| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| Rob R |
UK to slow expansion of biofuelshttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7493482.stm |
||||||||
| vanessa |
About time a politician saw sense. Maybe the "second generation" biofuels can / will use waste parts of plants ... but you can pretty-much bet that they'll also use the edible bits so the competition with food won't disappear. | ||||||||
| cab |
There isn't sufficient energy in the waste parts of plants to produce sufficient biofuels to make the impact desired. | ||||||||
| vanessa |
... which is as I suspected. Lies, damned lies, statistics ... and then "talk about the wonders of biofuels"   
I "like" the new claims about algae ... "1 acre of water could produce up to 5000 (from memory) litres of biofuel per year". Fine if there's enough water to effectively be "one acre of water dedicated to biofuel production per household" ... but the mind boggles!! It's time the oil companies were forced to release all their other technologies that they've developed and kept "under wraps".  I'm sure there's some genuinely useful stuff there that we're currently not allowed to know about.
|
||||||||
| cab |
While there have been assorted proposals for making fuels and other products from agrucultural waste, its hard to justify the point that this has been a driving claim in the recent surge towards biofuels; in my view this is something that has been more or less lacking from the recent debate. | ||||||||
| Shane |
Where have you heard about these "other technologies"? |
||||||||
| vanessa |
Snippets here and there that then get hushed-up or publicly dismissed as "rubbish" ... only to (in some cases) pop back up years later.
The oil companies invest billions in new technologies; take solar panels. They own the production rights ... so look at the prices!
Cars that run primarily on compressed air ... I remember these being talked about donkeys years ago ... now, there's one coming onto the market in the next year or so. Even cold nuclear fusion ... what ever happened to the scientist who managed to discover how this could be done? The above are the technologies that we DO know about (one way or another) ... you can bet your bottom dollar (or pound or euro) that there are many more that we do not yet know about. If some other scientist happens to invent the same thing, he'll be "dealt with" somehow ... publicly discredited, and perhaps paid enough to keep schtum. Yeah, I'm cynical ... but it's being cynical that keeps a lot of wool from being pulled over my eyes. |
||||||||
| Maxwell Smart |
Actually you do hear about a lot of great ideas revolving around energy which suddenly disappear from the public eye... the general belief for many is that the technology was bought up by oil companies and shelved....
As for waste product going into bio-fuels I think it is a way forward but not the answer. A friend is investing in the technology and from initial reports it does look very promising. |
||||||||
| cab |
Yeah, I've heard that claimed... Is it really true though?
Thing is, compressing air isn't free, it costs energy, and that energy would be obtained, most likely, from fossil fuels. I'm sure that such a vehicle could then work for a short distance, but it won't be a competitor for filling a fuel tank with petrol/diesel and driving all day. Whats this compressed air car then? Who makes it? Sounds fun.
People all over the world tried to replicate what he claimed... And failed. Doesn't so much look like a hoax, more just didn't work.
Careful now, just because you don't believe 'mainstream' does not mean that you're not having the wool pulled over your eyes; a heck of a lot of claims made for unusual forms of energy generation are, regrettably, complete balderdash (we've seen one or two posted here in the past). Generally speaking 'free energy' is thermodynamically naive. |
||||||||
| Shane |
Most of this stuff strikes me as hype against the big, bad oil companies, to be honest. I can't comment on the reports of them buying up patents to suppress development, but if they are / have, it won't be to stop the technology being developed - it will be to make sure they profit from the development. The oil companies are now starting to get concerned about a post-oil world, and they are starting to search in earnest for the next commercially viable energy source. They are all repositioning themselves as "energy companies" now, rather than "oil companies" and my guess is that within the next next decade you'll see increasingly large sums of money being pumped into targetted research into alternative means of producing energy.
An oil company's main focus, of course, is to keep shareholders (i.e. you and me, via our pension funds) happy, so they will of course continue to plough huge quantities of money into extracting fossil fuels, and at $145+ a barrel they'd be committing commercial suicide not too. Oh - and compressed air-driven cars do sound nice an friendly, don't they? Almost as though you could blow up the reservoir yourself like you would a balloon, and then travel to the coast and back for free. But, as Cab pointed out, compressing air isn't free (in fact, it's a fairly energy-wasteful process). And if anybody thinks that compressed gasses, even those as apparent harmless as air, are inherently safe, they've got another thing coming. |
||||||||
| Maxwell Smart |
That is true of many of the technologies being presented as possible saviours including electric and hyrdrogen powered vehicles.
People seem to conveniently forget that energy still needs to be generated to either charge electric vehicles of create hydrogen. Hydrogen is in many aspects no different a fuel cell than the battery found in an electric vehicle. |
||||||||
| vanessa |
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Air_car_runs_on_compressed_air_0104.html
I'm not daft. I know electricity costs, too - both in £££ and in terms of damage to the environment. However, once governments wake up to locally-produced renewable electricity, an air car will cause a lot less damage to the environment than a conventional petrol or diesel one. Sure, compressed air is potentially dangerous ... but so are petroleum products, and we drive round with those in our cars without a second thought. It's difficult in the scope of a posting (and in the time I have available for posting) to put one's whole views on a subject so vast as "energy", and by putting part of such a view, one is then open to suggestion that one is naive or just plain stupid. 
I'm afraid I cannot see the oil companies as anything other than "big and bad"; they fix the oil prices (directly or indirectly), they fix the rate at which petroleum products are produced. And yes, I am 100% convinced that they are "sitting on" several brilliant ideas that, if they were allowed to be "released" now would spell the end of their strangle-hold on the rest of the world. |
||||||||
| Northern_Lad |
50Kg cucumbers. - A virtual £5 note for the first correct identification of that source. |
||||||||
| Shane |
Two things that are a fact are: 1) the world is currently using more oil than is being produced, and 2) demand is projected to continue to rise. The oil producers are currently pumping out as much as they can (and at the current prices they are trying to squeeze out more). The combination of all this means that, regardless of any influence of the oil companies and / or traders (who, in my opinion, are at least as much to blame as anybody for the current high prices), the price of oil won't drop significantly for some time yet.
Indeed they do. When a new refinery is designed, it is designed to split the crude into products such that they can meet what the market is after: they want to make as much as they can of the products that they'll make the most profit on without producing an excess of any particular fraction. One reason that the price of diesel in the UK has risen somewhat disproportionately is that the producers have been caught out by how popular diesel has become in the last few years, and they simply don't have the capacity to produce more. In the States, they are woefully short of refinery capacity, with a combination of under investment and hurricane damage primarily to blame. At the moment, the world's refineries are pretty much at full capacity, and that's limited by the available hardware. Believe me, if the oil companies could produce more, right now they would.
|
||||||||
| vanessa |
|
||||||||
| Ricardo Pronto |
Hi What technology is this 
|
||||||||
| Jamanda |
Hi RP 
|
||||||||
| Cho-ku-ri |
Traditionally 20% of Britain's crops went to providing the original 'Bio-Fuel', feed for horses. Since the demise of the working horse, the price of our food has plummeted here in the U.K. When food was at its cheapest (only last year) and farmers complained they were earning far less than the minimum wage, governments told them to "get real" and learn to live in a "global marketplace". Hey! Why is it now global prices have risen, the public feel they have a say in what private farming businesses produce? Bear in mind, farmers do not get production based subsidies anymore. Market forces should be the deciding factor to whether or not a farmer decides to use the land he has invested £s and time into. It should be for him to decide to grow crops for humans, crops for animal fattening, or crops for Bio Fuel. After all we still live in a country whose economic policy is based on the free market. 
|
||||||||
| vanessa |
I don't mind the farmers getting a fair price for their produce.
I DO object to supermarkets cashing-in and making obscene profits on the food they dictate the prices of (what they pay to farmers and what they charge us). I also object to food that we could eat ("we" being humans across the world) being used to create fuel instead ... and very much object to the deforestation of the planet to grow further fuel-plants. |
||||||||
| Cho-ku-ri |
Why don't we just give the poor Africans some of our lovely North Sea Oil to use, to help improve their life standards? It is hypocritical of us to expect British private farming businesses to cut their incomes for the benefit of the third world whilst other businesses don't.
The supermarkets do make billions of £s profit from selling foods, but that is only because there are only four big players left. The margin they make per item is usually less than an independent retailer could survive on, hence the reason why they have almost all shut up shop. I heard, "Foreign Development Minister Alexander "(The Little Sh!t"quote David Sharkey) say the other evening on Question Time that we should be investing in African countries to produce our food for us. Doesn’t he know they are desperately short of water, have poor soils and are starving themselves? Is he so devolved from nature that he thinks food grows for cash? Is he really suggesting that virgin habitats go under the plough to feed Europeans, damaging the eco system forever?
|
||||||||
| Treacodactyl |
I don't think anyone's arguing farmers shouldn't be able to grow or sell their crops for whatever and whoever. What I disagree with is governments insisting a certain percentage of fuel sold must contain bio-fuel when it might require more fossil fuels to grow the stuff than is saved or it requires huge amounts of virgin rainforest to be cleared to grow palm oil etc, etc. That's not a free market is it? |
||||||||
| Ricardo Pronto |
Yes there is the intention for a greater market driven agricultural industry. But farmers can get the Single Payment Scheme which had a payout of £1.45 Billion in 2007. There are also schemes for environmental stewardship. I don't have a problem with this market intervention because as a townie we need farmers to grow stuff.
We also have a paltry UK target of 15% electricity from renewable energy by 2020, which is also not a free market
It is the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation that aspired to 5% of road transport fuel to be from sustainable renewable sources by 2010. In the UK transport is responsible for 27% of our carbon emissions so the RTFO was proposed as a start to tackle this. We all know something has to be done. Biofuels based on starch and sugar are in all likelihood to be transitional in the long term. Production plants are being built in the UK to utilise oil seed rape for biodiesel and wheat for bioethanol. As we know huge amounts of forest have unfortunately already gone  . Cleared for lumber, agriculture, mineral and energy extraction, not to mention some large hydro schemes. Palm oil is porduced in the tropics, and is exported from the likes of Indonesia, Malaysia and Columbia. The demand for palm oil is already well established and increasing all the time. Palm oil use for biodiesel is a real late entry here. This is because palm oil is an ingredient in food such as biscuits and sauces, and also in soaps, detergents and cosmetics. There is a brand called Palmolive. It also has uses in medicine.
I guess the point I am trying to make is that this is a complicated problem. The sustainability characteristics of biofuels are being questioned, which is the right thing to do. But what are the alternatives that can be deployed ? Biofuels derived from cellulose are moving towards demonstration projects. Cars using fuel cells or electricity are also being pursued but need renewable energy to be green. And as we only arpire to 15% of our electricity use to be from renewables by 2020, well we have a long way to go let alone before we even try to wean society out of their 4x4s. 
|
||||||||
| Treacodactyl |
Perhaps a realistic attempt to reduce fuel use? Apart from things like VED or fuel duty, which are mainly just taxes, I don't see any real attempt from the government. If a new technology comes along that does manage to conjure energy from genuine waste then great but if it comes from materials that have other uses then lets be honest about it. IIRC, when this report came out BBC R4 mentioned that maze growing for bio-fuels in the US uses 40% more fuel than is made. Even if that is remotely accurate surely any sane person can see there's a problem with that? |
||||||||
| RichardW |
All this carbon stuff is pants.
Whats worse cars planes industry concreate Not sure the exact order of sinners but concreate produces more each year than all the planes. So we need to stop building not stop having holidays abroard. Richard |
||||||||
| Jamanda |
But I have never built anything out of concrete, so I can't stop building things out of it. I do fly once in a blue moon, so that is something I can reduce. | ||||||||
| Cho-ku-ri |
Why not less of both
|
||||||||
| Jamanda |
How do I achieve that? |
||||||||
| Treacodactyl |
Agree to both of you.
It's used in roads, public buildings, air ports etc, not just homes. |
||||||||
| Jamanda |
But I don't commission them. I agree it would be good for the construction/road building industries to change their practices, but I can't influence them. I can only do my little bit. If everyone says they won't change until someone else does, then nothing will ever change. | ||||||||
| Treacodactyl |
But they were built for people like you and me, people who use them. Who is responsible? A complex question in itself. | ||||||||
| Jamanda |
I'm not disputing that. I'm simply saying it's no use waiting for someone else "them" or "the government" to "do something" before making your own contribution. Mine is to not fly (much). | ||||||||
| cab |
So other than making the cost of fuel and of motoring higher (which is what fuel duty and VED do), what would you do to reduce dependence on oil? |
||||||||
| Treacodactyl |
This has been covered in numerous other threads. If you think things like taxes work to change behaviour then why not put a similar tax that motorists have to put up with on other things like energy bills, flights, cement, new houses etc? I've always thought the government could do far more to encourage people to work from home and that would cut down on transport use, building costs etc. |
||||||||
| cab |
Because it is naive to view all of our energy and carbon emission problems as being analogous. They aren't. Theres a specific problem with regard to oil dependency that is quite independent of use fo other fossil fuels, So... If you're answer is 'carbon tax' then you've failed to provide a suggestion for dealing with oil dependence.
I agree with that... And how would you go about encouraging people to work closer to home? |
||||||||
| Rob R |
Give myself planning permission 
|
||||||||
| vanessa |
Hmmm. Having lived and worked in the Bournemouth-and-Poole conurbation for a number of years, this is one that first struck me about 15 years ago. In that area alone, there are thousands of people who commute from the "Poole end" to the "Bournemouth end" daily. And vice-versa. Hours of people's lives each year needlessly spent sitting in traffic, thousands of litres of fuel burnt needlessly each year. Organise a grand house-swap!! Problem solved
If only life were so simple, hey?!!
|
||||||||
| Rob R |
I'm up for that Just have to persuade the people in the half million pound house next door to switch with us...
|
||||||||
| cab |
Top answer
|
||||||||
| alison |
Haveing lived there for 12 years myself, I am sure there are plenty of people who live in Boscombe who would jump at the chance of moving to Sandbanks. Not sure if they would the other way around though.
|
||||||||
| Treacodactyl |
I know and I'm not.
There's all sorts of things. For example, many people can work from home but companies aren't keen to let them. The government encourage or force companies to come up with clear policies for allowing people to work from home if their jobs are suitable. |
||||||||
| vanessa |
However, Upper Parkstone and Boscome aren't too different in ... erm ... "level", so it should be possible. Of course, it doesn't help where husband-and-wife (for example) both work, and one works close to home whilst the other commutes ... but on balance it really should help reduce problems. |
||||||||
| Rob R |
They could also do more to encourage local services rather than everyone dashing to the large out of town places- not having a local petrol station is a right pain.
And many people no longer have a local abattoir- how awful & primitive a life that must be! 
|