Stupid, Smelly Hippies

[Fire_Moose]

http://valleywag.gawker.com/332218/snap ... id-hippies

Snappy answers to stupid hippies

Sparkle-Bunny5.jpgBiodiesel. Hemp. Local sustainable farms. Hippie tech is infuriating. You know in your engineer's heart it won't work, but because it's outside your field of study you lack the handy stats to rebut the moonbat ideas evangelized by modern-day hippies and their shiny shiny cousins, the ravers. Before Burning Man starts up again in earnest, I've prepared canned comebacks and bookmarkable URLs from hippie-approved sources like Wikipedia and GreenBiz.

Hemp
Hippie tech: It's a miracle plant that's been banned due to pressure from America's powerful tobacco lobby.
Reality check: The European Union and China subsidize hemp growers. Canada, the UK and Germany, which had banned hemp production, have allowed its commercial growth and sale since the 1990s. The result? Dude, check the people's encyclopedia: "British production is mostly used as bedding for horses; other uses are under development. The largest outlet for German fibre is composite automotive panels." And that's the propaganda in Wikipedia. Sorry, Sparkle Bunny, hemp just ain't the new soybean.

Biodiesel
Hippie tech: We can become energy-independent (cough Iraq cough) by converting food wastes to fuel.
Reality check: They tried running city trucks on 100% biodiesel in Berkeley. The trucks developed a habit of conking out at busy intersections, their engines gummed up with biodiesel residue. Berkeley dropped back to a 20 percent biodiesel mix. In San Francisco, attempts to locally manufacture biodiesel from cooking grease hit the wall: San Franciscans don't eat enough fried food to generate the raw materials. Maybe you should move to Oklahoma and try there!

Container ships
Hippie tech: They're huge fossil-fuel-burning monsters, the mega-SUVs of the global economy. Ban them from the Bay!
Reality check: Container ships are maybe 50 times more carbon-efficient than trucks. Global shipping accounts for only 2 to 3 percent of worldwide fossil fuel consumption. Trucks burn at least 15 percent. The real problem with container ships is lack of pollution controls on the world's biggest diesel engines. Still, one of the most damning studies available attributes 60,000 annual deaths worldwide to shipping-based pollution. By that estimate you're seven times more likely to die from drowning. And yes, there's that ship that hit the bridge last month and spilled oil and killed all those birds — well, not that you went down to the water to see for yourself. The San Francisco Chronicle is working overtime to hype the Cosco Busan spill into the most terrible horrible wildlife-killing catastrophe that's ever happened to the Bay Area. It sucked, but do you think the editors at the Chron want the big ships gone? Hell no, they just want more City Hall regulators they can report on.

Local farming
Hippie tech: Using sustainable organic methods, we should all grow our own food.
Reality check: Look up "Operation Feed Yourself" in Ghana. Yeah, that went real well. The average American farmer feeds 130 people, a productivity increase of six times over in the past forty years. If you want to push organic farming and sustainable measures, fine. Most of my paycheck goes to Whole Foods, gladly. But tell me I should spend less time writing so I can grow my own vegetables, and I'll whack you over the head with an economics textbook open to the chapter on comparative advantage.

Medical marijuana
Hippie tech: A plot by the AMA, the FBI and the tobacco lobby (again) has kept cannabis sativa from easing the pain of millions. And ouch, I could kinda use some right now.
Reality check: For once, the hippies are right. Web 2.0 wouldn't exist without San Francisco's determined efforts to look the other way while your entire engineering department smokes up on the roof. To very very loosely paraphrase Steve Jobs, the way to create the next Apple is to get good and baked, then think up your idea for a business.

[Elderberry]

Interesting read.

JK

[C.f.M.]

Firemoose, YOU ARE SUCH A DICK.

[Fire_Moose]

I didn't write it...but thanks!

[dr.placebo]

The list is a straw man. It takes a caricature and knocks it over. Big whoop. Here are a few comments from an old hippie:

1. Hemp is not a miracle plant, of course. No plant is. But industrial hemp has more uses than one might think. Check out this Canadian link. If hemp had the R&D that soy or peanut crops have received, and had less resistance based on legal history, it would be even more useful. To me the most attractive part of industrial hemp is that the plant is quite tolerant of conditions and does not require the same level of energy intensive farming as many other crops.

2. Biodiesel obviously does not scale well. There just is not enough fuel value in our waste stream from all sources to power transportation. But that is not an argument against using energy from waste, it's just an argument against thinking that it is a complete solution. Yes, there is a lot of wishful thinking on this subject, but flushing energy down the drain is plain nuts.

3. I actually like container ships in principle, and I like the efficiencies of sea transport. Comparing container ships to trucks is a bit absurd, since neither works well in the other's element, and both are parts of an interlocking transportation system. The big problem I have with container ships is the lack of pollution controls. And I think that this item is a bit lightweight, since I doubt that container ships are high up on the hippie hit list.

4. Local farming is not the same as sustainable organic farming practiced by the individuals who eat the food. Don't confuse local farming with gardening. The move towards local farming is a reaction to the harm caused by unchecked global agribusiness. Agribusiness has impressive productivity numbers, but it also is heavily subsidized and is linked to adverse public health consequences (pesticides, diabetes, declining nutrients in foods, ...). And the economic impact of the subsidies has made it much harder for small farmers overseas to support themselves (a key example is the devastating effects of subsidies and NAFTA on Mexican farmers).

5. Medical marijuana. I think that the benefits are overstated by hippies, but they are baselessly disparaged by those who oppose it. I sympathize with the hippies because it is their most effective wedge to reducing the harm caused by marijuana persecution. The picture of Web 2.0 being generated by stoners is amusing, but most programmers I know rely on copious strong coffee as their drug of choice.


In conclusion, many of the hippie delusions caricatured in the list are related to an inability to appreciate the consequences of scale. This is not a hippie speciality, since most of our citizens are mathematically challenged. I could generate a straw man list of right-wing delusional thinking based on the same failure, but it would be equally pointless to do so.

[gyre]

Would burning man happen without delusional thinking?

[Elderberry]

WOW, two interesting reads in the same thread!

JK

[dr.placebo]

Would burning man happen without delusional thinking?

Practically nothing creative happens without delusional thinking. But nothing worthwhile lasts without practical thinking.

[Trishntek]

Firemoose, YOU ARE SUCH A DICK.

You're just trying to sell that belt buckle aren't ya?

[motskyroonmatick]

Industrial hemp and flax was grown in the Willamette Valley of Oregon until the advent of Nylon. These were such good materials that they were used for parachute making. According to my recollection the plants in the historical picture I saw were about 9 feet tall. That is impressive bio-mass production for one year. If I recall correctly they out produce hybrid poplar plantations in bio-mass production each year. It would be really neat to see it grown again around here.

[Thecatman]

I run regular diesel and bio in my 03 Jetta. Bio blends are B5 to B99. Depending on temperature and weather. the colder it is the weaker the the blend. When it gets below 28 or so I'll switch to regular. Usually run B20. No problems. I had B20 in the tank this past December when it got down to -14 and the car started right up

[geekster]

The only thing that makes sense for bio fuel is wvo and then only if it is going to be thrown away anyway. Any other biofuel is generally a net reduction in efficiency. If wvo is diverted from some other productive use, then it is probably not sustainable as an energy source.

It is really basic arithmetic. Most biofuels require more energy to produce, process, and distribute than they generate. Things could possibly be more efficient with the use of turpentine fuels but in order to produce them in the required quantity, a lot of habitat destruction would need to take place.

At this point in time, petro fuels are still the most efficient in energy yield for energy expended.

Now getting back to hemp. That isn't really sustainable either. If you take into account land that would be required to be taken out of some other production in order to be placed into hemp production, you are then again faced with the prospect of habitat destruction in order to increase hemp production. Ok, so now you have your raw hemp. Who is going to turn it into something useful in an industrial scale? Nobody in the US. US labor is so expensive you will produce something nobody will buy unless it is just because "Hey, its hemp!". That is generally not a good enough reason.

Now one could produce their own goods for their own use but that pretty much makes you just a different flavor of Amish, only with drum circles. If you are going to spend all of your day performing tasks that provide for your own subsistence with little surplus to add to the general economy, then you are basically a net drag on the economy unless ALL YOU USE is stuff of your own manufacture. In that case you are an economic zero ... neither consuming anything produced by nor providing anything useful to the world around you.

Once you start down the road of specialization and trading with others, you are now on the road to making things more efficient and after a few generations of that, you will arrive right back where you tried to run away from.

[dr.placebo]

I mostly agree with geekster on this, but I have a few mildly contrary comments.

1. If biofuel is generated from crops grown to make fuel then it is likely to be a losing proposition. But there are several alternatives that make use of the waste stream from agriculture, forestry, industry, and even garbage. These can be quite efficient.

2. Hemp is sustainable if the right methods are used, although we have a poor record of using the right methods for other crops. Further, it could displace some less efficient crops with a net win. Now I have little patience with trendy hemp products, but hemp has a lot of potential to be a superior crop to several in the US that are currently farmed. Cotton is a good example, since it requires a lot of water and restricted conditions.

3. Fossil fuels are more efficient until you start to account for the external costs that are not born by the fossil fuel extractors. Then their efficiency (and desirability) becomes much more dependent on the values assigned to the external costs.

[geekster]

Fossil fuels are more efficient until you start to account for the external costs that are not born by the fossil fuel extractors.

I would say that if the same number of BTUs were produced by bio methods, the external costs would be much higher. Bio methods are fine as long as they are done at small scale. Once a well is drilled, say in Oklahoma, it can coexist with other uses of the land for quite a long time. There is an oil well that sits next to the taxiway at Oklahoma City airport happily pumping away year after year with grass growing all the way up to the small concrete pad the pump sits on.

It would require hundreds of acres of land to produce the same amount of energy that would be a lot more damaging to the native habitat using bio methods.

But generally I agree completely with:

But there are several alternatives that make use of the waste stream from agriculture, forestry, industry, and even garbage. These can be quite efficient.

Methane digesting is one method I favor. A close friend of mine is an engineer for a California city. They harvest considerable methane from their municipal landfill operations. That is a fine use of resources and provides energy that would otherwise go unused. Back in the area where I was born, chicken operations use chicken poop to heat and light the coops in winter.

[gyre]

My understanding is that hemp is an exceedingly hardy, low maintenance plant to farm.
This might factor in.

I have a heavy hemp rope.
It is superior for some purposes.
It appears to be very old.
I have used it to tow cars, so it tests to that load anyway.

[geekster]

The problem is that pretty much any land that can be put into agricultural production on any significant scale in the US already is in production. So if you want to increase hemp production on an industrial scale, one must reduce production of something else or clear new land.

One of the problems with corn sweeteners and ethanol production is that it has caused a great shift out of wheat, oat, and soy production in the US resulting in the complete elimination of surpluses of these grains. The result is that if we have a bad production year from, say, bad weather, there is no surplus from the previous crop to draw upon.

Any significant ( and by significant I mean production in millions of acres ) production of hemp will displace something else. There isn't a lot of nutritional value in hemp. If it displaces a food crop, you get a lot of hemp but higher food costs. It is probably not doable in the US but there are probably other countries where hemp could be produced on a viable scale.

[Trishntek]

Our son-in-law has run vegetable oil in his truck for the past 7 years. He is a caterer up around AntiM's country. So in the winter, he has to start with diesel until it warms and the last few minutes before he shuts it down for the day to make sure the fuel lines don't gel. He figures it costs about 20cents per gallon and he gets the same performance. One critical thing he has found though, the newer diesels with electronic metering for the injectors instead of the traditional injector pump do not do as well for some reason.

He filters his used deep fryer oils, has separate heated fuel tank and has to store it all in drums. For him it is worth it because he has access to the fuel and the filtering system in place. He has also bought new cooking oil by the pallet load from Costco and Sam's when they expire their shelf lives for pennies on the dollar.

edit: The injectors wear out faster than normal. Although, with my 2004 diesel with the newer injectors, I've replaced most of them once already. And I use straight diesel.

[geekster]

Yeah, waste oil that would be thrown away is a good source of energy provided it is not diverted from some other use such as soap production or animal feed.

To give an example of scale as I was trying to say earlier, Popular Mechanics mentions this about switchgrass and other cellulose-base fuels:

it takes a tremendous amount of cellulose to produce ethanol in industrial quantities, which means a lot of land would still have to be devoted to fuel production. "The low density of the supply is a problem," says Tad Patzek, a chemical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin. "To supply fuel to, say, the Bay Area, you would need an area of switchgrass that is larger than all the agricultural land in California."

And that is the problem. if you used *all* of the agricultural land in the entire state, you could fuel the SF bay area. Adding LA would probably take all of the agricultural land in Oregon and Washington, too. There just isn't enough land to grow fuel *and* food (and hemp).

[Thecatman]

the newer diesels with electronic metering for the injectors instead of the traditional injector pump do not do as well for some reason.

I've been told on 09 and newer Jettas there is something called a "particulate filter?" and for some reason this device causes higher blends of bio to get into the crankcase thereby reducing lubrication to critical components. Why regular diesel won't get into the oil???
I've also been told and have read that vehicles that can run bio, the lubrication for the injectors and pumps is much better with bio because of the low sulphur. Ultra low sulphur

[geekster]

the lubrication for the injectors and pumps is much better with bio because of the low sulphur. Ultra low sulphur

Actually, it is the opposite. Sulphur improves the lubrication properties of the fuel and makes the injectors and pumps last longer. If you are going to run ultra low sulphur fuel, you need a vehicle 2007 or newer or you will need to add synthetic additives to improve the lubricity. Some bio fuels have better lubricity because of natural waxes and such in the fuel and can be a life saver for older engines when mixed with newer ulsd but it has nothing to do with the sulphur, lower sulphur fuels are generally harder on injectors and pumps.

[ygmir]

pre 90 Mercedes diesels I.P.'s are internally lubricated, so, the lubricity is less a factor.

[Thecatman]

Maybe I did'nt phrase that right. Bio has better lubrication qualities than regular diesel because regular diesel is ultra low sulphur

[Thecatman]

I usually add a few ounces of RedLine 85 Plus regardless of what kind of fuel I use

[ygmir]

I've been having good results with Marvel Mystery Oil

[Thecatman]

I've concidered Marvel Mystery Oil and Lucas. They seem to be easier to get than RedLine.
What kind of vehicle(s) do you put it in?



Going back to bio: history tells us that Rudoulf Diesel ran the first diesel engine on straight peanut oil

[CapSmashy]

We run Diesel Kleen in our bus. Good stuff.

[ygmir]

I've concidered Marvel Mystery Oil and Lucas. They seem to be easier to get than RedLine.
What kind of vehicle(s) do you put it in?



Going back to bio: history tells us that Rudoulf Diesel ran the first diesel engine on straight peanut oil

I run it in my old diesel MBZ's and Dodge cummins.

IIRC, the first diesel engine was designed to run on coal dust.........oil came later.

[ygmir]

I've had good luck with Power service, too.

[CapSmashy]

The problem is that pretty much any land that can be put into agricultural production on any significant scale in the US already is in production. So if you want to increase hemp production on an industrial scale, one must reduce production of something else or clear new land.

The easiest first step is to eliminate corn subsidies and stop the corn based ethanol charade and replace the corn being grown for ethanol production with hemp.

Butanol production has benefited recently from a renewed interest in R&D dollars and there are a few small scale production facilities being set up. Butanol is biomass derived and can be utilized without modification in a gasoline engine.

Secondary, remove the sugar tariffs and trade restrictions and put the nation back on a "healthy" sweetner and a biomass fuel source that is far more efficient than corn based ethanol.

A move by the US back to large scale use of hemp and sugar would also serve to revitalize a lot of Caribbean nations that were severely impacted economically when the US stopped importing hemp and sugar.

One of the problems with corn sweeteners and ethanol production is that it has caused a great shift out of wheat, oat, and soy production in the US resulting in the complete elimination of surpluses of these grains. The result is that if we have a bad production year from, say, bad weather, there is no surplus from the previous crop to draw upon.

Its not just sweeteners from corn. Corn is in damn near everything these days if you buy prepackaged food.

[Trishntek]

I've concidered Marvel Mystery Oil and Lucas. They seem to be easier to get than RedLine.
What kind of vehicle(s) do you put it in?



Going back to bio: history tells us that Rudoulf Diesel ran the first diesel engine on straight peanut oil

I run it in my old diesel MBZ's and Dodge cummins.

IIRC, the first diesel engine was designed to run on coal dust.........oil came later.

coal dust? not coal oil? I've never heard of that being used other than on electric generator plants. The pressure would have to be tremendous! What kind of pump would do that?