US completes warmest 12 month period on record

Nope, miles per gallon, not passenger miles. Prius at 50 mpg gives us 200 passenger miles per gallon. The boat got 10 passenger-miles per gallon, giving us 2.5 miles per gallon as our pro-rata share of fuel consumption. Unbelievably inefficient way to travel. OTOH, if you take your house and swimming pool along with you on vacation, what can you reasonably expect?

Planes, by contrast, on the order of 60 passenger-miles per gallon at typical US seat loading. So our pro-rata share of fuel would work out to 15 MPG.

And to finish, DC Metro system as a whole (including buses), about 105 passenger-miles per gallon. Amtrak? About 35 or so.

Cruise ships? Seriously inefficient, when viewed as a way of getting from A to B.

 

seems like an area for a huge room for improvement. no nuke cruisers i take it? of course the security (or lack thereof) issues would be unmanageable

reminds me of an article i saw where huge "kite-like" sails were employed to pull a boat along which drastically reduced its fuel usage.

on a cruise ship, i am guessing the big energy user would be the fresh water maker

 

Bigger than propulsion, lighting, and air conditioning? The power requirements of reverse osmosis are fairly low - it's just a pump, really - compared to heating the water. Plus, the food waste and the amount of garbage generated is incredible. At least the newer cruise ships have sewage treatment systems. Other than the ocean, I mean.

 

Simple question,,,who has deeper pockets to fund a disinformation campaign? Big oil/coal etc or "green energy", alt energy folks?

As an aside, even if global warming we not an issue (and it is!) what is the down side of moving toward renewables? More local, on shore production and jobs, longer term energy security, slower price rises in energy costs net/net, reduced "defense" costs to protect oil, lower health care costs due to lower net emissions. I could go on and on,, but what's not to like?

Icarus

 

I'm guessing that propulsion is the main use of fuel. I had naively thought that since ocean freight is so efficient per ton-mile, maybe ocean cruise ships are as efficient per passenger mile. And, if you could stack passengers in like cordwood, maybe they would be. But in fact, just to grab an example, when fully loaded, the Queen Mary II works out to be almost 60 tons of boat per passenger. Clearly going to take a bit of fuel to move that much mass.

 

Wrong question. Do you like snakes or misquitos better? Which would you rather have in your house. Oil and alt energy companies are fine when they are telling the truth, but I don't like either when they are lieing. It doesn't really matter if one has more money to spend. Now those coal guys (brown) and those corn ethanol (green?) guys, I don't have much use for either.

none at all

oops when you say jobs I see a down side. I assume you want me to pay for those jobs whether they make sense or not. Do we really need those farming jobs so much that we look the other way at the down sides of ethanol? Are the chinese so bad, that we would rather pay off some rich venture capitalists, instead of buying their solar panels for less money. Yeah I'm for renewable, and willing to pay more for them. And I do pay. But no, I'm not willing to pay for American green jobs. I just don't think they ever get created. Let's go for renewables, and if we get more jobs great. If we don't we got the renewables we were paying for. IF we spend for a government green jobs program, we often don't get the renewables or jobs.

 

You may not be willing to pay for green jobs, but you are already paying (through great subsidies) non green jobs.

Please provide an example of a significant alternative energy concern of "not telling the truth" in this context? I don't think that the scope of solyndra qualifies in my mind. Some thing on the order of "smoking doesn't cause cancer" or "clean coal exists" or "Nukes are safe".

And by the way, I am with you on ethanol not being "green". It is nothing but a wealth transfer device for corporate Ag.

Icarus

 

Somethings weird with your calculations.Passenger MPG is pretty much the final figure for comparison purposes.Meaning 200 Pmpg compares directly to 10Pmpg for the boat.
Dividing the latter by 4 doesnt make sense.

 

(Nope, miles per gallon, not passenger miles)**2

Look at my original post. Compare passenger miles per gallon to passenger miles per gallon, miles per gallon to miles per gallon. Don't compare miles per gallon to passenger miles per gallon. Family of four. 50 mpg Prius versus 2.5 mpg boat, or 200 passenger miles per gallon Prius versus 10 passenger miles per gallon boat. Same difference. I was just explaining to Dave in Oly that adding more people wouldn't up the mileage.

 

Let me give you one example of how global warming could cause cooling. England is warmed by the Gulf Stream -- the warm water of the Caribbean is carried Northeast to England, which brings warming winds and weather. Climate change can, in theory, alter the flow of these currents. Should that occur, England will cool while other areas warm.

I'm not saying that this particular shift will occur, but it is an example of how climate change can cause cooling over a large area while global average temperatures increase.

 

One would think for preservation of glaciers/eco-system that Alaska might take a little more "biased" position; that maybe we need to control CO2. If you know what I mean, it's easy for an un-involved couch potato to voice a strong opinion 1 way or t'other, but if you got a dog in the fight, e.g; if you're a sinking island in the Pacific, you might error on the side of self-preservation.

Alaska is amazing Spiderman. That and Yellowstone are two places you might want to get to while the magic is still there.

 

? I haven't been to Yellowstone but I do live in Alaska.

 

"The Day After Tomorrow"
That was a really bad movie.Peer review gives it 2 thumbs down.

 

...I do know you live there...that's why I said it...nice!!!

We were there the day when Sarah Palin was announced as VP candidate. That was interesting.

 

Particularly when they generally go from A to A.

 

Most green companies I know would be happy if they could just scare you OUT OF subsidies. Remove all the subsidies that Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Transportation get, and every green company on the planet will cheer, and not request any subsidies. Win-Win.

 

Hey I might be willing to pay for real green jobs, just not the programs that seem to never deliver. Do you really have a problem with that? If we have renewable programs they should be about the energy. I don't like most of the governments jobs programs, but especially the ones that seem to pay for coal jobs. Why defend the green jobs programs that don't work.

Sure the biggest green subsidy - bigger than oil + solar + wind put together is corn ethanol. The biggest lie, ethanol gasoline reduces ghg by 40%. To make sure the lie isn't caught, the lobby met with the epa to make sure they would not look at land use and fertilizer, only the direct ghg. Why do politics, even those that claim to be green vote to spread the lie?

Gore Riles Corn Ethanol Lobby - NYTimes.com
Gore said he did it to get votes from the lobby. I assume this has been true for Bush and Obama too, as well as those in congress. When you include land use and fertilizer some studies have it reducing ghg by 1% but causing environmental damage, other studies say it increases ghg.

But most of the lies don't come from the oil or coal companies, but those other organizations they fund. Let's look at the biggest lie that was believable, funded by these green companies.

WWF printed in a pamphlet that all of Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035. The lie was repeated by the IPCC working group, which went on the rampage against some Indian scientists that said it wasn't true. Well it turns out, it just wasn't true.

Hey, I'm glad we agree on that. I was not trying to get in a pissing match. Just look up.

My wind is subsidized about 2 cents a kwh. This seems a reasonable subsidy for cleaner air. Since the government doesn't seem to want to enforce environmental regulations on coal, its not a bad thing. Solar is subsized much more here, a friend just put up solar and had a 65% subsidy from federal, state, and local laws. Its a crazy high level, but even that heavily subsidized per kwh, the subsidies in full amounts are low. The big subsidies really go to ethanol and in looking the other way in coal pollution.

 

By one estimate, global fossil-fuel subsidies are about $USD 550 billions

http://www.iea.org/files/energy_subsidies_slides.pdf

As many of the recipient comapnies are quite multinational, it may not be most appropriate to compare then with 'green' subsidies on a national scale.

 

+1
maybe it's all the friction between polarized PC members that's warming things up so much.
:behindsofa:
.

 

It's a vacation not a mode of transportation. One that many enjoy because you can move from point A to point B without unpacking, driving yourself or having to stop for bathroom breaks, meals and traffic jams.

I think it would be difficult to match the area covered, sights seen and time actually spent vacationing and relaxing by any other method of transportation.