Mondeo Diesel Stag Under Threat?

[wilf]

Hmm, lemme see. I know - let's enforce the use of catalytic convertors, which will result in all research into lean burn (and hence fuel and CO2 efficient) engines ceasing for ever.

A side effect of having cats is, ooh, lots more CO2! ( and suicidal folk have found new ways to off themselves without CO).

Now let's declare CO2 a poison! And tax the people we made pay to have catalytic convertors fitted to their cars on it. And encourage a huge rise in NOx and particulate-filthy diesel cars because of Company Car taxation rules penalising CO2.


Engineers are turning in their graves the world over.

BTW - China is forcing 6 MILLION older cars off their roads to reduce pollution. Nothing to do with their coal/peat fired power stations or hugely polluting industry then...........

[Ian Durrant]

Which just goes to show that these scrappage schemes have nothing to do with being green, and everything to do with selling new cars, which brings in lots of tax revenue for the government...

Perhaps the Green Party (or whatever they may be called nowadays) would do well to promote the use of a car for as long as possible, instead of this ongoing nonsense about buying new (and admittedly more frugal in the short-term) cars every three years and constantly insisting on ever increasing fuel taxation in the name of the environment... A scheme to subsidise better maintenance of older cars instead to make sure they are as good and safe as they can be would make more environmental sense....

Cheers,
Joakim

Spot on! I couldnt agree more!

[mike@thenook]

Clearly we are all of a like mind, which I guess is another reason why we all love our Stags and wouldn't dream of swapping them for a hybrid or something similar!

It also illustrates without getting too political, why the green party fail to make any inroads.........

Cheers!

[73stagman]

See if we turn this thread into one that supports "change for good" rather than change due to poorly thought out and questionable reasoning then I cant disagree...

Any honest physicist would assert that there can be no truly greener energy vehicles until we adapt a different type of fuel altogether. Fossil fuels are widely used to make petrol, diesel LPG and electricity. Using either one of those "products" of fossil fuels will never be any "greener" than any other.
The energy cycle is the same one. It can neither be created or destroyed it can only be converted and we use fossil fuel almost entirely but in different parts of the energy cycle. However the "carbon" output is the same if the overall total carbon cycle is evaluated.
You take a plant and it dies. It gets squashed by the ground and in time turns into coal, oil and gas. We drill into the ground and extract the oil and gas. We dig in the ground and pick up the coal.
We burn the coal and make electricity. (We then make wires using fossil fuels and plastics from fossil fuels to transport that electricity to where it can be used)
We collect the gas and burn it to make electricity (and see above..) or burn it to convert it directly into kinetic energy in an internal combustion engine.
We extract the oil and process it into all sorts of chemicals and oils and solvents...and we use pretty much all of it.. in fact we use a much larger percentage of it than we do of the animals we farm for food. In fact it is one of the most natural resources we use and we use it pretty efficiently. The by products include water and carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and in much smaller quantites we also produce ozone.... the CO and the ozone will mix naturally to produce carbon and co2. The Carbon cycle includes being absorbed by plants and converted into oxygen and energy for growth via photosynthesis (another process which is totally natural and not fully understood!). The water is absorbed into the atmosphere and falls back as rain which works with the photosynthesis process makes plants grow and then die.... etc etc etc....
All the time we are extracting oil from the ground the ground is making more oil. We know how quickly we are extracting the oil but we have no idea how much is still available now or how fast new oil is being regenerated.... but it is being regenerated. It is a renewable resource regardless of what politicians and so called experts tell us because we didnt make it so it occurred naturally and we have not interrupted the process of life and death of plant matter. Most likely the process happens much more quickly than we get told because it currently suits politicians and the so called experts to have us believe we need to use less of it because it is a limited resource and we are damaging the planet by using it.

I dont believe there is any doubt that global warming is happening. I think it is a natural cycle and is totally outside our control and I dont believe we have any significant effect on it. I think it is extremely arrogant of mankind to think that it has much negative effect or even more arrogant to think we can affect it positively.
To think that if we limit how we burn the fuel in our very small transport systems will have any effect is even more arrogant.

However if we really thought a different approach was required to transport ourselves around we would look to fuels that are not fossil based. I dont mean wind thats a waste of time and space. It cant be controlled predicted or stored! We cant generate enough electricity efficiently enough with wind turbines to even dent our energy needs for our every day life let alone our transport system but with careful monitoring and properly controlled research we could use atomic energy, hydrogen or other air born gas fuels to supplement our fossil fuel use.. with no atmospheric effect.
However those fuels do not sit nicely with the current political appetite for "Green" energy although in fact they would all be viable efficient alternatives if we think we are using fossil fuels more quickly than it is being regenerated... remember we have no idea how long that takes just that it does happen. It is not a limited resource.

The green movement is a political one. There is no real science to support their politics just scientists paid to generate results that match the requirements of a green political system.
Because in general people can be manipulated by politicians they are lead to believe "indisputable" facts and are shown films that support those indisputable facts.
Experiments that dont support the green political theories are terminated before the facts can be realised or finance is withdrawn because governments withdraw the subsidies because it is not politicaly expedient to generate results that dont support their poilitical persuasions....

Sorry........ Rant over.....going to get a bottle of wine and a warm blanket. sit in the corner and sing lullabies to myself until the pain in my head goes away.... maybe sanity will return by morning and i can join the misled crowds and continue to separate my plastics, tins glass and paper into two different containers which the council will collect in a dirty diesel burning truck which they will have to drive down my street twice in to collect the different containers that i have separated out and drive the hundred mile round trip (twice) to the land fill site in order to process my household waste efficiently......

[jagorstag]

Well said Neil, very persuasive and it makes a lot of sense.

Enjoy your wine!

Cheers,
Joakim

[Firept]

For some light entertainment try reading:- http://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-After-S.../dp/1908717890.
and remember that the government do not want to reduce fuel consumption nor encourage to use any "green" sources of energy as they loose out big time on the duty and VAT hence all the reductions in subsidy for PV power and LPG etc (Unlike the rest of Europe!)

[jakesmig]

Some good points there Neil, greenies will have you burning in hell for that.

Thank god for global warming, if it didn't exist our atmosphere would never have formed, how many billions of years ago?

Never really got my head round CO2 being responsible for GW, the volume of the stuff in the atmosphere is such a low percentage (somewhere about 0.01% I believe) that it is difficult to see how a rise in output is responsible for such 'devastating results'.

I also dont understand how CO2, which is atomicaly heavier than the majority of atmospheric gasses, can rise to stratospheric levels in order to reflect UV rays back to the earth, those rays already having been reflected upwards themselves. According to scientists, there hasn't been an appreciable increase in high level CO2 over the last 20 years. I would have thought rampant greenhouse gasses would have exponentially reflected increasing quantities of UV rays back out into space, thereby leading to a cooling of the earth. maybe they act like diodes,clever little things.

Lay a couple of thought on the table.

84% of the naturally generated oxygen in the world is produced by the oceans as a bye product of bacteria, plankton, krill etc absorbing CO2 as food and excreeting oxygen as 'waste'. The bacterial reaction is how our atmosphere was created in the first place. Is the 'rapid' increase in CO2 levels caused by the oceans not taking in so much CO2, and if so, why?

The number of 'dead zones' (areas of depleted or non existent oxygen content) in our oceans are increasing in number and size, and a high proportion of them are near estuaries, all over the world, but, IMO, more prevalent near industrialised continents. A lot of these zones appear to be caused by algael bloom, which when alive at surface level devours absorbed oxygen, blocks out the sub surface sunlight, and when they die off it falls to the ocean floor smothering all plant life. Both these actions are detrimental to health of the ocean. the bacteria, plankton, krill need sunlight to synthesize the CO2 and fish etc need the bottom feed which is killed off by the algae 'carpet'.

What causes the algael bloom? Modern contaminates washed down river, particularly phosphates, the majority of which comes from fertiliser in water runoff from agricultural land. Modern farming has been increasingly using phosphate rich fertilisers since the mid 1800's, in the form of guano and in even more so since the end of WW2, which coincides with the scientists statistical increase in CO2 levels and their unsubstantiated claim of an increase in global temperature.

Who is easier to blame, the filthy motorists or those who (thankfully) provide our food?

I'm going now..................

John

[mike@thenook]

If only I could have got my points and doubts across as succinctly as you have Neil & John, absolutely spot on and the finale about the recycling....rumour has it a lot of it ends up in some distant land having travelled a very long way by ship!

[DJT]

Wow! I didn't expect to start a learned discussion on right and wrongs of the energy situation. Very succinct points made, much of which I agree with.

The waste hierarchy is as follow:

Reduce - cut back on buying unnecessary new items (did you really need that new TV Andrew? ) and cut out excessive packaging fall into this category
Re-use - find another use for an item, or continue to use an old item rather than replace (the Stag falls into this category)
Recycle - use waste to make new products
Recovery - use waste to generate energy
Landfill - last resort.

[jbuckl]

It used to be the case in the '90's that you needed to do 600,000 miles in a 30mpg car to use the same amount of fuel energy as it took to build the car.
Its probably closer to 1,000,000 now as cars use even more energy to make than they used to.
Twin powertrain vehicles like pious & lexus hybrids even more.

BTW, who said Faye knew anything about vehicles in the first place?

The TV licensing advert / song 'you push a little button & you make a car' sums it up.

http://www.advertlyrics.co.uk/push-little-button-tv-licence-advert-lyrics-jingle/

take the (hybrid) bus.

[Ian Durrant]

I agree with Neil and others in this thread and they all said it more articulately than I could.

I do feel the need to point out however that we are not allowed to call it "Global Warming" any more though. Its been changed to "Climate Change". I think that's the most telling thing of all.

[73stagman]

I agree with Neil and others in this thread and they all said it more articulately than I could.

I do feel the need to point out however that we are not allowed to call it "Global Warming" any more though. Its been changed to "Climate Change". I think that's the most telling thing of all.

You are right of course Ian. Climate change is the new "phrase" because we have recently seen large parts of the globe with the coldest as well as warmest days ever recorded. Not a good selling point for global warming but an easy way of selling climate change... and we cant deny that as it is happening in our life time. Ice caps are melting and the number of year round snow covered mountain peaks is reducing. The discussion of why it is happening will carry on after our lifetime I believe!

[TR5convalescent]

I'd just like to say that Stagman's post is probably one of the most well reasoned that I have ever read on this subject.