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[LordSlowpoke]

-snip-

Well, Australia tends to have some rather large desert like areas. I'm sure most of it isn't real desert, but well...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

We have a lot of that. Behold Mundi Mundi planes, outskirts of Broken Hill, a days drive from the Ocean, and Adelaide.

So I guess were set for that 'desert near sea' thing. Also, I think a lot of the greenpeace bunch have good intentions, but path to hell and such. Some of them do not really understand how far nuclear power has come. Or I'm just being easy on them because I can relate to a hippie before I can relate to a oil tycoon.

Oh, sorry, I didn't clarify. Greenpeace isn't claiming something may go wrong and blow up. They claim that the use of uranium generates more CO2 than the use of an energetically equal amount of coal. I just want to believe they don't do the research on that one.

[Leafsnail]

Yeeeeah....  Australia really doesn't need this. America? Sure. But when I end up moving to Australia for a few years, I want to be able to say I lived in the most economically free country in the world.

It's potentially quite an economically free measure, actually.  If you make carbon dioxide emissions reflect their actual cost to the environment, things should go better.  Negative externalities, man.

[Virex]

You don't put solar power on farmland. You put it in the middle of the desert or on otherwise unused rooftops. You could meet more 100% of the human populations energy needs with solar power taking up a tiny percentage of the most desolate deserts on earth.

To put that in perspective: At an efficiency of 20%, you'd need the area of Spain to power the world (which is approximately 1/40th of the uninhabited area of the Sahara). The best way to create so much surface area of solar cells is unfortunately not silicon, but polymer solar cells, which have a projected maximum efficiency of 12% (but they're better with indirect sunlight and suffer less from cloud cover then silicon or thin-film ceramic solar cells). The big advantage of polymer solar cells is that they can be printed, much in the same way as newspapers. I can't find any figures right now, but one my professors calculated that if the production of solar cells would match the production of newspapers, it'd take less then two decades to match the world's energy demand.
Also, on the problem of storage and distribution, There are numerous technologies being developed to turn carbon dioxide into fuel. There are also numerous ways to store electrical energy generated at peak generation times for later use. Especially for a solar powered grid that's distributed amongst several production centers in deserts, a slight overcapacity combined with short-term storage, such as SMES or fly-wheel energy storage could be a real possibility.

[G-Flex]

Problem with a "carbon tax": Rich people are likely to be both more capable of affording alternative energy use, and more capable of affording a tax.

[Taricus]

Problem with a "carbon tax": Rich people are likely to be both more capable of affording alternative energy use, and more capable of affording a tax.

That's what income tax is for.

[Sheb]

Yeah, that's really the only problem I have with a carbon tax: like a sale tax it is essentially degressive, meaning poors pay more (as a proportion of their revenues). The best systems would involve giving everyone a fixed amount of carbon permits that they could use or sell. The problem, of course is the same that for standard cap-and-trade scheme: they are much more suceptible to political pressure.

[G-Flex]

Yeah, that's really the only problem I have with a carbon tax: like a sale tax it is essentially degressive, meaning poors pay more (as a proportion of their revenues). The best systems would involve giving everyone a fixed amount of carbon permits that they could use or sell. The problem, of course is the same that for standard cap-and-trade scheme: they are much more suceptible to political pressure.

This is still regressive: The poor would be economically pressured to sell theirs, whereas the rich would be capable of buying however much of it they want. End result: Rich dudes and corporations can afford to pollute as much as they want. The only way this wouldn't be the case is if they're prohibitively expensive to purchase from others, which wouldn't happen, as then the poor would just be even more pressured into selling them.

[Taricus]

That's when you use the army

[Bouchart]

Yeah, that's really the only problem I have with a carbon tax: like a sale tax it is essentially degressive, meaning poors pay more (as a proportion of their revenues). The best systems would involve giving everyone a fixed amount of carbon permits that they could use or sell. The problem, of course is the same that for standard cap-and-trade scheme: they are much more suceptible to political pressure.

It will probably lead to all sorts of crazy derivatives that nobody can value, too.

[Sheb]

G-Flex: The results would be that the rich would have to give money to the poor. Which I call progressive.

As for derivative, well, you can do derivative on about anything nowadays, I don't think adding a new market will change things much.

[breadbocks]

Except we DO have enough data to predict with reasonable accuracy what climate will do going forwards.

I'd just like to step in and say that the above is completely false.

I'm not saying we're causing it, or making it more extreme. I'm saying we have massive amounts of data saying the earth cycles from cold to hot then back again. That is all I was saying with that statement.

[Nadaka]

-snip-

Well, Australia tends to have some rather large desert like areas. I'm sure most of it isn't real desert, but well...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

We have a lot of that. Behold Mundi Mundi planes, outskirts of Broken Hill, a days drive from the Ocean, and Adelaide.

So I guess were set for that 'desert near sea' thing. Also, I think a lot of the greenpeace bunch have good intentions, but path to hell and such. Some of them do not really understand how far nuclear power has come. Or I'm just being easy on them because I can relate to a hippie before I can relate to a oil tycoon.

Oh, sorry, I didn't clarify. Greenpeace isn't claiming something may go wrong and blow up. They claim that the use of uranium generates more CO2 than the use of an energetically equal amount of coal. I just want to believe they don't do the research on that one.

Sure is, if you are retarded and only send the uranium once through. If it wasn't for the non-proliferation laws, nuclear reactors could easilly get 20 to 50 times more power out of their fuel.

On another note: if you were to filter the radioactive material out of coal, you could use it to generate slightly more power than you do by burning the coal directly.

[Virex]

You mean ignoring that the most efficient way to get those elements out of the coal would be by burning them and then filtering out the resulting compounds? (At least I think that's pretty much the only way because pure carbon just won't dissolve no matter what you toss at it)

[mainiac]

About the organization - I forget which one it was specifically (I've been up for 24 hours at this point), it was part of that hacked email scandal. One of the things that came out of that was that some scientists are clearly doing good science on this data and some aren't. I do statistical analysis professionally, and I don't do some of the things that were described in those emails. It's dishonest.  Generally, I try to ignore anyone who makes an absolute statement, because they're almost always guaranteed to be wrong.

The hacked email scandel actually showed that ALL the scientists were acting in an ethical manner and were in no way obscuring the data.  However it took a month for that information to come out by which point everyone had forgotten.

It's a simple formula: Lie, change the subject before people investigate.  Lie again.

It's the heart of the climate change denial strategy.  There is this huge body of mis-information that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but people understand it just on the basis of it's width, not it's depth.

And honestly, you need to explain why it is that 99% of climate scientists would devote their entire careers to spreading lies in order to sustain that whole "scientists lie" argument.  I mean, these people peer review.  It's really, really easy to get published and well paid if you become a denier.  Why do the vast majority of them agree that climate change is happening if it isn't?

[Leafsnail]

I'm quite surprised they only found one email that looked bad.  They hacked out several years worth of emails from this group, and they only found one which could be taken out of context effectively.