131 comments on DrumBeat: May 19, 2007
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131 comments on DrumBeat: May 19, 2007
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...permission to temporarily sell gasoline that doesn't meet federal environmental regulations
I think that we saw this one coming.
Best Hopes for Smog,
Alan
Yeah. Was it Hirsh who predicted that we'd avoid economic collapse, via environmental devastation, or some such thing?
The first to go will be the environmental laws.
That's why I have said that global warming worries me more than peak oil. We will throw all kinds of environmental concerns right out the window when it is clear that energy is depleting. We will burn anything and everything (CTL, for instance) with little regard for the environmental consequences. Some of the "easiest" mitigation strategies for resource depletion are those with the most serious environmental impacts.
I thought we were burning anything and everything now.
In a world powered by petroleum, this is the "heroin is a better recreational drug than crystal meth" discussion again. I think I used that analogy before in a comment on ethanol blend vs. straight gasoline emmisions. There is a difference, but neither one are exactly healthy.
Not quite. We haven't chopped down all the national forests yet. We aren't drilling ANWR...yet. And most people aren't burning plastic bottles and PVC pipe for heat, or digging up the roads to burn the asphalt.
Men convicted of stealing miles of railway line
Yeah, but they weren't burning it. There was little environmental consequence to their actions.
I know, but with metal price increases, metal theft is on a drastic rise and it's a forewarning of what will happen with increased energy cost. I really can't see someone ripping up asphalt and burning it scaling to an environmental issue, North American people just aren't that ambitious, but $3-4 gasoline in bulk storage is pretty tempting.
In a warming climate, our best hope for saving the temperate forests is to keep the trees on a moderately wide spacing, so the root systems will be more resistant to drought, and to concentrate on growing the more drought resistant and heat resistant trees. This is where biomass harvest can be very beneficial. In my region, the more resistant trees are ponderosa pine and black oak. Most of the white fir will die out, one way or the other, at middle elevations.
LSU (Louisiana State University) Forestry Dept. is about 5 years away from widespread public offering of salt tolerant bald cypress trees.
A small scale project where cuttings were taken from the few surviving trees after salt water intrusion (canals to service oil fields often let in salt water). These cuttings were grafted (and seed collected from these same trees, pollinated from nearby survivors). A new generation of interbreed salt tolerant trees was exposed to salt stress in the greenhouse and survivors selected from that.
Seedlings from these selected survivors are available for selected planting today and the volume is ramping up quickly for general release.
Bald cypress trees in watery swamps accumulate soil around their roots and "knobs" and reclaim land. They also prevent soil erosion and they add significantly to the friction for high winds. The wood is quite valuable, which sets up future problems/decisions. Most of the old growth cypress was cut and ended up in New Orleans homes.
Clearly, new bald cypress plantings are a carbon sink (directly for the trees and indirectly for the accumulated organic matter around them that builds up into "soil"). And, after thinning in ~70 to 90 years, the wood will likely be used for furniture or housing, half of the carbon will stay sequestered.
However, the Corps of Engineers does not believe in biological controls and opposes planting them just offshore from levees.
Best Hopes for more bald cypress trees !
Alan
"digging up the roads to burn the asphalt"
Thanks for the tip. Will make my next winter more economical.
I assume the redwood forest will make up some juicy biofuel in a not so distant future .... suitable for the Mars rockets in 2030 or so
I already volunteered for that trip - due to obvious reasons discussed at this forum
The only glimmer of hope that I see is that the most important mitigation actions for both GW and PO are the same: energy efficiency + renewables. Those who are not convinced that GW is real might be convinced about PO, and those that are not conviced that PO is real might be convinced about GW.
Only?
What about population? What about contolling it?
What worries me most is that peak oil - since we are not preparing for it - will damage our economy to such an extent that we will not have the financial capacity to replace our coal fired power plants with clean energy before we reach the threshold temperature increase for the start of the disintegration of our icesheets in Greenland and West Antarctica. That point of no return is less than 1 degree C equal to less than 450 ppm CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
Listen to NASA climatologist James Hansen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0hHlxaYNb0
"We had in the last 30 years 1 degree F (= 0.5 degrees C) warming but there is another 1 degree F that's in the pipeline due to gases already in the atmosphere just because it takes the climate system time to respond to the changes in the atmosphere. And there is another 1 F in the pipeline because of energy infrastructure which is in place for example power plants and vehicles which we are not going to take off the road even if we decide that we have to address this problem...you have to gradually make changes....."
"Icesheets are not as immutable as we once thought. We now have this spectacular gravity satellite which measures the mass of the Greenland icesheet and it shows that it has been decreasing by 150 km3 per year over the last few years and of even greater concern is the Antarctic ice sheet has also been decreasing at about the same rate.."
And here are some videos:
Icemelt in Greenland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-ujWi_P0QU
Glacier Melting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbQjukRmLSg&mode=related&search=
Arctic Sea Ice summer Minimum 1990 to 2049
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH8nJ5PMYhQ&mode=related&search=#
The economy will collapse by itself anyway without PO or Climate Change. What we are facing is multiple collapses; economic, energy, climate and ecological with geopolitical chaos thrown in for free. It is certainly possible that we could overcome one by itself, but not all together. Combined each one will block any mitigation of the others, meaning we will be sitting ducks, essentially defenceless. There is no escaping it, we're going to be in the grip of a positive feedback loop which is anything but positive for us.
Earth's natural defences against climate change 'beginning to fail'
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2556466.ece
Climate change may force mass migration
http://www.hindu.com/seta/2007/05/17/stories/2007051700061500.htm
The entire system of civilisation is currently stuck on stupid and cannot respond to the multiple threats sensibly, so we're going to have to take the hit head-on.
"Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth." Albert Schweitzer
It's an accelerating race to the bottom.
--
Authentic learning ends where faith begins.
Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?"
Since there aren't 16 fundamentally different kinds of smog, or whatever the number of boutique blends is up to now, I don't see the slightest harm in this. The formulation that corrupt legislators in state A demand in order to purchase votes by lining pockets will probably work just as well in state B as the trivially different formulation demanded by the corrupt legislators of state B. And, realistically, in most places, the overwrought concern over "smog" has become mainly something for people with too much time on their hands to worry over, like the endless oh-puhleeze postings about "toxins" over on Matt Savinar's site.
PaulS is exactly the sort of person representative of those who will see the world destroyed in order to fulfill their puerile neocon fantasies.
I have met so many relatively bright people who have this evil little bug in their minds that somehow protecting the environment is a political act designed not to protect but to enrich some group somewhere.
The problem is these people are bright enough to type, but not bright enough to think. Come the big dieoff, these people will be the parasites on society, and we will have to hunt them down like the vermin they are and mash them into roach paste.
Good luck, vermin.
Hey PaulS, have you ever been to the Inland Empire???
May I suggest that PaulS go and have his blood serum tested for toxins and post the results here. Otherwise, judging by this post and if I was him, I'd be worried that the results would prove beyond a doubt that he's so full of them that they're blinding him to the fact that we are all now practically certifiable as walking-talking hazardous waste sites.