On Jul 20, 10:41*am, Harry K wrote:
On Jul 19, 7:46*pm, "HeyBub" wrote:

wrote:

I suppose CO2 emissions could be important, but it seems to me, having
a power source that doesn't run out seems pretty strategic to me.
The rest of the page deals with CO2.

I don't know about you, but I LIKE power sources that don't pollute.
I'm willing to pay a little more just for that benefit.

You're presuming that CO2 is a pollutant.

Were it not for CO2, there wouldn't be any plants. With no plants, there
would be no cattle. With no cattle, there'd be no food. We'd starve.

CO2 is poisonous to us in excessive quantities, just as is Oxygen,
Water, etc. *Nature has adjusted to the what was the average CO2
content back before the industrial revolution. *It is now adjusting to
our adding to it and we are not going to like the result.

As to reducing our part in it? *Ain't gonna happen. *Best we can do is
not increase our contribution above what it is today. *Nothing we can
do will reduce it withough totally wrecking industry.







But the real issue is being prepared for the future.

We're hearing all this crazy deficit talk as if we're creating a
problem for our children. *I think using up resources on the only
planet we have is much more important.

We're NOT using up resources. More precisely, we're using resources but
we're accessing more than we're using. Today, there is five times the known
reserves of natural gas than there was just five years ago.

Look up the Simon-Ehrlich wager in which a doom-sayer* wagered $10,000 with
a more pragmatic scientist over whether the scarcity of ten commodities
(picked by Ehrlich) would cost more (and therefore be harder to find) in ten
years. Ehrlich lost.

Availability of resources has zip to do with whether we are depleting
them. *We are. *The supply of any mineral, oil, etc. resource you can
name is finite.

The truth of the matter is that we (humankind) meet every definition
of a parasite. * All take and no give. *Even our funeral practices do
everything possible to keep even our worn out bodies from decomposing
thus denying even that little bit from returning to nature. *The world
would be a much better place without us.

Harry K- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I agree we are depleting resources but the mining for materials and
fossil fuels is two completely different categories. Mineral
resources are not actually being depleted. For the most part all the
elements on the planet are still on the planet. Just because we dig
up some copper, use it for something, and then bury it in a landfill
doesn't reduce the copper. We could dig it back out of that landfill
and use it again. Or we could quit burying it in the landfill and
start recycling it which is more practical than digging it back up.
But who knows, maybe some day our descendants will be setting up mines
where we buried stuff.

Fossil fuel is a energy resource. It is the result of plants
capturing the energy in sunlight and it being turned into
hydrocarbons. Which is the chemical storage of energy. Like a
battery. We are converting that stored energy into heat energy for
the most part. Energy like matter is never lost but after we're
finished, the heat energy contributes to the gradual equilibrium of
the energy state in the universe which makes it of no further use to
us. The issue is that we're converting that stored energy at a
tremediously faster rate than it was stored. Years of our use equals
millions of years of capture. So no matter how good we get at finding
the hydrocarbons we will eventually use them all up. Will that happen
in 50 years or 500 years is debatable but most people would agree the
practical number is somewhere between those two. Bottom line we
really are using up the energy in fossil fuels.

As to the co2, we are also raising the co2 level. That's a fact. The
bydrocarbons were buried in the ground. We're releasing them and
breaking them up and combing the freed carbon with oxygen to produce
co2. Who knows maybe we will be the start of the next cycle that
produces new hydrocarbons for some other lifeform to dig up a couple
hundred million yeasr from now. On the short term the consequences
might not be so good for us.