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Glimpse into the trump future
- Thread starter EVie'sDad
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- Energy Environment Policy
Pretty sure it's the world that wants oil. I doubt the Donald even knows how to fill up a limousine anymore.
<1% of us have driven a non-petroleum vehicle on a public highway.
But it sure is easy just to claim that we as a country are not a bunch of jerks, but in fact, there is only one jerk that is forcing us to act like jerks.
Hey, it's the Liberal Way! Celebrate It! We are sin-free as long as we have a finger to point at others with.
There is no law that says you must buy anything, including petroleum and it's products. You make that choice willingly.
<1% of us have driven a non-petroleum vehicle on a public highway.
But it sure is easy just to claim that we as a country are not a bunch of jerks, but in fact, there is only one jerk that is forcing us to act like jerks.
Hey, it's the Liberal Way! Celebrate It! We are sin-free as long as we have a finger to point at others with.
There is no law that says you must buy anything, including petroleum and it's products. You make that choice willingly.
nonsense, talk about fake news. I didn't think anyone took mother jones seriously
This whole concept of complaining about what someone MIGHT do is confusing to me.
Really? We should wait until something bad happens before complaining about the plan to do something bad?
Mod note: partisan bickering will not be tolerated. Dial it down or the thread will be purged.
Thanks Mod (Doug_G)
I agree, I simply wanted to raise the topic and have a civil discussion where we could alert Elon Musk to the foibles in embracing this new administration too blindly.
trump has been known to say one thing and then do another, I see no reason to doubt he is planning to up-end the clean air laws to get his precious lobbyists goals of clearing way for greater oil and coal production. We would be fools to assume otherwise, given the anti-environmental rhetoric his espoused on the campaign trail.
I agree, I simply wanted to raise the topic and have a civil discussion where we could alert Elon Musk to the foibles in embracing this new administration too blindly.
trump has been known to say one thing and then do another, I see no reason to doubt he is planning to up-end the clean air laws to get his precious lobbyists goals of clearing way for greater oil and coal production. We would be fools to assume otherwise, given the anti-environmental rhetoric his espoused on the campaign trail.
I asked once before and I'll ask again
what is the basis for this prognostication?
do you have first hand knowledge of how he plans on dealing with the varied issues involved?
or are you just harboring the perception that you've been conditioned to see.
my version of the reality is that he is not as soft on environmental issues as some of the opposition makes him out to be.
but you can be assured that he will unwind many of the edicts issued by over stepping governmental agencies.
whether the limiting of many of the quasi legal edicts issued by the current crew in charge will hamper the issues of environmentalism, I think we'll have to wait and see,
the biggest problem many have with trump is that they can't seem to pin him down with any sort of labels that they're accustomed to using. watching the process and the inability of the pundits to grasp the changes happening is quite amusing.
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TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
I think it's safe to assume that the absolute neutering of the EPA, the organization that brought us from the chaotic filth of the 1980's to our somewhat cleaner current state, will be a challenge to environmental issues. Overstepping or not, the EPA made is possible to see my toes when standing in 3 feet of water off the Jersey coast.
Agreed. People who are used to having these black and white arguments, as if anyone could possibly be 100% correct, are having a tough time labeling Trump. I mean, the guy owns a Roadster after all. I see him as a far better for "our cause" than any of the other bought-out nominees in the Republican primary.
Are you 13? Or just from Florida?
Please close this pointless thread.
rw86347
Member
Here is the real deal. Even bad policy can't change the way things are moving. This year solar is projected to be cheaper then fossil fuels! One gallon of gas has about 6 KWH of electricity associated in refining it. In fact the Saudis have started using solar electricity to pump oil because it is cheaper than their own natural gas.
Now if you do use 6KWH to create this fuel you can drive 25 miles on average. Or you can put that 6 KWH of in my tesla and drive 36 miles.
Now as people struggle to stretch their dollars why not buy a $8k used Nissan Leaf?
Now if you do use 6KWH to create this fuel you can drive 25 miles on average. Or you can put that 6 KWH of in my tesla and drive 36 miles.
Now as people struggle to stretch their dollars why not buy a $8k used Nissan Leaf?
I will provide you with one tidbit of evidence which flies directly in the face of your version of reality.
Right-wing group led by Trump propagandist launches campaign against Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX
Thank you for proving your frustration with insults.
need proof?
trumpts views...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/donald-trump-global-warming-energy-policy.html?_r=1
Donald Trump betrays total ignorance of solar, energy market dynamics
The US coal industry is falling apart. Here's a surprising reason why.
Top U.S. coal company Peabody Energy files for bankruptcy
The end of the coal era in Massachusetts - The Boston Globe
as opposed to this Administrations view
FACT SHEET: President Obama Announces New Actions to Bring Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency to Households across the Country
Oregon says yes to coal-free electricity
More Americans now work in Solar Power than the extraction of Oil &Gas, or Coal
I am sure Clinton would have continued those environmentally friendly policies, your party (who supports trump) allowed lead to poison the good people of Flint Michigan. Thanks but no, trump will not be better for the goals Tesla has set out to achieve.
need proof?
trumpts views...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/donald-trump-global-warming-energy-policy.html?_r=1
Donald Trump betrays total ignorance of solar, energy market dynamics
The US coal industry is falling apart. Here's a surprising reason why.
Top U.S. coal company Peabody Energy files for bankruptcy
The end of the coal era in Massachusetts - The Boston Globe
as opposed to this Administrations view
FACT SHEET: President Obama Announces New Actions to Bring Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency to Households across the Country
Oregon says yes to coal-free electricity
More Americans now work in Solar Power than the extraction of Oil &Gas, or Coal
I am sure Clinton would have continued those environmentally friendly policies, your party (who supports trump) allowed lead to poison the good people of Flint Michigan. Thanks but no, trump will not be better for the goals Tesla has set out to achieve.
James Anders
Member
Trump is not ideological. He's a pragmatist and a business man. You can bet he will support businesses such as Tesla.
The fact is we will need petroleum for transportation fuel for several decades at least, even with an aggressive plan to change. As Elon has pointed out, to complete convert just the world's production of passenger cars and light trucks to EVs is going to take 100 GigaFactories. That's going to cost around $1 trillion just for the factories. The resources to feed those factories also need to be brought online.
And that's just replacing the personal passenger vehicles being built. It's going to take a long time to get all the old ICE off the road. The average car on the road in the US today is 11 years old. That means 1/2 of the cars out there are more than 11 years old. Most of those people driving older cars can't afford a newer car.
That 100 GF doesn't include the batteries that need to be made for EV semis, railroad locomotives, and doesn't address what to do about ships and aircraft. The core technologies are there to replace cars and trucks on the highways, but they don't exist to replace aircraft propulsion with anything but liquid fuel and fossil fuels are still the best aircraft fuel because it's the most energy/weight of any fuel except nuclear (which has a few major problems as a fuel for aircraft). Battery tech isn't anywhere near the energy density to do anything more than to build novelty and demonstration EV aircraft right now.
Ships too need a compact energy source. High tech sails might help reduce their energy needs and it's possible a ship covered with solar panels might be able to derive some of its energy from the sun, but a cargo ship run on batteries is just not practical. Too much cargo space would have to be filled with batteries to make it practical and even at that the ship might not have the range.
Bio fuels will help in some of these areas, but they have limits too. A fair bit of bio fuel can be made from what is agricultural waste today. That's how ethanol is made from corn. The part of the corn not used for animal feed is what you want to separate out to make ethanol, so it's a useful product from something that used to be thrown away.
However gasoline is 34 MJ/L and pure ethanol is only 21 MJ/L. (The best Li-Ion batteries available today are around 2.6 MJ/L, less than 1/10 the energy density of gasoline.) Ethanol is usually blended with gasoline to increase the octane rating (the speed at which it burns, the higher the octane the slower it burns) and to boost the energy density.
In short we will need oil for some time to come. However a smart energy policy pushes to move towards other fuel sources as quickly as practical. Obama was hindered with an uncooperative Congress, but that was essentially his energy policy. He still encouraged the development of oil in the Bakkan while also encouraging alternatives. The oil business is essentially in a depression right now but that's due to the low cost of oil, not discouragement on the part of the government.
If the US boosts it's home produced oil while also reducing the demand through alternatives, that puts the US in a much stronger position than it is today. The US has been over a barrel since the 1970s because it became dependent on importing oil when domestic supplies couldn't meet demand.
I do think Trump's announced energy policy is very short sighted and would leave the US behind the curve as the rest of the world works to convert to other energy sources.
Personally I think the incoming administration is going to learn the hard way that running a large country and managing the foreign policy of that country is several orders of magnitude more difficult than they think today. There is a reason presidents tend to pick cabinet members who have previous governing experience. Even if they have some new ideas about policy, they at least know what the old policies were, how they were crafted, and they have some idea how complex the problems really are. Bringing in a lot of people with no policy making experience is, IMO, a big mistake.
I have no idea what the actual policies will actually be, if they ever get to the point of finalizing anything. The guy at the top can be somewhat capricious with his ideas, changing his mind 180 degrees on a whim. Sometimes in the same sentence. And the people around him have a lot of competing agendas.
Personally I think the incoming administration is going to make the administrations of Harding, Grant, Nixon, Andrew Johnson, Buchanan, and GW Bush look good just for the lack of experience and understanding of the job going in, Trump's personality aside. There have been other presidents with thin resumes, but none as thin and none who didn't make sure their inner circle didn't have a fair number of old salts at the jobs they were given.
But at this point all we can do is wait and see. I've been wrong before.
you've made some valid and interesting points, I just want to note that you've ignored the very thin resume of the current occupant of the white house. His policies regarding energy were as absurd as anyone else's
It is painful to agree with you on these points. I wish it were not so...
On one point, IIRC the only source for ethanol that actually is positive in energy terms is sugar cane, although a handful of others, including various cactii, seem plausible sometime soon. AFAIK, only brazil produces sugar cane cheaply enough and has refining capacity efficient enough to be net positive. The wide variety of biofuels suggest quite a few economic sources, most of which will not scale very effectively. A handful of airlines and military have been experimenting with jet fuels from various sources. Most of them seem to have limited but positive potential.
One of the few highly scalable and cheap sources today is wind, mostly offshore. The President-elect does not like it, but that seems based on visual disdain, a problem solved by the current far offshore fields that are very consistent and cheap. We'll see, but;
Even the most enthused do not see any practical scalable use of coal beyond current levels in the US, and a gradual reduction, that based on pure economics, so...
The Keystone project will probably go ahead which will keep conventional oil cheap, but...
As Forbes says:
An Update On U.S. Natural Gas Production
US natural gas is now the world's largest, further it is cheaper than coal, cleaner and coal power plants have been converting to gas for some years because of cheapness, ease of storage, negligible waste byproducts (from a utility perspective). It remains to be seen if the Trump appointees, mostly coal and crude oil people, will accept taht, but...
We cannot forget that Rick Perry was a big advocate of West Texas Wind, not producing ~11% of all Texas energy use.
Frankly the incoming administration is so inundated with neophytes and so diverse in known energy preferences, not to mention the paucity of scientific knowledge in key positions, that nobody knows what might actually happen.
The uncertainty of it all is dismaying, but the certainties are even more so IMO.
Agreed, but think of the jobs creation potential of 100GFs or rebuilding the Nations (and World's frankly) infrastructure that would occur if this became a mantra as reaching for putting a Man on the Moon did in the 60's. More jobs, cleaner air and water, healthier citizens, happier voters....what's not to embrace about it? Which is why the trump admin so perplexes the rest of us.
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