Greenpeace stop a coal train with a polar bear in the Retford area

[newbryford]

If you were a member of Greenpeace and model railway enthusiast, would you have to use clockwork powered trains?

 

 

Cheers,

Mick

[petethemole]

No, use a bicycle powered generator. Get exercise and play operate trains at the same time.

[big jim]

i care about the future for my kids (as well as saving a few bob) but what annoys me about being enviromentally concious is i have to sort out my rubbish into 3 separate bins to recycle,i can replace my light bulbs for crappy energy saving ones, turn the tv off stand by, walk the kids to school to reduce my carbon footprint (and waistline) and i have to pay an extortionate price for my fuels etc while other seemingly non regulated countries simply spew out massive amounts of pollution, use V8s for a 1/2 mile trip to the drugstore for a gallon of milk in a plastic jug, light up cities 24/7, practically give you a carrier bag per item in supermarkets, seeing all of the above sometimes makes my rinsing out a jam jar somewhat futile!

 

im worried about this country having to shutting coal power stations with no real alternative 'practical' replacement, we cant order proven tried and tested locos after the end of the year that will reduce the number of wagons on the road because of emission regilations, we can hardly mine our own coal any more and rely on others to supply us, actually its getting to the time of the year where the daily mail will be starting to scare us with their "they will turn our gas off" headlines

 

i'm not anti greenpeace at all, we all deserve a better world but i do think their actions have been questionable on a number of ocassions with "activists" almost brainwashed into performing the donkey work by those holding the pursestrings within the organisation

[James Makin]

Their Facebook page is interesting at the moment. 

 

Thanks for the tip-off, time to bust out some offensive memes, me thinks!

 

Greenpeace once tried some direct action in my Woolies, by removing the entire stock of lightbulbs from our department's shelves back in the day...took ages restacking the little boxes...held a grudge against them ever since!

[Reorte]

I'm not condoning this action in any way but I'm also somewhat bothered by the reactions to it, many of which seem rather blanket. In this situation I'm with the general opinion that it wasn't justified, I'm not however of the opinion that any similar sort of action is never justified under any circumstances. We've seen it in this country in the past and in others more recently where downright illegal action that would have got a similar reaction from many at the time has proven to be significant events in getting much needed change going. Therefore any such cases need to be judged on their own merits (which make this one unjustified to me) rather than a general "they're fools."

[Revolution Mike]

It doesn't matter what your feelings are on "climate change", they put themselves and the train crew at risk by trespassing.  That's the point here.

 

Did they really though?  I don't know the full details of the incident.  Direct action has its place and it was a calculated PR stunt to coincide with a UN climate conference. In this case it is not really novel as they have done it before.

 

i care about the future for my kids (as well as saving a few bob) but what annoys me about being enviromentally concious is i have to sort out my rubbish into 3 separate bins to recycle,i can replace my light bulbs for crappy energy saving ones, turn the tv off stand by, walk the kids to school to reduce my carbon footprint (and waistline) and i have to pay an extortionate price for my fuels etc while other seemingly non regulated countries simply spew out massive amounts of pollution, use V8s for a 1/2 mile trip to the drugstore for a gallon of milk in a plastic jug, light up cities 24/7, practically give you a carrier bag per item in supermarkets, seeing all of the above sometimes makes my rinsing out a jam jar somewhat futile!

 

im worried about this country having to shutting coal power stations with no real alternative 'practical' replacement, we cant order proven tried and tested locos after the end of the year that will reduce the number of wagons on the road because of emission regilations, we can hardly mine our own coal any more and rely on others to supply us, actually its getting to the time of the year where the daily mail will be starting to scare us with their "they will turn our gas off" headlines

 

Of course there are practical alternatives to coal - gas, nuclear, renewables (really a combination of all of those).

 

The point about "non-regulated" countries is a bit bogus - the general gist of climate change agreements is that the existing pollution already in the atmosphere was by the developed countries going through the industrial revolution and that the unregulated countries are "catching up" in terms of industrialisation.  Of course they are generally doing it in a much cleaner way (even with China's massive use of coal) than we did as the technology is much cleaner and more efficient, furthermore they are not really unregulated as even if not covered by Kyoto they still mirror a lot of EU environmental legislation. We as developed nations have accepted that it is only fair that there is an imbalance due to the fact that the states are at different stages of industrialisation.

 

Cheers, Mike

[Horsetan]

Pity I recently sold my old car, as I was going to start adding tetraethyl lead to petrol once again...

[big jim]

Of course there are practical alternatives to coal - gas, nuclear, renewables (really a combination of all of those).

 

Maybe practical wasnt the best word i could have used, agreed they are practical but in the eyes of many they are not 'safe' or eviromentally friendly (windfarms etc aside), biomass for example it may be an alternative to coal but it still has to come 1/2 way across the world on a ship to get here, hardly an envoromentally friendly method

 

I think its 'danmed if you do, damned if you dont' scenario

[PaulRhB]

And solar panels are so environmentally friendly to produce. Sometimes they forget the massive progress we've made is often down to freely available electricity allowing medicine and education to improve quality of life and ironically make them aware of the damage it's production causes. Where'd they want to turn the clock back to? Pre industrial revolution? At least with our models we could rig up a wind turbine, inside for some , to keep playing if they got their way

[Adrian Wintle]

The other big issue with power generation that is glossed over is that you really need to match the output to the demand in real time (or as close as possible). As the amount of solar and wind generation increases, this becomes more of a problem. Solar and wind generation is dependent on conditions, and so provides a variable output that is not coordinated with demand. Nuclear and hydro are very good for providing a base level, but are relatively difficult to throttle, so are best providing a fixed amount of power. This means that the more easily throttlable sources (oil, coal, and gas) have to be the ballancing factor. Gas power plants are the easiest to adjust output on (and can be started from effectively zero output as required), but coal and oil plants (and other plants that produce power by burning things) are also easier to adjust the output of than the other sources.

 

Adrian

[PhilJ W]

I notice that someone has disagreed to my post # 6. What is there to disagree about?

[jamie92208]

I suppose it's lucky that it was only a slow speed area, as the train driver may not have been able to stop in time before hitting the bear.

Just to lighten the tone I once had a cab ride in Canada with a driver who had hit a bear.  Apparently two grain cars had derailed in the swamp next to the track and their content had fermented niceley. Apparently the local bears were partial to a cool beer but then decided it was cool to pick a fight with the next big noisy train.  Apaprently it's a bit disconcerting when you are in the cab of your F Unit and you see a set of bear paws through the windscreen.

Jamie

[Ozexpatriate]

If you were a member of Greenpeace and model railway enthusiast, would you have to use clockwork powered trains?

No, use a bicycle powered generator. Get exercise and play operate trains at the same time.

Has anyone brought such a setup to a UK exhibition. I did see one at a train show in the US. I didn't try it myself but it had inclines and people had to pedal pretty vigorously to the the locomotive uphill.

[Rugd1022]

I was going to type something very sarcastic in response to the self rightous polar bear depositing numpties and I've been biting my tongue since I started reading this thread, but instead, I think I'll just take my three and a half litre V8 engined Rover out for a very long waft tomorrow in their honour. I'll lay half my salary as an odds on bet that they didn't walk from their homes to the location of said incident.... rainbow warriors my a*se...

[Ozexpatriate]

The other big issue with power generation that is glossed over is that you really need to match the output to the demand in real time (or as close as possible). As the amount of solar and wind generation increases, this becomes more of a problem. Solar and wind generation is dependent on conditions, and so provides a variable output that is not coordinated with demand. Nuclear and hydro are very good for providing a base level, but are relatively difficult to throttle, so are best providing a fixed amount of power. This means that the more easily throttlable sources (oil, coal, and gas) have to be the ballancing factor. Gas power plants are the easiest to adjust output on (and can be started from effectively zero output as required), but coal and oil plants (and other plants that produce power by burning things) are also easier to adjust the output of than the other sources.

Solar power is the best option. There are no 'clean' alternatives: hydro power is fish killing power, wind power - is bird killing power. Arguably the temperature increase, drought and pesticides will kill off the birds and the bees anyway, both of which are in a precipitous decline in north America with some species (like the evening grosbeak declining by 96% in California and the tricolored blackbird almost disappearing there).

 

The answer is to reverse the model. A distributed network of solar power panels with local storage (something like liquid metal batteries, if they can be made large and safe enough) connected in a network seems theoretically possible. This is far more efficient than centralized generation plants and better suited to the relatively low total output of solar. It would be enormously expensive of course.

[Ozexpatriate]

I'm not condoning this action in any way but I'm also somewhat bothered by the reactions to it, many of which seem rather blanket. In this situation I'm with the general opinion that it wasn't justified, I'm not however of the opinion that any similar sort of action is never justified under any circumstances. We've seen it in this country in the past and in others more recently where downright illegal action that would have got a similar reaction from many at the time has proven to be significant events in getting much needed change going. Therefore any such cases need to be judged on their own merits (which make this one unjustified to me) rather than a general "they're fools."

We will likely see more civil disobedience on the topic of trying to arrest climate change.

 

I am in full accord with everyone who deplored the illegal trespass on the railway as a safety hazard. Notwithstanding the violation of boundaries intended to protect the public they seem to have safely halted and boarded the train and are all dressed in hi-viz and the exercise was clearly not as stupid as it might have been, while still wrong.

 

The chemical reaction of fire is a simple one.

 

C + O₂ -> CO₂

 

Combustion in a modern power plant is very efficient. That means that virtually every atom of every lump of coal in every coal train that goes into every power station is floating around in the atmosphere until it reacts with something else.  Think about how much mass of atomic carbon that is.  I think the real problem is that people cannot imagine a train load of coal invisibly floating around in the atmosphere in exactly the same way that bricks don't*, but that is exactly what happens.

 

It's not woolly hatted alarmism to think that there might be consequences. 

 

The UK produces 493,505 kt of CO₂ per year (1.47% of the world's total). Other than looking to the UK as a political and technology leader the problem is not really the UK.

 

China produces 8,286,892 kt/year (24.65% of the total) and the US is not far behind at 5,433,057 kt/year (16.16%)

 

The world is 33.615,389 Gt/year. In contrast global vulcanism produces 0.2 Gt of CO₂ per year.

 

USGS

Our studies show that globally, volcanoes on land and under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes of CO₂ annually.

We are meddling in forces beyond our ken.

 

* Apologies to Douglas Adams.

[Horsetan]

Solar power is the best option. ....

You have plenty of sun in Australia.

 

In Britain, the availability of sun isn't quite so, er, sunny.

[Anthony_S]

We have the environmental lobby to thank for the bizarre practise of using fossil fuels to chop down trees in the US, then pelletise them using fossil fuels, transport them to a port and load them on to a ship using fossil fuels, transport them thousands of miles across the Atlantic using fossil fuels, unload them from the ship and load onto a train using fossil fuels, transport them to Drax power station using fossil fuels to then burn them less efficiently than coal (which could be sourced locally). I haven't heard any cohesive argument about how this is better for the environment, but I'll bet that somebody is better off financially because of it.

[Dave Scott]

Reminds me of the 'Animal rights' activists who freed the inmates of a mink farm, who went on to devastate  the local indigenous wildlife.

The only thing to query is was it the mink or the activist who went on to devistate indigenous wildlife

[Ozexpatriate]

You have plenty of sun in Australia.

 

In Britain, the availability of sun isn't quite so, er, sunny.

I don't live there any more. Here in Portland, Oregon we get 2,341 hours of sunshine per year. Las Vegas (a particularly sunny place) gets 3,825.

 

For reference, London has 1,460 hours of sunshine per year.

 

Maximizing solar with storage is essential. There may need to be additional sources. It is purely a matter of technology and economics.

[HSTFAN13]

If you were a member of Greenpeace and model railway enthusiast, would you have to use clockwork powered trains?

 

 

Cheers,

Mick

What about small solar panels on top of your locos/units/wagons/coaches ?

HSTFAN13

Lee

[raymw]

Plants, you know, those generally green things, take in CO2, and release oxygen. 45acre greenhouse in Lincs uses waste heat and CO2 from a sugar beat processing plant. Back in Maggie's day, we were going to enter an ice age. As we were going to be generating electricity by means of nuclear fuel power stations producing no CO2,  thought was given to make factories specifically to generate CO2. The thing that started all this green energy panic, was Al Gores crappy film, and the suits jumped on the band wagon. To get to the bottom of this nonsense, you have to chase the money.

 

Solar panels, windmills and the like - there needs to be a dust to dust energy balance. I'm not sure if fibreglass or carbon fibre can be cleanly recycled.

 

Any way, I guess gp were happy with their demo, the power station/railway not so happy, and the rest of the public will chatter about it for a day or two.

 

Best wishes,

 

Ray

[HSTFAN13]

I don't live there any more. Here in Portland, Oregon we get 2,341 hours of sunshine per year. Las Vegas (a particularly sunny place) gets 3,825.

 

For reference, London has 1,460 hours of sunshine per year.

 

Maximizing solar with storage is essential. There may need to be additional sources. It is purely a matter of technology and economics.

The south of England is best for solar and the north of England/Scotland and/or offshore is best for wind

Yes grid connected storage is needed but i think it's a few years off(they did a demo a little Barford and there's a UKPN demo at hemsby)

I think the UKs power generation should be in the future...

Wind onshore and offshore

Solar both large scale solar farms and on most UK buildings(should be all)

Hydro(pumped storage and non pumped)

Tidal(should of been done years ago seems to be taking long)

Gas(in gas turbines as it's flexible and can be used base and peak load and as small back generators/peak load)

Nuclear(fission at mo but fusion when viable)

And coal shouldn't just stop generating now we should be retrofitting CCS when viable and building IGCC plants to continue base load generation for the foreseeable future

And CHP plants should be used were they can be fitted to plants

HSTFAN13

Lee

[phil-b259]

Some of the comments are on here are ridiculous - you can be environmentally conscious without wanting everyone "to live in a cave" etc. Of course difficult decisions need to be made and I don't agree with everything Greenpeace does (eg opposition to nuclear) but on coal they are pretty much right (even if their protest methods can be bonkers/dangerous).

 

Cheers, Mike

 

What I think most people are objecting to is not the overall aim of reducing Greenhouse gasses, etc but rather the fact that Greenpeace are 'picking' on the wrong country - namely US (the UK that is). Overall the UK - (and Western Europe in General) actually have a pretty good record on emissions, with continued and steady improvements being made year on year.

 

HOWEVER any reductions the UK has achieved are more than cancelled out by emissions from the US & China and both these countries are reluctant to do anything about it - In Americas case its the republican controlled Senate / Congress that won't have accept anything that will affect business interests while in China its the desire to continue to industrialise and become a dominant world economic power.

 

Greenpeace also seem to have their head in the sand when it comes to other aspects too. In Eastern Europe coal fired power stations tend to use 'brown' coal which is far more polluting than what we use (even if it is imported) and with Russia's potential to play silly ###### over gas supplies this winter, switching to cleaner sources (and for the Greenies information opting for gas rather than brown coal IS a positive development, not something to be decried from the rafters because it doesn't 'fit' with their ideology).

 

In America / China / Russia the similar actions to what they have done in the UK this week would have them carted off to jail immediately - by force if necessary and in the latter two countries could see the activists held for several years. In the UK Greenpeace know it won't happen here so they cause hassle because its any easy target and continue to ignore the real villains of global warming so to speak.

[HSTFAN13]

We have the environmental lobby to thank for the bizarre practise of using fossil fuels to chop down trees in the US, then pelletise them using fossil fuels, transport them to a port and load them on to a ship using fossil fuels, transport them thousands of miles across the Atlantic using fossil fuels, unload them from the ship and load onto a train using fossil fuels, transport them to Drax power station using fossil fuels to then burn them less efficiently than coal (which could be sourced locally). I haven't heard any cohesive argument about how this is better for the environment, but I'll bet that somebody is better off financially because of it.

 

The main reason why most biomass comes from the US is that there's not enough in UK for demand

HSTFAN13

Lee