I'm not sure how critical it is at this juncture, especially not with it's risks and costs to the environment.
How much plastic you think we’re making out of wind these days?
I fucking wish we could get off this goddamned oily teat, but there is no way it’s happening overnight. Even if there wasn’t massive industry resistance to adopting clean energy sources, it’s gunna take a decade or more before we can cut this infrastructure off.
I’m not advocating for these pipelines, btw. I supported the NODAPL movement a lot, donated a bunch of money to organizers and documentarians I knew in the region who helped fight against it.
I also happen to have a lot of family in the industry and have had a fucking ton of these conversations about this shit, so it makes me a bit of a realist who knee jerks instinctively when I see something this fucking awful happen and the response is a room full of people pointing and laughing like they had better ideas.
Have we tried raising prices to curb use
Yeah that’ll show them billionaire CEOs who’s boss!
Or maybe that’ll just fuck all the working class who rely on an infrastructure designed around fossil fuels.
You do that and then literally every single good you purchase goes up in price.
The way I see it, this happens with every path that involves not building the pipeline. We're the ones that use oil and plastic
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
0
Options
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
Like I said... got any alternatives?
0
Options
HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
Drive less. Elect politicians not in the pocket of Big Oil. Buy less oil-based products. Eat the rich.
Rip the bandaid off early and see what happens. Everything else probably requires yachtloads of R&D money that would also raise consumer prices.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
i don't mean to pick on you but i find the whole "well do you have a better idea?" rhetoric kinda exhausting at this point
of course i don't have a better idea - i haven't gone to school for this, i haven't spent years of my life testing things to come up with a future sustainable model
but like, to pull up an example of another thread on the forums right now, i also don't have a solution for changing the landscape of the patriarchy to stop men from sexually assaulting women, and no one's positing that people lambasting the way of the world offer solutions
sometimes we can just spit at the way the world works
They could promote alternate energy sources as a better idea.
Maybe building refineries at the source instead of shipping crude across the country via a pipe.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
0
Options
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
I get that, for sure.
I just felt like having a conversation that was more than just doing the whole Nelson Muntz “haw-haw” thing.
Shit is dire. I don’t have a better solution either. Solar is dropping in price drastically. That’s encouraging. There’s been big leaps forward in wave generation and wind power. New polymers are being discovered and invented all the time, and hopefully in the next thirty years we can start creating circular economies that can reuse materials and use additive manufacturing to create a lot of products locally that are traditionally shipped across the planet every day.
There’s cool bright lights on the horizon. But we aren’t there yet, and as shitty as this is, there are really no better alternatives than pipelines. I mean, trains? Fucking yeeeeeesh that’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
thinking about this and the difficulty of changing things makes me utterly despair
+1
Options
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
You know what I’d invent if I was a billionaire?
Machines that could float around the Pacific gyre, collecting micro plastics and converting them into filament that could be converted into 3d printed massive rafts for collection and recycling.
I just felt like having a conversation that was more than just doing the whole Nelson Muntz “haw-haw” thing.
Shit is dire. I don’t have a better solution either. Solar is dropping in price drastically. That’s encouraging. There’s been big leaps forward in wave generation and wind power. New polymers are being discovered and invented all the time, and hopefully in the next thirty years we can start creating circular economies that can reuse materials and use additive manufacturing to create a lot of products locally that are traditionally shipped across the planet every day.
There’s cool bright lights on the horizon. But we aren’t there yet, and as shitty as this is, there are really no better alternatives than pipelines. I mean, trains? Fucking yeeeeeesh that’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Sure, but also because you don't have a better solution, a lot of the conversation is just someone saying "i dunno, X?" and you saying "well that wouldn't work" :P
Like I said I don't mean to pick on you because I'm sure it came from a genuine place, but it's real easy for "what's your idea?" to cause just as much conversational stagnation as a "fuckin' morons" circle jerk. And I don't mean to seem like I'm tone policing or anything either. I just see it shutting down conversation because it winds up being employed casually often enough that it makes me bristle, and so I make posts like these to try and draw attention to the fact that it very easily becomes a conversation stifler, even if I don't have much to add to the conversation to begin with. It's very easy to just circlejerk a fatalist doomsay in times like these.
i don't mean to pick on you but i find the whole "well do you have a better idea?" rhetoric kinda exhausting at this point
of course i don't have a better idea - i haven't gone to school for this, i haven't spent years of my life testing things to come up with a future sustainable model
but like, to pull up an example of another thread on the forums right now, i also don't have a solution for changing the landscape of the patriarchy to stop men from sexually assaulting women, and no one's positing that people lambasting the way of the world offer solutions
sometimes we can just spit at the way the world works
I 100% get this, but there isn't even an accepted definition of what 'ripping the bandaid' looks like. If we all agree to not use any fossil fuels or petrochemical products tomorrow our society cannot function, at all. Not even if we seized all of the oil companies' assets, and massively subsidized alternative energies. It's a social, logistical, and technological problem on top of an economical and political one. That's not an excuse to do nothing, or a justification for the many ways petrochemical companies harm people and societies, but it's an indication of the scope of the issue.
Having said that, I do believe the best way forward for society is to move off of petrochemical products as fast as possible, with significant government intervention to make that possible. The logistical and technological problems associated with that makes even at that sort of pace something we could not achieve comprehensively for at least a couple of decades.
Which means that in the mean time we still need to move oil from one place to another. I think the way that government decides where the oil travels, and especially the regulations governing that flow is terribly insufficient, but we still need it to happen if we want a society that resembles our current one. We either need pipelines or trains to move this stuff in bulk, and both options suck. But we need to actually hold the companies doing this to a higher standard (or maybe just nationalize all that shit if it's too expensive to do properly)
Gotta preface this post with that I work in the industry.
I was personally opposed to this pipeline (which isn't DAPL by the way, it's a different one) because it's a tar sands pipeline and all the crude is just being exported immediately. We're not even using it. It's basically an excuse for Canada to put the environmental impact of the pipeline on others, as they won't be refining or dealing with the transport risks of the worst oil on the planet that we really shouldn't even be considering using. Obama tried to block it, but it got approved once Trump came into office. The fact that they had a spill like before they're even done building the damn thing implies their engineers and operators suck or that more likely their management is cutting corners to rush installation since it's years behind after all the permit delays.
DAPL sucks because getting moved from near Bismarck to instead cut through reservations was racist NIMBYism bullshit.
Despite this spill it's still less dangerous and uses way less energy to use pipelines than to transport oil via truck or rail. But in general we should stop relying so heavily on them.
I hope to be the last generation to be fully dependent on these fossil fuels and to work myself out of the job by the time I'm done. But unfortunately if we want to have the standard of living we currently have, we gotta keep using oil and natural gas for the time being while we work on the alternatives. And it's not like switching to electric is gonna be some sort of immediate environmental cure. We will reduce emissions (which is good and needs to happen) but we will have to strip mine deposits in the western US to get enough materials for batteries capable of powering the new cars and trucks and keeping power loads balanced when wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't out. I think this is preferable to burning fossil fuels but it's not perfect. Hopefully Tesla will continue to succeed so that it pushes other companies to really get into the electric car game and gets us to build out the infrastructure to start actually moving toward electric.
There's also no escaping that plastics, chemicals, and medicine are also all made out of oil and natural gas, so even when we end the need for gasoline we're still gonna be pumping oil. Much less oil, but it's still going to happen.
But then like, fuck, man. Was there ever an environmental impact study done before the pipeline was constructed to give us a predictive estimation of damage to the surrounding area, cleanup length or anything?
+3
Options
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
I just felt like having a conversation that was more than just doing the whole Nelson Muntz “haw-haw” thing.
Shit is dire. I don’t have a better solution either. Solar is dropping in price drastically. That’s encouraging. There’s been big leaps forward in wave generation and wind power. New polymers are being discovered and invented all the time, and hopefully in the next thirty years we can start creating circular economies that can reuse materials and use additive manufacturing to create a lot of products locally that are traditionally shipped across the planet every day.
There’s cool bright lights on the horizon. But we aren’t there yet, and as shitty as this is, there are really no better alternatives than pipelines. I mean, trains? Fucking yeeeeeesh that’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Sure, but also because you don't have a better solution, a lot of the conversation is just someone saying "i dunno, X?" and you saying "well that wouldn't work" :P
Like I said I don't mean to pick on you because I'm sure it came from a genuine place, but it's real easy for "what's your idea?" to cause just as much conversational stagnation as a "fuckin' morons" circle jerk. And I don't mean to seem like I'm tone policing or anything either. I just see it shutting down conversation because it winds up being employed casually often enough that it makes me bristle, and so I make posts like these to try and draw attention to the fact that it very easily becomes a conversation stifler, even if I don't have much to add to the conversation to begin with. It's very easy to just circlejerk a fatalist doomsay in times like these.
That’s fair, I can cop to that. Wasn’t meant to shut shit down as much as just make a hard left turn from the circlejerk of superiority-pretending, and was intended playfully to spark more conversation, so my bad if it came off otherwise.
Was there ever an environmental impact study done before the pipeline was constructed to give us a predictive estimation of damage to the surrounding area, cleanup length or anything?
I guarantee you there was. For years. The permits for these pipelines take fucking forever, and there are tons of studies that occur for every foot of pipe laid. I know a good number of the folks that do them, actually.
+2
Options
ReginaldWhen I am Pres., I will createthe Department of ______Registered Userregular
I hope indigenous tribes sue the fuck out of transcanada and win billions. I also hope that that deters further shoddy construction, because pipelines are still going to be built, but they need to be built better. We live in a very, very imperfect world.
I just felt like having a conversation that was more than just doing the whole Nelson Muntz “haw-haw” thing.
Shit is dire. I don’t have a better solution either. Solar is dropping in price drastically. That’s encouraging. There’s been big leaps forward in wave generation and wind power. New polymers are being discovered and invented all the time, and hopefully in the next thirty years we can start creating circular economies that can reuse materials and use additive manufacturing to create a lot of products locally that are traditionally shipped across the planet every day.
There’s cool bright lights on the horizon. But we aren’t there yet, and as shitty as this is, there are really no better alternatives than pipelines. I mean, trains? Fucking yeeeeeesh that’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Pipelines are the safest per unit way to move hydrocarbons, however other transport solutions have lower ceilings on what diasters happen even if the likelihood is higher.
More in importantly pipelines in the us are laid out with minimal capital outlay and profit maximisation in mind. They are not coordinated well, and not sited to minimise environmental impact. Pipelines for liquid transport are a utility and really should be centrally planned like some countries do it. America also skips on inspections like whoa.
'yes pipelines' and '*this* pipeline is well dumb' are not incompatible opinions
Keep in mind that I have an engineering background but not a sustainable-renewable energy one, so a lot of this is based on what I've read in articles or heard secondhand from friends in solar or gas - folks like rhylith can correct me if I'm off-base here
But phasing out the need for pipelines involves transitioning from oil so it isn't our primary energy source. If I remember correctly, Obama helped to nudge forward by lowering costs of researching and putting to market solar energy. The costs of development and sales of SRE sources are dropping as they become easier and more cost-efficient to manufacture and install, which makes any changes legally that Trump and co. attempt to pursue more of a stop-gap measure now than one that will revive industries like coal. So hopefully between that, the unlikelihood of oil to remain profitable in the long run and more accessibility for green energy will help to taper a lot of our usage out
There are ways that common people can help to reduce reliance too, by supporting the development of green technology and keeping a carbon footprint in mind when you can make adjustments to your personal life without sacrificing your livelihood
I'd also suggest donating to or volunteering for groups like Engineers Without Borders, if you have concerns about issues like Maui's diesel reliance mentioned earlier. Different chapters focus on resolving different issues for developing countries, including basic infrastructure and water treatment. I wouldn't be surprised if they have projects in the pipeline directly related to more efficient power generation for impoverished communities.
I hope indigenous tribes sue the fuck out of transcanada and win billions. I also hope that that deters further shoddy construction, because pipelines are still going to be built, but they need to be built better. We live in a very, very imperfect world.
Wrong pipeline. This spill was not on a reservation. The op is misleading because this is not the Dakota Access pipeline, but rather a pipeline that goes though South Dakota.
More likely it’ll be whichever farmer’s land just became unusable for x years getting woefully too little cash.
I don't disagree with anything else in that post.
rhylith on
+3
Options
MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
edited November 2017
whew so this is huge and right now completely directed at @Rankenphile, but I tried to make it universal and I don't want you to think I didn't read every word and I don't want you to think I'm trying to tear you down or anything like that.
I’m genuinely not trying to play devils advocate here, but posing a question — what alternative did they really have to this pipeline that would have been preferable?
That's fair and it's acceptable to play Devil's Advocate to try to find the weak points in an argument so we can perfect it. Here's my responses to your (again, totally reasonable, unless you listen to the answer, ignore it, and keep asking them) questions:
Not shipping oil means all kinds of fucked things for the way our economy is structured. Fuel prices and cost of goods could skyrocket, which inevitably target the poor and most vulnerable.
Moving it by other means poses far more cost, risk and often environmental impact. Pipelines suck but they’re the safest option we’ve got, that I’m aware of.
Sure, given current oil production runs and the existing demand for them, pipelines are the best method of transport, and shutting down pipelines carrying oil currently in our supply would be foolish as they'll be carried by truck or train instead, which is more environmentally destructive.
However, in the case of Keystone, the oil we're talking about almost certainly would not be strip mined out of the tar sands in Alberta in the absence of the pipeline. Besides being more dangerous, trucking and rail-shipping oil is also more expensive than piping it, and with the extraordinary cost of extraction at this particular site, it's not economical to produce unless it can be exported directly to US refineries through a pipeline. This is not a pipeline built to take over from less safe forms of transport, it's being built to enable new production using uniquely environmentally destructive extraction techniques. They're trying to increase total supply, at a time when the total volume of proven reserves already represents far more climate-forcing emissions than the planet can stand and remain inside of 2 degrees C of warming.
This was one of the highest-tech pipelines in existence. Something monumental fucked up to release a spill like this, and it’s a fucking tragedy on top of a pile of tragedies this shitty fucking year has been heaping on non-stop, but this wasn’t because a bunch of rich folks decided “hahaha fuck the poor”. This was literally the smartest minds in the industry using the best option available to provide a service critical to the way the world currently works.
I know they'd love to see themselves this way, but there are absolutely other options for delivering that energy. Oil is not at historic highs right now, suggesting that there's also not a dire supply problem crying out for tar sands to fix it.
This is rich people with access to a raw resource to which they have license because of the largesse of the Canadian government trying their damnedest to find an economical way to exploit it, which they have been unable to do economically up until recently.
Incidentally, due to the uniquely abrasive nature of the crude recovered from tar sands, pipelines which carry it must be state of the art because they are corroded at rates so much higher than pipelines carrying more traditional, more highly refined products.
How much plastic you think we’re making out of wind these days?
I fucking wish we could get off this goddamned oily teat, but there is no way it’s happening overnight. Even if there wasn’t massive industry resistance to adopting clean energy sources, it’s gunna take a decade or more before we can cut this infrastructure off.
I’m not advocating for these pipelines, btw. I supported the NODAPL movement a lot, donated a bunch of money to organizers and documentarians I knew in the region who helped fight against it.
I also happen to have a lot of family in the industry and have had a fucking ton of these conversations about this shit, so it makes me a bit of a realist who knee jerks instinctively when I see something this fucking awful happen and the response is a room full of people pointing and laughing like they had better ideas.
A reasonable question! The answer is obviously a negative number, as we require plastics to produce most wind turbines. (Although not a lot) The real issue is we need tons of energy and a bunch of water to produce the steel that goes into the turbine, which is something I'm going to get back into in a second in relationship to one of your next questions. Edit: I may have confused a different comment with one of yours, but this was obviously unreasonable. Check out the post below.
First though, it should be noted that petroleum isn't actually the main source of plastic inputs, natural gas is. And, again, we've got a ton (or, like, millions of tons) of petroleum coming in from existing sources which haven't (so far as I'm aware) been shown to be insufficient to the task of producing enough plastic for our society to live off of. Given the amount of plastic waste in our society, in fact, I'm struggling to see why we're worried on that front. If supply were to drop off artificially, presumably that would improve the value of recycling and reclamation, which ought to offset the final price increase by a significant %.
There are non-fossil-fuel plastic alternatives, and you're right that they're going to take more years to develop into productizable materials. If you want to accelerate their adoption, of course, raising the price of petroleum and natural gas-derived products would do wonders.
I mean — last time I was aware of figures, the island of Maui still got a massive, massive majority of its electricity from goddamned diesel. If they can’t be harvesting the sun, in the place where the sun COMES FROM, then how the hell are we gunna flip that switch for the Midwest overnight?
Fun story, it's actually harder to run a grid off majority solar in Hawaii than it is in the contiguous 48, largely due to the very small geographic area which means weather affects pretty much the entire grid simultaneously. There's also local building code issues, the generally low engineering quality of structures in Hawaii (only affects rooftop solar), and the (so far) relative immaturity of storage technology.
Yeah that’ll show them billionaire CEOs who’s boss!
Or maybe that’ll just fuck all the working class who rely on an infrastructure designed around fossil fuels.
You do that and then literally every single good you purchase goes up in price.
This is another important consideration in any attempt to craft an anti-climate change policy, and you're raising a serious concern that probably sank a lot of the early proposals.
These days, there are two really "serious" proposals for comprehensively limiting climate forcing emissions: a tax and dividend scheme, and a cap and trade (or cap and auction) scheme. In both, the proposal is to levy a tax or fee on the production of materials which causes climate change, and in both, the proceeds of that fee is dividended back to the taxpayers as a write-off or as cash. In other words, individuals will be taxed if their consumption patterns tend to be higher than average, and they receive a tax credit if their consumption is less than the average. Given the propensity of low-income individuals to rely on public transport over cars and apartments over individual homes, and the propensity of upper middle class and wealthy individuals to overspend on those items proportionally to their income, it ends up being a generally progressive taxation scheme.
It is absolutely fair to ask all of these questions, but I'm hoping in the future you'll recognize that even if the average environmentalist is not able to talk about them in comprehensive macroeconomic terms, and even if our most brilliant engineers and policy drafters aren't able to articulate a politically acceptable solution, the answers do in fact exist.
Machines that could float around the Pacific gyre, collecting micro plastics and converting them into filament that could be converted into 3d printed massive rafts for collection and recycling.
MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
I do want to address the very frequent whataboutism that infects discussions of alternative energy. There is a popular tendency to question what the environmental impacts of an ostensibly "green" energy solution in fact are. There is a similar but equally unfounded tendency to assume there are no negative impacts of tech like solar or wind, when they have obvious environmental impacts.
But any honest accounting between the relative impacts of solar and wind versus oil, natural gas, and fucking coal ends up with a major fucking win in the solar and wind categories.
And this is me doing the planet-wide, strategic, non-intersectional thing. If we're talking about local environmental justice, holy shit we have so much more to talk about.
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
Now that’s a quality answer.
Thanks Monroe.
+15
Options
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
For real though, we should talk about local manufacturing and the viability of potential circular economies in local geographic scales. Additive manufacturing and materials recycling technologies are right on the verge of being able to allow folks to start taking their own waste products (plastics, wood, metals, etc, not poop, although there’s actually some fascinating technologies in that regard as well), turn them cheaply into filament and run them through 3d printers capable of multi-nozzle and multi-material layering that could really change the way we create and consume products. Reducing global shipping would take down fuel consumptions to a drastic degree, and create all kinds of incredible opportunities for local innovation.
I dream of a city powered by solar and wind, with solar roads that melt snow and ice into the local ecosystem. A place where homes have solar roofs, and businesses have solar pants up top. Nothing is perfect but we could do a lot, at least locally,
of course I live in Indiana, a state that actually makes it very hard, borderline illegal in some counties, to move to green energy.
Very dumb question because I am stupid, would building a solar farm in the desert work for the surrounding area?
I dream of a city powered by solar and wind, with solar roads that melt snow and ice into the local ecosystem. A place where homes have solar roofs, and businesses have solar pants up top. Nothing is perfect but we could do a lot, at least locally,
of course I live in Indiana, a state that actually makes it very hard, borderline illegal in some counties, to move to green energy.
Very dumb question because I am stupid, would building a solar farm in the desert work for the surrounding area?
I mean, you can have a big solar farm and distribute the power to quite far away using power lines, if that's what you are asking. I'm not sure of the effective range of power transportation, but I'm pretty sure it's not any different from forms of distributing power from a centralised station.
There are a bunch of places where they have huge solar farms that work the same as a power station.
I think the issue is ultimately oil destroys gaskets, and I think they use gaskets frequently in pipelines to join two segments together? Leaking is inevitable with pretty much every gasket?
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
If you made me Supreme ruler I would probably over a number of years force close all the oil companies and offer free or highly subsidized retraining for the employees to other fields in the energy sector while providing similar incentives to the clean energy industries like wind and solar.
I think the issue is ultimately oil destroys gaskets, and I think they use gaskets frequently in pipelines to join two segments together? Leaking is inevitable with pretty much every gasket?
I think the issue is ultimately oil destroys gaskets, and I think they use gaskets frequently in pipelines to join two segments together? Leaking is inevitable with pretty much every gasket?
Make a better system
But, the cost to implement vs the cost of spill cleanups.
Fun fact: the guillotine was originally meant to be a humane way to execute people, since prior methods of beheading required swinging an axe and often missing the target.
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
Posts
But that's just a
Don's sunglasses
Pipe dream
This is why I like you.
The way I see it, this happens with every path that involves not building the pipeline. We're the ones that use oil and plastic
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Rip the bandaid off early and see what happens. Everything else probably requires yachtloads of R&D money that would also raise consumer prices.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
of course i don't have a better idea - i haven't gone to school for this, i haven't spent years of my life testing things to come up with a future sustainable model
but like, to pull up an example of another thread on the forums right now, i also don't have a solution for changing the landscape of the patriarchy to stop men from sexually assaulting women, and no one's positing that people lambasting the way of the world offer solutions
sometimes we can just spit at the way the world works
Maybe building refineries at the source instead of shipping crude across the country via a pipe.
I just felt like having a conversation that was more than just doing the whole Nelson Muntz “haw-haw” thing.
Shit is dire. I don’t have a better solution either. Solar is dropping in price drastically. That’s encouraging. There’s been big leaps forward in wave generation and wind power. New polymers are being discovered and invented all the time, and hopefully in the next thirty years we can start creating circular economies that can reuse materials and use additive manufacturing to create a lot of products locally that are traditionally shipped across the planet every day.
There’s cool bright lights on the horizon. But we aren’t there yet, and as shitty as this is, there are really no better alternatives than pipelines. I mean, trains? Fucking yeeeeeesh that’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Machines that could float around the Pacific gyre, collecting micro plastics and converting them into filament that could be converted into 3d printed massive rafts for collection and recycling.
That’d be rad.
Sure, but also because you don't have a better solution, a lot of the conversation is just someone saying "i dunno, X?" and you saying "well that wouldn't work" :P
Like I said I don't mean to pick on you because I'm sure it came from a genuine place, but it's real easy for "what's your idea?" to cause just as much conversational stagnation as a "fuckin' morons" circle jerk. And I don't mean to seem like I'm tone policing or anything either. I just see it shutting down conversation because it winds up being employed casually often enough that it makes me bristle, and so I make posts like these to try and draw attention to the fact that it very easily becomes a conversation stifler, even if I don't have much to add to the conversation to begin with. It's very easy to just circlejerk a fatalist doomsay in times like these.
I 100% get this, but there isn't even an accepted definition of what 'ripping the bandaid' looks like. If we all agree to not use any fossil fuels or petrochemical products tomorrow our society cannot function, at all. Not even if we seized all of the oil companies' assets, and massively subsidized alternative energies. It's a social, logistical, and technological problem on top of an economical and political one. That's not an excuse to do nothing, or a justification for the many ways petrochemical companies harm people and societies, but it's an indication of the scope of the issue.
Having said that, I do believe the best way forward for society is to move off of petrochemical products as fast as possible, with significant government intervention to make that possible. The logistical and technological problems associated with that makes even at that sort of pace something we could not achieve comprehensively for at least a couple of decades.
Which means that in the mean time we still need to move oil from one place to another. I think the way that government decides where the oil travels, and especially the regulations governing that flow is terribly insufficient, but we still need it to happen if we want a society that resembles our current one. We either need pipelines or trains to move this stuff in bulk, and both options suck. But we need to actually hold the companies doing this to a higher standard (or maybe just nationalize all that shit if it's too expensive to do properly)
I was personally opposed to this pipeline (which isn't DAPL by the way, it's a different one) because it's a tar sands pipeline and all the crude is just being exported immediately. We're not even using it. It's basically an excuse for Canada to put the environmental impact of the pipeline on others, as they won't be refining or dealing with the transport risks of the worst oil on the planet that we really shouldn't even be considering using. Obama tried to block it, but it got approved once Trump came into office. The fact that they had a spill like before they're even done building the damn thing implies their engineers and operators suck or that more likely their management is cutting corners to rush installation since it's years behind after all the permit delays.
DAPL sucks because getting moved from near Bismarck to instead cut through reservations was racist NIMBYism bullshit.
Despite this spill it's still less dangerous and uses way less energy to use pipelines than to transport oil via truck or rail. But in general we should stop relying so heavily on them.
I hope to be the last generation to be fully dependent on these fossil fuels and to work myself out of the job by the time I'm done. But unfortunately if we want to have the standard of living we currently have, we gotta keep using oil and natural gas for the time being while we work on the alternatives. And it's not like switching to electric is gonna be some sort of immediate environmental cure. We will reduce emissions (which is good and needs to happen) but we will have to strip mine deposits in the western US to get enough materials for batteries capable of powering the new cars and trucks and keeping power loads balanced when wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't out. I think this is preferable to burning fossil fuels but it's not perfect. Hopefully Tesla will continue to succeed so that it pushes other companies to really get into the electric car game and gets us to build out the infrastructure to start actually moving toward electric.
There's also no escaping that plastics, chemicals, and medicine are also all made out of oil and natural gas, so even when we end the need for gasoline we're still gonna be pumping oil. Much less oil, but it's still going to happen.
But then like, fuck, man. Was there ever an environmental impact study done before the pipeline was constructed to give us a predictive estimation of damage to the surrounding area, cleanup length or anything?
That’s fair, I can cop to that. Wasn’t meant to shut shit down as much as just make a hard left turn from the circlejerk of superiority-pretending, and was intended playfully to spark more conversation, so my bad if it came off otherwise.
I guarantee you there was. For years. The permits for these pipelines take fucking forever, and there are tons of studies that occur for every foot of pipe laid. I know a good number of the folks that do them, actually.
Pipelines are the safest per unit way to move hydrocarbons, however other transport solutions have lower ceilings on what diasters happen even if the likelihood is higher.
More in importantly pipelines in the us are laid out with minimal capital outlay and profit maximisation in mind. They are not coordinated well, and not sited to minimise environmental impact. Pipelines for liquid transport are a utility and really should be centrally planned like some countries do it. America also skips on inspections like whoa.
'yes pipelines' and '*this* pipeline is well dumb' are not incompatible opinions
But phasing out the need for pipelines involves transitioning from oil so it isn't our primary energy source. If I remember correctly, Obama helped to nudge forward by lowering costs of researching and putting to market solar energy. The costs of development and sales of SRE sources are dropping as they become easier and more cost-efficient to manufacture and install, which makes any changes legally that Trump and co. attempt to pursue more of a stop-gap measure now than one that will revive industries like coal. So hopefully between that, the unlikelihood of oil to remain profitable in the long run and more accessibility for green energy will help to taper a lot of our usage out
There are ways that common people can help to reduce reliance too, by supporting the development of green technology and keeping a carbon footprint in mind when you can make adjustments to your personal life without sacrificing your livelihood
I'd also suggest donating to or volunteering for groups like Engineers Without Borders, if you have concerns about issues like Maui's diesel reliance mentioned earlier. Different chapters focus on resolving different issues for developing countries, including basic infrastructure and water treatment. I wouldn't be surprised if they have projects in the pipeline directly related to more efficient power generation for impoverished communities.
3DS Friend Code: 0216-0898-6512
Switch Friend Code: SW-7437-1538-7786
Wrong pipeline. This spill was not on a reservation. The op is misleading because this is not the Dakota Access pipeline, but rather a pipeline that goes though South Dakota.
More likely it’ll be whichever farmer’s land just became unusable for x years getting woefully too little cash.
I don't disagree with anything else in that post.
That's fair and it's acceptable to play Devil's Advocate to try to find the weak points in an argument so we can perfect it. Here's my responses to your (again, totally reasonable, unless you listen to the answer, ignore it, and keep asking them) questions:
Sure, given current oil production runs and the existing demand for them, pipelines are the best method of transport, and shutting down pipelines carrying oil currently in our supply would be foolish as they'll be carried by truck or train instead, which is more environmentally destructive.
However, in the case of Keystone, the oil we're talking about almost certainly would not be strip mined out of the tar sands in Alberta in the absence of the pipeline. Besides being more dangerous, trucking and rail-shipping oil is also more expensive than piping it, and with the extraordinary cost of extraction at this particular site, it's not economical to produce unless it can be exported directly to US refineries through a pipeline. This is not a pipeline built to take over from less safe forms of transport, it's being built to enable new production using uniquely environmentally destructive extraction techniques. They're trying to increase total supply, at a time when the total volume of proven reserves already represents far more climate-forcing emissions than the planet can stand and remain inside of 2 degrees C of warming.
I know they'd love to see themselves this way, but there are absolutely other options for delivering that energy. Oil is not at historic highs right now, suggesting that there's also not a dire supply problem crying out for tar sands to fix it.
This is rich people with access to a raw resource to which they have license because of the largesse of the Canadian government trying their damnedest to find an economical way to exploit it, which they have been unable to do economically up until recently.
Incidentally, due to the uniquely abrasive nature of the crude recovered from tar sands, pipelines which carry it must be state of the art because they are corroded at rates so much higher than pipelines carrying more traditional, more highly refined products.
A reasonable question! The answer is obviously a negative number, as we require plastics to produce most wind turbines. (Although not a lot) The real issue is we need tons of energy and a bunch of water to produce the steel that goes into the turbine, which is something I'm going to get back into in a second in relationship to one of your next questions. Edit: I may have confused a different comment with one of yours, but this was obviously unreasonable. Check out the post below.
First though, it should be noted that petroleum isn't actually the main source of plastic inputs, natural gas is. And, again, we've got a ton (or, like, millions of tons) of petroleum coming in from existing sources which haven't (so far as I'm aware) been shown to be insufficient to the task of producing enough plastic for our society to live off of. Given the amount of plastic waste in our society, in fact, I'm struggling to see why we're worried on that front. If supply were to drop off artificially, presumably that would improve the value of recycling and reclamation, which ought to offset the final price increase by a significant %.
There are non-fossil-fuel plastic alternatives, and you're right that they're going to take more years to develop into productizable materials. If you want to accelerate their adoption, of course, raising the price of petroleum and natural gas-derived products would do wonders.
Fun story, it's actually harder to run a grid off majority solar in Hawaii than it is in the contiguous 48, largely due to the very small geographic area which means weather affects pretty much the entire grid simultaneously. There's also local building code issues, the generally low engineering quality of structures in Hawaii (only affects rooftop solar), and the (so far) relative immaturity of storage technology.
This is another important consideration in any attempt to craft an anti-climate change policy, and you're raising a serious concern that probably sank a lot of the early proposals.
These days, there are two really "serious" proposals for comprehensively limiting climate forcing emissions: a tax and dividend scheme, and a cap and trade (or cap and auction) scheme. In both, the proposal is to levy a tax or fee on the production of materials which causes climate change, and in both, the proceeds of that fee is dividended back to the taxpayers as a write-off or as cash. In other words, individuals will be taxed if their consumption patterns tend to be higher than average, and they receive a tax credit if their consumption is less than the average. Given the propensity of low-income individuals to rely on public transport over cars and apartments over individual homes, and the propensity of upper middle class and wealthy individuals to overspend on those items proportionally to their income, it ends up being a generally progressive taxation scheme.
It is absolutely fair to ask all of these questions, but I'm hoping in the future you'll recognize that even if the average environmentalist is not able to talk about them in comprehensive macroeconomic terms, and even if our most brilliant engineers and policy drafters aren't able to articulate a politically acceptable solution, the answers do in fact exist.
You're not named Ted Faro are you?
But any honest accounting between the relative impacts of solar and wind versus oil, natural gas, and fucking coal ends up with a major fucking win in the solar and wind categories.
And this is me doing the planet-wide, strategic, non-intersectional thing. If we're talking about local environmental justice, holy shit we have so much more to talk about.
Thanks Monroe.
of course I live in Indiana, a state that actually makes it very hard, borderline illegal in some counties, to move to green energy.
Very dumb question because I am stupid, would building a solar farm in the desert work for the surrounding area?
I mean, you can have a big solar farm and distribute the power to quite far away using power lines, if that's what you are asking. I'm not sure of the effective range of power transportation, but I'm pretty sure it's not any different from forms of distributing power from a centralised station.
There are a bunch of places where they have huge solar farms that work the same as a power station.
Steam // Secret Satan
I think the issue is ultimately oil destroys gaskets, and I think they use gaskets frequently in pipelines to join two segments together? Leaking is inevitable with pretty much every gasket?
Make a better system
But, the cost to implement vs the cost of spill cleanups.
Well let's not get too tied down in specifics.
An arm and a leg if you use it wrong.