VW ordered to set record straight.

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Originally Posted by biggin

So exactly how many people have death certificates with cause of death as "inadvertent inhalation of vehicle emissions"?

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None of course, because the medical profession doesn't use that exact language. It probably uses a dozen technical terms to describe the agonising gasping and coughing that ends up in the victims drowning in their own excreted liquids caused by exposure to excessive fine particles and oxides of nitrogen on a daily basis.

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Originally Posted by biggin

You really need to get a grip on reality.

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Which is called "smog" and it affects big cities all over the world where emissions from millions of vehicles pools in the atmosphere on a daily basis. Of course if you don't live in a big city you can pretend that smog is just a funny kind of sea fog and niver hurt nobahdy.

Smoking or some other medical condition has no part to play in any of these cases I expect. Just smog.

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Originally Posted by biggin

Smoking or some other medical condition has no part to play in any of these cases I expect. Just smog.

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That's right, doctors have no way of working out their patients past history and working out what's contributing to early deaths across an entire population of people. It's like the coal miners in Queensland don't get black lung disease any more because they stopped testing for it. Oh wait, some of them still do.

Just like coal dust only kills some workers, some smokers live to 100, nitrogen oxides don't kill everyone instantly, but you would have to be an idiot to deny the link between the cause and effect over the whole population. The plural of anecdotes isn't data.

There is no such thing as clean coal power - it doesn't exist. Even the most efficient coal plants emit twice as much as gas power plants.
Coal CEO admits that ‘clean coal’ is a myth : RenewEconomy

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Originally Posted by bee utey

That's right, doctors have no way of working out their patients past history and working out what's contributing to early deaths across an entire population of people. It's like the coal miners in Queensland don't get black lung disease any more because they stopped testing for it. Oh wait, some of them still do.

Just like coal dust only kills some workers, some smokers live to 100, nitrogen oxides don't kill everyone instantly, but you would have to be an idiot to deny the link between the cause and effect over the whole population. The plural of anecdotes isn't data.

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I think you'll find "anecdotes" is already plural.
I'm glad we agree on the rest. A link is not 100% of cause. Death by car accident is 100% caused by the collision or after effects in most cases. Have you been watching Zoolander recently?

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Originally Posted by DiscoMick

There is no such thing as clean coal power - it doesn't exist. ....

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No, it doesn't. And neither does clean storage batteries. Everything is relative.

I promised myself a while ago that I wouldn't get involved in these sort of threads, yet here we are. There is no black and white to any argument, so I'll leave it at that. Apologies to the OP.[bigwhistle]

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Originally Posted by DiscoMick

There is no such thing as clean coal power - it doesn't exist. Even the most efficient coal plants emit twice as much as gas power plants.
Coal CEO admits that ‘clean coal’ is a myth : RenewEconomy

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I was about to say the same. Clean coal is a massive lie marketed by those with a vested interest. The output from "clean" coal for the same output is not improved at all.

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Originally Posted by Slunnie

I was about to say the same. Clean coal is a massive lie marketed by those with a vested interest. The output from "clean" coal for the same output is not improved at all.

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Honestly?


Clean Coal means coal fired power stations that are capable of producing more electricity with a lower emission than older type coal fired power stations.


I am quite happy to be proven wrong here but I have never seen a claim that any coal fired power station could be built that did not have some amount of emission. But there are plenty of examples where new coal fired power stations are cleaner than the older type.


How much cleaner these new stations might be is only part of the reason for building them. And will they be dearer than the older ones to run. Yep they sure will be.


But then again, if they subsidised the new coal fired power stations like they subsidise solar and wind generators, then the cost of power from new, cleaner and expensive to build coal fired power stations, per kilowatt produced would actually be less than the cost charged for power coming from older type coal fired power stations.


Not only does solar and wind generators cost far more to set up, but wind generators are incredibly expensive to maintain, so without subsidies we will be paying even higher electricity bills. And subsidising anything is just an other way of paying higher HIDDEN costs for a product.


As for getting rid of coal fired power stations, just have a look at what that has achieved for South Australia. They now have amongst the worlds most expensive electricity, yet it is the most unreliably powered state in Australia.


Both the cost of the electricity and it’s unreliable supply has driven high power users out of the state, and they are not coming to Queensland or NSW, where power is cheaper, they can’t risk the potential of these states following SA, so these companies will end up in China or India, where the electricity is cheaper, but the generation of that electricity is far dirtier than here in Australia.


So if we get sucked in by the greenies, we will loose jobs, which is a lose in taxes as well. We will loose skills because the jobs needed for the ongoing need for those skills will be gone. We will be paying even more for electricity, and in reality, we will actually be contributing, indirectly, to world pollution, not reducing it.


And not only is South Australia now a basket case because of it’s high electricity cost and because the supply is unreliable, when they can’t produce enough electricity from their greenie setup they expect the rest of Australia to make up the difference, and where does the bulk of this imported power come from. Good old coal fired power stations.

And NOTE, on a day to day basis, SA needs anything up to 95% of their power requirements to be supplied from other states.


South Australia’s CLEAN ENERGY is pure B/S.


Now look at the opinion polls in QLD. If Annastacia Palaszczuk continues to try to promote “CLEAN” power here, it is predicted this will help her to loose the next election, and she won’t stand snowball in hells chance if we get the expected power shortages they are predicting for this summer.


Because so many working people have already had enough of these power bill hikes, so as the real facts become available, I don’t think to many VOTERS will continue to back changing to greenie unreliable and expensive power.

Are...the world is ****ed, over populated, standard of living to high and power demand it too big. Cannot go backwards

There are many things I could say in response to that post, but this thread is not in Current Affairs, so politics is not allowed.

I'll just make one point. All of our coal-fired power stations were originally built by state governments so they, and the Snowy Hydro scheme, were all totally taxpayer-funded. Governments only sold off the stations because they were too worn out to be worth upgrading. That's why the private operators are closing them - they're stuffed. Our power network is becoming unreliable because the coal power stations are worn out, becoming unreliable and being closed - 10 in the last decade.
I, for one, think it would be ridiculous to pour another $1 billion into keeping Liddell going for five years when it would still be totally worn out. Plus it only operates at about 40% of capacity most of the time anyway because it is so unreliable.

There are numerous alternatives, such as gas, batteries, solar and wind, which have long-term futures. Coal stations do not have a future.
Gas rather than coal would halve the emissions and we have lots of gas.
Ten of the battery banks SA is installing would provide the 1000 MW of dispatchable power ANEMO says we need.
Another way is to install smaller battery banks in every local sub-station to decentralize the supply when it is needed in local areas.
Solar and wind can keep the battery banks continuously charged through the network to draw down immediately when needed.
Buildings can have individual battery banks to power them at night. I last week had an estimate of $8-12,000 to add a battery bank to my solar system, so it is becoming more affordable all the time.
These technologies are now well-proven and they are the way of the future. They are more reliable than patching up worn out coal power stations.

Also, back on the original topic, vehicle emissions contribute to the illnesses which kill about 2000 Australians every year (more than road crashes). Obviously, illnesses can have multiple causes. My father died of lung cancer. Smoking was a factor, as was a lifetime of breathing diesel fumes from farm tractors and other machinery.

Vehicle emissions are also a major cause of global warming, which is heading for 2 degrees and probably closer to four degrees. The last time the earth was four degrees hotter there was NIL ice at the polar caps and the oceans were 80 metres higher. Think about the effects of the oceans rising 80 metres. How much of the world would be under water? How many billions of people would be forced to become refugees? How many wars would be caused? Could humanity survive?

These are big issues. Our politicians are failing to lead. We are already suffering increased natural disasters because of those failures.

Sorry to sound a bit earnest, but I'm getting jack of some people (not you) who just flatly refuse to face the facts.

I'd expect that an expert on cable sizes would have some idea, but no. The Victorian interconnector can at best supply around 1/3 of SA's electricity, so the claim of 95% is pure hogwash. In fact, SA derives around 50% of its year's electricity production from wind and solar, a teensy weensy bit more than 5%.

The "clean coal" debate is about emissions reductions of 10 to 20% maximum, "slightly less dirty coal" would be a more accurate moniker. Cleanliness isn't just about visible smoke out of the stacks.

SA's energy prices are determined by big multinational retailers. When a letter from my retailer arrived stating a roughly 22% hike was imminent, I shopped around and found a retailer happy to sell at the old price with zero costs to cancel the contract in case I felt hard done by. Nothing to do with wind and solar, just corporate heroes taking the average consumers for suckers.

And this:

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Originally Posted by drivesafe

but wind generators are incredibly expensive to maintain

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Where is the supporting evidence for that claim? It sounds like an urban myth. Coal plants have hundreds of workers per plant, gas plants have tens of workers per plant, wind has ?? workers per farm occasionally doing a little maintenance. All the wind farms I've driven past in SA are characterised by the singular lack of supporting vehicles flocking around in bunches near busy turbines. That's sparrows and crows.