White House Approves Sonic Cannons For Atlantic Energy Exploration 272
An anonymous reader writes: The White House on Friday gave final approval to allow the use of sonic cannons in finding energy deposits underneath the ocean floor on the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management says that finding energy resources off the Atlantic seaboard "could generate thousands of jobs, but has also acknowledged that the process will harm sea creatures." Sonic cannons "fire sound waves 100 times louder than a jet engine." Mammals such as whales and dolphins that communicate through sound will most likely be affected, but scientists aren't sure to what extent. They also aren't sure how the cannons will affect fish and other sea creatures or how any physiological effects on them may impact the fishing industries of the U.S. and the other countries who rely on seafood that migrate into and out of the Atlantic Ocean.
Lol (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck the earth, we do what we want!
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End of discussion. We all know the only things worse than aborting potential jobs are terrorism and taxes.
Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
in small print "for foreign workers"
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Because you think the next one will be better?
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Re:Lol (Score:5, Funny)
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I think you forgot shovel ready....
Or was that implied?
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And those jobs are "shovel ready"!!!
Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey man, didn't you read "could generate thousands of jobs?" Let me say that again. COULD. MAKE. THOUSANDS. JOBS.
End of discussion. We all know the only things worse than aborting potential jobs are terrorism and taxes.
Ya, but those jobs are going to be cleaning the dead fish & sea mammals off beaches.
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I'm sorry this isn't xkcd. [smbc-comics.com]
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With such unknowns as the following what could possibly go wrong?
Sonic cannons "fire sound waves 100 times louder than a jet engine." Mammals such as whales and dolphins that communicate through sound will most likely be affected, but scientists aren't sure to what extent. They also aren't sure how the cannons will affect fish and other sea creatures or how any physiological effects on them may impact the fishing industries of the U.S. and the other countries who rely on seafood that migrate into and out of
THOUSANDS of Job Opportunities! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Lol (Score:4, Funny)
everything is safe until we absolutely, 100%, know, for sure, with absolutely no dissent from anyone, that it is not safe.
Re: Lol (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything is safe always, you mean. In a world with the GOP, the EPA could find that this causes a 10000% increase in sudden infant death syndrome and no ban will pass the House because of "rabble rabble job creators class warfare energy independence"
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The GOP took the white house? And here I thought there was another 2 years or so before they even got the chance to do something like that.
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A few years back, before Obama, one of my black friends said when we have the first black president they are gonna paint the White House black, and call it the "Black House."
In fact, the political comedian Dick Gregory said that about his own satirical run for president back around 1968 or so. When I'm president (c'mon, you guys gotta start campaigning for me!), I think I'll do the exterior in Jackson Pollock.
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There is absolutely nothing racist about calling it the white house. The name has absolutely no connection to anyone living in it or who has lived in it. In the war of 1812, the whitehouse which was never previoudly called that nor was it white like we see today, was burnt by the invading english from Canada. The presidential manor was white washed in a hurry to hide the soot snd burn marks while the interior was rebuilt. That is when it became the white house and got its permenant white color.
Your friend i
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The presidential manor was white washed in a hurry to hide the soot and burn marks...
Is it just me or does that sound like a political statement proven more apt on a daily basis?
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The EPA is under the executive which occupies the White House.
I do not disagree with your comment, i just fo not see its relevance.
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Create 1000's of jobs balanced by destroying 1000's of them in marine based industries
The above AC is right.
Hoping this is not as bad as it sounds (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, even if they can, this sounds really bad, no pun intended.
Re:Hoping this is not as bad as it sounds (Score:5, Insightful)
The _turf_ of bottom dwelling creatures can be quite small, especially of mollusks. Injuring them, or driving away their predators, is likely to have quite large ecological consequences. Even driving away vegetarian creatures from their feeding grounds is likely to interfere with stable ecologies.
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Makes sense because an animal hearing the loud sound will immediately clue-in that that was a warning shot, not a one-off, and that much louder noise is coming ... and be able to get far enough away from the source to be safe ... ... what kind of magical creatures are these?
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Now we wish we had gone farther with those initial, aborted experiments in cetacean communication years ago. But in the absence of being able to issue warnings in "dolphin language" the idea of ramping up a series of smaller blasts before each 'big one' could work. This is how the redeye-reduction mode on a camera flash works.
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Torpedoes and depth charges are much worse and no-one asks for permission to fire those...
Well this is a very interesting point. However, is it correct that those are worse? Are there some numbers to support this idea?
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130kg @ 300m is 286db at source, 199db at 20km. So no, your typical 200lbs depth charge will not come anywhere near this insanity.
Re:Hoping this is not as bad as it sounds (Score:5, Informative)
286 db at source? Air cannons are 250 db at source, so 3 and a half orders of magnitude less powerful. Lightning in the ocean is 260 db at source and your average square kilometer of ocean gets two strikes per year. These ships will be covering tens of millions of square kilometers. With a pulse rate of once every 10 seconds (3.2 million pulses per year per ship, if they run constantly, which they almost certainly won't), you're looking at an order of magnitude less per ship than lightning (and I doubt there will be many ships, and they won't always be in operation). And lightning striking water is an order of magnitude louder. It even causes shock waves in the water by the same mechanism - rapidly creating an air bubble in the water (in lightning's case, by boiling the water) which then oscillates as it implodes and explodes repeatedly.
Now, one could say that this is different because it's all in one place at a given time, and thus animals would be tempted to flee instead of it being a one-off thing. But then again, lightning strikes aren't spread out evenly over space and time either, they come in thunderstorms which do the exact same thing, repeatedly hitting the same section of sea for hours at a time.
I'm not saying that I think these ships are harmless - not at all. I just think that I think people are overplaying it when they make these apocalyptic pronouncements on what effect they'll have on sea life. I mean, people have been detonating underwater *atomic bombs* - how do you think that compares to the sound of a pop of air? At 400 feet, a blue whale's own calls (188db @ 1m) are louder than the air gun.
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You think the boat is just going to sit in one place? They drag the sensors behind them while they travel across tens of millions of square kilometers. At the sort of pulse rate discussed and at typical ship rates of travel for a craft like this, the pulses would be about 100 meters apart, and the ship would be dozens of miles away an hour later.
There's no point to sitting in one area and pulsing the same place over and over.
Re:Hoping this is not as bad as it sounds (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking strictly in terms of pressure:
- A 1kt nuclear explosion is 300-310db re 1 Pa at 1m
- A seismic air cannon is 264-270db re 1 Pa at 1m
- Whales can go anywhere from 108 to 225b re 1 Pa at 1m
Looking at that without any context one might think it's no big deal. Except that for every 6db you're doubling the pressure.
240db re 1 Pa at 1m is 100% lethal to fish and mammals up to 125m, permanent hearing loss on all trauma frequencies to >50% of fish/mammals to a range of 900m and causes some permanent hearing damage up to 1.5km (McAnuff and Booren, 1976; Yelverton and Richmond, 1981; Phillips et al., 1989: Richmond et al., 1989; Myricket ai., 1989)
They already do this elsewhere (Score:2, Informative)
I've heard a geologist speak of doing this in the Mediterranean. I would hope the experience would allow them to do more than speculate about the effects on animals.
Thanks Obama! (Score:2, Insightful)
This is just disgusting news
I want one (Score:3, Interesting)
Other loud noises (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how loud they are compared with underwater explosions, volcanoes and seaquakes?
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210 dB 2.0 earthquake (sound force is the equivalent of holding a stick of dynamite).
235 dB 5.0 earthquake
248 dB atom bomb
310 dB loudest volcano that we know of (happened in 1883)
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These are very interesting and informative numbers, but can you cite some sources for them? A sincere question.
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All over the web. Those particular data: http://www.decibelcar.com/menu... [decibelcar.com]
Re:Other loud noises (Score:4, Informative)
Common screwup. Those are all atmosphere-rated decibel figures. Underwater decibel figures are listed at 61.5 dB louder than their atmospheric equivalents [dosits.org]. 250 dB underwater is 188.5 atmospheric.
Adjusting your above examples to be underwater figures, we get:
271.5 dB 2.0 earthquake
296.5 dB 5.0 earthquake
309.5 dB atom bomb
371.5 dB loudest volcano
I'd think it obvious that an air cannon isn't going to produce sound levels equivalent to an atomic bomb. And actually one would expect an underwater atomic bomb to be much louder than a surface one, far more of the energy is going to go into creating a gigantic oscillating bubble. And lastly, your cited atomic bomb figure is only for the 16 and 21 kiloton bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Modern thermonuclear weapons are generally three orders of magnitude higher yield than that. A large thermonuclear weapon in deep water will create a bubble on the order of magnitude of a kilometer in size [dtic.mil], which will then oscillate in a series of collapses and reexplosions. The oscillating bubbles created by air cannons are practically microscopic by comparison.
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What, intruding actual scale and proportion into a political argument?
Off with his head!
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i mean why have 6,8,or 10 children? when you can only feed 2 or 3(without assistance)?
Historic precedent, based on two factors -
* High levels of infant mortality
* The need to provide for one's retirement
These countries don't have functioning social care systems. Your children are the only care you're going to get in your dotage. That, combined with the historic trend of high infant mortality, means that high numbers of children are perceived as a form of great fortune. They don't have the career driven lives of the West that are leading our populations to shrink because we're producing fewer
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this is just stoopid...we've already done so much damage to this planet...
WE?
I had no part in the decision making process that led to any significant world or environment damaging, and I doubt you did either, unless you have a hand in directing activities of a industrial company or are involved in military decision making. You may very likely not even know anyone who did. Get it straight, the robber barons and financially powerful that direct the ecologically damaging activities are not "We". Not without contorting the meaning so as to blame the consumers for how the products use
BAD,Bad, Bad! (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:BAD,Bad, Bad! (Score:5, Insightful)
You are the reason environmentalism gets discredited. Of course our needs are a consideration. The oceans must exist for future generations to do what for them? Fulfill their needs. The first imperative of every species is survival, that is nature. We can talk about balance or relative cost, but there is no way that humans are going to agree to extinct themselves.
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Of course it wouldn't. But not "harming" the oceans or land i.e. not utilizing resources would be an extinction level event. All animals, humans included need to pull resources from those sources to live.
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Or howabout you attempt to make a realistic estimate rather than either 0 or infinity?
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There is no reason we need to cost future generations. There are reasons we need to manage the land and water on this planet in a way advantageous to humanity to maintain our population and anything remotely approaching our standard of living.
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America's energy consumption per day per capita is over 3 barrels of oil. That's about 3.3b calories worth of energy per dy. What difference to that consumption does adding or subtracting human manual effort make?
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It depends. If you add about 30 mins of cycling to work and back every day, that adds 600 calories to your list, but then you could remove about 25.000 calories that would be used in driving a car. And, since you're talking calories per capita, if enough people did that and less cars were needed, you could subtract the savings from the whole auto industry, which include energy needed to power factories, extract raw materials, build factories and retailers, shipping... I can't really estimate, but it would b
The White House isn't stupid.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheap oil is the real bread and circus that keeps the masses subdued. Some dead whales and dolphins isn't even a consideration.
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To expand on the sibling's post about Saddam switching oil sales to Euros :
The economy of the US is propped up by a vast debt. We're not talking loans to banks, or China. We're talking petrodollars.
The de-facto currency that oil is traded in was for a long time, the US dollar. Which meant that nations speculated in it, hoarded it, retained reserves of it for the purpose of trading oil.
This meant that the US printed more dollars with impunity, as long as oil markets expanded, meaning the government enjoyed t
You're more right that you know (Score:2)
If the oil stops flowing some Americans might have to tighten their belts, but people around the world that depend on our surplus food would just starve...
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70% of US corn is fed to livestock. Because of all the economic subsidy that corn receives this means the price of meat in the US is artificially low.
US meat consumption is multiple times that of the next nearest nation ; even if you cut your meat consumption by half, you'd still be eating a lot of meat, and you'd free up vast tracts of agricultural land to grow other crops.
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Nitrogen-based fertilizers generally come from natural gas, not oil, FYI. Of the three main sources of fossil energy (coal, oil, natural gas), oil is generally by far the most expensive per joule.
Also, I don't think your comparison is that simple that if yields decline, people die. If there was a global food shortage due to reduced yields per acre, the price spike would hit meat the hardest, practically driving grainfed meat off the market. A calorie of grainfed beef takes over 12 calories of grain to produ
Re:The White House isn't stupid.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The time of cheap and unconventional oil is over. Shale and deep water sources are unconventional and they wouldn't be profitable with the oil prices known in the last millennium. Besides in terms of oil used to extract oil they are also more costly.
The most reasonable solution is to move forward from hydrocarbons. That era is soon over and besides the dependency upkeeps certain political trenches. If an oil or energy company is shortsighted they will oppose this, but the companies who develop alternatives
Even regular sonar wreaks havoc on marine life (Score:5, Informative)
When sonar is used, it can create sound pressure levels of 140dB 300 miles from the source [nrdc.org]. The sound is so excruciating that whales will surface too fast and get the bends, and/or beach themselves, just to escape the sound.
Yup, let's rape our irreplaceable planet some more while torturing innocent, intelligent creatures. After all, they aren't human, and our comfort, convenience, and entertainment are so much more important than their lives.
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According to a more informative article [startribune.com], this won't be nearly as bad, then.
180 decibels. The maximum underwater noise from sonic cannons allowed within 500 meters, mitigating physical damage to marine mammals.
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The article is full of crap:
BS. 235 decibels is louder than almost all volcanos. That's essentially a 31megaton explosion. The navy has tested ship based sonar of that power but only experimentally. No submarine has every carried anything remotely like that. Sonar in use on subs maxes out at around 180 dB, which is still about the equivalent of a 1lb explosion but nowhe
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Once again, people here at Slashdot seem completely unaware that underwater sounds are measured by a scale that's 61.5 db louder than sound in the air [dosits.org].
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10^5.5 = 316,227
So I'm not sure where you are getting your numbers. I'm not sure what the falloff is in air pressure as you increase the size of an explosive. I'd expect a square root function (?) if someone knows they can solve that part.
Re:Even regular sonar wreaks havoc on marine life (Score:5, Informative)
whales get the bends? (Score:2)
Um, that's a bit of a puzzle, the whale breathes in air at atmospheric pressure, therefore to a first order approximation the air in its body can't be at much more than that after compression and then surfacing.
I'm not saying its impossible, but I can't see what pressure is driving the nitrogen deep into joints etc, it should all be in equilibrium.
the whole point with bends and SCUBA is that you are breathing high pressure air, and so high pressure nitrogen diffuses into the parts of the body with lower par
Some of the jobs this would create (Score:5, Funny)
1) Fish Deafness Specialist
2) Hearing Aid Designer for Dolphins
3) Bass Boosting Headphone Maker for Bass
4) ASL Teachers for Octopi
5) Jellyfish Mending Seamstress
6) Aquatic PTSD Therapist
7) Exploding Whale Cleanup Crew
Some (more) jobs this would create (Score:2)
...
8) Coral Relocation Consultants
9) Cochlear Implant Maker for Conchs
10) Ear Surgeons for Sturgeon
11) Disability Lawyers for Sharks
12) Mime School Professor for Deaf and Dumb Clownfish
13) Burst Blowfish Re-Inflation Technician
14) Electric Eel Defibrillation Nurse
I'll be hear all week, folks!
So It Has Come To This (Score:3)
This will create a Sharknado, won't it?
so long as the duration is... (Score:2)
... short. If they just blast away continuously for days that might be an issue. But if they do it for an hour or so every day that probably won't matter.
Think of it like the noisy neighbor... if they have a loud phone conversation or violent sex or blast party music for a couple hours every day... it probably won't be a literal threat to your health. It might be annoying but you're not going to get ill or die or something.
But if someone does it to you every day all day for days on end... then yeah... you m
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The US Navy recently increased sonar exercises [emagazine.com] without a proper assessment of the risks to marine mammals. The service and the Navy later estimated that the use of sonar during the five year plan will result in the de [courthousenews.com]
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For the third time I have to point it out in this thread, underwater explosions are measured differently on the decibel scale than above water explosions, you need to subtract 61.5 from the decibel figures before comparing them with above-ground noise figures. That's over 6 orders of magnitude difference.
Also, when people talk about how the ships keep making pulses every ten seconds, they act like it's in the same spot. Which would be idiotic. "Okay, now that we know what's down here, what should we explore
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The US Navy recently increased sonar exercises [emagazine.com] without a proper assessment of the risks to marine mammals. The service and the Navy later estimated that the use of sonar during the five year plan will result in the de [courthousenews.com]
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For what its worth, I fired off an email to my congressman. Sounds like its too far gone to stop but we can hope.
Understand, I am pro oil drilling, pro nuclear power... and all sorts of other things you likely find unsavory. But this just seems wanton to me. I'm not a monster or an idiot... and this seems like madness.
If it didn't disturb marine life then I'd be fine with it. But blasting that into the water for months on end?... no.
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Congresspeople don't care about email complaints.
Send snail mail, or you aren't really concerned about the situation at all.
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes Minister. (Score:2)
Red flags: (Score:2)
- Jobs in danger
- Jobs created
- Freedom
- Security
Look who is talking and who is supporting (bribing) them.
Applies to all politicians in the US where the supreme court is smoking what? - pot, no cannot be, they would be more sensible.
Sorry Whales (Score:2)
I SAID I'M SORRY!!!!!!!
Poor bastards can't hear a damn thing ever since we started with our sonic blasters.
Why should people change their energy use... (Score:5, Insightful)
You first (Score:2)
Figure out what level of energy use, as a whole, is acceptable by your calculations. Then figure out how much that means you get to use. Make sure to include all forms of energy usage, such as heating and energy used in building and delivering goods. Adjust your energy use to meet that level, and see how that goes. Then we can talk. Otherwise, kindly STFU.
The reason I say this is not because I'm against trying to reduce energy consumption, I think conservation is always a good idea when practical, but becau
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>> I think conservation is always a good idea when practical,
Just like every other change, conservation will require some compromise somewhere else, so if you always prioritize other sources of endless short term issues (such as business/economics/politics) above long term planning activities such as conservation, no conservation will ever get done at all.
It always amazes me to see how completely short-term most thinking in the US is. It is truly bizarre to me how most Americans will make excuses for
"Energy" exploration (Score:2)
I don't like the "energy" euphemism, they're not searching for some tidy glowing yellow stuff like something from an RTS game. Let's call it what it is. OIL. Wildlife-gooping, coast-ruining, fossil-carbon-filled, toxic oil that needs to have more energy dumped into it to be refined into something we can use.
You and I know what the dolphins are going to say: (Score:2)
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get that nonsense out of your head. the ones with Republicans and Democrats in their pockets rule your world. hint, the seat of power in the USA isn't Washington DC, it is New York
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Ahhh, so Dinos are totally without blame because the other party woulda done it?
The senate, the Oval office, all controlled by Dinos - but it's Bush's fault...
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whales don't shriek, they are very low frequency sources
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i) They aren't fish, they are mammals
ii) They have social grouping activity, the thing that separates the smart animals from the dumb ones, and the thing responsible for the growth of humans into the dominant species
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brain structure is the entire reason humans grew into dominant species, but whales have a brain mostly dedicated to sensory perception.
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Scientists don't know what will happen to a dolphin getting in the way?
Well, either they explode, or just get their brain squashed. It could be they just become permanently deaf or just scared shitless and swim to the shore to die there.
Either case: they die, who cares which way?
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You can reduce carbon emission a lot without changing lifestyles.
US has carbon intensity of 0.413 (Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide per Thousand Year 2005 U.S. Dollars)
France has 0.167
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdb... [eia.gov]
So they make 2.5 times more money for each ton of CO2
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France also has a much milder climate and 3.5 times the population density. They're also heavily dominated by nuclear power, which some people like but others truly hate, and which tends to be one of the more expensive generation sources per kilowatt hour and with a very long turnaround time from conception to commencement of generation.
And once again, we're talking about oil here, oil and electricity are not interchangeable. You need to be comparing oil consumption per capita. France's is a bit over half t
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Let me know how you managed to fit the sun or a fusion reactor into your gas tank.
Are we really going to keep pretending that oil and electricity are the same thing?
Tesla (Score:2)
Let me know how you managed to fit the sun or a fusion reactor into your gas tank.
Tesla managed it somehow.
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And for the literally 99.9995 percent of the world population who doesn't have a Tesla?
As much as I'm a fan of electric cars, it's simply an absurdity to pretend that everyone's going to have one any day now. The average car on the road in the US is 10 years old, implying an average US lifespan of 20 years - and many live on even longer, shipped to the third world. So even if every new car sold tomorrow was an EV, it'd still take decades to switch over. But of course, every new car sold tomorrow won't be an
Peak oil is not sudden (Score:2)
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Decade or two to ramp up production for new vehicle sales. Plus a decade or so for consumer acceptance lag. Then two decades or more to phase out existing gas cars. We're talking half a century here.
Yes, at one point there were 5 cars per million people period. Around the year 1890. Today there's 0.15 cars per capita globally. It took over a century to scale up that much, so I don't think that's the sort of point you want to be making. Plus, not only do we have to scale up for existing car replacement, but