House passes global warming bill

did I mention them as being biased?

 

Since I referred to them, and not the EPA, in my initial comment, I would think you would have commented upon that which I pointed out, not that which I didn't.

 

It's more reliable than wind and solar because it's consistent and therefore extra power doesn't have to be stored.

Hydroelectric usually requires the damming of a river and creation of a reservoir. It was popular in the 1930s and 1940s -- the TVA was built on hydro power -- but land acquisition and the building of the dam are the costs. Cost-wise, it would be similar to the creation of a wind or solar farm, because the bulk of the cost is borne in land acquisition. However, the power created is more consistent and far cheaper than wind/solar, because of the consistency of the power created. Our electric grid doesn't just need power, it needs consistent power without spikes or slow periods. Wind/solar are inconsistent and therefore require storage for excess power generated, which is *very* costly.

Nuclear is the cheapest, cleanest option for "green" power, but it isn't a popular option.

 

From what I've heard, France has had some success with nuclear power. If that is the case, could that be used as a persuasion to follow down that path?

 

Forgive my ignorance, but what happens to that water after it's been turned into electricity? Because if the answer isn't "People drink it," then it won't work. Because there are large swaths of the country that already don't have enough water.

 

Large, very populated swaths -- such as California, which has a shitload of water nearby (you might have heard of it) but can't get enough approval from, well, anybody, to build the type of desal plants that could turn that big blue blob on the map into potable drinking water.

(By "anybody", I don't just mean environmentalists, either.)

 

Much of the water from reservoirs is used to provide both power and drinking water to a region.

Hoover Dam, for example, pretty much allowed for the irrigation of the entire Southwest. The whole point of FDR's TVA was to allow for both hydropower and drinking water to what was the nation's most impoverished area during the Depression (and, of course, government construction jobs).

The water goes through a turbine as it passes through a dam to generate the electricity and the resulting reservoir created by the dam can be turned into drinking water.

 

Ragu if you limited your posts to 3 paragraphs, I believe that you would be able to elimanate 3 % of the world's green gases.

 

There is actually protectionism built into the bill. A 25% tariff on any imports from nations that are known polluters.

China and India are planning retaliation.

 

This is one of my biggest problems with the whole thing. At the end of the day, none of this legislation will do a damn thing to solve the "problem" it's supposed to.
The companies that are polluting will still pollute. They'll just pay a little more to do it -- to the federal government or other organizations that sell "carbon offsets". The same amount of CO2 is still getting pumped into the air, the same dirty cash is still changing hands. It's just more of the same corruption with better PR.
And how many trees can you plant? Where are you planting them? Where will these huge swaths of newly forested lands be located? Won't that create its own set of problems, some of them environmental?