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For now and that is not true in every instance now. I just built an electric bike. I can go 15-20 mph for 20-25 miles for pennies. (not finished in this pic)
Will this replace my regular transportation? No but for around town it's great. I can throw it in my car and when I get where I am going I can park the car and run this around.
Horses never became obsolete. Many are not able to afford the new technology right off the bat.
That's a pretty cool build but I wouldn't see that as replacing regular transportation, rather just as an alternative to those who don't want to pedal a regular bike.
You use horses as an example but horses don't pollute, they are the most basic form of transportation there is. A better example would be Tesla setting the new standard for automobiles. I am not saying to destroy all of the fossil fueled cars currently out there but new ones should not be built. As there is a high price point the sales would be lower but there would be work arounds if that were the only choice for a new vehicle. Longer options for financing, or perhaps finding less expensive ways to build the automobile. For those that still would not be able to afford them they could continue to drive the fossil fueled cars still on the road until there were finally completely phased out. If an expensive car is your only option people will buy them just as smokers will still buy a pack of cigarettes if the were $20 a pack. They find ways.
That's a pretty cool build but I wouldn't see that as replacing regular transportation, rather just as an alternative to those who don't want to pedal a regular bike.
As I said, it does not replace regular transportation. It's just for around town. I'm not into pedaling 10 miles any more. They make electric motorcycles now. The cost is prohibited for most but the prices will come down. The Chevy Volt will now go over 50 miles on a charge while still giving you the option of gas mode when needed.
Are these the answers? No, but they are milestones along the way. Technology will continue forward. Technology is the answer, not taxes.
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You use horses as an example but horses don't pollute, they are the most basic form of transportation there is. A better example would be Tesla setting the new standard for automobiles. I am not saying to destroy all of the fossil fueled cars currently out there but new ones should not be built. As there is a high price point the sales would be lower but there would be work arounds if that were the only choice for a new vehicle. Longer options for financing, or perhaps finding less expensive ways to build the automobile. For those that still would not be able to afford them they could continue to drive the fossil fueled cars still on the road until there were finally completely phased out. If an expensive car is your only option people will buy them just as smokers will still buy a pack of cigarettes if the were $20 a pack. They find ways.
Markets will work themselves out here. No, people can not afford expensive cars if that was the only option. Nobody has to give the guy making minimum wage a loan for $60k to buy a pack of smokes. Not to mention the infrastructure for this isn't in place yet.
Used Volts in great condition are down to the low teens. More can now afford this option. The technology isn't what the new ones are but it's a start.
I agree that we need to get lobbyists out of the equation.
The same Wall Street players that upended the economy are clamoring to open up a massive market to swap, chop, and bundle carbon derivatives. Sound familiar?
Why does Wall Street want cap and trade? It is not because they care about the environment.
Cap and trade is not the same as carbon tax. They are not used interchangeably as the systems are very different. Additionally, C&T has not been effective at lowering output of CO2 to the same degree that carbon taxes have.
Their entire country is a fraction of the size of the U.S. in population. You pretended that only the U.S. subsidizes things which makes them cheaper than in Canada. You were wrong.
Even when controlling for population size, it is still 2-3 orders of magnitude difference over the same time period. The price in milk is the same order of magnitude.
So, does that mean the world's output of CO2 has declined at all since these taxes were put in place?
Now you are moving the goal posts. We wouldn't only expect that nation, city, locality, whatever to lower its carbon footprint. Not the entire world
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If not (which they haven't), why not?
Because as with any shared resource, you need to build a global response. Please read the tragedy of the commons.
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So, since the population is continuing to grow and more people are moving towards a first world lifestyle (with billions to go), how do you see the increase stopping (not reducing but just no longer increasing)?
Are you talking about CO2? We need to study carbon sequestration, especially iron fertilizing to see if it commercially viable. We need to begin the switch to renewables. We need to put a carbon tax on imported items, in order to make locally produced items more competitive in terms of price. And many more.
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And on another note, since you are the scientist, can you tell us what happens to CO2 that is trapped in the oceans and ice as the temperature increases?
Well as a scientist you are using words that don't make sense.
CO2 is part of the carbon cycle and when it dissolved into the ocean it forms carbonic acid. This is part of the buffering system of the ocean but much of that CO2 will travel through plankton based food webs and either be sequestered eventually as sediment, or remineralize or outgassed back as CO2. Too much CO2 actually shifts the buffering equation to more acidic, which is beginning to happen right now. It also has potentially disastrous consequence, particularly for global oxygen levels.
A smaller portion of the CO2 that is in the ocean is there as a dissolved gas, due to Henry's law we know that dissolved gases do not remain in solution as temperature increases, so we would expect much of the dissolved gas CO2 to be outgassed back to the atmosphere. We know this has happened before in small areas, if it happens on a global scale it could be disastrous.
As for ice, are you talking about CO2 bubbles in ice?
The same arguments were essentially made when scientists were alarming about Lead.
Thankfully the tireless and outstanding work of Clair Cameron Patterson triumphed.
He basically proved that the surface of the earth was recently enveloped by a thin layer of fine particulate Lead as a result of automobiles and industrial pollution.
This lead on the surface cannot have been produced by natural forces.
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Beginning in 1965, with the publication of Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man, Patterson tried to draw public attention to the problem of increased lead levels in the environment and the food chain from lead from industrial sources. Perhaps partly because he was criticizing the experimental methods of other scientists, he encountered strong opposition from recognized experts, such as Robert A. Kehoe.
In his effort to ensure that lead was removed from gasoline (petrol), Patterson fought against the lobbying power of the Ethyl Corporation (which employed Kehoe), against the legacy of Thomas Midgley, Jr. (which included tetraethyllead and chlorofluorocarbons); and against the lead additive industry as a whole. Following Patterson's criticism of the lead industry, he was refused contracts with many research organizations, including the supposedly neutral United States Public Health Service.
In 1971, he was excluded from a National Research Council (NRC) panel on atmospheric lead contamination even though he was then the foremost expert on the subject.[7]
The United States mandated the use of unleaded gasoline to protect catalytic converters in all new cars starting with the 1975 model year,[8] but Patterson's efforts accelerated the phaseout of lead from all standard, consumer, automotive gasoline in the United States by 1986. Lead levels within the blood of Americans are reported to have dropped by up to 80% by the late 1990s.[9]
He then turned his attention to lead in food, for which similar experimental deficiencies had also masked increases. In one study, he showed an increase in lead levels from 0.3 to 1400 ng/g in certain canned fish compared with fresh, whilst the official laboratory had reported an increase of 400 ng/g to 700 ng/g.[10]
He compared the lead, barium, and calcium levels in 1600-year-old Peruvian skeletons and showed a 700- to 1200-fold increase in lead levels in modern human bones, with no comparable changes in the barium and calcium levels.[11]
When you make up stuff about what we do and do not believe you underscore your own ignorance.
I have posted this twice now but apparently this bears repeating.
Yes, the climate is naturally variable. This is called the Milankovitch cycle, and it is due to orbital issues like obliquity, precession, eccentricity, etc. It is completely measurable, and is not responsible for the current climate variation because based on Milankovitch factors, we should be cooling.
uhm the Milankovitch cycle is about 50,000+/- years....
the three parts of the Milankovitch cycles are Eccentricity (100,000 yr cycle)....Axial Tilt ( 41,000 yr cycle).... and Precession (23,000 yr cycle)....together they average out to a 50k yr cycle.....some cycles are much longer...some cycles are shorter
the peak of the last ice age was about 16000-18000 years ago...and we have been warming since...
every warming cycle has taken us to a global average temp in the low to mid 70's F
we still have a lot of warming to do over the next 20-40k years
Cap and trade is not the same as carbon tax. They are not used interchangeably as the systems are very different. Additionally, C&T has not been effective at lowering output of CO2 to the same degree that carbon taxes have.
uhm the Milankovitch cycle is about 50,000+/- years....
the three parts of the Milankovitch cycles are Eccentricity (100,000 yr cycle)....Axial Tilt ( 41,000 yr cycle).... and Precession (23,000 yr cycle)....together they average out to a 50k yr cycle.....some cycles are much longer...some cycles are shorter
the peak of the last ice age was about 16000-18000 years ago...and we have been warming since...
every warming cycle has taken us to a global average temp in the low to mid 70's F
we still have a lot of warming to do over the next 20-40k years
As you mention, the Milankovitch cycle varies widely, including one both large and small scales. But as you leave out, it is also measurable. We can measure our precession, obliquity, etc. and we should be cooling, and certainly not warming on the scale we have seen. It is also important to note that out last cycle of warming, was one of the super cycles which tend to occur at 125-400k year cycles. Even if the general cycle was not cooling, the entire system is still cooling from the super cycle.
This is not a simple sine curve, it has peaks and valleys within the large curves, which would limit its utility except we can measure the factors and the subsequent forcing. We should be in one of the cooling down turns. And in case you were unaware, we typically spend 80% of our time in a cooling cycle vs 20% in a warming. It is not 50/50 as you seem to be implying.
Without free market forces I don't think there's much we can do to stop carbon emissions.
I'm sure a small, upper class city could illegalize fossil fuels, and incentivize renewables, but that's not sustainable among different income classes or industries.
An entire country can do the same, but that would be politically impossible in a large democratic country with a diversity of industries and infrastructure.
Doing so would lower the demand for fossil fuels, which in turn would make them cheaper for developing countries and encourage excessive use.
The only out I see is if we figure out to make CO2 into bricks or something.
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