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My first thought when I read this thread title was "oh Lord, did you have a burrito for lunch?"
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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I drink one gallon of milk each and every day. Ever since I was a kid.
Another study this week suggested that male heavy milk drinkers have a 60% increased risk of Parkinson's Disease. Heavy use is defined as three glasses a day. I lose that out my nose watching Stewart and Colbert.
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There was an article a couple years ago that argued we are all the descendants of either alcoholics or tea/coffee drinkers because the water drinkers all died (except in the New World where the water was still unpolluted). I like to think that I descend from the tiny and rare group of milk drinkers.
Unfortunately, both my parents were alcoholics so I suspect that drinking milk is just typical rebellion! As a teen, me and my friends would get all hopped up on a 5 pound block of cheeze at music festivals (true). Wild, radical times...
Posts: 675 | Registered: Aug 2001
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So am I in the minority since 99% of what I drink on an average daily basis is water? I have soda once or twice every couple months, and I drink a glass of milk a couple times a week. (Of course, that doesn't include the milk in my cereal in the morning).
I figure water is cheaper (assuming you drink tap water) and better for you.
Posts: 684 | Registered: Aug 2001
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Regarding the OP, I suppose there's something to be said for producing all that energy domestically, rather than importing it, even if it pollutes just as much -- as long as we don't call it a solution.
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We sit on the cusp of expending a tremendous amount of effort to switch energy sources. That decision should be made thoughtfully to avoid creating more problems than we solve.
The US has already secured guaranteed access to the Alberta Oil Sands which has the reserves to meet domestic needs for most of the century.
America's addiction isn't to oil per se, but to cheap oil. Cheap energy may well be a thing of the past. Bio-fuels may be renewable, but they are not cheap. And if you add in the cost of environmental degradation even cheap oil isn't really cheap. Expensive energy that still has an unaccounted environmental cost is simply beyond the pale.
Zero emissions is all we can afford whether for economic or national security reasons.
Posts: 675 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:So am I in the minority since 99% of what I drink on an average daily basis is water? I have soda once or twice every couple months, and I drink a glass of milk a couple times a week.
That describes my middle daughter. She almost exclusively drinks water.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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Mmmm, chai. Have you tried rooibos? It's a South African herbal tea, strong but not as heavily spiced as chai. Goes great with vanilla.
Orlox, I'm curious about the "guaranteed access to the Alberta Oil Sands" you mentioned. As far as I know, most of the companies running mines are Canadian, and the US is among several countries (including China and India) vying for contracts with us.
Posts: 5 | Registered: Apr 2007
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Hmm, I had never heard of rooibos, but I looked it up and it sounds quite good. I'll keep an eye out for it.
Posts: 3420 | Registered: Jun 2002
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What do you people think of Nuclear energy? I've heard it vaunted as the best way to produce all the electricity we're going to start needing soon...y'know, once we run out of "black gold".
Posts: 368 | Registered: Dec 2005
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I drink probably a half gallon at least of chocolate milk a day, and I have no idea how much whole milk ends up in the 3 - 10 cups of tea I drink per day.
And it makes sense that ethanol would pollute almost as badly as gas. It's still an organic carbon compound and the reaction is still combustion.
What we need to be doing is looking for non-organic combustion energy and fuel sources. Nuclear is one that comes to mind, fuel cells are another. I think the best bet would be trying to switch power plants to nuclear (fission for now, fusion if we can get it working) and then try and develop an efficient fuel cell for portable power.
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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The thing about ethanol is that it takes carbon out of the atmosphere (in the form of carbon dioxide when the plants it is made from go through photosynthesis) before emitting it back into the atmosphere. Does this balance out the emissions? Maybe, unless the tractors that harvest the plants burn gasoline...and the processes to convert the crops into ethanol burn gasoline...and the transportation of the materials around burns gasoline.
With ethanol, there is at least some balance between carbon being emitted into the atmosphere. With fuel made from oil, there is no balance. It all goes up.
Fuel made from oil emits carbon into the atmosphere that was buried underground. Add on to this the fuel burned in transportation and processing, and things start to get ugly. I'm not sure (and don't have time now) to find a reference, but I know that a large percentage of gasoline cost gets burned (ha) in transportation and distribution. I'll post that later.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote: What do you people think of Nuclear energy? I've heard it vaunted as the best way to produce all the electricity we're going to start needing soon...y'know, once we run out of "black gold".
The biggest problem, as I see it, is that we still have no way of disposing of the radioactive waste. If we did, then I'd be 100% behind it.
I think most of them are outweighed by the benefits of being energy independent from foreign oil, but others disagree.
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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Wait....so according to wiki the main arguments against going to nuclear power are: 1) It pollutes (good thing our current power sources don't cause environmental problems). 2) It's dangerous. There was a really bad accident almost 30 years ago at Three Mile Island (described as the worst American nuclear plant accident in history), in which there were no injuries or deaths caused. 3) It allows the United States to have the ability to create nuclear weapons.
Is it just me or are those some really weak opposing arguments? Also, you really hear very little on the amazing technological advancements that have been made in the area of nuclear power generation. Tatiana has posted a ton of useful information in the past. Less waste, even safer than before, etc.
Posts: 1412 | Registered: Oct 2005
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Also, disposal isn't really a problem. We just find a way of dumping it into a subduction zone where it'll be dragged back into the mantel of the Earth. It's rather harmless and natural when in the Earth. Since most subduction zones are beneath the sea, making sure it does get dragged in is a little tricky, but I don't think it'd be too hard to work out.
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Dumbing nuclear waste into a subduction zone so that it gets buried beneath the mantel of the earth is a bigger engineering task than anything any civilization has done to date. I can think of dozens of things that could go horribly wrong with this concept.
And disposal is always a problem. With every waste that we produce, disposal is a problem. Maybe not for everyone, but the waste has to go somewhere, and that somewhere often ends up where people can't afford to fight it off.
Disposal with nuclear wastes is also a unique problem because the waste will last for generations. We, or our children, or our childrens' children may not be affected, but eventually, any container or waste zone is going to leak, and then who do you blame? I could imagine this generation being despised in a few generations for the blatant shrugging off of responsibility if we just bury nuclear waste.
I would rather see a movement for a reduction in the amount of energy we consume before we begin to search for riskier and less well-understood sources of energy.
If we keep focusing on finding more energy, the amount of energy we will consume will just grow. I look at it like food production. Whenever more food became available in our past, it did not stop starvation. It led to more population. Whenever we find new and better sources of energy, it does nothing to distribute the energy. It only allows people to feel like they can use more energy for more non-critical uses. If gas prices were still low, would the we (especially the US) still be focusing on alternative energy like it is now?
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Assuming production of the same amount of usable energy, we'd run out of uranium long before we run out of cheap oil. Per unit of usable energy produced, reactor-grade uranium costs more than expensive oil extracted from shale and tar-sands.
ThreeMileIsland was a second or so from Chernobylizing. While Chernobyl's primary ExclusionZone is a 30kilometre/18.6mile circle covering ~2830 square kilometres / ~1090 square miles, the plume heavily contaminated an amorpheous area of ~28,000 square kilometres / ~10,100 square miles. Using the distance between the areas most contaminated by the Chernobyl plume to the area surrounding ThreeMileIsland, both Philadelphia and WashingtonDC easily lie within that perimeter. And if you think cleaning up after Katrina was expensive... Consider that rebuilding in NewOrleans & on the GulfCoast was the most expensive option. It would have been cheaper to buy every Katrina evacuee a median-priced home in other areas of Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama. Then consider that the property value of Chernobyl-level contaminated areas in eg the Philadelphia or WashingtonDC metroplexes would have plummeted to zero; with no possibility of remediation back to current standards allowing for human habitation. And the effect of those suddenly valueless mortgage and business loan holdings on the US banking system.
The standard "Chernobyl couldn't have happened here" is contradicted by all the engineering studies "proving" that "A meltdown couldn't happen at ThreeMileIsland".....until it did happen.
Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe. -- Albert Einstein
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I doubt that nuclear waste will ever be a problem for us in the future, unless we end up back in the Stone Age again in the future. A race that can travel between the stars isn't going to have much trouble disposing of any amount of nuclear waste, IMHO.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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Okay, I just saw this. Obviously I have thought a lot about nuclear energy. BaoQingTian is right in that a lot of the arguments against it are pretty weak. It has a lot of really great arguments for it, as well. I happen to think it's a smart idea, and I think we really need it, unless we want to give up air conditioning from now on or something like that (which is perfectly doable). And even then we probably will need it eventually.
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Have you tried rooibos? It's a South African herbal tea, strong but not as heavily spiced as chai. Goes great with vanilla.
