GM laying off 15% of workers and shutting down 5 plants due to trump tariffs

Lucky Luke

Well-Known Member
Yes, hydro is good. So why, then is the world burning so much coal?

In my neck of the woods, dams are driving salmon to extinction. Personally, I'd rather we look at alternatives.

I'm not saying any of this is bad, I'm just saying we keep punching at the problem without knowing how to beat it. It's a system-level solution, which make any one effort ineffective.
only salmon we have are Aussie salmon (a salt water fish) and Farmed Atlantic salmon. We don't have wild Atlantic salmon.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
only salmon we have are Aussie salmon (a salt water fish) and Farmed Atlantic salmon. We don't have wild Atlantic salmon.
OK, so the answer to global warming is a large continent that has a small population and lots of hydropower and no concern for the environmental effects due to the dams and changes in seasonal water flow.

Do you see how this is so warped? You and Budley are just looking at your own back yard and touting solutions that narrowly work in your area. He likes subsidies which probably help but really don't make a dent in the problem. You are OK with hydropower because you don't know of its environmental effects yet and your small population is feverishly working on extracting all your country's resources to sell to other countries.

Getting back to the OP and why GM is doomed, Elon Musk seems to have the only systematic view of how to crack the global warming nut.
 

Budley Doright

Well-Known Member
Heat pumps use electricity which mostly comes from burning coal. So, great, he's dumping less CO2 -- 273 TONNES -- into the atmosphere but still dumping 273 tonnes. How much would it cost to make that heat pump zero carbon emissions? Would the price be all that attractive if he had to pay for mitigating all his emissions?

I installed a super de duper high efficiency gas furnace about 20 years ago and keep my house temperature at about 60 F during the winter. It still burns natural gas. Is the answer to switch to another appliance that burns less but still dumps tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere over time? If that's the case then we should be looking at the majority of people who can't afford those appliances and come up with a way to get them a better system too. But is that really the answer?

Doesn't it just slow down the rate of climate change? Not only that, but are these appliances really solving the problem or just making ignorant people like me think I'm doing something that I really am not. If that's the case then I'm being used as a tool to enrich somebody else. Fuck that.

My point is, these rebates look to be marketing gimmicks that sell more appliances and people like the rebates because they make a good product cheaper. Without a comprehensive systematic plan with the goal of zero CO2 or at least non-harmful rate of carbon emissions, I'm dubious of these gimmicks. Also, I don't blame you, I'm no saint and I see what I'm doing better now than I did 20 years ago when I went with that furnace. So, what's the objective to address human caused climate change, how do we achieve it, how much will it cost and how do we pay for it? I don't know and that's what I'm asking.
Well at least your not calling me closed minded and having a fossil fuel agenda lol. Your questions are all valid and honestly I don’t have the answers but what I do know is, yes reducing is a good thing as opposed to waiting to solve, if at all, the generation issue. That may never happen given the governments we have. Fuck I wouldn’t be surprised if Ontario goes back to coal. As far as the rebates that we HAD, they were raised by taxes on carbon fuels and producers of carbon so everyone paid. .3 cents on a litre of gas was just one. Also we do not produce power with coal plants here. We shut all of them down 2 years ago I believe. And jsyk your 20 year old furnace is a power hog, a new furnace with ECM blower would save 50% on the power usage re electric savings. A big issue is there is no incentive to go off gas, it’s cheap but if there was a tax on that that could be used to fund solar PV would that not be a good thing? We had that to, gone now :(.
 

Budley Doright

Well-Known Member
OK, so the answer to global warming is a large continent that has a small population and lots of hydropower and no concern for the environmental effects due to the dams and changes in seasonal water flow.

Do you see how this is so warped? You and Budley are just looking at your own back yard and touting solutions that narrowly work in your area. He likes subsidies which probably help but really don't make a dent in the problem. You are OK with hydropower because you don't know of its environmental effects yet and your small population is feverishly working on extracting all your country's resources to sell to other countries.

Getting back to the OP and why GM is doomed, Elon Musk seems to have the only systematic view of how to crack the global warming nut.
Budley has offered a few solutions, all you have offered is let’s study the issue and come up with a one size fits all solution. Every country/area has niche areas where some things work better than others, Iceland’s geothermal could power their whole country. Yes lowering emissions is a good thing, total carbon reduction is not going to happen in my or your life time so let’s agree that it all helps right? But yes I guess we could keep studying the problem. Also Musk just sued to bring back subsidies in Ontario and won jsyk lol
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
Well at least your not calling me closed minded and having a fossil fuel agenda lol. Your questions are all valid and honestly I don’t have the answers but what I do know is, yes reducing is a good thing as opposed to waiting to solve, if at all, the generation issue. That may never happen given the governments we have. Fuck I wouldn’t be surprised if Ontario goes back to coal. As far as the rebates that we HAD, they were raised by taxes on carbon fuels and producers of carbon so everyone paid. .3 cents on a litre of gas was just one. Also we do not produce power with coal plants here. We shut all of them down 2 years ago I believe. And jsyk your 20 year old furnace is a power hog, a new furnace with ECM blower would save 50% on the power usage re electric savings. A big issue is there is no incentive to go off gas, it’s cheap but if there was a tax on that that could be used to fund solar PV would that not be a good thing? We had that to, gone now :(.
So now that we've had our argument and made up, a question came to mind.

The background of the question comes from the yellow vest protests in France. They touched on a deeper issue but were triggered by Macron's raising gas taxes ahead of any consensus from the people affected that the new taxes were fair or necessary. Getting back to question. Regarding the Canadian "conservative government's" actions to suspend rebates -- what was the driver for that? Was there a strong blowback from the public or was it throttled by some lobbying effort? How much support was there for that kind of use of taxpayer dollars? Was there any justification for lifting those rebates?

As far as what to do with my furnace goes, I think I want to do an energy audit first and then decide what to do. I'm not a big consumer of power or gas in that I'm pretty stingy on how I use it. Maybe my money would be better spent elsewhere to reduce my carbon footprint.
 

too larry

Well-Known Member
Heat pumps use electricity which mostly comes from burning coal. So, great, he's dumping less CO2 -- 273 TONNES -- into the atmosphere but still dumping 273 tonnes. How much would it cost to make that heat pump zero carbon emissions? Would the price be all that attractive if he had to pay for mitigating all his emissions?

I installed a super de duper high efficiency gas furnace about 20 years ago and keep my house temperature at about 60 F during the winter. It still burns natural gas. Is the answer to switch to another appliance that burns less but still dumps tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere over time? If that's the case then we should be looking at the majority of people who can't afford those appliances and come up with a way to get them a better system too. But is that really the answer?

Doesn't it just slow down the rate of climate change? Not only that, but are these appliances really solving the problem or just making ignorant people like me think I'm doing something that I really am not. If that's the case then I'm being used as a tool to enrich somebody else. Fuck that.

My point is, these rebates look to be marketing gimmicks that sell more appliances and people like the rebates because they make a good product cheaper. Without a comprehensive systematic plan with the goal of zero CO2 or at least non-harmful rate of carbon emissions, I'm dubious of these gimmicks. Also, I don't blame you, I'm no saint and I see what I'm doing better now than I did 20 years ago when I went with that furnace. So, what's the objective to address human caused climate change, how do we achieve it, how much will it cost and how do we pay for it? I don't know and that's what I'm asking.
I think you missed the point. The decimal point. 0.273 tonnes.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
Budley has offered a few solutions, all you have offered is let’s study the issue and come up with a one size fits all solution. Every country/area has niche areas where some things work better than others, Iceland’s geothermal could power their whole country. Yes lowering emissions is a good thing, total carbon reduction is not going to happen in my or your life time so let’s agree that it all helps right? But yes I guess we could keep studying the problem. Also Musk just sued to bring back subsidies in Ontario and won jsyk lol
Absolutely, I want a first rate analysis of the situation and a plan of action that takes into account the costs and benefits before I could commit to what to do. Without that, any major actions would be "ready, fire, aim" with dire consequences if that shot isn't a lucky one. Also, without a good basis for why one specific action should be favored over another, industries like yours are left open to backsliding by later administrations -- as what happened with your beloved rebate program.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
I think you missed the point. The decimal point. 0.273 tonnes.
The question I have is, does this method make sense? Is the objective to reduce carbon emissions? If so, does it reduce emissions enough? Or is the objective zero carbon emissions? In which case, then a rebate to reduce emissions misses the target.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
maybe you guys are so far ahead of me that my questions are irritatingly obvious. So I'll take your criticisms as encouragement to read up.

I came across this article for starters. The issue addressed here is rooted in the question I gave Budley earlier. Macron triggered a political firestorm when he raised fuel taxes without consensus from the people most affected by it. The resultant yellow vest protests and riots came from people who were low to middle income and felt that the new taxes were more than they could pay. The result is that Macron's well meaning efforts to reduce carbon emissions are put on hold and probably will never be implemented.

The Design and Implementation of Policies to Protect Low-Income Households under a Carbon Tax
https://www.cbpp.org/research/climate-change/the-design-and-implementation-of-policies-to-protect-low-income-households

Excerpt:

A carbon tax is a cost-effective policy tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but the resulting increases in energy prices erode the purchasing power of households’ budgets. Low- and moderate-income households feel the squeeze the most, both because energy-related expenditures constitute a larger share of their budgets and because they have less ability to make investments needed to adapt to higher energy prices (such as buying new, more energy-efficient appliances or home-heating systems) than better-off households.

Among the principles for such protection are that it should not make poor families poorer or push more people into poverty; it should achieve the broadest possible coverage at low administrative cost by using existing, proven delivery mechanisms, rather than creating new public or private bureaucracies; and it should preserve incentives to reduce fossil energy use efficiently.

Subject to ensuring that a climate rebate is large enough to satisfy the criterion of not making poverty deeper or more widespread, policymakers have considerable discretion over its size and scope. The amount of the rebate and how far up the income scale it extends would depend on how much funding policymakers make available for consumer relief in the form of rebates and whether they want to provide larger rebates to a smaller share of the population or smaller rebates to more people.
 

Budley Doright

Well-Known Member
So now that we've had our argument and made up, a question came to mind.

The background of the question comes from the yellow vest protests in France. They touched on a deeper issue but were triggered by Macron's raising gas taxes ahead of any consensus from the people affected that the new taxes were fair or necessary. Getting back to question. Regarding the Canadian "conservative government's" actions to suspend rebates -- what was the driver for that? Was there a strong blowback from the public or was it throttled by some lobbying effort? How much support was there for that kind of use of taxpayer dollars? Was there any justification for lifting those rebates?

As far as what to do with my furnace goes, I think I want to do an energy audit first and then decide what to do. I'm not a big consumer of power or gas in that I'm pretty stingy on how I use it. Maybe my money would be better spent elsewhere to reduce my carbon footprint.
Well no one likes a tax. There was a huge blow back when the green on program was canceled which was funded by the the carbon tax. Typical ignorant conservative supporters didn’t make that connection so when their platform included carbon tax elimination they were all woohoo, when the tax funded rebates were cancelled with it they were all WTF :(.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
World reductions are the stated goal of which the Paris agreement was based.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
You are right. This is a good starting point.

Also, as discussed here, you are also right that the recent policy shifts made by various provinces in Canada makes it nearly impossible for Canada to meet goals laid out in the the Paris Agreement.

The link below takes one to an analysis of Canada's policies and projected emissions over time but the same site shows how other countries are doing.
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/canada/

Their rating for Canada is "highly insufficient"

The US is one of the rogue nations rated "critically insufficient". Hopeful that this will change once we bump out the Trump administration but it's not going to happen soon enough.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
Well no one likes a tax. There was a huge blow back when the green on program was canceled which was funded by the the carbon tax. Typical ignorant conservative supporters didn’t make that connection so when their platform included carbon tax elimination they were all woohoo, when the tax funded rebates were cancelled with it they were all WTF :(.
Yep, same here. Everybody loves to complain about taxes but people cry louder when their particular benefit is axed by tax cuts.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
only salmon we have are Aussie salmon (a salt water fish) and Farmed Atlantic salmon. We don't have wild Atlantic salmon.
Australia’s climate policy has further deteriorated in the past year, as it focusses on propping up the coal industry and ditches efforts to reduce emissions, ignoring the record uptake of solar PV and storage and other climate action at state level. The Australian government has turned its back on global climate action by dismissing the findings of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and announcing it would no longer provide funds to the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Australia’s emissions from fossil fuels and industry continue to rise and, based on the most recent quarterly inventory, are now 6% above 2005 levels and increasing at around 1% since 2014. Under current polices these emissions are headed for an increase of 9% above 2005 levels by 2030, rather than the 15–17% decrease in these emissions required to meet Australia’s Paris Agreement target. This means Australia’s emissions are set to far outpace its “Insufficient” 2030 target.


The government has abandoned any policy efforts to achieve emissions reductions in the energy and transport sectors. Instead, its plans to underwrite a new coal power plant are completely inconsistent with the need to phase out coal globally by 2050 and in OECD countries by 2030. If all other countries were to follow Australia’s current policy trajectory that we rate “Highly Insufficient”, warming could reach over 3°C and up to 4°C.
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/australia/

It's a good thing you don't have any salmon to worry about. Your great barrier reef is dying but hey you still have that hydro power. Why then is your country building new coal fired plants?
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
Cuz that coal just be laying around waiting to be burned. We just supposed to ignore that coal that just laying on the floor bro? thats craaaaaaaazy.
You know, I usually refrain from putting people on ignore but I'll make an exception in your case. Feel free to reply to me if it makes you feel better. Please don't give me any likes, however.
 

NWO4LIFE

Active Member
You know, I usually refrain from putting people on ignore but I'll make an exception in your case. Feel free to reply to me if it makes you feel better. Please don't give me any likes, however.
You're getting coal for Christmas you silly boy.
 
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