(Obama seems to have gotten off the liquid coal train. October 15, 2007)
Obama, Pelosi, and now Bingaman have boarded the liquid coal train. Sickening. Everyone knows this heats the globe, but did you know it will not make you any more independent? What do think happens when OPEC spikes the price of gas to $5.00 in say 2112, and we're using liquid coal? The coal barons will force us to pay $5.00 for their sinfuel, just like Exxon makes us pay the same for domestic gasoline as for OPEC gasoline.
This is not a guess. I make my living with energy economics, and this is as simple as it gets. That's just what markets do. If we won't pay the $5.00, they can sell it anywhere in the world for that price, because OPEC has jacked up the world price.
Back to global warming. Even if they capture the CO2 from making sinfuel, the sinfuel they make will emit the same CO2 as gasoline when we use it. On top of that, anytime more oil or sinfuel is produced, the world market makes sure more is used. That means more warming even with the most optimistic assumption. What are those Democrats been smokin'?
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Coal Barons Buy Dems
.
Labels:
Energy
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
14 comments:
It makes perfect sense to buy Democrats because:
-They're probably going to win.
-The Republicans are already bought.
-Considering how affordable politicians are and given the amount of money Big Oil has at stake, it's a bargain at 100,000 times the price.
er- Did I write "Big Oil"? Sorry. Force of habit.
What I meant was that given the deeply flawed American political system, Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Whatever, can just buy the status quo or change (depending on which they want) by buying the most/most influencial politians. Congress is basically an auction house where various interests bid against each other. In this case, Big Oil may find themselves bidding against Big Coal for dominance, assuming they don't merge and form Big Fossil.
(How's that for a face-saving recovery?)
Well, It's no secret that the U.S. gov't is a wholly owned Susiderary of Corporate America. Sorta matches reality. Big organizations doing big things get a lot of attention. There
are no fossil fuel issues at all because most of the petrochemicals we use are not from fossils. Most coal and oil is Abiotic. An atom of carbon is still an atom of carbon no matter what it is tied to. Life is a fairly complex process that is made up of only a small fraction of the carbon that is on the earth. Geo thermal heating of the naturally occurring carbon in the makeup of the earths crust is where most of the oil comes from. Not a cabbage patch.
Where does geothermal heating come from? The earth's crust is relatively thin. The rest is either
semi solid or liquid. It is composed largely of iron and silicon. These substances melt at extremely high temperatures. It seems very likely
that the liquid state is maintained by a nuclear reaction of some sort.
Nuclear materials are all very dense.
In liquid lead uranium would sink.
Possibly, some of the variations in climate are linked to the level of containment and activity of the planetary scale nuclear reactor we probably have right under our feet.
Off point, but I just wanted to thank you for a piece on Zfacts on cap-and-trade. I have to include in a paper and found the economics confusing before reading it.
I would like your thought on whether a base auction price for allownace should be set (as many auctions do) at a level where it encourages CCS -- a price where coal and Gas compete effectivley --say $30 a ton co2
Wogie1
The primary reason why oil prices increased dramatically is the "deregulation of commodities" that was "rammed through with no debate in Congress" by Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX). The following graph is from Representative Peter DeFazio's website. The high prices of multiple essential commodities is a direct result of that legislation. This is a real case of Republican exploitation of the American people. Entire text at http://www.defazio.house.gov/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=412%20
The deregulation of the commodities markets earlier this decade has also led to manipulation of other commodity prices. For example, the price of copper and other metals have exploded since the passage of the Enron loophole. There are no supply and demand constraints in the metals markets, but the prices have skyrocketed with no explanation left but manipulation.
The only immediate solution is to reign in market manipulation of commodities. If Congress were to simply close the Enron loophole and reregulate the commodity markets, credible industry experts say that American consumers would see oil prices cut by up to 50% in 30 days.
Nice site - a peaker friend of mine gave me a link to the brill debt graph and I immediately smelled a rat and complained about no GDP denominator and he of course started yakking about GDP externalities etc.
So I'm happy to find your site for a reality based antidote to peak hysteria and Y2K-style Chicken Little thinking.
Anyway, broken link at http://zfacts.com/p/611.html the words "Price of Oil" goes to /P/16.htm - it should go to 216.htm I think - I thought you were saying it was good that we were going to occupy Iraq in order to reduce the price of oil. Yikes. I don't think that is what you meant.
611.htm has a typo "at the Nazis did" should be "as the Nazis did"
850.html the last link goes to 589 should be 859. (how'd I get to womens rights?)
865.html first sentence, last word - "blackout" should be plural.
Something I hope you look into is Geothermal. It's like nukes in that it boils water but without all the fuss. Under all of the US west of the Rockies is really hot rock. There are single stage processes using water or dual stage using ammonia. Some web sites assume you need hot springs or surface heat but really all you need is the new deep drilling techniques used for oil wells and some investment. Google has recently invested and has some info.
Not to be confused with geothermal heat pumps used for heating and cooling in the eastern US, although that is smart, too.
Most discussions of alt energy omit geothermal althogether. It really needs more visibility and awareness. No carbon. Works at night. Once accessed, the energy is free. Inexhustable within the heat transmitting capability of area being used (can always just go deeper to get more). The western US is the Saudi Arabia of GeoThermal.
________________
On farming - My driveway runs through a wet land drained 100 years ago for truck farming. The fields are 100% carbon muck soil - no mineral. When uncovered it oxidizes at about 1/2 inch per year. Agriculture itself is a huge source of atmospheric carbon. Depletion of soil for corn or cellulosic ethanol is caused by its carbon being ozidized. So while the ethanol's carbon comes from the air, in the process the row cropping adds to the total CO2 load. Read some of the recent studies on wetland drainage to produce palm oil. I'm not sure the true cost of ethanol has been fully tallied.
_______
typo in http://zfacts.com/p/green-energy.html headline>> Corn ethanol—No. Cellusoe ethanol—Yes. spelled cellulose wrong
Steve, I hope you can do an analysis of fast-neutron based nuclear power generation. According to its proponents (www.nationalcenter.org/NPA378.html) it has advantages over current nuclear power generation: It is weapons-incompatible, passively safe, can be a net consumer of long-lived radioactive waste, and is less susceptible to diversion of dangerous materials into terrorist or criminal hands. It does have an extra heat exchanger in its power generation path, so it would be interesting to see your analysis of its $/kwh.
Hey Z, in your line of work is it customary to present random graphs without supporting the underlying data?
does this blog operator even check this anymore?
NO, now that Obama is in office suddenly no updates... In ZFACTS the claim of "no biases" is BS, everything on zfacts leans the way of CNN / factcheck.org, more bogus entities calling themselves scientists.
zReason - I think there are problems with large-scale coal-liquification, but I disagree with your assertion that not moving toward energy independance is one of them. We will not move toward independance from polution, likely, but we will move toward independance from other countries, which is how that term is usually used.
Chuck - Interesting post on Geothermal. I heard there are some good plants in California, but it was still expensive in the general case. I wonder how that breaks down in terms of rate of internal return from an energy perspective (take dollars out of the picture) and how much production efficiency changes as technologies advance. On the plus side, I like the fact that it is far less variable than wind, and so can contribute to baseline power.
Bill, Randy, and Jim - Please try to contribute instead of just throwing stones.
I was genuinely curious. I enjoyed following his posts on zfacts.com.
There's no reason for me to contribute if no one is going to see it.
Randy - I apologize. I misread your font as being sarcastic.
Post a Comment