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RNG

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Everything posted by RNG

  1. I'm not so sure. Basically Haiti is ecologically destroyed and still hasn't sunk. And it looks like the Voodoo sky gods weren't much help.
  2. The electricity magically appears how? You are just moving the location the pollution spews forth from. And given that NA still has the majority of it's electrical power coming from coal fired plants, that's just bad news.
  3. Just for the record, this, according to Wikipedia is what GDP is.
  4. Totally wrong. Their oil sells at world price. Ours is at a large discount because the only export market we have is the US untill Northern Gateway is built (or if) so they are putting the screws to us. Here is a quote from http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/04/20/oil-refining-canada.html
  5. About the best recharging time I'm aware of is 8 hours. OK for commuting and shopping trips, but visiting Grannie in the next province would require many long stops or a hell of an extension cord. Yes, electric cars are a good step, but they are not a solution to all need for oil and it's products.
  6. It sounds like they are advocating allowing the burning of coal in household fireplaces again. What a disaster that was.
  7. What resources does Iraq have? They have IEDs, which we don't need and oil, which we have a glut of.
  8. The electric vehicles we have are very limited. Just for city driving, basically. What would the freight rates have to be to pay for running overhead lines from Vancouver to Halifax? All pie in the sky.
  9. How are Conservatives causing us to be stuck in the 19th century? For vehicles, trains, ships and planes, what do you propose as an alternative. Several countries have tried natural gas. There is a mild decrease in CO2 emisions largely offset by limited range and safey issues with carrying a high pressure tank. Ethanol and biodiesel have proven to be ecologically problematic. And hydrogen is still pie in the sky. Perhaps a Eureka moment may come and allow the development of high(er) capacity batteries, but those too are problematic in vehicle crashes. And fuel cells are pie in the sky. Not in terms of technology, but where will you get the hydrogen? Below is an analysis that is about 4 years old now, but not much has changed. And take note, the recent article titled something like "Cheaper Energy Storage" which appeared on the CBC site is only claiming cheaper catalysts for the electrolysis of water Like most people, I have been watching oil prices very closely, trying to figure out what is going on, and perhaps more importantly what is going to happen. And I have been thinking more and more about fuel cells and the push for a “hydrogen economy”. I have spouted off a few times about there not being an economically viable source of hydrogen several times. But ongoing talk about fuel cell powered cars, an aggressive advertising campaign by GM, and just my general interest caused me to do the following. ***Most of the numbers input here are from Wikipedia.*** There are 243 million passenger vehicles in the US. (2004). For ease of calculation, and probably viable given the growth in the past four years, lets say 250 million. 250 X 10E6, each driven 12000 miles and getting 25 mpg all divided by 365 = 329 million gallons a day of gas consumed. Interestingly enough, after all that thinking and math, I Googled “gas consumption” and got several hits in the 320 to 330 million gallon per day result. But I figured I’d show off a bit and include this analysis. Now a more thorny problem. What is the efficiency of a current car. I couldn’t find good data for this. One article talked about a modern internal combustion engine being 40% efficient, but I think it was referring to flywheel output on a test bed where there was no other drain on the output, not even an alternator or water pump. The best I could get was an estimate for passenger diesel engines of 22% for “source to wheel” efficiency. Let’s use that. Now, for the efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells. When I started looking at that I was very surprised. They generate a lot more heat than I had thought. Their equivalent to a flywheel efficiency is thought to be 60%. But on top of that, apparently they need pumps and blowers to work so the actual output efficiency drops to about 45%. Then Wiki says the electrical controllers, motor and power train all consume some power. Wiki goes one step farther and factors in the energy requirement to compress the hydrogen gas fuel and arrives at an overall source to wheel efficiency of 22%. How is that for coincidence. Sure saved me a bunch of calculations. The net result. You would need exactly the same energy equivalent of hydrogen as of gasoline to move the same mass the same distance. Gas energy content varies slightly from batch to batch, source to source but is fairly close to 34.8 Megajoules per liter. So you would need 34.8 X 3.79 l/gal X 330 X 10E6 = 4.35 x 10E10 Megajoules per day of hydrogen to replace the gas. Wiki also tells me that electrolysis of water is about 60% efficient. So you would need 7.25 x 10E10 Megajoules of electricity a day to make that much hydrogen. Wiki also tells me that the largest nuclear power plant in the US has an ouput of 1.25 gigawatts. My physics text tells me that 1 watt-hour is 3.6 kilojoules, or 1.25 gigawatts for 24 hours is 1.25 X 10E9 X 24 X 3.6 X 10E3 = 1.08 X 10E14 joules or 1.08 X 10E8 Megajoules. So, 4.35 X 10E10/1.08 X 10E8 = 403 You would need the total output of 403 nuclear power plants to replace gasoline with hydrogen for the US only.
  10. You are breathing out CO2. You defecate and urinate. You consume and create tons of garbage. You consume land that cute little critters could be frolicking on for a place to live and a place to work. You are an environmental disaster and therefore you must kill yourself.
  11. For the free market to work doctors and dentists would need to be free to advertise. I'm not sure if it is law or professional association regulations that prevent them from doing so. Do you know who the more economical dentists are in your area? The second last dentist I went to charged right out of a dental assoc of BC or whatever they call themselves guidebook. Not saying the last one didn't, he just wasn't so blatant about it. And I don't have any dental coverage.
  12. I would even be willing to allow people to be put on to temporary no-fly lists if they were automatically given their day in court to clear their names in a reasonable time frame. I'm not aware of any Canadian examples, but the list of blunders in the US having serious impact on the quality of life and sometimes livelihoods of innocent people who have the misfortune of sharing a name with someone is a gross injustice. Edit: By "clear their names" I am not implying it is their responsibility to prove themselves innocent, it is still the crown's duty to prove them guilty.
  13. There have been worse droughts than that of the "dirty thirties" since but our farmers now know much more so we aren't seeing the same dust bowls as before. And there are several Canadian NGOs who are working in various third world countries helping establish good farming methodologies as well as providing sources of safe drinking water. They are far, far more worthy of charity dollars and/or government funds than the UN is.
  14. If you read the news at all you would know they have that power now. It's called police and armed forces. The only thing they are lacking is constitutional authority o/e but they just don't let little things like that bother them.
  15. I wish I could remember the source but there is a great quote from an ancient Greek who apparently said words to the effect that democracies are inherently doomed in that at some point the electorate will discover they can vote themselves the keys to the government treasury. I think you are seeing that phenomenon to some degree in the US with their Democrats right now.
  16. Yes, I remember a time when the NDP bragged about how their MPs were allowed free votes on all bills. Mind you, that was when they had virtually no MPs.
  17. There are a variety of both private and Canadian government funded agencies working in the third world on these problems. I would much sooner see the monies which would have gone to the UN where most of it is spent on headline grabbing conferences rather than actually providing any help be directed to those efforts.
  18. The Liberals had an easy time when the Conservatives and Reform were splitting the vote. Then with the "merger" the Liberals lost the center-left split to the NDP. I wonder if there are now enough right-centers upset with the Conservatives and left-centers upset with the NDP that the Liberals may be back. It will be interesting. I am again quite disturbed. Ignatief was probably a smart guy but was lacking in the charisma department. Justin has that in spades. And that unfortunately is a big deal in elections today.
  19. The Harper government decided to save some money that was being used for more UN corruption and eye-candy. If it goes to reducing our deficit, home grown ecological work or more graft for politicians, it will still do more good than anything through the UN. At least he has the nerve to act correctly.
  20. There is the other reason the results must be non-binding. There can be all kinds of intentional or innocent shadings of meaning in the wording of the questions.
  21. Back on one of my favorite soap-boxes. Several posters have suggested that the Pro-life MP's are trying to represent their constituents. Do they have polls to back that up? In fact I have no trust at all in any polls. All poll results should now be prefaced with "62% of people who don't have call display or have no life believe that............". So I would love on every civil, provincial and federal ballot there appear a multitude of questions. Death penalty, abortion, immigration and on and on. I am so sick and tired of hearing some politician stand up and say "the majority of Canadians want xyz" when neither myself or any of my friends want that. I could believe that we are out of touch with the country but want some proof. Now I would also insist that the results be non-binding. In fact I would insist that there be a legislated "cooling off period" before actions could be taken on the results of such broad based referenda. Immediately after some particularly gruesome killing pro-death penalty sentiment might surge. Those types of emotional overreactions need to be countered. But I still advocate this system.
  22. I lost my "free" access to technical papers some time ago. Have any of the models been able to handle water vapor yet?
  23. Sad, but true. The problem here as well as Alberta and America is why do fiscal conservatives seem to end up wallowing in generally unpopular socially "conservative" causes? And thus the self-inflicted shooting of feet.
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