News Forum - Tax to promote electric vehicles forecasted

[Soidog]

2 minutes ago, JohninDubin said:

I can feel the frustration in your posts. But what you are complaining of is not new. Exactly the same happened when smoking was linked to cancer. 

If you see a man get shot and he dies, it's not to difficult to get someone to believe that he died from the gunshot wound. But when a man smokes and he dies 20 years later, certainty becomes much more difficult to convince others of. Step forward the vested interests and their PR men, whose sole job is to muddy the waters. Does that explain your tendency to flip-flop? 

For most of us, the science is far too complex. I tend to go with repeated studies that reach the same conclusion. Tomorrow, there may be a new study showing that Fossil Fuels are not the reason for CC and the FF industry will make sure it gets as much media coverage as possible. What you never see is that same study being duplicated elsewhere with the same conclusions. So when you see a contradictory programme giving an alternate explanation, ask yourself, "Have these results been duplicated elsewhere"/

Yes all great points there. I especially like the comparison to the smoking and cancer debate. Today it seems so obvious that anything as toxic as breathing in smoke in to your lungs must be bad for the body. I guess to take that case and link it to my question about previous warming events. It would be like a report which said:

200 years before tobacco was even harvested, the world had significant levels of throat and lung cancer. So what explained that. The pro-tobacco industry couldn’t point to that inconvenient hypothetical fact otherwise they would have done. For me, this is the one aspect I just can’t get a grip on. Add to that new reports of I’m teased cyclone activity, increased flooding or increasing deaths by natural disaster and the facts just don’t stack up. There is simply no evidence I can find which shows cyclones are more frequent or flooding more frequent. 
 

If manmade climate change does turn out to be true, then in years to come generations will look at us and shake their heads. Just as I do when I watch movies from the 50’s-80’s where everyone is smoking

[longwood50]

17 hours ago, Tjampman said:

Your first point about just posting the word Science, I will take to heart. Lets instead look at history and see why the scientists knows the Earth is warming

Yes the earth is warming however this idea that somehow we can isolate the reason and attribute it predominately to man is ludicrous. 

The earth has warmed and cooled into ice ages for billions of years.  The last two hundred years is but a millisecond in earths history.  To somehow say those two hundred years and in particular the last 100 years are somehow the "norm" for the earth is absurd. 

Does man influence the earth.  Yes of course.  To what extent? Who can be sure.  We know that many bodies of water are polluted, that plastic fills our landfills, that rain forests are being decimated.  Should we do something about it.  Yes 

However this idea that somehow the governments of this world are so smart as to pick electrification as the answer is equally ludicrous.  The "science" always promotes the money supporting the science and there are trillions to be fleeced from causing everyone to rush to buy electric vehicles and solar panels. You have the government picking the winners and losers in selecting the technology and to think that they are pure in motive is ignoring history where politicians choose not based on what is bests but what pays the most.  

You only have to look at the fiasco here in Thailand and much of the world in the various governments response to Covid and see how inept they are in picking the appropriate remedies. 

Rather than government picking the technology they should establish the goals and let the marketplace provide alternatives.  This is not different than the fleet mileage mandates  I don't know if there are better alternatives to electric vehicles but I sure trust the marketplace to sort that out rather than having the numskulls who run the various governments around the world pick it. 





 

[Bob20]

18 hours ago, Tjampman said:

So I see a lot of good comments, that only skimmed but I will reply to you since you quoted me.

You second point about unintended consequences, I don't really know what to say about that. But it is a fair point as long as you don't use it for inaction.

Your first point about just posting the word Science, I will take to heart. Lets instead look at history and see why the scientists knows the Earth is warming and I will maybe extrapolate that into why we know it is caused by man kind.

In the 1820's scientists (natural philosophers back then) were able to calculate the amount of energy coming from the sun and hitting a globe the size and orbit of the Earth. 
What they found was that Earth was a lot warmer than what it should be, about 30 dgr C warmer.
While not the primary hypothesis, Joseph Fourier theorized the reason could be because gasses in the atmosphere holding on to the heat.

In the 1850's George Tyndall, then investigated the absorption bands of different gasses. Mind you, nitrogen, oxygen and argon, contributes more than 99% of our atmosphere, but he found these gasses absorbed virtually no light or infrared radiation, these gasses were "invisible". On the other hand, he found gasses like CO2 and H2O to be invisible to light but absorbing infrared.

Now water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, however you can't force water vapor into the atmosphere as there is a saturation point and it will simply start to rain. However, if you increase the temperature, the atmosphere will be able to hold more water vapor.

Based on this (as well as other known physics) in the 1890's Svante Arrhenius attempted to calculate how much the the Earth would heat up if you doubled the atmospheric CO2 content - By his calculation it would be 4 dgr C.
He actually wanted to know if by increasing the CO2 it would be possible to increase the Swedish harvest season. However, he estimated that it would take 1000 years for humanity to emit this much CO2.

So is global warming man made? Well if you accept 200 years of science (I don't know, do you?) Some might argue that we can't possibly emit enough CO2 to change the world or something to that effect.

But we are in the progress of changing the world already.

1. We move more than 10 times as much dirt than natural erosion
2. We produce more nitrogen fertilizer than all bacteria on land
3. We make more sulfate than ocean plankton

Can we change the atmosphere? Yes, I am sure we can after all it is only 10-15 km high and we (all of us in the west) are dumping about 15 tons in to the atmosphere every year.
And we know we are already doing it. Just by measurements we can see CO2 is going up, O2 going down - this is the effect of combustion.

So is it man-made fossil fuel emissions, yes, the isotope doesn't match the natural carbon, so a lot of the carbon we are releasing is fossil carbon. This actually effect our method for carbon dating.

So yes, when it comes to global warming, I do trust the scientists who are working on these subjects. Keep in mind I am not mentioning climate change, that is very difficult, but warming, that is 19th century physics, we know that sh!t.

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I could go on, but I think that is enough for now. I don't pretend to be a saint, I work in the energy industry. I am however aware how deeply we are on energy, I know it will not be easy to change, especially with SE Asia and at some point Africa coming to expect better living standards.

Now debating if global warming is real or not, or man-made or not, I feel is moot at this point - We need to start coming up with solutions, and EVs is only a small part.

I take hope that Tony Seba is right and in 10 years renewables and storage will be so cheap that it will be a no-brainer, however lifetime of coal power plants are 30-50 years, and they are still being built.

Alright, I guess I did go on.. I better stop now.

Have a nice day.

Do you have a summary available? I have a dinner date at 8pm