71–80 of 257 posts
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The EU does something impressively crazy burning 23 million tonnes of wood pellets in 2021. https://unece.org/media/press/372591 It's labeled as 'renewable' electricity.
What do you think the furniture industry does with the wood byproducts such as sawdust and bark?
Lobbyists are responsible for all of the harm that Americans at large come to. Eco damage, car crashes, toxic chemicals in food, the drug war, wars in the Middle East, lack of public housing, the world's most expensive health care, union-busting, even heart disease. If you can think of it and it hurts lots of Americans, lobbyists were behind it.
We need some anti-mosquito lobbyists. That’s an environment disaster I can get behind. Just hasn’t happened yet because the benefit is too spread out to make it happen.
No, it doesn't happen because you can't make money out of that. So there's nobody to pay/hire the lobbyist.
Same reason why there's hardly research into new antibiotics. It's hard to make money on those as they tend to cure. Chronic diseases and their subscriptions to suppress symptoms, that's where money is to be made
80% of UK’s waste oil would only power 0.6% of its flights Using synthetic e-fuel for all USA domestic flights would use 85% of USA’s electricity generated. Powering UK flights on plant-based biofuels would use >50% of its agricultural land 2⃣ UK waste oil is already spoken for, used in soap, cosmetics etc. But it’s far short of what would be needed anyway. Instead we will import ‘waste’ from places like Malaysia, wh…
Even DOGE didn't dare go after ethanol subsidies.[1] Even the Cato Institute, which is classic conservative in position, is against them. [1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-musk-doge-havent-gone-...
Cato Institute is big L Libertarian, not classic conservative
is the Cato institute without the novel anti human rights anti environment spicing?
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It makes perfect sense. Forest are only carbon sinks if they stay as a forest . The second you cut one down it goes from being a sink to source. Searchinger's argument states that more forests will be grown to be cut down if burning wood pellets (that are shipped from North America to the EU) is considered renewable and that means you're now cutting down even more forests to clear land for growing more trees. The lan…
Forests are not long term carbon sinks. They flatline rather quickly. This is obvious to anyone who has spent much time in a forest, because if this wasn’t the case, forests would be sitting on thousands of feet of sequestered carbon. Instead of a few feet (typically) of non-mineral soil. Forests also (typically) go through cycles of burning. The highest rate of carbon sequestration is when a forest is in the 3-25 ye…
This is why you can't ignore land use changes in carbon budgets. It's a sound argument, it's not ridiculous at all.
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Forests are not long term carbon sinks. They flatline rather quickly. This is obvious to anyone who has spent much time in a forest, because if this wasn’t the case, forests would be sitting on thousands of feet of sequestered carbon. Instead of a few feet (typically) of non-mineral soil. Forests also (typically) go through cycles of burning. The highest rate of carbon sequestration is when a forest is in the 3-25 ye…
Look dude, read the papers or read the book. I don't have much more to offer you. This isn't just about the forest itself but about the land used to grow the forest. "In the Carbon Costs of Global Wood Harvests, published in Nature in 2023, WRI researchers using a biophysical model estimated that annual wood harvests over the next few decades will emit 3.5-4.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year. That is mo…
But I see no difference between humans speeding this cycle by planting quick growth trees, cutting them down, releasing their stored carbon, planting more. It’s the same thing being sequestered and released continuously.
For years I saw saturation ads for the Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation on PBS, I found out years that this is the prime beneficiary of the ethanol program. Farmers growing corn for ethanol are growing broke despite subsidies. The program is an environmental disaster because people in the Mississippi River basin should be growing anything except corn because corn is a crop that requires huge imports of nitrogen fer…
Unless I'm going senile, I've done this calculation a few times and consistently I get that a solar farm produces 25-50 times more energy a year than corn.
For years I saw saturation ads for the Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation on PBS, I found out years that this is the prime beneficiary of the ethanol program. Farmers growing corn for ethanol are growing broke despite subsidies. The program is an environmental disaster because people in the Mississippi River basin should be growing anything except corn because corn is a crop that requires huge imports of nitrogen fer…
Unless I'm going senile, I've done this calculation a few times and consistently I get that a solar farm produces 25-50 times more energy a year than corn.
Interesting take though, I'm not saying that growing corn is best way to "produce stored energy", but in your comparison it's almost like direct competition to for PV + batteries of any sort.
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Corn and most ag subsidies are using taxpayer money for corporate welfare for mostly mega farming consortia with a smattering of medium and smaller farmers, who also can't exist in the rigged market without welfare. 5% of all US land, not just arable land, ALL land is used for mostly cow corn. It's absolute insanity. And then there's the federal US sugar cartel keeping prices artificially (no pun intended) high.
Crop subsidies are certainly poorly applied and poorly distributed, but we also need to not throw the baby out with the bath water. Crop subsidization is the only alternative to the granary system, which while decent still resulted in repeated famines for thousands of years basically everywhere, while no country that has decent crop subsidization ever has famine. Crop subsidization in general makes granaries 90% obso…
And on top of that, many Western countries routinely dump their overproduction on Africa, where as a result of all that free aid, local food production industry has all but vanished. Up until the '00s, Simbabwe was known as "Africa's corn chamber" - that is long gone now.
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car. If the only difference was that producing ethanol emitted much more carbon than producing gasoline, where were ethanol’s benefits? Where…
But in any case, carbon from the ground is used to fertilize the fields to grow the corn. For every unit of energy produced by corn using carbon sequestered from the air, it matters how much carbon from oil buried underground is released in the atmosphere to produce that unit of energy. If it's greater than or equal to the amount offset by not burning gasoline, it's a net loss.
All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, which are the tool to use for deciding if a proposed policy is going to lead to lower atmospheric carbon in the future, rather than simplistic models. Selling someone a simplistic model instead of an LCA is basically lying.