Are we being manipulated?

[NoddY]

Biodiesel is a good move, though there will be need for way too much crops to completely switch away, so it is not a solution - just a quick improvement that can be made - tax on petrol should gradually increase year on year, so that in 5-7 years priceis 3 times higher than that of diesel, this way people will switch en masse to diesel engines which would be a big plus.

What I mind however is scum NL taking in more taxes that actually will be wasted on PFIs and crap like that - any enviroment related tax should be ring fenced and only used on R&D to remove dependency on fossil fuels.

Lower the tax on diesel, not raise the tax on petrol.

[hattra]

El Gordo is already eyeing up the old Fuel Escalator that was abandoned following the Fuel Price protests of some years ago. It'll be a test of his green credentials if bio-fuels are included.

IMHO liquid fuels like bio-diesel and methanol are the short to medium term solution - we wouldn't even need to change the infrastucture to distribute them. And I bet a few African countries would be happily to switch one of their two or three crops a year over to vegetable oil production.

We may not be able to meet all our needs, but we could rapidly reduce our dependency on fossil fuels by 20-30% and in the long term develope other sources of bio-fuel. like the guy in the USA who processes waste turkey giblets, fat & skin into bio-diesel (he gets about a barrel out of every ton). He reckoned that, by reprocessing all the organic waste it currently produces, the USA could meet ALL its fuel requirements.

[wendigo100]

Electricity is the best transferable energy source. Our next problem is inventing batteries that can power a one-ton car (including the weight of the batteries themselves) for 300 miles with reasonable speed and acceleration.

[AtW]

Lower the tax on diesel, not raise the tax on petrol.

Tax on petrol has to be increased - it should become a LOT more expensive to drive petrol car, so much that such cars should be pretty much worthless and this should trigger upgrades to diesel cars, which to be fair already taking up 40-50% of new car sales, but old junk needs to be thrown out and replaced.

Lowering tax a bit on diesel may help create nice differential between petrol and diesel prices too.

> Electricity is the best transferable energy source.

NO - a lot of electricity gets wasted in National Grid - I think about 30-40%, if those power stations were closer to end points then less power generation would be needed.

[Nipple Clamp]

NO - a lot of electricity gets wasted in National Grid - I think about 30-40%, if those power stations were closer to end points then less power generation would be needed.

Most of that leakage could be eliminated by using superconducting cables.

As for nuclear power, it seems to me by far the simplest solution, which eliminates the risk of catastrophic radiation leaks caused by accidents or attacks (by terrorists or countries), and avoids ending up with plants having to be dismantled and high-level waste needing disposal, is to build nuclear plants deep underground:

Just tunnel two or three miles into basement rock, e.g. granite and basalt, and install reactor cores in shafts off the main tunnel. These could be a lot simpler and more compact if necessary than a reactor on the surface, especially if unmanned, and at the end of their lifetimes one could just seal their shafts and leave them (quite possibly for future generations, with more advanced technologies, to dispose of or even make further good use of as they see fit).

This also uses less space on the surface, especially if several such buried reactors could feed output energy to the same surface station.

Naturally the tunnel would be quite expensive up front to dig, and equip the necessary infrastructure such as coolant pipes and power cables. But if one tunnel could be used with lots of "offshoot" shafts, one would gain economies of scale.

Also, as diamond miners know, tunneling several miles into the Earth's crust gets noticeably hot. So circulating coolant could double up to produce thermoelectric (based on temperature difference) or even geothermal energy.

To prevent a meltdown of one reactor trashing the whole underground complex, the best design would be a vertical entrance shaft (or possibly more practically a spiral ramp), then have long horizontal shafts running off this, and have each reactor in further vertical shafts off the latter, with a large plug of rock suspended over each reactor shaft. At the first sign of a meltdown, or to seal a spent reactor, they could then flood the affected shaft and detonate charges symmetrically round the top of the plug so the latter would break free and fall over the top of the shaft. Bang! - sorted!


OwlHoot in "sooner or later they must dig the tunnels anyway, to bury the waste" mode

[hattra]

Diesel does have a downside, like increased particulate emission, and a large amount of the impact of petrol engines could be mitigated by the use of gasoline/ alchohol mixtures. It would be fairer to put a larger tax on the sale of NEW petrol engined vehicles and to tax the gasoline component of any gasohol mixtures, to encourage a switch to a more bio-friendly mixtures.#

But of course this would be reasonable, not "tax efficient"

[Denny]

I think the global warming, climate change fear is evident. The seasons here in the UK are different than they used to be. At one point we could expect Spring to start around March, summer around June and Autumn around September, and winter around November.

Now what we get is the seasons shifting back by at least a month. Spring doesn't really kick in until late April even May, summer around July and Autumn around late October/November, with Winter which is not even snowy in the south anymore kicking in around late December even January. Even last month, I was walking around in t-shirts. It might be cold now, but it's due to get warmer again!!!

If that's not the effect of global warming, I'd like to know what is!

[wendigo100]

Too many people. Stop them overflowing.

[AtW]

I think the global warming, climate change fear is evident.

The very same people who argued that there is no such thing as climate change in 80s, now say that even though it is present, humans have nothing to do with it - a load of crap considering how different weather has become in mere 20 years, which is a blip on a radar for this planet's history of "natural" climate change periods that took thousands of years.

Worrying thing is that Golf stream stopped for a few days couple of years ago - then it restarted but it did stop briefly, if this thing become permanent this country will pretty much need to rebuild all houses because they are simply not suitable for temp of -15C - people here don't change summer to winter car tyres, and this will have to change. Hech, bookies will be accepting bets on when there is NO snow on Xmas rather than otherwise.

[Emperor Dalek]

And most improtantly - money from econological taxes MUST be invested into alternative fuel research, and no bullcrap research - the real one, tough goals and whoever makes it first will get richer than rich.

You know as well as I do that the extra revenue raised will in fact be used to plug the black hole in the public sector employees' pension scheme.