Pennsylvania children living near the sites at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia between ages 2 and 7, a new study finds.
The entire concept of fracking is that you drill into a fissure, then blast it full of a dangerous chemical slurry so that it eventually forces natural gas out of the fissure. Then when all the natural gas is gone, they pack up and leave with their money. The chemical slurry stays in the ground forever, leaching into water tables, public waterways, potentially contaminating soil used for live stock and agriculture.
We literally have a visible ball of unlimited fusion energy in the fucking sky, and natural tides that can power tidal generators, but no, let’s just poison the shit out of everyone for a slightly better profit margin…
It is if you consider the cost of the redundancy required for renewable energy to serve as base load once you cut oil, gass and coal out of the supply.
Nuclear can cover this base load until we develop better storage systems for large scale use.
If we had just built nuclear with the modern architecture developed in the 70’s onwards we’d be able to move away from fossile fuel FAAR more easily today, without any mjor disasters from the reactor technology from the 50’s.
If we had just moved ahead with solar heat and hot water, or even solar panels, back when President Carter was trying to encourage it, we would already be moved away from fossil fuels
My interest in renewables, in ecology, in recycling, was all from growing up with that. But how did we let fossil fuel companies take over the conversation, guide our choices down the road to their profits at our cost?
Many ways away from fossil fuel, both solar and nuclear would have been great options, but even with early solar, we would have had to use coal or gass for base load without nuclear was what u was trying to say.
How we let them was just by not standing up and not holding them accountable. That is still the issue today. They knew for DECADES and still is profiting with government subsidies everywhere. We need to push politicians away from lobbying and give them the support they need to be firm with the 1%.
You know that renewable Energy exists? In the time we would need to replace follils with nuclear we can insted build renewables and Storage capacitys and we would be way cheaper.
I’m mostly commenting on the fact that people are so concerned with the cost of nuclear plants yet they seem to not care about the cost of the damage that rampant fossil fuel production comes with. This has been the shitty argument for long before renewables became viable and nuclear would have been a much better stepping stone. There are also always going to be places where renewable energy won’t work or be enough.
A single one maybe not, if we standardize and scale it might work. If solar and batteries keep getting cheaper, it might not be worth it, but the current problem is that new reactors are their own unique snowflakes, making it more expensive.
The ancient romans also didn’t have solar panels, and actually hydro and wind were totally used in these little things called watermills and windmills. I wouldn’t be surprised if they figured out geothermal heating, too. The difference is that you can simply light oil on fire and that’s easy when you otherwise have a lower level of technology and aren’t ready for better, more advanced ways of generating power.
Yes, please describe how that solar panel came into being. Try it without the fossil fuel foundation of every single item we use. Everything from the rubber tires of the delivery trucks to the food the workers eat.
You are blind to what’s around you. If you think we’re going to support 8 billion people living a Western lifestyle without fossil fuels, I’m afraid it’s not me who isn’t bright.
How do you support our present industrial civilization with windmills and watermills? We already had these, why did we give them up?
You’re completely oblivious.
“better, more advanced ways of generating power.”
But we don’t. We don’t “generate” power. We harvest energy. And once our little geological energy reserve is drawn down, how do you plan on keeping our present arrangements going?
You haven’t explained how you plan to make fertilizers, concrete, plastics, with electricity? And you don’t simply “light oil on fire”… Where did the iron come from to make engines? Coal, oh yeah.
You also think we’ll just spin copper wire and rare earth magnets from sunshine…
You understand that without those wind and water mills that oil couldn’t have become a thing, right? Like I said, oil was a great way to bridge the gap because it is relatively easy to use but it shouldn’t be our end-goal. Having oil for producing things made of it is certainly important but we’d have a lot more to go around for those purposes if we stopped using it for inefficient things like so many personal vehicles, wasteful plastic packaging, and a myriad other things that we just don’t need it for. It’s done its time, it’s time we scaled back and moved on.
We didn’t give up water or wind mills, either. Canada has so many hydro-electric dams that we literally call home electricity “hydro” and wind farms are only getting bigger and better.
We don’t need oil to make concrete. It’s portland cement(limestone powder), water, and variously sized aggregates and it’s been around for a loooooong time in one form or another. The machinery used to create it does not need to run on fossil fuels. You may be thinking of asphalt, but even then maybe if we didn’t unnecessarily obliterate our roads with constant heavy vehicle traffic we’d be able to keep them for longer and not need to constantly pour resources into barely keeping them alive or refreshing them far too often.
For someone with such a raging erection for oil you’d think you’d be more concerned about reducing our dependency on it so that we don’t waste this precious, finite resource.
“The cement industry is one of the two largest producers of carbon dioxide (CO2), creating up to 5% of worldwide man-made emissions of this gas, of which 50% is from the chemical process and 40% from burning fuel.”
Another one who is blissfully unaware of how the world got to be the way it is.
Look, I’m done. There is no way to bridge the gap of understanding between us. Educate yourself. Please.
Stick to physics, chemistry, facts, and history. And keep the references to hard ons to zero.
50% is from the chemical process and 40% from burning fuel.”
So what I’m hearing is… If we switched to alternative energy transportation infrastructure, we could eliminate 40% of the CO2 released from the 2nd largest contributor? Seems like a good deal to me, we should do that ASAP.
So, CO2 production does not immediately mean oil is required for production of something. Literally further down that article is “mitigation” and it points out the chemical process has nothing to do fossil fuels, directly, but with the creation of alite. The other part of it, burning fuel, can be changed for other stuff.
Plastic requires oil because it is made of the stuff. Powering a car does not because it doesn’t actually matter where the power comes from. These are important differences. You can make concrete without fossil fuels.
You’re right, we can’t bridge this gap because you are so beyond stupid that your own source even tells you that you’re wrong. It’d be funny if it was fiction but somehow you’re a real person and that just makes it terrifying.
The cheaper energy becomes, the more of a threat it is to literally all of the world’s heirarchies of power. The people at the top that benefit most from these heirarchies and who have the most control are also the most disincentivized from finding a solution that makes energy cheaper for all.
Solar is already a way cheaper way to make energy. Fossil fuels for electrical energy are only profitable due to large government handouts and steep tarries on Chinese electronics such as solar panels. Economic forces always win so renewables powering most of the grid is inevitable.
The real issue is that vehicles and aircraft need something with equivalent energy density and battery technology just isn’t that good yet and will take a long time to get that good.
The other thing is economically it’s cheaper to run a lot of ff powered devices at a higher rate than to invest in a replacement to run at a lower rate. The roi just isn’t goof enough. Eg Almost all new heating systems are heat pumps but the economic cost of replacing a gas heater with a heat pump just isn’t worth it.
I’ve been looking at that decision. My furnace is well beyond its expected life and I’d like to replace it before it dies so it’s not an emergency. I’ve looked at heat pumps and really want to make that choice. The incentives help with the initial cost, at least for a couple more months.
But then it comes down to gas is cheaper than electricity. If electricity is twice the cost per unit of energy, is it really sufficient for the heat pump to be twice as efficient? How can I rationalize the choice that is not only more expensive to install but more expensive to run?
And the answer is not sinking yet more money into also doing solar. My house is mostly shaded, and I’m not killing treees just to make this mess work together
Definitely part of the answer needs to be adjusting subsidies to bring the cost of electricity per unit of energy closer to the cost of gas, or maybe incorporating. The externalized costs would actually be sufficient
Well the whole point of a heat pump is that they have a COP (coefficient of performance) of about 2-4. Meaning that for every unit of energy u put in they have an effective heating/cooling capacity of 2-4 units of energy. They have an effective efficient of greater than 100% whereas a gas can only every reach a max of 100%.
At ideal conditions. As the temperature difference is greater, the efficiency goes down. So right when you need heat the most, gas is still at 90+% efficiency while heat pumps are closer to or under 200%.
Then you have to look at capacity. It can be expensive sizing for the greater temp differences when it usually isn’t. If you have a heat pump that can be 400% efficient, do you really want to pay for quadruple the capacity so that even when it’s at 100% efficiency it still puts out enough heat? No one can afford that
It works all the fucking time. The sun doesn’t turn off. You attach batteries to the solar panels that way if there are clouds you can just use what’s in the batteries and if it’s a sunny day and you don’t need the extra energy you store it in the batteries until you do. And if it’s really cloudy in your area… Get a windmill.
That was the joke. We know precisely down to the second when the sun will be shining. We’ve been able to calculate that for over a century at this point.
“Oh, what about storms and clouds!?!”
Let me introduce those naysayers to the national energy grids. My house can get electricty from a producer thousands of miles away, so even if clouds are covering my whole state, we’re still getting power from sunny areas.
For the record, the current technology we have to capture renewable energy is not capable of supporting the civilization we have built compared to how efficient oil and natural gas are as energy-dense molecules. Only very recently has battery technology come far enough to make it worth it to move a semi-truck any reasonable distance, but cargo ships are still going to be difficult to replace and account for a huge amount of pollution, as well as commerce we depend on. So it’s not a “slightly better profit margin”, as it would range from a literal decimation of society to straight up impossible to cut out all fossil fuels today.
But we should have started a global, methodical transition over 40 years ago, and the free market control over government and media has systematically prevented that. And THAT is unacceptable.
I’ll agree with we should have started 40 years ago. We knew we should have and we did have sufficient technology to take other paths.
But I’ll disagree on whether we have the technology now. There was a recent post on Lemmy that in a sunny place like Las Vegas, you could replace 97% of energy generation with renewables and batteries. Cheaper. Not just that you can but that it’s cheaper. We have the technology.
The challenge is always to bring the cost down. We do have technology to create aviation fuel from green sources. We do have several options for fueling shipping that we know how to do. Even if we’re just making ammonia or hydrogel or green diesel, that is a huge step forward that we have the technology for. The problem is we don’t yet have a compelling economic case to (especially since climate change is externalized, not counted as a cost), nor anyone with the fortitude to make it so
Yeah, to flip the switch now, all at once would be incredibly disruptive. But we knew this was going to happen over 40 years ago. Shit, all elected officials in the US had to do was follow the plan that Jimmy Carter laid out.
I also seriously question the numbers saying that tidal, solar, and wind power can’t provide enough to sustain the status quo. Yeah, powering a ship across the ocean can be hard… But you also have an essentially unlimited supply of wind and tidal power for a ship out on the ocean and quite a bit of solar power although it’s not as reliable.
I mean it may take a little bit longer for the overall journey but you could pause and just bob up and down in the ocean to recharge the batteries in a cargo ship or move the slower speed while you recharge. That’s not even exploring options like hybrid sail / battery powered ships
I agree that would be more environmentally friendly, but now you also need to train and employ how many nuclear experts to keep thousands of ships running safely? And this tech has existed for a while. If this was cheaper to do, I expect they would have already done it.
It’s not cheaper because it’s not heavily subsidised lie oil.
Had it been and SMRs would be further along the line and well within the realm of feasibility.
The entire concept of fracking is that you drill into a fissure, then blast it full of a dangerous chemical slurry so that it eventually forces natural gas out of the fissure. Then when all the natural gas is gone, they pack up and leave with their money. The chemical slurry stays in the ground forever, leaching into water tables, public waterways, potentially contaminating soil used for live stock and agriculture.
We literally have a visible ball of unlimited fusion energy in the fucking sky, and natural tides that can power tidal generators, but no, let’s just poison the shit out of everyone for a slightly better profit margin…
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we havnt tapped into geothermal like scifi does, we have the other ones though.
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Geothermal very often uses fracking, too. Difference might only be a bit higher depth it’s used in.
Except that nuclear is not economically viable.
I didn’t mention nuclear
You didnt but the person you replied to
Huh? France seems to be doing OK.
I should mention, that building new nuclear reactors is not financially a viable option.
It is if you consider the cost of the redundancy required for renewable energy to serve as base load once you cut oil, gass and coal out of the supply.
Nuclear can cover this base load until we develop better storage systems for large scale use.
If we had just built nuclear with the modern architecture developed in the 70’s onwards we’d be able to move away from fossile fuel FAAR more easily today, without any mjor disasters from the reactor technology from the 50’s.
If we had just moved ahead with solar heat and hot water, or even solar panels, back when President Carter was trying to encourage it, we would already be moved away from fossil fuels
My interest in renewables, in ecology, in recycling, was all from growing up with that. But how did we let fossil fuel companies take over the conversation, guide our choices down the road to their profits at our cost?
Many ways away from fossil fuel, both solar and nuclear would have been great options, but even with early solar, we would have had to use coal or gass for base load without nuclear was what u was trying to say.
How we let them was just by not standing up and not holding them accountable. That is still the issue today. They knew for DECADES and still is profiting with government subsidies everywhere. We need to push politicians away from lobbying and give them the support they need to be firm with the 1%.
Yea, better burn the world down instead.
You know that renewable Energy exists? In the time we would need to replace follils with nuclear we can insted build renewables and Storage capacitys and we would be way cheaper.
I’m mostly commenting on the fact that people are so concerned with the cost of nuclear plants yet they seem to not care about the cost of the damage that rampant fossil fuel production comes with. This has been the shitty argument for long before renewables became viable and nuclear would have been a much better stepping stone. There are also always going to be places where renewable energy won’t work or be enough.
It’s never going to be a single solution problem.
A single one maybe not, if we standardize and scale it might work. If solar and batteries keep getting cheaper, it might not be worth it, but the current problem is that new reactors are their own unique snowflakes, making it more expensive.
Give it the same subsidies Big Oil has then… and i’d rather have clean energy than “economically viable” dirty energy.
Then why did it take until 1859 for human population to start trending up and reach 8 billion?
I’ll help you: oil. The ancient Romans had geothermal, wind, tide, solar, and hydro as well.
They had the exact same energy we do now. The difference is we have power, they didn’t.
I’ll help you again. You can’t fertilize crops with electricity, or make plastic.
Let me help you.
LOL. You can NOT be serious.
How will you FEED all these people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
" and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers"
You can NOT sustain our present human population with sunshine and puppies. Vaccines or not.
You seriously misunderstand just about everything.
Ah, chemical fertilizer must be made with crude oil and natural gas! And we must have started using those in the mid 1800s!
No, wait. Both of those are wrong.
You know what else you can’t sustain a human population with? A planet with no fresh water and a toxic atmosphere.
The ancient romans also didn’t have solar panels, and actually hydro and wind were totally used in these little things called watermills and windmills. I wouldn’t be surprised if they figured out geothermal heating, too. The difference is that you can simply light oil on fire and that’s easy when you otherwise have a lower level of technology and aren’t ready for better, more advanced ways of generating power.
You’re none too bright, huh?
Yes, please describe how that solar panel came into being. Try it without the fossil fuel foundation of every single item we use. Everything from the rubber tires of the delivery trucks to the food the workers eat.
You are blind to what’s around you. If you think we’re going to support 8 billion people living a Western lifestyle without fossil fuels, I’m afraid it’s not me who isn’t bright.
How do you support our present industrial civilization with windmills and watermills? We already had these, why did we give them up?
You’re completely oblivious.
“better, more advanced ways of generating power.”
But we don’t. We don’t “generate” power. We harvest energy. And once our little geological energy reserve is drawn down, how do you plan on keeping our present arrangements going?
You haven’t explained how you plan to make fertilizers, concrete, plastics, with electricity? And you don’t simply “light oil on fire”… Where did the iron come from to make engines? Coal, oh yeah.
You also think we’ll just spin copper wire and rare earth magnets from sunshine…
Please go back to AI vibe coding.
You understand that without those wind and water mills that oil couldn’t have become a thing, right? Like I said, oil was a great way to bridge the gap because it is relatively easy to use but it shouldn’t be our end-goal. Having oil for producing things made of it is certainly important but we’d have a lot more to go around for those purposes if we stopped using it for inefficient things like so many personal vehicles, wasteful plastic packaging, and a myriad other things that we just don’t need it for. It’s done its time, it’s time we scaled back and moved on.
We didn’t give up water or wind mills, either. Canada has so many hydro-electric dams that we literally call home electricity “hydro” and wind farms are only getting bigger and better.
We don’t need oil to make concrete. It’s portland cement(limestone powder), water, and variously sized aggregates and it’s been around for a loooooong time in one form or another. The machinery used to create it does not need to run on fossil fuels. You may be thinking of asphalt, but even then maybe if we didn’t unnecessarily obliterate our roads with constant heavy vehicle traffic we’d be able to keep them for longer and not need to constantly pour resources into barely keeping them alive or refreshing them far too often.
For someone with such a raging erection for oil you’d think you’d be more concerned about reducing our dependency on it so that we don’t waste this precious, finite resource.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete
“The cement industry is one of the two largest producers of carbon dioxide (CO2), creating up to 5% of worldwide man-made emissions of this gas, of which 50% is from the chemical process and 40% from burning fuel.”
Another one who is blissfully unaware of how the world got to be the way it is.
Look, I’m done. There is no way to bridge the gap of understanding between us. Educate yourself. Please.
Stick to physics, chemistry, facts, and history. And keep the references to hard ons to zero.
Then get back to us.
So what I’m hearing is… If we switched to alternative energy transportation infrastructure, we could eliminate 40% of the CO2 released from the 2nd largest contributor? Seems like a good deal to me, we should do that ASAP.
So, CO2 production does not immediately mean oil is required for production of something. Literally further down that article is “mitigation” and it points out the chemical process has nothing to do fossil fuels, directly, but with the creation of alite. The other part of it, burning fuel, can be changed for other stuff.
Plastic requires oil because it is made of the stuff. Powering a car does not because it doesn’t actually matter where the power comes from. These are important differences. You can make concrete without fossil fuels.
You’re right, we can’t bridge this gap because you are so beyond stupid that your own source even tells you that you’re wrong. It’d be funny if it was fiction but somehow you’re a real person and that just makes it terrifying.
deleted by creator
The cheaper energy becomes, the more of a threat it is to literally all of the world’s heirarchies of power. The people at the top that benefit most from these heirarchies and who have the most control are also the most disincentivized from finding a solution that makes energy cheaper for all.
Solar is already a way cheaper way to make energy. Fossil fuels for electrical energy are only profitable due to large government handouts and steep tarries on Chinese electronics such as solar panels. Economic forces always win so renewables powering most of the grid is inevitable.
The real issue is that vehicles and aircraft need something with equivalent energy density and battery technology just isn’t that good yet and will take a long time to get that good.
The other thing is economically it’s cheaper to run a lot of ff powered devices at a higher rate than to invest in a replacement to run at a lower rate. The roi just isn’t goof enough. Eg Almost all new heating systems are heat pumps but the economic cost of replacing a gas heater with a heat pump just isn’t worth it.
I’ve been looking at that decision. My furnace is well beyond its expected life and I’d like to replace it before it dies so it’s not an emergency. I’ve looked at heat pumps and really want to make that choice. The incentives help with the initial cost, at least for a couple more months.
But then it comes down to gas is cheaper than electricity. If electricity is twice the cost per unit of energy, is it really sufficient for the heat pump to be twice as efficient? How can I rationalize the choice that is not only more expensive to install but more expensive to run?
And the answer is not sinking yet more money into also doing solar. My house is mostly shaded, and I’m not killing treees just to make this mess work together
Definitely part of the answer needs to be adjusting subsidies to bring the cost of electricity per unit of energy closer to the cost of gas, or maybe incorporating. The externalized costs would actually be sufficient
Well the whole point of a heat pump is that they have a COP (coefficient of performance) of about 2-4. Meaning that for every unit of energy u put in they have an effective heating/cooling capacity of 2-4 units of energy. They have an effective efficient of greater than 100% whereas a gas can only every reach a max of 100%.
At ideal conditions. As the temperature difference is greater, the efficiency goes down. So right when you need heat the most, gas is still at 90+% efficiency while heat pumps are closer to or under 200%.
Then you have to look at capacity. It can be expensive sizing for the greater temp differences when it usually isn’t. If you have a heat pump that can be 400% efficient, do you really want to pay for quadruple the capacity so that even when it’s at 100% efficiency it still puts out enough heat? No one can afford that
I’m an educator, and I’m forbidden from taking about fracking at work ( ° ͜ʖ °)
Right, but that visible ball isn’t reliable. You have no idea when it’s going to work or not.
If anyone cares, sunset is at 9:04 PM today.
It works all the fucking time. The sun doesn’t turn off. You attach batteries to the solar panels that way if there are clouds you can just use what’s in the batteries and if it’s a sunny day and you don’t need the extra energy you store it in the batteries until you do. And if it’s really cloudy in your area… Get a windmill.
That was the joke. We know precisely down to the second when the sun will be shining. We’ve been able to calculate that for over a century at this point.
“Oh, what about storms and clouds!?!”
Let me introduce those naysayers to the national energy grids. My house can get electricty from a producer thousands of miles away, so even if clouds are covering my whole state, we’re still getting power from sunny areas.
For the record, the current technology we have to capture renewable energy is not capable of supporting the civilization we have built compared to how efficient oil and natural gas are as energy-dense molecules. Only very recently has battery technology come far enough to make it worth it to move a semi-truck any reasonable distance, but cargo ships are still going to be difficult to replace and account for a huge amount of pollution, as well as commerce we depend on. So it’s not a “slightly better profit margin”, as it would range from a literal decimation of society to straight up impossible to cut out all fossil fuels today.
But we should have started a global, methodical transition over 40 years ago, and the free market control over government and media has systematically prevented that. And THAT is unacceptable.
I’ll agree with we should have started 40 years ago. We knew we should have and we did have sufficient technology to take other paths.
But I’ll disagree on whether we have the technology now. There was a recent post on Lemmy that in a sunny place like Las Vegas, you could replace 97% of energy generation with renewables and batteries. Cheaper. Not just that you can but that it’s cheaper. We have the technology.
The challenge is always to bring the cost down. We do have technology to create aviation fuel from green sources. We do have several options for fueling shipping that we know how to do. Even if we’re just making ammonia or hydrogel or green diesel, that is a huge step forward that we have the technology for. The problem is we don’t yet have a compelling economic case to (especially since climate change is externalized, not counted as a cost), nor anyone with the fortitude to make it so
Yeah, to flip the switch now, all at once would be incredibly disruptive. But we knew this was going to happen over 40 years ago. Shit, all elected officials in the US had to do was follow the plan that Jimmy Carter laid out.
I also seriously question the numbers saying that tidal, solar, and wind power can’t provide enough to sustain the status quo. Yeah, powering a ship across the ocean can be hard… But you also have an essentially unlimited supply of wind and tidal power for a ship out on the ocean and quite a bit of solar power although it’s not as reliable.
I mean it may take a little bit longer for the overall journey but you could pause and just bob up and down in the ocean to recharge the batteries in a cargo ship or move the slower speed while you recharge. That’s not even exploring options like hybrid sail / battery powered ships
Nuclear.
I agree that would be more environmentally friendly, but now you also need to train and employ how many nuclear experts to keep thousands of ships running safely? And this tech has existed for a while. If this was cheaper to do, I expect they would have already done it.
It’s not cheaper because it’s not heavily subsidised lie oil. Had it been and SMRs would be further along the line and well within the realm of feasibility.
Terrible “externalities” for humanity are what enables “profit” for capital.