Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Don Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Climate Change Denialism in SF Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2024 15:23:01 -0000 (UTC) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 111 Message-ID: <20241207b@crcomp.net> References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8stipulation Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2024 16:23:01 +0100 (CET) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="36d2236d7ebef56cbd0d7f29f52fd2fa"; logging-data="3324483"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/86G+veDwewIYDob20ZuNt" Cancel-Lock: sha1:ebE56Od0E5Nta2vAUaFMGhn5bnI= Bytes: 6682 Robert Woodward wrote: > I know of one book, _The Last Centurion_ by John Ringo (published in > 2008). There are probably others. What is really odd about _tLC_, is > that there was a pandemic starting, IIRC, in 2019 (a really nasty one - > world fatalities, IMS, exceeded 1 billion). Oh, yes, the US presidential > administration flubbed the response, big time (I believe the president > was a "Hillary Clinton" pastiche). There was significant turmoil over > the 2020 Presidential election as well. THE HIDDEN TRUTH by Schantz is a Young Adult set in an alternate reality where Gore became President. In this reality the White House was hit on 9-11. President Lieberman got Congress to pass the Preserving our Planet's Future Act as a monument to the late President Gore. A key part of the plan to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and rein in global warming involved a carbon tax that opponents, like Dad, called the "Gore Tax." Global temperatures had stopped rising and in fact levelled off in the years since the plan passed. A strong consensus of scientists all agreed that the President's action had averted global disaster, yet some extremists denied there was a connection between the law and the climate. It was all just a coincidence and natural variation, they claimed. Dad followed climate-denier websites like wattsupwiththat.com where skeptics argued that because carbon dioxide levels had continued to rise while temperatures levelled off, the Gore Tax was ineffective. But any number of climate scientists had models proving just how much worse greenhouse gases and temperatures both would have been without the law. I'd tried discussing the scientific consensus and the importance of saving the planet from climate change with Dad, but he was just too stubborn to listen to me. ... several chapters later ... "Do you recall the Whiskey Rebellion?" I'd read about that in Paul Johnson's A History of the American People. "Sure. Frontier folk in Pennsylvania couldn't get their corn to market because the expense of carting it in bulk across the mountains was too high. So, they distilled it to whiskey which made it more portable. But then, the federal government started taxing whiskey and they rebelled. Washington sent the Army in to restore control." "Yeah, that's the gist of it," Uncle Rob agreed. "That's what gave me the idea. Up and down the Appalachians there's natural gas wells. Not so many in these hills, but more up into Kentucky and West Virginia. Part of the Gore Tax included a heap of new regulations on how to transport natural gas. The regulators carefully crafted the rules in collusion with Tolliver Corporation and some of the other large energy companies who were big campaign contributors. They engineered the regulations to make it very difficult for small independents to get their natural gas transported to market at any reasonable expense. So most of their wells are idle and their owners are losing their shirts. It's the same problem as faced those frontiersmen with all the bulky corn they couldn't transport. How did they solve it?" "By distilling it down to a more compact form," I answered. "You mean chilling and liquefying the natural gas?" "Sharp kid," Uncle Rob said to Dad. "But, not quite there yet," he said to me. "Liquefied natural gas, chilled and compressed to make it more compact is a standard technique. But, the energy companies and their lobbyists thought of that. They forbid shipping liquefied natural gas by tanker truck except for very short distances. And somehow, while it is perfectly safe and acceptable to truck gas from a rail depot or a distributor to a customer, when the gas is being moved the other direction from a gas field to a rail depot or to a distributor or directly to an end user, it suddenly becomes too dangerous to transport on a truck. The upshot of it is, if you don't have a rail spur to your gas field, you pretty much can't ship your gas in compact liquefied form which means it just isn't economical to ship." "So how do you ship it?" I asked. "You don't," Uncle Rob grinned. "That's the beauty of it. If you can't bring your natural gas to your customer, you bring your customer to your natural gas." I was confused. Uncle Rob continued. "Your Mom and Dad engineered a mobile system in a cargo container for compressing, liquefying, and distilling air. It burns natural gas to drive the compressor and chiller. We truck our rig on up to a natural gas field, and we tap into what would otherwise be an idle well for a few hours. We burn the natural gas and collect the liquefied compressed air into tanker trucks: about four tanker trucks of liquid nitrogen for every tanker truck of liquid oxygen. We have a small tank that collects the residue of argon and heavier gasses. Our production method isn't as efficient as big fixed plants, but our energy costs are way lower. The small independents are happy to get a market for natural gas they otherwise couldn't sell, and we're able to get a steep discount. The rules for trucking compressed liquefied oxygen and nitrogen are still much less stringent than for liquefied natural gas. Danke, -- Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God. tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.