There is quite a bit to talk about in energy news so let's get to it!
First up is a call for nuclear power that I have been waiting for a long time. Check out the source!
Four scientists who have played a key role in alerting the public to the dangers of climate change sent letters Sunday to leading environmental groups and politicians around the world. The letter, an advance copy of which was given to The Associated Press, urges a crucial discussion on the role of nuclear power in fighting climate change.
Environmentalists have the same problem with emotions and instransigence as the Right does in terms of their views on...well...just about everything:) Nuclear power is clean and much safer than the worry warts will have you believe. The letter signers are James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist; Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution; Kerry Emanuel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tom Wigley, of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Speaking of climate change, a report on the effect of climate change on world food supplies has been leaked and the news is not good.
The warning on the food supply is the sharpest in tone the panel has issued. Its previous report, in 2007, was more hopeful. While it did warn of risks and potential losses in output, particularly in the tropics, that report found that gains in production at higher latitudes would most likely offset the losses and ensure an adequate global supply.
The new tone reflects a large body of research in recent years that has shown how sensitive crops appear to be to heat waves. The recent work also challenges previous assumptions about how much food production could increase in coming decades because of higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The gas, though it is the main reason for global warming, also acts as a kind of fertilizer for plants.
For a closer look at this problem and all the data, click here.
Will this be enough to convince people? I think when you start messing around with the food that Americans eat, they tend to react!
Finally, for the "Drill, Baby, Drill" crowd, it looks like we have a way around the northern section of Keystone.
Since July, plans have been announced for three large loading terminals in western Canada with the combined capacity of 350,000 barrels a day — equivalent to roughly 40 percent of the capacity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that is designed to bring oil from western Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast.
Over all, Canada is poised to quadruple its rail-loading capacity over the next few years to as much as 900,000 barrels a day, up from 180,000 today.
Rail..uh oh! Republicans hate choo choos! Speaking of oil, why is the price of it so low right now? Because the dollar is stronger. How can that be? I thought we were heading for apocalypse! Also...
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said it expects demand for its crude oil to fall to 29.2 million barrels a day in 2018 from 30.3 million barrels a year this year. OPEC said rising supplies from other sources, such as Canadian oil sands, crude from Latin America and the increased use of biofuels would contribute to the fall in demand for its own output.
Demand has fallen? Wait...I thought demand had nothing to do with price. And increased biofuels? What pinko nonsense!!
8 comments:
So much clap trap, where to start?
Environmentalists have the same problem with emotions and instransigence as the Right does in terms of their views on...well...just about everything:
Funny how you disassociate yourself from them when you disagree with them.
Of course they are emotional and intransigent when they disagree with the great and all knowing Markadelphia. Mark would never make a decision from an emotional level and would never, ever, ever intransigently stick with it just so he isn't shown to be wrong.....
Hmmmm, so the key to not being childish is to agree with you?
Republicans hate choo choos!
Bullshit. R's hate publicly funded rail that does not pay for itself. Private rail is fine - especially freight BECAUSE IT PAYS FOR ITSELF.
Because the dollar is stronger.
Yeah, I told you that years ago - oil high because dollar was weak. Ooppsie! Forgot that didn't you? Guess what - dollar fluctuates, get back to us when dollar stays strong for long term. Then you can start the high fives.
.I thought demand had nothing to do with price
Are you lobotomized or something? Could you really believe that we had said that? You just prove over and over and over that you do not listen to what is said - and argue with made up fantasies and imagined conversations.
Demand has fallen
But you in fact did say that demand was not going to fall....hmmmm what happened there?
The first thing I saw at the top of that article "on the effect of climate change on world food supplies" reminded me that the observations have not been matching the projections. If the very basis of the fear-mongering* is false, why should anyone pay attention to the rest of it?
Climate Model Projections vs Real World Observations
“Real-world observations fail to confirm essentially all of the alarming predictions of significant increases in the frequency and severity of droughts, floods and hurricanes that climate models suggest should occur in response to a global warming of the magnitude that was experienced by the earth over the past two centuries as it gradually recovered from the much-lower-than-present temperatures characteristic of the depths of the Little Ice Age. And other observations have shown that the rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations associated with the development of the Industrial Revolution have actually been good for the planet, as they have significantly enhanced the plant productivity and vegetative water use efficiency of earth’s natural and agro-ecosystems, leading to a significant “greening of the earth.”
(*Wait, isn't fear-mongering what you accuse us of?)
Oops. Correction: I was referring to the "closer look" link, not the "effect link".
BTW Mark, that's what you do when you make a mistake. You not only admit it, you correct it; something Obama will not do re. people losing their insurance.
equivalent to roughly 40 percent of the capacity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline
Higher cost, lower capacity, more moving parts to break. What's not to love?
:::retching:::
One word will tell you everything you need to know about nuclear power: Fukushima.
That place is a nuclear disaster area, worse than Chernobyl. It is still leaking radioactive water into the ocean. They're going to build an ice wall underground to try and stop the leaking. That shows how helpless we are in the face of nuclear power disasters, and that wasn't even a bad (i.e., explosive) one.
After decades, the United States still has no safe and secure nuclear waste repository. The proposed Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is never going to happen. Waste is stored on site in concrete casks, in more than a hundred locations across the United States. It would just take one terrorist bomb at a nuclear waste site to forever poison American minds against nuclear power.
You might be a little too young to remember the Three Mile Island accident, but it's the main reason why we haven't been building nuclear power plants in this country over the last 30 years. And nothing really happened at Three Mile Island: the reaction was totally hysterical and emotional.
The scientists recommending nuclear power don't seem to understand how people think. The reality is that radiation poisoning isn't all that terrible. After all, we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and that country turned out okay, didn't it? The detonation of a dirty bomb in New York or the bombing of a nuclear storage site would kill relatively few people immediately: some number of people would die prematurely of various radiogenic cancers over the next 90 years. Yeah, 90 years. There are still people alive today who were hit by the atomic bombs in Japan. Being exposed to radiation isn't a death sentence, it just increases your chance of contracting cancer -- in some ways, living in a brick house, having a basement or flying in a plane is just as risky.
We went totally mental when just 3,000 people died on 9/11. Imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth if someone used shaped charges to blow up the nuclear casks sitting at a nuclear power plant outside of Chicago and five million people were exposed to radiation. Even though very few people would die immediately, they would have the specter of death hanging over them their entire lives. Farms in Illinois and Indiana would be shut down: who would buy radioactive food? Tourism would die. Fishing would be eliminated in Lake Michigan. It would wind up costing hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars in lost productivity and increased medical costs from literally millions of medical tests, drugs and procedures that would inevitably follow.
Building nuclear power plants is ridiculously expensive. It makes much more sense to expand the use of solar and wind power, using natural gas turbines for load balancing. Research into the cheap renewable generation of methane, hydrogen gas, and liquid fuels will ultimately provide a carbon-neutral source of combustible fuels, and we won't need to drill holes in the ground for energy.
We're always so confident that we'll adapt in the future if we need to. Why not adapt before we need to, and make a killing on the energy market when all the laggards come to us for our solutions?
Wait...I thought demand had nothing to do with price.
From August 2012:
Plus ole N makes the same mistake that M makes by assuming that oil being a global commodity somehow divorces it from market forces - while at the same time bemoaning the effect those same forces have on a global commodity.
Supply. Demand.
Increase supply, apply to global market, decrease global price.
— GuardDuck
We did our darndest to explain to you that supply and demand combine to drive price. Now you're trying to claim we said the opposite?!?!?
Do you believe the cajones on this guy?
I should point out that GuardDuck did most of the heavy listing in that thread. (And apparently had the highest blood pressure due to your bald-faced idiocy.) The rest of us just chimed in from time to time.
Republicans hate choo choos!
Is there really a more perfect demonstration of the childishness that is Markadelphia?
Don't you even aspire to be a grown up M?
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