A Polluted Future?

[skewbe]

I'm trying to keep some BSers from continually muddying the waters with crap stories about how great they are and their associated invalid conclusions and constantly making excuses for pollution at the moment. I don't make excuses for myself, I am not going to make them for anyone else. We pollute, we need to try to do better is the entire friggin point, and that aint gonna happen by itself.

You've lost any and all cred because:
A. you are not consistent
B. You act on behalf of the status quo in your spare time.
C. You blow your own horn WAAY to much.
D. You cannot acknowledge the simplest of principles.

Have fun talking to yourself.

[psyshack]

The crux of this thread was coal ver. NG for home heating. In certain area's of the country.

So yes, the thread did get way out of hand.

I wouldn't burn coal unless I had to. And yes I can burn some coal if needed in this old house. The fire place in the living room was built just for that task.

There are three problems with coal as I see it. Its dirty, pollutes like crazy and is very hard to control combustion wise.

The dirty part of it concerning mining and transport can be handled with water. That IMO is a huge waste of water.

It pollutes like crazy when burned. It can be controlled. But the cost of scrubbers, cats, monitoring eq. time and labor are staggering. And it's still not as clean as propane or NG.

Concerning the control and combustion of coal. Its a pain in the ***. It has to be at full stoke all the time. Or your polluting like crazy. But your also wasting energy. If you throttle the combustion back. It then gets sooty and dirty on its burn. And is slow to react when one needs all the energy it can provide. It just can't be throttled, modulated or turned off and on. With any ease at all.

NG is cheap here. Propane is not cheap. I wonder sometimes how the folks in the country can afford the crap. And again you are only going to burn so clean with these fuels. But they can be throttled and controlled with ease. With the ease of control one can then extract the flue gas heat. And also integrate other subsystems into the over system with relative ease. So in the long run one can get more bang for the buck. As far as cost are concerned for the fuel. I think others in the country have allowed themselves to be screwed over by the tax man. I know the tax here is a major reason why propane cost so much.

What gets me is why we are not using more wind and solar power? I don't consider myself a activist or greenie weenie. But one as to wonder. The wind always blows here in Oklahoma at some level. Yet we only have one wind farm in the state. The sun shines more than its fair share of the time. So why isn't there more solar?

If we are in the mess many think we are. Why is Vegas and PHX allowed to suck the mountains dry of there water. And why aren't Parabolic mirrors focused on steam generation systems in the southwest to generate electricity? Is it the cost? The politics? Or a faction of the greenies that want to save the desserts and not change there fragile eco system.

Every which way you turn there are the boogy men.

[GeneW]

Originally Posted by skewbe

I'm trying to keep some BSers from continually muddying the waters with crap stories about how great they are and their associated invalid conclusions and constantly making excuses for pollution at the moment. I don't make excuses for myself, I am not going to make them for anyone else. We pollute, we need to try to do better is the entire friggin point, and that aint gonna happen by itself.

You were the one who introduced Statist non-sense into this discussion, Skewbe. When someone objected you were the one who started the divergences into politics. Look in the mirror.

When some of us started to discuss how we do "our bit" you were the one who raised objections. You were the one who polluted the discussion with trite assumptions such as "All businessmen care about is money" or "capitalism exploits people" or any number of other unsubstantiated assumptions that were common wisdom amongst some for many years.

I worked in small businesses, Skewbe. A lot more goes on than turning a buck. Believe it or not, business owners who screw customers and staff do not last long. A "Fair Deal" does count for something, even today.

As I see it, if Al Gore can buy "carbon credits" than my job which generates savings in energy ought to allow me some "slack" too.

Originally Posted by skewbe

You've lost any and all cred because:
A. you are not consistent
B. You act on behalf of the status quo in your spare time.
C. You blow your own horn WAAY to much.
D. You cannot acknowledge the simplest of principles.

Have fun talking to yourself.

Well, so you're going to ignore me? Good. You argue like a child and persist on being a goodthinker.

On the other hand, you've raised some asinine remarks that need addressed here....

I act on "behalf of the status quo"? That's funny..... Why am I here? Why did I buy the most fuel efficient non-hybrid car that Toyota makes? Why didn't I buy another used luxury car and waste more money and gasoline? Why not buy something big like most of my coworkers?

...because I understand that cost of gasoline will be the new "rate limiting" factor in my life. Because I took the time to do my home work.

Blowing my horn? Listen up: Variable Freq Drives save industry hundreds of millions of dollars each year. We reduce pollution dramatically in the process. I qualify them for a living. My hard work does more to reduce pollution than any "Think Globally, Act Locally" hippy type crap accomplishes.

Does my work give me a "right" to pollute? Well, let me put it this way - if Al Gore can purchase "Carbon Credits" to "offset" his mansion in Tennessee, how much "indulgence" does my hard work in industry give me? I save tens of thousands of watts of power and probably many tons of coal just earning a living.


Here are my principles, which I will use to forward what I think is right...

1. Coercion is strong medicine, to be used JUDICIOUSLY. Just as you don't settle an argument by bashing someone's brains out you do not solve problems in the real world by pointing guns at people. When you make a law you are pointing guns at people.

To solve most problems you talk to people. You reason WITH THEM. The Market is reason. The Government is force.

2. Civilization is not NATURAL. Nature is eat or be eaten. It is a jungle out there. Life is not fair. Life is not equitable. Big things eat little things. The 'cycle of life' includes something called the 'food chain'.

Civilization depends upon COMPROMISE. Civilization means that you're going to have SOME pollution. Civilization means that things aren't going to be "Carbon Neutral" or "perfectly planned" or whatever crypto-Authoritarian buzz word is going around today.

Civilization means that each of us has to act like adults. Adults watch out for themselves. Adults accept the consequences of their decisions. Adults don't run off to mommy crying because something bad happened to them.

Civilization depends up allocating scarce resources. Civilization is a matter of costs and benefits.

The most scarce resource is not fossil fuels, raw materials or even food and water, it is people's time.

When you waste people's time with bureaucratic non-sense, you are wasting a scarce resource. You are also showing gross disrespect to them as human beings. You are treating them as livestock. We are not livestock.

You don't have to read what I wrote. You do have to obey the law.

3. People have to stand up for themselves. People who do not stand up for themselves are VICTIMS. VICTIMS get what they deserve in life. People who decide to stop being victims empower themselves.

4. In order to change our world we have each change ourselves. We have to be bigger than we are today. We have to be more subtle and careful.

Most of all, we have to be willing to examine our own assumptions.

Gene

[GeneW]

Originally Posted by psyshack

The crux of this thread was coal ver. NG for home heating. In certain area's of the country.

So yes, the thread did get way out of hand.

I wouldn't burn coal unless I had to. And yes I can burn some coal if needed in this old house. The fire place in the living room was built just for that task.

There are three problems with coal as I see it. Its dirty, pollutes like crazy and is very hard to control combustion wise.

The dirty part of it concerning mining and transport can be handled with water. That IMO is a huge waste of water.

It pollutes like crazy when burned. It can be controlled. But the cost of scrubbers, cats, monitoring eq. time and labor are staggering. And it's still not as clean as propane or NG.

Concerning the control and combustion of coal. Its a pain in the ***. It has to be at full stoke all the time. Or your polluting like crazy. But your also wasting energy. If you throttle the combustion back. It then gets sooty and dirty on its burn. And is slow to react when one needs all the energy it can provide. It just can't be throttled, modulated or turned off and on. With any ease at all.

That's not entirely true, Psyshack. I have at least two friends who burn coal in the old school type boilers.

The way you "throttle back" is to get the coal very hot, into beds of glowing embers.

First the coal must be processed. This is done by ramping up the rate of combustion so that you combust the volatiles. After they are gone you are left with embers that glow orange. A boiler does great with this because the mass of iron and water absorb the excess heat caused by this processing.

These embers tend to stick to one another, forming a "bed".

The bed can be "banked" to allow it burn more slowly. Banking means that you push the embers off to one side, so that they naturally constrict air to the bed. The trick is to reduce the rate of combustion on the outside by limiting surface area that can be exposed to oxygen while keeping the embers hot on the inside so that they don't go out.

Periodically you stir the bed to expose the embers on the inside. These partially burned embers get a chance to combust in turn.

You need not bank the bed. If you flatten it the rate goes up.

You use the ashes to throttle off the flow of air through the supporting grate. This helps to throttle air while preserving the grate from damage.

If you balance it right, and this takes experience, than the amount of soot and junk seen out of the stack is pretty light if at all.

I think part of the reason that you might have trouble accomplishing this in your fireplace is because of energy balance. In one of those big cast iron boilers heat energy is partially balanced. The iron will re-radiate heat back into the bed while transferring some into the water. This helps preserve the bed's integrity.

You also have a way with the boiler to more easily throttle air flow into the bed since air cannot reach the bed from any side but the bottom through the grate, which is often covered with ash. Your fireplace cannot do this.


As for commercial uses.... most of the power around here is generated with coal. Those people have scubbers to catch the NOx and SOx. They make building materials, turns out that calcium sulfate makes a fine substitute for plaster. Don't know if turns a profit of not.

Originally Posted by psyshack

NG is cheap here. Propane is not cheap. I wonder sometimes how the folks in the country can afford the crap. And again you are only going to burn so clean with these fuels. But they can be throttled and controlled with ease. With the ease of control one can then extract the flue gas heat. And also integrate other subsystems into the over system with relative ease. So in the long run one can get more bang for the buck. As far as cost are concerned for the fuel. I think others in the country have allowed themselves to be screwed over by the tax man. I know the tax here is a major reason why propane cost so much.

What gets me is why we are not using more wind and solar power? I don't consider myself a activist or greenie weenie. But one as to wonder. The wind always blows here in Oklahoma at some level. Yet we only have one wind farm in the state. The sun shines more than its fair share of the time. So why isn't there more solar?

If we are in the mess many think we are. Why is Vegas and PHX allowed to suck the mountains dry of there water. And why aren't Parabolic mirrors focused on steam generation systems in the southwest to generate electricity? Is it the cost? The politics? Or a faction of the greenies that want to save the desserts and not change there fragile eco system.

Every which way you turn there are the boogy men.

I did the numbers on putting photovoltaics on the place. We'd see a "payoff" in about eight or nine years without any tax subsidy, assuming bright and sunny days. That was for just the cells.

Power storage and processing raised the costs but not by much. I can homebrew some of that so we cut cost estimates there. I even considered using a water tank for storing power but gave it up because of the mass of the water needed for the job.

We were not talking great shakes on power either. As I recall it was three or four kilowatts at peak with a sufficient number of cells to cover the roof. More a gesture than anything substantial given how cloudy it is around here.

Trouble with "giving power back to the grid" is that the power isn't necessarily "clean". Photovoltaics generate DC. To make AC you either use an inverter or a generator/motor combo. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. The inverter has no moving parts but the power contains harmonics that drives computers and other stuff crazy. The motor generator combo can be dangerous because you are dealing with live power on the utility end and they do wear out over time.

I don't have enough land here to grow biomass. I also won't go through the hoops with the ATF to get a distillery license for ethanol. The approved "adulterants" list are nasty chemicals. I'd be happy if they let us regular folk just add gasoline to our storage tanks, that'd work, but gas isn't on the ATF list so if you get caught it's like moonshining. Kind of crazy but that's the law - which is why I was so hard on poor Skewbe. Poor thing isn't out here where the rubber meets the road it seems.

I'd love to do biodiesel. Be fun to build an tiny little pilot deal to process cooking oils and garbage into fuel. I don't own one and probaably won't for a long time.

Wind? Up in the hills there is a good bit of wind. Again, it's not consistent. There is also the icing issue. Probably a way to jerk the blades so that they shed ice straight down.

I'm sure that engineers don't like ice either since it unbalances the blades and strains the bearings.

I think amortization for wind is a dozen years. After that you're making a profit. Hopefully long enough before you have to fix it. I'm sure that they're not trivial to repair. Which is why Congress has to give the wind mill owners subsidies.

Again, the power generation isn't great and I have to wonder about the little ones that people put up themselves. More symbolism over substance....


As for taxes on propane and heating oil.... yeap. The ones who pay are the poor folks who live in trailers. Those of us in houses have a bit more latitude given that we burn NG. For now.


In the long run the Fossil fuels will be gone or driven up in price because people elsewhere will compete with us for it. The dirty little secret is that Greens are ahead of their time, just for the wrong reasons.

Gene

[GasSavers_James]

Coal is going to be the one source of energy the U.S. has plenty of in the future. Oil, NG, Propane are bound to go up substantially.

Gene, the problem you miss with coal and mercury is that it builds up in fatty tissue of animals that humans consume. its not just breathing flue gasses, its in the water and the fish and the milk of cows, and breast milk. Small quantities are harmful.

Personally i heat with wood. it is far from perfect. it is dirty at startup, requires stoking, cleaning, splitting, cutting. But it comes from right here. Our heat comes from our cookstove, which also does the cooking, baking and some of the water heating. I am not certain, but it seems that heating with wood is fairly sustainable around here. I am just cutting trees that block my southern exposure, and have more firewood than i need for the next couple of years. I wouldn't ask anyone to stay cold instead of using coal. But skewbe has a point that insulation should be considered first. As many of you know, a lot can be gained by improved efficiency.
I am doing off grid solar power here, and wouldnt say its perfect. There is a lot of lead in those batteries! It also requires management, which i find fun. I can say one thing about it: no moving parts. The panels are 25 years old and still produce over 90% of their rated wattage. That is the main reason windmills haven't taken off. They break and wear out and then are very expensive to fix, especially on a residential scale.

I think govt. regulation has probably caused as much trouble as gain, pollution wise. I am worried where they are going with the ethanol thing.

Al Gore is a complete hypocrite! Did you notice he was driving a cadillac in the movie? Naturally I wonder what his motivation is. Does he own the company that sells carbon credits?

Agreed clinton and bush are pretty similar...more similar than the media would like to tell us.

Yes be careful sealing up your house too tightly, especially if it is made from materials that offgas. Insulation and window coverings help tremendously.

And yes I have gone back to the earth, but am not just gathering berries...as you can see i am typing on the computer right now.

I agree that we shouldn't have others tell us exactly what to do, I would prefer a govt that helped start projects that were beneficial to all...taking the best of socialism, without the topdown control or lack of ownership.

[GeneW]

Originally Posted by James

Gene, the problem you miss with coal and mercury is that it builds up in fatty tissue of animals that humans consume. its not just breathing flue gasses, its in the water and the fish and the milk of cows, and breast milk. Small quantities are harmful.

We know that mercury is eliminated from the body, very slowly.

We also know that ecosystems can tolerate and "neutralize" some poisons. That is well known too.

The devil is in the details. How much, for how long?

Assuming the worst, or the best, is not how you run things.

So I do agree that further study is required. Where I drew the line was that the Clean Air Act of 1990 was modified by Court order to include mercury from coal fired plants. I don't think the Courts, Sierra Club and WWF have any business doing the work that Congress should be doing but will not do.

I'd also like to know if the mercury burden from coal fired power plants in our food is any greater than the naturally occurring mercury in seafood?

Originally Posted by James

Personally i heat with wood. it is far from perfect. it is dirty at startup, requires stoking, cleaning, splitting, cutting. But it comes from right here. Our heat comes from our cookstove, which also does the cooking, baking and some of the water heating. I am not certain, but it seems that heating with wood is fairly sustainable around here. I am just cutting trees that block my southern exposure, and have more firewood than i need for the next couple of years. I wouldn't ask anyone to stay cold instead of using coal. But skewbe has a point that insulation should be considered first. As many of you know, a lot can be gained by improved efficiency.

Wood is nice. Most of us can't use it because we lack the proper stoves. Fireplaces tend to be less than ideal in efficiency.

I've considered "smartening" up my central heating system. Installing dampers into the ductwork so that certain rooms get heated preferentially while others are left "colder". Also would like to add a "soft start" to the furnace motor. As gas grows more expensive these are not bad measures.

Since I am a renter and my landlord is in love with the wood siding I can't insulate. I do plastic over the windows, install weather stripping and other common sense measures.

Originally Posted by James

I am doing off grid solar power here, and wouldnt say its perfect. There is a lot of lead in those batteries! It also requires management, which i find fun. I can say one thing about it: no moving parts. The panels are 25 years old and still produce over 90% of their rated wattage. That is the main reason windmills haven't taken off. They break and wear out and then are very expensive to fix, especially on a residential scale.

How much power are you getting, James?

Originally Posted by James

I think govt. regulation has probably caused as much trouble as gain, pollution wise. I am worried where they are going with the ethanol thing.

What bothers me about regulation is the coercion, and the reaction it generates. I have a problem with regulations that are sold as good for everyone but really benefit small groups. Other regulations are symbolism over substance - they're meant to gratify some people while hurting others but do not accomplish much of anything. It's like the government is selling off rights to the highest bidder.

Then we have regulations that discourage growth or change.

Nobody wants pollution, except those who want to spend nothing on their processes. We have a right to breathe clean air.

Where I draw the line is how clean is "clean". I also draw the line when people abuse regulation for other purposes, like discouraging competitors or to wage some sort of political issue.

Ethanol? I think the way it's being done now is Corporate welfare. If we did things like gather grass clippings and organic waste and processed them ourselves at home that would make sense. However we have the ATF to contend with, seeing as how they have a mission to collect taxes on what people can drink. I don't begrudge them their jobs, though I wish Congress could streamline things so we could do this at home.

Originally Posted by James

Al Gore is a complete hypocrite! Did you notice he was driving a cadillac in the movie? Naturally I wonder what his motivation is. Does he own the company that sells carbon credits?

I don't comment on any movie Al has made. The excerpts convinced me that "Inconvenient Truth" was up there with "Triumph of the Will".

I have read "Earth in the Balance" and felt that on the whole it was propaganda. Reminded me a lot of Jeremy Rifkin's older books, and I suspect that it was modeled on Rifkin's works or was ghost written for Gore by Rifkin.

Some of the graphs remind me of "lying with statistics". On the whole it was embarrassing to think that this man was almost President for eight years and then ran for the job for eight more years.

Did get me thinking about heat ponds though, but that's common sense to use a fluid with a greater heat capacity than air.

What is Al up to? I don't have the faintest idea. I have read that he's worth $100 million dollars now, and he wasn't that well to do in the 1990s when he had Occidental stock and other monies. Probably wants to "make a change" and add some to his pocket too.

Originally Posted by James

Agreed clinton and bush are pretty similar...more similar than the media would like to tell us.

Yes be careful sealing up your house too tightly, especially if it is made from materials that offgas. Insulation and window coverings help tremendously.

And yes I have gone back to the earth, but am not just gathering berries...as you can see i am typing on the computer right now.

I agree that we shouldn't have others tell us exactly what to do, I would prefer a govt that helped start projects that were beneficial to all...taking the best of socialism, without the topdown control or lack of ownership.

I support basic research. I complained to my Congress person when funding for the Langley Research Center was curtailed. Same with other gov't labs. Other folks might claim that government labs displace science done by private industry and universities. I think it's a mix, really.

Would be nice if scientists were not punished or rewarded for making certain claims, like in "anthropogenic global warming", though maybe we are changing the climate? I don't claim to know, though I am highly skeptical of the sorts of computer modeling being used right now. I would have been hammered by my Profs if I made the sorts of claims that these people make with the kind of "We can't disclose" source code they've been using.

The proposed solutions are not being sold to the public honestly. We are being lied to about the costs of "remediating global warming".

I personally feel that the global warming issue is close to a scam, meant to fleece taxpayers. Resources needed for critical issues like water, waste disposal and other issues that will become more critical in the future are being squandered on glorified weather forecasting.

There are a lot of things that the average person could do. It's annoying to me that there aren't a few tax credits floating around to make that choice easier for some of us. Seeing as how tax credits are being given away for many less worthy purposes.

Gene

[GasSavers_James]

The solar power setup we have generates 300 watts under full sun. so a sunny day gives us 1.5 KWH (20cents of power) a day. Most residential systems are much larger, ours is more of the cabin size. we have two deep cycle lead acid batteries we got for free that only have about 40% capacity compared to new ones. We power about 4 lights, radio, computer, fan, battery charger, and vaccuum, when its sunny. No fridge, we have a root cellar which works except in the middle of summer, when everything is fresh from the garden anyway.

as far as mercury goes, you are right, no one knows exactly how much the body can take, or can excrete. my guess is it depends on diet, weight, sex, age, etc. I would like govt to keep regulating this because it affects people's health. They do need to figure out accurate limits. I dont like that my pregnant wife can't eat many fish I catch in lakes around here (according to govt). I know that so much energy is being wasted to heat giant homes where no one is even there most of the day. In Ithaca, two trainloads of coal are burned per day at the power plant.
Mercury in the sea is naturally occurring to a certain extent, but the levels have been increasing, especially high up on the food chain. A pregnant woman is only supposed to eat 2 servings of tuna per month. I don't want to be coerced to be more vegetarian because of mercury. I love seafood and milk cheese and butter. I want to be able to eat these items from local pastures, lakes with out an unsafe level of mercury in their flesh/milk.
I believe in freedom, but dont believe in freedom to pollute in unlimited quantities.
I wish the government would encourage u.s. manufacturers to produce an efficient car. They know how to do it. It involves aerodynamics, light weight, and an efficient engine. They designed aero cars and never really sold them: GM Impact (give me one with a gas or diesel engine!), ford probe concept, and several others. I believe that part of the reason GM is in the dumps right now is because they have not made an efficient simple low cost car. If they made something with better gas milage than civic and yaris for the same cost it would sell like mad right now. the profit would not be as high per vehicle, but many more vehicles would be produced and sold.

[GasSavers_James]

Yes They have really taken the global warming thing too far. There are so many other environmental/energy problems that get covered up by this. The media just loves it because it is so fun to cover. I think the reason why it has suddenly showed up in the media is because many of the elite have switched their investments into ethanol/solar panels/wind energy/carbon trading. Just a guess, hard to really know. But the smart consumer will figure out how to use the least of all of these items, to avoid being enslaved by the costs. I dont claim to know how much the globe is warming due to human interference, but to be on the safe side I conserve everything. Part of this is just me being cheap.

I am lucky now not to be renting. I have never owned my own place before, but can really do all of the energy efficiency things i dream of. The place is pretty well set up though with passive solar heating thru south facing windows. It is old though and has lots of gaps in the walls, keeping me busy. I cant say I did it all myself, I needed a loan from my parents to make it happen. It was really nice to heat with wood this winter. I have never done a whole winter that way. It cost 20$ in chainsaw supplies, 120$ in wood that I bought to get started, and time. That got me through the winter in cold central ny, heated much of my water for baths and cooked most of my food. The propane bill was 26$ for about 4 months for extra water heating and cooking.

[GasSavers_James]

One last thing:
Gene-your work in energy effiency is highly appreciated.

[GeneW]

Originally Posted by James

One last thing: Gene-your work in energy effiency is highly appreciated.

Thank you. I am sorry that I am actively discouraged from revealing where I work. My employer is a major producer of VFDs but does not appreciate employees "representing" themselves as official spokespersons for the company.

The VFD takes power and converts it into a controlled form which will manage an electric motor. The VFD permits the user to directly control the motor using our device, so that maximal efficiency at all speeds is obtained without the need for gears, transmissions or other energy robbing devices. Best of all, since "line starts" consume huge amounts of current, the VFD permits our users to economize on power distribution systems, saving scarce natural resources, money, time and allows them to go in novel directions.

The work itself is fascinating, taking a device which is carefully hand crafted, checking it out, proving it in stages, until finally we burn it in. We are highly motivated to make sure that only our best leaves the factory to go out into the world. If the customer desires special testing or certification we are ready comply with various agencies to ensure total confidence and complete customer satisfaction.

We service many industries and it is a special joy to me that we are saving scarce resources while empowering companies to take risks in new ventures. All of which serves an energy hungry world.

I don't really think I'm entitled to burn more fuel or waste because of my occupation. I was teasing Skewbe about Al Gore's indulgences. Like you, James, I am "cheap".

I am also aware of my peers overseas, and of billions of people who will never enjoy the kind of life I live now. I do not take what I have for granted. Nobody should. We should each do our bit to spare resources for others while growing our economy and building a civilization of respect for others instead of self indulgence and childish narcissism.

Gene