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> Natural gas extremely expensive? Let me introduce you to renewables, which btw are getting better and better every year. Shutting down a natural gas pipeline

by rsj_hn 5y ago

> Natural gas extremely expensive? Let me introduce you to renewables, which btw are getting better and better every year. Shutting down a natural gas pipeline that people depend upon just before winter, and then lecturing them about solar panels is not a good look. Artificially increasing the price of natural gas causes famines, it causes food and fertilizer to be more expensive, and it makes it hard for people to heat their homes. But one thing it doesn't do is increase reliable renewable energy sources. Solar is not a replacement for home heating oil during the Michigan winters. And renewables do not spring instantly into existence out of suffering. Another thing it doesn't do is help the air, because instead of this pipeline, we will need to run 5000 trucks per day from Canada to the Midwest to deliver that natural gas in time for winter. So it's a good thing we don't have a shortage of truck drivers or any supply chain issues. This idea that we should be punishing end users who need to heat their homes and buy fertilizer instead of actually deploying reliable alternatives is a form of scolding eco-sadism. It may be fine for you to absorb an increase in home heating oil prices, but other people really suffer. It's pure mismanagement and very much has a "let them eat cake" vibe. > It may be a painful few years to navigate that transition The pain inflicted on households in the midwest will be returned with interest in the next election. The next time you wonder why it's 2050 and the US hasn't raised any gas taxes or instituted carbon credits, or really done much to reduce CO2 emissions, then remember that to pass a green agenda you need to win battleground states like Michigan, and then remember back to this moment and the kinds of finger wagging lectures that were being delivered all over the country to people worried about how they will heat their homes in the winter.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
The Michigan pipeline shutdown has been discussed for most of this year; back in May the MI governor began her attempts to shut it down by revoking easements issued to the operator. It's not honest to characterize what has been happening in the last few weeks as a last minute action by the administration "just before winter". It's also not honest to focus exclusively on the costs of the pipeline being shutdown without also considering the potential costs of it staying open. I'm entirely open to someone presenting the case that the costs of shutdown vastly outweigh even the worst projected cost of it remaining open, but if you're going to present that case, do it while being aware that there are people (including the MI governor and various Indian tribes) who don't agree with this assessment. MI voted for Biden in 2020, its US HoR representation is split evenly between both parties, and both US Senators are Democrats. If you're suggesting that those in favor of carbon credits and higher gas taxes might lose representation if this pipeline is closed, maybe make that case more explicitly. Also, it's not unambiguously clear that winning battleground states like Michigan is synonymous with winning Michigan, nor that it's necessarily required at all given the steady drifts of some red states into the purply-blue zone.
unethical_ban 5y ago
Are you talking about the nearly 70-year-old oil and gas pipeline "Enbridge Line 5" that bisects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron? Indeed, it would be great if the United States proactively funded deteriorating infrastructure before it was past-expiration and at risk of collapsing.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I sympathize with this, but if climate experts are to believed, we’ve stalled to the point where we have perhaps a decade to get emissions under control in order to meet targets, and most countries haven’t even begun to make significant changes. At some point there will be pain. The question is, “do we want a little pain now or a lot of pain down the road?”. And to be clear, “wearing a coat inside during winter” may just constitute “a little pain” compared to the famines and wars that are likely if we fail to get our emissions to zero in time.
- nostrebored 5y ago
  Why in the hell would you believe climate experts? The entire argument is poorly done forecasting for a system we don’t understand. The claims are unfalsifiable. It has all of the hallmarks of a scientific fad. When once again the modeling is inaccurate and the claims about temperature change impacts aren’t realized, this will be used as _more proof_.
  - throwaway210222 5y ago
    >Why in the hell would you believe climate experts? a) because we don't have a spare planet, and b) we kind of like our children. Like Russian roulette, its the risk of being wrong that changes the decision making paradigm from the one you use for 'should I buy bitcoin'.
    - nostrebored 5y ago
      Your mistake is weighing superstition vs tangible harm. Eliminating fossil fuels will condemn large swathes of the living population to true poverty and kill many more. How do you think things like hospitals in the developing world run? And the infrastructure that lets them be created to begin with? The idea that we should eliminate fossil fuels is truly a privileged take.
      - throwaway210222 5y ago
        > Your mistake is weighing superstition vs tangible harm. Care to share which of the thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's website, you have: a) read b) understood c) found errors in d) brought to the world's attention? 500, 10, 1, ? I thought not. And yes, of course it sucks - no one wants this. You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you and yours an out. https://www.ipcc.ch/ https://www.ipcc.ch/
RC_ITR 5y ago
Woah, what are you honestly on about? You can claim that the US is artificially raising natural gas prices, but the exact opposite is true. By chance of circumstance, we've historically underbuilt LNG processing facilities and that is isolating the US market from the rest of the world, so we have some of the lowest natural gas prices in the world right now. Please take your uninformed takes and cringey political rallying elsewhere, it's not what this platform is designed for.
- neuronic 5y ago
  The people with an agenda against renewables are strong on HN (and even more on Reddit) and completely outside of any viable statistics and numbers out there. Every single country which increases their renewables share is performing better and better in terms of energy. But I suppose if you have a lot of shale gas to sell or subsidies to steal from tax payers for fossils or nuclear then the financial short term incentive is very high to shill for these dinosaur technologies.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  I'm not the one ranting here. Biden has 1) put a moratorium on oil and gas leases in Federal lands and waters 2) cancelled one pipeline already and is about to cancel another (which means prices go up as trucks need to ship in the fuel) The above makes oil and gas more costly to extract and to ship, which raises the price. Moreover he is lobbying to remove all investment tax deductions for Oil and Gas (even though other industries still obtain them) > Please take your uninformed takes and cringey political rallying elsewhere ^^This is what this platform is not designed for.
  - RC_ITR 5y ago
    What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wexler88 5y ago
Solar is an excellent replacement for home heating oil during the Michigan winters. The vast majority of people in Michigan are already connected to an extremely efficient distribution network for electricity. The marginal cost of delivering additional energy through this network does not round to zero, it is zero. Meanwhile heating oil is delivered by trucks with a large cost in depreciation, labor, and fuel (further fossil fuels burnt in support of a system which was designed to make economic sense with <$10 oil). Whereas domestically produced oil can never drop below $40-50 a (marginal) barrel at the refinery, and imported oil never realistically below $30 + the cost of fighting forever wars for resources, there is a clear and feasible convergence of the marginal cost of solar energy generated in the Southwest US to $0. All this would make solar a viable replacement even without the role of heat pumps, which reduce the raw energy cost of heating with solar to around 20% of that of burning fuel.
- throwtheacctawy 5y ago
  I live in Michigan. I have a 5.9kwh solar array. Spring/fall, I can produce over 40kwh/day. Summer heat lowers my production to upper 30-40kwh. January 2021, I produced 197kwh the entire month. I know this discussion is focused on heating. But from an electric vehicle perspective; 197kwh is not that much. In the winter, I don't think it would be enough electricity for a homes electric needs + EV or electric heat. I can make 1MWh over 1 month in the summer. Basically, Michigan has short days in the winter. Snow does sit on top of the solar array until it melts, which robs me of production during sunny winter days. It wouldn't be impossible to use solar to replace heating oil in Michigan, and the over capacity installed to satisfy winter demand could serve as a "peaker plant" during the warm summer months. While I know renewables have decreased in costs, I think the costs related to building overcapacity is a hindrance.
  - relaxing 5y ago
    Can you not get out there with a long handled broom and knock the snow off? Serious question, I’m debating a similar setup for myself.
    - 5y ago

by rsj_hn 5y ago

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

The Michigan pipeline shutdown has been discussed for most of this year; back in May the MI governor began her attempts to shut it down by revoking easements issued to the operator. It's not honest to characterize what has been happening in the last few weeks as a last minute action by the administration "just before winter". It's also not honest to focus exclusively on the costs of the pipeline being shutdown without also considering the potential costs of it staying open. I'm entirely open to someone presenting the case that the costs of shutdown vastly outweigh even the worst projected cost of it remaining open, but if you're going to present that case, do it while being aware that there are people (including the MI governor and various Indian tribes) who don't agree with this assessment. MI voted for Biden in 2020, its US HoR representation is split evenly between both parties, and both US Senators are Democrats. If you're suggesting that those in favor of carbon credits and higher gas taxes might lose representation if this pipeline is closed, maybe make that case more explicitly. Also, it's not unambiguously clear that winning battleground states like Michigan is synonymous with winning Michigan, nor that it's necessarily required at all given the steady drifts of some red states into the purply-blue zone.

unethical_ban 5y ago

Are you talking about the nearly 70-year-old oil and gas pipeline "Enbridge Line 5" that bisects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron? Indeed, it would be great if the United States proactively funded deteriorating infrastructure before it was past-expiration and at risk of collapsing.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I sympathize with this, but if climate experts are to believed, we’ve stalled to the point where we have perhaps a decade to get emissions under control in order to meet targets, and most countries haven’t even begun to make significant changes. At some point there will be pain. The question is, “do we want a little pain now or a lot of pain down the road?”. And to be clear, “wearing a coat inside during winter” may just constitute “a little pain” compared to the famines and wars that are likely if we fail to get our emissions to zero in time.

nostrebored 5y ago
Why in the hell would you believe climate experts? The entire argument is poorly done forecasting for a system we don’t understand. The claims are unfalsifiable. It has all of the hallmarks of a scientific fad. When once again the modeling is inaccurate and the claims about temperature change impacts aren’t realized, this will be used as _more proof_.
- throwaway210222 5y ago
  >Why in the hell would you believe climate experts? a) because we don't have a spare planet, and b) we kind of like our children. Like Russian roulette, its the risk of being wrong that changes the decision making paradigm from the one you use for 'should I buy bitcoin'.
  - nostrebored 5y ago
    Your mistake is weighing superstition vs tangible harm. Eliminating fossil fuels will condemn large swathes of the living population to true poverty and kill many more. How do you think things like hospitals in the developing world run? And the infrastructure that lets them be created to begin with? The idea that we should eliminate fossil fuels is truly a privileged take.
    - throwaway210222 5y ago
      > Your mistake is weighing superstition vs tangible harm. Care to share which of the thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's website, you have: a) read b) understood c) found errors in d) brought to the world's attention? 500, 10, 1, ? I thought not. And yes, of course it sucks - no one wants this. You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you and yours an out. https://www.ipcc.ch/ https://www.ipcc.ch/

RC_ITR 5y ago

Woah, what are you honestly on about? You can claim that the US is artificially raising natural gas prices, but the exact opposite is true. By chance of circumstance, we've historically underbuilt LNG processing facilities and that is isolating the US market from the rest of the world, so we have some of the lowest natural gas prices in the world right now. Please take your uninformed takes and cringey political rallying elsewhere, it's not what this platform is designed for.

neuronic 5y ago
The people with an agenda against renewables are strong on HN (and even more on Reddit) and completely outside of any viable statistics and numbers out there. Every single country which increases their renewables share is performing better and better in terms of energy. But I suppose if you have a lot of shale gas to sell or subsidies to steal from tax payers for fossils or nuclear then the financial short term incentive is very high to shill for these dinosaur technologies.
rsj_hn 5y ago
I'm not the one ranting here. Biden has 1) put a moratorium on oil and gas leases in Federal lands and waters 2) cancelled one pipeline already and is about to cancel another (which means prices go up as trucks need to ship in the fuel) The above makes oil and gas more costly to extract and to ship, which raises the price. Moreover he is lobbying to remove all investment tax deductions for Oil and Gas (even though other industries still obtain them) > Please take your uninformed takes and cringey political rallying elsewhere ^^This is what this platform is not designed for.
- RC_ITR 5y ago
  What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wexler88 5y ago

Solar is an excellent replacement for home heating oil during the Michigan winters. The vast majority of people in Michigan are already connected to an extremely efficient distribution network for electricity. The marginal cost of delivering additional energy through this network does not round to zero, it is zero. Meanwhile heating oil is delivered by trucks with a large cost in depreciation, labor, and fuel (further fossil fuels burnt in support of a system which was designed to make economic sense with <$10 oil). Whereas domestically produced oil can never drop below $40-50 a (marginal) barrel at the refinery, and imported oil never realistically below $30 + the cost of fighting forever wars for resources, there is a clear and feasible convergence of the marginal cost of solar energy generated in the Southwest US to $0. All this would make solar a viable replacement even without the role of heat pumps, which reduce the raw energy cost of heating with solar to around 20% of that of burning fuel.

throwtheacctawy 5y ago
I live in Michigan. I have a 5.9kwh solar array. Spring/fall, I can produce over 40kwh/day. Summer heat lowers my production to upper 30-40kwh. January 2021, I produced 197kwh the entire month. I know this discussion is focused on heating. But from an electric vehicle perspective; 197kwh is not that much. In the winter, I don't think it would be enough electricity for a homes electric needs + EV or electric heat. I can make 1MWh over 1 month in the summer. Basically, Michigan has short days in the winter. Snow does sit on top of the solar array until it melts, which robs me of production during sunny winter days. It wouldn't be impossible to use solar to replace heating oil in Michigan, and the over capacity installed to satisfy winter demand could serve as a "peaker plant" during the warm summer months. While I know renewables have decreased in costs, I think the costs related to building overcapacity is a hindrance.
- relaxing 5y ago
  Can you not get out there with a long handled broom and knock the snow off? Serious question, I’m debating a similar setup for myself.
  - 5y ago