Towards a smaller, deeper carbon footprint;
Staufen, in the Black Forest, was proud of its innovative geothermal power plan that was supposed to provide environmentally-friendly heating.
But only two weeks after contractors drilled down 460ft to extract heat from below the earth, large cracks have appeared in buildings as the town centre subsided about a third of an inch (8mm).
The baroque Town Hall, the main church, two schools and over 64 other buildings in the historic centre were severely affected. Experts said buildings in the outer part of the town had risen by a similar amount.
According to Robert Breder, an engineer, the problems began when geothermal probes penetrated an underground reservoir. As the water seeped out and the pressure fell, upper layers of earth started to collapse, causing the surface – and the town – to sink.
Environmentalism is communism cloaked in pagan earth worship, determined to destroy the enlightened and Judeo-Christian based culture.
Need any further proof?
Geothermal is such a red herring. Here in Winnipeg, they’ve abandoned the plans for the new Waverley West subdivision to be geothermal-based. Way too expensive, way too little in heat recovery.
I’m all for trying to find new ways to heat and cool our buildings, but please try to have them make sense.
Putting cracks in a few buildings is worth the benefit of providing low-cost geothermal heat to the populace. Better yet, if all the homes and businesses sink into the ground, they won’t have to be heated at all.
Sorry neocons but we know what’s best for you. Don’t you know we’re saving you from coastal flooding and drowning polar bears?
Marching forward to a brave new greener world, one unintended consequence after another.
Such honourable intention, such small minds.
Here’s tomorrow’s CBC News headline:
Sink-holes in Germany, earthquakes in Switzerland linked to global warming
Mark my words. The deer will catch on fire and you’ll discover that the crib isn’t flame retardant. But it’ll be all too late.
One would think they’d have checked the geology a little better, this being a German project and all.
Subsidence happens in Arizona all the time. Put in a new subdivision, sink a couple new wells, water a few golf courses and lawns, poof! Subsidence!
Have a look at a google map of the area some time. around Tuscon all the lawns are in the old part of town, built when water was cheap and came from wells. Phoenix has water from the Salt River, lots more lawns.
These are the same people who want to control the climate with money.
Splain this. Every company gets assigned a pollution limit. If you don’t use it all up you can sell to someone who is using more than their share. Where’s the decrease in pollution? And who measures each company’s emissions? How does anyone know which of the millions of businesses are producing more or less of anything?
Who will do it in China and India and Africa and Russia?
What gargantuan big brother department of pollution-watch will monitor all this? Christ there is an army of police and border guards and they can’t keep drugs from coming across the borders.
I suppose when businesses are being shut down by the eco freaks the government can hire the former employees to work in the pollution-watch department. That would keep the economy steaming along.
Ach du Lieber! Das ist upgefucht! 🙂
Silly Krauts-stop bowing down to the Goddess of Green! If you want lots of cheap, clean energy, build another nuclear power plant!
This reminds me of an oil well that was drilled in Louisiana. The well was drilled in a shallow lake – unfortunately it penetrated an old salt mine. As the water poured in through the drill hole, it dissolved the salt pillars holding up the mine. Eventually the whole thing collapsed and the lake got sucked through the ever enlarging drill hole.
“Marching forward to a brave new greener world, one unintended consequence after another”
“Here’s tomorrow’s CBC News headline:
“Sink-holes in Germany, earthquakes in Switzerland linked to global warming”
ROFL!
You guys are on top of your games tonight, LOL. I suppose it’s a bit nasty of me to experience a titillating thrill of schadenfreude at this, but come on; anybody reading this tidbit:
“A similar experiment triggered a series of earthquakes near Basel in Switzerland last year”
would need a heart of stone not to at least giggle a little bit.
mhb23re
at gmail d0t calm
It should get interesting when the large scale carbon sequestration projects get into production.
I wonder what surprises may show up from that.
What can you expect when you force carbon dioxide under immense pressure down into a hopefully impervious formations?
The expectation is that it will just permanentely stay down there and even do some usefull work in increasing production of some old wells. But what if it migrates somewhere it should not or finds an opening that was not known about.
.
Comic relief
.
John B >
Here’s a short documentary on that Louisiana lake fiasco if you haven’t seen it already. A good watch anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHol4ICeDoo
If Stephie promises in the next election to force Ottawa, Toronto & Vancouver to use geothermal to heat all their buildings, he has my vote.
*Wow* You guys have so totally convinced me that AGW is bull. How can I argue with you guys, after you gave the world the likes of space flight, modern medicine, computers, the internet, cosmology, and genetic engineering!
Oh wait, that was the people you’re OPPOSED TO. Uhhh…right. Ok, well I’ll be sure to, you know, *consider* your POV, I guess, against theirs. I suppose it deserves at least, you know, attention proportional to its relative potential worth….is 12 seconds ok?
Hey anon are you sure you have the attention span for 12 secs, and if that is all you can manage your boyfriend/girlfreind must be pissed.
anon:
I believe you’ve got it backwards.
Science is never settled and new facts come out nearly every day. That’s what makes the discovery of the truths of our physical world so compelling for those who can adapt to new information.
You and your ilk are the anti-science luddites, who would have us all live in a pre-industrial time.
Scientifically, your stance gives one more shred of evidence that your goals and al-Quaida’s are continuing to find common ground.
Thanks for the lesson on the nature of science. I work in the industry, so I trust the process. That’s why I leave it to the experts to crank the wheel. I’ll quote my own comment from elsewhere, since I hate repeating myself:
[Climate science] actually has been developed over decades by literally tens of thousands of scientists, researchers, assistants, partners and theorists, and has been reviewed, modified, updated, corrected, improved and criticized in various capacities countless times. Perhaps some data was suspicious. Perhaps some formulation or simulation was faulty. Perhaps, even, a few researchers were on the take. Even if we grant you all of this, there is still no way you’re going to convince anyone that the trickle of quote-mined and poorly interpreted specks of media-spoon-fed (and usually premature and unverified) minor issues that crop up occasionally – and are dutifully echoed ad nauseum by armchair PhDs – is anywhere near enough evidence to convince anyone with respect for the scientific establishment to withdraw said trust. Particularly when the potential risk and the exponentially rising costs of mitigation compel any sane person to
a) put trust in the experts, because we pay them to inform us, and we may think we understand all the details, but we usually don’t, and;
b) make at least a cursory effort to not impede the capability to do sound scientific investigation.
Meaning: If you don’t have anything to add to the process at an effective level – and I’m quite certain that you don’t, since blog entries rarely get published, nor do bloggers arrange academic conferences – then stop looking like an ignoramus and find something worthwhile to complain about. Like potholes, or the garbage, or something like that. Despite what you think, the scientific community is very critical. More than you can imagine, actually. It’s kinda the nature of the method itself.
You’re just not going to convince most people to listen to your blog rantings over a scientific establishment that has given us wonders like space travel or modern medicine. The people you do convince are kooks.
Nice link to terrorism there. That’s funny.
We’re sinking!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guELpieYlFU
Anon – …put trust in the experts, because we pay them to inform us, and we may think we understand all the details, but we usually don’t…
Trust me anon, we get your point. You don’t want to think for yourself, you’d rather pay someone else to take that responsibility. In this case, it’s scientists (a rather loose definition BTW, specifically which scientists do you include/exclude from the debate?).
That’s OK, it’s your choice not to think, not to look at the facts for yourself and come to your own conclusion. In fact, this is a normal leftie trait, you aren’t shocking anyone!
However, some of us consider this stuff important enough to look at the science ourselves and come to our own conclusions.
Some of us also happen to see those media reports that cover your “experts” contradicting other experts, guessed you missed that!
Some of us also happen to be experts in fields near and dear to AGW, work in the industry and have multi-discplinary interactions. In other words, our heads aren’t up our butt’s.
So if you don’t want to debate the science or poltiics of the situation (because of your acknowledged ignorance), that’s fine – but it is the height of hubris to think that your deference to experts is, in any way, transferable to us.
[quote]Science is never settled and new facts come out nearly every day. That’s what makes the discovery of the truths of our physical world so compelling for those who can adapt to new information.[/quote]
Set you free at,
That is what most pll are missing… Science is NOT a consensus building process. In fact the odds are usually against the solitary theorist. Those that actually deliver a product or process have to fight for funding & competing theory. The theorist must prove their science. It is this science that brings products to society
The academic world, or Gov’t agencies, have never produced anything but empty theory. The private sector may pickup on that theory and develop a product or process.
The GW group are political scientists engaged in social engineering. Political science is the art of forming or selling a “Consensus” and must never be confused with researched scientific theory & development. The Global warming Group are not delivering anything but political rhetoric.. They are experts in the art of spin.
BTW: The US Supreme Court ruled, last week, that International Law is unconstitutional. That will
spin the Eco freaks on the 9th circuit.
Phillip – The US Supreme Court ruled, last week, that International Law is unconstitutional. That will
spin the Eco freaks on the 9th circuit
This is huge decision, do you have a link for that!!
thanks
Of course anon. Why bother reading and learning about something? And I mean reading both sides. You just want somebody to tell yo what to think. Common for lefties. Learning takes time and energy,but ignorance is instantaneous. Maybe anon is an April Fools joke? Or just a joke.
a) put trust in the experts, because we pay them to inform us, and we may think we understand all the details, but we usually don’t, and;
‘Claude Allegre, one of France’s leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists (Not to mention A MEMBER OF THE IPCC), was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about global warming was in its infancy, little was known about the mechanics of how it could occur, or the consequences that could befall us. Since then, governments throughout the western world and bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have commissioned billions of dollars worth of research by thousands of scientists. With a wealth of data now in, Dr. Allegre has recanted his views. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.
His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in l’ Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro’s retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. “The cause of this climate change is unknown,” he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the “science is settled.” ‘
So a Major IPCC scientist is now saying there is NOTHING to this. Will YOU listen to him, anon?
Anon must conveniently forget what the “experts” have told us over the years:
– The world is flat;
– The Sun revolves around the earth;
– Ulcers are caused by stress;
– Lizards are the last-remaining direct descendents of dinosaurs;
– Atoms are the smallest elemental particles; and
– Etcetera ad nauseum.
Knowledge (science) is ever expanding and evolving and very often requires that widely-held and unanimously-accepted theories be completely trashed and replaced with new and better theories to reflect recent discoveries.
But Anon would have us believe that THIS TIME the “experts” have got it ABSOLUTELY CORRECT about AGW and there is NO CHANCE they’ve overlooked ANYTHING.
You believe anything you want, Anon…as for me and mine, I will remain skeptical of the “experts”.
We distrust AGW because it is so patently and obviously ideological in its presuppositions. This leads to biased assumptions and unreliable results. In other words, bad science.
The Germans “trusted” the Nazi science of their day — based on darwinian evolution, by the way, that assured them of the superiority of the Aryan race, and the inferiority of the others.
This same darwinian idea of weeding-out misfits and inferior races was an integral part of the science that existed at the time of the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial in the U.S. — a point conveniently avoided in the propaganda film that was made of the event.
This article and related posters are starting to run the risk of becoming the same bunch of finger-wagging buzzards we see in the leftist world.
Complain, complain, complain.
New ideas and ventures require risk, creativity, and failure, and your criticisms run the risk of ….well, just go join the bitch-and-complain crowd in the main newspapers and universities etc.
I like the SDA site-it is an antidote to the chronic drivel from mostly urban newspapers and other sources; but don’t run the risk of becoming stale or, despite your ideology, similar to the other so-called news information sources.
This article and related posters are starting to run the risk of becoming the same bunch of finger-wagging buzzards we see in the leftist world.
Complain, complain, complain.
New ideas and ventures require risk, creativity, and failure, and your criticisms run the risk of ….well, just go join the bitch-and-complain crowd in the main newspapers and universities etc.
I like the SDA site-it is an antidote to the chronic drivel from mostly urban newspapers and other sources; but don’t run the risk of becoming stale or, despite your ideology, similar to the other so-called news information sources.
This article and related posters are starting to run the risk of becoming the same bunch of finger-wagging buzzards we see in the leftist world.
Complain, complain, complain.
New ideas and ventures require risk, creativity, and failure, and your criticisms run the risk of ….well, just go join the bitch-and-complain crowd in the main newspapers and universities etc.
I like the SDA site-it is an antidote to the chronic drivel from mostly urban newspapers and other sources; but don’t run the risk of becoming stale or, despite your ideology, similar to the other so-called news information sources.
New ideas and ventures require risk, creativity, and failure,
And the BEST ideas have often come from individuals working on their own, following leads that others would not dare to, or would consider idiotic or even crazy. If ‘the science is settled,’ then where do you expect that creativity to come from? The likes of the goreacle will STOMP on anyone who does not work under their socialist / government control, and take us down roads built upon the BAD science that agw is all about. Edison, Ford, Bill Gates… NONE of them would survive in today’s world. Not if the Left has anything to say about it, and that is precisely what they are attempting to do with ‘settled’ science.
Knight 99:
Thanks for that link – I hadn’t seen it and wasn’t aware it was available. I remembered it since I was a geologist at the time (you tend to remember such events). Amazing there was no loss of life and one thing is certain – the lawyers made out like bandits.
Foobert raised an interesting point (before the trolls stumbled in) about carbon sequestering projects.
Y’all may not be aware of this, but liquefied CO2 under high pressure is a hell of a fine solvent. Any chemistry Poindexters out there happen to know what liquid CO2 at a couple hundred bar will do to coal or petroleum in the ground? Or shale? Limestone perhaps? I’ve a suspicion its nothing good.
Don’t forget the “new ice age” which was the msm’s cause du jour during the 1970s. Note the moniker, “climatology cassandras.” A still useful descriptive phrase.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
The unarrested rush to green will tend to result in a lot of red: red faces and red bottom lines.
A number of things that rule the universe are ignored along the way. Such as that an action will usually result in a reaction, often unanticipated, and in human terms often unwanted. Also, a long history in and around mines has proven to me that nature not only abhors a vacumn, but also abhors a hole. Make one and nature will immediately attempt to fill it in. Fill it in with rock, soil, water, roadways or buildings; it does’t care.
As to Phantom’s question at 12:00 PM re storage of liquid CO2 underground: eventually think of spectacular, effervescent geysers where probably unintended and likely unwanted. 😉
At last year’s HomeShow there was one company selling Geo-thermal systems, this year there were at least three. Northern mining companies have been building geothermal heated warehouses. It is based on the principle that runs a fridge and does both heating and cooling.
Here’s a recent article about a Sask. company that has built 300geothermal systems.
http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/business/story.html?id=3f9ebd3e-c149-48f1-8ee7-6c4f021196ec&k=26050
Geothermal heat is more efficient than electric resistance type heaters, or electric boilers. It is not more efficient from a money point of view than natural gas.
If you live in the city and you have natural gas, its cheaper than geothermal. If you live in the country and electric is your only option, its better than base board heaters. Geothermal provides air conditioning very effectively, but unless you live in a apartment tower air conditioning is for wimps and it makes you soft.
Phillip – The US Supreme Court ruled, last week, that International Law is unconstitutional. That will spin the Eco freaks on the 9th circuit
This is huge decision, do you have a link for that!!
Frenchie77,
The case has not been published yet. Its news down here in AZ because it involves Mexico and the media “think” it was a hit against Bush. (He took one for the cause)
TEXAS vs. US (Bush) A Mexican national on death row claimed that international law required the state of Texas to provide notification to the Mexico consulate.
US department of Justice interceded in the case and Texas appealed all the way to SC
The Supreme Court ruling held that US Treaties & Foreign agreements do not Trump the US constitution. International Law may not be used to overturn State rights
This case is another Gem that will prevent activist Judges from giving weight/preference to International Law in court arguments. It will also play in the US senate against the UN & other slease BS
YES its HUGE! in the big picture (i think it also overturns the conviction of three border agents). The SC will be coming down with a decision on the Second Amendment in June. I predict a 7 to 2 for the Individual right to Keep & Bear Arms.
Thanks for that info Phillip
To the SC: “I say, Bravo’ (in my best Berti Wooster voice)
It’s about time the slow bleeding of rights out of the US was stopped, let’s see how the left will try to wiggle out of this one!!
That American case doesn’t say that “international law is unconstitutional”, which is nonsense. It says that signing, even ratifying, a treaty doesn’t make the treaty provisions law unless the treaty itself expressly says it is meant to do that. The legislature has to enact laws to bring the treaty provisions into effect. That’s not radical or even new.