Some people in Congress — including, shamefully, Barack Obama — think it would be a great idea for taxpayers to subsidize “Coal to Liquid” technologies that would belch forth massive amounts of CO2 — and rip apart the earth while we’re at it. They think that’s the future of “energy independence.” I think they’re nuts — or worse.
MoveOn is putting their energies to good use — fighting this utterly disastrous bill.
Click here to sign their petition against the Coal-to-liquid subsidy bill.
And as I’ve said before, this basically prevents me from supporting Obama. Sorry — some things are just too important.
Please share widely!
Like a broken clock, even you are occasionally correct. This plan for coal liquifaction and gasification is folly. Between emitting astronomical amounts of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere there is the issue of the production of sulphuric acids which are changing the pH of our streams, ponds, lakes, and oceans, dramatically damaging flora and fauna.
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I have no idea how the coal lobby got to Obama, but he is off the reservation on this one. That being said, he will likely be the democrat nominee. Get used to it.
…he’ll come to his senses, since he will no longer be beholden to the voters in Illinois. I doubt it, though.
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BTW, you are quite correct that about the problems with coal–even just mining coal results in acidification of streams and rivers.
…he’ll surround himself with really smart people. Didn’t happen though.
and I add the caveat of sometimes: “Democrats piss me off.”
Thank you for promoting this petition. We’ve been covering Liquid Coal since we started West Virginia Blue.
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The N.Y.Times wrote about it last week (see: CTL subsidies: corporate welfare writ large, environmental disaster, what’s not to like?). As Al Gore denounced it, we asked everyone to call the bill’s co-sponosors (including Obama) and express their displeasure (see: Al Gore – “A horrible mistake” (with video) — the dKos version was highly rec’d a week ago and our YouTube video picked up over 2600 views in just a few days). We were tickled pink when word came that Moveon.org picked up our cause with the petition signature drive.
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Our most recent “banging of the drum” is coverage of regional displeasure in ths bill (Liquid Coal Backlash in Coal Mining Region) and anti-coal activism (Asheville NC activists confront Bank of America for coal industry investments).
I’ll promote. Thanks WVB.
Done. đŸ™‚
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FWIW. About Obama. He has also said that he will only support Liquid Coal if there is proven carbon sequestration technology. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s in this legislation.
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Obama is the Dem. leader of the Senate Coal Liquid Fuel caucus. This bill is his baby. Therefore, I’m more inclined to believe his actions than his rhetoric.
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There’s so much I like about him (and many other pols who are pushing this)–his stance of this issue is incredibly frustrating for me.
…are you from WVA or Massachusetts?
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The answer doesn’t matter to me very much in regards the rather substantial pollution issue regarding coal, but I’m just curious.
I blog as Clem G. at West Virginia Blue.
Energy Independence would wean us off of foreign oil. This would diminish our need to be in the Middle East. Like it or not the world runs on energy dense hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons, initially coal in the late 18th and 19th Centuries and now oil have: increased the standard of living, virtually eradicated slavery(as the manpower used for production has been replaced by the horsepower generated by hydrocarbons), and allowed us to live the relatively easy lives we all live.
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Hydrocarbons are at this point central to a functioning economy and lifestyle. We had a chance in the middle years of the 20th century (1950s-1980) to move to nuclear power for a fair amount of our energy needs, but this was stopped by Jimmy Carter and his allies on the left. If our civillian nuclear capabilities had been allowed to grow we would not be facing the choices we do now.
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While I fully support finding alternative energy sources, mainly from a national defense standpoint, the fact is many of those sources are not economically viable without subsidies. Worse yet there production hurts the environment, or food stream in some way. Case in point – Ethanol. Ethanol is not cheap to produce, it takes corn to produce in its current process. Corn production is notoriously bad for streams as it involves large amounts of fertilizers. Finally the skyrocketing international corn prices may lead to starvation in Central America and Mexico, where corn is a staple of the diet.
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So while these other energy sources are being developed, using a technology that has been around for over 70 years to help us towards energy indepence is not a bad idea. You cannot be against intervening in the Middle East and against rational policies to wean us off foreign oil, unless you would like to dramatically reduce your standard of living.
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P.S. I may finally buy a compact flourescent bulb for my home. I saw some of the new ones at my parents house and they actually are a lot better than the ones I remember fromt the early 1990s.
With the world on the verge of an unprecedented man made climate change we can’t stuck in a seventies mindset. This bill subsidizes one of the least efficient ways of producing energy, from a carbon standpoint, right at the time that the public is finally starting to seriously debate effective carbon controls for the first time.
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One look at the co-sponsors of the bill in the Senate tells one that this isn’t about “enery independence,” it is old fashioned coroporate welfare pork.
that I don’t know where to begin.
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No, most of the world runs of little energy at all. The Western World uses lots of hydrocarbons, but locales from Denmark to Idaho have shown that it’s just not necessary to do so.
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You left off whale oil in the earlier history [a renewable resource if harvested with restraint, I’d point out] and give far too much credit to carbo-fuel. Slavery was ended on moral and political grounds, not because of the availability of burnable chemicals.
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Not so much. Unsafe nuclear practices, excessive public subsidies to nuclear energy, and not having solved the problem of what to do with the waste led nuclear to a standstill. That we don’t have a means of energy storage means that nuclear can’t solve much more than about 50% of our energy needs also renders your claim to be garbage. In the 1970s — and even today — we don’t have the battery capacity to run primarily electric cars, so all that dinojuice used for autos can’t be replaced by nuclear. Furthermore, since nuclear plants don’t really have an on/off switch that works on the scale of minutes or hours, they’re only appropriate for base load: so, it’s particularly inefficient to use nuclear power for a huge chunk of of the electricity load. You can transition some building heating to electricity to put more heat/cool on nuclear power [via the grid], but that’s a long time scale process.
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As opposed to coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear? Oh that’s right, they all get massive government subsidies too. I forgot. Apparently you did too.
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This entire paragraph is nonsense. Ethanol does not [just] require corn — it can be done with sugar or switchgrass, as is done in Brazil. In fact, Brazil would love to sell us ethanol, but we slap such a big tax on it that it can’t be sold in tUSA. Corn production doesn’t require fertilizers, and could be grown [at lower yields] with far less fertilizer. The “skyrocketing” international corn price is not going to lead to starvation in CA and Mexico; there’s been virtually no evidence to demonstrate a link between commodity prices in tUSA and widespread starvation anywhere: starvation results from inefficient transportation systems, government corruption, and other factors.
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Biodiesel has been around over 100 years — when will you take up the flag for that more environmentally conscious fuel alternative? Mass rail transit has been around for about 200 years — when will you take up the flag for expanding mass transit?
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So long as there are other opportunities to reduce our dependence on foreign oil while also reducing pollution instead of creating more, claiming that coal-to-liquids is not a bad idea is just plain stupid. Throwing in the standard of living argument is horseapples too — we could reduce our energy consumption nationwide by 20% with absolutely no change to our standard of living or habits. CF bulbs, inflating your tires to full pressure, that sort of thing. 20%. We could get another chunk by expanding renewable energy — and by the way, wind power, biofuel [wood chips], and landfill gas are all economically profitable now with subsidies smaller than those that coal or oil companies get.
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[blockquote]P.S. I may finally buy a compact flourescent bulb for my home. I saw some of the new ones at my parents house and they actually are a lot better than the ones I remember fromt the early 1990s.[/blockquote]
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Well way to do your part. CF bulbs have been more than adequate replacements for incandescent bulbs in most applications for many years now. That you haven’t noticed a change in 15 years just shows how far your head is buried up your ain the sand for all this time. Somehow, it doesn’t stop you from posting enough crap to power a landfill generator though.
Unsafe nuclear practices,… and not having solved the problem of what to do with the waste led nuclear to a standstill.
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At least some of the waste problem can be dealt with by construction of breeder reactors.
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Corn production doesn’t require fertilizers, and could be grown [at lower yields] with far less fertilizer.
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No plant production requires use of fertilizers, but use of fertilizers increases yield per acre. It is naive to believe that fertilizers will not be used to increase yield. At least as important, in my view, is that increase in yield also requires water, and would probably result in depletion of acquifers at accelerating rates.
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The “skyrocketing” international corn price is not going to lead to starvation in CA and Mexico; there’s been virtually no evidence to demonstrate a link between commodity prices in tUSA and widespread starvation anywhere
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Quite frankly, increased (US) domestic consumption of corn products might actually benefit Mexico and Central America. As I’ve described elsewhere here, US dumping of corn, subsidized by the American taxpayer, in Mexico and Central America, has decimated domestic agriculture there, impoverishing more than a few agri-workers and increasing illegal immigration into the use. If there is another outlet for use of corn in the US, that dumping may stop, taking pressure off of Mexican and Central American farmers.
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On the other hand, increases in corn prices will cut into the price of feed in the US. That was clear from a recent article out of Indiana, which stated that cattle producers were not happy with increasing feed prices. Of course, ruminants (cattle) shouldn’t be eating corn, anyway, so increases in corn prices may be a benefit.
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Let me rephrase: Much of the first world nations run on energy dense hydrocarbons. The third world may not use much hydrocarbons but I wouldn’t want to live in the third world, would you?
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Point taken, but the sustainability of the end of slavery and serfdom was enhanced by the industrial revoloution and farm machinery, which made it more efficient, and less politically risky to produce goods by machine and not by massive amounts of unskilled labor. You may not like it, but the industrial revolution helped bring about the end of slavery.
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Sugar is used in Brazil but their tropical climate lends itself to the production of an abundance of sugar. The switchgrass e.g. bagasse is used to produce energy for distillation, it is not converted to ethanol per se. Which I agree is a good use of an otherwise waste product. The United States can not produce that much sugar economically, hence the use of high fructose corn syrup in this country. There is promise in celluosic conversion to sugars for ethanol production, but that is still not comercially viable.
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Commercial production of corn requires fertilizers. Take out fertilizers and I would place a huge bet on barely being able to produce enough corn for our food needs, never mind for ethanol.
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The high price of corn driving up food prices is very well documented: here, here, see blockquote below, and here amongst others.
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On the order of “renewable fuels”? I think not.
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No — but Denmark’s quite nice — and their health care ratings are higher too. Germany’s rolling out all sorts of green energy programs: wind, hydro and other renewable plants produced a total of 56 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity or 9.3 percent of power consumed in Germany in 2004, up from 7.9 percent in 2003. Since tUS electricity demand is expected to grow 1.8 percent per year between now and 2020, Germany’s 1.4 percent increase indicates that tUSA very likely could eliminate construction of new power plants with a combination of renewable supply and demand reduction through conservation. Germany’s not too shabby, ask raj. Oil supply is the same story. We don’t need coal-to-liquids. Gasoline demand is expected to rise 1 percent per year between now and 2030. We could get 15 percent efficiency going from 65 mph to 55 mph, another 3 percent from air inflation, and 10 percent from smoother driving [less gas, less brake in city driving]. That would be more than enough to offset the so-called natural demand increase while we’re gradually replacing the fleet with more fuel efficient vehicles, which would again reduce demand further. By then, the massive investment tUSA could be investing in mass transit instead of it’s eventually reduced war in Iraq would be finishing up, and there’s another reduction in demand for you. Biodiesel will have taken off by then, and ethanol production more efficient at using co-generated materials, thereby getting more ethanol with less.
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Coal to liquids and nuclear may be needed someday. Let’s not jump the gun — they’re just not needed yet, and we have alternatives which are cleaner and safer. We ought to use those first.
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America shouldn’t be producing anywhere near the amount of sugar we produce now — high tariffs have resulted in Florida sugar growers doing vast amounts of damage to the wetlands caused by runoffs. Should we exchnage dependence on Middle Eastern oil for dependence on Brazilian ethanol? You betcha, at least for now. We only import about 24% of the oil used in tUSA from the Middle East, we could substitute a huge portion of that for ethanol within a year or two. These kinds of stopgaps will help allow technology to catch up — cellulosic technology, battery technology, materials technology, etc.
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If by “our” you mean “American”, nonsense for two reasons. Firstly, tUSA exported over $68 billion in agriculture production in 2006, over $225 per man, woman, and child in America. That’s an awful lot when you consider its raw ingredients, not value added grocery store product. Secondly, beef production [and to a lesser extent broiler, turkey, and hog] uses on average 2.6 pounds, and as much as 16 pounds of grain for every pound of meat produced. If we reduced our incredibly high meat consumption in tUSA [a consumption promoted, incidentally, by the US gov’t], we’d free up all kinds of cropland for growing food or fuel.
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Because of these two facts, there’s no reason to think that tUSA will face a food shortage anytime soon due to ethanol or other biofuels. We might reduce exports and we might reduce meat consumption, but Americans won’t starve.
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It’s true that the price of corn has gone up substantially — but so what? In and of itself, that’s not implicitly a problem: it means corn farmers are making more money, and corn consumers [mostly those who raise livestock] are paying more. As for troubles in food south of the border, like I wrote above, the problems are largely political. Besides, I haven’t seen you beating the drum to help solve global starvation problems before, yet now you shed crocodile tears over those poor brown skinned peoples? It’s a recently-typical Republican tactic of making the perfect an enemy of the good and suddenly defending the weaker man’s lifestyle to the death as long as it helps promote corporate success in traditional industries.
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Think again, batman. Oil and gas: $6 billion worth of Federal subsidies in the energy bill signed by President Bush on August 8, 2005. In 1991 the EIA determined that the US subsidy for nuclear power was $3.05 billion per year, primarily due to the Price-Anderson act of 1957. In 2005, wind power’s 17.8 billion kWh US production was worth $338.2 million. So, one of these is not like the others. In fact, America does not subsidize renewable fuels to a larger extent than fossil fuels. In terms of dollars its far less, in terms of dollars per Joule, it’s actually pretty closely aligned, with substantial variations for different fuels, fuel sources, and fuel usage.
So, like I’ve written: maybe we’ll need to use Fischer-Tropsch methods to create oil from coal. Maybe we’ll need to build a massive amount of coal or nuclear power plants. Maybe we’ll need to drill for all that oil in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). But, we don’t need to take those extreme actions just yet since we can meet all of our new growth and some of our existing demand using renewable fuel and increased efficiency standards.
Regarding energy supply, as far as I’m concerned, if the US is really interested–which I doubt–it should put invest more in research into fusion (not fission–that technology is well along–but I wouldn’t disregard it), photovoltaic arrays and storage batteries to store energy after the sun goes down, and hydrogen (there are several known technologies to isolate hydrogen, although combusting hydrogen does result in water vapor, which is another greenhouse gas, but that can be removed from the atmosphere by rain). There is plenty of oil (including, it should be noted, the sands of Canada), so there is no particular reason to get exercized at this point over coal liquefaction, particularly considering the environmental devastation that coal mining is doing (see the thread started by WVaBlue).
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I still object to US plans to use ethanol from corn for the reasons I’ve stated here elsewhere. Fertilizer runoff is already killing parts of the Gulf of Mexico (analogy–Italian farmers along the Po River pretty much killed off the Adriatic Sea through over-use of fertilizer). And increased corn production will only lead to depletion of the acquifers (analogy–one of the reasons that Venice is sinking relative to mean sea level is the depletion of the acquifer that underlies it to supply water to the mainland). I actually wonder whether one of the reasons that there have been more than a few so-called “floods of the century” along the Mississippi in recent decades is because the land has been subsiding due to over-irrigation.
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From one of your blockquotes: The United States can not produce that much sugar economically, hence the use of high fructose corn syrup in this country. Oh, so that’s the reason why the foods in the US contain so much high fructose corn syrup. I had been led to believe that it was because of high tariffs and low quotas on sugar importation, primarily to benefit Archer Daniels Midland, corn farmers, and the sugar cane growers in south Florida who are devastating the Everglades. It’s interesting that the person you were blockquoting believes that the US should produce all of the sugar that it consumes–it certainly doesn’t produce all of the oil that it consumes.
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And, no, Germany isn’t too shabby. Most of its train system (that includes intercity as well as light rail) is powered by electricity. I don’t know how the electricity is generated, but they do have more than a few nukular power plants.
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Same thing. Without the tariffs/subsidies, there’d be virtually no sugar production in tUSA. With the gov’t meddling, there is quite a bit, a la corn syrup and sugarcane&beat.
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I guess I should have been clear: without subsidies and tariffs growing sugar in tUSA isn’t economically efficient.
As for Germany’s electric makeup as of 2003: here’s a source. The jist: 5% hydro, 20% nuke, 10% “green”, 66% fossil fuels [coal, oil, nat gas]. Their coal and oil consumption in generating electricity has gone down between 1993 and 2003, and their electrical demand increased by just under 1% per year. Another nice pdf is here; just take care to distinguish between numbers reflecting electricity production and total energy numbers.
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This is germane to my points above. Germany has reduced their fossil fuel usage to generate electricity, meeting all new demand and more old demand by expanding renewable energy production and increasing efficiency from the demand side.
…the reason that sugar in the US is so expensive, and HFCS is so cheap, is because of the combination of, in the case of sugar, high tariffs and low quotas on sugar importation (to benefit those who–mostly in FL–can grow sugar cane) and, in the case of HFCS, subsidies to agribusiness in the US.
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It is not particularly relevent as to whether the US itself could produce enough sugar to provide any significant amount of ethanol. If it could import sufficient quantities at a sufficiently low price, it might be an economical alternative to corn. On the other hand, it would probably be more efficient for ethanol to be produced “on site,” rather than import the raw materials and have them processed here.
Yes.
I restrict my quibble to the slavery point.
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Slavery ended because the rise of the industrial economy, in which the value of labor was greatly reduced (by historical norms) demanded it. The moral argument gained favor only then.
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It is no coincidence that slavery did not begin to recede until 1807– the beginning of the industrial revolution.
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And, in MHI, the CFLS still have a long way to go. Yes there might be good ones, but you need to do research and hunt around for one that has the necessary color, size, and ability to deal with a reostat, if necessary, and then you need to buy them by the gross over the internet in order not be killed by shipping charges. This is a lot to do for a light bulb.
Moses didn’t wait for the industrial revolution to lead Israelite slaves out of ancient Egypt, and perhaps on more solid legal footing, the Cyrus Cylinder, inscribed about 539 B.C.E. in Persia, abolished slavery and allowed Jews and other nationalities who had been enslaved under Babylonian rule to return to their native lands.
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The industrial revolution’s agricultural advances were still often more expensive to operate than a team of slaves. Methinks you’re confusing correlation with causality a bit.
W.R.T. CFs, you’re spewing more FUD. With the exception of the rheostat [dimmer] CF challenge, all of those other “problems” exist with incandescent and halogen bulbs too. Nobody is claiming that CFs are the right bulb for every single application. But, they are a great device for many common applications, and CF bulbs that have less-commonly-desired color spectra, the ability to dim, 3-way, or operate in cold temperatures are hitting the market. Would I like to see a greater selection at ACE and True Value? Of course. In the mean time, may I recommend you bundle an Internet bulb order with friends or neighbors if you’re worried about the few extra bucks in shipping that you’ll more than save on your electric bill?
…the Israelites were actually enslaved in Egypt is a matter of dispute. An article published in Ha’aretz a few years ago (I don’t have the cite now) more than suggests that the enslavement was a myth, one of the many myths in the Old Testament.
but how does
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square with
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? Didn’t the Cyris Cylinder begin to recede slavery? Didn’t it predate 1807 by 2300 years or so? Doesn’t make the claim that the industrial revolution corresponded with the slavery “begin[ning] to recede [in] 1807” factually false?
If the Cyrus Cylinder began to recede slavery, or Moses, or whichever ancient writing or person you select then its recession didn’t really take.
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There was something like 12 million African slaves shipped across the Atlantic from 1500s to mid 1800s. Then, something happened. Since economics and the chase for wealth pretty much account for everything in human history, it’s not a stretch at all to conclude that a change in economic conditions (i.e. industrial revolution, decline of agrarian society in US) ended slavery.
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It doesn’t. Because if it did, chattel slavery would not have expanded to such a degree from 1492-1807, because it would not have had a legitimate existence but rather would have been driven underground, as it no doubt remains today.
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I didn’t realize that “mainstream” chattel slavery ended when Pharoah and his chariots went on an unexpected swim in the Re[e]d Sea. Someone whould have told the British; they could have saved themselves the trouble of banning the trade in 1807. Maybe the Confederacy’s gripe was all about “states rights” after all.
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I’m not disagreeing with you on anything in this thread except for this quibble. Slavery didn’t end because mankind suddenly evolved moral principles. As you point out, the moral case against slavery had already existed existed for millenia by the nineteenth century. Yet chattel slavery expanded in the New World year after year until the nineteenth century, and then declined. Why?
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Karl Marx turns out to have been a decent societal diagnostician, even if his prescriptive ideas were, um, catastrophic failures. The rise of the industrial economy commodified labor by eliminating the value of craftmanship. The business cycle– in its early, brutal form– required free labor in order to allow layoffs in the trough. Slaves, by contrast, can’t be laid off; they must be sheltered, clothed, and fed in order to protect the investment. In other words, chattel slavery is economically inefficient.
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The two economic systems were mutually exclusive, and one had to end. Little wonder, then, that the millenia old arguments against slavery suddenly found cachet in Great Britain and the American North– the two first regions to industrialize on a wide scale.
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As for CFLS. Yes, they have improved dramatically. I have several installed now. No, they are not nearly as good, from a lighting perspective, as a GE “reveal” incandescent. And they are quite inappropriate for recessed lighting applications. So, I use my four or five and wait for LEDs.
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ow, what can we do to break the ethanol lobby to (i) allow Brazilian imports, and (ii) subsidize the bejesus out of cellulosic ethanol research?
…are you an employee of a compact flourescent (CF) bulb company?
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The reason I ask you is the following. Several months ago, before I started commenting on the subject anywhere, we had an energy audit done on the house here, and the auditor suggested CFs. He left us with a couple of samples (company name on the boxes). We started investigating, and discovered that the company had been acquired by another company. We contacted that company’s sales representative, and outlined our requirements: that the bulbs be usable with dimmers (btw, not all dimmers are rheostats; indeed, most modern dimmers use voltage cycle cut-off; rheostats use more energy than the bulbs do), that the bulbs be usable in relatively cold environments, and that the bulbs be relatively “instant on.” Despite numerous shipments (the most recent of which they screwed up) none of those requirements were satisfied.
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We use the CF bulbs in our basement, which, for a reason that I really don’t know, we keep on all the time. But otherwise, CF bulbs aren’t “there” yet. But CF bulb manufacturers seem to be pushing CF bulbs as an alternative to incandescent and halogen bulbs, when they really aren’t.
Although I do own a few thousand dollars worth of GE, and I think they make some CF bulbs.
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CF bulbs aren’t the right answer for all lighting applications. There isn’t a single technology that is the right answer for all applications.
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The trick is using CF bulbs where they are a good fit. For my home, that’s the 3 recessed lights in the kitchen, the two bulbs in the bathroom sconce over the sink, the single recessed light in the entry hallway, the bedroom tabletop lamp, and the lamp next to the couch which is used for reading.
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I don’t use them in my three wall sconces [no CF bulb fits the housing], nor in the chandelier over the dining room table [it uses small halogens that approximate oversized Christmas tree lights], the 12 bulbs totaling 180 watts.
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Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and that’s what conservatives have done over and over again on this site with respect to CF. It’s not a panacea for efficient lighting, no less global warming. But, it’s fairly cheap, easy to do, and does work in many lighting applications.
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In short:
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In a great many of applications, they are an alternative to incandescent and halogen bulbs.