General: Ecomentalists

Ok, this is going to be controversial, so hold onto your hats...

My sister is an ecomentalist. She's utterly convinced she's going to save the world, and that to do so, we all need to back wind farms and solar power and stop using big cars and switch to hybrids and such.

Now for the controversy: Can I just ask how many people are fooled by this garbage? I can't seem to get through to her how daft this is.

I'm not saying the planet isn't being polluted, and I'm certainly not saying that this pollution doesn't have to stop. What I want to know is, how many people are fooled into this new form of consumerism?

Take "sustainable energy" for example. It's massively expensive compared to other forms of energy, and can only account, at *most*, for about 15% of our power due to it's unreliable nature. Now, thanks to the ecomentalists, we're getting rid of our nuclear power plants too. Because they pollute the earth, and they're prone to blowing up. Except, modern ones don't, and they're not. British reactors in the 60's were so safe that you couldn't make them melt down if you *TRIED*. Not so much because of the reactor, but because the fuel was mixed with other elements before being used, and so wasn't pure enough to reach a runaway state.

And we also had over here some reactors that were tied to reprocessors that turned spent fuel into fuel. So basically you didn't have to store lots of dangerous waste, you just kept re-processing it back into fuel.

Sounds good, huh? Cheap electricity, little or no dangerous waste or danger of anything going boom. That's how things were.

The ecomentalist then pipes up and changes everything. Now, we can't have nuclear power because it's "Dangerous" and the waste is OOOOOH so polluting. So instead we have to have wind and solar. Which would be fine if it could provide 100% of our power, instead of just 15%. But without the nuclear plants, what's going to provide the other 85%???

Fossil fuels.

WOOOHOOO! Well done, ecomentalists. Your drive for a cleaner future has produced more pollution than if you'd kept schtum. The oil barons love you since you've helped them to push prices to an all-time high, and they've never had it so good. Their profits are at an all-time high, to match the oil prices you helped them pump up. And the guys on the high-street love you since "green" products make more profit than anything else.

You go out and buy hybrid cars, which do more environmental damage during their construction than a normal car does in it's entire lifetime. You then harp on at the rest of us for not doing the same.

Can we cut through the marketing please and see the reality of things? Stop trying to get everyone to use wind and solar (except on a small, stuck on your roof home-made and grid-tied basis, where it can actually be worthwhile) and go back to nuclear reactors. Modern reactors are about 60% efficient, compared to the 40% we're getting out of the old generation that ecomentalists are causing to be replaced with coal and oil burning plants. So instead of our electricity bills going up by 30% like they did recently because of the cost of renewables and fossil fuels (about 100% in total over the last year or so) they'd be stable, maybe even drop.

And we'd cut emmissions caused by electricity use by 100%.

Then you could go moan about something that is causing far, far more greenhouse gasses than everything else put together - meat farming...

3 things - first, if nuclear is done correctly, there's no problem being put off. Second is that the idea of every home having their own solar/wind generation is actually a good one that beats centralised power generation because on a national level, it's far less unreliable. When your home is producing too much energy, some guy 100 miles away might be using your excess. When you're not producing enough, the reverse happens.

With nuclear to back it up and to power commerce and industry (which sucks up far too much juice, for the most part, to take part effectively - just not enough roof space per watt used) I personally think (and have thought for a while) that grid-tie home power generation is a big part of the way forward. You can build a wind turbine generator yourself that will pay for itself in a year or two - the plans are all over the Internet.

And third, "bumper car" style grids is a good idea, but I can't see it as being practical. If more were spent on hydrogen fuel cell research and hydrogen storage tank research, we could use excess electrical energy to generate hydrogen fuel, which we could pump into homes via the current gas network. This could then be used to cook with (should only require very minor adjustments to our stoves), and to run any gas central heating systems that can't be replaced with electric ones, but also to fuel our cars. No more petrol stations...

The oil companies will never, ever let that happen, unless they're making money out of it *somehow*...

*EDIT* 4th point - if we stopped intensively farming meat, which consumes about 7 times more nutrition in the form of grains than it produces in meat, we'd have more land to produce more food, and ultimately there may just be enough landmass not only to produce bio-fuels (which as you pointed out, aren't the panecea people claim) but also enough to feed everyone on earth. Especially if we spent the time and money to irrigate the land of the world's poorer countries, which could then feed themselves and generate bio-oil for the rest of the world, easing their economic problems...

Posted By: Beanz

If we all became vegitarians

That would probably be more than enough on it's own, actually.

You know we're all heretics, right? We're all gonna burn at the stake for this...

Of course, burning at the stake will put yet more CO2 into the atmosphere!

I'm not sure that solar (in it's current form) is a part of that microgeneration. At current cost per watt, even as microgeneration, solar (photovoltaic solar, that is) can't stand up to wind - 1KW of wind vs 200W of solar for the same price...

Solar for heating water, I think has an immediate future - but I don't think PV cells are good value for money at the moment...

I think that if the government were to give large grants to people to set up microgeneration on their homes *tomorrow* (they were talking about it a while ago, not sure what happened to that) then the result would be that most of the UK's population would start to think seriously about it, and as it became popular the economies of scale would kick in. Also, the newer, more wideband solar pannels (that can generate leccy from more of the spectrum - I think current pannels can soak up about 20%, the new wideband stuff is 40+%, next gen perhaps 60 or more) we'd see solar become a more economical.

I'd love to build a homebrew wind generator. I've seen 1KW dyno's online for £200, so an all up price of £300 seems fair for a homebrew 1KW generator. 3 or 4 of those could (if you're in a fairly gusty area, and your design is suitable for the conditions, and a - admittedly expensive - grid tie inverter) in theory soak up your electricity bill...

Or am I going mad?

Coyote, ever done anything like this, my man?

Trains. Lots of them. More railways. Get rid of domestic flights. Et voilà! Significant drop in oil usage.

...but that's semi-hypocritical since I just went to Japan and back (on an aeroplane) from Hong Kong for a 5-day tour, after recently arriving in Hong Kong (on an aeroplane) from London, and am going in two weeks to Singapore (on an aeroplane) for 3 days and then back to Hong Kong (on an aeroplane) before going to Melbourne (also on an aeroplane).

A friend of mine said she wants to come and visit me in Melbourne (from the UK) but since she's a super-environmentally crazy (vegan but also eats food out of the bins behind M&S) she refuses to fly. But taking a boat to Melbourne creates more CO2 than the flight...

Posted By: Mike

Edit: Just realised I'm a bit off topic. My bad.

Not at all - the point is that the whole "environmental" movement has been hijacked, and that people are being misled for commercial reasons. And if you try telling these people that they're being lied to, they'll attack you for being a heretic.

I'm not saying global warming isn't happening. I see England isn't as cold as it was when I was a kid every winter, that's for sure - I just don't think that if we as a species are causing it, the current form of environmentalism is helping. I think it's doing the opposite. I also think that a lot of nasty things come out of exhaust pipes and effluent pipes and smoke stacks, and no-one seems to think of what damage THEY are doing.

Just for a second, think about this - the bees are dying off. We don't know why. Without bees to pollinate crops, there will be no crops and with no crops comes the total collapse of all mammal life on this planet, maybe save those that live in the deep seas. Insects will probably be ok, as will plant life - but without bees, we as a species are likely to die off.

I'm personally convinced that it's nasty emissions causing it. It's not CO2 emissions, which unless I'm mistaken were much higher during the industrial revolution than they are today anyway - I think something in heavy industry is causing it. Or some radio waves are maligning their nervous systems (either our production or the result of damage to the atmosphere allowing in cosmic radiation that is damaging to the bees).

Then again, is anything really happening to the bees, or is this just another ecomentalist plot to part people with their cash?

I think, digging a very rough number out of the ground, the estimated number of species going extinct every week is about 6,000.
That's very rough.... But it gets the point across.

Just a little update - tried telling my sister about breeder reactors. She wouldn't listen, and when I told her to just google it, she said she wouldn't. She's got a bumper sticker on her car that says "Minds are like parachutes - they only work when OPEN" - and yet she tells me that I'll never convince her, that nuclear power is damaging the environment, that the waste is going to make all 3 heads we grow glow in the dark yada yada.

Evidence be damned, you just have to have FAITH that these things are true. All hail the new religion - ecomentalism.

Posted By: crazy pete

All hail the power of the popular media - 'but think of the children!'

She rang my mum about the large hadron collector too - convinced that this thing was going to end the world. I think you have a very valid point there - I think she believes what she sees on TV, and won't listen to reason. And the media has latched onto chernobyl, the IPCC report etc - and made a reality for people that they just won't challenge - or let people like us challenge either...