Biodiesel vs Petrol - which is cleaner?

[castros_bro]

It is more complex than that, for every statement going "this is the way to do it"  there are many reasons why it is not.  The use of natural gas predates all the shouting about global warming so the infra structure to use it (in the UK modded seals on town gas supply etc) was already in place. In places like the US of A  (Russia)   NG is used as it comes from wells drilled in the ground concentrated above a reservoir so easy to control with one big tap and pipe not 500,000 small bio-methane plants in small communities.

 

There a small Biogas to electric plant near Gatwick which uses the manure and plant waste from local farms (all less then 1.5 km away) and puts electric into the grid, we spent time with the owner/one worker/entrepreneur he was employed building biogas plants before building his own and now struggling with bankruptcy as the price of electricity means he'd be better financially investing in a savings account. The renewables tariff which encouraged uneconomical plant has done just that.  Elsewhere (Germany) local combined heat and power get a better deal so hot water is (in the flat I had) piped to the local buildings - domestic and industrial. Large bodigesters need to be fed continuously and the waste products removed, this is a logistic problem, partly due to the bulk of material needed as in energy per cubic meter of feedstock and compared to coal or oil or piped gas  so the biogas "free" energy is not free. Small, labour intensive plants work as there is a small distance between the source of bio and the consumption and then the waste is reused in the same local place.

 

 

This sort of thing

 

[Junkman]

The real problem is this:

 

Human_population_growth_from_1800_to_2000.png

 

Utterly unsustainable.

 

But when Hitler and Stalin tried to address the issue, the whole fucking world was pissed off.

[Guest Hooli]

It's the whole world fucking that's the issue!

[forddeliveryboy]

And the way we're going, burying our heads in the sand, there'll be chaos and carnage when the hundreds of millions trying to escape flooded lowlands start hammering on doors and borders.

 

The Fukushima catastrophe (and it is one despite the low premature death toll as yet, though neatly avoided by much of the Western World's mainstream media) is only the first of many as coastal nukes go pop all round the world; we may be able to cope with mass population movements but add in mass sickness (which you could argue we already have in the UK) and organised state systems won't have the reserves to cope.

 

I have faith in future generations, but the changes will need to be immense. We're going to have to ween ourselves out of this consumerist culture - at some point people will realise it doesn't really make things better, rather like excess alcohol it's a disease which eats away at our humanity.

[Fumbler]

Perhaps this is needed to shock some sense into people when it all collapses and we all have to start again... with Carl Benz's engine designed to run on peanut oil!

[Junkman]

And the way we're going, burying our heads in the sand, there'll be chaos and carnage when the hundreds of millions trying to escape flooded lowlands start hammering on doors and borders.

 

The Fukushima catastrophe (and it is one despite the low premature death toll as yet, though neatly avoided by much of the Western World's mainstream media) is only the first of many as coastal nukes go pop all round the world; we may be able to cope with mass population movements but add in mass sickness (which you could argue we already have in the UK) and organised state systems won't have the reserves to cope.

 

I have faith in future generations, but the changes will need to be immense. We're going to have to ween ourselves out of this consumerist culture - at some point people will realise it doesn't really make things better, rather like excess alcohol it's a disease which eats away at our humanity.

 

I take the liberty to point out that none of this was caused by the motorcar.

Unless you count reclining seats, that is, but that would be nit picking.

Besides, excess alcohol consumption is actually quite a pleasant form of birth control.

[somewhatfoolish]

The Fukushima catastrophe (and it is one despite the low premature death toll as yet, though neatly avoided by much of the Western World's mainstream media) is only the first of many as coastal nukes go pop all round the world; we may be able to cope with mass population movements but add in mass sickness (which you could argue we already have in the UK) and organised state systems won't have the reserves to cope.

 

Twenty thousand people died from the quake and tsunami, none have died as a result of being exposed to radiation from Fukushima. Mass screening of children found no contamination and no increase in thyroid abnormalities. There's not going to be a death toll, not from that anyway, just hundreds of people who have died from the stress of being evacuated unnecessarily from areas with no significant radiological hazard by a government stampeded into counterproductive action by hysterical media reaction, and the subsequent longterm shutdown of undamaged nuclear power stations in favour of filling the air with pollution from coal and gas power. Someone coined the term radiophobia for this behaviour, it seems appropriate. Fukushima is definitely a disaster and there are plenty of guilty parties, TepCo's senior execs and the government first among them, but the earthquake and tsunami dwarf it in magnitude.

[forddeliveryboy]

Fukushima is definitely a disaster and there are plenty of guilty parties, TepCo's senior execs and the government first among them, but the earthquake and tsunami dwarf it in magnitude.

 

Oh absolutely, beyond the tsunami and earthquake the most casualties to date were caused by a total lack of information in the days after the event and the infirm being abandoned to die.

 

But focusing on the lack of human fatalities from radiation exposure, to date, is missing the point a little. How can it not be a catastrophe when the cost of clearing up and compensation alone is officially around $100 billion, up to now? Lost manufacturing due to power shortages must have cost them a few yen, too.

 

Then there's the humongous radiation leak to ground water and into the sea, something which is going to continue for many, many years yet. There's tens of thousands of times the energy in the fuel than in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even machines break after an hour or two anywhere near it, the radiation is so powerful.

 

Sheer luck dictated the wind was blowing offshore at the time, fingers crossed Japanese parents will be spared a lot of the agony the Ukrainians have been through, and are still.

 

 

Radiation damage to your DNA lasts generations, so a grandchild may be born with defects decades after exposure of one of its grandparents.

[Talbot]

I take the liberty to point out that none of this was caused by the motorcar.

Given that on a global scale it really makes very little difference whether fossil fuel is burned in a car engine, a boat engine, an aircraft engine or an electricity generation station, I'm not sure what relevance that has.

 

Yes, there are localised air quality issues in the vicinity of the combustion process (cruise ship deck air being more polluted than a city street.. that one amazed me) but fiddling around with which fuel to use or where and when it can be burned really is like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

 

This graph from XKCD (and hence is reasonably reliable and researched) is frightening:

 

 

Essentially we need to stop burning Coal, Oil and Natural Gas immediately. And stop making Concrete (staggeringly bad from an emissions point of view) and stop making plastics (although stopping using oil will do that).

 

And don't get me started on Nuclear. The very first Nuclear reactors in the UK (Windscale Piles 1 and 2) are still being de-comissioned. Quite how we justify building new ones when we still don't really know how to de-commission old ones, or have any real clue as to what to do with the waste is beyond me.

 

It's in discussions like these that it makes me ashamed of my profession and what we've done to the planet.

 

Edit: Bollocks. Uploading that image has killed the quality. Have a link to the original:

 

https://xkcd.com/1732/