square feet, or 65 square meters. So, a typical house is good for about 13,000 watts, on broad average. That sounds good.
But, the current record for solar cells is about 24% efficiency. That 13,000 watts is now down to 3000 watts. Your typical home uses between 500 and 1000 watts, if you aren't using electricity for heating or cooling. So, let us just say you've got 2000 watts left.
A car uses something like 1.5 kw-hours per mile. So, with what's left on your house, for every hour you charge your car, you can go 1.25 miles. So, your house will get you maybe 30 miles driving a day.
This, as I noted, is on average, and not counting cloud cover. We'd need to go a long way before this becomes practical.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 08:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 09:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 01:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 01:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 04:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 12:07 pm (UTC)But you could start out with most sorts of common rock. Quartz is best, of course. And granite has a significant amount of quartz in it. Basalt would be a pain, but you could do it.
Whatever you start with once you've extracted relatively pure silicon dioxide from it, then you get to refine it. A nasty process involving lots of chlorine and other things (recyclable, thoughh).
Once you get that reduced to hyper-pure silicon, then you are at the piont a company I worked at for 12 years. Growing the single crystal ingots. And producing silicon wafers from that.
They spent six months teaching us about the entire process before we started working there.
Anyway, trust me, silicon could get more expensive, if they have to extract it from harder to work with rocks. But we aren't going to run out.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 07:04 am (UTC)I've been going back ot urban and suburban planning shortfalls. A great deal of the problem originates in how work and residential areas are laid out. Why should people have a 50 mile commute to what they can afford to live in? One of our big problems is building booms in older styles, leaving us hardscapes that don't get changed much later on, and don't adapt very well. Why should we all be commuting into central downtown cores, or to big office parks, for instance?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 01:56 am (UTC)In many places, the answer will be bigger than your lot. :-(
Besides, liquid hydrocarbon fuel is a lot better energy storage medium than any battery that can be produced in the numbers you'd need to replace current gasoline and diesel fueled vehicles.
Rather than converting the cars to electric, it makes better sense to convert to making fuel without using oil. It can be done. It's just expensive (even so, it'd be more practical in the long run).
Alas, *all* the alternative cost a *lot* more than using oil. And there are ecological costs, not just monetary ones. Solar cells and batteries have environmental costs in their production too.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Just that it's not going to be easy.
And we have to watch out for "solutions" that work ok on a small scale but are a *disaster* when scaled up. Ethanol as fuel is one of those. At least as long as they are producing it from food crops instead of the *waste* from food crops.
That's part of what's driven up food prices... :-(
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 04:14 am (UTC)Now if everyone in the country were to stop eating red meat and dairy, that might still be feasable. But the vast majority of folks aren't even willing to discuss that.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 04:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-05 06:09 pm (UTC)You have two choices
Date: 2010-09-05 03:52 pm (UTC)Move to Canada, or force your politicians to act in your favor. The United States is the only industrialized country without good health care (no, ObamaCare doesn't count - it's a piece of total junk). Curiously the United States is also the only industrialized country that allows corporations to interfere in politics.
Makes you wonder about the connection, doesn't it?
Re: You have two choices
Date: 2010-09-05 06:05 pm (UTC)I have a lot of friends who are libertarians and very opposed to national health care. I'm not 100% thrilled with the government making health care decisions for me, but I'm FAR less thrilled with a corporation that is motivated by profit doing so.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 04:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 06:42 pm (UTC)Do you realize that in the Gulf alone, there's like 5000 rigs? Statistically, yes, you're going to have one or another go boom on occasion. Having a couple of them go boom without much time between them isn't much more than an anomaly.
If you get five or so of them in a row going boom, that's one in a thousand - a tenth of a percent - and that's getting more into realms of systematic problem than random chance.
A cleaner, safer alternative? Well, you can't power a population of nearly seven billion souls without having major impact on the world, and risk of worse. That's thermodynamics.
The best alternative for which we currently have the technology is probably nuclear fission. Done properly, cribbing majorly from the French, it might not be too bad - but it still wouldn't be Utopian-level clean and safe.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 07:33 pm (UTC)As our economy moves firmly from a "spend money you haven't got" to a "Oh-my-God, we've got to hold on to every penny because we may never work again" system, the amount of money available to do hour-plus commuting just won't be there. I predict that tangibles--goods and services you have to go somewhere to obtain--will be much more localized in ten years than they are now with the return of self-sufficient neighborhoods.
Tom
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 07:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 04:19 am (UTC)We've got our front yard plowed up for strawberries and flowers. Not sure what the full plan is for the back. We do have to eliminate the rabbits and squirrels (or at least reduce their numbers), but we've got a wrist rocket and plans to turn the shed in the back into a hat-making operation. Champaign, unfortunately, has laws against owning chickens, or we'd have our own eggs, too.
Tom T.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 07:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 04:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-02 07:06 pm (UTC)Grrr... *rant on*
Date: 2010-09-02 08:04 pm (UTC)GM was essentially the catalyst for the social changes which resulted in the dismantling of that system, so I have a grudge.
The electricity required to run a system of inter- and intraurban electric rail does not necessarily need to be generated by petrochemicals (or coal, for that matter, Niagara Falls generates quite a bit of electricity, for instance), and would still equal a net energy savings.
While I'm blue-skying, I'd really like to know what would have happened if electric cars like the Milburn (http://www.milburn.us/history.htm) (30mph and 100 miles on a charge in 1918) hadn't been driven out of production by gasoline-powered cars and a disastrous fire (funny how that happened to Edison too), and we'd had the incentive of electric cars driving the development of light-weight, heavy-duty batteries between the nineteen-teens and now. We'd likely be in much better shape.
*sigh*
Date: 2010-09-02 09:12 pm (UTC)The problem is that the mainstream American society is trained along consumer/profit lines, not along lines that would consider harm to humans and environment as prevailing factors. So the tipping point would be if petroleum products become too expensive to support our current economy. We can only use the "too much harm" filter if we redesign society to consider that important.
Re: *sigh*
Date: 2010-09-02 09:37 pm (UTC)Re: *sigh*
Date: 2010-09-03 03:39 am (UTC)My Mom's next door neighbor called the city to take away her recycling bin. Why? The city SELLS the items you recycle! And that's HER money!!! Cost of trash pick-up with recycling option? $63. Cost without recycling? $63.
My brother (with 4 teens) refuses to recycle. Too much trouble, takes too much time. He also lives in an area where recycling is picked up for free.
I have been mocked for years by my relatives for "trying to save the world". I keep pointing out, I don't have any kids, when I'm gone... I'm gone. It's their children I'm doing this for.
Re: *sigh*
Date: 2010-09-05 12:00 am (UTC)The problem with trying to stop people from going along consumer/profit lines is that if people only bought what they absolutely needed, a lot of people would lose their jobs.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 03:04 am (UTC)That said, we need to get on the thorium nuclear standard to help kill our dependency on oil. It's cheap as dirt, more powerful than uranium, rarely degrades to plutonium, and the reactors are much much smaller.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-03 09:09 am (UTC)anything to do with TransOceanic?
Don't get me started
Date: 2010-09-05 04:00 pm (UTC)One of the big issues, is that in the United States at least, corporations have too much political power. For example did you know that the Tea Party is funded heavily by Koch Industries? Koch Industries is the largest privately owned oil and coal producer. Curiously, the Tea Party advocates policies that Koch has spoken in favor of, like closing the Environmental Protection Agency.
If you want to have an effect, you have to become politically active. You have to encourage your neighbors to become politically active, and help them encourage their neighbors.
One person can't save the world, but one person can start an avalanche! Be that one person.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 09:51 pm (UTC)