Eco-nazis VS Business

I am hereby officially sick of enviros nit picking every little thing businesses do. Here's yet another example:

Eco-Scandal! AA Plane Flies 5 Passengers From US To London
A major airline is under fire from environmentalists for flying an aircraft across the Atlantic with only five passengers on board.
The flight from Chicago to London meant that the plane, a Boeing 777, used 22,000 gallons of fuel.

Friends of the Earth said it was 'obscene' to waste so much fuel flying an almost empty plane
It led to American Airlines being accused of reckless behavior by green lobby groups.
The latest "eco- scandal" flight took place on February 9 after American was forced to cancel one of its four daily services from Chicago to London.

 

It is obscene. My father is an airline pilot and it is well known that each airline has hundereds of empty flights going everywhere to preserve prime slots etc.

You'll be complaining when fuel prices go up again wont you?

 

You know, it's ironic - I was reading this exact article before logging onto HoP.

Protesting business practices helps existing businesses to know what their consumers are looking for. I could simply go to Wendy's since their pickles are better than McDonald's, helping to drive McDonald's out of business (I know, not happening, just an example), or I could write them a letter saying that they need to improve their pickles if they want my patronage back. Either model is economically sound; the latter is just nicer.

And yes, McDonald's pickles are disgusting.

Final note: these "Eco-Nazis" are highlighting an important point - policies that waste fuel in such large quantities are only hastening fossil fuel depletion, which is a problem that we may not have to deal with (if we're lucky and the waste stops), but our children certainly will.

 

Not me, baby!

I see fuel as a product created by a private business which citizens can buy at-will. If people don't want to buy the oil company's product because the price is too high, the price will decrease. But as long as demand is high, prices will continue to climb (I think they taught that on the first day of Basic Economic Principles class.) Peope are free to take a bus or ride a bike or, God forbid, use their own legs and walk. No one can force people to move themselves from point A to point B via fossil fuel-consuming modes of transportation.

Maybe I'm a moron. Maybe I'm just living in the quickly-dying "personal responsibility" era.

 

Really? I love their pickles! Do you like Wendy's fries better than McD's?

My point is this - as long as fuel is a legal product to be bought/sold on the open market, the people purchasing said product shouldn't be subjigated to obnoxious scruitiny by people who dislike the product they've purchased. I don't like when people buy lite beer - it disgusts me - but they bought it under their own free will and can decide best for them how they want to use/enjoy it (gag). I'm not going to castigate them in an open-letter to swill drinkers.

 

I prefer thicker, crisper pickles. McDonalds' pickles look and feel withered. Gross.

I tend to like McDonalds' fries better though. Wendy's fries are a little bland.

Light beer isn't a nonrenewable resource. In fact it's very (lamentably) renewable. Complete fossil fuel depletion will be a reality someday. Economically speaking, highlighting this fact for the general public ought to be helpful - after all, the longer fossil fuels hold out, the longer we have to come up with ways to replace them once they're gone and ways to convert our infrastructure and economy to support these alternatives, both of which are going to be difficult, but necessary, tasks. The quicker fossil fuels run out, the less time we have to come up with plausible alternatives. Assuming we even manage that, converting from a fossil fuel driven economy to whatever the alternatives wind up being is going to be a slow, expensive process. The more time we have for it, the better. The less time we have for it, the more economic instability caused by rapidly changing industries.

That's the macro-economic point of view. The micro-economic point of view, that of an interest group imposing itself on a business, doesn't quite fit in my mind either. The aim of any company is to please consumers, so they will continue to purchase/make use of their products/services. If greenies making a stink about wasted fuel (that was a horrible pun, apologies) has an impact on travellers, the airline will change its policies. If not, the airline won't change its policies. Either way, the airline is not being asked to accept adverse economic sanctions - they're not being forced to do anything other than keep their customers happy.

 

Agreed. However, we have massive amounts of oil just sitting in our own territory (offshore, ANWR, etc) that our own government refuses to allow to be tapped. Some estimates I've seen say that the yield from these sources could give us at least another 50 years' worth of gasoline. Are we just saving it until we're down to our last barrel from the middle east?

As far as alternative development is concerned, I would offer that (at least from what I experience) many suppliers of electricity are already pushing wind/solar/hydro/geothermal as alternatives. My electric company, for example, has stated that in at least 25% of its energy must come from wind power. Hmm...what about nuclear? France uses it for 75% of their needs. Too good for us?

Personally, as far as autos go, I'd like to see a car that runs on something other than gas. not because of global warming, but because of pollution and i really hate giving any of my money to the middle east (even if only a small portion of our oil comes from there.) Saw a video once of a dude who tried finding a way to treat cancer, and he ended up turning salt water into an intense fire simply by passing sound waves through it. Salt water? Are you kidding me? People on the coasts would be driving for FREE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6vSxR6UKFM

Until then, though, I'm not going to complain if a company chooses to waste every bit of gas it buys. They paid for it. They can do with it as they choose. no offense.

 

May I recommend a nice diesel, then?

 

What about vegetable oil?

 

vyo

It is possible that oil, gas and coal are renewable resources and may be renewing themsleves as we speak.

There has been a great deal of research into the process of serpentization. This process uses heat and the most abundant element in the earth's crust to produce oil, coal and gas, in a matter of weeks. This process doesn't require dead dinosaurs or millions of years.

This process is believed to have caused the methane deposits on Titan.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6876518/

This makes sense to me as the largest oil deposits are located in areas that could never support the vast prehistoric life necessary to produce huge oil deposits. (Saudi Arabia, Siberia and Alaska come to mind).

It is likely that some oil is dead dinosaurs and some is being made as you read this.

Serpentinization is no reason not to conserve oil. Serpentinization is very likely reality and oil may turn out to be renewable after all.

 

HI Invest,
I see where you are going with this, and I am not sure if petroleum is formed that quickly actually and the notion goes against the standard school of thought for the last century at least. I may be wrong, but I am quite sceptical of this theory.

Also, in terms of the carbon, it is less "dead dinosaurs" and much more plant material than anything. I have heard somewhere that Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the modern day middle east was once under a vibrant and bountiful ocean or similar massive body of water. Similar in ways that the current oil fields in Alaska sits on a tundra plain the size of California. Millions of years ago, apparently it was rather lush forests.

Again, I am not an expert, and this is anecdotal, but because someplace is now a barren desert, the same location millions of years ago was probably quite different.

 

So...we're just gonna go to Saturn then. Okay. I'll go hop in my NASA built gum-and-paperclip rocket and hope I don't get knocked out of orbit or run out of fuel before I get there.

 

Oh, yes, if oil were to renew itself, it'd need to do it at a rate high enough to keep our global economy going.

Pidgey

 

Every estimate I've ever read has said that the entire world's oil supply will only last another fifty years, not just the stuff we're willing to use. To be honest, though, I'm really not sure. The following website has some info that could be useful (I don't have time to look at it now or I'd crunch the numbers myself):

http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=15186

Nuclear isn't "too good for us," it's too much of a hazard. Nuke plants tend to last around thirty years; after that time, the plant has to be sealed up, because the radioactive material inside will stay radioactive for around a millenium. These plants can't be "resupplied" once the fuel rods run out, and since, at present, there's no safe place in the United States to dump radioactive waste, the plants themselves become heavily walled repositories of radioactive chemicals - which have to be heavily guarded to keep terrorists from getting their hands on some nasty implements of death, disease, and destruction.

Right now I believe wind power is our best bet; it's costs have come way down in the last twenty years and its getting more efficient every year. Geothermal is pretty promising, too, although the kind of geothermal energy that could, potentially, be used to replace fossil fuels is still highly experimental (and potentially horribly dangerous). Solar could still turn out well, but most solar power sources have turned out to be dead ends - it's just too hard to make it cost effective. Who knows, though?

Biofuels are becoming more of a reality these days; they're not exactly cars that run on vegetable oil (there's some chemical mixing involved) but its very doable. I've done a couple of experiments myself and created a (small) amount of biofuel, and I know a few people who drove around the country on it, siphoning excess cooking oil out of fast food dumpsters (they drove around the entire perimeter of the lower forty-eight states and only spent sixty or so dollars on gasoline the whole time).