EPTUS Politics Mega-thread - Page 6310
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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please. In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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pmh
1414 Posts
Trump is doing great so far I think,much better then expected.I am getting very optimistic about his presidency,its going to be awesome. Who for secretary of state. It seems to be between guliani,newt and Romney. None of them are appealing to me,romney being the best despite the controversy. I hope they find someone else though. | ||
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On November 25 2016 06:05 TanGeng wrote: I don't see what the problem with fracking is. Fracking is a perfectly legitimate way if not very economical way to extract oil/gas in the US. It's much better than the coal alternative from a pollution and carbon perspective. Fracking problems are: [*] well hole seal failure [*] fracking fluid cleanup The well hole sealing failure is a general problem with the oil/gas industry. Going to just toss a few links in your general direction. Environmental effects of fracking: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Environmental_impacts_of_fracking Comparison to coal: http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2016/jan/24/environmental-justice-league-ri-environmental-just/could-fracking-be-worse-climate-coal/ Longer study: http://www.environmentamerica.org/sites/environment/files/reports/EA_FrackingNumbers_scrn.pdf Hard to compare to traditional drilling due to efforts being pushed against doing good studies on the matter. Nevertheless it's pretty bad from an environmental perspective. Pretty severe air and water pollution, also causes earthquakes. The water used in fracking generally can't be cleaned very effectively, and it also damages groundwater supplies. Long story short it's bad for the environment in a big way and it's a big deal that Clinton supports it. Well not anymore since she lost, but it was important. | ||
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ChristianS
United States3304 Posts
On November 25 2016 06:40 LegalLord wrote: Going to just toss a few links in your general direction. Environmental effects of fracking: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Environmental_impacts_of_fracking Comparison to coal: http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2016/jan/24/environmental-justice-league-ri-environmental-just/could-fracking-be-worse-climate-coal/ Longer study: http://www.environmentamerica.org/sites/environment/files/reports/EA_FrackingNumbers_scrn.pdf Hard to compare to traditional drilling due to efforts being pushed against doing good studies on the matter. Nevertheless it's pretty bad from an environmental perspective. Pretty severe air and water pollution, also causes earthquakes. The water used in fracking generally can't be cleaned very effectively, and it also damages groundwater supplies. Long story short it's bad for the environment in a big way and it's a big deal that Clinton supports it. Well not anymore since she lost, but it was important. I don't know that much about it, but from what my old professor at UCSD Skip Pomeroy said, it's totally possible to do hydraulic fracturing, and by using the right chemicals and reuptake protocols, the immediate environmental impact is fairly minimal. (That's not to say anything of the more controversial long-term effects like earthquakes, but since it's hardly proven that fracking does cause them, it's pretty hard to prove that with particular changes in procedure it would not.) But all that aside, the difficulty comes partly from nebulous oversight and accountability. So from our perspective we can't be sure particular companies are using responsible practices, and from the companies' perspective, even if they use responsible practices, some other company in the area could not be, and they'd still get held responsible for the environmental damage. Skip Pomeroy certainly seemed to be an environmentalist, and a lot of his research was on producing biofuel with algae, so I tend to be a bit skeptical that supporting fracking means a candidate is bad on environmental issues. | ||
TanGeng
Sanya12364 Posts
On November 25 2016 06:40 LegalLord wrote: Going to just toss a few links in your general direction. Environmental effects of fracking: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Environmental_impacts_of_fracking Comparison to coal: http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2016/jan/24/environmental-justice-league-ri-environmental-just/could-fracking-be-worse-climate-coal/ Longer study: http://www.environmentamerica.org/sites/environment/files/reports/EA_FrackingNumbers_scrn.pdf Hard to compare to traditional drilling due to efforts being pushed against doing good studies on the matter. Nevertheless it's pretty bad from an environmental perspective. Pretty severe air and water pollution, also causes earthquakes. The water used in fracking generally can't be cleaned very effectively, and it also damages groundwater supplies. Long story short it's bad for the environment in a big way and it's a big deal that Clinton supports it. Well not anymore since she lost, but it was important. Ok... So there are additionally methane gas discharge, earthquakes, and land use impact. Earthquakes and land use impacts are certainly some of the additional problems over conventional oil/gas. I still feel like the fracking fluid cleanup is still the biggest externality of which if done improperly is a big big deal. The problems of coal mining all together are worse. It's potentially a big deal to environmentalists who are against all of this. But is it really that bad if you have the water and accept conventional oil and gas drilling? | ||
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RealityIsKing
613 Posts
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On November 25 2016 07:21 TanGeng wrote: Ok... So there are additionally methane gas discharge, earthquakes, and land use impact. Earthquakes and land use impacts are certainly some of the additional problems over conventional oil/gas. I still feel like the fracking fluid cleanup is still the biggest externality of which if done improperly is a big big deal. The problems of coal mining all together are worse. It's potentially a big deal to environmentalists who are against all of this. But is it really that bad if you have the water and accept conventional oil and gas drilling? How exactly do you "have the water" to waste? It necessarily comes from a water supply that others will also need to use, e.g. groundwater. And the process of fracking pollutes that water quite severely, to the point that it's not really very feasible to clean it. You seem to underestimate how big a deal the "water" aspect of fracking is, acknowledging it as an issue but basically saying "big deal, so what?" It actually is a pretty big deal. | ||
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farvacola
United States18855 Posts
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Dan HH
Romania9179 Posts
On November 25 2016 07:49 RealityIsKing wrote: Why can't we all just look at the Solar Panel Roadway? Because the materials needed for them don't exist, among many other smaller problems with it | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
On the plains of West Texas, new wind farms can be built for just $22 a megawatt-hour. In the Arizona and Nevada deserts, solar projects are less than $40 a megawatt-hour. Compare those figures with the U.S. average lifetime cost of $52 for natural gas plants and about $65 for coal. Environmental rules and government subsidies are no longer the key drivers for clean power. Economics are. That’s why Donald Trump will have limited influence on the U.S. utility industry’s push toward renewable energy, according to executives and investors. Companies including NextEra Energy Inc., Duke Energy Corp. and others that invest billions in power plants are already moving forward with long-term plans to generate electricity with cleaner and more economic alternatives. “We said before the election that whoever is elected president, we would be continuing our efforts to go to a low-carbon fleet and also pursue renewables,” said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke, the second-largest U.S. utility owner. Wind and solar have been the two biggest sources of electricity added to U.S. grids since 2014 as utilities closed a record number of aging coal-fired generators. Trump has derided clean energy and assailed environmental regulations that hinder jobs, while pledging to revive the mining industry. In an interview Tuesday, Trump softened his view, telling the New York Times that he has an ‘‘open mind’’ on the Paris climate accord and noting that “there is some connectivity” between human activity and climate change. And it’s not just cost that makes clean energy attractive to utilities -- it’s time. A solar farm can go up in months to meet incremental increases in utility demand; it takes years to permit, finance and build the giant boilers and exhaust systems that make up a coal plant, and they can last for a generation. A four-year presidential term is hardly a tick in that energy clock, and companies are already planning projects that will commence after Trump leaves office, even if he serves two terms. Over the next four years, utilities have announced plans to close 12 gigawatts worth of coal plants, largely because cheap natural gas has made them uneconomical -- the equivalent of switching off a dozen nuclear reactors. Trump will have some levers at his disposal to influence how they’ll be replaced. He has vowed, for instance, to kill President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would require states to reduce emissions from power plants. And two federal subsidies -- the investment tax credit and the production tax credit -- remain key components to making solar and wind affordable. He hasn’t indicated whether he’ll push to repeal the tax credits for wind and solar, which were extended for five years at the end of 2015 with bipartisan support. And the Clean Power Plan, which has been suspended pending a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, isn’t scheduled to take effect until 2022. Utilities, meanwhile, are marching ahead. Source | ||
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TanGeng
Sanya12364 Posts
Overall wind farms look very promising. Solar power still lacks the flexibility to be viable standalone solution in the electrical grid. | ||
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FiWiFaKi
Canada9859 Posts
I suspect some massive fudging of the numbers, and would just take the source as completely unreliable. Any person who knows any technical details of electricity production knows those numbers are a joke. | ||
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FiWiFaKi
Canada9859 Posts
On November 25 2016 11:00 TanGeng wrote: Are the tax credits factored in for MW-hr numbers? Overall wind farms look very promising. Solar power still lacks the flexibility to be viable standalone solution in the electrical grid. Nah, wind is the overhyped, plenty of issues with it. The future is solar, with hydro to absorb the peaks (or natural gas when water isn't available). That's the golden standard for the mean time. Unless public acceptance of nuclear changes, or we find a practical storage means for energy. | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
President-elect Donald Trump's plan to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to make it "a lot better" for U.S. workers would not be a one-way street for his administration, as Canada and Mexico prepare their own list of demands that could require difficult U.S. concessions. The 22-year-old NAFTA and other trade deals became lightning rods for voter anger in the U.S. industrial heartland states that swept Trump to power this month. Trump -- who on Monday vowed to file notice of his intent to quit an Asia-Pacific trade deal on his first day in office -- has pledged to leave NAFTA if it can't be improved to his liking. But he has said little about what improvements he wants, apart from halting the migration of U.S. factories and jobs to Mexico. Trade experts, academics and government officials say Canada and Mexico would also seek tough concessions and that NAFTA's zero-tariff rate would be extremely difficult to alter. And any renegotiation would likely take several years. "In a renegotiation, one side can come in with requests, but the other side is going to expect concessions," said Wendy Cutler, a former deputy U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). "We need to know what we're going to ask for and what we can give." When Cutler helped renegotiate a stalled trade deal with South Korea in 2010, USTR won concessions for U.S. automakers, but at the expense of a longer phase-out on steep Korean pork tariffs and allowing Korea to largely maintain a health care reimbursement system that favors domestic generic drugmakers. Trump, who during the campaign called NAFTA the "worst trade deal ever" and threatened to levy a 35-percent tariff on Mexican-assembled autos and other goods, would have a hard time raising U.S. tariffs without scrapping the agreement, trade experts say. "There is no precedent in free trade negotiations for one side raising tariffs more than the other," said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington. "If U.S. workers are more expensive than Mexican workers, the only way to level the playing field is to do things that raise costs in Mexico," Bown said. Negotiating stronger environmental and labor protections would be one way of doing this, as it would increase manufacturing costs in a lower-income country like Mexico. The Trump transition leader for trade, Dan Dimicco, declined Reuters' requests for comment. DiMicco, who is under consideration to be Trump's top trade negotiator, is a former chief executive of steel giant Nucor Corp. who has long fought for protections against unfairly traded imports. Source | ||
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
For people without a background in separation processes, just look at this image: ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/BbKZvCN.jpg) Imagine how hard it is to get the water on the right, then realize that that kind of water is still worse-than-Flint quality. Full of carcinogens and radioactive elements. Also realize that that water can very commonly seep into the water table and contaminate people's drinking water supplies. For people with some separations background, let me share a few select quotes. Another alternative is waste treatment: removing the contaminants and then dumping the“clean” water into a nearby sewer or river. But you can’t use a standard municipal water treatment plant to treat flowback and produced water as those facilities are just not designed to handle the level of contamination, especially radioactivity, found in these waters. (See here, here, here, here and here.) But there are so-called brine treatment plants that are at least in principle equipped to handle that level of contamination. Although they’ve been in use for quite some time to treat water from conventional oil and gas operations, many facilities of this type have been found lacking and some have even incurred fines for failure to meet Clean Water Act or other regulatory standards. ... Specifically, the authors looked at the effluent from the Josephine Brine Treatment Facility in western Pennsylvania and its impact on downstream water quality and sediment. The plant, which only treats oil and gas wastewater, dumps its effluent into Blacklick Creek, a kayaking and whitewater destination. Over a two-year period beginning in August 2010, Warner et al. collected effluent as well as downstream and background water and sediment samples, and analyzed them for key contaminants and radioactivity. You could say that the results raise some concerns: While radioactive “radium [was] substantially (>90%) reduced in the treated effluents,” stream sediments at the point of discharge were about 200 times background levels. The good news is that most of the radium appears to be localized in those nearby sediments**. The concern is that by hanging around at elevated concentrations, it can potentially be a long-term source of radiation for nearby aquatic life. It also has the potential to be remobilized and transported downstream eventually. Chloride and bromide concentrations downstream of the plant were on average 4.5 and 12 times background levels. The plant was found to contribute about 90 percent of the downstream chloride content. Bromide enrichment can be a problem for downstream drinking water treatment facilities given that carcinogenic compounds form during chlorination in the presence of bromide. ... Effluent isn’t the only byproduct. As part of the treatment, chemicals are added to the fracking wastewater to precipitate out salts and metals. And just like the water from the plant, plant operators must have a place to send the precipitates to. Warner et al. calculate that each kilogram of the resulting sludge could contain roughly 900 becquerels of radium* (at 900 becquerels of radioactivity, 900 atoms of radium decay every second emitting a high-energy alpha particle and leaving behind a radioactive gas, radon). This level of radiation exceeds the level for application to soil and may also exceed some landfill limits as well. And if it exceeds landfill limits, then it has to be treated as a hazardous waste, which is another can of radioactive and contaminated worms in its own right. Are all treatment plants like Josephine? I suspect not. One advanced plant I visited during an eco-fact-finding trip to Pennsylvania in June 2012, run by Eureka Resources, appeared to do a pretty thorough job of getting contaminants out of wastewater from fracking operations (see photo), but even it has garnered some air quality violations from EPA. And plants like Eureka’s are not a panacea: even these plants have to deal with the sludge that’s left behind; they are expensive, and at least for now, their current capacity is quite limited. The effects of fracking on water supplies are very, very scary. Sane countries that care about their environment ban it for good reason. We are not one of those countries. | ||
BigFan
TLADT24920 Posts
On November 25 2016 11:27 FiWiFaKi wrote: Lol what. You have to be hella stupid to be spending 52 dollars for MWH of natural gas, and 65 for coal. In Alberta, at 30CAD (so way less US), the electricty producing companies are rolling in money. I suspect some massive fudging of the numbers, and would just take the source as completely unreliable. Any person who knows any technical details of electricity production knows those numbers are a joke. Do you have any other reference that can show that the source is unreliable? You can't just throw that out without at least giving a counter reference, not to mention that Canada and the US are different countries so if what you say is true, there could be a lot of reasons for that difference. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23714 Posts
On November 25 2016 12:04 LegalLord wrote: On the topic of fracking and cleaning up the water, I'm going to demonstrate the problem very quickly. Source. For people without a background in separation processes, just look at this image: + Show Spoiler + Imagine how hard it is to get the water on the right, then realize that that kind of water is still worse-than-Flint quality. Full of carcinogens and radioactive elements. Also realize that that water can very commonly seep into the water table and contaminate people's drinking water supplies. For people with some separations background, let me share a few select quotes. The effects of fracking on water supplies are very, very scary. Sane countries that care about their environment ban it for good reason. We are not one of those countries. Yeah, if you cared about the environment you were pretty hosed this cycle. The alternative to Trump's transition team was one who said: I'm sure people in 50-100 years will be as confused by the arguments for fracking not being a terrible idea, as they are by the arguments that cigarette smoking wasn't dangerous. | ||
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kwizach
3658 Posts
On November 25 2016 05:50 ChristianS wrote: [...] If we're discussing climate change, it's a win when candidates that want to do something about it win, and it's a loss when candidates who don't want to do something about it win. It really is that simple. To say "but some candidates are better and some are worse on climate change" isn't really a rebuttal. Of course we will have more and less pro-climate presidents, but that doesn't mean there's no reason to be frustrated by the less pro-climate presidents, nor does it mean we shouldn't criticize them. Exactly. And it is fallacious to argue that one isn't looking "at the long game" by discussing the environmental policies of the next president -- the impact of those policies will precisely be long felt, and the urgency of climate change makes four years of inaction an extremely serious loss of time. I personally think that HRC, like Obama, was indeed too much of a supporter of fracking. They clearly saw it as a bridge from coal to cleaner energies, and thus as a path to reduce CO² emissions and fight climate change, but it was also seen both as a business opportunity for U.S. energy companies and as a strategic opportunity to help some countries decrease their reliance on Russia for their energy needs. Clinton had been putting emphasis on the regulations needed to address some of the immediate environmental issues linked to fracking (in particular those mentioned in this thread, namely the release of methane and the contamination of water) for some time, though. See for example this quote from 2014: "[...] But to capitalize on this boom, we have to face head-on the legitimate, pressing environmental concerns about some new extraction practices and their impacts on local water, soil, and air supplies. Methane leaks in the production and transportation of natural gas are particularly troubling. So it’s crucial that we put in place smart regulations, and enforce them, including deciding not to drill when the risks are too high. And if we keep making progress in developing technologies to capture and contain methane leaks, that’s something we could export all over the world. In the end, to make sure that natural gas is an effective bridge fuel, we must keep moving forward on renewables, and the kind of sustainable clean energy future we seek." In any case, her promotion of fracking under certain conditions as a bridge to clean energies (although one has to note that it can have the opposite effect if not regulated, namely to discourage investment in green energies because of its cheap prices) was accompanied by a lot of proposals to address climate change and protect the environment, so pretending that her and Trump were vaguely similar on the issue, as the anti-Clinton crowd likes to do with its usual false equivalences, is nonsensical, as ChristianS pointed out. | ||
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On November 25 2016 12:29 GreenHorizons wrote: Yeah, if you cared about the environment you were pretty hosed this cycle. The alternative to Trump's transition team was one who said: I'm sure people in 50-100 years will be as confused by the arguments for fracking not being a terrible idea, as they are by the arguments that cigarette smoking wasn't dangerous. But when she got criticized for it, she backtracked and gave a vaguely "if you didn't know any better you could believe she supports what you want her to support" response about her fracking advocacy. Surprisingly she also found a "blame the Russians" approach to complaining about groups disliking fracking. Oh well, the chance of having a good president was lost when Clinton and Trump won their primaries. | ||
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Sermokala
United States14104 Posts
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