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posted by
CoolHand
on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:37AM
from the tonight-they're-going-to-pollute-like-its-1999 dept.
from the tonight-they're-going-to-pollute-like-its-1999 dept.
Both houses of the California legislature have passed a bill called SB-32 which would tell the California Air Resources Board "to ensure that statewide greenhouse gas emissions are reduced to 40% below the 1990 level by 2030." The state's Democratic governor has issued a statement indicating that he intends to sign it into law.
The Western States Petroleum Association and the California Manufacturers & Technology Association expressed their opposition to the bill.
links:
- the bill
- governor's statement
- Western States Petroleum Association statement
- San Jose Mercury-News
- UPI
- Vox
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California Likely to Impose Drastic Carbon Dioxide Restrictions
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Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gravis on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:34AM
i agree with this which is why i think gasoline cars should be heavily taxed and used to subsidize EV purchases.
those are exactly the people who should be punished! seriously, if you are using that much gas every day, you are a huge polluter!
the proper solution to this is to then use the tax to subsidize the trucks and home batteries until it makes the same amount or more sense to get them than not. unfortunately, unless this is already part of the law, that's not going to happen.
businesses and people can run from taxes but they cannot escape climate change.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tftp on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:56AM
those are exactly the people who should be punished!
I presume you understand that those are the poorest, least compensated people who clean your office, fix water leaks, protect you from crime, sell you apples, and perform many other tasks like that?
Let's imagine that one day they cannot come to the Bay Area from Morgan Hill, Pleasanton, and other places. The roads will be empty. Your office will be empty. Your LAN will be down. There will be no coffee in the machine. What will you do?
The problem here is that the market is not interested in providing inexpensive accommodation. I saw many times how affordable homes are demolished and expensive condos built in their place. Note that the valley is pretty small. The society wants one thing, but the market wants another. The society has no say. Taxes on cars will only make matters worse. It is a good idea to wean ourselves from gasoline, but you start with tax benefits to those who provide chargers! You make sure that people can have two cars, one electric and one regular, for longer trips. Or you make sure that it is easy to rent one on a moment's notice and that it is cheap. You create conditions when people want to use ev. Today people hate them because they are not good enough for most people. No tax will make them good enough. Only construction of infrastructure where every parking spot has a charger will get you there. Punishment will only make people mad at you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @10:12AM
I very much doubt Gravis understands that. He's in his ideological zone where reality is taxed to death.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday August 31 2016, @10:33AM
Excellent points. My question is mostly why we are considering a vehicle driver ( which must, by definition, have a highly portable energy source ) to be a heavy recipient of cutbacks, when the goal is overall CO2 emission lowering?
My take is that encouraging solar for static installations is the way to go. We discussed here a few days ago about advances in solar roofing. This needs to catch on. Big-time.
I was at the city hall a few days ago inquiring about replacing my patio and putting in solar. They were full of all sorts of requirements, hoops, and property tax paperwork.
I feel if the State of California came down on cities about reducing energy loads, the city government would have been all over themselves when a homeowner approached wanting to go solar as much as a homeowner coming in inquiring how he could pay additional sales tax. The last thing they should do is discourage the guy with all sorts of hoops and procedures for going solar. Help the guy as much as they can, and for gawd's sakes, don't ram the guy with tax disincentives and messes of paperwork!
Its gonna be a lotta work to get another pound of CO2 savings from the automotive sector, but for static things like houses, we can still get substantial improvements at a much lower cost.
I don't want to foist the burden of this on the vehicle owner. We still have a lot of easy pickings out there by encouraging adoption of solar and refrigeration designed for being powered by solar.
Mostly for things where the end use of the energy is thermal management.
There are alternative energy storage techniques than storage batteries to tide us over when the sun is not shining. Batteries excel for storing electrical energy. However, the elephant in MY house is thermal management. So I need far more thermal storage than electrical... and what stores thermal energy quite nicely? Water! Pure plain simple tap water. Make ice with it when solar energy is abundant, melt the ice when I want to cool the house. Or make ice when I want to warm the house, and use the solar panels in thermal mode to keep the ice melted. Thermodynamics. Heat Pump technologies.
I will deteriorate a battery by repeatedly charging and discharging a battery, however, I have not witnessed anyone wearing out water by repeatedly freezing and thawing it. And it stores a helluva lot of thermal energy over the phase change from liquid to solid.
We have barely even started with this kind of stuff yet.... there are a very few people aware of these technologies - and the few installations I am aware of were put in by the super-rich for their vacation homes in the middle of nowhere. However, these technologies have nothing in them that are expensive! Its friggen water, and propane gas used as a refrigerant!
In the event one fears cross-contamination, one can always use a heat transfer loop of something like water/alcohol ( we can't have alcohol! People might drink it! ).
Governments will spend more money than you care to imagine chasing hard to get savings, and tell people like me that I can't use propane as a refrigerant because of its flammability, yet they let me have a car with far more explosive gasoline in it on the road. I have the wild suspicion that those laws are to protect the business models of freon patent holders, who manufacture an environmentally far more toxic product.
I am really being disillusioned as to having spent so many years of my life studying the science behind this kind of stuff, only to be told that I am re-inventing the wheel, and one can already buy air conditioners at WalMart. I am rapidly getting too old to transfer what I have learned and train a younger generation to take the reins of this and go with it. I feel the kind of stuff I am interested in doing, differently from anyone else, is best done in a third-world country that economically has to tolerate innovation, as they can't just print themselves the money they want to buy executive-level handshakes.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:21PM
What you're talking about exists and has been around for decades. It's called a ground source heat pump (GSHP). The principle is 6ft down the earth is a constant 55F. So you sink a loop carrying water + antifreeze into the ground and run it back into the house, where you blow air across a manifold to cool the place or boost the temperature 15 deg and circulate through a radiant floor system. It's lovely, comfortable, and saves thousands on heating/cooling costs.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:27PM
Or if you live by a lake/sea, you can put the pipe in there.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:28PM
Not quite. The lake or sea is ok for cooling, but doesn't work at all for heating. You want to sink it down into a bunch of solid rock (or equivalent...loose stones don't give as good conduction, and water tend to make things cooler. Then you will end up with a yearly average temperature. (I wouldn't claim 55 F, as I suspect it depends on the mean temperature for your area...with a lot of thermal ballast.) You might want to heat or cool away from this temperature, but it would certainly reduce the amount of heating or cooling significantly and THAT reduces the energy requirements. If you keep it running all the time, then it should, over time, adjust to being exactly the temperature you want it to be.
Please note: You still need to insulate your house well. A well insulated house is the prime requirement, and heaters and coolers should be purely modifiers to that basic temperature. I've heard, though I doubt it, that a house can be insulated well enough that it can be heated in a snowstorm by a candle. This is a bit too extreme to believe, and any house that well insulated would have air quality problems, but it gives you a basic framework. With poor insulation you won't be comfortable unless you like the external temperature no matter what your heater and air conditioner are doing. With good insulation you can get away with quite weak temperature modifications.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday September 01 2016, @08:21AM
What you're talking about exists and has been around for decades. It's called a ground source heat pump (GSHP). The principle is 6ft down the earth is a constant 55F.
Exactly. Its not exactly rocket science. Like you say, not even new. My only twist is phase changing both propane and water in order to store thermal energy ( either to heat or to cool ) driven by solar energy, so that one can continue to have a boosted GSHP operating during times the solar panels aren't putting out sufficient to do the job.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:30PM
What will you do?
Leave, which is exactly what they should do anyway because they have no water in the desert.
Its kinda the whole point... get rid of 40% of the population and/or population related economic activity.
Thats whats so weird about it, I know it has to drop more than 40% due to water supply issues, so why stop there?
The funny thing is people used to have doom and gloom conversations about Detroit before it collapsed... But oh no, silicon valley or LA or SF will never fall, no never LOL.
Eventually, one way or another, cooperate or not, CA is going back to cattle ranch haciendas and some minor coastal trade. 1800 AD is coming back, like it or not. That doesn't mean everybody gotta leave, and high tech means more can stay than were sustainable in 1800, but most of them gotta go somewhere else. If you want water we have more than we know what to do with east of the mississippi.
Its kind of a dumb idea anyway ... here's an unsustainable situation that's on its way to crashing, I know lets burn irreplaceable fossil fuels to floor it as we fly off the cliff in order to squeeze the last drops of blood from that stone.
Any tradesman or coffee maker or whatever you list should move to a higher standard of living area NOW while they can still get gasoline and settle into the community. I mean, everybody's gonna have to leave CA sooner or later and the first guy jumping on the lifeboat always ends up better off than the last guy to try.
Gosh doctor, this hammer is defective, every time I hit my thumb with it, my thumb hurts...
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Wednesday August 31 2016, @03:08PM
This sounds like a variation on Malthus, which hasn't had very good predictive power.
Besides, there is a great deal of catastrophe and pain to occur before people take flight, which it seems like California is attempting to ameliorate, even if it is through questionable means. You'll note the poorest of the poor are the ones still left in Detroit. They don't have the means to move, and definitely don't have the means to rebuild.
Much of the problems can be traced back to Henry George's observation about San Francisco back in 1871, and really haven't improved since. If anything, much of the problems can be traced back to property tax rates being too low and attempting to capitalize on economic rents.
http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2014/09/san-francisco-property-tax-rate-slated-drop-next-year.html [socketsite.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNYViRmSUBE [youtube.com]
The high CO2 emissions are just a by-product of the confluence of those two events.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:18PM
Having known some of them, I explicitly *don't* know that those are the lowest paid people. The lowest paid people can't afford the commute, and have to live in inferior housing in undesirable areas. The long commutes are made by people who want to live in a 1950's middle class life-style, but can't afford the prices in the closer suburbs. These aren't the highest paid people, but they are quite far from being the lowest paid people.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Informative) by tftp on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:27PM
It's hard to speak for others, but among my personal acquaintances one plumber commutes to Bay Area from Santa Cruz, one mechanic commutes from Pleasanton, one engineer commutes from Gilroy, another engineer commutes from Modesto, and another contractor lives in Santa Cruz and is effectively excluded from most of the business that occurs here. Some of them are low paid, other (engineers) are what you say.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @09:32PM
Some of these workers will go away, thereby reducing property value. Some of these workers will get paid more. Neither change would be bad.
(Score: 2) by EQ on Thursday September 01 2016, @05:36AM
Gravis, So its government's job to punish groups of people who have committed no crime other than to not be able to afford to live close to their workplace? You advocate punishing groups by government fiat without any regard to individual circumstance - and rewarding favored groups, commanding prices on things by laws according to your whims? Who let you out of North Korea? Or else you've done a very good job of trolling as a parody of a collectivist eco-nazi