Not all of the flaring is in remote areas, either: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-4...
Yeah, I'm not really a believer in conspiracies, but the whole straw thing feels like a distraction campaign.
I started using Linux as a better and free system than win95, and only after a while thought about the bigger software freedom issues. Before linux, microsoft was just a random company for me. I am not alone in this respect. And look how far open source has come.
In the same way, straw banning can be a 'gateway drug' to environmental awareness. You've done your bit. So you acknowledged there was something to do. Then you dont want that small bit to be meaningless, so you do a tiny bit more All the while advocating to other people this is a worthy cause. Then you find how bigcorps are flagrantly violating the good cause. Of course this cant be right. And drip by drip you wear down a mountain.
Try swapping out the 'wrong' and 'good' with something else and the reasoning seems far clearer.
"Hey, I've done my two hours of volunteering at the orphanage, now let me go back to running my child sweat shop."
If you feel the scaling is unequal, change it. At any scaling I can imagine the initial reaction to someone seriously holding that view is disbelief and then mocking.
Keeping everything else the same is hard with diets, but just cutting soda does seem to have a real impact.
A better analogy for the straw is skipping one fry in each meal. Technically that's an improvement, but the amount is negligible and if you act like it made a difference you're more likely to skip opportunities to actually force meaningful change.
Edit: Did some googling, and this article sums up my concern nicely:
"Banning straws may confer 'moral license' – allowing companies and their customers to feel they have done their part. The crucial challenge is to ensure that these bans are just a first step."
https://earth.stanford.edu/news/do-plastic-straws-really-mak...
Comment with more details and a link to the study:
I can think of populations for which it's more necessary (e.g. the homeless) but as I think you've posted about before - the solution to that is to, well, fix the root issue, no?
Maybe it's an artifact of my upbringing - I literally couldn't afford takeaway food apart from the odd cone of chips (wrapped in paper) or whatever, a McDonalds meal with a straw etc is still something I think of as being absurdly expensive (it's like an hour at minimum wage).
Even middle class families in the UK often just don't eat out like this because it's both bloody expensive and usually crap food.
It's weird to me that people treat this luxury, and of fast food at that, as something that absolutely has to be protected?
When I was a homemaker, workers at grocery stores where I shopped would joke about getting me to talk to their wife do I could convince her to cook as much as I did. They could tell by the frequency of my visits to the store and the contents of my cart that most of our dinners were home cooked.
A lot of modern Americans don't really know how to cook. One expression for a woman who can't cook is "Microwave queen."
I hate microwave food and seldom eat it. I think most stuff that comes out of a microwave is pretty revolting.
In recent years, it has been my observation that grocery stores are simply mobbed in the days before a big holiday when the stores expect to close and a big home cooked meal is thw norm. I also routinely see comments on the internet about how impossible it is to cook for one person or how impossible it is to stay on budget and eat healthy when you don't have time or energy for anything but takeout.
I strongly suspect a lot of Americans don't do all that much cooking. Fast food seems to be basic survival for many Americans. They don't have the money or time for fancier restaurants and they don't have the skills or time to cook from scratch.
If you don't have the time or skill to cook, you will find it tough to find the time to learn to cook. A lot of Americans are very time stressed.
It's not correct to look at, say, a father who can just let the woman of the house be the homemaker, or a person who just buys take out all the time, and say "they don't have the time or skill". I know people like this. The former is especially prolific - they will go ahead and pretend they can't cook, make silly unhealthy meals, because they can't be arsed and know that wifey will sort it all out.
They have what they consider to be a substitute good and so they don't need to cook. They could rapidly develop the skill if they wished to. No, they won't be some gourmet chef, but making mashed potatoes and stews and salads and stuff like that basically requires knowing that you can boil things to cook them.
You could compare it to, say, a well off parent who has no idea how to raise children because they just pay for a nanny or whatever. If you forced the issue; they lost their job, say; they would learn because the alternative wouldn't bear thinking about.
It's a hell of a lot easier to buy a hob and some pans, than it is to move home. Cars are a far more difficult issue because there are homes in locations that are simply too isolated to function properly without the mobility a car provides.
(Amusingly, I'm in temporary accommodation at the moment - it would be completely impractical to live here without a car, but also without home cooking, because the nearest fast food place is... I don't even know, probably over 50km away.)
Groceries are soooo cheap in America, take advantage of it.
I've heard something like your last paragraph there a lot.
I don't really understand cooking as something that takes a lot of skill or time. I just made a stew whilst chatting on here, it took less than 10 mins and you just throw things in a pot.
Hell, if I had a McDonalds or whatever _next door_ it would take me more than 10 mins to get food from there.
What it does require is some level of capital investment - you need pots and pans, a hob, a stable place to store that stuff, etc. Which is a barrier.
The whole "Americans can't cook" thing just seems like a silly joke to me though. It's not like other countries don't have that sort of person. They'd figure it out if you took away their microwave bullshit, they're not gonna starve and die.
And of course, this is all tangential to the issue of straws. There we're talking about opening a tap and putting a cup under it. Or a bottle if you have no running water.
My dad was very old fashioned and never learned to cook. My oldest son found cooking scarily intimidating, though he did eventually learn to cook.
My mother is German and she cooked up a storm, plus sewed and knitted and crocheted. I'm actually one of the least domestic ladies of my extended family. I don't really like cooking and I never learned to sew or crochet or knit or quilt. I feel like some terrible failure of a woman in the eyes of my relatives, but Americans often seem to think I'm some kind of domestic goddess because I stayed home with my children, I cooked dinner most nights and we didn't live in squalor.
My oldest son was saying to me just recently that he thinks something went very wrong somewhere in the world that we don't know how to teach people to cook. Maybe it's some weird American thing.
I wrote a smidgen about him learning to cook here:
https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/
I'm actually planning to start a blog about feeding yourself well because this seems like such a big issue for so many people.
Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. I know it's a thing - I have old friends with extended families that are like this.
I'm pretty sure it is a weird American thing. It doesn't help that you guys have seemingly super cheap fast food.
One thing that might be interesting to look at is - if fast food just disappeared tomorrow - imagine every restaurant below say $15 a head just was gone overnight, microwave meals disappear, etc - would there even be enough food? Would the local supermarkets have enough or would there have to be an adjustment period?
If yes then the supply side of things is perfectly fine. Stores shelves might be low for a few days from the rush, but that will be over very quickly. All the interesting stuff is out of scope.
If no then I don't think the scenerio says anything useful about the places people eat. You're just deleting a chunk of the food supply, and you would cause similar problems no matter what random chunk you deleted. Even if it wasn't particularly big. So the scenario tells you nothing about whether any kinds of food are too popular. It just says that a sudden cut to the food supply is bad.
How many people don't have a stove i.e. they're effectively homeless if not literally on the street? Stuff like that.
I have no idea. It'd definitely be alright in the UK but the way I see Americans go on about this stuff on here makes it seem as if McDonalds is critical infra.
*The US is noticeably higher overall, but there are about 13 US states including NY and California with lower averages than the UK.
1 for 1,600 people in UK
1 for 1,700 people in US
> There we're talking about opening a tap and putting a cup under it
Requires a minimum grip strength and coordination.
Plastic waste is also an issue (not sure if straws are really the biggest issue there), but it shouldn't be hard to tackle both.
Of note: Gas requires a pipeline. Take a look at some recent well-meaning protests around pipelines; they've likely had the opposite of the desired effect.
Compromise would be way better than "my way or the highway" extremist positions.
"Son, this is where your ancestors were buried, but we're not quite sure what happened to their remains after the oil company scraped the top few feet of soil in the 2026 oil spill cleanup and 'remediated' with clean soil imported from somewhere else."
Obviously it'd be best if we didn't use any hydrocarbons for burning, but the alternatives to pipelines in the current economy are:
* Flare the gas off, instant C02
* Train crashes
* Increase well head pressures creating an explosion hazard (and if it blows, you now have a oil well fire)
* Put it through older pipelines engineered to safety standards of the 1950s
If not what is the timescale to pay itself back?
Would the following alternative work? :
The well delivers barrels filled with oil to the connected world, and thus needs a constant supply of empty oil barrels. Why not fill them with liquid nitrogen (generated at large "economy of scale" liquefaction units at the connected world) and use this to liquefy the gas at the remote well?
https://nubluenergy.com/lng-facility-implementation/
Re: your liquid nitrogen idea; "that's not how physics works." Even if you could store liquid nitrogen in oil barrels (you can't) ... how does that help you?
Edit: it's not surprising that LNG liquefaction plants cost on the order of say billions of dollars: by economy of scale one is driven to build extremely large plants. This does not mean smaller (but less efficient) liquefaction plants at much lower costs are impossible, but it does mean those smaller plants don't reach the same efficiency as the bigger ones... (my refrigerator is condensing and freezing water from air...)
It's not like people haven't thought of these things before. Thermodynamics is well understood.
I am not proposing to bubble raw natural gas through liquid nitrogen.
>It's not like people haven't thought of these things before. Thermodynamics is well understood.
I don't claim to be the first to come up with the idea of using liquid nitrogen to liquefy raw natural gas. I am entirely open to the idea that using liquid nitrogen to liquefy RNG is somehow uneconomical or infeasible. I was hoping to get a more constructive reply: not references of how expensive or hard a smaller scale liquefaction plant is, but rather papers detailing why specifically using a heat exchanger with liquid nitrogen is infeasible, if as you say "It's not like people haven't thought of these things before."
What is raw natural gas? Predominantly methane, and some slightly longer alkanes, with impurities (H2S, CO2, N2, He,...) see [1].
What are the atmospheric boiling points of the alkanes? see [2]:
alkane, boiling point:
methane -183 °C
ethane -183 °C
propane -190 °C
butane -138 °C
pentane -130 °C
hexane -95 °C
heptane -91 °C
octane -57 °C
nonane -51 °C
decane -30 °C
undecane -25 °C
dodecane -10 °C
eicosane 37 °C
triacontane 66 °C
Observe that the lowest boiling point of the alkanes (the fuel in natural gas) is for propane at -190 °C.
The atmospheric boiling point of liquid nitrogen is −195.795 °C [3], wich is colder than the boiling point of any alkane!
What does this mean by definition? that a balloon filled with gaseous alkanes, when submerged in a heat bath of liquid nitrogen, and left to equilibrate temperature, will fully liquefy.
>Thermodynamics is well understood.
^ indeed
(This is my first order interpretation, assuming the mixing entropy does not decrease the boiling point of a mixture of alkanes, if however this is the case, I would like to see an explicit reference to a paper describing this for alkanes.)
So essentially heat exchangers and a supply of liquid nitrogen should be able to liquefy raw natural gas.
Now what about the economics of having to generate liquid nitrogen?
Let's take a step back: domestic natural gas pipelines connected to the gas grid doesn't contain liquid but gaseous natural gas. So at some point the liquid natural gas is expanded to a gas, and this absorbs heat at a low temperature. (I don't know at what point in the distribution chain this happens, but it necessarily happens somewhere.) This is the ideal point to colocate the liquid nitrogen generation plant: use the evaporation of LNG to gaseous natural gas to help the heat pump liquefy air/nitrogen, so the energy required to liquefy nitrogen is largely recycled.
The storage of liquid nitrogen at the gas well should be an entirely solved problem: at the exact sciences campus (de Sterre) of the Ghent university, at the solid state research block, there is a large (fenced off) tank of liquid nitrogen, and once in a blue moon a tank wagon comes to refill it...
[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/fsc432/content/natural-gas-c...
[2] http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/501hcboilingpts.html
My guess is that in practice, it's not profitable given the current price of natural gas and the difficulties of keeping liquid nitrogen cold - the smaller the container, the shorter the time it can economically stay liquid. So you'd need either pretty bulky equipment that needs to be moved once the gas at a well runs out, or you'd have to spend an awful lot of the energy from the gas keeping your N2 cold during transport. Which even if it is profitable on paper, might not survive contact with the field - oil leases are not controlled environments, and Murphey's law is out in force out there in a way that can be easily underestimated.
Banning gas flaring would be extremely short sighted and counter productive.
Plastic straws/bags/etc are obviously small (but not necessarily negligible) efforts. They rise to prominence mostly because they are easy to mock.