Pipelines by their nature are run through low population areas, the land is cheaper and fewer people to complain about. Trains by their nature run through high population areas. Rail carries a variety of cargo, cargo that people need. If the rail does not stop at as many population centers as possible that rail does not make as much money. Pipeline on the other hand only needs to serve two customers, the supplier and the consumer, so the path can avoid the population.

I've seen some spectacular failures of pipelines before, some notable ones were from poor site choices. One I recall is from a rocket fuel plant built on top of a large natural gas pipeline. That just had "fail" written all over it.

The argument isn't if transporting oil is safe, it isn't. Nothing is "safe", even hiding under the bed from the evil world contains the risk of getting killed from a meteor strike. The argument is if the pipeline would have been safer than transport by rail. There is little evidence that the train is safer.

If you want to argue about the safety of oil transport then I'll have that argument. I'd then demonstrate the statistical safety, low cost, and minimal carbon output of nuclear power.

Lower gun ownership does lower gun violence. Remove the guns and you still have the violence. The guns don't cause the violence, criminals do. Remove the criminals and you'd lower the gun violence rate too, in fact you'd lower the total violence rate.

Why the focus on "gun violence"? Shouldn't we be concerned about all violence?

So, you are admitting that background checks don't keep criminals from getting guns? Thank you! This seems to be a more and more popular realization. Now, how about we stop spending so much time and money on background checks and use those resources to keep violent criminals away from polite society?

If you torture the data enough you can get it to admit anything. Why are you carving out a group of nations with a similar standard of living for comparison? You do that because if you didn't then gun control looks like a really bad idea.

Could it be that gun control is why these countries have such a low standard of living? I mean if criminals have no fear of getting shot by homeowners then they will steal everything not nailed down, once they have enough stuff worth stealing in their house. People having their stuff stolen all the time would seem to lower their standard of living.

Hand warmers?

Yes, it will be fixed. I just read an article on how Californians are buying all kinds of rifles before the registration requirement goes into effect. The government can't take the rifles until they know where they are.

Registration leads to confiscation so often that it is difficult to deny. I would argue that registration IS confiscation. The government is telling people that they don't own their rifles anymore, instead they are property of the state and the state needs to know where its property is located. The government may be kind enough to allow people to possess the firearms they paid for currently but how long will that last?

Sure, we have laws that require people to register cars but there are two big differences between car registration and gun registration. First, people can legally choose to not register a car if they do not intend to drive it on public roads, there is no such option with gun ownership. Second, I have yet to see any government use a car registry to confiscate cars from people that lawfully purchased them, history has many examples of such confiscations of rifles.

I see you fell into the gun grabbers trap. The key there is "gun violence", as if getting killed by a gun shot makes a person "deader". Of course we'd lower "gun violence" by lowering gun ownership. We'd also lower the rate of people getting run over by cars if we lowered the car ownership rate. That might also make more sense than gun bans because cars kill far more people than guns. Medical mistakes kill more people every year than guns but no one seems to be calling for a ban on physicians either.

If that is the case then how am I to know that the lower violent crime rate isn't just because these nations are more rural? There's a lot of big cities in the USA, if the crime in Oakland is because of the high population density then that should also apply to other nations in the world.

Yep, they do. There is a solution to the illegal gun ownership problem, repeal the laws that make them illegal. These guns are "illegal" only because laws declare them so. How about instead of looking for guns and throwing them in the ocean we find all the criminals that are killing people and throw them in the ocean?

An "illegal" gun is illegal many times is because people steal them. Taking guns from law abiding people to reduce "illegal guns" makes as much sense as taking cars away from their owners to reduce "illegal cars".

I have an idea. Instead of taking guns away to keep people from shooting holes in electric transformers we ban transformers? That does not make sense of course, people will just make transformers to shoot then.

Seriously though, gun control does not lower crime because the gun is not the problem, it's the criminal. Criminals will get guns. If they can't buy them they will steal them. If they can't steal them then they will create them. Gun control is irrelevant now. Even if gun control did control crime before people can now print out a gun from a 3D printer if they want one. That genie is out of the bottle. Gun control will never work again because any idiot can make a gun now.

You don't get it. They told me that IF we ban these evil rifles THEN people won't be shooting at transformers. Well they passed their law and someone shot at the transformers, did some pretty expensive damage too it looks like. Now what are they going to do, ban them AGAIN?

Now what they are going to do is use this as an example for advocating confiscating these rifles. How do I know? Because they always do that. These are the same people that tell me that they won't take my hunting rifle. They can't both confiscate the rifles that did this damage while also allowing me to keep my hunting rifle because they are the same rifle.

Yes, we ban murder. It also does not keep people from murdering. A ban is nothing more than prescribing a punishment for an action. The laws says if you do something then we punish you for it. If you scream "fire" in a crowded theater, and there is no fire, then we punish you for it. A rifle ban is like punishing people for screaming "fire" in that theater even when there is a fire.

Which one would that be?

I live in the USA where we don't have bans on rifles, unlike the Republic of California. We also don't have a lot of people shooting up power stations or getting murdered either. Might have something to do with the fact that people around here can shoot back. The state I live in has 1/4 the murder rate of California and twice the firearm owner rate. I don't know what the rifle ownership rate is for either state, those firearms in California must be shotguns because those are Biden approved.

At least with murder we can get a pretty high agreement that it should be banned. With gun laws that agreement is not so high. We saw a lot of gun laws go away this past year. Saw our murder rate go down too. I know correlation does not mean causation but it's real hard to deny causation when the correlation keeps showing up.

I didn't mean scaling up the tower and sawing through the wires with a pocket knife by "taking them out". I was thinking of ramming them with a large dozer, or using explosives like you suggested. Some more suicidal methods that came to mind, cutting through the support structure with a torch, running into the wires with a small airplane, or short them out by launching wires over them. Another idea was just a redneck with a rifle and a lot of time, just shoot at insulators and wires from a safe distance until sparks flew or the police came.

Getting explosives is not as difficult as you think. I saw this stuff on the shelf at a gun show called "Tannerite". I was curious about this stuff so when I got home I looked it up. This is serious stuff if in enough quantity. It's a binary explosive so it's safe to ship by mail, and numerous places will sell it. I saw Tannerite again later on the shelf at a sporting goods store I frequent. I haven't bought any so I don't know if there's ID needed to buy it. It was on the shelf where I could grab it, not behind the counter like the handgun ammunition. Tannerite is a low order explosive but I'm sure that there are ways to boost up the power if someone wanted to take the time to learn some chemistry.

That's not possible. Someone must be lying. I know this because California banned all those evil high powered rifles.

I once saw an offer to tour a nuclear power plant. I thought that would be fun, I never saw the inside of a nuclear power plant before. I imagined it would be much like the coal fired plants I toured, I doubted I'd get near anything even remotely radioactive, but I still thought it would be quite interesting and educational. I then read the fine print on the tour invite. To go on the tour I'd have to submit to a background check, I believe that included getting fingerprinted. I lost all interest.

I didn't think I'd have any problems passing a background check, I've done them before for things like getting in the military and getting government work. I just didn't like the idea of having to take my time going through that again for something as mundane as a tour of a power plant.

While on vacation one summer I happened across a sign for a hydroelectric power plant. I recall it was called Raccoon Lake but a quick Google search tells me that is in the middle of Indiana and I'm pretty sure the dam I was at was in Tennessee. Anyway, I had time so I took a detour to see if I could take a tour or something. I got there and found the visitors center. I had a look around, they had a video playing on continuous loop showing the history of the area and how the dam worked. The video ended with a message to ask for a tour. I then asked to get a tour. I was told tours were no longer offered "for security reasons".

I recall seeing a Youtube video recently about nuclear power where some nuclear power plant operator hated the security policies that banned tours. He wanted to show people how safe these power plants are. I understand where he's coming from, if nuclear power is so safe and secure then why can't we see that for ourselves? I can just imagine what people are thinking, do they have something to hide that they can't let me in?

While they have these security policies in place for the power plants the wires leaving them are totally insecure. I remember driving down the interstate and seeing these HUGE power lines going overhead. It was not long after getting denied a tour of the hydro plant "for security reasons" that I saw those power lines so the first thought through my head was just how easy it would be to take out that power line. The foundations for the towers that ran overhead were just out in the middle of someone's corn field. There was a fence around the field but it was just something to keep cattle from wandering in or out, not anything that any able bodied adult couldn't climb over or through.

The people that secure the power in this country have some seriously skewed priorities. We can't have people tour a hydroelectric plant "for security reasons" but some one can cut the communications to a power plant, shoot up some transformers, and no one knows who did it.

Irrelevant. We'd still need energy. Conservation is a good idea that I wholly support. The problem is that one can only conserve so much before it starts to affect their standard of living. This comes through either increased expense in the form of energy efficient devices and materials, an expense that is not offset by the energy saved, or through an inconvenience.

No, that "gap" does not get smaller. The utilities have to produce power based on an consistent "base" usage and on the peaks. For residences the utilities charge consumers based on their average costs, industrial/commercial users may be offered discounts on certain times of day for power usage to address those peaks. The "gap" between the base and peak has to be made up with expensive peak power. The larger that gap gets the more expensive electricity becomes.

When adding solar as a power source there's an added complexity, the utility doesn't just have to compensate for the power consumed by their customers but also by the power they produce. It makes the "gap" between base power and peak power a greater percentage of the total. Energy efficient lighting reduces the total power consumed but does little to affect that "gap".

An interesting thing about CFL and LED lighting, they have power supplies in them that are very adaptive to the power they are supplied. They do this so that they can be used in a number of places with different power and still produce a consistent light output. The same power supply can be used for places wired for voltages from 110, 120, 208, 220, 250 and anywhere in between. Also they don't care on if it's 50 or 60 hertz. Old incandescent lights are somewhat similar in that respect, the voltage has to be within a tighter range, they can't vary from 240 volts to 110 volts but they will give pretty much the same light on 110 volts as they do on 130 volts.

I go through that explanation of lighting to point out how badly utilities hate these new lights. It's not because they affect profits from reduced consumption by customers, they will always adjust their rates accordingly. One problem is that these new bulbs add reactance, a load that is either inductive or capacitive. Reactance messes with the generators and need to be compensated for to keep them running. Incandescent bulbs are almost purely resistive, utilities like resistive loads. Another problem is that they consume the same amount of power regardless of voltage. If there is a problem at the utility a common result is a voltage drop. With incandescent lights a voltage drop means reduced power consumed. With the fancy new bulbs a voltage drop means the same, or more, power is consumed. That is a problem with the utility, if power used does not reduce with voltage then a runaway condition can happen. Instead of the lights dimming a bit and coming back up the lights keep trying to stay on at the same brightness, the current consumed goes up and up until wires get hot and fuses start to trip.

These incandescent light alternatives are adding on to an already complex system. Solar and wind make it more complex. The more complex the system the easier it is to break.

Energy storage also adds to the complexity, and cost, of electricity. Solar and wind are already expensive, more expensive than even the cheapest peak power we have. No one uses this stuff because it is cheap. The only reason we use it all is because some legislators thought it was "green" when it is not. We burn more natural gas to make up for the times when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine than if we had just burned that natural gas in an efficient boiler.

Pumped hydro only works because the losses in the system are made up with rain. With compressed gas, weights on ropes, whatever, the power out is always going to cost more than the power in because of the losses. Solar is already mind blowing expensive, adding compressed air storage is only going to make it worse. Wind is approaching the costs of peak power sources right now so a lot of utilities like it since it makes for a nice PR show when greenies and politicians show up. Wind power also has an "off" switch. If the grid becomes unstable because the wind is adding too much power they can feather the blades on the turbines and have them stop spinning. Residential solar does not allow for that, they have to take that power.

Another cute fact I heard of wind turbines is that they need to be spun up to speed so that they can catch the wind. There's a motor in those turbines to get them spinning. Theoretically I assume that windmills could be used as a sink of power as much as a source. If they need to shed some excess power the utility could just spin some windmills. I don't know if they do that but I would not be surprised to find out that they do.

I understand you're dislike of coal power, I share it. The problem is that for much of the USA, and much of the world, we don't have the luxury of mountains and water for cheap pumped hydro. That makes expensive wind and solar power even more expensive. I see the solution in nuclear power.

If a law is capable of reaching the intended result then it can be argued to be lawful under a rational basis review. If a government act cannot be shown to reach the intended ends then it is automatically illegal.

Assume I was mayor and I just signed a law that all houses need to be painted blue because zombies can't see blue and therefore will not see the house and attack the occupants. But for something to have a rational basis review the law must have a an effect on a constitutional right. Painting a building blue might be pretty mundane but someone might object under their right of free expression or of some religious objection to blue paint.

I will see the usefulness of laws brought up quite often in Second Amendment cases. A law prohibiting armed people from entering places where alcohol is consumed was struck down after a woman watched her husband get fatality shot in a bar where they worked. The murderer was a known problem for them both. She had recently bought a pistol and obtained a concealed handgun license because of this stalker. The armed thug waited until they were both at work, and knowingly unarmed, before he attacked them.

I'm trying to remember the names and places of this incident. I do recall another similar incident that happened to Suzanna Hupp. She was disarmed by law, at the time people could not bring weapons into certain businesses. She watched a crazy man drive his truck through the front of the restaurant, then got out and executed numerous people there that came to eat.

I know I got off on a bit of a rant there but I just got done reading how weapons laws keep people from bringing wiffle ball bats and bowling pins on airplanes because those are "weapons" but knitting needles and scissors are not weapons. Oh, and of a girl asked to change her shirt before going to class because the picture of a rifle on the shirt violated the school's weapon policy. Stupid rules. Sharpened pencils and heavy books are a greater danger than wiffle ball bats and PICTURES of a rifle.

I know they exist just that they are nearly as favorable as they are for solar. I know that if I had a few million dollars for a natural gas fired power plant that I could get some pretty sweet deals from the government, tax breaks, low interest loans, maybe even a cash grant. They'd do that because I'd bring jobs, tax income, and cheap energy.

However, if I said I'd spend that same money on solar power then I'd get an even sweeter deal. But I wouldn't get the money because I brought jobs and tax revenue. I'd get money because those politicians want to look good to voters and their fellow politicians.

Yes.

I'm sure it costs plenty. That is why I advocate we build more nuclear power, allow for more domestic drilling of oil, and conserve the energy we do use. That conservation of energy means stop wasting energy on solar and wind. I think we could use more research in wind and solar because as it is right now nuclear and domestic natural gas are much better ways to generate electricity.

I think about them every time I pay my utility bills or fuel up my truck. I don't like the status quo because that means burning coal and foreign oil when we could be using nuclear, natural gas, and domestic oil.

You don't have to preach to me about the problems with the status quo. I don't agree with your arguments about "externalities" since I think that a lot of it is nonsense. I do agree that burning coal and foreign oil is a problem and we need to do something about it. I just think that wind and solar is the wrong path to take.

I studied electrical engineering in college. I had to take classes on power, systems engineering, control theory, and I worked on the solar race car project. It was explained to me how fragile the electric power grid is and how solar power plays into that. Even with that education almost two decades ago it was only relatively recently, after regaining an interest in this and doing some reading in my spare time, that I made a realization on how bad solar power really is.

Solar power is expensive, really expensive. It's only because of government subsidies that anyone even considers using solar where grid power is available. What piles on to the cost is the backup systems that need to be in place for when the sun does not shine. What angers me more is that these backup systems we have now are all fossil fuel based. They are also very expensive and inefficient. They are so inefficient that they negate any savings in fossil fuels from using the wind and solar in the first place. Unless or until we find backup systems that are not powered by fossil fuels then solar power, and wind, saves us nothing in fossil fuels burned. I believe that we need to stop with the wind and solar as it gives us nothing. We need nuclear. If the government would only allow new nuclear power capacity then we could both reduce the fossil fuels we burn and get the cheap and reliable power we are used to.

Nuclear power.

Yep, I'd need LESS energy but I'd still need energy. If all I had was windmills and solar PV for electricity then no wind + no sun = no electricity. Something needs to fill in that gap. The cheapest peak power is still two or three times that of coal and nuclear base load power. Even if solar and wind power were free, which it isn't, then electricity rates would still be higher than what we have now. Insulating my house also costs money. We are not burning coal because we want to pollute the air. We do so because it is the best means we have to get the standard of living we have now. By switching to solar and wind you are asking me to lower my standard of living with some pretty difficult to define benefit to the environment.

Yes they do. I'd explain to you in detail how medical devices work but they bring up too many bad memories. Instead I suggest to look it up yourself.

I'm sure Germany has reliable power. The problem is that Germans pay three times what Americans pay for electricity.

The study on the impact of solar power that found potential grid instability came to that conclusion by starting with the question, if all new electricity generation was solar then what would happen? The answer was that at some point the peaking reserve generation would become inadequate, the generators on line at the time would become overwhelmed, and the power would go out. It seems to me that is precisely what Hawaii is concerned about right now. If too many Hawaiians add solar power too quickly then the utility will be unable to build enough peaking power plants to keep the lights on.

Other studies I've seen point out the carbon output of solar PV. PV panels themselves don't add much to the carbon output but when added to peaking power from natural gas turbines (the cheapest and most common source of peak power) then the carbon output would be higher than if natural gas boilers were used. A combination steam turbine and steam can get something like 50% efficiency. A natural gas turbine can get around 25% efficiency. The more solar PV you have in the day then the more peaking power turbines you need for the evening peak. That means more carbon output.

Hawaii does not have a lot of natural gas so they burn oil. That oil carbon output is greater than natural gas, but still lower than coal. This means that unlike Germany or continental USA where natural gas is relatively cheap and plentiful the more solar added to Hawaii has an even greater impact on carbon emitted to the atmosphere.

Germany has kept the lights on with their wind and solar. The downside is the much higher prices for electricity and the greater carbon output.

Portugal is different than the USA. You have more mountains and see which allow for more reliable wind and more prime places for hydro. Out here a typical windmill will run for 16% of the time. That means to get the same energy in a year as a gigawatt coal plant we'd have to put up 6 gigawatts of wind power, and still have to build a gigawatt peak power plant for when the wind does not blow.

I've seen videos of experts in the field explain why we cannot rely on wind and solar beyond a certain point in the USA. Much of what allows wind and solar to be cheap is having enough reserve capacity in traditional peaking power (typically natural gas turbines, sometimes diesel generators run from cheap heating oil) or in hydro. I took a tour of a pumped hydro station in the Tennessee Valley but they didn't use it to back up wind and solar but for peaking power for the nuclear and coal power stations. They can do that because the geography allows them to. Can't do that everywhere.

There's papers out there that study the Texas power grid. They ran simulations with increasing amounts of solar power. Somewhere around 10% of power from solar and the grid becomes unstable, just not enough reserve capacity available. When it comes to the cost of the power the math looks real bad. Power would get real cheap for the utilities, so cheap that at some points the price goes negative. A negative cost of power is normally nonsensical but it is a means to describe the problems a utility would have with excess solar capacity. Negative cost of power means, if I understand correctly, is that it would be profitable to pay someone to use their electricity. That may sound like a nice problem to have but when that cheap power goes away, such as the sun goes down, they will have to make up the difference with expensive peak power.

The cost of solar power may be negative at certain parts of the day but that does not mean anything when you can't get it when you need it. Utilities run on the average cost of power, that is what they charge the users. With solar power the average cost always increases.

That's another thing, how much does your electricity cost? Running on 40% wind is nice but if your power costs even the slightest bit more then it does not make economic sense. Talk about saving the environment all you like but people need to make a profit or they don't eat. Global warming and sea level rise is a century away, but people want to have supper before they go to bed.

Yes, and where does that power come from? It's from expensive natural gas peak power. If there was no solar on the grid giving that peak output at noon then the utility could run the cheap and efficient base load generation for much longer periods in the day. Having to accommodate solar means using more peaking power generation, meaning higher prices.

Solar power even in the best conditions cannot be cheaper than coal, hydro, natural gas, or nuclear. It's only in Hawaii and other tropical locations much like it where it gets even close. Those panels cost money, as do maintaining them, and given the little power density they have it makes them expensive.

That little peak of power consumption that utilities see as the sun goes down is precisely why utilities hate solar so much. Solar PV just plain costs them money. The more solar they have the more peaking power they have to use in that time period. It may last only an hour or two every day but peaking power is used so rarely because it can cost the utility three or four times what base load power costs. They have to pass that cost on to the consumer.

The primary reason peaking power costs more is because of efficiency, it takes more fuel per kWh than base load power. More fuel burned means more CO2 output. Put this all together and what you have is that more solar power means more CO2 in the air. The only way around this, barring some leap in power generation technology, is nuclear power. If we get more nuclear we get low carbon output, cheap, and reliable power. With nuclear power we won't need solar power.

I thought you solar power people didn't like CO2 output. Well, the problem is that modern technology and economics means that more solar means more CO2. That's just how it adds up. I used to like solar until I had someone show me the math. Solar PV does not reduce CO2, it increases it. The main reason is because of that short little peak after the sun goes down.