The Green Leap Forward

[Fife]

Do you have a link to the full story or a video clip?

[de officiis]

The combination of ignorance and arrogance in an apparently seriously issued bill from a major political party is truly breathtaking.

[Speaker to Animals]

2019 is going to be so awesome.

[MilSpecs]

We consider everything but the most logical place to start: a real country-wide mass transit system. Besides the huge energy savings and destruction of unwanted foreign entanglements, we'd also have a better quality of life, much expanded job markets, lots of jobs during construction and afterwards for maintenance, more efficient movement of goods, a lower death and disability rate, and we'd even have a more cohesive society. Pretty much nothing else is as much of a win-win for the country as a whole.

[Fife]

Muh Monorail.



:goteam: :drunk:

[Ph64]

Nah, that would actually be far less of a risk with every other home generating its own power. The lines might be down, but those homes would be saved.

Presuming your grid-tie inverter survives the event. Hint, I'm betting very few if any on the market today are designed to withstand an EMP type event. Then you've got millions of homes that not only can't feed power to the grid but probably have fried inverters and can't power the home they're installed in either. How long do you think it's gonna take to build & install a few million new home inverters?

Anyways, the point is adding millions of new potential failure points doesn't necessarily increase resiliency. Resilient would be your own system, off grid, with battery storage, with the grid as backup. (FYI some places, I know one in Canada, do not allow battery storage systems to be grid tied - either you grid tie w/o storage, or you have battery storage w/o the grid, but you can't do both).

If you want to go that route, sure. Of course I should mention the side of my house that gets the most Sun has lots of trees I'd have to cut down to put solar up there... Not to mention its New England and its not always sunny, and there's snow, etc. There is wind fairly often... the neighbors might not like a 100' tall wind tower in my back yard though.

You seem to understand this subject pretty well.

Why couldn’t I power my home and use the grid as a backup for it? What if I don’t want to supply them?

Wouldn’t this be the same as a Floridian using a generator until the power is back on?

You can definitely do that. In fact the Canadian story I mentioned I wasn't quite sure... They stayed grid tied for the 220v appliances (stove, water heater, well pump, etc - all very power hungry), and their laws didn't allow battery storage in that circumstance - but I didn't quite get the whole thing because to me it seems you could have battery/solar on a breaker panel for the lower power stuff and keep the grid for the heavy usage stuff. As long as you keep them separate I'm not sure they couldn't have done it. (They had an old fashioned hand pump well outside as well, plus a wood burning outdoor furnace for heat).

Really it depends on local/state/national regulations. You might well be able to (legally) grid tie and have battery storage where you are. I'm not an expert on state laws or what the utilities will allow, do your own work in that regard. I was just commenting that as a "nationwide project" it's kinda crazy - outrageously expensive and not the "like adding batteries in parallel" simplistic thing many seem to think of it as, it's not without its potential problems on a massive scale.

Overall I like the idea of panels on my roof, battery storage, lowering my bills... CT isn't sunniest of states though and I have lots of trees I'd have to take down. Not sure how much "payoff" I'd get out of the expense.

[DBTrek]

We consider everything but the most logical place to start: a real country-wide mass transit system. Besides the huge energy savings and destruction of unwanted foreign entanglements, we'd also have a better quality of life, much expanded job markets, lots of jobs during construction and afterwards for maintenance, more efficient movement of goods, a lower death and disability rate, and we'd even have a more cohesive society. Pretty much nothing else is as much of a win-win for the country as a whole.

We have that, it's called an interstate highway system.

[Ph64]

We consider everything but the most logical place to start: a real country-wide mass transit system. Besides the huge energy savings and destruction of unwanted foreign entanglements, we'd also have a better quality of life, much expanded job markets, lots of jobs during construction and afterwards for maintenance, more efficient movement of goods, a lower death and disability rate, and we'd even have a more cohesive society. Pretty much nothing else is as much of a win-win for the country as a whole.

We had that... 100 years ago, "envy of the world", all the major northern cities had grand architecture train stations, cities had trolley systems...

...and we gave it all up, the car companies pushed the "freedom" of everyone having their own vehicle(s), driving down the highway in style in a sleek finned automobile smoking your totally safe non cancerous cigarette with a picnic basket in the back seat... most of those grand train stations got torn down or abandoned...

And now all we gave left is some local bus lines, Greyhound, and Amtrak.

Thing is, your not gonna get people to accept $trillions in debt for "super-Amtrak" without a far better sales pitch than "it'll help the environment, but suck as bad as Amtrak and cost $trillions".

[Speaker to Animals]

It wouldn't suck like Amtrack because they'd own their own rails. Amtrack sucks because they borrow the rails from freight, and are always second in line to use those tracks to freight.

Actually riding in Amtrack is not that bad, but obviously not fast either.

It's possible to make train travel really fucking nice if we wanted to do that.

Commuter trains are fucking horrible because they are packed in with people. That's not really what happens on long distance trains.


My concern with high-speed rail is the safety. We are headed into a kind of dark age with diminished capabilities. Shit we could have done in the 1980s is not necessarily what we can do now, even if we have the technological know-how. A dark age is not really about the knowledge being ultimately lost, but that the social and economic structures are unable to support it.

[Speaker to Animals]

The big issue here is not "the environment". It's an impending peak oil event and a provincialized world. People are so used to globalism that they are not considering our future is more provincial. Things are going to get smaller, not bigger.