Come on Figaro mate! Use your noggin! Industrial revolution? What a few towns in the UK and Germany? At a time when there was probably about double the area of rainforest in the world, no cars, no planes and, I don't know, a quarter of the current world population? You might not have been able to breathe the air in London, but I don't think you'd have had any problem in Los Angeles, Peking, Bankok, Mexico City - you get the idea. As for the ozone layer - a lot of the damage cleared up when they banned CFCs in the 70s, which is why you don't hear much about it. Don't worry, there were plenty of people then who claimed that CFCs were no problem at all, or that the ozone layer phenomenon was entirely natural. We've been here before you know. As I said: RTFM - Read the book. Read the book and then tell me I'm wrong.
I am in a bandwagon of yes conserve energy, yes save resources but sorry do not buy the climate change bit. Few reasons for that so called scientists get their data to predict climate change from about 300 years of records at best, 100 out of that quite inaccurate. They can not comment on millions of years before that in any detail, just general. We had ice age but no one can tell you how it started/why or how long it took for it to catch on. All this talk about green energy and wanting to save planet that comes from government is loads of bollox. Sorry you want people to go green remove any vat of any sort from any green products, even more subsided them. You want to improve safety of motorcyclists remove vat from riding gear and subsidies. Even recycling, good in general is a scam in uk. There is plenty of companies in usa or Poland that buy any garbage, sorted or not, as they tale it all to big processing plant where they sort it. That fulfils the recycling bit and gives much more jobs as there is a hole new industry evolved around sorting that can potentially grow. Government want's us to recycle because we do the dirty job for them for free. Then they can sell recycled garbage at higher price as it is sorted while still charging us more and more for less and less of collection and there is vat on recycling business.
gliddofglood Two points. I have seen many documentaries about all sorts of subjects, some of which I even know something about, and they are all very convincing, even when I know them to be wrong. The one about the moon landings being a fake for example, a brilliantly made program full of 'evidence' and a well constructed argument, but utter bollox. A documentary shows only what the program maker wants to show and it either fits your paradigm or it doesn't. I don't subscribe to the New World Order idea in the sense that there is some evil master mind sitting in his lair plotting world domination but if you look at the increasing number of supranational organisations that are being set up by our leaders because some things are just too important to be left to national governments there is a definite trend. These organisations take power and have influence at a global level and are often not democratically accountable. Power is the great motivator, who wouldn't want to jet around the world saving the planet. Multinational corporations, banks and non elected organisations such as the European Commission are the new masters of the universe. Recent issues with News International and Barclays bank are not about who hacked Milli Dowlers phone or who set the LIBOR rates but about who is in charge. The history of the world is about the aspirations of a small number of (usually) men who wanted the top job, why would today be any different. Global elites are emerging. Climate change is a useful tool in that game. Ask not what is happening but why it is happening.
What enjoyable read of all your comments regarding the environmental issues. I was having a bad day till I started to read so thank you. The electric bike is an interesting alternative and the one pictured looks really good. Wouldnt it be good if human and animal waste could be harnessed and utilised to run our bikes and motors ;-). Hey also loved the " My degree is bigger than yours" so so funny
I'm not going there as I have an absolutely ENORMOUS degree. Don't mind so much being branded as a greenie killjoy - don't want to be seen as a pretentious green killjoy!
Documentaries? Yes and no. If they are no use whatsoever, there is no point ever looking at any or assuming you can ever learn anything from any of them. I dunno. Usually, if they are on the BBC and seem well produced I am likely to believe them. Fake lunar landings? Right. Did the BBC screen that? Oh yes, and 911 was entirely Photoshopped. But I take your point. I agree with your second paragraph. When you have globalisation, you are going to get the globalisation of power. Life is all about being chief gorilla with more bananas. Certainly. Do I think that the green lobby is a useful tool in that game? Not really. It would be a lot simpler for everyone and all the people in place if there were no global warming and we could all carry on as before. It would be good news pretty much all round. If you want to explain exactly how the power brokers gain from global warming - I'm all ears. Most of 'em can't even be bothered to show up to climate conferences to spin their webs.
If I may contribute my two penny'orth, I am agnostic on this one. The way I see it, the proponents of cutting carbon emissions policies in Britain have a whole series of hurdles to jump. The onus is on them to persuade us: 1. That the climate of the planet is in fact changing. 2. That the change is consistent, significant, measurable and predictable. 3. That the change is caused by human actions, not just natural effects. 4. That the change is a bad thing which ought to be stopped. 5. That it is possible to take human action to reverse the change. 6. That the best or only way to achieve this is reducing carbon dioxide emissions into the air. 7. That such action taken in Britain would have a worldwide effect. 8. That potentially the harm done to civilisation by reducing carbon dioxide emissions would not be greater than the harm done by global warming. Only if we are convinced of the validity of all eight of those propositions are we obliged to support their policy proposals, in my view. Item 1 is easy, even trivial; we all know the climate has always changed, in the short-term, medium-term and long-term. Items 2-8 remain topics of debate and personally I am not fully convinced on any one of them. A whole series of interesting debates has been going on elsewhere for years on all these topics. We could recapitulate them here, if anyone wants to. The proponents of climate change have severely damaged their case by overstating it, exaggerating effects, suppressing opposition, falsifying figures, making apocalyptic predictions, etc, etc. But we should avoid falling into a trap: the follies and errors of those putting the case forward do not mean their underlying case may not be valid after all. Returning to the original topic (battery electric bikes), let us assume for the sake of the argument that all the eight propositions have been established – does that mean battery electric bikes are a realistic and practical contribution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions? No, obviously not. If there is any justification for them, it would have to lie elsewhere.
gliddofglood I'd rather watch a good documentary than most films but they all have an agenda and have to be viewed with that in mind. The BBC as a whole has a liberal leftwing agenda (not quite as blatant as Channel 4 however) and has swallowed theAGW idea hook line and sinker. It is no longer an objective source of information. Global power brokers gain by using AGW to promote the supranational organisations required to tackle it thereby establishing the precedent forfurther measures outside the already fragile democratic accountability that exists today. If there are green payments from rich to poor countries you can bet that they are linked to transfers of power and influence. Google the activities of Al Gore, Dr Pachauri (of IPCC and Teri [The Energy and Resources Institute]) and our very own Tim Yeo. And as I have said previously politicians love that which they can control and tax. We are heading for an energy crisis (the topic of a whole new thread maybe ?),one way of mitigating against that crisis is to take control of the supply ofenergy and what better reason to do that could you ask for than AGW. Paranoid, moi, I think not :wink:
I'm not so sure. As oil prices increase, previously untapped resources become economically viable. Allied with the expoitation of new energy sources, we could see our dependence on traditional sources of energy decline. Oil is now cheaper per barrel than it has been for years: that's not due to increased production but to reduced demand. Alongside the general recession, prices have risen, people are moving towards more efficient vehicles and are taking fewer trips in their cars.
JerryXt It might not be next year or even this decade but it will happen. Untapped resources will become viable as the oil price increases but that oil is going to be harder to extract and take ever greater investment to do so, that investment is not just in monetary terms but in investment of energy itself. The ratio of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI - Google it) is getting less and less as the easy oil is depleted and deepwater offshore oil is developed. Easy oil has an EROEI ratio of about 100:1, offshore about 40:1 and deepwater less than 20:1, shale gas and oil is less than 5:1 along with the 'green' alternatives. There is no shortage of hydrocarbon ie shale gas and oil but if it takes more energy to extract it than it contains then where is the benefit ? Demand is low and that is suppressing price but if there is ever any real return to growth then that price will only go one way, particularly if demand in developing countries kicks in. The days of reliable cheap energy, which fueled the growth of the last century (along with debt), are over and we need to adapt to that new reality. New energy sources will never replace existing supplies in terms of availabilty and price. We need massive investment in nuclear to keep the lights on but that investment must generate a return and in order to produce a return we must consume more stuff, but we already can't pay for the stuff we have been consuming over the last few decades. Enjoy it whilst you've got it.
There can be no energy shortage in an absolute sense. The whole planet is awash with energy - geothermal, sunlight, rain, wind, waves, tides, biological, and of course fissionable and combustible materials - more energy than the human race could possibly consume in millenia. Nearly all energy simply goes to waste. We need and use only a tiny fraction. But that is not the real issue. For each source of energy, is the technology available to harness it in a usable form at a price consumers can afford? That's the issue. Investment in each energy source requires commitment of vast investments which can only be made if they can reliably be recouped over decades. Unfortunately the price of oil (and thus gas & coal) fluctuates wildly week to week and year to year. Obviously this prevents rational long-term investment decisions from being made. If the price of oil reached a higher level and stayed there consistently for several years, one of the more benign effects would be to unlock investment in many other technologies which otherwise remain marginal (with subsidies) or non-viable (without subsidies). Incidentally, it does not help when the ill-informed (including government ministers) refer to battery-electric and hydrogen as "sources" of energy. They are nothing of the sort. Both batteries and hydrogen are merely ways of storing and transporting energy - that energy has to come from a real source somewhere else. As it happens, both are extremely inefficient, complicated and expensive formats; liquid hydrocarbons are far superior. This illustrates the point that the debate about where the energy we need is to come from in the first place is an entirely different argument from how energy is to be transported and stored, although the two issues usually get muddled together.
Indeed Pete. The economics has to work, but physics trumps economics. The investment required to harness 'alternative' energy sources in the quantity we current enjoy from fossil fuels is colossal and from an EROEI perspective it just doesn't add up, higher and higher investment is required to get smaller and smaller returns. I challenge anybody to come up with a game changing technological solution to replace our dependence upon oil.
Any oil company (or not "green" energy company) that does not invest 15% of pre-tax profits in to alternative energy development programs get's hit extra 30% income tax, the type you can not avoid.
If we were successful in cutting CO2 emissions, surely that would have an effect on plant growth, right? Which means less nice, clean air, which means a higher concentration of CO2, right..? It's all too confusing for me. I'm prepared to listen to, and believe, anyone that can give straight, plain answers on climate change. But no-one can, it seems. And as for energy, I harnessed the power of the sun when I was ten (cooking insects with a magnifying glass...), so I fail to see how we could ever have an energy crisis. Perhaps it's the economic and political world that's in peril, rather than the actual physical world. Perhaps it's time we started looking into being responsible for our own power production. We need to blow a few more holes in the ozone to get rid of those nasty clouds, then solar energy would be more reliable...
As Pete says we are awash with energy, in fact we are energy, but the practical problem is how we tap into it to drive our modern world, which is totally dependent upon it. Hydrocarbons are, in effect, a hugh reserve of stored solar energy accumulated over millions of years, but it is a finite resource, it is becoming ever harder to extract and the developing world will want it's share, meaning there will be less for us and we will have to pay more for it. You are absolutely right about the economic and political world being in peril rather than the physical world. Unfortunately the idea that we can all take responsibility for our own energy production in a modern economy wont work, there are simply too many of us.
I think that we need to find an unlimited resource that has greater COP's than existing that will not have a detrimental impact on the planet.
Why aren't we making oil rather than just extracting it? We've known for donkeys years how oil is made from crushed dinosaurs, so surely with the technology available to us we can speed up the process of rotting and compressing plant life. Or am I being too simplistic?
Sure oil can be made from other material but the problem is that it takes energy to do so and that energy has to come from somewhere else, this is the basic physics, energy can neither be made or destroyed, it can only change from one form to another. If you put more energy into making the fuel than you get back out from it then there is no gain, unless that gain is in another sense, such as generating electricity from hydrogen / oxygen fuel cells on a spacecraft when the benefit to the overall project outweighs the simple energy balance. There is also the problem of the quantity of energy we need to fuel our modern world. Just because a process can be made to work on a small scale doesn't mean it can be made to work on a large scale, wave power is a classic example. The economics and engineering has to work but also the physics.
