• Skua
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    17 days ago

    We don’t need it to power a particularly significant subset though, just the stuff that’s least practical to take off of hydrocarbon power. The ferry is already built and the islanders need the ferry service. There are going to be edge cases like that in which a carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel will be useful for a while.

    • federal reverseOPM
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      37 days ago

      The ferry is already built

      “It’s already built” is a terrible argument for keeping anything that produces several times its production emissions during its useful lifetime.

      There are a couple billion cars and trucks and heatings that are already built. Somehow, suddenly you’re at a very significant subset of fossil fuel consumption.

      • Skua
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        17 days ago

        Well it only produces that scale of emissions if running on LNG or diesel, right? If it’s running on biogas, that’s another matter. So is it more costly (both in terms of money and resources used) to replace the ferry or to set up biogas infrastructure?

        • federal reverseOPM
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          17 days ago

          Biogas can be largely emissions-neutral — but only if you don’t scale it up. E.g. collecting biogas from municipal organic waste is a good thing. But collecting it from farm animals directly or indirectly from feed production is worse, because you might just be helping factory farms greenwash their ops.