Saturday, June 22, 2013
The Not So Sweet Stench of Nostalgia
To those of you who think that the environment of pre-industrial America was somehow pristine, think again. In larger cities like New York and Philadelphia, hundreds of thousands of tons of horse manure (horses being the primary mode of transport for people and freight back then) were deposited onto the streets every year and the primary mode of heat was wood, a fuel with a carbon to hydrogen ratio of nearly 10:1 (natural gas, by comparison, has a carbon to hydrogen ratio of 1:4). The air quality in these cities was terrible back then and life in a more general sense was nasty, brutish, and short....But, hey, at least they had some windmills, right?
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11 comments:
Gee, Will. I thought you knew the difference between air quality and climate change. Are you confused about the difference between weather and climate change too?
Pre-industrial America was like any other time; to paraphrase
Dickens, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The
US population in 1780 was a rural
2.8 million scattered along the east coast. The largest city was
Philadelphia at 28,500; Boone was
hacking out a path in the Cumberland Gap. The relatively
primitive energy was inefficient
but sparse..CO2 250ppm. Progress
since has resulted in 311.6 million of us with 254 million cars and trucks. (11 million of
those vehicles pass through the
4 lane tunnel under the Cumberland Gap each year). It is still the best of times/worst of times and
our species continues to make and
solve problems.
My point here (and where exactly do I even bring up global warming, er, I mean, climate change?) is that a lot of radical environmentalists tend to romanticize the pre-industrial age (mostly from the comfort of their private jets and air conditioned offices) and that upon closer inspection it really wasn't all that wonderful (life expectancy 30, zero disease cures, zero modern conveniences, etc.). That's all. And, yes, I do understand those distinctions.
I think that things are overall way better, BB. Food supplies up, life expectancy up (more than doubled), illiteracy down, work hours down, universal voting rights up, infant mortality down, child labor down, etc.. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to live back then (250 ppm or not).
Your reference to carbon and windmills.
I'd agree things are better. Just
in my lifetime they invented the jetplane, cured polio and made
tires that don't go flat every few days!
I'm not an expert on air quality but common sense tells me that a fuel with a carbon to hydrogen ratio of 1:4 burns significantly cleaner than one which sports a 10:1 ratio (that and whenever my neighbor burns his firewood it stinks).......Windmills was just a slap at what once was and continues to be an inferior technology.
On that basis, we should not be burning any coal.
On this one we have some common ground, Jerry. Coal is by far, BY FAR, the nastiest of the fossil fuels. Not only does it emit significantly more carbon than oil and natural gas, it also emits gobs of mercury, lead, arsenic, and even more in terms of solid waste. UNFORTUNATELY, it is also inexpensive and plentiful and you have to expect that the developing counties are going to be utilizing a lot of it in the years to come....It isn't going anywhere in other word
Will: I'd be interested in an objective evaluation of how clean "clean coal" is, or how clean it could be made. Interested of course in if it is possible to remove/etc the actual toxins from it: "it also emits gobs of mercury, lead, arsenic, and even more in terms of solid waste."
By the way, did I tell you before about an instance of wind energy dumping tons of coal waste into the Great Lakes?
click here
I don't know the exact project... but I doubt it would exist at all if it wasn't given some special "green energy" corporate welfare or tax break or crony capitalism or combination thereof.
Green energy is clean... snickers.
The technique that I hear most frequently is something called carbon capture and sequestration. Robert Bryce describes it in his book, "Power Hungry", and I guess that it works. The only problem (yet again) is the cost and the time that it takes to accomplish it. Maybe as the technique improves over time but now, no, clean coal remains an oxymoron.
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