Keep in mind that Social Security was never intended to be a retirement system - it's a safety net.
I do quite well with my retirement annuity. Social Security is a bonus.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Erik: Good point.
Euclid The market for fuel used in rail transportation is gigantic.
The market for fuel used in rail transportation is gigantic.
In 2019, the US consumed 18.27 billion gallons of aviation fuel and 3.656 billion gallons of railroad fuel.
With family size: Social Security is another factor that reduces the needs for large families to take care of parents in their old age. OTOH, Social Security is effectively a Ponzi in the money to pay retired folks comes from younger working folks. A birthrate below replacement rate will require adjustments to the program that could include higher taxes on workers, lower benefit payments or raising the retirement age (note "or" is intended to be inclusive "or" not exclusive "oro").
Family sizes in LDNs decrease dramatically as their economic outlook and educational opportunities improve, all without draconian measures being imposed.
Erik_Mag Population control can also be enhanced by restricting immigration, though there is a lot of disagreement about whether it is appropriate. Keep in mind that a large number of "first world" countries have a birth rate less than replacement rate.
Population control can also be enhanced by restricting immigration, though there is a lot of disagreement about whether it is appropriate.
Keep in mind that a large number of "first world" countries have a birth rate less than replacement rate.
Restricting immigration only helps the overpopulation problem in one place, all those people who aren't immigrating still exist, they are just somewhere else. And since they are somewhere else it is not your problem if they starve.
Family planning and educating women tend to lower the birthrate, but there is still quite a bit of opposition to those tactics from certain parts of modern Earth society.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
Another area plans to switch to alternatives to diesel (Scotland) by 2035. Battery and hydrogen cell will be used on lines where electrification infrastructure costs can't be justified by traffic.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/01/01/scotland-banks-on-hydrogen-fuel-cell-trains-for-zero-emission-railway-by-2035/
The market for fuel used in rail transportation is gigantic. So, if someone could develop and alternate fuel that was significantly cheaper, they would become fabulously wealthy. This incentive thus attracts the most brilliant minds constantly seeking substitute fuels that reduce cost enough to replace diesel fuel.
I believe there is a common, but faulty, conclusion that anything we decide we want can be developed and made practical and available. All we need to do is decide to develop it. This seems to be the underlying belief in all of the alternative energy dreams. But what this overlooks is that there are real obstacles that may have no immediate solution, so they may only become achievable after long periods of time of trial and error and depend on many concurrent other developments moving forward in their own scale of progress. It is not as if these breakthroughs have never been desired and that alone is what holds them back. In many cases, they have been wanted and pursued for centuries without success.
Alternative energy in particular seems to be regarded as something we can have now just because we decided we want it. So, it follows that all that is needed is to pay to develop it now. But the doors that must be opened to achieve that are closed and locked, waiting for their time when many other new developments converge and finally open those doors. You can’t just buy a breakthrough because you want one.
In the meantime, successful development is possible if one condition yields and that condition is that the winning alternative must be cheaper than diesel. That has to go out the window. And without that there is no market incentive, so to solve that problem, the solution is market coercion such a government mandates. But even mandates must have a convincing justification.
Mandates alone can be a road leading to fabulous wealth coming from the sale of products that are mandated, but not able to be made cost effective. All that government mandates require is the public perception of necessary purpose. And what better purpose can there be than saving the planet from total destruction that is sure to happen within only a decade or so?
One must decide whether this call to action to save the planet is really based on true need, or on a pretext for need, which will then be forced by mandate.
Paul MilenkovicI am unfamiliar with why it takes courage to discuss population growth.
To a certain extent, "population control" can be enhanced by certain nominally acceptable methods. Encouraging legalized abortion, for example, is one. So is increasing the cost to bear and raise children effectively. However, many social programs intended to benefit mothers and children can have the effect of enhancing 'successful reproduction' -- even serial reproduction -- often with outright social subsidization or 'mandatory tolerance' of the "right" to large families.
charlie hebdo Relevant to your Narragansett Bay piece: https://www.nbweconomy.org/economic-sectors/aquaculture/ There are links at end of article to studies. One hazard to aquaculture mentioned is AGW. Another is population growth. It takes some guts to discuss the latter factor.
Relevant to your Narragansett Bay piece:
https://www.nbweconomy.org/economic-sectors/aquaculture/
There are links at end of article to studies.
One hazard to aquaculture mentioned is AGW. Another is population growth. It takes some guts to discuss the latter factor.
I am unfamiliar with why it takes courage to discuss population growth. Please fill me in on some of the reasons for this.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
charlie hebdo https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926337320303908 A technology to use far less platinum in fuel cells.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926337320303908
A technology to use far less platinum in fuel cells.
Yes, you are correct, the technology to use far less platinum in fuel cells will save the Earth. We have the word of a couple of people publishing in a for-profit Elsevier journal that this is indeed the case. I am greatly relieved that this problem has been solved and that you have brought this to the attention to all of us on this Forum.
Euclid"Clean Meat" appears to be on the horizon ... Consumer acceptance might be a problem, but maybe just the worry that it might be in the food supply, indistinguishable from real meat, will discourage consumers from eating real meat, and thus satisfy the green goal of reducing meat consumption.
I always think of ostriches when someone brings up alternatives to 'cattle' and 'hog' meat. My father had a broker who was always calling up to propose various wild-hair schemes to make the world a better place, and he introduced me to the Great Emu Farming Scam when it was only about 2 generations in. According to the tale, emus produce a large percentage of lean red meat, similar "enough" to beef that lots of consumers could be induced to eat it, and if enough of a production system could be developed, perhaps 10% as an initial target of American beef production could be supplanted. (This being calculated 'correctly' as cleaned and dressed tonnage, not 'on the claw' or whatever you ought to call it for the live stock...)
Of course, to 'get there' you needed a very large number of rather big and not very bright birds ... first to breed up to large herds, and then support the desired volume of 'harvested' or culled stock. And to this end, the fairly bright idea of unenlightened self-interest was brought forth. The great 'business opportunity' was not to breed birds for meat, but as microchipped breeding pairs to sell to entrepreneurs who would ... breed more microchipped breeding pairs to sell toe engrepreneurs who would breed more microchipped breeding pairs to sell to ... well you get the idea.
By the time this scam had had about its 19th MLM-style 'doubling' I was in Springhill with B&S, and lo and behold! one of Mr. Boucher's brothers-in-law WAS a practicing emu raiser. I wish now that I'd taped him when he got on the subject of 'those $@#&$ birds' -- there were thousands of issues that would cause them to 'fail to thrive', like some hideous labyrintspel of aviculture ... almost all of which would result in them 'throwing up their heads and yelling' and then falling dead on the spot. Whether or not anyone actually went beyond test-marketing that stuff -- I did see a few trials in supermarkets here and there -- I never found out. But it certainly isn't being touted as an alternative to the proven problems with conventional meat, at least where I can see.
I have been trying to comment here for about a day and a half -- here and on that other thread about hydrogen firing. Every time I get a few sentences in, that Kalmbach-sanctioned iPhone-virus scam triggers and wipes out everything. Isn't it interesting that it only happens when on this forum ... not in Classic Trains, not on MR. I don't find that circumstantial...
charlie hebdoMany areas of the oceans have been over-fished, such as the North Sea. Solutions to all of these except energy are not on the horizon.
I did considerable work on an aquaculture startup in Newport, RI in the early '80s; this involved suspending a carefully-designed network of ropes (using repurposed 600-gallon HDPE syrup barrels from Brazil as floats!) and encouraging mussel growth in 3D in the plankton column. We had about 40 acres of Narragansett Bay under culture at the time we finished the initial processing train (using, of all things, Dutch machinery specialized for mussel culture) and this was scalable well beyond that. One of the studies (I regret I didn't keep cites on it) pointed out that if this approach were implemented in the various bays and coves along the Eastern Seaboard, that alone would provide enough fully-renewable protein -- and good-tasting protein, not some vegetable Soylent Yellow horror -- to feed the current world population effectively. (Note that there are many other applicable coastlines elsewhere in the world...)
This of course is a bit idealistic, and some of the factor costs of production don't scale as economically with greatly increased volume -- but it would be perfectly feasible to conduct a large number of parallel harvesting operations, and processing the output for storage and shipping is not highly difficult in parallel either. The principal issue we encountered with 'quality' was opportunistic parasitization by things like pea crabs (we had a joke marketing approach that called these "George Washington Crabs" the way the C&O was "George Washington's Railroad" and that if you found one in your mussel it was to be considered a rare delicacy...) but separating these in processing, or indeed using them as 'additional assimilable protein', poses little real difficulty.
I think most of the issues with "world hunger" are largely political on the one hand and logistical on the other. Both should be addressed, but I suspect we may need more than one revolution or singularity before modern society actually steps up to a plate to accomplish what is technically possible.
I have spent many years agitating for something that ought to be a fundamental human right: free access to clean water. Here, too, there are surprisingly easy things -- my housekeeper's husband, when I lived in Englewood, worked with the CDC and developed a simple filter-based approach to solve the problems with schisto. Many other issues of water quality are similarly amenable to sensible and 'appropriate-technology' solutions. I helped set up a response to the Haitian hurricane crisis a few years ago -- instead of sending bottled water to be 'distributed' by profiteers, we sent crews of well-drillers and equipment to keep drilling clean wells, intentionally long past the time Haitian social institutions had recovered from the immediate crisis. Something I hope Biden and Harris prioritize is a return wholesale to the kind of Peace Corps activity that puts practical engineering, and practical resource management, in the hands of actual experts with actual morality and selfless dedication to bettering humanity -- perhaps we can shame other nations into doing the same. (Note that I think we learned from the Green Revolution and similar failures what 'not' to do in these regards, too...)
charlie hebdo MidlandMike mkwelbornjr Every human emits CO2. Its normal. The earth warms because every rotation is slightly closer to the sun. We have had historical warm and ice ages. The deserts in the USA were once at the bottom of an ocean. I would expect in a million years for us to go through that cycle again. The earth is warming presently because increasing CO2 is traping heat trying to radiate back into space. Carbon isotope studies show the CO2 to be from fossil fuels. As a geologist I am aware of past climate extremes. Are you aware that they were mass extinction events. Luckily the present climate change could be mitigated by reducing carbon burning. mkwelbornjr To squelch all modern existence and even to the point of getting rid of meat etc to prevent global warming is absurd. How would replacing coal burning plants with solar and other new technologies "squelch all modern existence" ? Who said anything about meat? Thanks Mike for injecting some facts into to thread. The unspoken part of the crisis is over- population. This factor requires more energy, food and water. Producing meat, as opposed to vegetables and fruits requires more of the above. Many areas of the oceans have been over-fished, such as the North Sea. Solutions to all of these except energy are not on the horizon.
MidlandMike mkwelbornjr Every human emits CO2. Its normal. The earth warms because every rotation is slightly closer to the sun. We have had historical warm and ice ages. The deserts in the USA were once at the bottom of an ocean. I would expect in a million years for us to go through that cycle again. The earth is warming presently because increasing CO2 is traping heat trying to radiate back into space. Carbon isotope studies show the CO2 to be from fossil fuels. As a geologist I am aware of past climate extremes. Are you aware that they were mass extinction events. Luckily the present climate change could be mitigated by reducing carbon burning. mkwelbornjr To squelch all modern existence and even to the point of getting rid of meat etc to prevent global warming is absurd. How would replacing coal burning plants with solar and other new technologies "squelch all modern existence" ? Who said anything about meat?
mkwelbornjr Every human emits CO2. Its normal. The earth warms because every rotation is slightly closer to the sun. We have had historical warm and ice ages. The deserts in the USA were once at the bottom of an ocean. I would expect in a million years for us to go through that cycle again.
The earth is warming presently because increasing CO2 is traping heat trying to radiate back into space. Carbon isotope studies show the CO2 to be from fossil fuels. As a geologist I am aware of past climate extremes. Are you aware that they were mass extinction events. Luckily the present climate change could be mitigated by reducing carbon burning.
mkwelbornjr To squelch all modern existence and even to the point of getting rid of meat etc to prevent global warming is absurd.
How would replacing coal burning plants with solar and other new technologies "squelch all modern existence" ? Who said anything about meat?
Thanks Mike for injecting some facts into to thread.
The unspoken part of the crisis is over- population. This factor requires more energy, food and water. Producing meat, as opposed to vegetables and fruits requires more of the above. Many areas of the oceans have been over-fished, such as the North Sea. Solutions to all of these except energy are not on the horizon.
"Clean Meat" appears to be on the horizon:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lab-grown-meat/
Consumer acceptance might be a problem. But maybe just the worry that it might be in the food supply, indistinguishable from real meat, will discourage consumers from eating real meat, and thus satisfy the green goal of reducing meat consumption.
MidlandMike The earth is warming presently because increasing CO2 is traping heat trying to radiate back into space.
The earth is warming presently because increasing CO2 is traping heat trying to radiate back into space.
Water vapor is an even more important "green house gas" (GHG) than CO2 due to a higher concentration (up to 5% for wv, versus 0.04% for CO2) in the lower atmosphere and broader IR lines. The uncertainty of how much warming is caused by increased CO2 is driven in large part by how much the water vapor fraction changes with increasing CO2. Much of the remaining uncertainty is how cloud formation will be affected along with thunderstorms.
Keep in mind that Mars has more CO2 in its atmosphere than the Earth, but it doesn't have the water vapor or other GHG's that are present in the Earth's atmosphere. Venus is literally sitting under an ocean's worth of CO2.
IMHO, the best way to de-carbonize electricity production is to switch to a combination of nuclear and roof top solar + batteries.
mkwelbornjrEvery human emits CO2. Its normal. The earth warms because every rotation is slightly closer to the sun. We have had historical warm and ice ages. The deserts in the USA were once at the bottom of an ocean. I would expect in a million years for us to go through that cycle again.
mkwelbornjrTo squelch all modern existence and even to the point of getting rid of meat etc to prevent global warming is absurd.
Erik_Mag We also need to add in the costs of the back-up generation to handle wide-spread calm periods.
One of our local amateur radio repeaters is completely off the grid, relying on solar panels, a small wind turbine, and batteries to provide 24/7 power for the repeater.
We're into the time of the year when the operator of the repeater occasionally has to trek in to the repeater site with a generator to charge the batteries, as wind and solar can't keep up.
RKFarmsWhat actually is "most efficient" when the external costs of destruction of environment by coal mining and burning are not considered? ...... On the other hand, windmills only take about 1/3 of an acre out of production for each installation, and the visual pollution is a very subjective thing.
......
On the other hand, windmills only take about 1/3 of an acre out of production for each installation, and the visual pollution is a very subjective thing.
Did a quick back of the envelope calculation and 1/3rd of an acre of a Powder River coal seam would be equal to what a 5MW wind-turbine can produce in 30 to 40 years. For the wind turbine we need to calculate the amount of damage from making the concrete, steel, copper and rare earths. IIRC, the wind turbine industry uses about a half billion dollars worth of lubricating oil each year. We also need to add in the costs of the back-up generation to handle wide-spread calm periods.
TANSTAAFL
Our regional landfill burns the methane produced in gensets which feed the grid.
Another such landfill is using the waste heat from the gensets to heat/cool greenhouses in which some one fifth of NYS's hothouse tomatoes are grown.
There are options.
YoHo1975Would it not be entirely plausible to have a set of locomotives where power was provided by diesel only when absolutely required and otherwise ran on overhead generation and battery?
Now it could be argued, and perhaps sensibly, that full dual-mode (where the power when drawing from external sources is much higher than that fir constant-horsepower sizing of the electrical drive) makes sense at a certain level of 'penetration' of electric supply, for example on grades currently requiring helpers or in services where higher speed would be required. But I think for a considerable time the same premise Conrail applied to the original dual-mode-lite (which was, sensibly, that you assign a given diesel consist rating to a given train and the consist behaves the same if on electric power) would be the most cost-effective for general operation. That imposes no requirement for operating electrical supply at any point, but seamlessly accommodates any level of implementation, specifically 'punctate' electrification where there are a great many interruptions in physical supply or changes in infrastructure, for example if using 50kV overhead in areas with many low overhead clearances.
And yes, it also seamlessly encompasses any desired percentage of zero-carbon generation instead of 100% internal-combustion power.
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Every human emits CO2. Its normal. The earth warms because every rotation is slightly closer to the sun. We have had historical warm and ice ages. The deserts in the USA were once at the bottom of an ocean. I would expect in a million years for us to go through that cycle again. There will always be some waste from living life. A modern coal plant can be highly clean burning. The mercury can be trapped and contained. To squelch all modern existence and even to the point of getting rid of meat etc to prevent global warming is absurd. Next up...only one kid per family to reduce global warming. Windmills create widespread visible pollution. Whats the point of saving land if you are going to clutter it with manmade object.
The most efficient process for the lowest cost will always win out.
mkwelbornjrThe pressure is a political agenda.
Any national program will usually find itself between competing political agendas. Some agendas are based in scientific evidence, and some are based on preserving status quo and coporate profits.
mkwelbornjrIts funny that few even know coal plants exist...they are usually surrounded by lush wilderness...
Is it those few people, or the coal plants that are surrounded by lush wilderness?
mkwelbornjrIn a modern coal plant 99.9% of the waste is reused for gypsum.
Not even close. The Sulfur can be recycled into gypsum. What about ash, mercury, NOX, and of course CO2.
OM has a good point, what works nicely on a small scale may be a real bear to work on a large scale. Similarly, a chemical process that is relatively safe on a small scale may be a major hazard on a large scale.
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