Joe Biden has taken us down a rabbit hole

[Tiny]

Originally Posted by Texas Contrarian

The Amish Paradise? That's pretty fuckin' funny!

However, I'm not sure that it's quite good enough for the guys who don't want to engage in anything resembling critical thinking, and instead just want to snark at people.

I mean, look at all the animals in the video.

(Cows belching and farting! Methane! Greenhouse gasses galore!)

Can't these people feed their families by planting and harvesting their crops by hand, with human labor only?

Yeah, they want a Vegan Amish paradise. Well, I’ve got news for them. There ain’t no vegan Amish! You take away their plow horses and buggy horses and it’ll be like taking away our guns and internal combustion engines. We’ll have a revolution on our hands!

[Texas Contrarian]

Originally Posted by Tiny

Yeah, they want a Vegan Amish paradise. Well, I’ve got news for them. There ain’t no vegan Amish! You take away their plow horses and buggy horses and it’ll be like taking away our guns and internal combustion engines. We’ll have a revolution on our hands!

Well, can't they hunt deer and rabbits with bows, arrows, and traps like many native American tribes did for millennia?

If we're really serious about eliminating planet-scorching emissions, aren't sacrifices necessary?

[Tiny]

Originally Posted by Texas Contrarian

Well, can't they hunt deer and rabbits with bows, arrows, and traps like many native American tribes did for millennia?

If we're really serious about eliminating planet-scorching emissions, aren't sacrifices necessary?

Touché. Thinking about the bigger picture, not just the Amish, maybe we could replace tractors and plow horses with humans! Just replace the horses that drag the plows with people!

[Texas Contrarian]

Originally Posted by Tiny

Touché. Thinking about the bigger picture, not just the Amish, maybe we could replace tractors and plow horses with humans!

And that would be a win-win for society since we'd dramatically mitigate the obesity epidemic!

(Tip: Short the hell out of pharma stocks if that ever happens!)

[Ripmany]

Rabbit don't dig holes

[Texas Contrarian]

California's climate change zealots seem to have begun dreaming of mandating that all new locomotives meet zero-emission standards, despite the total absence of any technology allowing those criteria to be met in any way remotely resembling an affordable manner.

Further, some wish to forcibly retire existing diesel locomotives long before the end of their useful life. The fact that transporting freight by rail produces a very minuscule portion of total emissions isn't important, I suppose, if you have a political axe to grind.

https://reason.com/2024/05/02/how-ca...repercussions/

Go for it, Governor Brylcreem. Encourage more businesses to move to Texas. We love it!

[Tiny]

Originally Posted by Texas Contrarian

California's climate change zealots seem to have begun dreaming of mandating that all new locomotives meet zero-emission standards, despite the total absence of any technology allowing those criteria to be met in any way remotely resembling an affordable manner.

Further, some wish to forcibly retire existing diesel locomotives long before the end of their useful life. The fact that transporting freight by rail produces a very minuscule portion of total emissions isn't important, I suppose, if you have a political axe to grind.

https://reason.com/2024/05/02/how-ca...repercussions/

Go for it, Governor Brylcreem. Encourage more businesses to move to Texas. We love it!

What a bunch of nuts! This makes even less sense than the Biden administration's suspension of new permits to build LNG plants, which would help substitute natural gas for coal. As you know, natural gas produces less CO2 than coal for equivalent energy.

New contributor CreatedInSpace, who Lucas McCain suspects is LustyLad come back from the dead, had some interesting things to say about this in another thread. See posts 33, 23 and 29:

https://eccie.net/showthread.php?t=2978984&page=3

CreatedInSpace believes real "0 carbon emission" electric trains will only make sense with a build out of nuclear power plants. Do you think that's going to happen in California? And he notes that "it’s still always most efficient to use the source power as close to, and converted as few times as possible, to its final mechanical output." Meaning diesel locomotives make more sense than electric trains. And that's before considering you have to create the infrastructure from scratch and replace the diesel locomotives with electric ones. Or that California's probably going to fall flat on its ass in trying to generate adequate base load electricity without fossil fuels or new nuclear.

I wonder if the end result will be that long haul diesel trucks end up substituting for long haul diesel locomotives. So carbon emissions are higher than they would be otherwise. Or maybe the railroads have to swap locomotives when they cross into the PRC (Peoples’ Republic of California.) This doesn’t seem very efficient.

[eccieuser9500]

Why locomotive? Is that the language in the proposed legislation?

Just here to ask the stupid questions.

This is getting into my area - logistics. The money talk is still Greek.

[Why_Yes_I_Do]

Originally Posted by Tiny

Touché. Thinking about the bigger picture, not just the Amish, maybe we could replace tractors and plow horses with humans! Just replace the horses that drag the plows with people!

We gots us a chite-ton of extra humans streaming across the board everyday - to escape the climate change, don't cha know...- which apparently we don't have here. So besides just hosing up the GDP denominator and sucking our tax dollars to fund them with food, shelter and health care - turn them in to plow horses?!? Not all bad I s'pose. But that sounds eerily familiar from back in the day. Though I vaguely recall a bit of a tussle ensuing over it even...

[Ripmany]

Rabbits and digging go together like dogs and barking; it’s just something that many rabbits do. Some rabbits dig more than others, and no dirt is needed to dig. Rabbits can make the dig motions anywhere. Why do rabbits dig? You can’t really expect an answer from your bunny, but you can make an educated guess. One reason probably accounts for most rabbit digging, but a few other reasons also exist.

The Power Of Instinct
You might have guessed that instinct drives a majority of rabbit digging. Most rabbit species in the wild live in underground burrows that they dig. A notable exception are cottontail rabbits, which live in nests rather than burrows. Burrows provide some safety from predators and extreme temperatures. A group of burrows where numerous rabbits live is called a warren. All domesticated rabbit breeds are descended from the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), which burrows, so your bunny pal has burrowing in his or her genes.

At first, digging might seem cute. Your rabbit might paw at the carpeting, couch cushion, your bed quilt, or other household item or furnishing. This is unlikely to harm anything unless you let it continue or encourage it. Repeated digging can cause damage to items.



Same reason Joe Biden in rabbit hole hopefully this helps.

[Tiny]

Originally Posted by eccieuser9500

Why locomotive? Is that the language in the proposed legislation?

Just here to ask the stupid questions.

This is getting into my area - logistics. The money talk is still Greek.

We're actually really talking about train locomotives eccieuser. California wants to replace all the diesel locomotives with electric locomotives. The thing is though that diesel trains emit about 1/7th the green house gases as trucks per ton-mile. So this is an example of perfect being the enemy of the good IMHO.

Originally Posted by Ripmany

At first, digging might seem cute. Your rabbit might paw at the carpeting, couch cushion, your bed quilt, or other household item or furnishing. This is unlikely to harm anything unless you let it continue or encourage it. Repeated digging can cause damage to items.

Exactly like Biden's energy policy! It was kind of cute at first. But we have to put a stop to it. Your analogy is pure genius!

Some may compare you to the gardener (Peter Sellers) in "Being There", but Eccieuser and I have you pegged for what you really are.

Originally Posted by Why_Yes_I_Do

We gots us a chite-ton of extra humans streaming across the board everyday - to escape the climate change, don't cha know...- which apparently we don't have here. So besides just hosing up the GDP denominator and sucking our tax dollars to fund them with food, shelter and health care - turn them in to plow horses?!? Not all bad I s'pose. But that sounds eerily familiar from back in the day. Though I vaguely recall a bit of a tussle ensuing over it even...

One of my dead relatives actually did that. The family didn't have enough money for a mule so he pulled the plow.

[eccieuser9500]

Originally Posted by Tiny

We're actually really talking about train locomotives eccieuser. California wants to replace all the diesel locomotives with electric locomotives. The thing is though that diesel trains emit about 1/7th the green house gases as trucks per ton-mile. So this is an example of perfect being the enemy of the good IMHO.

My brain was going overtime with the language. I haven't heard of this. I thought the law was going apply to other forms of transportation. Ya' know- lawyers.



Exactly like Biden's energy policy! It was kind of cute at first. But we have to put a stop to it. Your analogy is pure genius!

Some may compare you to the gardener (Peter Sellers) in "Being There", but Eccieuser and I have you pegged for what you really are.


Pegged? Words, sir. Words. "All I have in this world . . . ."

Not this.

This.

One of my dead relatives actually did that. The family didn't have enough money for a mule so he pulled the plow.

At least they should keep their promises.

"High" brow?

[CreatedInSpace]

Originally Posted by Tiny

Touché. Thinking about the bigger picture, not just the Amish, maybe we could replace tractors and plow horses with humans! Just replace the horses that drag the plows with people!

Hope you’re wearing a race card proof vest.

[Texas Contrarian]

Originally Posted by Tiny

What a bunch of nuts! This makes even less sense than the Biden administration's suspension of new permits to build LNG plants, which would help substitute natural gas for coal. As you know, natural gas produces less CO2 than coal for equivalent energy.

New contributor CreatedInSpace, who Lucas McCain suspects is LustyLad come back from the dead, had some interesting things to say about this in another thread. See posts 33, 23 and 29:

https://eccie.net/showthread.php?t=2978984&page=3

CreatedInSpace believes real "0 carbon emission" electric trains will only make sense with a build out of nuclear power plants. Do you think that's going to happen in California? And he notes that "it’s still always most efficient to use the source power as close to, and converted as few times as possible, to its final mechanical output." Meaning diesel locomotives make more sense than electric trains. And that's before considering you have to create the infrastructure from scratch and replace the diesel locomotives with electric ones. Or that California's probably going to fall flat on its ass in trying to generate adequate base load electricity without fossil fuels or new nuclear.

I wonder if the end result will be that long haul diesel trucks end up substituting for long haul diesel locomotives. So carbon emissions are higher than they would be otherwise. Or maybe the railroads have to swap locomotives when they cross into the PRC (Peoples’ Republic of California.) This doesn’t seem very efficient.

I have a great deal of trouble imagining even the remote possibility of a nuclear power plant build-out in California.

And, absent something like that, we barely have enough baseload power to keep what we have today supplied without the grid creaking and rolling brownouts affecting many areas of the country when temperatures reach extremes. Besides that, demand for powering data centers and AI is skyrocketing.

Further, even if we had vastly more baseload power from nuclear or other sources, getting it to rolling locomotives in remote areas would be staggeringly expensive. You'd either have to build third-rail electrified tracks like some short distance trams and commuter trains use, or some sort of overhead line system like the old streetcars and electric buses used in some cities. And it would have to extend for many hundreds (or even thousand) of miles. It seems to me that would be grotesquely cost-prohibitive.

I suppose you could power electric locomotives with railcar-sized Li-ion battery packs, but how much would that cost? Maybe in a decade or two we'll have batteries that are much less expensive and about an order of magnitude more energy-dense, but until that time this just doesn't seem remotely feasible.

Moving passengers over relatively short distance via light rail is one thing; transporting massively heavy railcars over long distances is an altogether different ballgame.

[CreatedInSpace]

It would have to be overhead and well protected. Cables that large either go underground or way out of reach. You wouldn’t lay partially uninsulated 1000 kva cables on the ground through Bumfuck Idaho. It might as well be a minefield lol.