Originally Posted by AlanE (Post 20033)

There are so many deep water drilling platforms because the high cost of extracting that oil is still less than the market price of oil and so there is profit to be made.

Originally Posted by Xringer (Post 19624)

New prepper TV Show: “Doomsday Prepper” | ModernSurvivalOnline.com


Is it my imagination? Or does it seem like there's a lot more interest
in Doomsday Prepping during the last 2 or 3 years??

Originally Posted by AlanE (Post 20023)

The following wouldn't be taking place if solar energy was as efficient as claimed. From Slate Magazine:



This directly contradicts your claim that solar power can be had for 1/4 to 1/2 the cost of fossil-fuel generated power.

More highlights:



Oops for you. I guess that you made the mistake of taking the reciprocal - Solar isn't one fourth as expensive as fossil, it's four times as expensive.



This speaks to the point I made upthread - paying more for a product or service than one actually needs to pay is a form of inefficiency and when this inefficiency infects an entire economy, then there are profound ripples effects which touch all manner of things, such as competitiveness, job growth, wage growth, economic growth, social spending, deficit spending, etc.



Here's the boondoggle of "green jobs" that environmentalists have been tripping on - again, inefficiency with respect to opportunity costs. Faith and wishful thinking are very bad foundations for public policy, especially when they are anti-empirical with respect to their claims.

Originally Posted by Solar (Post 20049)

well theres this whole war with iran thing going, republicans and defense contractors are drooling over it

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard (Post 20081)

I notice the vacuum solar hot water collector on the roof. At least they are getting all their hot water carbon free.




There is no "they" -- only us.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard (Post 20078)

Alan that is a straw man argument. Reality and facts are what they are. Science is the way we humans are working to understand the universe around us. Climate science is interrelated to almost all other fields of science, and the peer review process is the same for all science.

You and I are not qualified to criticize brain surgeons, or astrophysicists, or oceanographers, and we are certainly not able to dismiss the conclusions of all the IPCC scientists. They are telling us about reality and just like if astrophysicists were telling us about an asteroid on a collision course with earth -- we ignore them at our peril.

Originally Posted by AlanE (Post 19960)

Underwater oil? Yeah, right. Look, your threshold on credulity is not some universal benchmark on what is possible.



Look around you, most people don't care because they'd rather have coal energy and 1.) a job and 2.) cheaper electricity to power their ipods, cell phones, plasma tvs, etc than do without all the gadgets and lower their electrical usage. China is building a huge number of new coal plants even though they know full well that unfiltered coal emissions are polluting. Why are they doing this? They've made the informed trade-off between environmental concerns and economic well-being.



This is simply pleading to irrational emotion. I could point to many aspects of your life and nitpick about what YOU'RE doing which will leave the world in worse shape. That effort would come up with loads more examples if I started applying my own idiosyncratic standards to your life. For instance, here's an example of how I can twist your particulars into a no win scenario by applying idiosyncratic rules, as you're doing above. Do you have one child? You're leaving the world in worse shape by only having one child for you and your wife are going to be drawing pensions that have to be paid by extracting money from the working careers of society's children and by only having one child your pensions can't be paid by his earnings thus making the world worse off for everyone else. Do you have more than 2 children? Now you're contributing to overpopulation thus increasing the marginal deprivation of future citizens.

If you want to live in an energy deprived present-day, then there is nothing stopping you. Why are you participating on this forum for your participation requires a.) electricity to power your computer and the internet infrastructure and b.) it requires a pollution emitting, and energy consuming, industrial infrastructure to produce all of the components of the computer, so your participation in cyberspace is making the world worse off for future generations.

Clearly you're not living your life in a manner which meets MY standards of making the world better for future generations, so you really have no business preaching to everyone else that they should live their lives by YOUR standards so as to make the world better for future generations.



Have you look at the embodied energy and the EROEI of a silicon solar cell or a steel windmill blade? The point is that the same considerations apply to renewable energy technologies just like they apply to fuel-sourced energy technologies. The differences are in the margins and those differences come with significant trade-offs. Renewable energy is not some religious holy water which cures all that ails us.



Look out on your street. Perhaps you have a gravel lined water ditch nearby. Go and grow some carrots in that free gravel ditch. Now compare the effort of trying to grow FREE carrots in a 10 foot deep field of baseball sized boulders to the effort of buying the carrots in a supermarket. Which is a more efficient use of your time and resources? The "free" carrots or the purchased carrots? The same principle applies to all this "free energy." All that free energy hitting Flin Flon, Manitoba, up near Hudson's Bay, doesn't do much good for the residents there because it's too irregular and too infrequent, to be put to much use. All that free energy that is hitting Phoenix, Arizona does a resident no good if they don't have the capital resources to buy solar collectors and the real estate to situate the collectors upon. In both cases, but for different reasons, these folks are better off paying for energy than collecting it for "FREE."

The fact that sunlight or wind is "Free" is not the principal driving criteria in the energy use calculations people, corporations, governments and society have to make.



This whole position is a religious position. It starts with the axiom that humans MUST exist as part of nature. Because you treat it as an axiom you don't question it. How to explain the astronauts who live on the ISS? How to explain sailors who live in submarines for months at a time? These environments are apart from the natural world.

There is an alternative to your religious viewpoint and that is that man controls and manages nature through the power of intelligence. That too is an axiomatic position.

My point here is that you spouting off religious viewpoints doesn't make your case strong it just highlights to us that you hold religious viewpoints that are immune from reason and alternative ways of seeing things. Further, the thing about religious viewpoints like yours is that there are always alternative religious viewpoints, opinions that are immune from challenge because they're held on the basis of faith rather than reason, so your own particular faith-based religious viewpoint is not something that is universally acknowledged.

Originally Posted by Solar (Post 20091)

alan e the new source for global warming information, pfft

youre probably another douche blogger wanna be working for those polluters up in canada. gah stupid trolls

Originally Posted by AlanE (Post 20094)

This wouldn't be a picture of you, would it?

http://images.cheezburger.com/comple...5485179679.jpg



1.) You obviously care because you get very emotional about responding to my posts. Look, I understand, lot's of people get all steamed up when someone challenges their religious beliefs.

2.) Help a dude out - you add little to no value to a dialog by simply vomiting forth the claim "This is stupid" so why not instead actually explain your position on why what I wrote is stupid. That way I can learn from your wisdom and all the other people reading this thread can have their knowledge-base enriched by your careful refutation of my points.

HINT: Shouting "Blasphemerer" won't really count as a careful refutation.

Originally Posted by solar (Post 20095)

nobody cares about your longwinded hot air, especially that one post, what like one person here read it? You earn yourself ignore points way to easily is all. By sounding like another one of these religious zealouts that is automatically labeled as crazy by us sane people. Is jesus gonna freeze your nuts off? How does god feel about global warming? If anything you wackjobs are so maligned that you dont even understand that if there was a god, and there is. That everything to the t what the democrats do legislatively and are supposed to represent are of catholic/christian value. And to pollute and destroy mother nature is to curse yourself to the hell where you sinful bastards oil company republican tea party hicks belong. Hey, why dont you go start a war?

Originally Posted by AlanE (Post 19987)

Here's the problem when guys like you go fishing for supporting evidence put out by environmentalists - you present yourself as knowing jack about business and accounting. The vast majority of the tax breaks and subsidies that oil companies receive are simply regular depreciation allowances available to all business but environmental lobbyists classify these accounting expenses as special gifts from the taxpayer when these same depreciation allowances are also available to every single renewable energy company.

Here is an explanation:

The largest tax break at issue is a tax credit passed in 2005, which is available to all U.S. manufacturers. Oil and gas companies qualify for that credit, so they will likely deduct somewhere in the neighborhood of $18.3 billion from their tax bill over the next 10 years. Note that this isn't really an "oil subsidy"; it's a manufacturing subsidy that oil and gas companies--along with many other companies--enjoy.

Your environmentalist "think tanks" are more akin to propaganda mills when they purposely obfuscate facts and twist them to advance their narrative.

If we stuck with the propaganda that infects the fevered swamps of environmentalist-land we'd have to reconcile the fact that solar companies, windmill companies, tidal power companies, biofuel companies, etc are all receiving "oil subsidies" due to their manufacturing activities.

Secondly, there are provisions in the tax code which seek to encourage US domiciled oil companies to explore and develop outside of the US, provisions such as the Foreign Tax Credit, which your own source even notes:

The largest of these, the Foreign Tax Credit, applies to the overseas production of oil through an obscure provision of the Tax Code, which allows energy companies to claim a tax credit for payments that would normally receive less-beneficial tax treatment.

The Foreign Tax Credit is NOT AVAILABLE to US oil companies who drill and process the oil in the US. No subsidy.

Again, when you understand what is going on you see that the choice for legislators here is to a.) do nothing and put US oil companies at a competitive disadvantage to their foreign counterparts thus letting foreign companies develop non-US oil fields and sell the oil to the US or b.) make some provision for US oil companies to drill overseas and level the playing field with foreign oil companies and thus put US oil companies into the game, collect tax revenue at a reduced rate on income that wouldn't have been earned otherwise, and create some US-based jobs. It should also be noted that when foreign oil companies operate in the US they have to play on a level field with US oil companies. So the tax credit seeks to do the same thing for US oil companies when they operate outside the US.

Thirdly, to pick and choose one's facts in order to advance an argument while ignoring other pertinent facts which weaken the argument isn't an attempt to put forth an honest argument about reality, it's more an attempt to advance a propaganda agenda. Here's what I'm talking about:

US tax policy is a convoluted mess, so to understand the effect of subsidies directed to fossil fuels one must also look at the other side of the equation - tax treatment of fossil fuel producers. For the environmentalist narrative to be a true representation of reality we should expect to see favor being granted to fossil fuel companies in the way of subsidies and no favors on the tax side of the equation, with the net result being fossil fuel companies being given an advantage. Is that the case though? No, it isn't: (from above link)

But oil and gas companies have a point when they cry foul. After all, about 41% of the net income earned by the oil and gas industry is already paid out in federal taxes compared to 26.5% for the rest of the businesses in the S&P 500.

This is the unholy mess that is created when Philosopher-Kings intervene in neutral policies and try to rejig them to create some social benefit - there are cascading consequences which follow, which often times means that there are countervailing efforts as responses. When oil companies are penalized with higher tax rates and special taxes that don't apply to other commercial concerns, then they seek to create tax situations which work to minimize those penalties in other areas. An honest environmentalist advocate would look to present the entire picture but I've never met such a thing as an honest environmentalist policy analyst.

The fundamental flaw in the religious arguments put forth by environmentalists on this issue is that their Tu Quoque fallacy fails because fossil fuels are produced economically and desired by the market and renewables are not.

To continue, when a solar company establishes a plant they invest many millions of dollars to build the plant and stuff it full of expensive equipment. That infrastructure depreciates and the must eventually be replaced. The government recognizes this fundamental aspect of commerce and allows depreciation allowances for businesses. The same applies to an oil company's oil field. It costs money to develop an oil field, it costs money to develop a coal mine, etc and at the end of the useful life of these fields, the costs to develop them have to be recouped, in that they've become completely depreciated assets.

So, back to your mixing apples and oranges question - Yes, I object strenuously to liberals/environmentalists using taxpayer money to intervene in the market and decide which companies deserve direct injections of money and which don't. I would object just as strenuously if government was directly granting oil companies cash gifts. As it stands I object to the convoluted mess that is the present tax code because it works to favor and disfavor competing sectors through the use of special tax provisions. However, if I have to scale the distastefulness on display here, I'd score outright grants as being worse than differential tax treatment due to the fact that tax treatment is predicated upon income being earned while a grant is a direct transfer of cash to the favored company or sector. It's really not government's place to pick winners and losers with the money that the public entrusts to government. Government is supposed to be a neutral referee, not a cheerleader, not a banker, not an investor, not a sugardaddy for some of the companies that it supervises and not for others.



That's a pretty impressive claim. Back it up. I've never seen anything like this in all of the data I've looked at from impartial sources, so go back to the fevered swamps of your environmentalist "think-tanks" and post some evidence in support of this claim.

You see, here's the thing - if what you say is true, then the condition that I specified in my first comment would be met and renewables would be taking over the market because they'd be cheaper than fossil fuels. Here's why - energy costs money. Energy input into producing fossil fuels costs money just like energy input into producing renewables costs money. If, as you claim, fossil fuels have higher energy inputs to produce a given quantity of output energy than renewables, then fossil fuels would be uncompetitive in the marketplace as compared to renewables. We all know that this is not the case.

If you want to blow sunshine up my skirt with your bold talk, then back it up. Your blowhardary of claiming, simply claiming, that anyone who states coal has a higher EROEI than solar is using "flawed data" might fly in the circle-jerk fevered swamps that you inhabit where confirmation bias reigns supreme but simply because you SAY SO doesn't mean jack squat to anyone not a member of your religion.



Terrific. Now the case is solid. IF what you state is an accurate statement, then you win the argument. Let's see what other people have to say, let's also see what independent reports have to say. You'll understand, I hope, that after your performance above, that I don't put much trust in your blowhardy statements of fact. Your statement begs this question though - if renewable power can be had for half the price of grid supplied power, a.) why aren't utility companies rushing to implement such technologies and b.) why aren't individual consumers doing the same?