As I was looking around for a way to tie Earth Day to the subject of this site, I found this artifact: Ecobabes Calendar Here's an example: I hope you all had a good Earth Day. It's a day for sex on the spring grass (though it was rainy here today :ugh ). A day for glass dildos instead of petroleum-based ones. A day for pulling off the road and turning off the engine for that blowjob at the wheel. And a day for solar-powered vibrators. There really are such things, though it wouldn't have worked for me today, since, as I said, it's rainy here.
even if its raining solar powered devices still work, unless you have an eclipse there is sun light sadly, my gf and I are both studying for exams on monday
why would anyone buy an old calendar, i dont care if its just 6 dollars! i guess i do my part daily by using glass dildos
Mine are usually renewable and biodegradable. (Cucumbers.) A quick check of Wayback shows that the calendar site hasn't been updated since January 2008. It's really just an artifact. Maybe they would have had more success with an Ecostud calendar. :brow
Here's an eco-friendly idea for energy production :lol http://www.woostersmotorcycle.co.uk/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/m9sex.gif
When the calender has pictures like that. Who really cares what year it is. Damn.. It could be 1969 for all I care lol
I think the wind generators are beautiful, their intrinsic architecture is aesthetically pleasing, deceptively delicate looking and elegant. Maybe that's just the engineer in me. I would love to see a row of them on the horizon.
My father is a civil engineer who is into the oil industry in a big way. I have tried to make him look into if they need people like him for designing windpower stations. He always goes "well sure, but I have found a new way of building even cheaper off-shore oil platforms!" :eyes
I wonder, if you calculate the platforms' net usable energy that can be contributed directly to our needs, after subtracting the energy spent mining, smelting and manufacturing the parts; designing, manufacturing, delivering, assembling and operating a platform; does it contribute more net energy than a continental array of wind farms could be projected to generate, after considering the same input of resources for building them? On another note, we're going to be plugging in more of our cars soon too. That might(I say might because they use more plastics) reduce petroleum consumption but increase coal electricity consumption. That's nasty. So are Lithium Ion batteries. Electric cars seem green, but like most green looking things, they're not, for similar reasons. And just another throw-in; saving paper is not green. All office paper is from farmed pulpwood. Saving paper might cost pulpwood industry jobs(I haven't actually looked that up yet). But pulpwood is a well managed renewable resource. People imagine we are cutting Sequoias for paper.
Sorry I didn't see your reply earlier HR. These are things I frankly don't know much about. Building oil platforms is a major undertaking and I know the expenses are probably quite enormous (I have to ask my father about this). But then, the expenses seem to be dwarfed by the income, judging from the surpluses in the Norwegian economy. I am guessing that the payoff in terms of energy or income still is higher with the fossil fuels than with wind power, but it may depend on how far ahead people are willing to think. At any given oil platform the oil will eventually run out, but the wind "harvesting" can theoretically go on forever. There are always some costs of maintenance and repairs of course, but that is true in both cases. Interestingly, in Norway electricity is notably "greener" than many other places, as virtually all of the power is hydroelectric. Even that has it's flip side though: higher consumption means more rivers and waterfalls have to be ruined to provide the power. There is also silting, which seems to limit the life span of at least some hydroelectric power plants.
No doubt it's economically good to build oil platforms. It puts everyone to work, from the miners, smelters, millworkers, and manufacturers, the design engineers, the transporters(trains, planes, trucks, ships, etc), assemblers to the operators. I was just wondering if all that energy used by those entities had a footprint significantly smaller than the potential energy output of a platform.
I don't know the math, but counting the factors you mentioned only, I would guess yes; we have had platforms in Norway producing oil for decades so I think it would outweigh energy consumption by a good margin. BUT during production they burn off oil impurities, so if you count that as energy waste (mostly from an environmental standpoint I suppose), then well....I don't know. It gets more complicated I suppose. edit: actually calculating the burn-off should be LESS complicated than all the other things...
