ehill27
Short North
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The following is a Columbus Metropolitan Club forum on climate change with retired Navy Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn. In a nutshell, Admiral McGinn discusses the Pentagon's view that climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels are a threat to national security.
I found this line of reasoning to be encouraging, as it has the potential to add some common ground to this currently partisan issue.
Rockmastermike
CORNspiracy HQ
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It's only a partisan issue to those who chose to make it one. The rest of us view these things as problems to be worked on and hopefully solved in some way or another.
Of course the defense department is mostly made up of personnel who are going to be working on these problems no matter who gets elected. Particularly the troubling problem of dependence on foreign fuel sources which are coming under increasing demand pressure. I'm willing to bet that one keeps some of those folks awake nights.
They (and agencies like them) are in the perfect position to examine these kinds of large problems in an honest, pragmatic way with an eye to long term solutions. The politicians from either party, on the other hand, appear to be unwilling to think in timescales much beyond the 24 hour news cycle. That's something they could CHOSE to fix.
rus
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Made me think of stories like this...
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_31/b4141032537895.htm
rus
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If alternate energy is your thing, you might like at least some defense spending:
http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/12/08/49138-army-evaluating-transportable-solar-powered-tents/
J.R. Locke
Weinland Park
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Water. Water. Water.
gramarye
In Exile
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Climate change and dependence on fossil fuels are separable concepts.
A cost-effective way to manufacture synthetic oil from plant material, for example, would free us from dependence on foreign oil but have no guaranteed impact on our carbon footprint, assuming that consumption of the new oil produced roughly comparable carbon emissions to the more conventional kind.
TomOver
Here Now& Beyond
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gramarye wrote >>
Climate change and dependence on fossil fuels are separable concepts.
A cost-effective way to manufacture synthetic oil from plant material, for example, would free us from dependence on foreign oil but have no guaranteed impact on our carbon footprint, assuming that consumption of the new oil produced roughly comparable carbon emissions to the more conventional kind.
Please tell me more about the manufacture of synthetic oil from plant material. What's the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) ?
But that aside, don't the issues of climate change and peak oil overlap ? What about designing settlement patterns that require less driving, and designing built environments that make sense on foot or on a bike ?
How about food systems that involve less transportation and reduced, if not eliminated, usage of petroleum-based and natural gas-based fertilizers and pesticides ?
With both the transportation and food examples, carbon emissions as well as petroleum usage would seem to be reduced.
If there is some petroleum-intensive and carbon-emissions-intensive aspect to walking, bicycling, and organic farming that I am not thinking of, please clue me in.
Sure, as the MORPC Local Foods report points out, hundreds or perhaps thousands of small farms using their own trucks to bring products to market would be less energy-efficient than the distribution system currently used by the mega farms. But I think those are snags that can be worked out.
rus
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TomOver wrote >>
But that aside, don't the issues of climate change and peak oil overlap ? What about designing settlement patterns that require less driving, and designing built environments that make sense on foot or on a bike ?
How about food systems that involve less transportation and reduced, if not eliminated, usage of petroleum-based and natural gas-based fertilizers and pesticides ?
See, that's exactly why I don't give a shit about climate change.
If your "cure" is vegans on bicycles, I'd rather have the disease.
gramarye
In Exile
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TomOver wrote >>
gramarye wrote >>
Climate change and dependence on fossil fuels are separable concepts.
A cost-effective way to manufacture synthetic oil from plant material, for example, would free us from dependence on foreign oil but have no guaranteed impact on our carbon footprint, assuming that consumption of the new oil produced roughly comparable carbon emissions to the more conventional kind.Please tell me more about the manufacture of synthetic oil from plant material. What's the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) ?
Not good enough yet. But that's why I was speaking in the conditional sense (see "would").
But that aside, don't the issues of climate change and peak oil overlap ? What about designing settlement patterns that require less driving, and designing built environments that make sense on foot or on a bike ?
You could design settlement patterns that required and even enforced no driving at all (house arrest for every human being from birth until death) and it would have minimal effects on total atmospheric carbon.
If there is some petroleum-intensive and carbon-emissions-intensive aspect to walking, bicycling, and organic farming that I am not thinking of, please clue me in.
Sure, as the MORPC Local Foods report points out, hundreds or perhaps thousands of small farms using their own trucks to bring products to market would be less energy-efficient than the distribution system currently used by the mega farms. But I think those are snags that can be worked out.
Well, they haven't been worked out yet, but more to the point, it's irrelevant. Organic farming is also not necessarily less carbon-intensive in its own right than industrial farming per unit of output. It uses fewer other chemicals, certainly, but that's another topic.
The only way to reliably reduce total atmospheric carbon in ways that are geologically significant would be complete economic collapse and the systematic elimination of a significant portion of the world's population. Since neither of these are morally tenable, action to mitigate climate change is pointless and proposals for the same are categorically pointless distractions in any serious public policy debate.
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