The American Constitution

[Alan Klein]

1. Any drilling has certain earthquake and oil spill consequences. Fracking with its high pressure techniques more than regular drilling.
2. The Nordstream pipeline is built for natural gas, not oil. Financed 50% by Russia, 50% by EU countries. Same gas as it is now carried by the pipeline through Ukraine.

Les, 1. You know life is full of risk.  We kill 40,000 Americans on the road every year.  But we don;t stop driving.  Same with fracking.  There might be some downstream risk.  But meanwhile, it's providing cheap oil and natural gas, the latter which is replacing filthier coal and oil and reducing pollution.  My community of 1100 homes heats with natural gas.  No stinking oil is allowed.  Less schmutz.  More American oil will lessen the world's reliance on Middle East oil and the need to militarily protect that area.  Maybe we should let Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz and it's oil shipments.  We'll be able to sell more American oil. 
2. Isn;t a pipeline through the Ukraine "safer" to western European countries than one from Russia? 

[LesPalenik]

1. At the speeds I drive, especially on the  Autobahn, I don't put any strain on the earth, so it's earthquake safe.

2. I'm no export in the pipelines. But if the Russians built it to standards of their Sputniks Soyuz vehicles, they should be safe. Almost as good as Toyotas.

[RSL]

2. I'm no export in the pipelines. But if the Russians built it to standards of their Sputniks Soyuz vehicles, they should be safe. Almost as good as Toyotas.

Until they shut off the gas.

[LesPalenik]

That's a good point, but on the other hand, it could open a new market for American-made Tesla batteries.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Until they shut off the gas.

Which the USA would never do?

Cheers,
Bart

[Alan Klein]

Illegal immigration took a hit recently in the US.  The Mexican government has finally agreed to help after a Trump threat of imposing tariffs on their exports to the US.  However, you probably haven;t read about it.  The good news about Mexico helping us decrease illegal immigration into the US will soon fall off the headlines before Trump gets too much credit.  After all, next year is another presidential election and we only want to publish bad news regarding his policies.  In case you haven;t read about it overseas, here is probably the last article you might read about it.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfoflores/mexico-deploying-troops-border-stop-immigrants.

[LesPalenik]

Until they shut off the gas.

As far as I know, the Russian-Ukrainian pipeline was shut off because the Ukrainians stopped paying for gas. Which wouldn't happened with EU.
On second thought, stopping the future gas purchases from Russia could become Germany's secret weapon.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

If I remember correctly, during the worst cold war years, Russian never threatened to cut off gas to Europe, knowing quite well that is the weapon they can only use once.

[Alan Klein]

As far as I know, the Russian-Ukrainian pipeline was shut off because the Ukrainians stopped paying for gas. Which wouldn't happened with EU.
On second thought, stopping the future gas purchases from Russia could become Germany's secret weapon.

I can just see the headlines: "Germany's NATO Forces Pass Out Wool Blankets in Preparation of Shutting Down Gas Pipeline to Russia."

[RSL]

Which the USA would never do?

Cheers,
Bart

Can't quite figure out how the U.S. could do that to a Russian pipe, Bart.

[JoeKitchen]

Fracking, drilling or otherwise, all of those sources are finite.

The sensible thing to do is to create alternatives. The oil folks know this, and some have hedged their futures as moneymakers by investing in alternative ventures. Some see that as nothing but cynical manoeuvring, but I don't agree: they are thinking ahead. The problem is, they are taking too long in the middle ground. There has to be a push to move faster.

China and India are red herrings. I would be highly surprised if China were not beavering away at alternative technologies, and one day coming up with the solutions that those who sat on their thumb will then have to buy from them. Wait, sanctions! That'll fix 'em.

If you are on a sinking ship, you don't stop closing down the bulkheads because some sections of hull are already flooded: you do your damndest to keep the entire structure afloat. You attend to the wet bits if and when you make port. If you just give up, you die.

No, that is just not the case Rob.  Wind and solar farms are increadably inefficient and can never be base load power sources since they ONLY produce energy 10% to, at most, 30% of the time.  So, each and every time a new wind/solar farm is built, typically a coal/oil/gas plant is built in tandem with it.  This is why the coal/oil/gas companies invest in wind and solar; it helps them sell more oil and gas and coal. 

[JoeKitchen]

The problem with wind and solar, outside the fact they’re left-wing icons, is that neither is a method of storing solar energy. Fossil fuels are such a storage method. It’s storage that we need. We need a fuel that’ll let us, like the train they call the City of New Orleans, be gone five hundred miles when the day is done. You can’t do that with an “electric” car. We’ve made amazing progress in battery storage since I was a kid, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared with what we need. The energy’s there in solar, but it’s intermittent. We can forget about wind unless we can come up with a better method of accessing it than the bird blenders we now have. People will only put up with the desecration of our prairies and the killing of birds for so long before they rebel. If we come up with a really good way to store energy we probably can use nuclear to generate it. Somewhere down the line we’ll figure it out.

Storage is the least of the worries!  Production is the biggest. 

A solar or wind farm needs to be 500 times larger then a nuclear power plant to have the potential to generate the same amount of power. 

Being so large, you need cheap land to make it worth wild.  So land is often used far outside of a city, which means you need long range power lines to bring it to market.  They are expensive to build and maintain. 

Wind and solar only produce energy 10 to 30 percent of the time, so you need to build multiple farms, and multiple high transmission power lines, to make up for this. Even so, this does not take away the fact that you may just have a less sunny and windy year.  (It is a false to believe that if it is not sunny then it should be windy and vis versa.  This is not true.) 

Neither wind nor solar is by any means cheap.  It cost a lot to mine the ores and minerals.  It cost a lot to refine them.  It cost a lot to manufacture the panels or wind mills.  It cost a lot to transport them.  You need significantly more concrete, metal, glass, building materials to build these farms just because they need to be 500 times larger in size.  This make the meager energy produce more expensive to make. 

List goes on and on. 

Nuclear is it. 

[LesPalenik]

You need a combination of alternative energy generation and storage.

1. Putting the solar panels of the house roofs and feeding the electrical energy into large batteries in the garage would alleviate (at least partially) the need to carry the energy over long distances.

2. Adding thermal batteries in the backyard could help in cooling and heating the house.

3. More efficient house design and better wall and window insulation would help, too.

The cumulative effect of just these 3 approaches might help a great deal.

[OmerV]

The problem with wind and solar, outside the fact they’re left-wing icons, is that neither is a method of storing solar energy. Fossil fuels are such a storage method. It’s storage that we need. We need a fuel that’ll let us, like the train they call the City of New Orleans, be gone five hundred miles when the day is done. You can’t do that with an “electric” car. We’ve made amazing progress in battery storage since I was a kid, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared with what we need. The energy’s there in solar, but it’s intermittent. We can forget about wind unless we can come up with a better method of accessing it than the bird blenders we now have. People will only put up with the desecration of our prairies and the killing of birds for so long before they rebel. If we come up with a really good way to store energy we probably can use nuclear to generate it. Somewhere down the line we’ll figure it out.

Wind and solar energy is not stored, it’s fed into the power grid to augment what a traditional power plant generates. People with solar panels on their roof get a kind of credit for the amount of energy their panels generate into the grid.

The right is underestimating the understanding by the general public of the need to protect the environment. The devastating floods in New Orleans and Houston had no political preference, and the drought in the Southwest is occurring in red states. There is no avoiding it.

[LesPalenik]

Wind and solar energy is not stored, it’s fed into the power grid to augment what a traditional power plant generates. People with solar panels on their roof get a kind of credit for the amount of energy their panels generate into the grid.

That's the current way of capturing the wind and solar energy. With large batteries, that electricity could be stored locally and only the excess would be fed into the power grid.
 

[Alan Klein]

None of this works on a hot windless dark day or night when maximum electricity is required to operate air conditioning. Only the existing fossil fuel plant could provide that electricity operating at full capacity. So while you could save some consumption of fossil fuels, the cost to maintain and man and operate the full capacity traditional fossil fuel energy plant still exists.

[LesPalenik]

Very true, at least for the foreseeable future. But the dependence on oil and gas could be reduced, and also some of the activities which contribute to global pollution and warming (developing new oil wells, fracking, transport of fuel, etc.). Nothing is absolute in this world, we just get more shades of gray.

   

[jeremyrh]

You mean Londonistan?

Actually the thing about London being not British was from ex-comedian and current tax exile John Cleese. Lindonistan was the work of alt-right blogger and generally lowlife Katie Hopkins. For those not familiar with this pond life she started out by winning Apprentice and then found that she could make a living by writing inflammatory garbage for newspapers.

[jeremyrh]

The problem with wind and solar, outside the fact they’re left-wing icons

Don’t worry, Russ, you can still watch Fox on a solar powered TV.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Don’t worry, Russ, you can still watch Fox on a solar powered TV.

However, to quote one of the 2020 Presidential Candidates:

Democrats can no more turn the clock back to the 1990s, than Republicans can return us back to the 1950's.

Cheers,
Bart