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Old 08-24-2011, 07:26 PM
Charles Charles is offline
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Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 10,348
Quote:
Originally Posted by bhunter View Post
That period is far too short to make sweeping conclusions on climate change. Remember the scare stories of the coming ice age in the sixties and early seventies. Those folks were just as sure and just as convinced as the global warming folks are today. Man has had an influence but the significance is in question.



Why take a chance? Because it is economically costly. It is simply not feasible to move to green using any method other than nuclear. The nuclear industry was killed by the environmentalists years ago. Remember all the pablum that Jane Fonda spewed in the late seventies. That, together with the recent Japanese nuclear plant, has put a dagger into nuclear. So what's left? Solar? Solar panel production is not environmentally friendly and is costly. Hydrogen? Again too costly. Batteries? Too dangerous and limited by resource availability. A viable alternative does not exist. If and when a viable alternative exists it will not need subsidies to garner acceptance in the marketplace.



Sure. As long as it's feasible and cost effective to do so. It's bad because oil and energy produces all the modern necessities that make life more tolerable for people on this planet. Consider how many more people would not be able to eat without modern agriculture or the number that would die without modern medicine. Energy production underlies all because its use has allowed people to have leisure. Leisure means that people have the necessary time to develop and innovate.



Producing solar cells and batteries in vast quantities is also very environmentally unfriendly. Perhaps a simpler way would be to eliminate, say 4 or 5 billion people. That would help our environmental problem and, ironically, would probably be where we'd be without the modern convenience of cheap energy.
I think you're onto something.

Chas
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