Scientific American's Path to Sustainability: Let's Think about the Details
Posted by Gail the Actuary on November 9, 2009 - 10:10am
Scientific American presents "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030" in its November issue. In many ways, it sounds good. But let's think about the details: What would the end result look like? Would it really be sustainable? What would the costs really be? Is there any way we could afford to do what is proposed?
The authors of the article, Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, propose substituting wind, water, and solar (WWS) energy for all other forms of energy by 2030, not for just the US, but for the world. The types of energy sources that would be eliminated include the following:
• Petroelum (including gasoline, diesel, propane, heating oil, etc.)
• Natural gas
• Coal
• Liquid biofuels, such as ethanol
• Wood and other biomass
• Nuclear
All that would remain would be wind, wave power, tidal energy, hydroelectric, geothermal, and solar. Because of the ambitious timeframe, the only techniques that can be used are ones that work at large scale today, or are very close to working.
What would we end up with?
Essentially, we would need to change all of the world's infrastructure to use either electricity or solar or water power directly--by 2030. What might this mean?
• Airplanes. The authors propose that airplanes be powered by hydrogen powered fuel cells (with the hydrogen be made by hydrolysis using WWS energy sources). I understand that hydrogen is three times as bulky as gasoline, explodes easily, and escapes fairly quickly from its holding tanks, making it difficult to store for very long. It seems like airplanes and helicopters would need to look more like blimps, to hold the necessary fuel. Unless the explosion issue is solved, the popularity of hydrogen fuel cells would likely be pretty low.
• Ships. The authors don't tell us how ships would be powered. Clearly sailing ships would meet the criteria, but would be quite slow. Because of their slow time for passage, we would need a lot more sailing ships than the types of ships we use now, because so many would be in transit at a given time. Barges could float down rivers, and if the current isn't too strong, could perhaps be towed back in some way (boat with fuel cell?). Ships powered by hydrogen fuel cells might also work, but they would have the same issues as for airplanes. Because of their long trips, leakage would be more of an issue than on airplanes.
• Automobiles and Trucks. According to the authors, these would be powered by batteries or hydrogen powered fuel cells. There are several issues--the technology is only barely there for automobiles and trucks--for example, I don't know of anyone working on battery-powered technology for long distance trucking. Fuel cell technology is very expensive. David Strahan in The Last Oil Shock says that the current cost is about $1 million dollars per car. He quotes the chief engineer at Honda as saying it would take 10 years to get the cost down to $100,000 a car.
Minerals shortages are also likely to be a problem for converting autos and trucks to batteries or to hydrogen fuel cells. The Scientific American article mentions following materials as being in short supply: rare-earth metals for electric motors, lithium for lithium-ion batteries and platinum for fuel cells. The article mentions recycling as a partial solution. Analyses published at The Oil Drum, such as this one, indicate that we would likely run out of rare materials fairly quickly, even with recycling.
• Farm equipment; bulldozers; cement mixers; and other heavy equipment. Would need to be converted to electric. It is not clear that the technology (or rare materials needed for the technology) exist to do so.
• Heating of buildings; heating for cooking and baking; hot water heating; commercial heating; heating of grains to remove excess moisture. Would need to be converted to electric, or in some cases solar. This would be true, even where heating is now done over wood or charcoal fires, such as in Africa or China.
• Mining and manufacturing. Would need to be converted to all electric. Presumably oil and natural gas extraction would continue, but at possibly lower rates, because of their uses for non-energy uses, such as textiles, asphalt, plastics and lubrication. Drilling for oil and gas would be converted to electric as well.
What steps would be needed to build all of these things?
It seems like we would first need to figure out what the end point would look like, and then work backwards.
We are told that the authors of the Scientific American article think we would need the following:
• 3.8 million large wind turbines
• 90,000 solar electricity generating plants
• "Numerous geothermal, tidal, and rooftop photovoltaic installations"
Besides these, we would need to build all of the new airplanes, ships, cars, trucks, heavy equipment, and new appliances that would be needed under the new regime. Individual homeowners would need to get their homes rewired for the larger amount of electricity they would use--especially if they are converting to electric home heating.
One thing we need to plan for is a greatly expanded and improved electrical grid. The Scientific American article indicates that the variability in generation would be mostly smoothed out by combining electrical transmission of many different types--wind, hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, and wave--over a wide geographical area. To do this will require considerable long distance transmission, often between different countries--including some that may not be friendly with each other. The grid will also need to be upgraded to be "smart," so automobiles can draw electric power at the times of day when it is not needed elsewhere.
Once we have figured out what the new system will look like, we will need to figure out what kind of factories are needed to build all of the devices for the new system, and what raw materials the factories will need. Some of the raw materials can perhaps be obtained by recycling, and some factories can perhaps be obtained by converting other factories, but this won't always be the case. It is likely that new factories will need to be built, and new mines opened, especially for the rare minerals.
By the time we start seeing many finished good produced, it is likely that we will be at least half way through the 20 year period. In part, this is because we are still working out technology details (for example, how to efficiently build a hydrogen fuel cell powered airplane). Also, once we get those details worked out, we need to build mines for raw materials and build the factories to make the new devices. It is only when we get those steps taken care of that we can build what we really want--the airplanes, the new ships, the wind turbines, the solar PV, and all of the rest.
When sizing the factories, we will need to size them not for "normal" production levels, but for converting the economy quickly to use the new power sources. For example, under normal circumstances, if earth-moving equipment is expected to last for 40 years, we would expect to need factories to make 1/40 of the world's needed earth-moving equipment in a given year. But if we need to ramp up to replacement in 10 years, we will need 4 times as many factories. (What do we do with the excess factories at the end?)
How much would this all cost?
The authors tell us that they expect the cost of the new WWS energy generation equipment would be $100 trillion over 20 years. But that doesn't include the cost of all the new infrastructure to go with it--the new airplanes and ships and cars and trucks, or the electrical transmission lines. In total, the cost will be far higher than $100 trillion--lets guess $200 trillion--to be paid for over the next 20 years.
The Scientific American article gives the impression that the costs will be low, because it looks only at the cost the new electricity generation, and assumes that cost of generation will go down with volume and with additional research. It also implicitly assumes that debt financing over a long period, such as 40 years, will be used, so we don't have to pay for the cost of the new system before we start using it. But how realistic is that?
The cars, trucks, boats, airplanes, coal fired power plants, etc. we are currently using won't have much trade-in value once power is generated by WWS, and the new equipment will likely be fairly expensive. So we will be faced with buying new high priced equipment, with little trade-in value from what we used previously. In many cases, businesses would not normally be replacing equipment this soon. The debt that was taken on to pay for all of our current equipment won't magically go away either--it will still need to be paid.
So how will we pay for all of the new equipment? The governments of the world are pretty much maxed out for borrowing. Companies are not going to be able to take on a project of this magnitude either, especially since they already have debt to service. It seems to me that the only way a program such as the program of WWS fuels replacing other fuels can be financed is through increased taxes that would cover each year's expenditures, as they are made.
So let's think about how much this would cost. $200 trillion over 20 years amounts to $10 trillion a year, spread over world economies. The US share of this would be something around 21%, based on the ratio of US GDP to world GDP. So let's say that the US would need to fund $2.1 trillion a year. Let's compare this to current taxes. In 2008, US Federal, State, and Local taxes combined amounted to $4.1 trillion according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. In order to collect $2.1 trillion more, a tax increase equal to slightly more than 50% of all taxes currently paid would be required. If the additional tax were collected as a percentage of "personal income" (which includes wages, social security income, rents, dividends, etc.), it would amount to 17% of personal income. It seems unlikely that a tax of this magnitude, or even half of this magnitude, would be agreed to by tax payers.
If such a tax were passed, after a few years there would be benefits that would start offsetting its cost, and might lead to a lower tax, and after 2030, perhaps lower costs overall, because it is no longer necessary to purchase fossil fuels. The benefits that would start offsetting costs would be sales of electricity and other energy, and sales or leasing of vehicles and other goods produced. Many of the sales of goods would be going to replace automobiles that had worn out, factories beyond their useful life, and ships that no longer had value to the owners.
But there is a remaining issue. There will be a lot of assets which would still have considerable value in 2030, if it weren't for the new law. For example, a new car with an internal combustion engine that was manufactured in 2028 will still have considerable value, and a gas fired stove a homeowner owns will still have value, even though he needs to replace it with an electric one. A coal fired power plant built in 1980 is likely to still have value, apart from this law, and so will all of the tankers used for international transport of oil, and all of the natural gas pipelines. Should the owners of these assets be compensated for value of their otherwise-useful assets? There is nothing built into the tax to do so.
It would seem to me that these owners should be compensated, even if it takes a higher tax to do so. In part, this compensation could come in the form of "trade in" value, if a new automobile or electric stove or other item is purchased. But suppose the assets that lose value belong to businesses, and aren't easily traded in for corresponding asset--such as a coal fired power plant, or natural gas pipelines. I would argue that compensation for the remaining value of these is really needed as well.
The assets that will lose value because of the new law are typically owned by a company. The stocks and bonds of these companies will generally have a wide variety of owners--very often pension plans, insurance companies, endowment funds, and individuals saving for their retirements. If the otherwise-useful assets of these companies are taken without compensation, the companies are likely to default on their bonds, and the stocks of these companies will lose value. This will mean that some pension funds will not be able to pay their promised payments, and some life insurance policies will not pay as promised. If there is no compensation to these companies by a tax or some sort, the loss will flow through the system and hit others--with retirees likely hit the hardest. So there will be a loss to the system, one way or another.
How sustainable would this system be?
There are a number of weak areas in this system:
• There are not likely to be enough rare minerals (and even not-so-rare minerals), to make all of the desired high-tech end products. Recycling will help, but it is likely that the system will run into a bottleneck in not very many years.
• The system will use a huge number of electrical transmission lines. These transmission lines are subject to all kinds of disturbances--hurricane or other windstorm destruction, forest fires, land or snow slide, malicious destruction by those not happy for some reason (perhaps those unhappy by wealth disparities). Fixing lines that need repair will be challenging. We currently use helicopters and specialized equipment. These would need to be adequately adapted to a system without fossil fuels.
• If electricity is out in an area, pretty much all activity in an area will stop (except that powered by local PV), and there will be no back-up generators. Residents will not be able to recharge vehicles, so they will quickly become useless. Even vehicles coming into an area may get stranded for lack of recharge capability. Food deliveries and water may be a problem. The current system at least offers some options--back-up generators, and cars and trucks powered by petroleum that one can drive away.
• Operating the system will require a huge amount of international co-operation, because the transmission system will cross country lines. If one country becomes unable to pay its share, or fails to make repairs, it could be a problem.
• All of the high tech manufacturing will require considerable international co-operation and trade. This could be interrupted by debt defaults by major players, or by countries hoarding raw materials, or by difficulty in producing enough ships and airplanes to handle international trade.
• The system clearly can't continue forever. It could be stopped by a lack of rare minerals, or international disputes, or lack of adequate international trade. The system doesn't provide any natural transition to a truly sustainable future. For example, food production is likely to still be done using industrial agriculture, with the food that is produced shipped to consumers a long distance away. It will be difficult to transition to a system which is truly sustainable at the point the system stops working.
What would a reasonable timeframe for transition be?
It seems to me that a reasonable timeframe for a transition such as that discussed in the Scientific American article would be 50 years, rather than 20 years suggested in the Scientific American article. With such a timeframe, there will be a little more time to fine tune technology, so as to find cost-efficient solutions that scale well. We also have more time to use the factories that are built, so that we don't have to overbuild, just to meet a deadline. Costs are likely to much easier to handle, since there will not be as much of an overlap issue. In addition, there will be much less problem of having to dispose of other-wise useful assets.
The problem is that we really don't have 50 years to make a transition. We already are on the downslope. We should have started back in the 1960s with a project like this.
It seems to me that all we can do is a very much reduced version of an approach such as the one described in the Scientific American article. Given the timing, we may not even want to do an approach such as described in the article. The approach described assumes a high level of international trade continuing long-term. This is a fairly optimistic assumption, given the difficulty of air and ship transportation without fossil fuels.
Instead of the high tech approach advocated by Scientific American, we may want to find solutions that can be done locally, with local materials. For example, we may want to encourage local agriculture. For industry, we may want to look at solutions that have worked in the past, such as wind powered factories, as discussed in this recent post. These were built with local materials, and were used to power factories directly, without conversion to electricity. With such solutions, a transition to a truly sustainable future will be much more of a possibility.
Scientific American's Path to Sustainability: Let's Think about the Details
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Scientific American's Path to Sustainability: Let's Think about the Details
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395 comments
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A few points:
1. Why does the government have to do it all? Gail's taxation plan assumes they will. I agree it may be wise to have the government set up the transmission network as a catalyst to get wind and solar going, but the government doesn't have to own every power plant. Nor does the government have to own every car and airplane.
2. Pass a ban on new fossil and nuke plant construction. As more/replacement power is needed, then it will be constructed from one of the favored sources. Although I think 20 years is too short a phase out for recently constructed powerplants, establish a schedule (maybe by 2050) to have them eliminated.
3. The use of explosive hydrogen will replace the use of totally non-flammable petroleum products? For pete's sake, when will people stop repeating this canard about the supposed danger of hydrogen? A gallon of gasoline fumes is roughly equivalent to a stick of dynamite, and it's characteristics of pooling and evaporating make it particularly dangerous. Hydrogen will of course tend to float away.
4. I would include the use of electricity generated from manure to methane plants. Probably better to burn the methane than to let it into the atmosphere.
I think Gail's comparison to the tax take was partly just that - a comparison. It shows that 2.1 trillion dollars is a lot of money. However, if it doesn't come from government then how will the investment be made for this super ambitious plan? For example, it's a high risk plan, so one wouldn't expect private companies to put in such investment. If it's mandated by government, as a way to get it to happen, are you saying that private companies should be forced to invest funds at this rate?
The risk of explosion may be overdone but the other points about hydrogen powered planes are valid.
I made similar comments to Gail's in a Sciam blog post about the article and in a largely supportive article by Tom Whipple. I think we'll see a lot more of these grand schemes as it starts to become obvious that energy is a problem. They might also be proposed for climate change reasons but I don't think there is the slightest chance of any government proposing such schemes for that reason.
It is all about preaching to the converted. The rest will not hear.
Olduvai Theory is not liked by the general public. Jim Kunstler is never taken seriously.
Our present High-tech society and our planet with 6 Billion people really does not have a benign solution. We can wish, hope, and pray all we want but our present industrial creation is a pyramid upside down.
1) Governments are totally incapable of doing anything except incremental Status Quo. The answers will not be on the "big scale". Already the US cannot maintain much its infrastructure, let alone actually do a massive re-engineer. Its back to the Bill Gates's in a garage to get new ways to do things.
2)The nuclear scientists tell us Nuclear re-breeders are a solution that can span another few hundred years with no worse results than we already have.
Oil, gas and Coal-- after India and China each have three cars in their back yard like in the US-- will be long gone, so need no action. CO2 is fast losing its "Monster" status as the "Climate Change" game evolves to what it really is.
3)Hydrogen containment is probably the single most important problem for the industry and seems to have no workable solution for our types of transportation. It is far more than just its explosive nature.
Bio Diesel could be a viable fuel for limited jet travel.
4) During WW2 many many small Austin and Morris 10HP cars were seen riding down the road with a massive balloon gas bag on the roof.
5) High tech sailing ships are faster than the old clippers and need very few crew members.
6) An "All Electric" (no fossil fuel)society even if all the "Alternate" generating means were possible seems not to be even remotely capable of maintaining even close to the Status Quo.
The real problem we have is still thinking that the Status Quo is the only business model. The Biblical admonition that the "Sins of the fathers will be visited unto the offspring to the Third and fourth generation" is most appropriate.
6+ Billion people will not be the world population counted by our great grand children.
Re: Hydrogen Storage, I read about this a couple of years ago, I don't know if this is still being pursued today.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070821112346.htm
Re: Your closing point.
An example of this is the BAU kind of thinking is that these transitions can only be financed by taxation.
On a personal level I would be more willing to contribute my time and expertise, pro bono, to a group of people actually doing something locally than I would be willing to be taxed. Maybe we could find a way to give people credit for their tax bill if they gave of themselves to the communities where they live. Just another of my crazy thoughts, I guess.
On the energy storage system, I imagine the issues are the amount of energy that is required for such a system--which is likely to be an important determinant of cost.
Regarding the proposed new system, I don't see people's time as the most important cost factor--instead, it is likely that energy costs will play a very important role--we will need to burn a huge amount of oil and natural gas and even coal to make a program such as this work. Many of the new devices that are needed (for example, electric cars) are very energy intensive to make because of the need to mine the necessary minerals, make the various components, and then assemble the cars.
The costs become so huge, the amount research needed so large, and availability of debt financing so unlikely, that it is hard for me to envision a program such as this without government sponsorship. It may very well be that the private sector can play a big role in this--I have not tried to break this out.
You made some interesting points which seemed reasonable to me.
However, I found this statement to be cryptic to me:
Are you saying that CO2 is not the primary driver of a mankind-enhanced greenhouse effect? Or are you implying that climate change is not mankind-induced or perhaps not of major consequence compared to other challenges we face?
I also looked up Austin 10 hp cars
http://www.austintendriversclub.com/
so I have the sight picture on what kind of cars you were referring to...except the part about the large gas bags on the roofs. My guesses: 1) Filled with methane which the engines were adapted to use? 2) filled with a lifting gas in an attempt to lighten the weight through the wheels (pretty absurd)...I haven't had enough coffee to figure this one out...
The bag on the roof held "town gas", made from the gasification of coke and distributed through the gas mains for cooking and heating (and originally for lighting). It is very easy to mix fuel gas with air in the correct proportion to make an easily-ignited mixture; for years the problem with using gasoline wasn't getting the liquid, it was building a reliable carburetor.
According to the Galactic picture, assuming the Cloud chamber effect of Solar and Cosmic ray theory as driving the earth's temperature we are approaching an secondary ice age.
There are however, many planet centric effects with the bobbles and the wobbles and the sun etc which are causing some extreme temperature changes.
The science on my last read said that we have not yet even got one degree warmer as a planet.
Adding together all the CO2 content on the planet caused by industry it was small compared with the CO2 tied up and fluxing in and on the rest of the planet and its atmosphere.
Primordially they say that we used to have up to 10,000 ppm CO2 during the great oil and coal creating forests, and the temperatures extrapolated bear no correlation to CO2 content.
Very sadly, the "Fringe" who are now becoming more and more correct Have analyzed and charted the "Climate Change Scam" to a series of Political decisions starting under Margaret Thatcher and taken on by Reagan for political reasons.
Some honest scientists document how "Global Warming" related research slowly became the only way to get funding.
--- http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming.html
here is one I did keep.
I am sorry If I sound like a crank, unfortunately I never keep a record of evolving events to prove my points. However, as an "Intellectual" all the many many credible arguments presented to me about the minor part played by CO2, carried far more weight for me than all the present propaganda and "Politically correct" science emanating from CNN, FOX, BBC, and Mogul owned news media, all with vested interests.
Personally, I feel that we are being herded in directions which we will regret.
Don't worry you don't sound like a crank at all! It's obvious you are one!
Re: your delusional reference to yourself as an "Intellectual".
Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Ad hominem attacks really don't contribute much to the discussion.
The reality is that reality is not following the theories very closely. It looked similar for a couple of decades, but in the last decade temperatures have been doing their own thing. The conclusion one could draw is that the theories need a bit more work.
The bigger reality is that in the global context you really can't do anything about it - what will be will be. So it's best to be prepared to adapt to whatever happens. You have your ideas about what that may be, I have my own.
The great thing about delusions is that everybody has different ones.
And the models are being adjusted. This article reports on one of the freshest most detailed studies run on climate data.
Since I live up north I keep a weather eye on the current extent of the arctic sea ice. Where and for how late in the season that ice lies off the coast does seem to have major impacts on our local weather..
We like to watch the aurora in these parts as well, which of course is directly related to the solar winds which supposedly cycle regularly. The beginning of this new cycle has been right quiet this time around (click on the solar activity comparison plots bar graphs and you have access to plots going back as far as 2001). An active solar cycle is supposed to add a 1/2 degree or so if I recall therefore a weak active cycle should have some dampening effect on global temperature rise.
We live with daily weather and are lucky to remember six or eight successive seasons accurately. No great wonder there is a lot of disagreement on the climate change phenomenon. Even large changes historically have substantial up and down temperature swings while trending one way or the other. How much of what is going on can accurately be attributed to our civilization's carbon release has not come back as a sealed verdict yet. But as many have said, given the range of consequences our possible courses of action can bring about, the prudent course would be to substantially lower carbon emissions rather than take the chance at all the AGW modeling is hogwash. Fossil fuels are a bank account at the very least, and draining a bank account without investing it in something that will replace the principal it formerly held first is just plain stupid.
FMagyar is correct.
Sometime you DO have to call a Spade a "Spade".
Neither does argumentation by assertion. You are full of crap. The science could not be clearer. There are no papers, anywhere or by anyone, that support your position.
The science could be much, much clearer, but at this point in time it's not.
The ski resorts here in the Canadian Rockies are open, and I'm going skiing tomorrow, so global warming can't be that bad yet.
If I couldn't ski, then global warming would be a problem. At this point it's not.
The science is very clear, has been for a while.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
How about a history lesson of the development of the science of global warming?
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html
(or you can buy the book)
For extra credit, you can find the link and read John Tyndall's 1861 paper.
(yes, that is EIGHTEEN Sixty One. n.b. "Carbonic Acid" is what we now call CO2, "Oliogenic gas" is what we now call ethane.)
The full IPCC 4 report is quite long, but they have a very good FAQ on the physical science basis:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-faqs.pdf
Of the history of the science and denialism - this video is great.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio
Don't want to watch a video?
www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/Presentations/Oreskes Presentation for Web.pdf
All your other questions answered, though not as clearly and easily as one might like (sorry).
http://www.realclimate.org/
Hi FMagyar,
That was a most interesting site you posted on my delusions. Were I a young man I would probably take note but at my stage in life I kind of know who I am and my capabilities.
Very sadly the bell curve predicts that half of us are dumber than a horse. I can live with that.
Gr
"Vanishing glaciers jolt smokestack China"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6907919.ece#cid=...
"AS an expedition from Chinese state television worked its way across the remote Tibetan plateau earlier this year, the explorers were amazed by what they found.
The plateau has been called the world’s third largest ice store after the North and South Poles. Yet according to Chinese scientists, the “third pole” is warming up faster than anywhere else on earth.
The TV team found bare rock where glaciers had retreated. Lakes had dried up. Lush grassland had turned to desert. The livestock was dead, the farmers impoverished.
They brought back a visual lesson in global warming so stark that censors allowed the programme makers to broadcast a frank exposé."
BBBaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!
Human's have always been herded in directions that they regreted. *Smirk*
I have always wondered what the world looked like before most of the oil layer was set down into the rocks. Having the oceans rise and the climate change is only bad for you if you have Lots of investments on the sea coasts that can't be moved, which we do, but didn't have 10,000 years ago. The biggest killer of species is humans, not climate change, though that happens over time as well.
I never understood the need to waste so many things, or trash the planet. As a Christian I don't think that is something God wanted us to do with what He gave us. Living humble sustainable lives doesn't seem to be the agenda of some people that call themselves Christian, and that also irks me. If I could influence the rest of the world to live humble sustainable lives I would. I can only do my part.
Charles.
"whatreallyhappened" also promotes liars who claim that the Nazi Holocaust was greatly exaggerated, they are definitely not a credible source even if a small part of what's on that website is true. A stopped watch is right twice a day.
"3)Hydrogen containment is probably the single most important problem for the industry and seems to have no workable solution for our types of transportation. It is far more than just its explosive nature. "
Hydrogen is much more easily handled when it is bonded to carbon. IMHO, hydrogen produced from renewable electricity will need to be converted to a hydrocarbon and used in the exisiting infrastructure either as liquids or gas. Hydrogen on its own is too problematic for storage and distribution and requires new end use technology that is proving elusive. Renewable hydrocarbons are already being produced in the form of bio-fuels. The next big research push should be how to crack CO2 using renewable energy, maybe concentrating solar, and using the carbon and hydrogen yielded from electrolysis of seawater to create new hydrocarbon fuels. I have no idea how scalable something like this could be, but I believe it has a better chance of success than hydrogen powered aeroplanes and fuel cell ships.
The reason I assumed this would be a government program is I don't see how debt will work, and only the government can pass tax laws. Perhaps a way could be figured out for it to have more private company involvement, but for at least for thinking out how much this would cost, but I didn't see an easy way to do it. Maybe apart from the taxes collection and the initial research and planning, there might be a way of transferring the program back to the private sector.
"Cash for Clunkers 2.0"?
The notion that people and companies who make stupid financial decisions should be rescued from that stupidity is certainly a product of a world of excess.
Assuming such a tax scheme could be imposed, in likely a much more resourced challenged world, what justification would there be for excusing such poor judgement?
Unfortunately, pensions are funded based on the continuation of BAU. If companies make what turns out to be stupid financial decisions, these result fall through to owners of the bonds--insurance companies, pension plans, lots of individual owners. Traditionally utility stocks and bonds have been considered safe long-term investments, good even for widows. It is these owners that suffer.
Another issue is secondary fallout, if a utility company or other owner of some of these assets goes bankrupt. We assume electrical service will continue, but will this necessarily be the case? If we get enough bankruptcies, it will be hard for any government organization to come in, pick up the pieces, and keep electrical service available to all.
Traditionally utility stocks and bonds have been considered safe long-term investments, good even for widows. It is these owners that suffer.
Like my in laws.
No amount of persuasion can get them to reconfigure their portfolio despite the massive hits they're taking.
They even gave us BoA stock last Christmas.
The energy co-op near my lifeboat, http://www.wolverinecleanenergy.com/ is planning a new coal based power plant in Rogers City despite the Michigan Public Service Commission saying they “failed to demonstrate the need” for this plant.
Of course supporting Wolverine’s grant application were U.S.Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow, U.S. Congressman Bart Stupak and Governor Jennifer Granholm.
Liberal Democrats all. I would've expected this from Republicans.
A sane populace would remove them quickly from their seats of power before their stupidity and shortsightedness ruins one of Michigans remaining livable areas and their outcry would force Wolverine to change its plans or face closure.
But the BAU mentality wins every time, the good people of Rogers City are swayed by the promises that the fly ash will be harmlessly interred or that when the wind blows from the South and the East it won't carry the stench that wreathes nearby Alpena constantly or the surrounding land won't be stripped bare by the 10% "renewable" biomass stipulation these same liberals insisted be part of any base load generation.
The company claims that Michigan is currently "a net importer of power.Our new power plant will make the state more self-sufficient and create much-needed jobs."
How importing coal from the removed mountains of Appalachia makes us more self sufficient is just another of the lies.
Businesses like this and the people that invest them deserve to fail but they need to fail soon before they doom the rest of us.
This would be a mistake on the order of Easter Islanders cutting down all their trees. Nuclear resources in the USA are sufficient to run the nation's electric grid for hundreds of years, if we stop throwing fuel away because it can't go into a LWR. The DOE had 8000 tons of thorium nitrate, which is sufficient to replace about 20 years of coal-fired power in the USA. The systems which can make use of this fuel have fallen out of political favor, so it is buried in Nevada in a waste dump.
Attempting a nuclear ban means planning for the lights to go off. You'd have blood in the streets over that.
This is a case of picking winners based on political pull, like ethanol from corn. It would be a much bigger and dumber mistake.
My comment on this is at
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5941/557615#comment-557688
The only way to continue industrial civilization is to implement fission breeders, the best of these are the MSRs; currently the most developed fission breeders are those the Indians are developing; probably it should have been either the MSR from the ORNL program shut down in the 1970s or the IFR from Argonne shut down in 1994.
The MSR would be the simplest design that could be built the fastest, it is likely the safest design, and it has the greatest fuel supply available.
The abundance of electricity that would be available can be used to make artificial liquid fuels.
Wrt to hydrogen fuel cells, I had heard of the approach of using ammonia salts as hydrogen carriers, it appears comment
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5939/557936
( or http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5939#comment-557936 - I'm not sure what is the favored way on TOD to quote other comments)
has more to say about this.
Perhaps it's time to deeply examine and think about what kind of civilization we want and how we can sustain it.
For the record I'm very much for having a civilization that gives us access to the fruits of science and technology and provides us with fulfilling healthy lives where each and every individual can aspire to achieving the highest level of attainment be it in the arts, music science, architecture, agriculture, medicine or whatever they may feel is their particular path.
I have traveled the world quite widely and happen to be fluent in at least three very different cultures so I will say that I'm sure my perspective is both privileged and unique, but from this, my perspective, I think Industrial civilization as it exists all over the globe today, FLAT OUT FAILS! in all the important things that civilizations are supposed to provide.
I'm pretty much willing to toss most of it in the dustbin of discarded ideas of all civilizations past.
I don't purport to have any concrete solutions or explicit recommendations for our many dilemmas but I do think we all need to stop and reassess where we are going. What we have now, very simply, is not working.
is just what I would like to see too, and it's what I think is entirely (technically) possible.
AFAICS, the urbanized world causes the greatest move towards sustainability, not least because it involves the empowerment of women, who are more educated and economically involved, and have greater control over how many children they will have.
The urbanized world requires energy, because an urbanized world has less people doing the farming i.e. food production.
Fission breeders produce the least CO2 and can produce the least wastes of any kind of large energy production. They are the most sustainable because they have the least impact on the environment and the longest lasting fuel supply of non-solar energy.
Whatever kind of enlightened future society you want, surely it is most likely to happen in a world that has access to the most abundant and clean energy.
"The urbanized world requires energy, because an urbanized world has less people doing the farming i.e. food production."
I'm not sure this follows. We already have quite an urbanized society and a fairly small portion of our energy goes into farming.
We may need some energy for a sustainable world, but as Magyar says, our main task is to stop and reflect a while on what makes life worth living, and how much of that really requires massive amounts of energy.
Just throwing more energy into the mix before we reconsider these basic questions is basically throwing more fuel on a fire already raging out of control.
That's good news.
But it doesn't change the fact that nuclear power can be, if it is the MSR or a like nuclear technology, cheaper, safer (less CO2, less damage to wildlife), more reliable and less visually intrusive than renewables (Jacobson's WWS), whether we want BAU or not.
I don't think you will change the course of BAU by a prescriptive process. It seems to me that increasing sustainability appears correlated with increasing security. Increased security of life requires that the basics are affordable and available. Renewables perpetrates scarcity and unreliability. People who are scrambling for the basics are harder on the environment than people who have the basics. Technology should be used to provide the basics to everyone, not restrict it.
There are lots of good uses for cheap clean abundant energy. For example, I'd very much like to see the space elevator built. I'd also like to see every one in the world have clean water. These are quite different uses of technology, but they can both be done easier and sooner if there is clean cheap abundant energy available.
If building a space elevator is a high priority for you, we really don't have much more to say to each other.
Best wishes'
dohboi
"I don't purport to have any concrete solutions or explicit recommendations for our many dilemmas but I do think we all need to stop and reassess where we are going. What we have now, very simply, is not working."
+1x10^6
Thank you.
I am not fluent in many cultures (if you don't include profanity), but I see that the purpose of living is to provide a future usefulness, not to consume resources sans moderation.
The question at this point is, "are we too late?". I think the answer is "yes". Partly because when it comes to the climate triggers we have induced, we need to start thinking "Venus" instead of "tropical", and partly because the most powerful entities (who make decisions for us) are morally and economically bankrupt. None of the fantastic plans for 'saving' industrial civilization can be paid for with the System of systems that is now failing.
"Industrial Civilization" is an oxymoron.
Industry, like the economy, is a side-effect of civilized (city-based) activities by human groups servicing each others' needs. Money is supposed to be a tool that works for people, not the other way around. SOME people figured out how to accumulate money selfishly via bullying and coercion and scheming business systems, and the rest now think that they have to service the money instead of each other.
It really doesn't take money to make money, but a lot of money can accumulate more money that should be circulating among smaller entities.
It only takes muscle and brains to build a better mousetrap. It takes money to sell one that doesn't work.
Dan
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to sell fish and the oceans boil."
It may make a catchy head line for
It may make a catchy headline for a magizine cover but the reality is that senario has a 0% chance of happening. SA should put some useful effort into the discourse of reality. We have a massive investment in fossil fuels that not going to be abandoned. Coal, at gas, nuclear are still going to be around in 2030, along with a little and very expensive oil and synfuels.
Essentially the goal is to reduce the proportion of coal and tar sands (CO2) as much as possible through efficiency and alternate sources. If you don't believe in global warming go to Alaska (even Sara Paline believes it).
I think this cap and trade debate is key right now. We've got to get Cina and India onboard. If we do it and they don't, we're screwed (expect a trade war). And remember that term oil shock, its coming soon to a town near you. So lets get with it (nat gas!, biofuel?). Until then the worlds going to be lurching through depressions and unstable energy prices.
"We've got to get Cina and India onboard."
We've got to get ourselves on board and quit using Chindia as an excuse for our lack of leadership and vision.
Not only a 0% chance but it's suicide to try. This scenario - essentially rebuilding everything already built on the planet - will run out of resources on Day 2. It's our present level of economic activity that is killing us. Amping it up to the level required will just kill us that much faster. And everything else. Perhaps if we could turn the entire sea into self-replicating gray nanobots it might work. It would still suck more to live with an implementation of this plan than without.
This plan is so totally ridiculous.
Or maybe I missed the footnote - the one where the US Military marches across the globe killing 9 out of 10 people. And somehow not turning every square inch of the planet into a toxic stew. Destroy the planet to save it. Right.
Most interesting to me is how totally unhinged the herd has become. That something like this could pass editorial review in Scientific American astounds me. Probably it passed review by the advertising department and the publisher. Or maybe all the editors only nod OK so they can pull down another few paychecks.
cfm, the growlery, gray, me
Dryki, glad to see you still around here posting.
The authors of the article in SA, are putting out a wish list of what they want to see happen, for whatever real reasons. But business as usual is not here to stay very long. As someone else said, if this had been started 30 years ago, we might not be having many of these discussions. But we live in a world driven by the need to get as much as we can and then die the richest man on the block.
Nearly 7 billion souls on earth and no end to the things we could improve, but won't be able to given the time we have and the unwillingness to live in harmony.
The SA article was a nice idea for a fictional story though.
Charles
I didn't think I could put those thoughts in an article, but at least some of them went through my head.
We are no closer to figuring out how to detoxify nuclear waste now than in 1945.
Thorium and its byproducts are toxic for incomprehensible lengths of time.
What is the EROEI of babysitting the nuclear excrement for millennia?
There is no firm technical barrier between so-called peaceful nuclear energy and nuclear weapons production, it's mostly a political choice. That is why a fully nuclear economy would require a police state to monitor the materials, as predicted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's "Barton Report" (Halloween, 1975).
Nuclear power is carcinogenic and mutagenic.
Some biological processes can detoxify some of the crud generated by fossil fuels (see the book "Mycellium Running" by Paul Stamets for some examples). But radioactivity is not a chemical process, so no biological process can turn radioactive atoms into non-radioactive, stable atoms.
The only safe nuclear power station has a 93 million mile evacuation zone. We might be able to power a much smaller, steady state economy with solar energy, but there is no way our globalized, hyper consumption society will continue overconsuming without fossil fuels (or even with less fossil fuels). There's no free lunch. Sorry.
I'm pretty sure you either don't know what you're talking about or you're deliberately lying/ignorant.
To use phrases like "an incomprehensible length of time" is to avoid any real analysis. Try this:
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/2009/11/nuclear-composting.html
There is nothing incomprehensible about the lengths of time mentioned.
To say "no biological process can turn radioactive atoms into non-radioactive, stable atoms" is again to ignorantly or deliberately obscure anything like a scientific knowledge of the issue. Radioactivity decreases by the process of the half life naturally. Given enough time there is no need to do anything other than put the materials in question somewhere safe until they decay to background levels. There are a very few actinides that take a long time to decay; these can be processed, by non-biological means, so that they are reduced to non-radioactive levels far sooner than they would by their own decay process - in the US one of many programs to develop the methods to do this was cancelled by the Clinton administration. But cancelled or not, there are certainly processes available. The MSR can be configured to minimize the need for these processes and to a large extent incorporate those that are most effective. The use of the term biological is ignorant at best.
I have no idea what you mean about a 93 million mile evacuation zone. You cite nothing in support, and I suspect, again, you don't know what you are talking about or you are being deliberately silly.
The rest of your statement is confused, even if you mean well. Nowhere did I say that I want to see a "hyper consumption society". I support the continuation of the benefits gained from a civilization based on scientific endeavor.
EDIT: it appears I was confused about who was replying to whom. I would retract the sentence "Nowhere did I say..." since it appears you weren't talking to me anyway.
The 93 million miles is about the distance to the star we orbit, a safe enough distance (for a 'few' more years) as long as our atmosphere has the proper percentage of the right components and our magnetic field remains intact. Really not in the same league as the other types of nuke plants here being discussed
If we built Moonbase Alpha would that help?
It certainly would stoke permatopia's fears. I personally think we can address the waste issues here on earth, and I do think they can be effectively addressed. To paraphrase oldfarmermac, nuke power could well help us avert a nuke war.
Someone (could we volunteer oldfarmermac?) should tell Jacobson and Delucchi that.
Goodness gracious! Next thing you'll tell me is that we've learned nothing about detoxifying cadmium, mercury or lead! Oh, wait...
Thorium is naturally occurring. So is uranium. These can be transformed from atoms with half-lives of billions of years to fission products with half-lives of tens of years down to seconds. The "toxicity" of an isotope with a 30-year half life becomes essentially zero in less than the existence of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
To support this claim, you have to account for the reason that no nation has ever built weapons from the products of PWR's. There's plenty of plutonium in the spent fuel, but for some reason (like the hyper-abundance of isotopes 238, 240 and 241) the weapons makers prefer to operate special reactors to produce what they call "weapons-grade" plutonium with a lot less of the above. Now why would that be?
Whereas biological processes can and do turn relatively non-toxic metallic mercury into extremely poisonous methyl mercury; on the other hand, the only thing required to eliminate radiological hazards is time.
You look like someone who has swallowed Dittmar's propaganda uncritically. I'd pity you if I didn't have a raging case of compassion fatigue.
groundhogsteve on November 7, 2009 - 10:33pm asks:
Why government taxation?
Since fossil fuelers won't take environmental responsibility, say by including the entropy costs in their product, the govt could level a tax to reflect the damage. Such tax would encourage a switch to cleaner alternatives. When virtual monopolies of essential products fail their social responsibility, govt has to step in--hence roads, schools, and public utilities commissions.
The Hindenberg was a PR disaster for hydrogen.
It is interesting that there is no mention of changing consumer habits or increasing efficiency. Those two are by far the least expensive ways to reduce carbon output and reduce the volume of new hardware needed. Painting roofs white and insulating are not very sexy or dramatic, but they work, and some minor subsidies and PR would accelerate the process. As far as bigger government programs are concerned, subsidizing or 0% financing solar water heaters so they are nearly as cheap as gas or electric ones would take another big bite out of consumption as well as educate the public about how renewable sources actually save money.
I really think that our consumption habits will change, either through voluntarily changing ourselves or having the earths changes forcing change on us.
If magazines delved deeply into numbers and the foundational principles of science, they would become textbooks, and no one would read them.
Commercial airplanes converted to run on fuel cells??!!!! Don't them mean that hydrogen should be liquefied, stored and combusted in flight, like it's done in a rocket? Imagine replacing a Boeing 777's giant kerosene-powered turbine with an electrically powered fan - they'd need a super-heavy gazzillion-watt fuel cell to power that. Even if they combusted hydrogen, imagine the thick trail of white water-cloud coming out the engine. They'll definitely have to come up with a better medium than hydrogen in which to store energy with high volumetric density.
As usual, no mention of overpopulation and over-consumption. Popular science tries to pave the way for human desires to come into fruition; it never challenges them.
Well said!
I believe Sci-Am must instead say this to its readers.
"The single most abundant source of natural resource used to produce food, transport it, provide you your jobs, provide transportation to the cops, your flight trips, the plastics from china, etc., etc., is going to decline soon. We used the term 'humans' to make it sound scientific but the fr!gg!n reader here is a human too. That means, you will feel emotionally affected with every damn thing you interact with (including this article). Needless to say how such a depressing article is bound to affect you emotionally.
Therefore, we don't expect you to accept this right away. Afterall, each of you, our dear readers, are mere game strategies. Even if we told you the truth, you're not designed to accept it as-is without playing it out in your heads. 'What game?' you ask? Its a pointless game called Life. You might pass from "Denial" to "Acceptance" over a long period of time. In the meanwhile, if you're interested in understanding the predicament humanity is in...
provide references to books and stuff on the web"
Even if SciAm did that, the masses will be left unaffected by and large. Very very few will get to know the truth. Given our ancient source code, the majority will probably end up thinking that all changes to one's own lives (ex: a job loss) that happens due to peak oil will be interpreted as caused by "someone" (ex: "the company / banks / country were badly managed").
There are desire-driven elements at play and many irrational outcomes do happen. I guess, things are beyond repair and only a collapse will give us all an opportunity to rethink about ourselves. Or so I hope.
Probably, the very same desire-driven engine has different plans for us and our so-called wisdom/intellect/knowledge is yet to experience the hangover of the party to even wake up to a realization. I don't think we'll realize. We'll only "PANIC!". Don't call me a doomer - I call myself Yeast.
New Scientist did something not too far from this last year in a special report on how economic growth is killing the planet.
I didn't notice it make the slightest difference.
You mean this one?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026786.100-special-report-why-po...
The author of the article, Tim Jackson, has now released a book "Prosperity Without Growth".
I declare an interest as a member of his research group. ;)
Tim Jackson's model, though, is oddly like all the other popular steady state economy models. It avoids fixing the intrinsic problem of growth economies. It achieves economic stability with what amounts to human enforced resource limits that come sooner than the natural ones would. You might call it resource rationing, to say it bluntly.
That is still a clear step ahead in realism from the schemes that propose perpetual efficiency multipliers to reduce the resource intensity of the economies by 50% every 20 years so the economies can continue to double in scale every 20 years, of course. I'm being sarchastic in how I phrase that, of course. The people proposing those schemes would shrink at hearing the implication of "decoupling" if they heard it without all the fine phrases it is usually decorated with. The level of common sense is not high in the published work on this!
What they're all trying to avoid is the solution for economic sustainability that JM Keynes first realized, and Ken Boulding and I noticed too, is the only physically possible one. That's for economic climax to occur by the people with investment earnings spending enough of their investments to relieve all the growth pressure.
Hopefully that spending, equal to the entire return on investment of the whole economy(!), would be used to achieve something admirable. That might be like trimming our total energy use and making the LARGE and relatively uneconomic investments needed for coming into real balance with the earth and sustainability....
We can't have the latter as long as all the investment funds are tied up pumping the fastest growth possible to use up the cheapest resources people can find as fast as we can... People should start bringing up the question at least, shouldn't they?
Don't we need to figure out how to make economies that can become part of nature?
Maybe we need to start with the realization that happiness, contentment is not dependent on perpetual growth. I think we can go further and say that there is an element of an inverse relationship.
Well, isn't the functional possibility of spending the money used to pump growth for converting to sustainable systems something to keep in there too?
I'm concerned that people are satisfied by having "right purposes" rather than functional plans...
I am just thinking that until we have the right purpose the right plan will not happen. Sort of the question of, do you make money to live(have happiness) or live to make money (no time for happiness).
Spending profits for sustainable systems is using money to live, using them to make more money is living to make money.
Yes the objective is to put functional plans into action, not wallow about in some self-grandiose stupor about having the "right purpose".
That made me think about a show on Hulu.com that I watched ( Vanguard: from Current TV ) talking about how a Thai rainforest was being trashed to feed the ecstasy drug trade, mining Safrole found in a tree growing in the rainforest. They grind the trees up, cook them and move on to another site.
Human's are killing themselves in more than one way. Economies being a part of nature, seems like just what these plant poachers are doing. When will we get to the point where we have destroyed nature to feed our needs.
"as caused by 'someone'": God (pick the religion, it just doesn't matter) is punishing me/them for doing/not doing something the way he/she/it wanted or didn't want. God works in mysterious ways. God's will. God sent 9-11 and Katrina to punish for U.S. for embracing gays and woman's rights and so forth.
I have met an alarming number of people who shrug their shoulders, cast their eyes upward, and throw their intellect on the mercy of some imaginary court instead of thinking for themselves about the reasons we are where we are and the possible paths forward. Even Master Engineers. One of whom I met who showed me his nylon bracelet with a little piece of shiny metal on the back. He said that it was 'infused with negative ions which aligned the poisoned positive neuronal pathways'...he also was wearing a cross around his neck. This person was making ~ 200K/year managing very complex projects. I'm not surprised that these projects have turned out poorly, given the modern voodoo priests and priestliness who work them.
So what you are saying is that anyone with a religious faith is unsuitable to work in engineering. Gosh, there's a bigoted sweeping statement if ever there was one.
One of the least pleasant attributes of the American stereotype, I find, is the bizarre polarization on matters of religion. To an outsider an American is either a rabid hell-fire and brimstone mad preacher who believes the Earth is only 4,000 years old or an equally rabid intolerant bigot atheist who will take every opportunity to try and belittle people of faith. I am fotunate to know that this stereotype is the exception, not the rule, but my goodness some posts on TOD really do try to live up to that stereotype.
Please try to keep your anti-religion to yourself. It really doesn't add to the debate anymore than if someone posted that prayer will solve the ensuing energy crisis.
Thanks, in good faith!
Strawman. What part of "showed me his nylon bracelet with a little piece of shiny metal on the back. He said that it was 'infused with negative ions which aligned the poisoned positive neuronal pathways'" didn't you understand? Do "people who shrug their shoulders, cast their eyes upward, and throw their intellect on the mercy of some imaginary court" sound like coolly rational problem-solvers capable of recognizing and dealing with troublesome facts?
Pot. Kettle. Black. If you defend the irrationality instead of recognizing and criticizing it, you're part of the problem.
no me old mucker, that won't wash. He also just had to mention that the chap in question was wearing a cross around his neck as if to imply that his Christian faith was also a sign of unsuitability to his profession.
And as for you selective quoting of my comment, it is beyond contempt really. So you just mash up the parts of my comments you like to make me sound like what i am critizing. Pathetic.
I say again, there are some who post on this website who have a knee-jerk reaction to have a dig at religion at every possible chance. In my mind it reflects an unattractive by-product of the culture in which that person lives, that he needs to constantly reinforce his own dogma - be it atheist or evangelical. It doesn't help the debate on these boards one iota, so let's leave the God-bashing out, ok?
Pointing out a significant form of irrationality in the general population is hardly dogma.
I thank you for making my point for me so well! You have just dogmatically equated having a religious faith with being irrational. That is just as dogmatic as an evangelical ramming his religion down your throat. Can't you see? Do you (and people like you) not see the irony of your position?
I made reference to this polarization of opinion above as a sour quality of the American make-up. It is something which, mercifully, is very rare in Europe. The biggest irony of them all is that the US was specifically founded with rigid separation of Church and State. Heck, it is written in the Constitution! So how come you are all so bombastic about religion? Surely the US should be a chilled out zone, where you respect each other's position but don't feel the need to force yours onto the other? Isn't that the whole idea of liberalism?
Here in the UK our Queen is both head of state and head of the Church and morning prayers are still said before each daily session of parliament (not many MPs attend, but none the less prayers are read in the chamber) and it is still technically law that all state schools should hold an act of Christian worship each day! Can you imagine that in the US!! But yet religion here quite literally never gets involved in politics, and people do not feel it necessary to inject their faith or atheism into other people's lives.
HAcland - "religion here quite literally never gets involved in politics".
Come on,laddie,pull the other leg.I am an Australian so I have a slightly different perspective.We also have your Queen as our head of state(unfortunately)and here,as in the UK,religion,in all it's various manifestations and with all it's barmy,blowhard bull,is continually getting involved in politics,usually with detrimental consequences.
According to my Oxford Dictionary the word politic and it's derivations,have a broad meaning - one is - "relating to the government or public affairs of a country".It would be surprising if the religious community didn't get involved.
HAcland,
I deeply resemble that remark!
In the US, christians constantly "inject their faith" into politics. Even our historic attempt at getting health reform is bogged down over religious objections to any abortion assistance - regardless of the hardship and health issues posed for many women - especially poor women.
My opposition to religion has nothing to do with dogma - I'm not sure what kind of dogmatic creed you could be referring to. Atheism is not a domatic creed or belief system - it is simple opposition to belief systems that are highly contradictory and cannot be proven.
My opposition is very simple: I think the planet is overpopulated and most religions advocate increasing the population of their faithful. I would like to point out that this is a serious problem for the existence of future generations of humans on the planet. I very honestly do not see how we can solve the coming problems if we cannot control population growth. I do not see any evidence of religions taking a positive lead for this need. There is no dogma involved in my POV.
As long as christians tolerate cults like Quiver Full I find little reason to think they are going to help solve our problems.
http://www.quiverfull.com/
If you are interested in the book they promote you can buy "The Duggars: 20 and Counting!"
" I very honestly do not see how we can solve the coming problems if we cannot control population growth. I do not see any evidence of religions taking a positive lead for this need. There is no dogma involved in my POV. "
Dave, be patient. It took them 350 years to apologize to Galileo. Give them another 350 years and using effective birth control will no longer be a sin.
"As long as christians tolerate cults like Quiver Full I find little reason to think they are going to help solve our problems."
I don't agree with their cultish ideals. But, all I can do is voice my disagreemnet of them and leave it at that, I can't get rid of them, just because I don't like what they preach.
My Christian faith, does not limit me from seeing the problems that our current population faces. I am sad at the thought of people dying because of whatever reason. But I understand that my peaceful solutions aren't going to be inacted anytime soon.
Thanks for posting, Charles.
That is actually an interesting question. Since our founding philosophy seemed to make being able to practice ones own form of religion without persecution very important, how could it have devolved into its present acrimonius state?
I can only offer a couple of observations, as to how much of the differences they really explain I don't know. First I see Europeans as having had such a history of religious conflict (30 years war and whatnot), that they implicitly recognize the dangers of mixing religion and politics. In the US, we missed out on that piece of cultural heritage. Until pretty recently religion wasn't too much used as a tool of politics, but in recent decades, that has become increasingly the case. The BUsh administration can be considered to be a case of one group imposing their evangelical views on the rest of the country. So we've rather quickly come to see anothers religion as a potential threat to having the sort of society/government that we want. I think it takes a while for the various factions to learn to find a workable compromise. We are pretty early on that learning curve.
Guess this discussion isn't going anywhere useful, but since you address me directly:
I honestly don't mind about your invisible friends (if you have any) one way or another. It's my impression you're one of the more intelligent posters in a very intelligent group of people.
However, the notion that delusional beliefs of one sort should get a "free pass" merely because they're widespread - and that is certainly the only reason they do - is a bit grating. If I believed telepathic space aliens were putting thoughts in my head and admitted it, that admission would quite rightly be considered by others as salient to assessing my general mental functionality.
If you have a proposed list of supernatural exemptions to science, post it and I'll weigh in as respectfully as possible. Not sure what the arm-waving about queens and such is about.
IMO your analysis isn't well reasoned in this area. Which beliefs aren't "delusional"? You make it sound like delusional beliefs are of little value, when in reality they are often of huge value-they can literally put fortunes into people's pockets. L. Ron Hubbard was nothing but a big pile of delusional beliefs freely expressed and it made a lowly writer into a megamillionaire with personal power achieved by very few humans, and even fewer of these started at the very bottom like that guy. If that guy had gone to you with his plan (to found and lead his own religion) you would have given him nothing but discouragement. He was delusional and therefore you would be right and he would be wrong-meaning absolutely nothing. Seeing through the game is not the same as winning the game. Often delusional belief systems are at the heart of winning the game-go to any sales seminar. As the USA is now a financial (sales) economy, delusional belief systems are absolutely necessary for individual survival for a high % of the populace-not everyone is qualified to be a genius engineer of some sort.
Wonderful, and worth replying to just so it can't be edited and future historians deprived.
So "delusionality is good".
I'll be letting my SciAm subscription lapse since they seem to increasingly be sipping that kool-aid as well. But they once had a hell of a magazine. I'll take John Rennie over L. Ron Hubbard and spot you 50 points.
I wouldn't describe the censoring of any politically incorrect opinion as "editing" but maybe Kafka would.
The only question I have is... what took you so long? "Science in Pictures", indeed.
If you want to blow your mind, go back to the SciAm of the 1960's and read the "Amateur Scientist" column.
These guys are delusional all the way to the bank (with your money)-God Bless Goldman http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/11/04/goldman-one-ups-gordon-gekko-...
Hi Greenish,
I don't know why I bite on this stuff either - but the grate quotient is very high.
When I read a essay like this post, and follow the more technical parts of the debate, I tend to feel like there is some hope for somewhat of a graceful powerdown scenario if conservation and efficiency (in the broadest sense) are the lead elements. Within that context some mix of technologies could be very helpful.
However, then I reflect on the population issue, and it seems pretty obvious that no scenario has much of chance of success with a growing (or even current level) global population. It is then further evident that many (probably most) of the cultural and political impediments to a significant family planning program have roots in religious beliefs. Getting people to move beyond these belief systems seems to be an almost impossible task.
It is interesting to note that "godless" China (who is frequently accussed of resisting any CO2 reductions) has a one child policy. By some estimates, this policy has spared the planet an additional 300 million new humans. Regardless of the exact number, this is a far more positive action to reduce CO2 than anything I can think of in the christian world.
Religions -we're stuck with them.Lord Chesterfield iirc correctly said something to the effect that when men quit believing in God they do not henceforth believe in NOTHING -they just start believing in something else.
Some of those something elses might arguably be described as National Socialisn, communism, capitalism,nihilism,social Darwinianism.....
So as a practical matter perhaps we ought to be careful what we wish for-we might actually get it and it might be worse.
I tend to be rather sympathetic to the pious because(my own twisted version of this old saying) "but for the grace of God ....we are them".
I am not PC but I do understand the importance of treating everybody in a respectful and dignified way and it distresses me when otherwise very polite and responsible people unload on folks who -thru no fault of thier own -happen to believe is something that ain't so.
In this forum it probably really doesn't matter-it is not likely that many seriously pious folks read TOD-BUT IT IS A MAJOR MISTAKE to make fun of people's beliefs in more mainstream forums.
If I had to point out one single PARTICULAR reason why I don't have much faith in most popular liberal initiatives it would be that the average liberal grossly overestimates the general level of knowledge and mental sophistication of the man on the street.
She gets really bent out of shape when somebody calls her a broad or an addled female , and then she turns around and accuses half or more of the population of being ignorant superstitious louts.The TRUTH of the accusation is not the issue-not if the goal is to achieve change.The issue is that even a person who follows as well as he can the teachings of forbearence, turning the other cheek, etc, develops a lasting and deep seated antipathy towards you and what you stand for.
This my friends is NOT the way to convert people to your way of thinking.
For those who may remember some of my own anti religious rants -I am not yet THAT far gone-I just reserve the right unto myself to call my family and my ancestors and millions of others ignorant when I feel like it-in the same way that a black comedian can use the n word if he feels like it.
We all have to make our decisions the best way we can-which means relying on our own judgement when our knowledge is sufficient-and relying on the leadership and advice of others when it isn't.
The average person who takes his or her religion seriously lacks any significant understanding of the sciences, but he has at least a lyyman's grasp of the world of law, business, politics, and so forth.Being UNABLE(what part of unable do WE fail to understand?)to make sense of the arguments made in this or similar forums, he relies on the judgement and advice of whoever he percieves as his friends and allies.
You have lost him or her forever as an ally or convert as soon as you utter the words ignorant, superstitious, deluded....any place he will hear them.
Why are we suprised when he turns into a "rightwingnut?"
We need to seperate the message from the social commentary when we go out into the world and preach OUR message.Let us not be mistaken-there is no hope of EDUCATING the masses within the time frame available-they must be, if possible, gently lead to the correct conclusions by persausion-logic is inadequate.
Please-no one should interpret this rant in terms of feeling the need to apologize for hurting my feelings nor as a personal criticism coming from my direction.
All I'm trying to say is we should be a little more politically savvy.There is no need to go out of our way to furnish the Jerry Falwells of this world with ammo.
Lotta truth to what you say, Mac. In this instance I'm not trying to convert anyone; rather, I spoke up because it seemed a shame that even on TOD, religion is forced down peoples' throats by some posters and if I stand by and say nothing, I'm complicit. Didn't do any good though. (or harm either, if Falwell is a TOD reader I'll believe anything).
FWIW, I coexist quite well with the religious, including most of my extended family members. May come in handy in the future. I've taught in religious schools.
However, I come to this site for the clear thought and analysis. The incongruity of gods and angels having privileged authority even here is quite depressing. So if one may not speak up on TOD, then where?
I suppose I should have better perspective; historically, being able to question the prevailing religions is a very rare and temporary situation, and it will probably revert to that norm soon enough.
Greenish, You and I are on the same page in this respect.
You are absolutely correct when you say "if one may not speak up on TOD, then where?
I'm just trying in my unpolished way to get folks to think a bit about winning public debates and directing the culture in the direction we need it to go.
I probably should have been an academic myself , rather than an irascable amatuer scholar of everything-I am like the River Platte, famously described by some cowboy as "a mile wide but only an inch deep".But being only an inch deep means that I have at least acquinted myself with the world views of many different classes of people-specialists have trouble seeing the forest, in terms of understanding people.
I fly under false colors here because I live in a fundamentalist community-the locals ARE educationally deprived but you can reason with them-as long as you don't insult them first.
I have quietly counseled a terrifed pregnant fifteen year old girl and her Momma and helped them arrange an abortion-quietly- although both the girl and her Momma and Daddy attend a hellfire and brimstone church -this being possible because my personal style (face to face) is to listen rather than lecture.
Most of these people actually have a gnawing sense that things aren't as they should be and the more intelligent ones actually realize that contrary to Gospel the world is not flat, that dinosaurs really lived , that if Noah and his sons built a boat big enough to haul two of every animal she would have been a hundred times bigger than any ship ever floated,that he would have needed his whole nine hundred years and a million helpers to collect them all, etc, etc.
So knowing that I keep my mouth shut-within the community-people come to me with questions. I can explain the rudiments of evolution to someone interested , and do so without denying his God(Who handily indeed works in mysterious ways!)or insulting him or risking his social standing in the community.
In a place where everyone considers his absolute property rights on a par with his religious rights and his free speech rights and his rights to his own personal armory I never attack property rights.
I just talk about the developer on the mountian spoiling OUR trout fishing and xxxxing in our drinking water and the coal fired power plants in Ohio blowing so much smoke WE can't see OUR horizons anymore and how many wells have gone dry since so many new houses have been built around here.
I talk about how every place I ever heard of the people who sold out half thier farm to developers find out that they have to sell out the other half in another ten or fifteen years because they can't afford the property taxes that come with development.
I don't talk about free trade and peoples rights to do business with the lowest bidder.I do talk about all the poor slobs who are out of work (cause thier jobs are in China)and how we are going to be supporting them on welfare.
The change in thier world view is gradual but it is very real.
You come here to TOD for the "clear thought and analysis".This place is now my home away from home and (with one or two exceptions) every body here is an invisible magic friend even though I may disagree vehemently with them on some given issue.
Being stuck in or close to the house with an invalid I might explode from lack of an intellectual outlet if not for my books and this site.
When I talk to my liberal friends retained from the old days(if you aren't a liberal when you are young you have no heart) sometimes -all too often- I want to screaam at them because they confuse idealism and reality.When I talk to my right wing older friends (if you are not a conservative when you are old you have no brain)I want to scream and force them to recognize that they are being had by the fat cats in the same way that poor white southern trash was had by the slave holding class in the American Civil War.
Here is the only place I can go-the only place I know -where there is a balance struck and there actually is a rational and intelligence discourse underway.
I am convinced that anyone with a modicum of education(enough to appreciate the content) who is a real seeker of knowledge (in the broader sense, rather than a specialist) who once visits this site for a week or two will become a regular, although most will never post comments.
It's a good thing electrons are cheap and I can only type with two fingers(when I'm in a hurry I don't correct spelling)or tptb would have to throw me off the site.
Long live TOD.
The only things I'd ask of you are to use the spacebar before "(", after ")" and after any of ";:.?!". (It's much easier to read, and if TOD had a filter option I'd write one you could use to perform the cleanup; it's a very simple thing to do with the Unix stream editor, sed).
Great thoughts, mac, thanks for them.
Hi Mac,
I respect what you are saying and I'm sure that I'm often about as diplomatic as a Sherman Tank. However, I have never called a religious person ignorant - in fact, I know lots of religious people who are a lot smarter than I am in many disciplines.
But, I do think religious people have been mislead and this results in a form of delusion. I don't blame the person, but I do find significant fault with people who are in religious leadership positions - and particularly those that make a nice profit from this enterprise.
Basically, I find this situation to be quite hopeless. I see no way that world religions are going change their views about reproduction and increasing their numbers. Whether my message is well crafted or I am silent - it will make no difference. It's just so darn hard to be silent.
Hi Dave,
I couldn't agree with you more about our religious leadership as a general thing.
In the near term I you have a valid point about religion and reproduction.But in the longer term, a religion may be viewed in the Zen fashion of a river and its bed-each shapes the other.
Similarly, religious leaders shape thier followers, but the followers shape the leaders too-preachers are like politicians in that the more successful ones figure out where the crowd is headed and get out in front and yell follow me(and God of course).
I make no effort to keep up with the dogma pitched day to day in fundamentalist churches but I can say with confidence that very very few preachers say any thing about birth control or family size or sex, except premarital sex and occasionally homosexual sex(Homosexual sex is considered so bad it is hardly considered proper form to mention it even to condemn it.), both of which are roundly condemned.Abortions are also condemned of course but the subject is not often mentioned from the pulpit except around election time.
The people who glorify large families are a vanishingly small sliver of the entire group.
In the longer run the people decide-the priests keep thier ,mouths shut or they are replaced with more perceptive priests.Witness Ireland with a total fertility rate of less than two children per woman , yet Ireland is about ninety percent Catholic.Poland is also about ninety percent Catholic, with a tfr per woman of only 1.3.
Family sizes in "my" branch of fundamental Christianity are steadily falling and I strongly suspect the locals are having no more than two children per couple on the average although I have no hard data.In my personal extended highly religious family the average is well under two children per couple.
Of course in spite of this good news our local population is growing by leaps and bounds due to an influx of immigrants and the failure of us old folks to considerately die faster.
And of course in the third world the situation is nothing less than desperate.Many tens of millions, probably many hundreds of millions, of people will starve within my lifetime.
Depending on how the cards fall the total could be in the billions-but my guess , backed up by a farming background, is that the dieback will wipe out a fourth or a third or a half of local populations in different years, and that the survivors will mostly make it until they hit another bad year.Once the local population is sharply reduced most countries will be able to once again feed themselves in the short term at least after some fashion.
it was intended to show you that while the US has specific separation of Church and State, the UK explicitly does not as our State is also the Church (kinda). Do you get it now?
If you think religion (ugh I hate that word), I mean the Bible, has anything to do with the politic of America you are sorely mistaken.It was the plan of the notorious Bavarian Illuminati to accomplish three goals in the overthrow of the Old World Order:
1)The emancipation of women.
2)The overthrow of all monarchies.
3)The separation of 'church' and state.
Gee that sounds familiar.Yes HAcland, America indeed has a religion; and it is not the Bible, it is Illumination via the Illuminati.It is no longer a secret order, it is out in the open; an open conspiracy if you will.
Just ask any psychotropic pill popping TV addicted brain dead American, they'll tell you.
Religions and belief systems exist to throw a blanket over the perception of death, which creates considerable anxiety in most humans. Scientific rationality offers no succor to the fearful mind. Open two bookstores, side-by-side, one full of religious books and totems and one full of scientific works and some nice Somso anatomical models and see which one is most visited. I'll guarantee you that most of the pop science works are going to end-up in the bargain bookstore down the street.
"God is all-powerful. God made man and the earth. Everything that happens is God's will. I have nothing to worry about because I'm going to end up in heaven."
God and religion are a ready substitute for learning and science. Swallow a dogma whole and let it expand to fill every nook and cranny of your cranium and then you can lay back and congratulate yourself on finding the one real truth.
Add to this the fact that you've just been dropped naked and helpless onto nasty planet. Someone or something wants to eat you or cause you damage by using your body for reproduction (viruses, bacteria parasites) while you are trying desperately to murder some other being to eat. In the meantime you learn through experience that humans are highly deceptive and competitive and someone is trying to steal whatever you have found to make life easier. Under these circumstances it is desirable to seek a more benevolent reality even though it does not reveal the bare bones of death like true rationality does.
Amen!
Oh but it isn't so simple or grim, myriads of small bacteria live within us and allow us to gain sustenance from what we eat, small creatures battle on our skin some defending our system some attacking. It is frigging amazing our complex biological systems function so well. Viewing the wonders science continually explains thus revealing even new and more amazing wonders is one of the greatest benefits of living in our time as I see it. But as I stated up thread, science accepts its explanations necessarily have limits (Planck time, Planck length, etc) but that those limits are not the limits of physical reality. It is the height of arrogance to believe science can explain ALL to our little minds--science says it can't. An open mind allows for that which is beyond comprehension or proof.
Funny you should mention the beneficial bacteria of the gut. I've had a terrible case of the flux for the last couple of days and I'm tempted to take an antibiotic, a technological weapon of mass destruction and kill billions, good and bad. Could be Crypto. or Giardia, though, maybe a virus, who knows. I will feel fine in unleashing the grim reaper in pill form because those beneficial bacteria didn't make a moral decision to be good bacteria. They evolved in a direction beneficial to themselves and really don't give a crap about us as long as we continue passing great chunks of multicellular organisms through our alimentary systems.
An open mind is for that which is yet to be discovered. Magical thinking often creeps into those spaces left empty in the mind. If science leaves only .0000001% of reality unexplained, that is where many will find God.
granted, but 'for that which is yet to be discovered' cuts a lot of ways. Explaining physical reality all the way to the theoretical Planck limits may just as well leave 99.99999999% of reality unexplained, we would not have any way of gauging the percentage. We are storytellers and rememberers first and foremost, a little magic can lighten things up some. But using it to quell or inquisitiveness, and thoughtful search for answers is more than counterproductive to my mind. The prohibition on eating the fruit from the 'tree of knowledge,' 'tree of life' or whatever the best translation of the story-from Greek I'm guessing, but who knows those stories had often travelled widely and mixed and remixed considerably before there was a way to commit them to stone tablet, paper or whatever--comes to mind as a rank example of just that sort of abuse of magical thinking.
With all the amazing things we are discovering in the micro and macro world around us, I thank God for showing me His wonders. None of it stops me from my faith in Christ's salvation.
You all may call me what you want, I'll not be angry with your opinions.
The stated goal of the SA article is impossible without a large die-off, and then might not be needed so much depending on how many people are left. If I had the power to fix the world I would. By that I mean helping people life decent lives, without trashing our planet in the long run. Peacefully and everyone helping their fellow humans.
I can only help where I can help. Thank you all for your comments. Have a nice day.
Charles.
Dopamine,
Well said sir!
I have to say (as a practicing athiest)that I have been amazed at the depth of religious belief I have seen in good engineers. I always attribute it to the amazing human ability to wall off different parts of the brain to focus on different subjects and never attempt to deal with the contradictions.
I think a lot has to do with the different sorts of personalities attracted to science versus engineering. The former are very much motivated by curiosity about the world, and not averse to taking an unpopular or unusual position. Engineers, usually just want to make an honest living. They pursue their education and craft as a career, not as a mechanism for gaining deep understanding of the world. They also mostly want to fit into the society. At least in the US, the radical (and socially isolating) thing to do is to reject the dominate religions.
It is just a matter of where you put your faith. Science gives us the big bang that we start charting just into the creation of time, expanding space which was nonexistant before the bang, the source of which is unfathomable. Then after we have that all hashed out it ends up about 90% of the universe necessary is relegated to 'dark' or the math doesn't work. I love science, the unravelling of the mystery, but it takes a whole lot of faith to buy into what science is trying to quantify. All could just be some vibrating 'strings' and dimensions may be wound in dimensions, but it could be that all math explains is really just an approximation of the reality, that in the end can be known no better by the true scientist than by the true mystic (only time constraints would seem to make those pursuits mutually exclusive). That said, I have a heck of time with religions, but if the structure religion offers makes it possible for some to navigate through life no problem, except when those say their chart is the one and only chart...then we have big problems.
Is there a religion that thinks other than that "their chart is the one and only chart"?
Look for religions that do not worship an idol. The big problem idol seem to be various books. The people worship the words in their one book of choice, how odd...
not out at the salesman level are far as I have seen, but I have known very deep practictioners who merely professed their faith to be right for themselves and made no further assertions about it
science accepts that it can't explain anything before Planck time, it doesn't claim there was no before Planck time
But religion can't explain anything before Planck time either, it can only assert.
but then I made no assertions, except the whole framework could be far greater and much more sublime than anything science could ever explain. I made it obvious somewhere in this tangled thread that I am not selling religion, but that I do reject BELIEF in the ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that science is truly describing reality rather than the mathematically available approximation therof
Science doesn't claim absolute knowledge. What should be coming under fire here is that which does.
Perhaps the perspectives of two great physicists might help clarify why I think you have that precisely backwards. Science deals with reality and uses mathematics as a language of description.
First you need this free software fro MicroSoft:
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html#data=4|0||6b89dded-3eb8-4fa4-bbcd-7c69fe78ed0c||
Then choose the second lecture titled: The Relation of Mathematics and Physics
Then for a more current perspective try this:
'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
Enjoy!
As long as you remember that these two great physicists are just two smart primates limited to the perceptions possible to a creature with five senses.
They also have the scientific method and inference at their disposal, so they are not strictly limited to the five senses.
Thanks for the links, wish my machine/connection acted better on Feynman, he was a joy to watch. Only got through 20 minutes of him(hours of effort that included watching Krauss and running the meat of his talk repeatedly as Silver whatever attempted to stream). Krauss was fun but does he really equate the absolutely empty space between things with nothing. Empty space requires time to traverse, nothing does not have that attribute. You might be getting my drift. The physical universe (visible and dark) which can only accurately be described mathematically may well only be the discernable 'edge' of reality.
I would be curious to see if the nothing Krauss says the flat universe came from is the same nothing that he equates with completely empty space. It might have to be related as mathematics might not extend very well into true nothingness.
Since I'm not a theoretical physicist, I'll go way out on a limb in saying, that if I understand what he is saying , that "nothing" (at least in physics) is actually "something" and that is what 90% of so called empty space is composed of. He goes further to say that the only given the preexisting condition of zero total energy and the quantum fluctuations of "nothing" could we have had a big bang which produced "something",(our visible universe).
As for the mathematics not extending well into "true nothingness" I'd be flat out lying if I said I had even the most rudimentary understanding of how one might arrive at the mathematical calculations that produced the incredible animation of fields popping into and out of existence within the empty space of a proton.
I'll just accept that Krauss is telling us the truth when he says that this animation is the result very precise mathematical calculations. Though if one takes that at face value then mathematics does indeed extend quite well into "true nothingness".
I'm not arguing with the fluctuations accounting for 90% of mass of visible particles. But empty space is not nothing, it takes time to travel across it and they are not saying the universe appeared out of empty space, I believe, because the universe created space. Quantum mechanics explains very small spaces, I will go out on limb and say they are really stretching it when they have quantum physics explain no space. Krauss unlike Feynman, in the very short exposure I had to both, had moments he came across with all the sincerity of a used car saleman. (Fortunately I did manage to get a decent stream of Feynman's lecture this morning--I've a feeling your posting that link on TOD might have pushed a little more traffic to the site than it was able to handle).
Saying the universe appeared when it was already 10-e43 old indicates the limits of what mathematics can explain not the limits of what is, there may very well be quite some difference there. As it is more likely that I will sprout wings and fly than I will sometime in what remains to me learn enough of mathematics to follow its reasoning to Planck time I of course will only be guessing at how the boys got there, but I am human and have three score years in dealing with the way other humans sell their views of things so some of my insights are likely valid.
Back in the day I read a work by Descartes, where he purported to show the existence of god. All I saw him showing was the limits of how we describe the world with language. Physicists are very likely just showing the limits of how we describe the world with mathematics. Past that it is all belief one way or the other. Feynman hit the nail squarely when describing his preferred way at looking how the physics will end up explaining the universe, loosely he said " but this is just my prejudice and we shouldn't get too attached to our prejudices."
jjhman: One way to understand religions is as a collection of memes. Memes (and meme communities, and religions are communities of memes), evolve and compete in a manner not to dissimilar to the evolution of life. Like genes, memes don't care about the wellbeing of the lifeform that carries, them, they simply compete for mindshare with other memes. The best memes, at spreading win, not the ones that are best for the minds containing them. A really good introduction is Richard Brodie's "Virus of the Mind".
In any case the fact that a religion containing a meme like, "all other religions are false, and if you don't believe in THIS one, you will suffer eternal suffering" are common is evidence that those memes increase fitness (for the meme collection -not necessarily the minds holding them).
Yes, many engineers are "cookbook" practitioners, with no deep understanding of what makes their devices and methods work. This is probably why engineers are prominent in the creationist movement; when you take things on authority rather than understanding, you are reduced to picking someone to follow.
Needless to say I am not that type.
As a wannabe scientist who didn't quite makeit, I've had to have my career among engineers for most of my time. It can be frustrating, but it does put bread on the table.
The military factors large too. Just following orders.
The insensate authoritarians are a huge problem and one that will get far worse.
cfm, the growlery, gray, me
Contradictions!?
What's wrong with do not steal, do not kill, do not bare false witness against your neighbor?
Do science text books teach us these things?Or are these inimitable truths to be put under the subjection of our personal whims?
It is amazing how much knowledge makes one ignorant of truth.
What is "truth"?
I am one who cannot answer that question for you, since I am just as falible as the next man;God knows my life is a litany of failures.
All I know is that the Most High God has never lied to me when I asked Him a question with all sincerity.It is hard to comprehend this with all of the inconsistencies in the world in which we find ourselves in - be it with religious institutions or political dialectics.It is hard to tell the difference between the two, for the simple reason: all of what is of this current system is of the very same ideologies and of the same spirit.
I find that true iconoclasm is the only way to navigate yourself through all of the confusion that is within the world: what I was brought up to believe turned out to be false.When I read the Bible for myself, without any religious bias, I find that it is agreeable with no one organization - and this within itself is liberating to me.Truth can be found anywhere if you have a heart to see it; and it is not predicated upon any mans dogmatic understanding or interpretation, whether reigious or secular.When you reach that point you realize God will never tell you a lie, and infact, God's truth is actually very close to you if you are genuinely concerned about your fellow man and the injustice that is prevalent in our world in which we live.
Trust no man and trust in God; it is not that hard to find truth if you seek after it with your whole heart.It is the beginning of a journey, and God knows what is within your heart.
When you are sitting in a secluded room, all by yourself and muttering silently to yourself, prayers or whatnot, who do you think is the only one listening?
It's you. That's who is listening. It's an echo chamber.
You call your echoed thoughts, God. But you're just another ape, making noises out of one orifice, rehearing it through another orifice and then pretending that "something else" is listening to your meaningless vibrating of the air molecules in the room.
Does your God listen to fish burping under the sea? Are those prayers? Does your God "care" about what the fish intend as they go about burping under the sea? Of course not.
How about bacteria (billions of them) as they excrete one thing or another from their membranes? Maybe they are "praying" too and God cares? Of course not.
By some amazing miracle, your God is interested in one and only one special creature in the entire Universe. You. That's because You and God are one and the same. Get over yourself.
Step Back: Your amusing and popular comment begs a response. Bill Maher covers the same ground in his entertaining flick. Yes, you are talking to yourself-you feel that somehow people using the image of a supernatural force to assist their efforts is "cheating" and just not proper form. Why exactly?
I never said that.
Even I pray during times of stress --hypocrite that I am.
It's just that there are times when you need to admit who you are really talking to.
This can be tested. Answers received by experiment participants individually could be compared with each other and to those received by Pat Robertson.
LOL
Is the statistical data gathered before or after the broadcast of his show?
"...By some amazing miracle, your God is interested in one and only one special creature in the entire Universe. You. That's because You and God are one and the same. Get over yourself..."
All I am saying is I trust no one nor do I care what anyone's definition of the ontological aspects of reality are.Atheistic and academic postulations on the origins of the universe and their perceptions of the future are laughable.Organized corporate religion is no better, for they all seem to be preoccupied with trying to find a consensus among themselves of what God's actual lineaments are.The Creator cannot and will not be defined by us nor can we create Him in (our) own image and to our liking.
I find it odd that you perceive me to think of myself as 'one special creature'.I guess people find it offensive when they are informed their own personal opinions mean nothing in the final analysis.Everyone indeed has an ego, and in our world it is all about control.If you disagree with your professor,rabbi or priest you are marginalized.The Bible in and of itself is a threat to their control over you.
God is very much concerned about all of his creation, it predicates in the Book of Revelation that He will destroy those who destroy the earth and bring proper judgment and equity to the poor and afflicted of the world - whether you or I end up on the wrong side and are judged in the end - only the meek shall inherit the earth.
God is opposed to the proud is not a respecter of persons and He will render to everyman according to their works.
I am not the plenipotentiary of truth; if one questions me to try and define truth in a perceptible way of trying to trap me in my words the only answer to give is - find out for yourself.Neither Barret nor you are in no way answerable to me anyway, it is your own responsibility not mine.Read the Bible for YOURSELF if you are so inclined (if not) so be it....
Sampson,
I've read the Bible. In the original Hebrew.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that G-d does exist, only not in the way that most believe.
If a human being does "God's work" then God's work is done and therefore God does exist in that sense. Churches get built. Synagogues get built (and get burnt down by Nazi swine). Charity monies are collected and distributed. A lot of good things are done in God's name and a lot of bad things are done.
If sitting in a secluded room and muttering to yourself (aka praying) helps psychologically, then great. Keep doing it. You have an absolute right to do it and I will support that right. On the other hand if you gather in a mosque with co-evil planners and mutter hatred and hatch plans to kill other people, that's the devils work. The devil exists in that way also.
It's both real and unreal at the same time. Quantum mechanics at work.
Have, several times. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) the meme did not find me a suitable host for infection. Maybe I should try the Vedic Texts or the Bagavad Gita.
I am one who thinks there is a lot of room for religion. If nothing else, our forefathers had a lot of insights to pass down about many things--how to treat one another, what is important in life, certain practical advice. One doesn't pass this down as a set of stone tablets. There is a whole body of understanding that goes with it.
It is easy for us now to say this or that is absurd (for example, the world was created in 7 days, 6,000 years ago), but if one views the Bible as a collection of stories about how our forefathers viewed the world, that offers us understanding about how we should live today, there are many things that are worthwhile. One can even compare creation stories from the BIble, to creation stories from other literature from the same time-period, to get some insight as to how views differed among the various groups.
There are any number of religions and philosophies that have been passed down, and I expect quite a few of them have something to offer. We now have economics, which seems to play pretty much the same role today, but is even more flawed. But it has a lot of people fooled into thinking it can tell people what is important, how we can be happy, and how we should treat one another.
If we only had one not prone to violence. Maybe Budhhism.
sigh - I'll bite on this, as a former Bible as inerrant truth believer wanting to make amends for all the people I lied to about hell and the end times...
You apparently believe that only religion teaches morality.
You fear - rightly, that without some public morality, there will be (dark) chaos, murder, mayhem, and all manner of bad/painful/ineffective things.
Thus when someone says "religion not (necessarily) good" - you hear "I'm some ivory tower airhead and want to try some grand social experiment of anything goes". (or more sinister: "I've sold my soul to the devil and want to cause disruption, damnation, ...")
That is scary - IFF it were true.
But it's not. Religion is not the only path to public morality.
N.B. scaring people is an old persuasion trick, one oft used by the priesthoods to maintain their cushy sinecures. (a position with no real work).
This is one reason why the U.S. has such virulent religious movements: itinerant preachers can build massive empires of monetary and emotion currency by preaching hatred and division by stirring up trouble against "the other". In Europe, with institutionalized churches, one has to go through official channels, thus the lack of "innovation".
I am going to presume that you haven't read (with understanding) Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and Adam Smith - philosophers of the Enlightenment, who basically came to "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" from reason, not "because the pope said God said".
Another part of why Europe tends to be more civil is not only their history of seeing/experiencing religious dogmatics kill in the name of preserving civility (and one can see to this day bullet holes for various wars in many European cities), but also more respect for intellectuals.
FYI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
If many atheists sound snarky, one can hardly blame them (even if they may be less effective debaters for it), given the murder of Giordano Bruno, and the sentencing of Galileo. Who gives someone the right to kill/confine someone else because they feel insulted?
The fear by atheists/agnostics of religious nuts is well founded.
While I'm here, two definitions:
religion - a set of beliefs and physical practices meant to support spirituality.
spirituality - one's relationship with the divine, the numinous, with God/Goddess/All-That-Is.
IMHO, most religious people are (a) massively ignorant about spirituality, and (b) crassly materialistic and ignorant of being that way.
My prescription is for the religious to move beyond mere belief and seek active, evolving relationship with the Divine, the numinous, the ineffable ... via "technologies" like: meditation, psychical phenomena, mediumship, etc.
Ah - but the priests warn against such "work of the devil"?
No wonder - it would threaten their cushy sinecures and community stature if someone got an evidential message from a departed friend/relative that death is just the dropping off of an outer material vehicle. (and threatens similarly the crassly materialistic atheists who deny parapsychological evidence.)
FYI - some books to read:
http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922
http://www.amazon.com/End-Materialism-Paranormal-co-published-Institute/...
http://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Universe-Mechanics-Participating-Collectio...
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Reincarnation-Biology-Intersect-Stevenson/dp...
(and anything else by Ian Stevenson)
And how 'bout the Pam Reynolds case (not the best video, but what I could find):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnY7gq7B5PY
n.b. 15 deg. C is 59 deg. F.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o47N_UPkGrc
Maybe the religious folks might consider getting a little more scientific, rational and honest, without totally abandoning the numinous.
"first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye". Matthew 7:5
"The great way is not difficult for those who hold no preferences." - Hindu/Buddhist saying.
More exactly: "The great way (enlightenment, truth) is not difficult for those who are not attached to their preferences."
Like say (going back to, ahem!, peak oil), a preference for: Business As Usual... ;-)
Try to use less anger in your posts, even when it seems to you that your opinions of things has been tarnished. Civil conversation is best and will win you more friends than ranting.
Charles.
As a Christian, I'd love to have a humble Sustainable world to wake up to everyday. No worries about trashed rainforests, or dying ecosystems because someone wants to strip mine a rainforest. I wear a cross around my neck, but I understand Peak Oil Production, resource collaspe, species die off, and likely vast numbers of humans dying off because of human natures need to be greedy.
I don't think God sent 9-11 or Katrina to punish us, though He is in control, all the messes around us, and our own aliments and death are the price for Sin.
What I believe and what others believe is likely going to be different, it does not mean that we can't try to work together in a civil way for a sustainable life while we are here abouts living on earth.
No need to flame me for my faith, just understand If I had my way, living on earth would be peaceful and comfortable for everyone.
Charles.
As I understand it (haven't run the numbers myself) aircraft flown full are a relatively efficient way to move large numbers of people and some products (e.g. circuit boards) a long way. If it makes sense energy wise to move people from Los Angeles to London on a 747, then it probably makes sense to manufacture enough kerosene to continue to fly them. Feedstock? petroleum, natural gas, coal. Or if fossil hydrocarbons are unavailable, wood or kudzu or algae.
If, OTOH, it doesn't make sense to fly people from Akron to Chicago, we ought to phase out short distance air travel. Be nice to have a viable alternative in place first though.
Likewise trains and trucks. If they can't run on hydrogen or CNG for some reason and electrifying all the trackage in the US is impractical or isn't cost effective, then make diesel. If Germany could do it half a century ago and South Africans do it today, even 21st Century Americans possibly can manage it.
"As I understand it (haven't run the numbers myself) aircraft flown full are a relatively efficient way to move large numbers of people"
If you did run the numbers yourself, you would find that they are not.
What has to end is our obsession with travel, with moving ourselves and our things all over the globe. It's time to once again source nearly everything from within about 100 miles of where it is used, and keep ones travels mostly to within a similar perimeter.
Ideally, we can keep enough of a communication system going that this will not lead to too much closed minded parochialism.
I disagree with you on this one my friend.
I think BAU travel as in planes, cars, buses etc... probably does have to end, however I went to a screening this past Friday and met these two young guys who built their kayaks from kits and paddled them 1200 miles over 3 months from Alaska to Seattle This is the film they made:
http://www.dudesonmedia.com/PADDLE_TO_SEATTLE.html
I think the way our free time is currently structured is going to change drastically in the future. I could for example imagine people going for a six month sail around the globe. The desire to visit new places I think will never die out in humans at least as long as we survive.
BTW I'm 56 and I can still easily paddle 15 to 20 miles a day depending on weather conditions I can ride 30 to 40 miles on my bike as well. I can hike some 20 miles a day. Plus I know how to sail and navigate. Chances are I will still be able to do this for another decade or so.
Maybe other circumstance will prevent me from doing so but I don't see the obsession to travel ending anytime soon.
I envy you that you got to see the film and talk to those involved!
Perhaps I was wrongly extrapolating the average American's sorry physical shape and pitiful practical skill set into the future. Few currently would be able or willing to undergo such rigors. Of course, those who are able and willing will continue to explore the world. It will be again more like real adventure, I imagine.
But I'm guessing for most Americans at least, when traveling no longer involves sitting on a winged bus then renting a car to drive to the exact same kinds of hotel, restaurants and stores they had at home, most will just not travel very far very often.
Travel will become again what it always had been: travail--hard work (the original meaning was actually 'torture'.)
It was quite special as it was a private screening organized by the kayaking community of the greater Miami area. The official screening was on Saturday.
Fmaygar,
Agreed-bau travel hopping on a plane or marathon auto trips must come to end before too long, either as a matter of social policy or not too much later by physical constraints.
It is WAY PAST TIME FOR AVIATION FUEL TO BE TAXED by the way.
Personally My guess is that there will not be a powered down back to the horses days crash in the near future but that we will change our ways drastically.
Trains will be coming back in a big way and there is no reason that fast frieghts can't pull a few passenger cars.
With modern electronics and a lot of extra sidings I can't see any reason rail trolleys-essentially single car trains can't run intercity and just pull off when a train is approaching.
Nor can I see any reason who Toto's(I hope he isn't sick or something !) light rail cannot be extended out into many urban and even rural areas-light vehicles could be designed to run on light rail but also capable of traveling on standard rails.
We probably could move half or more of our transportation infrastructure or more to some kind of highly flexible rail system in two decades.
If frieght could be gotten to within for example five miles of its destination on a train powered by overhead lines and a single car-equipped with its own battery pack and electric motor- could be detached , it could unload or load anywhere up and down a five mile long branch line which could be built right into a highway;this would eliminate the need for branch line electricity while still being well within the limits of todays batteries-even lead batteries probably.
Such a system could cut liquid fuel use in a big way without requiring any new technology,while also reducing pollution substantially if we achieve a large wind or solar power capacity.
It would also be a good way to balance renewable loads-all those batteries could be topped off with renewable power as available and maybe even used to heplp trim peak loads a little in a pinch.
The main reason you can't is that such cars throw away two of rail's greatest advantages - long trains have much lower energy requirements per ton due to low air resistance and rail has its greatest capacity when all trains run at roughly the same speed - if you try to mix fast (ish) railcars with slow freight either the freights will have to stop to allow the railcars to overtake or there will big gaps in the freights to allow the railcars not to catch up the train in front. This problem is one of the main reasons for building high speed rail in Europe - if you move the fast trains off the old network you can run more medium speed passenger and freight than the displaced high speed services on the existing lines and the expresses can also run faster on the new system. The only problems are cost and NIMBYs.
This would not be worth it - you would waste loads of power hauling the batteries around on the main network, better (and common in the nineteenth/early twentieth century) would be a small battery locomotive for the last stage or minimum wired systems (they need nothing more than timber poles for the overhead) - these could also be combined with tram systems if the passenger demand is there. Better than lead batteries would be the even older technology of NiFe cells - they weigh more than lead-acid but they last indefinitely (with electrolyte replacement every 25 years or so there are century old ones still in service). The extra weight would not matter for a low speed local use locomotive as they usually need to be ballasted to give them sufficient hauling power in any case.
Already done in Europe (even in the UK). Indeed there is a system in (former east) Germany where steam hauled tourist trains share tracks with diesel railcars and freight and have electric trams with diesel generators running over them from the adjacent town system. Substitute the generators with batteries and you have the whole system.
Binglebong,
I with you on the efficiency of the big long train running straight and steady-my idea is that smaller goods trains and local town to town or village to village trolleys would do all the pulling over.Even a heavily traveled main line is not apt to have a major frieght pass thru more than a couple of times an hour in most places.
If the big guys come thru on the hour , there should be plenty of time to run some short hop locals between them.The key thing about good electronics is that there should be no collisions if the system is correctly implemented.
Some sort of minilocomotive might be better than cars that carry thier own motors and batteries for trips down long sidings or it might be better to just offload onto local electric short range trucks.Mostly I was thinking in terms of achieving adequate track front capacity-obviously most businesses cannot be located alongside existing main lines.
OFM
Fair comment if there are already long gaps in the traffic, a lot of the US main lines seem pretty busy to me with very long slow freights every few minutes but I've not been there enough to know if that is just an impression. The other thing to remember is a lot of the US milage is single track and long gaps when you change over the direction of the trains are inevitable (more shunt spurs and sidings would allow a mixed system to work in that case though).
In Europe things are different - busy railways can often have a passenger train every few minutes (5 min headways are not uncommon) with most freight running at night or on separate tracks.
The biggest problem I see is that by the time things got bad enough for the inconvenience of returning to a train plus local road system the available track space would be hoplessy inadequate even with a massive reduction in demand. Country stations in the UK were often spaced based on the maximum range horse drawn vehicles could serve from them rather than being anywhere near any existing settlement, we could do the same thing now but with battery vehicles but no way could we carry anywhere near the present volume of road traffic.
We can obtain hydrogen from electrolysis of water and from there can obtain methanol, dimethyl ether, and gasoline (all viable fuels for ICEs) all from reduction of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide can be obtained from coal and nat gas in the short term and from biomass, sequestered carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide scrubbers in the long term.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy
or
“Chemical Recycling of Carbon Dioxide to Methanol and Dimethyl Ether” in the Journal of Organic Chemistry.
The reduction of carbon dioxide has been demonstrated in excellent yields (up to 99.8%) using catalysts such as copper, zinc oxide, and aluminum oxide, some of the more common catalytic elements. This type of reaction has been known for 80 years and is demonstrated on a pilot scale plant in Japan. It is being scaled up for commercial use in Iceland to take advantage of cheap geothermal energy; and in Japan, Mitsui chemical is building a 100 ton/year plant.
Conversion of hydrogen to liquid fuels is feasible, though will involve some energy loss from the hydrogen itself. It does work and is probably scalable.
Where there's a will there's often a way. If only we yearned for the right things!
If we yearn for BAU to continue, then in the last resort, we might send a mining expedition to the moon and mars to look for precious metals; and maybe we'll invent a special machine to deploy into space which captures energy from the sun and stores it in a dense medium which can be shipped back to earth, where it will help multiply this parasitic race of ours.
Or perhaps we might yearn for our material lives to be slowed down, so that our wisdom has time enough to catch up to our science and technology.
I wonder how the plot will unfold........
I'm sure we are going to get a bit of both. BAU has always evolved tto take advantage of technology. Think back twenty years to pre internet days, none of us felt deprived that it didn't exist. Now it is hard to imagine life without it.
Fossil fuel depletion will cause BAU to adapt. Part of that will be re-jigging the daily arrangements of local life, part of it may be new communications technology to avoid the need for travel, part of it may be new energy sources which will necessarily force adaptation either because of it's avaialbility/scale/cost or the nature of the source eg liquid, gas, solid electricity etc.
@ drofeverything
It was called Hindenburg and the comparison isn't that nice because you can't compare modern hydrogen-tanks with the mantle of the Hindenburg...
@ shox
You can burn hydrogen direct (with modifications) in an gas turbine, so you don't need an vast and heavy electric engine. It works also with an internal cobustion engine - BMW is already running cars with modified conventional engines powerd by hydrogen. Actuel hydrogen is the only realistic medium for the long-time future air-traffic medium (exept of bio-fuels of curse), because it hase the needed energie-density batteries (probably) never will have.
This does not mean that a hydrogen airplain is an easy goal and I also exspect that this plane will be a little slower than our actuall kerogene enginees. But there are definitely no fundamental scientific problems with running airplnes on hydrogen. These airplane maybe smaller and slower and with a much shorter range than actual airplanes but they will fly. Maybe at part with internal combustion engines like in the old days. It may also be more expensiv to fly but i don't agree do doomsters saying will will fly no more, but we will for shure fly less, it will become more luxery than today. Hydrogen will propably be the long-time solution for air-traffic. But for airplanes we will still have some time left for further research because this is a field where the oil will be replaced at last - shurly after 2050.
http://www.mtu.de/de/technologies/engineering_news/others/Sieber_Neue_Tr...
http://www.mtu.de/de/technologies/engineering_news/others/Sieber_Zukuenf...
Another rosy scenario that purports to continue BAU without much pain in the transition to sustainable living.
Main problem is the cost for the infrastructure and new transport vehicles, assuming buildings are simply modified. Old fossil fuel based infrastructure is scrapped and new wind/solar/tidal/hydro based energy system built with whose money?
Only transport mode easily convertable to electric is rail. Airplanes that run on H*2 fuel will be horizon technolgy. The use of fuel cells for transport applications has been discussed numerous times on this site, and Gail has discribed the obvious problems here again.
The only way to greatly reduce high carbon fossil fuel use (coal & heavy oil) is through conservation. Forego taking three or four trips per year by plane. Forego the 25 mile daily commute. Forego the summer house in Florida or on the Mediterranean coast. Forego all those power sucking appliances. Forego maintaining the huge highway infrastructure and lighting it with a million power sucking 500 watt fixtures. Forego a lot of activities that do not clothe, house, feed, and maintain health of the population (like buying derivatives, lawyering, flipping real estate, wedding consulting, and thousands more useless occupations).
The only way to get off fossil fuels is with a huge amount of pain and drastic changes is EVERYONES lifestyle.
Good points.
Buses, bikes, walking, car pools, rail.
As far as aircraft and fuel cells go:
http://www.livescience.com/technology/091013-ion-tiger.html
Note that the Ion weighs 37 pounds and carries ~ a 3 pound payload.
This technology is not going to scale to airliners. A 'Cessna' type bug-smasher carrying maybe up to four people and some baggage for ~ 300 miles on a 'charge' would be the pinnacle of this technology, and that is stretching credibility.
Might as well just use a glider.
Re. BAU...It drives me crazy when future scenarios are based on BAU, i.e., a consumer driven, debt-based, market oriented society. It isn't going to happen. BAU is unsustainable regardless of what the energy source(s) is.
Rather than starting with a definition of the future society and the energy requirements of that society, the cart is always put before the horse by extrapolating from current society.
My own view was stated here in June, 2007: http://www.theoildrum/node/2598#comment-198254 where I foresee a society of very low consumption with people living in either family or affinity groups. One of my additional points in that post was that "energy" was mostly dispersed to the living units. And, yes, population control was a reality.
Todd
Thank you, Todd. My sentiments as well.
Although I should add that I don't really like the term "BAU" to begin with. It's meaning is too vague, and different people obviously use it to mean different things. To some, it means any scenario that involves a continuing high level of technology. To others, it means any scenario that involves high levels of energy consumption. To others, it means -- as you suggest -- continuation of the current socio-economic system: consumer driven, debt-based, and market oriented. Others would assert that all three of those interpretations are equivalent, but can supply only vague generalities to make their case.
To me, it's the perverse incentives inherent in the current socio-economic system that are the most fundamental obstacles to a sustainable culture. I don't think most people appreciate the degree to which current excessive levels of material and energy consumption are the result of artificially stimulated consumption, which follows from the need to have jobs for everyone in a world where technology and competitive pressure are constantly eliminating jobs.
If we can get to a world in which adequate food, clothing, shelter, and sanitation are taken as basic rights, then jobs will be optional. The need for advertising will evaporate, and consumption will plunge.
Thanks Gail--
Good post!
I'll echo that one. Gail is jolly good here ; a well founded realist/skeptic. I'm impressed by her ability to present 'her case' without even using a small spoon of Sarcanol- Cudos for that-
This Chart "How long will it last ?" belongs attached under such postings.
As for the SciAm-magazine ?... well he**, why don't you go consider an article that evaluates why the Big Bang actually took place ? But if the article in Q starts up something like this : "Imagine if the sky was pink and renewable and sustainable energy sources was as easy to scale to running demand as saying Yes .... then ..." well then skip my rant!
Thanks for reminding me of the image of the remaining time for many minerals, even with recycling.
Gail,
What are you saying?
There are only 4 more years of Indium left?
I won't be able to read your wise words on an LCD screen after that ?
OMG
Relax.
4 more years, if the world consumes at half the U. S. consumption rate.
13 years, at the current consumption rate.
After 13 years, the guy with all the old CRTs in his warehouses will be king!
Well, what if everyone continues to double their resource use at the rate of the last 200 years, i.e. doubling about every ~40 years?
I keep wondering why scarcity charts like that don't list magnesium.
That's because magnesium is extracted from seawater. There is essentially no way to run out of magnesium. It is infinitely recyclable and losses can be made up from the oceans.
Dow Chemical investigated the dehydration of ethanol to ethylene with a Brazilian partner. There is no way to run out of ethylene from this source, which means there is no way to run out of polyethylene or any of the other polymers made from ethylene. Flows may be limited, but they remain far above zero. Carbon nanotubes are made from... carbon. Carbon nanotube fabric can now be made at seven meters per minute, and it is stronger than steel. How do you exhaust the supply of that?
How do you exhaust the materials for silicon carbide? Silicon nitride?
Just because our current favored materials are running low, doesn't mean technological society has no alternatives. Biomimicry is the use of techniques adopted from from biology. Making things out of air, water and soil certainly fits.
The way to run out of any of those is to run out of the energy to make or extract them. This is likely to be the limiting factor for aluminum, at least, in the not too distant future.
EP,
I don't know anything about seawater extraction of magnesium, but I do know that some Mg is mined terrestrially...the town of Gabbs, Nevada exists to support the large magnesite deposit just to the SE. IIRC, this deposit is one of the bigger magnesite deposits in the world and I can attest to Gabbs being one of the most wretched towns in the world...nice symmetry eh?
One can't fault Jacobson and Delucchi too much for being too ambitious. I would guess they fully understand that, given the current socio-political climate, only a portion of their program has a chance of actually being implemented. They might as well aim higher than is supposedly realistic. Their intent is to describe what could be done if there were the political will. A good bulk of Gail's criticism is just her pessimism opposed to their optimism (e.g. "It seems unlikely that a tax of this magnitude...would be agreed to by tax payers.") I find that type of criticism has no bearing on whether I should favor or oppose the project being proposed.
Put another way, if the plan is so impossible that it will never happen, why the need to spend so much time on how fantastical it is? Are there good reasons to be afraid of the success of such a plan? I'm sure many TODers will feel there are, and I might well agree on many points. But that scenario (that the plan could do more harm than good) surprisingly isn't very well explored here.
With all that said, I also agree with some of the statements made in this post. I agree with the 20 vs. 50 years statements, and I find the last paragraph of the post very reasonable. I think that a good general argument can be made that, given the costs likely involved, putting all our eggs in such a one basket could be a bad wager. I think it's a bit of a shame that such an argument wasn't developed better in this post.
Finally, I have the following quibble...
I don't know what justifies the word "clearly." The sentences that follow that statement may or may not be mere speculation. We've had a lot of vociferous debates about whether the EROEI of renewables is sufficient to sustain the industrial capacity necessary to keep renewables themselves going. I haven't been convinced either way on the subject. Less absolute terms are in order, IMO.
I don't know jaggedben - but I'll give it a shot
==>> if you understand what fossils gave you - you'll immediately be in position to understand what fossils can take away from you.
(A Reminder : still 85-90% of total global energy utilized for technical purposes are ... ehh fossil... none other methods are even theoretically nearby)
paal myrtvedt reminds us...
"Reminder : still 85-90% of total global energy utilized for technical purposes are ... ehh fossil... none other methods are even theoretically nearby"
Hmmm...and why do you think that is?
Could it be that fossil fuels, despite the contention that we are to run clear out of them any day now (yeah, and I know, "peak isn't about running out..." so why does every scenario created by peak oil aware groups seem to imply exactly that we are in fact "running out"...and damn soon?), said fossil fuels are still priced at such idiotically low prices that no other technology can compete with them on a cost basis?
Hmmm...and if said fossil fuels are still priced this cheaply, how hard is it to get the majority (or even a statistically significant minority) to accept the need for serious change and sacrifice in the effort to create a major change in our consumptive patterns?
Let's just face it: The above creates such a logical conundrum to even the most aware and alert citizens among us so as to be THE critical factor against building support for any alternative other than meltdown should we be on the edge of critical energy and material supply shortages (which are hard to find evidence of even IF one is searching hard).
Even those most certain of critical fossil fuel shortages seem to use so much effort in their attack on any proposed alternative to fossil fuels (talk about a logical conundrum!) that those who do not accept the concept of impending critical shortages will be extremely difficult to recruit to any alternative plan...thus we seem to close off all available althernative paths except one: BAU until the return of the new dark age. Of course by then most people in the developed nations will be so old they cannot survive without the critical medical and social services that only an advanced nation can provide, making the whole discussion moot anyway, except for the relatively young among us.
P.S. And yes, I am aware that the stock markets went down....oops, than back up...and oil prices exploded and then oops, collapsed, and natural gas went to astronomical prices and then oops, really collapsed...and real estate prices collapsed if you were in just the wrong place, but in most of the country there is still a dearth of affordable and decent housing...and the banks melted down (but the credit unions didn't?), and....it really is starting to look like the normal hysterical reaction to a worldwide bubble...and guess what? Things are going along pretty much as they always do after such madness of crowds...but that explanation is just too simple isn't it, it just lacks real drama?
RC
It all looked so darn good...right up till it didn't anymore...
This answers the question as to why governments have to take the lead (notice I did NOT say 'do everything'): The sheeple, left to their own devices, are too busy working, watching TV, playing video games, etc. to notice anything, except maybe all those natural gas industry commercials that trumpeted how we have enough NG to meet America's energy needs for 60 years!...except that now a year later the same lobbying group's ads trumpet that "NG will last us 100 years, and more is being found every day!'.
Only an organization with the scale and scope of a government can start to turn the Titanic away from the berg by investing in technologies which will supplant then replace most FFs.
I can't wait to hear the kicking and screaming...then you definitely won't like my idea for a mandatory 2-child per woman per lifetime limit, taxing energy use, and the plan to close the borders to all but legal immigration.
None of that will come to pass...we will all assuredly have the freedom to mash the accelerator and speed off the cliff.
Well, governments are not really a good bet either are they? They're all solidly committed to using up everything ever faster as the way to create ever more bountiful supply, aren't they? Check the math!
It's a cognitive glitch. No, we'er not "running out".
What we're doing is "running up" our remaining resources, making the short supply of EROI>1 recoverable resources into scarce necessities for speculators to bid up till some industry or population that once relied on them is shoved aside and has to do without. That's more like a slamming door than a limitless supply.
The subject at hand was a hypothetical renewable system that had replaced the world's need for FF energy. So fossils have zilch to do with it. It's separate from the "can we get there from here?" question. (Not to mention the "do we want to get there?" question...)
Of course the word 'forever' in this context is not useful at all. We can suppose that 'forever' in this article is meant to mean 'for a long time', which in these type of discussions here seems to equate to a couple of hundred years.
I read both the SciAm article and the longer "technical" article on which it was supposed based. Very sloppy, poor quality work (IMO).
The most egregious fault is their uninformed and ideologically motivated bias against nuclear power. In order to make it come out worse than WWS in their analysis, they essentially made the equation "nuclear power will lead to proliferation of nuclear weapons which will lead to nuclear war, so the environmental costs of nuclear war must be weighed in to the cost of nuclear power." No mention of the fact that the star performer of the WWS scenario -- the large wind turbine -- uses 10x the amount of concrete and steel as a conventional nuclear plant, per kilowatt-hour delivered annually. Or that newer designs for nuclear plants would score even better. Also no mention of the fact that no nuclear weapons have ever been built, by any country, from plutonium recovered from spent nuclear fuel. The plutonium in spent reactor fuel is heavily contaminated with Pu 240, whose spontaneous neutron emission rate is too high to allow a super-critical mass to be assembled before detonation.
Its treatment of nuclear power aside, the article also suffers from the points enumerated by Gail. Liquid hydrogen could be used to fuel airplanes; Boeing has done serious design studies on that. The operational cost would be very high. The problem isn't explosions; hydrogen that leaks will rise and diffuse too quickly to present a significant risk of explosions. But its super low temperature, high thermal conductivity, and nearly invisible flame do make it dangerous. If you were going to use liquid hydrogen as an aviation fuel, you'd burn it directly in jet or gas turbine engine, not a fuel cell.
The whole idea is stupid, however. If you've produced the hydrogen to use as a fuel, it's energetically down hill to produce synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. The energy you lose in conversion isn't much greater than the energy needed to liquify hydrogen. The authors refusal to consider synthetic hydrocarbon fuels simply points up their ignorance.
Link from two days ago: The Nuclear Green Revolution: The Jacobson-Delucchi plan revealed.
I agree, and since hydrocarbon fuels can be synthesized from CO2 and water, it's basically carbon neutral anyway, but as always the problem is that we need an energy input. In any case, I've wondered about synthetic fuel plants as a way to store energy generated from wind/solar sources during peak generation, but low consumption, periods.
The problem with synthesis of renewable hydrocarbons isn't the synthesis, it's the renewing. Scraping CO2 out of the atmosphere is the rate-limiting step, and absent some breakthrough like algae ponds the demand for hydrocarbon products is going to keep the price too high for mass air travel.
The obvious path is to chemically add energy to renewable feedstocks. The biofuels provide the carbon and then wind generated electricity is used to additionally reduce the biofuels, storing more energy up to or past the energy content of kerosene.
This seems like a much simpler and cheaper way to keep airplanes flying than hydrogen fuel cells. The hydrogen is added to biofuel carbon to make synthetic kerosene or equivalent and current engine designs just burn it.
The US has 1.3 billion dry-tons per year of biomass potential; 368 million could come from sustainably removable biomass from forestlands and 998 million could come from agricultural lands.
http://feedstockreview.ornl.gov/pdf/billion_ton_vision.pdf
Biomass is composed of a mix of polysaccharides (cellulose and xylan) and lignin. If 70% of biomass is polysaccharide (about 40% carbon content) and 30% is lignin ( say 80% carbon content), then about 50% of biomass weight is carbon. So 1.3 billion tons biomass is about .65 billion tons carbon. That carbon can be converted to alkanes using hydrogen from electrolysis of water, giving .75 billion tons of alkane or 5.5 billion barrels of alkane. The US consumes about 7.6 billion barrels a year of oil. Hence, biomass can provide nearly enough carbon for liquid fuel consumption at today’s rates if all carbon from biomass is converted into fuel.
Yup, that's true. It's also true that the losses in the process, and the overhead for the physical plant required, make it absurd to try to continue BAU on that basis. We are much better off converting the end-use to electric power than converting electricity to fuel. In a capital-constrained future, we will do it the sensible way or not at all.
On the other hand, there are possibilities with stranded energy supplies, such as strong winds in places where the electric grid is weak (e.g. Iowa). If carbon is available there (say, from CO2 scrubbed out of biogas) and something like electro-microbial conversion of CO2 to methane can be made to work cheaply, nearly all carbon in such gases might be converted to fuel. CO2 taken from supercritical water oxidation of wastes is another source. Once carbon has been captured and concentrated, releasing it back to the atmosphere is a waste.
Agreed. There will be ~20% loss converting from electricity to hydrogen, additional loss in converting hydrogen and carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide to fuel, and then the ~80% loss in the ICE. There are alot of losses. Electricity is highly preferable and hopefully we can use it for most of our transport needs, but if batteries don't work out for any reason synthetic fuels are an option. I see carbon from biomass as the long-term option for synthesis of chemicals and polymers and supply of liquid fuels for difficult to electrify transport.
Any guess what that price would be?
I agree that the link between civilian nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons production is specious and contrived.
Someday we will wake up and embrace modern civilian nuclear power plants again. The waste stream is tiny, expressed in volume, compared to coal-fired generation. This waste is easily contained and monitored, compared to coal-fired wastes. And yes, this nuclear waste production can be reduced using the right types of reactors which use up a far greater proportion of the fuel...these same reactors can re-use the legacy wastes to generate even more energy and also reduce the amount of legacy waste. What little waste is left is entombed in a well-engineered repository.
Hi Moonwatcher,
I want to agree with you. My only hesitation is the cost argument that will prevent construction of new plants - that new plants are so expensive that funding in this day of limited credit is a real obstacle.
How do you envision this funding issue? And, I really do hope you have a good solution as I think most of the other objections are far less significant.
Another big mistake in the article is that they mention that
NEODYMIUM is needed for the GEARBOX of Wind Turbines.
And that a possible solution to this problem would be to make Wind Turbines without gearbox.
I think that there is a German company that already makes Wind Turbines without a gearbox.
But the NEODYMIUM is NOT needed in the gearbox !!!!
The neodymium is needed for the magnets in a particular type of wind turbine. It is not necessary, it just improves efficiency.
Neodym is used for making permanent-magnetic material (Ne2Fe14B) in a rotating current synchron-electric generator - for the rotors permanent-magnetic material, not in the gearbox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet
If you have no Neodym, you could use other magnetic materials or even an other type of generator without permanent-magnetic material (for example asynchron-electric generator), a little less efficient, but not enough to stop BAU I guess...
We will have no problem transporting people and supplying them with goods and services sufficient for a very good quality of life without burning fossil fuels. We may have problems persuading them to stop burning fossil fuels.
Gail is concerned about the following points:
Aircraft - indeed, hydrogen is a nonsense for aircraft. However, very little in terms of essential goods are transported by air. No more Chilean cherries in New York winter, oh well.
Ships - consider the scale of the issue. Currently, some 34% of shipping tonnage worldwide is devoted to transporting oil [source, p.16]. 96% of oil is burned. SA's article proposes no more burning of oil, so some 33% of world shipping can be scrapped.
World coal trade was about 718Mt in 2003 [source, p2], at the same time as total world trade was 6,500Mt, so that coal was 11% of world seaborne trade by weight. Coal is all burned (even if sometimes liquefied first), and again SA proposes stopping this; so another 11% of world shipping could be scrapped.
I could go on, but the point is clear: just by no longer burning oil and coal, we could almost halve our global shipping, thus halving the demand for fuel for it. This does not eliminate the problem of how to fuel the ships, but certainly makes it easier to deal with.
Automobiles and trucks - these don't need to be fuelled at all. We have some recent inventions called "trains" and "trams", which are in many parts of the world entirely electric, and which can thus be powered by renewable energy.
Many supposed "problems" are like this. When you look at changing every single piece of infrastructure to some new power source, things look difficult. When instead you look at what the infrastructure is supposed to do, things look much easier. We don't need cars and trucks. We need to transport people and goods. Cars and trucks are simply one inefficient way of doing that; other more efficient ways exist.
Farm machinery, etc - electric versions of these exist already as anyone can discover in five minutes with google.
Mining and manufacturing - are largely electric anyway. It's only when going for marginal ores that a lot of fossil fuels are used, eg in open-cut lowgrade mines. Of course, absent fossil fuels, our demand for things like iron ore will drop - electric (not electronic) things tend not to break down as quickly as fossil fuel-powered things.
"We'd have to build lots of stuff" - we build lots of stuff anyway. So it's just a matter of building different stuff. In 2006, the world produced a bit under 50 million cars.
If we can produce 50 million internal combustion engine cars I don't see why we can't produce (say) 2 million electric train engines and 10 million electric cars.
Likewise, we are already building more coal-fired and gas-fired power stations. China alone is building one or two new coal-fired power stations each week. If they can do that, they can whack up wind turbines or solar thermal stations or whatever.
We build lots of stuff already. The only question is what we build: more stuff that burns fossil fuels, or more stuff that doesn't.
"We need to figure out how to do this" - a century or two ago we had this thing called the Industrial Revolution. People harnessed wind and water, then wood and coal, and finally gas and oil, and used its energy to build things. Nobody figured out any Grand World Plan To Burn Stuff. They just went ahead and did it and muddled along.
I don't see why we were able to just stumble along through an Industrial Revolution, but an Ecotechnic Revolution is supposed to require careful planning. I suppose because some people are rather anxious that we should not stop burning stuff, their stock in fossil fuel companies might drop too low.
"So how will we pay for all of the new equipment?" - the same way we pay for 50 million new cars, hundreds of new coal-fired power stations, and billions of plastic widgets every year. As noted above, we're buying all this ecotechnic stuff instead of this burning stuff, not as well as it.
"But if we stop burning stuff, my Valiant won't be worth anything in 2028!" - well, so what? Electric typewriters, brick-sized mobile phones with satchel batteries, valve radios and buggy whips ain't worth much nowadays, too. Things become obsolete, that's life in a technological society.
"Will I get compensation for this?" - no, why should you? When we brought in personal computers, did anybody compensate the typing pool? When we brought in cars, did anyone compensate buggy whip makers? When we brought in transistors, did anyone compensate the valve glass factories? Again, things become obsolete, that's life.
"Too many rare minerals are needed!" - name them, and tell us why they're needed.
"What about all the power lines?" - yes, we couldn't possibly have a system where power lines criss-cross the country. Wait, what?
"When the power goes out, we're in trouble!" - how is this a change from today?
"Operating the system will require a huge amount of international co-operation, because the transmission system will cross country lines. " - Of course, that's impossible. That's why the Danes never sold wind power to Sweden and Germany, and the Swedes never sold hydroelectric power to the Danes, nor Germany nuclear power to Denmark.
Good thing countries never buy vital goods and services from each-other. Imagine if the US were to rely on other countries for most of its energy? However would it cope?
"All of the high tech manufacturing will require considerable international co-operation and trade." - this is a bad and new thing?
"The system clearly can't continue forever. It could be stopped by a lack of rare minerals, or international disputes, or lack of adequate international trade." - are you talking about the ecotechnic system, or the current fossil fuel one?
North Korea shows us what happens when countries try to go it entirely alone. All worthwhile systems require some international co-operation, people honouring contracts, that sort of thing.
"Instead of the high tech approach advocated by Scientific American, we may want to find solutions that can be done locally, with local materials." - see now this at last is a piece of good sense. However, the two are not incompatible. We can have some international high-tech, and some localisation of stuff.
We will have no problem transporting people and supplying them with goods and services sufficient for a very good quality of life without burning fossil fuels. We may have problems persuading them to stop burning fossil fuels.
On this point if peak oil has been reached, then prices will certainly creep upward as production declines. These high prices are what will persuade consumers to buy imievs, leafs, volts, and the like. Coal, oil shale, and natural gas will probably be around for a long time.
On powering aircraft - IDK why no one has pointed out that aircraft have already been successfully tested with liquid ammonia and biofuel. Either type of fuel will work with existing engine technology.
Very good set of points, Kiashu. Especially the point that we're already making equivalent amounts of stuff, just of a different kind. And the point that we'll end up needing to make less stuff. And the point that we're not faced with a binary choice, we can choose both.
I think that the transition will be both easier and more difficult than Gail suggests. Easier technically but harder politically. Just think of all those new products to be standardised. The sheer weight of standards committees will break the back of the transition :-)
(There is cause for hope, though: we now have an agreement on a standard cellphone charger specification across companies and countries. Our landfills are saved! How long did that take? (Rhetorical).)
A couple of nitpicks, though. It's often said - I think Jim Kunstler goes on about it - that urban form is dictated by the dominant mode of transport. In the past trams and trains dictated fairly dense population centres separated by farmland. Cars dictated the current sprawl. Going back to trams and trains may cause issues; what, exactly, I don't know, but I know people won't like it at first. How will you do your grocery shopping by train? Or get the materials for those bookshelves you're making?
A sub-point here is that the baby-boomer generation is reaching "crustiness". People get resistant to change as they age. Baby-boomers have been used to having things their own way for their whole lives. This doesn't bode well for massive changes. (Was this what you were getting at with your last paragraph?)
Secondly, Gail is at least partly right about the need for some planning, because electricity is different. Fossil-fueled engines won out over electric motors, despite a later start, precisely because they needed much less in the way of a dedicated system to operate.
Let me expand on that last point. Edison is credited with "inventing the lightbulb". In fact, he didn't. His great achievement was developing a complete, integrated electricity generation, distribution, and consumption system with all its myriad interconnections, structures, safety features and so on. Edison was a brilliant systems integrator.
Edison also developed better electric cars, but they didn't take off, because they were dependent on an electricity system that didn't exist except in a few places, those being places where most people didn't need cars: densely populated cities.
Gasoline, on the other hand, could be transported pretty much anywhere by train and wagon - kerosene for lighting had been transported the same way for decades. Suddenly, farm-dwellers everywhere could get to church on Sunday, and visit their neighbors. So gasoline won the battle with electric vehicles hands down.
With electricity, if you're using AC and have more than one generator, the generators have to be kept precisely in sync. Easy enough to do with a few large generators, but with a million wind turbines dotted about in groups of a hundred here, five hundred there, coordination needs a bit more thought - especially of the "what could possibly go wrong?" kind.
My own solar power plant has no problems keeping precisely in sync with the AC power grid. I think you can count this problem as being solved.
gregvp - While I agree with most of your post I have to take issue with your comments on the Baby Boomer generation.I am one of these "crusty" types.I am certainly not used to having things my own way for my whole life and I am not resistant to change,provided it is for the better.
It should be obvious that while there may be a few markers of attitudes and behaviour in any generational group this is overwhelmed by the usual human diversity.Age is no barrier to original thought not shackled by conventional wisdom.If you think otherwise I suggest you read more widely.
Generalizing about generations is patently false reasoning and is not helpful in tackling the immense problems we have.
Well, even if slightly misplaced it's really critically important that people think about the learning response time on these things. That's one of the key distinguishing characteristic of real systems thinking. It's unfortunately profoundly missing from most of the eco-technology discussion.
People just pick numbers out of the hat for how fast things can change, not realizing how thoroughly cross connected our economic and social functions are. The systems themselves rigidify, not just the people.
The biggest rigidity I see getting in the way is we set our scientific, financial and cultural models around the experience of perpetual exponential growth over 100 years ago, and forgot all other possibilities. Now people can't even discuss what that is or how something different would function.
We simply can't convert an integrated global system into a scattering of local systems the way most people describe the transition. It would just totally implode and the culture that built it would vanish.
What we need to do most of all is to take our foot off the gas. We're going to be slow in responding to the pressures. The conversation today really seems to be going in the same circles that the one in 1970 was.
People do their grocery shopping without cars in a lot of places, even places that have indoor plumbing and reliable electricity. I used to have a folding wheeled shopping basket that held a week's groceries for a family and stored almost flat. I even took it on buses.
The problem isn't shopping without a car, it's running out of milk mid-week. The current suburban form doesn't have the numerous little corner grocery and whatnot shops that traditional urban areas have.
Been there, done that too. I have variously loaded up my folding shopping cart and walked a pretty good hike, taken a bus with the cart full of potted plants, hired a taxi, had it delivered, and at occasionally hired a guy with a little truck. At one place I lived, I was fortunate to be able to buy stuff for my apartment at a store just a few blocks away and I came home with a toaster, a lamp and a bunch of plastic kitchen containers packed into the cart.
Easy and inexpensive personal car ownership creates land use forms that do not integrate retail and services into the fabric of where people live. Take away easy and cheap and suddenly traditional urban forms make sense again.
It's also worth noting that most of us don't expect fossil fuels to all simultaneously disappear overnight. Thus, there will be a time when the affordability of fuel drops - either because the price rises (as in mid 2008) or because long unemployment makes people poor.
At the moment, in the US and Australia, the corner grocery store is not really viable. It used to be - I worked in one when I was a teenager in the 1980s, and it'd been open for more than twenty years. It had fresh fruit and vegies, tinned food, preserved meats and cheeses, made sandwiches - whatever you could think of.
It's gone now. Suburban supermarkets killed it - the owner just couldn't compete with their prices, the prices they got from their vast buying power and minimum wage underage employees, all made possible by... cheap fossil fuels.
Now, do people want to open these stores nowadays? Yes. Every two or three blocks in the older suburbs (not the McMansions suburbs, but the older ones) we find strips of 3-6 shops. Most are abandoned, but every year or so someone comes along and opens a takeout joint or hairdresser's. Some succeed, most fail.
People would LOVE to open corner grocery stores, to have a small business dealing with lots of members of the community. People would jump at the chance - it just has to be profitable.
With less affordable fossil fuels, the margin of the supermarkets is lost, and the corner grocery store becomes profitable again.
I realise that many people do take the car to drive 2 blocks, but most can manage without it.
It takes a special person to dedicate that 16 hours a day six or seven days a week to try make the small store go. Much of the wholesale structure the small stores relied on for has supply has disappeared as well. Small store chains linked to a wholesale structure is more likely scenario at least near term. I knew families in the Chicago area that kept their grocery stores going up into the late eighties but none of the kids wanted to put in the hours. Those little stores profit margins were only decent in the high end dense city areas by that time.
Actually, I sometimes did my grocery shopping by train since there was a train station close to a grocery store. However, there was another grocery store within walking distance, and bicycling also worked well.
It can be done. You just have to wrap your automobile-oriented mind around it.
For automobile-oriented people, however, it could be a trauma, particularly when they suffer a loss on selling their suburban houses to move to a more pedestrian-friendly neighborhood because they can no longer afford gas for their SUV.
The SUV will have no value in a few years anyway. It costs much more to rebuild the urban landscape than to build electric cars to make suburbia habitable without gasoline, so there's going to be a lot of arbitrage going on there.
Arbitrage of filling the valueless SUV with very expensive gas paid for out of cashflow vs buying a very expensive electric car with savings (due to their being no financing avaialable). The SUV might be good for twenty years because it won't be used much. The sub-urban landscape still has land in it as well as pretty good irrigation and power infrastructure. I see a lot more adaptation in place with current equipment and, not becasue it's the easy option or preferred choice but because many people will simply have no other option.
"Automobiles and trucks - these don't need to be fuelled at all. We have some recent inventions called "trains" and "trams", which are in many parts of the world entirely electric, and which can thus be powered by renewable energy."
This is far to simple. Sure, many cities have rail and trams but what about inbetween?
My mother lives in a village near an intercity rail line but the nearest station is about 15 miles away. How does she get there for work without her own personal transport? How do they get food and other needs to her when the only shop in the village is a postoffice? and if they do get those needs to her how does she pay for them if shes got no work?
Many cities rail infrastructure systems are already stretched to the limit. Take London, England for example. It has a good metro network which could be used for the transportation of nesassary goods for the population but that network is already in full use just getting commuters in and out of the center for work.
There are different problems for dense and sparsley populated areas when it comes to transport and neither are even recognised as an issue yet by a majority of people.
This problem has long ago been solved by the 80% of the world's population that already lives on 10% of the US/EU energy consumption level.
A shuttle bus runs a couple times a day from the village to the rail. Of course the shuttle bus can operate on a tiny percentage of the energy and materials cost for private automobiles. No rocket science required, and most of the planet does it already. An electric or hybrid or biodiesel bus is much less of a financial/technical challenge than converting thousands of private cars to electric or hydrogen.
That sounds reasonable to me. Switching from personal to public transport is a must. But how do you get round the fact many rail lines are almost at full capacity carrying passengers now and in the future will have to distribute needed goods?
London doesnt have a tram network so one could be built. This would go some way to help alieviate the problem but I still dont see a city of 9 million being supported without a plentiful supply of fossil fuels.
Do you think that passenger rail lines are operating anywhere close to capacity at mid-day, at night and on weekends?
Amsterdam tried delivery of freight by streetcar. Here is the promo video. The effort ran into opposition from the passenger operation which claimed the unused "parking" tracks for its own use and CityCargo went into receivership this year. It is likely that without the bureaucratic power-grab, the effort would be a success and an example.
I've heard a story that it's possible to lay down new tracks. But that could just be a crazy rumour.
Anyway, maybe your mother will end up having to move house. A change to renewably-generated and efficiently-used energy would be a change as profound, I said already, as the Industrial Revolution was. Apparently quite a lot of people had to move house because of the Industrial Revolution.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Edison, you can't electrify that factory, my mother might have to move house!"
Yes, London etc already have overstretched railway systems. So again, perhaps people will have to move. In The Oily Smudge on the Future of the City-State I already pointed out that the day of the mega-city might be soon past. Cities of around 1 million rather than 10 million look more plausible, absent fossil fuels.
So either we become a bit more spread out, or else we have cores of a million or so middle-class, with several million people living in slums rarely travelling anywhere or receiving any goods. We have cities like that already today, as anyone who's ever visited the Third World can tell you.
Hi Kiashu,
Thanks for taking the time to make your analysis - I think this is a very useful debate. I am one of those people who are still struggling with what will be the most likely course of events - and how to prepare for them.
If I were to write the Sci-Am article it would have this framework:
- We have a problem (PO, GW, biosphere destruction, etc)
- The root cause of the problem is overshoot of the planet's carrying capacity (pop, consumption, etc). And, there are many, many other problems (debt, political will, actual resources, etc)
- We need to set some goals and objectives regarding sustainability (pop numbers, GHG numbers, timelines, etc)
- Then we come to possible solutions. Sci-Am solutions, Gail's solutions, Kiashu's solutions and mine all should be evaluated in terms of how well they actually satisfy goals and objectives. Like Kiashu said "We need to transport people and goods" - what is the best mix of alternative ways to do this and still meet our overriding goals for sustainability?
My solutions would start with global family planning; low-tech transportation; localization where sensible; giving electricity the highest priority for energy (much as possible from renewables); using as much technology as possible if it is actually beneficial; etc. My optimal solution set would envision a significant "powerdown" with far fewer people living a far simpler lifestyle (assuming we don't all kill each other first). As many TOD folks have pointed out - wishing for a hi-tech way to sustain BAU is just that: a wish. Mother Nature will be the final judge.
"Like Kiashu said "We need to transport people and goods" "
But we don't NEED to do this on anything remotely like the scale we are doing so now. How much energy is used shipping cookies and other products back and forth across the globe that could just as easily be produced locally?
Hi dohboi,
You are absolutely right - we can't possibly meet realistic goals for sustainability with today's scale of global shipping. That's the whole idea: when it comes to transporting people and goods we should be taking a hard look at the total environmental cost of every current practice. Then, we should focus first on what is essential and second on the most environmentally efficient means of satisfying those essential activities. Sorry if I gave the impression that I was advocating a continuation of all the current transportation practices.
Cookies on the high seas in today's ships would not make the cut.
Beasts like this one burn 1600 gallons of heavy oil and hour while pushing 170,000 tons at 25 knots over the sea. Actually fairly effecient propulsion but the crap that fills the shelves at Wallmart probably fills the ships they power.
That thing is massive..just look at the size of that flywheel
Wonder what kind of battery it would take to power that drive shaft.Lots a luck boys and girls.
They start those big two stroke diesels by injecting compressed air into the cylinders per firing order (either direction). There is a 'small' electric motor that is used to turn the flywheel to position the pistons and shaft as needed when doing maintenance, thus the teeth on the flywheel.
I was being a bit sarcastic with my remark about powering the drive shaft of that engine with a battery.All this talk about battery powered transportation, jolly good luck cranking the propellers that would be attached to that engine with batteries.The only way to sufficiently power a drive shaft/or crank shaft of that size is with massive amounts of fossil fuels or a nuclear/steam driven turbine.Diesel electric designs not withstanding since they of course use fossil fuels.
Whenever I think of (strictly) battery powered transportation - I picture golf carts or little two seat cars.
You threw me with the fly wheel reference, I should have been more nimble as your point was part of the reason I posted that pic. That engine produces 80MW of power. Now my local utility has a 27MW nic-cad battery that only weighs 1500 tons. That diesel weighs over 2500 tons so batteries less than double the weight of the diesel could produce the power needed to turn the prop....for fifteen minutes before needing recharging....
No doubt world shipping is excessive, but big ships with big engines are the most efficient bulk carriers man has yet devised.
Critical, basic fact.
Sticking to the basic facts always helps. But facts are easily drowned out by the non-verbal advertising copy that says, 'don't worry, be happy, keep on driving your [100,000 watt] car, and replacing your laptop every other year'. That same Scientific American issue had an article on how to grow food -- indoors, in skyscrapers. I particularly liked the advertising artist's touch of a photocell on top of a 60 story hydroponic food tower. That photocell would probably be big enough to power and cool the CEO's penthouse office.
I suppose it will always be too late to change in time.
Not even the power to weight ratio is as good:
80,000,000 watts/5,000,000lbs. - Deisel engine.
relative equivalent output for nickel cadmium battery -
81,000,000 watts/9,000,000lbs. gross weight of batteries
Let alone how long the battery can operate at optimum performance.Perhaps a 4000 mile long extension cord would help.
But you know, perhaps you could possibly transmit a current without a transmission line and have a receiver on the remote battery pick up the current - much in the sameway a radio can receive radio frequencies.Something like that would surely have effects on biological life though, it is not safe to live near high voltage power lines due to the electromagnetic fields they produce.If you had to work near a battery receiving transmitted power like that it would probably be equivalent to working (in) a microwave oven....scratch that.
darn I just clicked reply without switching browsers and all my 'new' highlight will be gone...I hate when I do that
Wireless power transmission capability could come down the pike, maybe even finding some way to encapsulate the magnetic fields will reveal itself (that might be even a push for sci-fi), oh shucks we have to get through the bottleneck on the near horizon first.
Us oldsters do like sci-fi, the original hokey "Star Trek" popped on our screens only a couple years after we nearly incinerated ourselves with the Cuba thing. As long as I'm on a far flung tangent including TV sci-fi and Kennedy here is an odd (at the very least odd to be aware of) historical fact about 'Dr. Who.' at the very same time Britain was viewing the very first episode of 'Dr. Who' Lyndon Johnson was in the Whitehouse for the viewing of JFK's body...segue way to phone booth flying through cosmos/play theme.... ?-)
Try control-clicking the Reply link to open a new tab; works for me.
That is easier, if this old dog can learn a new trick, thanks
One trick that's not obvious: watch out for the "Flag" link, because it executes Javascript which reloads the page (and clears all your [new] flags). The safe way to use it is to load the comment subthread (multi-balloon link after the time stamp) in a new tab and flag it from there.
I mention this now because this thread has one of the major spreaders of teh stooopid (willful ignorance) making comments, and removing the comments by flagging is far less disruptive than posting rebuttals which just get angry flaming responses.
I like this concept of a Sailboat that can recharge it's batteries while under sail by spinning it's props like regenerative braking in a hybrid automobile. This seems to be pretty new technology and according to the author it is still not quite been put to a real world test as far as its long term reliability. Still a pretty cool idea all in all. I wonder if the concept could scale to large ships as well?
http://www.matternetwork.com/2006/12/diesel-electric-hybrid-yachts-set.cfm
Wind and solar generators should be a no brainer addition to this boat and the author doesn't understand why they are not standard. Neither do I.
Very cool. The weight/space constraints of course will always have to be taken into account. I imagine a diesel would still be considered standard safety gear even if a two hour battery/electric motor system were in place. But ballast is important. Battery systems could be integrated nicely into many designs. That of course would add complexity, which is not always a good thing at sea, but it also adds redundancy-a very nice companion on a vessel.
The 80 MW model is the 14-cylinder; the one in the pic appears to be the straight 6, which produces less than half that much.
I think you are correct, looking at it a little closer. Several different models are clumped on most of the pages with pictures. This does look about square as well which should have clued me right away. None the less, I thought is was amazing something this size was being trucked complete rather than assembled on board in place, any shots of how the shipyard would deal with such out there? It would seem the 14 cyl model would never travel this way.
Just how much forest would it take to make the charcoal for the container ship you propose? ?-)
These big 2-stroke engines can convert 52 percent of the energy of the fuel to mechanical energy !!
Direct-carbon fuel cells can hit 80%, and 70% appears quite practical. Charcoal-electric container ship, anyone?
The transmission line issue isn't a minor point that can be dismissed by simply noting that we already have a lot of power lines. It's a killer.
The average distance that power is transmitted, from power plant to consumer, is currently somewhere in the range of 10 - 20 miles. Under the WWS plan as proposed, the average distance would have to increase to something more like 200 - 400 miles. That's partly due to the fact that the best areas for wind and solar farms are far from the cities where the power is consumed. But more than that, it's due to reliance on geographical supply averaging. "The wind isn't blowing around here at the moment, but hey, there's a surplus over in Nebraska. We'll just import 20 GW or so of their surplus."
A twenty-fold increase in the average transmission distance translates to perhaps a 50-fold increase in the total mass of conductors in the transmission grid. (You can't pin a firm number on it, because it depends on how much of the generated power you're willing to lose in transmission. A mere 20-fold increase would preserve the same rate of loss per mile, but that would mean a 20-fold increase in total losses.) Considering how difficult it is to acquire right-of-way and permitting for even a single new high voltage transmission line in this country, does anybody seriously suggest that we could manage a 50-fold increase in transmission lines over the next 20 years?
Of course, the transmission problem could be mitigated -- at great cost -- by massive use of energy storage systems. The fact that the article's authors fail to even consider that option is just more evidence that they don't know beans about what they're writing about.
Not here in Australia. 10-20 miles (you obviously made the figure up from pure guesswork, but let's take it seriously for the moment) would put our brown-coal-burning Hazelwood power station in the inner suburbs here in Melbourne. Which would be unpopular to say the least. In fact it's about 100 miles from Melbourne. We've not been bankrupted by those long power lines yet.
You seem to imagine that power stations must necessarily occupy a lot of land area, and so must be far from cities. Whereas in fact we can (and already do) fit grid-connected solar panels to supply a frugal use of home electricity on about 6m2 of roof; a profligate (current average) use of electricity would take 18m2. With the average new home in Australia being 220m2, with at least one-quarter this area suitable for receiving solar power, space isn't a problem.
That's domestic use. Commercial and industrial buildings often have large roof space. There are many of 1,000-2,000m2 in my suburb, which is home to a bit of light industry.
Long high tension power lines already take up swathes of urban land here. Put them underground and there'd be space for quite a few wind turbines.
Geothermal power just has to go wherever the heat is, regardless of a city being there or not.
And so on. You just have to use your imagination a bit. Or even just google. The distance isn't an issue, because it's not as great as you think, and anyway lots of countries already do this.
I know the US transmission system was built relatively early, and was based on the idea that each city or town would supply its own electricity. There were a few extra lines between cities, but primarily for use in a case of an emergency.
I know that Jason Makanski in Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What it Means to You says that the US has a "third world grid". The way the electrical system is currently organized, no one really has responsibility for the grid (except for little pieces). Spending on the grid has been declining since 1975.
I wrote a post in May 2008 called The US Electric Grid: Will it be our undoing. An excerpt:
The figure of 10 - 20 miles is from a conversation with a district manager for the ISO for northern California (including San Francisco and the SF bay region). He didn't offer a more specific estimate, but his job involved knowing exactly where all power plants are located and how much each could produce and when. He was responsible for dispatch operations. The context was a session on energy storage systems before the California Energy Commission in Sacramento. The specific topic we were talking about was the headaches caused by having to accommodate erratic output from regional wind farms.
Tell me, if I said that the average height for Caucasion males is 5' 11" (which is a figure I made up from guesswork), would you reply, "Not so! I know a fellow who's 6 foot eight"?
This business of average distance from power source to load is quite complex, and even talking about it in terms of a simple average is a simplification that can be misleading. Obviously there are a great many instances of power plants that are located 100 miles or more from their major load centers. But there are a lot more that are tucked away near old industrial areas of cities. They're typically smaller plants (~100 mW) and often gas-fired rather than coal. While I don't know Melbourne at all, I'd be willing to bet that there are half a dozen power plants within its metropolitan area, and that the Hazelwood power that you mention supplies less than a third of the total power consumed in the Melbourne area.
It's easy to import small amounts of power over long distances ("small", in this context, meaning less than a few hundred mW) but losses increase with the square of the current. Long distance transmission is used mostly for contingency supply and load balancing at the margins. I don't know the actual figure, but I know that the total kWhrs transmitted more than 100 miles in the US is "tiny", compared to the total of wWhrs consumed.
I don't imagine that at all. I was commenting on the SciAm article, whose authors specifically discounted rooftop solar because it was twice as costly as large scale solar farms. Completely ignoring the issue of transmission.
In fact, I believe that the only way that a WWS economy could be made viable would be to rely heavily on very local resources. High efficiency buildings with high efficiency lighting, solar hot water, appliances designed to operate as much as possible from "as available" power, and distributed energy storage for nightime power supply. That's not the world the SciAm article was describing, however.
Roger, it looks like you're labouring under the illusion that the US power grid is typical in world terms. It's not. It's an example of the early-adopter syndrome. Because the US was the first country to be electrified on a large scale, and also probably because of the structure of government and commerce, power plants were built close to consumers.
In other places, this varies widely, depending on electricity generation sources, and it's common for the bulk of electricity to be generated hundreds of miles from where most of it is consumed. This requires extra investment, and there is transmission loss, but neither is a show-stopper, unless you forget to plan for it.
You may be right about the state of power grids in US vs. the rest of the world. But I wan't commenting on the rest of the world; I was commenting about the shift to 100% renewables, coming mainly from wind and solar farms, that the SciAm article claimed was feasible for the US.
The same idea is central to Al Gore's "Repower America" program. Both plans assume little change in total power consumption, and both are non-starters (IMO) because they ignore the issue of power transmission. Their proponents don't realize that they are talking order of magnitude increases in the flow of power over long distances. They implicitly assume that power transmission is free, or at least "down in the noise" in terms of costs.
For the record, I'm not saying that these hairbrained schemes are technically impossible; merely stupid. In principle, we could build the transmission infrastructure to make them feasible. But it would involve one hell of a lot more than using information technology and modest line and transformer upgrades to make the grid "smart". It would ultimately exceed the effort of building all the wind and solar power farms.
I don't think people really understand the grid issue. From where we are now, it is even difficult get adequate maintenance on the grid without upgrades, because there are so many organizations involved, each intent on maximizing their own profits, and not wanting to raise rates. Also, there is a huge NIMBY problem, so that a single new transmission line can take 10 years from design to completion. I have read that transmission is already a bottleneck in some of the areas where wind turbines would be expected to be most efficient. It seems like mandating renewables is asking for trouble.
Gail, you've made some similar comments before and I'm not sure I understand your position. Is it that wind and renewables are bad (strongly implied) or that it's all the grid?
Ever read an analysis of transmission issues associated with a specific wind farm proposal?
We are already in trouble with our grid, even without trying to add wind and solar. The grid has been badly neglected, because of the way deregulation has structured the market. There are a huge number of companies involved in electricity production and distribution. Each company can make more money (short term) by ignoring the grid, and no one has responsibility for maintaining it. Adding wind and solar to the grid adds more stresses to the system, and does nothing to fix our basic problems.
Right now, because there is little long range electric transmission, electric costs vary significantly across the country, with places with coal-fired power plants generally having the lowest rates. Fixing the grid is likely to produce many strange results. It is likely to mean that electricity rates will be evened out across the country (approximately to the average current cost of electricity plus the cost of the new grid setup). This means that for well over half of the country, electricity rates will go up. Because of this issue, it is extremely difficult to "sell" politically.
Another catch is that with the rates evened out, wind and solar are unlikely to be competitive anywhere. Previously, there were some pockets with very high rates, where wind and solar could be close to competitive, but once there is better long-range transmission, this goes away.
Building a link to the grid, as with a specific wind farm proposal is just a tiny part of the problem--in fact, one pretty easily solved. It doesn't fix the overall grid system, and puts further stresses on it.
Thanks for the reply Gail.
Looks like you've got two parts here:
1. As I read this then you're more concerned about the condition of the grid than the availability or impacts of the primary energy supplies that power it.
2. You're making some assertions about the relative economics of wind and solar relative to the current mix of generation.
I don't buy either of these positions and will try to add more in the future on these.
Did you see the news about Brazil's dam failure?
It wasn't the dam that failed it was the power grid, apparently due to severe storms in the region
http://www.matthewyglesias.com/2009/11/11/blackout-darkens-much-of-brazi...
How about some sources, references or calcs to support those claims?
The average distance that power is transmitted, from power plant to consumer, is currently somewhere in the range of 10 - 20 miles.
Where's your evidence?
Keep in mind: Given the size of the US, that would basically mean that the US currently has at least 10,000 power plants.
But who knows, maybe the US is not capable to build longer power lines, but China and Brazil certainly are.
And one single power line with 6400 MW power rating can actually power several Million people:
http://www.abb.com/cawp/gad02181/c0d40da9112e6856c12573b0004490f7.aspx
http://www.abb.ch/cawp/seitp202/06C9CD09D993758CC1257601003DB274.aspx
A twenty-fold increase in the average transmission distance translates to perhaps a 50-fold increase in the total mass of conductors in the transmission grid.
No it doesn't. If the length and power of the transmission line is increased, so is its voltage:
http://www.abb.com/cawp/gad02181/c0d40da9112e6856c12573b0004490f7.aspx
You can't pin a firm number on it, because it depends on how much of the generated power you're willing to lose in transmission.
Of course you can put a firm number on it: With a 800 kV, 6000 MW line you lose 6% per 1000 miles:
http://events.energetics.com/electric_transmission09/pdfs/Bahrman.pdf
Of course, the transmission problem could be mitigated -- at great cost -- by massive use of energy storage systems.
No, that's not correct:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
Also, neither solar hot water capacity nor PV nor efficient CHP plants nor efficient appliances require long transmission lines and the US is currently consuming double the electricity per capita compared to export nation Germany. So obviously there is already a grid in place which can currently deal with double the load Germany can and Germany has a much higher Wind power penetration than the US.
It doesn't have to work that way. You have two sorts of loses, resistive, and inductive. The former is inversely proportional to the voltage on the lines, so going towards a higher transmission voltage mitigates the effect. Inductive losses can be reduced by DC transmission. The losses in DC transmission are mainly in the coversion from AC to DC and back again. But somewhere around 100KM distance it becomes more efficient.
The real problem with the needed transmission upgrades, is the rampant NIMBYism. We currently have plans for solar thermal electric on hold because of ongoing battles over where to put transmission lines. There is clearly great reluctance to the public accepting new power lines nearby.
Reduced? Try "eliminated". The voltage across an ideal inductor equals jωL, which drops to 0 when ω=0. (j=√-1, which indicates that the inductive voltage is 90° out of phase with the applied current.)
But "losses" is a misnomer; reactance doesn't lose energy, it just drops voltage and limits the power-handling capacity of the line. The AC current capacity is limited not just by the conductor size but also the geometry of the conductors (which determines their inductance). With DC, only the resistance of the conductors and the breakdown voltage of the insulators and air gaps matters.
Pure inductance (usually called reactance) doesn't consume any energy (averaged over a complete cycle) as you state. What I meant was that the time varying EM field in the neighborhood of a power line, can induce currents in the ground underneath. Unless this ground is a perfect conductor, these currents suffer resistive loses, and the only place the energy can come from is line losses. This is why high power power lines are put on such tall towers, the further from the ground the lower the induced currents. You are right, a non varying DC current will not induce any currents, and henece cannot suffer inductive losses. Of course E&M energy is stored in the fields surrounding DC wires, but they only come into play when the currents are changing.
No problem. I knew what you meant. Most of the time I read any equivocation such as "can be reduced" as just a shorthand for "there might be exceptions but I don't have the time to rack my brain right now.
"The losses in DC transmission are mainly in the coversion from AC to DC and back again."
This statement is incorrect. I work mainly with the Pacific DC Intertie. Our technical data on our thyristors shows about a 0.2% loss due to thyristor losses. I have confirmed this with heat runs on our cooling system. At 3100MW we dump out about 6MW of heat from the four converters.
Our line losses run around 15% at full load. High for DC due to the way the system was developed over the years. Built from scratch, we would likely run in the 5-10% range. Depends on how much you want to spend on conductors.
Transformer losses I can't remember, but are similar to thyristor losses.
Jeff Barton
I think AC lines lose energy not by heat alone (I^2R losses) but also due to radiating antenna losses. Even though frequency is 60Hz, the lines can be long enough to behave as energy radiating antennas.
Unless a DC transmission line can have perfectly constant current (and voltage), it too can act like a radiating antenna.
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Left click on image for more info
I was reviewing some reports and thought I should correct myself. A recent ABB study in accordance with IEEE 1158-1991 put the Celilo substation losses at 0.8% at full load (3100MW) Sylmar would be about 0.7%, on account of its newer and has a different configuration. so total conversion losses at full load would be about 1.5% for the Pacific DC Intertie. Probably a bit lower since ABB will run the calcs conservative. This includes not just thyristors but transformers and filters and everything inside the converter stations.
As far as radiative losses, I know we have them. We do get harmonics despite our efforts to filter them out inside the substation. I can also tell you they are not significant. Less than a Megawatt at full load, I would estimate. Likely a whole lot less. We usually stay withing a couple amps of power order.
Jeff Barton
Kiashu- Thanks ever so much! I was doing the dishes and grinding my teeth at the feeling that I HAD to make some sort of reasoned comment on this thread, and behold- you did it. Wow, what a sense of release.
I will just add a few of my standard remarks, ones that infuriate people on TOD- if they notice at all.
1) We (US) are so hugely wasteful that any comments like "how will we pay for it" are inane. We pay for it by quitting the idiotic doing of what what we are doing that gets us fat and in the ICU and damn near nothing else.
2) vacuum tube trains are not just sci-fi. Much better than planes in getting there from here FAST. If you really need to, and I don't.
3) It is stupid to keep talking about limited range from batteries- switch them out at the battery station just as we now fillerup at the gas station. This one is actually catching on, and no surprise- too obvious to ignore.
4) the deserts of the world are just sitting there, waiting for us to notice. Give the Germans credit for noticing the Sahara -long ago- as a power source for Europe. Now they are actually starting to do something about it.
5) And solar thermal needs NOT use up a lot of water, any more than my car does, and for the same reason. The liquid is recirculated, not blown out the stack. Of course, if you really want to, you can indeed blow it out the stack, but then you HAVE TO ADD THE COST, and not be so dense as to say "it's cheaper when we blow it out the stack". Gawd!
6) I have no problem with nuclear- technically- except for one thing it is great. That one thing is people. People are very good at being very nasty, and ain't no way to tell who and where and how some nasty might be tempted to use one or another bit of the whole nuclear process to get nasty with.
Much harder to do it with wind or solar.
7) Besides, I work on solar, and would make more money if we did it all with solar. Go solar!
I don't think the range of electric car batteries is an issue. We have enough. Let's compare with a common appliance, the mobile phone. So far as I know, most mobile phone batteries only allow 1-2 hours of continuous talking. However, most people talk for not more than 1 hour a day, and can plug the phone in at night when they're sleeping and won't need to use the phone. Thus, the limit is rarely an issue.
To expect an electric car battery to be able to take you 450km when the average daily travel is around 50km, it's like expecting the mobile phone to last for 8 hours of talking. What for? Almost all customers won't need it. The few who do will pay extra for the privilege.
Even cruddy old lead-acid batteries get people 50-100km, the fancier ones get them 150km or so. That's plenty for almost everyone. Just remember to plug it in every night, just like we do with mobile phones.
That said, I don't envisage a future where everyone drives an electric car. Resource constraints other than those on oil and natural gas will stop that.
I have many problems with nuclear. But I don't want to start that conversation again. ;)
Agree to all that. I would buy a lead-acid battery car in a minute if somebody less lazy than I would put one together for me.
Nuclear- my point there was that nobody knows nothing about nuclear, but, unlike tech or economic arguments, the terrorist argument is one they get.--- so now let's talk about solar.
Kiashu,no one else here will say it but I will: Very good post, stronger in many respects than the post it is debating...somehow people here totally disavow the amount of raw materials used now for absolute frivolity...heaven forbid that these materials be used for something to produce energy rather than consume it. (your point about the amount of shipping used to transport oil was informative)
Perhaps your most informative point was your late one near the end of your post..."However, the two are not incompatible. We can have some international high-tech, and some localisation of stuff."
EXACTLY CORRECT. And this applies to all industries and services. A mix of energy sources, a mix of transportation types, a mix of financial forms and a mix of working styles and income generating types will probably turn out to be astoundingly resiliant, a "case hardened system" as I have called it. One of the positive outcomes of the recent financial crisis may be that people are breaking out of thinking in "either-or" option and much more into real "multiple option" thinking. I personally think we could be on the cusp of a major technical/logistical/organizational revolution, not out of fear of peak oil per se, but simply because there is so much wealth being wasted away through lack of effort and simply crappy engineering. Times will be tough in many ways, as they always are in change periods, but this period will also present huge possibilities for the cultures with the guts to take advantage of them.
RC
"We need to figure out how to do this" - a century or two ago we had this thing called the Industrial Revolution. People harnessed wind and water, then wood and coal, and finally gas and oil, and used its energy to build things. Nobody figured out any Grand World Plan To Burn Stuff. They just went ahead and did it and muddled along.
Wind and water were the high tech of pre-industrial society. The IndRev happened because of steam, necessiated by the need to access more coal beacuse they had burned down all the forests.
They didn't muddle along with this new technology for very long either. Along with the technological revolution came the social revoultion which resulted in much more complex societies and levels of governance. That's what we have today and that is the context in which people will ahve to try to implement their solutions. It is not possible to build or maintain a high tech energy supply system unless you have a stable and necessarily complex society. They are mutually dependent. The reason we have to "figure out how to do this" has much more to do with maintaining a safe social order for transitioning to whatever comes next.
Very excellent points. My thoujghts exactly but said far better than I could have.
Just the the transition from the horse to the car, there will need to be some adjustments and those that are flexible will fare well. I have a black and white TV an 8 track tape player and other obsolescent stuff that I should have junke but, as a stodgy "Baby Boomer" just recently on the SocSecurity dole I am hoping they become museum pieces.
Like our parents used to tell us when we were whiny, impatient children: CAN'T was defeated at the battle of TRY.
I hope I make it another 30 years so I can see the changes.
Hi Kiashu,
Thanks for your thoughts.
I'd like to see more specifics, and especially for people to check out some of the more technical comments that were posted on the Sci Am website in response to this piece. Quite a few people called attention problems with the numbers, analysis and the affiliation of one of the authors.
I have some questions about what you say here. I'd like to just choose one to focus on for now:
re: "When instead you look at what the infrastructure is supposed to do, things look much easier. We don't need cars and trucks. We need to transport people and goods. Cars and trucks are simply one inefficient way of doing that; other more efficient ways exist."
1) What is the quantity of goods and people that you want to transport in order to be in line with your assumption in the beginning of a "very good" quality of life?
2) How do you measure "what the infrastructure is supposed to do"?
3) Can you create a "more efficient" way to "transport people and goods" in a context of a rapid and near-term decline in fossil fuel availability?
Can we (anyone) do so in a declining economy? (That may be the result of the decline in FF availability.)
4) Can we (anyone) maintain this new infrastructure without oil?
In other words, for example: Does your "more efficient" "ways" involve the use of the electrical grid? How can the grid be maintained unless the roads are maintained? How can the roads be maintained without heavy equipment that calls for diesel and gasoline as liquid fuel sources?
A slide I just made based on Luis' (and my) Olduvai revisited article. These calculations assume that there is a 50% energy saving from efficiency and conservation. And there is still some FF based energy flowing through society at that time.
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3565
Anyone wanting to power the future using hydrogen and no nuclear is quite simply pipe dreaming and raising false hope among a largely ignorant population.
A renewable/efficiency energy solution is technically quite possible, but politically quite difficult.
As a building energy engineer, I know that zero-energy consumption buildings are not that difficult to design and build, and that reducing the 30+% of total energy used to heat/cool buildings by 90% likely has a negative net cost and no significant technical obstacles.
So is building trillions of dollars worth of nuclear to power inefficient buildings and transport really a better path than simply building and designing more efficient bulidings and transport?
I doubt it, and I expect that all the cries for nuclear will founder on the insane capital requirements, while people quietly insulate their attics, buy hybrids, and start bicycling, using transit and walking instead.
The hydrogen thing is a total red-herring. The future economy will likely use solar energy directly for passive-solar heating and hot water, solar thermal/PV/wind for electricity, and electricity/synfuels for transport.
A small fraction of the deserts in US/North Africa could power the US/EU with solar thermal at somewhere around 20 cent/kwh(see ICE studies,etc.) which would not bankrupt developed economies. Storing heat energy from solar thermal for later use is in the lucky situation that economies of scale are positive. As the heat reservoir gets larger, the volume grows much faster than the surface area (squared vs cubed), so for a large enough heat reservoir surface heat loss becomes insignificant.
I think the renewables/efficiency transition will be difficult, but nuclear is in no sense required. Currently, I live in a passive solar house and buy 100% wind-generated electricity and the marginal cost versus conventional houses which consume many times the fossil energy is not a concern. If my utility asked me to contribute thousands of dollars for nuclear power plant construction I would refuse as would most ratepayers.
tommyvee - Part of the solution is to mandate the building of energy efficient structures and to modify,if possible,existing ones.However,this is a massive and long term undertaking and in itself requires a lot of energy.
Yet,in the same comment you dismiss nuclear as part of the source of this energy,seemingly on ideological grounds.We will need to build solar,wind and geothermal systems along with more HVDC & HVAC transmission lines but we will also need to build generation 4 reactors to provide baseload power relatively quickly and get coal fired generation offline as soon as possible.
I get the distinct impression that the anti-nuclear crowd are suffering from a bad case of cognitive dissonance just like the people who can't see that growth,particularly in population,just can't continue.
If you want to build new nuclear, you have to be cheaper than this:
http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/665644
Keep in mind: Besides that the Gen 4 reactor is not available yet and won't power any aircrafts, trucks and commercial ships, new nuclear is not the only option to get a warm shower and a cold beer.
thanks for reminding me, I think I've one left in the fridge
The largest wind farm in the world covers 75 square miles and produces 750 MW peak (300 giant wind turbines intermittently running), producing 3000 Gwh annually. This is the equivalent to the electricity produced by one 500 MW IGCC-CCS plant.
http://www.seco.cpa.state.tx.us/re_wind.htm
To replace 350 GW of coal fired generation in the best onshore locations possible would cover 26000 square miles/ 100,000 giant wind turbines.
This forum is dominated by dreamers who have NO sense of scale.
The expection is that the US population will grow by 70 million in the next 40 years; so one must conclude that energy use will..go down?
Actually, over 99% of the area covered by a wind farm can still be used for other purposes:
And a wind farm as opposed to a coal power plant doesn't require any water and doesn't require any coal mines and doesn't require any freight trains transporting coal:
And off-shore wind doesn't require any surface area:
http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publications/repo...
The Black Thunder strip mine(Wyoming) covers 40 square miles and produces 80 million tons of coal per year good for 160,000 Gwh
compared to 3,000 Gwh for the Horse Hollow 75 square mile wind farm
intermittently delivered.
Black Thunder is being expanded by 50% and will soon produce 12% of US coal production(130 million tons per year)
http://www.warws.com/documents/ArchtapsJacobsRanchmine.pdf
Right now wind contributes 2% of US electricity. Over a century perhaps we could wean ourselves off fossil fuels but we need to reduce by 80% by 2050.
Fantasies about wind and solar CANNOT do this and those who pretend they can are worse than GW deniers.
You ignore the power of the exponential function. Wind and solar are growing exponentialy, with a doubling time of about two years. In a decade, this would be a 32times expansion. Now obviously there will be many challenges to maintaining this rate of growth. But, citing the low current contribution of these sources does not prove that they can't grow to do the job.
Denmark has a higher GDP per capita, than the US and has no hydro and no nuclear power but already 20% wind power. Denmark is a large net-electricity exporter and still gets most of its power and heating from fossil resources and yet produces already 45% less CO2 per capita than the US does.
And btw, solar hot water capacity added worldwide (2006):
China: 80.2 %
USA: 0.5 %
www.ren21.net/pdf/RE2007_Global_Status_Report.pdf
And over 99% of the area covered by a wind farm can still be used for other purposes. Coal strips cannot be used for other purposes. Railtracks congested with coal trains cannot be used for other purposes. Areas covered with cooling towers cannot be used for other purposes.
This is all fact - not fantasy.
Denmark produces 6.6 Twh from wind from 3 GW of wind turbines. The overall electricity consumption is about 45 Twh so wind is about 15% of their electricity.
They export about 12 Twh and import 8 Twh of electricity.
+80% of their electricity comes from thermal (mainly coal) plants.
http://www.iaea.org/inisnkm/nkm/aws/eedrb/data/DK-elpt.html
The Danes are rightly worried about GW flooding their flat country so they are pushing for zero emissions technology like wind.
Dude, you're fooling yourself by cherry-picking with your blind optimism.
Actually, fact is that Denmark emits 45% less CO2 than the US, despite not having any nuclear nor hydro power. You can ignore this hard fact as long as you want, but your ignorance won't change it:
http://www.iaea.org/inisnkm/nkm/aws/eedrb/data/DK-enemc.html
http://www.iaea.org/inisnkm/nkm/aws/eedrb/data/US-enemc.html
And fact is that Denmark is at 20% wind power:
http://ens.dk/en-US/supply/Renewable-energy/WindPower/Facts-about-Wind-P...
And Denmark consumes 35 TWh of electricity per year.
http://www.indexmundi.com/denmark/electricity_consumption.html
This is typical 'eco-hype'.
Wind makes 20% of power means 20% of the nameplate GW not 20% of the actual electrical energy Twh. I was surprised that Denmark's turbines only produced at the nameplate about 2200 hours per year.
I like wind turbines and would like to see a massive deployment(100s of GW) but I also see that the promises don't stand up to scrutiny.
BTW, wind turbine deployment in Denmark has been slow over the last decade because it doesn't integrate with the grid easily.
For example the wind capacity of 1/1/2009 is about the same as 2004
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark
Denmark reports 34,338 TWh generation in 2008, of which 6,582 TWh was wind power. That is 19.2%.
And before you start up a flamewar because someone proved you were wrong: I have flagged the above comment, and I encourage everyone else to do so if you start any nonsense over your wounded ego.
Poetical troll,
Your link is not to Denmark but the US EIA, so your statement that 'Denmark reports..' is in fact false(though I would guess that you'll flag me again for pointing out this false claim.)
The Danish Energy Association actually reports 36.2 Twh of electricity for 2008 including 12.8 Twh imported from Norway and Sweden and 11.3 Twh exported to Germany. They deduct.9 Twh from the total for transmission losses for 35.3 Twh consumption. See page 13
http://www.danishenergyassociation.com/Statistics.aspx
As I posted before the Danish wind industry has not grown since 2004 with the total wind stalled at 3166 MW.
This shows that wind is not replacing coal in Denmark which was the claim of wind enthusiast,'anyone'.
As I posted before the Danish wind industry has not grown since 2004 with the total wind stalled at 3166 MW.
That's a lie: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/denmark-inaugurates-worlds-large...
And there's more to come online:
http://ens.dk/en-US/supply/Renewable-energy/WindPower/offshore-Wind-Powe...
Wind makes 20% of power means 20% of the nameplate GW not 20% of the actual electrical energy Twh.
That's a lie and you disproved it yourself:
Your link states following:
http://www.danishenergyassociation.com/Statistics.aspx
Wind turbine production (2008): 6,928 GWh
Production total (2008): 34,736 GWh
That's actually 19.94 %.
And your data is obviously without the 800 GWh which will be produced by the offshore windfarm Horns Rev 2 which has been online for 2 months.
Needless to say, that the US has over 4 times more area per capita than Denmark and much larger wind resources to draw from. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_popul...
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/05/14/sdwind/
How well do you cope with the intermittent nature of your 100% wind generated electric supply?
While I can't speak for Tomvee, as someone who sells off grid Solar generators, I could think of a few viable options for coping, a charge controller with a good bank of batteries and an inverter might be a start. Learning to adapt your energy usage to those times when it is available might be another.
Romantic candle light dinners followed by sitting in front of a fireplace and discussing theoretical physics for a few hours to pass the time... ;-)
BTW having lived in third world countries where intermittent access to electricity from the grid is not all that unusual, I can attest to the fact that people there seem to adapt quite well.
Why would covering an area of 190,000 km2 with light PV or solar hot water modules be an unsolvable challenge?
After all 117,000 km2 of the US alone is already built and the US only has 5% of the world's population:
http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/dailynews/2004/jun/16/news5.html
Besides 190,000 km2 at PV 15% efficiency leads to a capacity of 28.5 TWe.
With 1500 sunhours that's 42,750 TWh or 2.5 times more electricity than what the world currently consumes:
http://www.indexmundi.com/world/electricity_consumption.html
And 190,000 km2 at solar hot water 85% efficiency leads to a capacity of 161.5 TW.
At 1500 sunhours that's 242,250 TWh of heat energy.
Besides the area on a house is more than sufficient to power a house with the sun alone:
The Swiss house below generates 4 times more heat and electric energy from the sun than what the entire household requires:
(That's why they can sit in a pool in February).
You ask
One is that you'd have a maintenance problem. The instruction manual says to double the size of the array every 35 years, and not to stop or the whole thing gets turned off. That's the owner's very strict contractual rule.
One of the other things your energy numbers are all missing is the source of the energy used by the economy to make the incomes of the people. A good round number is the global average, 6000btu/$.
I think you'll find that to generate the energy to provide the incomes for the people living in the house you picture, in a temperate climate as you show it, would maybe be 20 times the array you show around the house or more.
One is that you'd have a maintenance problem.
One is that PV has no moving parts and thus no maintenance problem and the other one is that you do not need to double that area, but even if you do, it takes less than one day to cover a roof with PV. So you still have 35 years - 1 day to do whatever you want.
I think you'll find that to generate the energy to provide the incomes for the people living in the house you picture, in a temperate climate as you show it, would maybe be 20 times the array you show around the house or more.
Wrong. Besides that this picture is almost 20 years old and the house generates 4 times more energy than what its household requires: Most people do not live in colder climates than the Alps and thus definitely do not need more energy.
Fact is, Americans live in very inefficient housing compared to houses in central Europe and there is absolutely no reason to live like this.
The "maintenance problem" I was referring to is the maintenance of the plan to need continually doubling energy to use to support our continually doubling incomes. Sorry I was not clear. You know that earning money uses energy, right? The average is 6000btu/$.
That's also the energy your house collectors are not any where sufficient to provide the energy "the household requires". Are you saying that everyone will live in upscale houses and have no need for incomes maybe?? ;-)
Sorry I was not clear. You know that earning money uses energy, right?
You know that solar energy is basically unlimited, right?
Are you saying that everyone will live in upscale houses and have no need for incomes maybe?? ;-)
Do you realize that PV is already at 0.85 cents per watt?
http://www.firstsolar.com/company_overview.php
Do you realize that the warrant 25 years manufacturer guarantee?
http://www.firstsolar.com/pdf/PD_5_401_02_NA.pdf
Do you realize that a household can easily live on less than 2000 kWh of electricity with efficient appliances?
Do you realize that to reach 2000 kWh with 1500 sunhours you only need 1.33 kW of PV?
Do you realize that the manufacturing costs for 1.33 kW of PV is $1133 ?
Do you realize that you cannot even a pay a one month rent in many US cities with $1133 ?
Do you realize that you can definitely not pay healthcare costs in any US city for just one year with $1133 ?
Have you realized that in many US cities you may have to pay $720,000 of mortgage or rent within 30 years (lifespan of the PV-system) and do you realize that the costs of PV are completely ridiculous compared to the cost of the mortage or rent you need to pay over the lifetime of your PV installation?
Do you realize that people need jobs in order for the unemployment rate to go down?
Funny isn't it? :o)
anyone,
You probably mean well, but your understandings are naive and wrong.
If a bird poops on your PV panel, you have to clean it.
If snow covers your PV panels, you have to clean them.
PV panels are constantly subject to chemical corrosion.
Also solar energy is not unlimited. It is very limited ... to 1kWatt per meter^2 per hour in the best of daylight times and zero at night.
Actually your understanding is naive and wrong.
If a bird poops on your PV panel, you have to clean it.
Besides that PV-roofs should be free of over-shadowing trees, where birds could sit. How many bird poops do you currently have on your roof?
If snow covers your PV panels, you have to clean them.
Besides that many sunny places do not even have snow fall - so what?
Is handling a snow rake with an extension really asking too much?
Since the roof is slanted, it's much easier to clear your PV panels than clearing your drive-way and people haven't minded to clear their drive-ways for decades.
PV panels are constantly subject to chemical corrosion.
No they are not. They are mostly made out of glass and the critical parts are properly packaged otherwise they wouldn't have a manufacturer warranty of 25 years. Besides it's not like that PV-panels drive 75 mph on salty, dirty roads.
Also solar energy is not unlimited. It is very limited ... to 1kWatt per meter^2 per hour in the best of daylight times and zero at night.
Besides that there's no reason to turn off all hydro, nuclear, geothermal plants, CHP plants, CSP plants, wind power plants and besides that electricity consumption during day time is up to 3 times higher than at night and besides fossil fuel that is currently being used for hot water and heating purposes and needs to be substituted by heat pumps (if you want the fossil fuel consumption to go down) and heat pumps do not need to run at night:
The area is basically unlimited. Only the built area in the US is 117,000 km^2. At 15% PV efficiency that's a PV capacity of 17,550 GW.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=24956
With 17,550 GW of PV capacity, you can probably even generate more power at night than with all the current nuclear power plants combined.
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17596199
A lot of what is being discussed is Concentrated Solar Power (using mirrors) driving electric power generation, usually using steam turbines. These definitely have maintenance issues. They are likely to be located in deserts, where dust is a problem. When they drive steam generation, they have the same maintenance issues as any others--also tend to require a lot of water.
The freaking birds are on my roof every morning.
Don't get me started on that topic.
The whole article is so unreal and impractical I don't think it is worth serious consideration. Total rubbish. And 20 years away too. Ridiculous.
Science is about doubt and questioning every hypothesis. Plans that ignore reality are fantasy. Scientific American appears to be in a fantasy world.
What do you hope to accomplish with such a post? You offer no justification for your assertion. It is therefore ignored by readers.
Thanks, this post put a lot of my thoughts into words. However, one thing that the doomer or back-to-pre-industrialism fraction forgets, I think, is that "we" don't have to figure out exactly how to plan this great transition. We don't have to "allocate resources" or have a grand "five-year-plan" for all this. We just have to provide a market structure that rewards people and enterprises going in the right direction, and punish those who don't. All the details will get figured out by the people on lower levels, just like today. There is no "grand plan" for how to get food to the table today, just markets - converging towards the cheapest way of fulfilling that goal.
This is by no means a guarantee that society will succeed in making the transition the way we would like, but it does provide some comfort in that there will be millions (actually billions) of people working towards a sustainable goal, just by going after the cheapest solution.
We really haven't succeeded in doing this. Mostly, our system rewards BAU thinking. There doesn't seem to be recognition of resource limitations--each inventor comes up with something new that uses scarce resources. No matter how great a solution they would be, the solutions aren't really scalable to the whole world. This detail is missed.
It is likely that what is sustainable is (at least) a step down from where we are. How many are willing to move a step down from where we are, unless there is no choice?
Agreed, and I would say this is the issue in collectively finding the key to transforming society. None of us have to single-handedly define the key or provide it to civilization for the transformation to happen.
I find this thought comforting since I know I won't have to rely on one or two (or two hundred) "experts" to define in detail how the society of the future should look like. And I know I won't have to figure it out all by myself, either. There are billions of people just waiting to tackle the challenge, given the right incentives.
there's one thing that would... and maybe only one (unless you feel confident on government being able to reverse the profit motive).
What it would take is the people struggling with this to take themselves seriously enough to understand the problem they've identified is their solution too. The approaching overlap of the EROI and other resource conflicts with growth will probably result in a large permanent loss of economic capital. It's hard to imagine, but that's what the numbers seem to say don't they?
If we also think of ourselves as investors in this world of ours, then we can see that there is only one choice. That's to use an investment strategy for preserving as much of what we have as possible. That would mean starting massive investments in preventing the collapse, rather than than continually as much more to the pile to ensure the biggest of all possible collapses...
Right?
I sometimes think preventing collapse means reinforcing the system we have today to make it stronger, rather than adding new elements too it.
Our electrical grid is in bad shape. It clearly needs repairs, even if by government intervention. This would be a form of reinforcement.
The way our electricity system is broken up now makes it difficult for any groups to take responsibility. Reinforcement would come by way of a return to more vertical integration.
Government mandates for use of renewable energy seem inherently destabilizing to me. I wonder if the result will be insolvencies that leave us without electricity in some areas of the country.
Well, we do need a thorough system study of what future grid concept to use, and that does seem likely to be one of the determining factors in what kinds of energy systems get developed. Not knowing what to do is slowing everything down at this point it seems, so I certainly support that study.
What I'm trying to point out, though, is where the money must come from to fund the low return investments needed to keep our economic infrastructure from collapsing...
Few real investments have very high returns (and most of those are things like insulation and CFLs). The huge returns we've been used to seeing are due to leverage (where somebody is getting a fraction in interest on the bulk of the money) and bubbles.
"Instead of the high tech approach advocated by Scientific American, we may want to find solutions that can be done locally, with local materials."
Exactly,
we need to simplify our attempts at renewable energy production which will reduce costs and allow production and repairs to be carried out on a smaller scale. If repairs can be made in a local workshop rather than sent off thousands of miles to a specialist factory because the broken part is so complex, the sytem has a great redundancy.
I think the Sciam article was almost devoid of content except opinions. Certainly no scientifically or rationally argued points or calculations. And no mention of environmental impact assessments.
All in all, pretty much garbage though I'm glad it ruled out nuclear, another unsustainable power source.
It would seem to me that these owners should be compensated referring to coal mines, power stations and other FF burning assets. I disagree. These folks have already had twenty years to wrap their thinking around the shift to low carbon. Do asbestos or tobacco companies get paid out by the taxpayer? Maybe the companies concerned could get priority over the replacement activity.
Which raises the question if all-renewables by 2030 is unachievable then what is? Barring a slowdown in business-as-usual, not only oil but gas and then coal will have peaked. Not FF and not renewable seems to only leave nuclear. Could we even achieve mostly nuclear by 2030?
TOD is one of the few places where people know how to rub their stomach and pat their heads at the same time, in other words to be multi-disciplinary. We can comprehend chemistry and physics at the same time. This is an art that seems to have been lost in the Scientific American community.
_________________________
p.s. Here's what NukeGreen said about the SciAm article: link
Reductionist thinking is dead! Long live the holistic aproach.
Freakotific American?
Optnion masquerading as the scientific method?
I don't suffer fools gladly, and had it with "Stupidific American" a few years back. I don't know if this is just pure stupidity -or the deliberate construction of an easily knocked down strawman.
One of indications of a closed mind is absolutes (zero fossil fuels, zero nuclear)! That is pretty absurd. Now the basic thing they seem to be trying to motivate, a large and more rapid buildout than most people think is doable, is laudable. But appeals for a total ban on things can only be considered to be extremist. (Maybe thay should just have said -even if we had zero Nukes/Fossil fuels, it would still be possible to....)
The rationale for eliminating wood, let alone scrap in the wood and paper industries, seems to be a bit limited. The notion of running aircraft on fuel cells powering electric-drive props, as opposed to direct burn of hydrogen or biological hydrocarbons in aircraft, is perhaps equally overcomplex.
On the positive side, the alleged cost of this effort is quite modest, especially given that 'we must do this in 20 years' is perhaps a bit overenthusiastic. One does note that few cars or trucks have a lifespan of 25 years, so therefore as they wear out they can be replaced with different models having different designs, all purchased by their owners as now, with limited added expense.
There seems to be a tendency to fixate on solar as meaning photovoltaic, though there are alternatives for many purposes that are rather more efficient. For example, in much of the United States in most seasons, at least for people who live in houses of reasonable size, solar hot water heating is currently expensive but already works. Solar house heating is considerably more practical with forced hot air rather than hot water heat; you need for hot air to get an output temperature of under 100 F rather than the 150 F needed for hot water, at least when coupled to current radiators. (Yes, I am aware of heat pumps, including geothermal or as a boost on solar panels; I am occasionally impressed by the number of people who use them primarily for heating and still locate the pump itself outside, rather than inside where its inefficiency would contribute to home heating.)
"we must do this in 20 years' is perhaps a bit overenthusiastic"
I assume that most people would think so, but really we should be immediately ending the burning of coal and rapidly fazing out oil and natural gas. We have already overshot the amount of CO2 we could safely dump into the atmosphere (and, indirectly, into the seas).
We are turning earth into a different planet and acidifying the ocean.
The most annoying part of the post to me was the assumption that anything like BAU could or should be preserved.
Why not you get it? The current financial system of western world cannot continue. Banks are not failing for nothing. The load of bad doings of past by western world is too high to be stopped from a fall. There is no way, absolutely no way using which western world can continue its current system of economies. The whole system have to be wiped out and cleaned and new sets of rules have to be put in place. This is the financial thing in absence of any present or future energy shortages.
Add in the energy shortages that exist and increasing and increasing faster at per capita level. This in itself is enough to collapse the western world which consume most of the energy in absence of any present or future financial problems.
The western world today is facing both problems. Its a total checkmate. End of many countries. End of many technologies. End of many rules of the game.
Never before human race has used this much energy even at per capita level. There is no way present in nature that we can utilize to extract current levels of energy except fossil fuels. If you still think any of the renewable sources of energy can be utilized to continue current levels of energy consumption try to get more data and answer some basic questions:
1) Dollars needed to install a wind turbine or solar cell per watt of electric energy output?
2) Joules needed to install the above?
3) Lifetime reasonable estimate of total energy and dollar production of these?
4) Minimum EROEI needed to continue current level of energy consumption (hint: its more than 8)?
5) Current industrial output of entire world both in dollars and tons of materials like steel?
6) Using above figures calculate years needed to produce the energy producers such as wind turbine and solar cells?
7) Add in the amount of dollars and energy needed for transition once the renewable energy sources are in place, these includes new electric lines of transmissions and automobiles overhauling among others.
What kind of bullshit is this???????? Don't they teach how to divide in schools in west?
Another bullshit. You can't map energy usage percentage to GDP percentage joules for joules dollars for dollars. Its because a thing called "nature of economy". Try to get a course in economics first before you attempt to write anything on this topic. Sure usa uses 21% of world's energy but its because it has a car culture and those cars run on 10 to 15 percent efficiency using fossil fuels directly. Once there are electric cars efficiency rise to 85% at the motor level and about 28% when counting 33% efficiency of turbines. Usa would not be consuming 21% of world GDP in an all-electric world so that kind of thinking is too childish and simplistic. Such kind of articles reduce tod's credibility and prestige.
$4.1 trillion is already about 30% of usa's GDP if usa's GDP is $14 trillion. That figure of GDP is a usa's govt's given figure which needs huge haircuts to be made real. The real gdp of usa would be like 50% to 75% of what the usa's govt says. The taxes rise in proportion. Having another $2.1 trillion tax load would not be humanly possible for usa's people.
BLOCK THIS GAIL. YOU NOT LIKE ANYBODY TO READ THIS.
Do you consider Pakistan to be in the 'Western World'? What about India? What is the demarcation between the 'Western World' and yours wrt finance and resource usage?
Deliver a post about how Pakistan has solved all of its problems and is now a Utopia for all the World to emulate )or will do so within 20 years)?
181 million (and rising) people in such a small land? Your posts are bizarre.
Ignore the nationalistic B.S., and recognize the seriousness of the problems WFP raised. Too bad Darwin's Dog apparently has been cast into outer darkness. He could have articulately explained why homo sap. in all his colorful variations is the problem, and why extinction is his lot.
P.S.
Of course If I were in Pakistan, I'd be damned hopping mad at the U.S. and its reluctant partners in crime, myself. Actually, I am anyway.
Tell me, what should a farmer of a small village in Pakistan, whose ancestors have been living here since many centuries of centuries and farming since last atleast 6,000 years, who lives a simple life and know very little about modern sciences, do when he see climate changing, crops failing, snow falling at places where they should not be and not falling at places where they should be, rain patterns going unpredictable, unnatural species of pests attacking crops and viruses and germs and bacterias attacking pets, cattle and people. Who is to blame? Who had polluted the earth so much and so long that the seas can't absorb any more of the pollution gases and temperature must rise and poles must melt? What do you expect the world would do to you once a common man know who is responsible for the habitat destruction? What do you do with a person who kill a person? What about those people who make a part of land entirely inhabitable by not only humans but all planet life except perhaps bacteria?
What the world get in return of that pollution? Do everybody now own a large house? Did everybody on planet had atleast one experience of air travel? What about owning a car? You know what, the people of east, the simple and loving people of east, are looted three times: once when there land was made into colonies, second when they had to pay the price of many wars the west had started in past two centuries and third now when the ultimate climate effects have to be tolerated.
What punishment you decide for yourself?
You and yours have my sympathy, unfortunately it's worth nothing.
I'm sure my punishment will be harsh, but not sure which black swan or giant flapping chicken homing in on its roost will administer it first.
Wisdom -
well the USA's punishment is to endure fantasy levels of debt and a dollar destruction
.... and the UK's punishment is the same, but only ten times worse!
I completely agree with you that the third world has been poorly let down by the so-called 'rich' nations. But I reckon those who live simpler lives will have the last laugh before long.
that describes story book people everywhere and real people nowhere
If a person have to become perfect before advising others about their problems then there would be no advises in world and every person would be on their own.
The term "western world" and "eastern world" are very self explanatory and recognized and understood by 90% of world's population (give it a try). The other 10% are americans and isolated villagers of sub saharan africa. Since most audience here are americans so I will explain here, though those things are thought at schools at pre primary levels.
East is part of world which get the sunlight first and therefore where day starts first. East begins at japan and ends at the west most corner of north africa, a country called morocco. All of the american continents (there are two of them) are in west, as they get the daylight the latest. Europe is also considered in west for reason i don't know. Arab countries are considered in middle east. Starting from burma all the way to japan is far east. Govt documents of all khilafats considered north africa west as its west to them centered in medina, damascus, baghdad and turkey at various times.
There is a clear divide between east and west in culture, traditions, economies, way of govts etc etc. East is always the center of civilization. All early civilizations are in east. East is center of culture. East knows how to live sustainably. East is the supplier of raw materials. East is where the colonies were. East is where alexander the great wanted to go. See his egyptian and persian conquests. East is where napolean and hitler wanted to go. See their conquests of egypt and russia. East is what a part of germany including its capital was called in cold war period not only because its in east of its west part (which it always be) but also because it was in control of soviet union whose center was russia and russia is considered an eastern country.
The context here is that by large eastern cultures know how to live sustainably. Eastern people are the first farmers and had farmed since atleast an eon (century of centuries). Eastern people by large are the least polluters. Yes japan has a large economy and therefore a large contribution in pollution and energy consumption but that can be taken as an exception when 50 other eastern countries consume very little energy and pollute very little. Try to get something called world map with something called names of countries written on it to count eastern countries. Yes china is a huge polluter and energy consumer but that is a recent thing and in large scheme of things, in the industralization age which started from late 18th century this event of china can be taken as a very minor thing. Heck even america can't broke the historical record of british pollution means america in its entire industrial age life have yet not produced as much carbon di oxide as britain has produced in its entire industrial age life.
Pakistan has not solved all of its problems. Who ever had? Still we have 72% people living in villages and 60% people who are actual farmers. Only 28% people live in cities and a 5,000 population is called a city in Pakistan. So in mega cities with over 1 million citizens only 15 to 20 percent of Pakistanis live. Per capita energy consumption of Pakistan is just 200 watts. Remember that 100 watt is needed just to live because that is the amount of energy an average person consume in a 2000 calories daily diet. In comparison, per capita energy consumption of america is 10,000 watts and of japan and france is 3,500 watts. In a population of 180 million total oil consumption is just 300,000 barrels per day, not even half million barrels. Gas consumption is proportionally less too. Coal consumption is near to zero even though we have over 200 billion tons of good quality coal which is 20% of world's coal reserves. Why we are not using it? It has something to do with the culture, remember 60% of Pakistanis are actual farmers.
Pakistan is over populated by historical standards. It used to have 20 million people in mughal era. Entire world is over populated. Egypt has a population of over 60 million when it never had more than 6 million people at time of pharoahs and sometimes population used to fall to 3 million. We still are managing in Pakistan even though we were forced to give off 3 of our 6 rivers to india in 1960 by pressure of usa. It resulted in one of our two agricultural provinces going barren. Yet we are managing. The key? LOW CONSUMPTION.
Materials can't bring you happiness, they only bring problems.
Growth is exception, not rule.
Affluenza starts with the first car.
Not only is the western world continuing, but the eastern world is becoming westernized. Start likin it.
I think you're right on your main point, that what the western world is trying to do is fundamentally unnatural. What you're missing is the way to articulate that, though your comment:
is not too far off. Westerners have a peculiar way of talking about a world they go to a great deal of effort to change ever more rapidly, as if it was forever changeless. It's so ingrained they can't really see that in 1970 everyone talked about the need to provide for that year's fossil fuel consumption with solar energy and 40 years later we talk about replacing this year's fossil fuel consumption with solar energy...
We speak of it as if it's the same amount, but it's nearly twice as much and we don't notice that. It's like in 1970 we'd have only needed to cover ten times the built area of the continent and and now we need to blanket twenty times. We think of it somewhat as if it's making a check mark on a multiple choice test. We're just crazy, is all! ;-)
No that is "technical" stuff, too boringly old fashioned! We are into spin, not the understanding of reality.
My end number is right. I made typo in getting there. I said $200 trillion divided by 10 years is $10 trillion a year. I meant $200 trillion divided by 20 years is $10 trillion a year. (The authors are saying we have roughly 20 years to 2030.) So I am right in talking about 2.1 trillion for the US.
typo? What about a mistake?
A word of advice. Consider getting off your combat high horse and adopting a stance of detached benevolent argumentation. If you are just here to pick a fight, you will not win many friends, but many more people who will just kill-file you with the TODban script.
If you want to get your message heard by a maximum number of people, act accordingly.
As to your points about US debt, current liquidity pumping, western materialistic way of living, the western financial system and other things being unsustainable, I agree. I share the *belief*. And make no mistake, it is a belief, not a proof.
I just don't know - and neither do you - WHEN exactly will they unravel (and at what speed).
"In the long run, we are all dead." - J.M. Keynes
I have no illusions about being able to predict if the current liquidity run will continue and enable the world (not just OECD) to be pumped into a new bubble or not. Or if the bubble comes, how long does it take to build and when does it pop.
Sure, we can draw plenty of overlapping probability distributions in time about this based on oil flow rates, demand, consumption, real GDP growth, M2/M3 growth, peak energy/capita, EROEI rates, energy infrastructure investments, GHG emissions, food production, PNK/rare earth metal flow rates, social stability, and a few dozen of other variables. But all we have in the end is PROBABILITY. We'll know for sure when we get there, not sooner. It might take more time than you or I have to live. Who knows.
As you've clearly done the basic courses on economic history, you should know as much yourself.
As such, trying to understand the best viewpoints is better than sticking to a single one vehemently.
In the tradition of Archilochus, be a fox, not a hedgehog.
A word of advice SamsuN, try getting off your high horse of superciliousness and taking it upon yourself to be the official plenipotentiary of TOD, or the people who participate therein, and attempt to censor Mr. Pakistan.
Let the man say what he wants to say without worry of someone like yourself speaking down to him with grandiloquent malevolence.If you do not like what he has to say banscript him from yourself and keep it to yourself.
IMO you should try and see things from his vantage point and have a little more understanding.I'm sure that he can see reality a bit more clearly than you or I from where he lives.What you may consider the best viewpoints to be is a matter of private interpretation based upon presuppositions and is not intellectually honest.Open up your ears please, we are in alot of trouble.
I do see things from his POV - to the extent it is possible from where I stand. I also appreciat WfP's posts with substantiated content. But yelling, allcapsing, purposely misunderstanding and calling names gets him nowhere.
Except on a todban list, like you, I'm afraid.
"...Except on a todban list, like you, I'm afraid..."
Your afraid? No need to be apologetic sir.Obviously the topic of energy resources affects peoples lives in more ways than we realize, i.e. politics/power/finance/security...
It is easy to get emotional over such issues when they effect our very existence.
Since we in America consume such a disproportional amount of energy juxtaposed to our population as compared to the rest of the world, I do not mind, nor am I surprised when someone not autochthonous to our culture castigates our logic...
If you are honest with yourself you cannot possibly assume you understand his vantage point in anyway.
Some days his vantage point may be under the watchful eye of a deadly Predator Drone along with the rest of his family.
(Ask yourself why??...Could it be possible this has to do with securing energy resources?)
You and I have never experienced that in our lifetime and should not close our eyes to other peoples misfortunes or be offended by their (emotional) cries for reason.To do so would be prideful indeed - quasi/intellectual data and obfuscations notwithstanding.
His vantage point can be viewed here.
I am not a religious person, nor hold to any secular Manichean organization whatsoever:i.e. one who would pontificate the difference between right and wrong.
Like I have said a thousand times already - they all share the same ideologies - and that is violence as a means to an end....This includes American geopolitical aspirations.
One would have to be truly myopic not to see this and I am not going to pick a side by being influenced by illogical emotional presuppositional religious or patriotic outbursts like Wisdom from Pakistan's or anything you might imply.
Aside from this statement - what of this vantage point...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3776750618788792499&hl=en#
Even in spite of these egregious actions by our government, I would counsel WfP to refrain from violence.
What Jesus predicated incontrovertibly was nonviolent acceptance of ones circumstances no matter how unjust.Judge not least you be judged.In the end God will make the final decision on whether a man is justified by his actions.Hope you haven't been duped to one side or the other.
Sorry, I'm on a modem so its not viable to watch the video. You seem to have a tendancy to ramble.
To bad, you might have learned something....carry on mate
Wisdom, "typo" is shorthand for "mistake" when typing. Saying it, is tantamount to admitting one has made a mistake, though it does not necessarily imply that one can't do simple arithmetic...Should one argue that you are ignorant because you are not fluent in English?
I think that ruling out all biomass/biofuels is unnecessary and unrealistic. First, it makes very good sense to send all municipal and agricultural wastes into anaerobic digesters to produce biogas (methane). This is an established low-tech solution already installed and operating all over the world, and is scalable. In addition to producing some gas (and thus providing something to keep at least some of the NG pipelines operating), this also removes a very potent GHG from the atmosphere. Given the crisis which GCC represents, how can we NOT be doing this to the greatest feasible extent?
Second, while I don't think that it is possible to sustain "happy motoring" with biofuels, I do believe that we could probably produce enough to keep the most essential applications running: agricultural machinery, heavy equipment, public service vehicles (police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, etc.), buses for local transport, shipping, and some essential air transport. This will have an impact on food production, and it will probably have to come at the expense of grain-fed meat production; trade-offs such as this are unavoidable in a declining and increasingly constrained economy. That doesn't mean that the whole world must go totally vegetarian (much as advocates would like), but it does mean that whatever meat is still available is going to have to be grass-fed from pastures on more marginal land, and such meat is therefore going to be a scarce and expensive luxury food. Such it has been for most of human history, we have no reason to think that in the long term it will not revert to that status anyway.
Third, I don't see why wood needs to be totally written off as an energy source. In any case, it won't be. Those of us who live in less densely populated, forested areas will be heating, and probably cooking, with wood. That is natural and logical and will happen, regardless of what some theorists might think. Wood won't be the solution to all the world's energy problems, but it is going to continue to have a place in the mix.
I must also say that I think the authors are being way to optimistic, and downright unrealistic, when it comes to hydrogen. The problems and downsides of hydrogen are severe and well documented, and we have discussed them often here on TOD. I am inclined to think that hydrogen is going to end up being a non-starter, a pipe dream rather like fusion (which is unlikely to ever become reality, either).
Finally, as I am sure others will realize, sustainability is not going to be achievable at present US levels of energy (and other resource) consumption. It is possible to build a truly sustainable economy powered by renewable sources of energy, but only at a much lower level of resource consumption, a much lower "ecological footprint", and a much lower standard of living. As a rough estimate, I am thinking that 25% of the present US per capita GDP and per capita energy consumption gets us in the ball park of where we need to be to even have a chance of building a sustainable, renewables only economy. We've got a long ways to decline.
Well put, but I'm thinking we need to be well below even 25% of present US per capita energy (and other resource) consumption. Europeans live at half our energy use per capita. Living at half their rate of consumption would still be a fairly comfortable life style.
Hell, I already live below one quarter of the average Americans resource use, and I know I have a lot more I could reduce (according to www.myfootprint.org).
I'd say if we can manage to level off at 25% of present, then we will be very, very lucky. It is not yet impossible, but each day that the important and hard choices that must be made and the difficult things that must be done are not, and each day that denial, stupidity, and inertia rule instead, brings us that much closer to even that 25% level becoming unreachable.
You are right, 25% isn't really all that uncomfortable - at least not if spread around reasonably equitably. It will thus be real shame if future generations, already denied the privilege of enjoying our standard of living, find that we've foreclosed even life as good as that 25% level can be for them.
How effective are reduced consumption rates if we keep putting more people on the other side of the scale?
Zero growth means zero growth, and that most particularly includes population. I don't know what the magic number is for population when it comes to sustainability, but I do know that any population growth rate above zero is unsustainable.
Neat site, thanks.
We live at 28% of the national average. The score for us was 70.51 v 246.4.
We have been doing some updating of systems recently.
***The problem is that we really don't have 50 years to make a transition. We already are on the downslope. We should have started back in the 1960s with a project like this. ***
Of course we have 50 years, although it might be a really terrific idea to use them wisely (for a change).
Let's assume that world population stabilizes around 9 billion which is not at all unlikely. That's way too many, but it's probably tractable. Don't believe that will happen? Population increase rates in many industrial countries are close to zero. Even the US and China are down to 0.7% and in the US much of that is immigration. It's a reasonable assumption that population increase even in the most primitive countries rates of increase will shrink as the countries develop.
Let's further assume that we are headed eventually for a world where every human uses energy at about the level of France and Japan today -- 400,000btu per person per day. Maybe a bit more in northern climes, a bit less in some favored climates where heating and air conditioning are truly optional.
Could Americans adapt to a Japanese level of energy use. I think so. I'd a hell of a lot rather live in Tokyo than Dayton or Detroit ... or San Diego for that matter. (Yes, I've lived in all those places, and a number of others).
Can we support that with non-renewable resources for 50 years? Well, the US certainly can. Even if the US doesn't change its ways at all except to switch energy sources away from petroleum and conserve enough to compensate for population growth there appears to be at least a 50 year supply of natural gas and a 150 year supply of coal. (That's adjusting current estimates assuming that petroleum makes no contribution at all and must be replaced tomorrow). Note that natural gas, coal, hydro and nuclear together provide well over half the US energy. In addition, about a sixth of US petroleum needs are satisfied from "condensate" -- oil that turns up in gas wells. That's omitted completely.
This is not to say that the US shouldn't change its ways. But not that dramatically. Cutting energy usage per person by 1.3% a year for 50 years would bring the US down to about 450,000btu per person per year. Even allowing for population growth, does 2% a year in more conservation, increased use of renewables, more nuclear, and more efficient energy use sound all that unachievable?
Is there enough energy in the rest of the world to bring them up to 400,000 btu per year? Probably. Half the world's petroleum is still in the ground as is most of its natural gas. There are huge reserves of heavy oil/tar sands in Canada and Venuzela. Three quarters of the world's coal is not in the US.
Is this a perfect solution? Absolutely not. It puts
a lot of Carbon Dioxide into the air. And the planet will probably run out of fossil hydrocarbons sometime in the 22nd Century if we just burn the stuff and take no other actions.
But I submit that we have ample time to change over to a more rational energy usage scheme and that such a scheme does not require the human race to return to the stone age. We just need adult supervision.
"We just need adult supervision."
Sorry, but when it comes to the human species, no such thing exists.
Take a look at our species from the perspective of an alien race who has swung by our planet to study us. Get rid of your personal bias based on your individual life experience. A dispassionate, intellectual study of human history will show a consistent pattern of environmental destruction and moral corruption. We are like animals, in that given the opportunity, we will exponentially expand our numbers until resource depletion causes a die off. That is instinctive and can't be changed. We are unlike animals in that we are so morally corrupt (as a species) to allow murder, torture, enslavement, theft, corruption, bigotry, sexual abuse, genocide, and war.
Even attempts to create Gods that rise above human failings have been disasters. As we create Gods that serve us, even though we pretend we serve them.
Again, step way back and look at the human species from a position of a truly intelligent species from outside our solar system. Look at what we humans have done to each other during recorded history. Look at how less than 1 percent of humans have exploited the other 99 plus percent. Add up the percentage of humans who have been murdered, killed in wars and genocide, or starved to death intentionally. Add to that percentage the number of humans who have lived in slavery or other types of bondage. The number is staggering.
We are what we are. Evolution will not change the instincts we are born with quickly enough to overcome the flaws of our species. We run the gamut from people like Jeffrey Dahmer to Mother Teresa. Those who feel the human species falls closer to Mother Teresa than to Jeffrey Dahmer are ignoring history. Bottom line, the human species, taken as a whole, is not intelligent enough to save itself from resource depletion, and its moral failings are going to make the coming required reductions in population more horrific than they had to be if there really were such a thing as "adult supervision".
The depressing thing is such life forms may be very rare. We only know of a single planet that evolved complex life -and if you posit that the goal is to generate a truly intelligent species (rather than one clever enough to destroy itself), then the observable universe so far is batting 000% (0 for 1). There is no quarantee that most forms of brainy life won't be just as lacking in wisdom as ourselves.
I think our gods and religions are our futile attempt to create the "adult supervision". The problem is we (mostly) invent god's with all of humanities bad characteristics, then make satisfying their every wish to be more important then survival itself.
I think the basic "steering" principle is before you make a turn, especially a sharp one, if you have your foot to the floor, take your foot off the accelerator.
Disturbingly well said.
And I hope you're wrong.
Regards, Matt B
Mark Z Jacobsen embraces hydrogen airplanes because he's an anti-biofuels nutjob and battery powered airplanes are too goofy.
But hydrogen can be produced at good efficiency(+60% versus 83% at the oil refinery)
from NA natural gas and coal(a +6600 XJ resource) and the CO2 waste can be sequestered in oil/gas fields and saline aquifers. Right now the US produces 11 million tons of hydrogen per year(1.5 XJ per year), the equivalent of 11 billion gallons of gasoline. The US uses 21 XJ per year in petroleum for liquid fuel.
Typically, these academics are out of contact with the real world. Governments around the world will not come up with a joint infrastructure plan since there is no governing body with power to mandate. See the toothless bodies G-20, the UN, etc. A US citizen does not want to pay any tax; Tax is worse than the devil and they rather prefer to live in a decaying infrastructure than to pay taxes. US politicians want to be reelected and have a time frame accordingly. US industry will not put billions into research and trillions to make products. Maximizing shareholder value is sacred. All these many many obstacles show that the time frame 2030 is ridicules. In my opinion, proposed project cannot be completed in this century, if ever.
The Desertech Industrial Initiative proposes to build solar power plants in the Sahara and DC transmission lines to Europe with a cost of $400 Billions by 2050, supplying 15% of Europe's electricity. That is modest in comparison to the above article but the involved industry wants government monetary support. Yet, so far governments give only lip-service and no money. Hence, the time frame also seems unrealistic.
You are right. If there is any chance we could do a big project like the one proposed, we certainly should be able to do a relatively small one.
We don't have "spaceship earth" - with Kirk or Piccard or anyone else on the bridge. We have a collection of a couple hundred lifeboats, called nations. Some of the lifeboats are large and well appointed and have plenty of space, even plenty of empty space. Some of the lifeboats are small, have no emergency supplies, are leaking badly, and are filled to overflowing with passengers. Of course, there are other lifeboats in-between these extremes.
Some lifeboats (and their passengers) will survive, some will not. It doesn't take a genius to guess which will do which. I can't imagine anything that anyone could feasibly do that might fundamentally change this reality.
Sad, tragic, but this is the reality I'm afraid.
A US citizen does not want to pay any tax;
Ironically, Americans don't seem to mind to have to pay a high tax on their work (which is almost doubled compared to Switzerland), but somehow could not stand it if they had a tax on gas like Switzerland does.
When I was young and naïve I remember reading Scientific American because it represented a future for mankind that I wanted to believe in, that is, before I knew the true nature of the beast (I was also an avid reader of Science Fiction when it was still considered, to be kind, as being somewhat off the acceptable mainstream for literature), so I have some knowledge of the magazine and what it used to represent.
Unfortunately, it has since been taken over for a much darker purpose under the, to be kind again, misguided direction of the quasi-religious “eco-freak” movement (sorry, time is running out and I need to call it for what it is – no time for the more PC term “environmentalist” anymore).
It is now being used to present eco-freak “pseudo-science” propaganda disguised as real science in an effort to mislead the masses in order to frighten and manipulate those who have little or no scientific knowledge into making disastrous choices for our future. Too bad, it used to be a relatively entertaining magazine.
While I generally agree with the arguments presented as to why the WWS energy solution as presented in the Scientific American is not a workable solution, ignoring for the moment the glaring omission of any geopolitical ramifications related to the issue, I would like to point out the solution presented, that of advocating a “local solution” to the problems is equally disingenuous, ignoring completely the probability of a massive die-off of the world’s human population, which cannot be sustained by a “local solution” under any circumstances.
I think I would have far more respect for the eco-freak movement if it had the courage to present its ideas for a “sustainable future” with some candor. Instead, I have noted that eco-freak solutions tend to be simplistic and unattainable, with flights of fancy to some “never-never land” that, to be kind once again, never existed and never will.
Personally, I could care less if eco-freaks want to indulge in their utopian dream worlds far from reality, but what really frightens me is when some “quasi-religious” crank wants to impose his/her personal flight of fancy on me and my lifestyle, with no consideration of what that would mean to me.
I think it is complete and utter arrogance for anyone to think they know how someone should live better than the person does himself. As a result, I try not to impose my ideals on others (believe me, without going into any detail, you would be extremely offended by how I think people should be forced to live).
In return, I generally try to respect the rights of other human beings as well, with the knowledge that their opinions probably differ widely from mine, but nevertheless with equal validity in their world.
Unfortunately, this “live and let live” attitude has proven to be in vain, given the proclivity of the human species to meddle in everyone else’s business for their own benefit, generally under the guise of doing something worthwhile for mankind (like religion, democracy, the so-called “social contract” whereby we give up our rights for the protection and benefits of civilization run by and for the wealthy, or “saving the planet” – usually as a means of furthering their own ambitions for power).
Since I have had to listen to you eco-freaks expound with great “quasi-religious” fervor and “eco-divine knowledge” of the future for some time now, “driving down” dissent with the epithet “denier,” I think I have earned a right (if nothing else as an equal stake-holder in the future of this planet, something eco-freaks are eager to deny me of) to tell you what I think the world’s problems are and how they should be resolved.
First and foremost, the most pressing problem the world has is overpopulation (never mind, groaning it won’t do you any good, just as my groaning over your bullshit has done any good thus far). Any “solution” that doesn’t specifically and explicitly deal with the problem of a surplus population of 6+ billion people on the face of the planet is simply bullshit.
Because of their “quasi-religious” beliefs and simplistic solutions to what are very real problems, eco-freaks are about to become responsible for committing mass murder, genocide of the human race, because they can’t seem to face the reality of the truth and are peddling their line of bullshit to the masses as a realistic solution.
We have essentially two choices here: (1) either eco-freaks are stupid enough to believe their own crap, which would make them just about the most ignorant and dangerous people the earth has ever seen, or (2) eco-freaks know the truth, but deliberately choose not to reveal it to the masses because they simply don’t regard the masses as real people on a equal par with them. History is filled with horrors that have been committed for the same reasons and with the same reasoning.
Take your choice as to which scenario you want to believe. It is a moot point because the result will be the same either way. To me, that makes eco-freaks worse danger than the governmental systems and religious organizations that got us to this point in the first place.
As I said, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to live in my world. Maybe you should think twice about forcing me to live in yours.
One final cautionary remark, believe me when I say that there could easily be some unanticipated “collateral damage” in the present eco-freak course of action. And my guess is there might be a considerable number of other people out there who would feel the same once eco-freak intentions become generally understood.
Since eco-freak “solutions” generally rely on the shaky supposition that the masses will be cooperative and submissive, reacting to major paradigm shifts in civilization with calmness and reason, you apparently don’t understand how the masses are really likely to react, so you might want to rethink this assumption, for your benefit as well as mine.
Gordon
I am not sure I would use the wording you use, but there definitely is a question of what population level would be sustainable with local food production and local industry. This is a reason why few politicians will want to embrace any such change.
Which is why the two party political party political system that we currently have in the US is completely useless for the kind of paradigm shift that we as a society need to undergo.
Perhaps we shall see the birth of new political parties.
Not sure why I am replying to a comment which uses the inflammatory epithet "eco-freaks" but the mainstream US environmental organizations all recognize the impact of population on climate.
For example, Sierra Club (1 million plus members) population policy below
"If we are to achieve a more sustainable future, addressing the root causes of environmental degradation — including overconsumption of natural resources, poverty, and population growth — is paramount....Working with domestic and international coalition partners, we seek to increase universal access to voluntary family planning services and comprehensive sex education; advance women's and girls' basic rights, including access to health care, education and economic opportunity; promote youth leadership; and raise public awareness of wasteful resource consumption in the context of social and economic equity. Our program has five action objectives:
1. Make the Population-Environment Connection
2. Promote Voluntary Family Planning Around the World and in the U.S.
3. Advance Sustainable Development Solutions that Address Poverty and Gender Inequity
4. Empower Youth with our "Youth Action for the Global Environment" Campaign
5. Curb Our Ecological Footprint"
http://www.sierraclub.org/population/overview/
Of course the real forces pushing overpopulation are fundamentalist religions, Catholic/Muslim opposition to family planning/contraception/abortion, and capitalist "greed is good" growth fixations, etc., rather than the "eco-freak" boogieman you have imagined.
Painting with a broad brush always results in inaccuracy and the quality of science among environmental groups varies from Nobel Laureates to ridiculous cranks, but the science of species extinction, carbon emissions, and ocean acidification can only be denied by those who wish to depart from physical reality.
I agree that the ecofreaks that wrote Freakonomics are completely misguided. Economy freaks like Leavitt and Dubner really have few good economic ideas and they disguise their “pseudo-science” propaganda as real science in an effort to mislead the masses and to frighten and manipulate those who have little or no scientific knowledge into making disastrous choices for our future.
Good call on the Freak-Economics.
Actually I suspect you meant SuperFreakonomics. Freakonomics is their older book (I haven't read it, but I don't think it tread too badly into dangerous falsehoods). The latest SuperFreakonomics has been widely panned for its climate chapter, which has them making patently ridiculous arguments which betray almost complete lack of understanding. Once I detect that from a writer, I deem them untrustworthy, i.e. I can't trust that what they right about is well thought out. So their credibility has been spent. [But will that help or hurt book sales?]
Both books are bad. Quote from the first book concerning PO
BTW, my post was intended as a kind of Emily Litella joke. Eco-Freak = Freak-eco
Gordon;
Follow the power. Follow the money.
There is some popular following, though it may often amount to little more than loud lip-service to environmental beliefs.. but really, the situation we are in is a result of massive quantities of power. That does not lead you to the door of the World Wildlife Fund or the NRDC.
If you're really looking to find out where our course got so skewed, look at who is really driving the boat.
Bob
We can cut through the above confusions by using the Thermodynamic Razor: All earth-energized technological ordering results in an overall loss of order.
This means Jacobson and Delucchi are correct in only looking at relatively direct solar (which includes their wind and water sources).
This approach excludes all fossil fuels, geothermal, nuclear, and the lesser evil of biofuels(since they only delay deployment of relatively direct solar).
Hydrogen fuel (if produced via solar) can be stored interstitially for transportation uses and released by temperature changes (from exhaust) upon command.
The above solar sources are already cost competitive if the entropy costs are included. For example, add 4 cents/KWH to coal for logistics and another 4 cents/KWH for global warming. Wind is already competitive.
We have no choice--go solar or decline.
The cost of solar retooling is a necessary investment that is paid back through energy sales.
I think that covers it.
Too many peeps!
Peeps have unrealistic expectations of living the unattainable and unsustainable American Dream -- proving that the peeps are actually asleep (see George Carlin).
No matter what technology -- too many of us are here.
About 6 billion of us need to exit the planet immediately -- or in the next few years --if anyone is to survive with the comfort of a relatively soft landing for our species.
Even then, the Ecological Tsunami is already set up and paid for. It will happen no matter what we do now.
I am grateful for some years of relative comfort -- actually living like royalty compared to most people who have ever lived.
I know that I am absolutely vulnerable to a sudden and violent death, perhaps after a few years of misery in a violent and inhospitable world.
We are all absolutely vulnerable, with no path to security at all.
When things slide in all directions at once there is no safe place.
So maybe we do the best we can to make positive changes, yes. That seems to me to have great value in itself: stewardship is a more fulfilling way to live than rape and plunder.
But we all need to prepare ourselves for the reality that the odds are against more than a billion or two people surviving the ecological Bottleneck and the wars we will fight to make ourselves "secure."
Beyond that, who knows? War, famine, disease, drought. These will shape whoever or whatever gets through the next 30 years or so.
I am trying to find meaning and fulfillment even in the face od these realities, while most people try -- understandably -- to find a meta-narrative that conforms to what they want their lives to be like.
We can cut through the above confusions by using the Thermodynamic Razor: All earth-energized technological ordering results in an overall loss of order.
This means Jacobson and Delucchi are correct in only looking at relatively direct solar (which includes their wind and water sources).
This approach excludes all fossil fuels, geothermal, nuclear, and the lesser evil of biofuels (since they only delay deployment of relatively direct solar).
Hydrogen fuel (if produced via solar) can be stored interstitially for transportation uses and released by temperature changes (from exhaust) upon command.
The above solar sources are already cost competitive if the entropy costs are included. For example, add 4 cents/KWH to coal for logistics and another 4 cents/KWH for global warming. Wind is already competitive.
We have no choice--go solar or decline.
The cost of solar retooling is a necessary investment that is paid back through energy sales.
I think that covers it.
The article Scientific American might be overly optimistic, but the good thing is that it bring awarness that the potential of renewable energies is higher than what thought initially, especialy for wind energy. Clearly the transition won't be easy and cheap especially when you read that you have to multiply by more 100 what is already installed... But it is good to know that the potential is there.
Well,... As always the sustainability thinking on planet earth has exceptionally large holes in it's accounting practices. The proposal leaves out a long list of things, including the most glaring of the all... that:
Why is it that all the "really smart" people keep filing that detail in some mental black hole, that is, the physical relation between economic growth and its direct physical effects? It's quite clear that economic stability for a our capitalist growth economy requires continual real growth to keep from breaking down. Do you hope to get a system that requires growth for stability to use only the lowest EROI and highest priced resources???
I think you probably do that only in your dreams... to be realistic.
A number of the best and brightest I know, when I've asked them this specific question, have actually said they thought that changing the nature of the growth system could be taken care of after everything else, and it would be best not to mention it at present.
Any guesses what that reflects?? ??ksat siht ot pu ton re'ew taht ti sI
Two questions..
1) Which sources are you describing as the lowest EROEI around? (If Oil is coming in at some 8:1 now, than it is lower than wind, hydro and solar, IIRC, tho' of course calcs don't all agree on these accountings)
2) How do you conclude that we need to be in a system that demands growth for stability? I hear this frequently charged, but I don't see why it has become axiomatic.
I'm mainly saying that the incentive to maximize profit will NOT lead to developing the technology able to use the most expensive (lowest EROI) energy sources we'll need to adjust our whole society for in the future. We're preparing to simply abandon, I think, the things built around low cost fuels that stop being available...
We physically do need to be in a system that DOES NOT demand growth for stability (Sorry if I misspoke) since continued growth inherently becomes unmanageable for a million unalterable reasons. The one way to do that, that does not result in net zero returns on investment for the economy and major economic turmoil, was discovered by JM Keynes. There's a discussion of how it would apply to us in my short piece Economies that become part of nature
I keep bringing this up on various economics blogs. Hoping to spark some new "sustainable" economics thinking. I am largely ignored. I think they are sufficiently overwhelmed by trying to work through the current crisis, that worrying about the longterm is put off.
Growth and change are not identical. It is possible to have zero growth - in population, in energy consumption, in everything consumption - and to still have change. The human intellect and creativity can still come up with ways to use those limited, not-growing resources differently and better, to the betterment of human life.
I suspect that unarticulated by some people is the idea that we can evolve to that sort of system, but that the types of changes that I have described can somehow constitute a type of continued "economic growth", even if the material economy is not growing but steady state. This is the same mentality that thinks that one can create financial derivatives on top of derivatives on top of derivatives, and that this consitutes economic "growth" and can in some way create real wealth. We've all seen how well that idea is working out.
If we start allowing our conceptualization of "the economy" become too far divorced from the real world, we will only be asking for trouble. A sure grip on reality is the only antidote for delusion and folly.
I have not read the original article and so I don't know two things:
1. Why are the authors proposing we get off fossil fuels? "Because supplies are dwindling", or "so we can stop our foreign meddling" would be different than "because climate change will result in our extinction otherwise". The latest figure I heard was that we (in the US) need to get to zero emissions by 2020 in order to not inflate CO2 over and above crucial tipping point levels.
2. Do the authors ever say that the present level of consumption must be maintained? Any discussion of how much energy we need to generate needs to look at why we feel we need that level of energy. To ship cookies around the world? Asparagus from Peru? Apples from New Zealand? To maintain/increase American levels of GDP, production, consumption because otherwise the whole system comes crashing down?
The article feels unmoored to me. There is no admission that the starting point is problematic, no explanation of why the ending is desirable, not enough discussion of the changes required, the injustices we might take the opportunity to address, or the type of disruption that would occur.
So its usefulness is limited.
I see now that my concern, that CO2 emissions caused by the renewables buildup would tip us towards climate catastrophe would most likely not be a deal-breaker. The economy would be largely "re-directed" to manufacture and installation of renewables. Converting factories to making wind turbines is a problem, emission-wise, but this could be partially recouped by everyone consuming less in order to pay either their increased taxes, or their solar panels.
Instead of a couple of years' worth of vacations, my family would buy a solar array. For other families, it would mean buying fewer clothes, or toys, or electronics, less expensive food, fewer restaurants, concerts, sports events, and... turning off the A/C, turning down the stupid thermostat (a lot!!).
The loss of the non-essential "services", from tourism, to massage, to psychotherapy, through furniture, linens, jewelry, books, art, and Playstations would nevertheless result in huge disruptions and financial system collapse.
I suppose after taking a couple of years to install massive conservation measures and local food security, we should try it anyways. But we won't. So back to discussions of how we go down "in style".
The July posting on my 'Relationality' blog at http://my.ecoearth.info/
proves, using the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that all earth-energized (nonsolar) technologies necessarially cause more disorder than order, and in this sense are unsustainable.
I call this proof 'The Thermodynamic Razor' since it cuts through all the crap above.
It culls out all technologies other than relatively direct solar.
Please re-read my above posting.
Here is something to consider.
The First Law is yeoman;
Net Energy; EROI.
The Second is atman;
Go solar or die.
What else is there to say here about SciAm's Sustainability Article?
It is sad situation that I have to add this posting. If readers were up to speed they would have gotten the message the first time.
I would just point out that biomass, and the fuels that can be derived from it, IS derived from solar energy. I am not at all convinced that building an acre of PV panels is always and everywhere going to be a better way to go than growing an acre of oilseeds for biodiesel feedstock, or growing an acre of forest and harvesting the firewood. I would point out that these more natural approaches have the advantage of test of time, and of being much more quickly implemented. They also have the advantage of providing a large variety of other valuable ecological "services" - things which PV panels cannot do.
Covering the earth with PV panels might produce a lot of energy for us. It might also kill us, along with the rest of life on earth. We need to be thinking more in terms of working WITH nature, and adjusting our lives to the limits that sustainable life within nature imposes upon us.
If there were say only 500 million to 1 billion of us on the earth, we would be wise to use biomass, then solar etc.
Okay where did we put all those body bags?
Sighs.
The authors claim they want to re-power the world in a carbon-free way. There is no indication that they think scaling back at all would be helpful or necessary. They give brief reasons for not using the other fuels they eliminate.
I read the SciAm article last week and am glad to see it dealt with. This to me is the real debate now -- peak oil is a done deal, maybe not with the general public, but with irreversibly sufficient segments of the "cogniscenti". This despite the article in the prior SciAm by, who was it?, Maugheri or something like that.
Certainly the conversion issue is a huge one, and is a show-stopper by itself. Never mind the rare metals -- the metals and other raw materials needed for the new infrastructure, both generation stations and the interconnecting network would be immense. While there may not be an absolute scarcity, there is certainly an ever decreasing ore richness (what's the proper term?), which means bringing ever greater amounts to the surface for smaller amounts of end product, and ever more difficult refining.
And the amount of land and soil destroyed will continue escalationg, as well as water used in mining and refining, because the amount of tailings will increase, etc.
We have managed to lift 1-2 billion people out of a pre-industrial existience, a not very large fraction of 7. The SciAm wants us to think this can continue and even progress without hydrocarbons. It's ridiculous.
What can be be done, and done cheaply, is retrench, scale back, and do it comfortably (unless cars and malls are included in your definition of comfort). It means relocalization, getting back to the land, sharing many things we don't share now, working with our hands, etc. It means systematically undoing as much as possible of the damage we've done to the surface ecology.
Tens of millions are out of work, many living in tent cities or worse. Most will never return to the market economy. There should a massive campaign to help people begin rebuilding their lives in this alternative economy. This is the only way they can resume control over their lives and build new ones. And they will turn out to be in the vanguard. Because the global market economy is going to have room for fewer and fewer of us in the coming decades.
But no -- profit reigns supreme. These people are to be thrown onto slag heap, left to rot.
"....Because the global market economy is going to have room for fewer and fewer of us in the coming decades..."
Decades?I wish I could be as optimistic as you.I think we have only one decade left.While everyone is debating on what to do WW 3 is going to transpire.Not many seem to realize our current system was set up to fail by design, and the agenda is working to perfection.
Oh well, if you can't beat em' might as well take some antidepressants so we can be numb in the head whilest we kiss our asses goodbye.
In all seriousness though, the Bible does tell us (warn us) what is about to happen.Of course on this message board if you mention the Bible you get accused and castigated for being a narrow minded dolt.Well, read the book of Revelation with an open mind and see the future for yourselves.I do not think linear charts and depletion data are going to save the individual from the coming Antichrist.
Well, which bible are you referring to -- Campbell, Deffeyes, or even Catton?
Still, when you accuse me of being too optimistic, you may have a point.
'.. Individual homeowners would need to get their homes rewired for the larger amount of electricity they would use--especially if they are converting to electric home heating..."
How in the hell do they propose we generate all that electicity to power the current infrastructure we use since electricity is an energy carrier and not a source??
Lets be realistic here.
Is nuclear power sustainable?
How about coal?
What is meant by this fallacy of sustainability with our current demand?
There is NO WAY wind and solar can meet that demand in the real world.
Solar and wind technology are entirely DEPENDENT on fossil fuels for their manufacturing to begin with.If we want true sustainability we need to go back to horse drawn carriages and oxen plowing our fields.
This article should be called "The Wizard of Oz path to sustainability" - nothing but pure fictitious entertainment.
The laws of thermodynamics rule the universe I live in.
Gail's synopsis is more intune with reality.It's just getting there that will be the painful part.
Sustainable Agriculture is an Oxymoron .
Unless we immediately and accurately use what we have learned (technology) , it is back to Hunter/gatherer.
Solar Thermal and Photovoltaic life style is our only chance to prevent mass die off, and we may have already run out of time and resources.
Reduce the Birth Rate Immediately ... the death rate will increase and the population will stabilize.
BY the time we get to $5 gas , the discussion will be a lot different.
We are only at $2.50/gal now so not much will happen now.
You mean sustainable corporate/gmo/agribusiness/nitrogen fertilizer produced from NG/petrochemical pesticide/agriculture is an oxymoron.
Because you surely are not implying that organic agriculture that has been practiced for thousands of years - long before industrialization - is a self contradiction.
If you are, that has got to be one of the most arrogant statements I have ever read on TOD.
If we want to prevent mass die off: Everyone who is able needs to have the opportunity to work the land for themselves and their families and enjoy the fruits of THEIR LABOR; and not have big government/banking/corporate interests steal from their efforts.Pick up a hoe and get busy, you know, that four letter word w-o-r-k.
We cannot eat solar thermal and photovoltaic anything.
You obviously have never even heard of King's Farmers of Forty Centuries, let alone read it.
To the extent agriculture involves nonsolar inputs, it is not sustainable on any large scale since its damage cannot be reversed by solar inputs eleswhere (overall entropy reversals) via the large-scale regenerative cycles (carbon, oxygen, etc.).
The only person alive in the US who has grown a complete diet
School of Agriculture - FSU Class of 67
jmygann,
Maybe we can solve our problems with the genetic engineering equivalent of computer viurses.
It might be possible to introduce genes in crops that cause them to produce poisons that make people sterile.
If such covertly introduced poison were to be slow acting by the time people found out about it the population problem might be solved.
I'm just kidding of course but something functionally equivalent may be loosed upon the world if it can be invented and manufactured.
I don't understand why hydrogen as an airplane fuel is being written off by several posters including Gail. Hydrogen is readily burned in jet engines and has almost three times as much energy per unit weight as jet fuel. The Air Force or NASA or somebody was flying hydrogen planes back in the late 1950s. I would think the main drawback would be the extra cost of liquifying the hydrogen gas but if we are talking utopian scenari anyway.....
Three times the energy per weight but also three times the volume per energy. Huge fuel tanks with cryogenic insulation, increased drag from the fuel tank volume, hazardous refueling operations... Can be done, but why? When synthesis of jet fuel from hydrogen and carbon is straightforward and more efficient for flights of 1000 miles or less...
R Arnold says: Three times the energy per weight but also three times the volume per energy. Huge fuel tanks with cryogenic insulation, increased drag from the fuel tank volume, hazardous refueling operations... Can be done, but why? When synthesis of jet fuel from hydrogen and carbon is straightforward and more efficient for flights of 1000 miles or less.
However, hydorgen can be stored interstitially (in the interstices of a molecular lattice) thereby solving the volume problem. I mentioned this above. Another poster mentioned storage in pellets (which I assume was also interstitial). Synthesis of jet fuel exacerbates both the GHG and the oil problem, plus its hydrozine additive is highly toxic.
The Department of Energy target for vehicular hydrogen-storage systems is 7% by weight. Interstitial storage substitutes weight for volume and high pressure.
If you had to fuel airliners with adsorbed hydrogen, you would not be able to carry enough to fly across oceans. Hydrogen is simply a non-starter as aircraft fuel; it only makes it as rocket fuel because rockets require the high performance and don't spend enough time in atmosphere for the problems of handling the liquid to overwhelm the advantages.
For many decades Scientific American satisfied the needs of a small fraction of Americans who had a strong interest in the details of ongoing scientific discovery. Just go to any good library and browse through their collection from decades ago to see how it was.
A few years ago the powers that be at SA decided to cash in on the magazines reputation by publishing flashy papers that would have mass public appeal and ramp up the cash flow. Not a bad idea if they maintained the level of quality, but they skipped that part and pump out shallow, sometimes deeply flawed work. They may have sunk to a new low with this one.
They have also lobotomized their web site by making it impossible to link to comments, making it much more difficult to distribute thoughtful critical comments. Very disappointing.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The fact that this paper is on the front cover points to that conclusion.
Gail and Bill,
I was thinking much the same thing.
At least there is a bright side to this.
Even though the authors and SA are wildly overoptimistic (more for political and people rather than technological reasons imo )they are at least moving the entire energy debate along in terms of public awareness.
There is a saying in show biz to the effect that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
SA is seen and read in lots of school libraries and in the homes of lots of well educated people who may not know any more about peak oil than what they read in the NYT -such articles can actually be looked at in one sense as a sort of stealth advocacy of the peak oil concept.
You can bet that peak energy and renewables are now the subject of many a conversation over some md or dentist's dinner table as a result of this coverage.At least they will henceforth probably be more open to the idea that there is a crunch on the way after reading it.
Given the general state of public knowledge this is a considerable accomplishment.Look at it as a possible crack in the walls of the most hardcore cornucopians fortress-a little water or knowledge leaking in here and there can bring down even the mightiest walls-eventually.
It's too bad that it's too little too late.
I think you are right about the flip side of an article such as the one in Scientfic American--getting more people to think about the issue.
Some people will believe the hype, but quite a few won't. And even those who do believe the hype will begin to see that there is a problem that need to be addressed.
Look, nonsolar sources are not sustainable due to their entropy effects.
Go solar or die.
Once we get viable solar (even on the transition scale being considered by SciAm), it is a short step to realize its advanages of being free and already distributed.
Then it is a short step to decentralize under locally fitting solar applications.
As the SciAm authors say, the transition problem is political.
Since I don't see any working way to get technical help, can someone tell me how to get the shaded box (representing the comment to which I am replying) in my reply?
See "More information about formatting options" just above the save button.
What you want is the <blockquote>...</blockquote> tag pair.
I work with a company that markets grid tied commercial and residential PV systems.
I'm beginning to see a rising interest in completely off grid solar generators even among customers who would normally have gone with grid tied systems. They also tend to be people who seem to be willing to invest in what I can only describe as hyper efficiency with regards appliances, lighting and cooling systems, this being south Florida space heating is not generally a concern but passive solar for heating water is.
More interestingly a large percentage of these people fall into what I would consider to be politically right leaning and otherwise generally anti "GREEN", as in being condescending to environmentalists and inimical to concepts like AGW and restrictions on fossil fuel use. In other words these systems are starting to make plain economic sense. Either that or these people are starting to read the writing on the wall.
It would be extremely instructive to know their reasons. Likely they wouldn't respond to a buyer follow up survey that was trying to delve too deep. But post purchase dissonance is very powerful and does get people talking about personal stuff more readily than one might imagine. That was THE lesson that came home from my first (possibly only) undergrad field study, and I find it every bit as much in play near forty years later.
Here's some hydrogen heresy.
You can modify gasoline spark engines to run on 60% gasoline (btus) and 40% hydrogen gas(btus) injected into the carburator, premixed with air.
Theoretically you could reduce gasoline consumption by 40% substituting hydrogen to make up the difference either reformated from fossil fuels like natural gas/coal or from renewables, reducing
tailpipe CO2 emissions by 40% in modified transport.
I only mention this because as far as I know nobody has brought it here up before.
Yawn...
Diesels can be modified to run on 80% or so gaseous fuel. Spark-ignition engines can run on 100% propane, methane, producer gas... and, yes, hydrogen. Hydrogen requires special treatment to avoid backfiring and handle NOx production, and the displacement of air by the large volume of gas reduces volumetric efficiency and power output.
Implicit in a macro interpretation of the Second Law of Thermo is the physical necessity that all nonsolar energy exchanges are unsustainable since they generate more disorder than order.
This includes geothermal.
Of course, relatively indirect solar is also unsustainable since the solar input is washed-out by logistical nonsolar--hence increased entropy (pollution).
Wind, waves, hydro?, are, of course, solar driven.
This means we either go solar or decline.
I call this thermodynamic imperative the 'Thermodynamic Razor' since it cuts through most of what is uninformed energy-contention today.
If we have no choice, except to go solar, shouldn't our energy be focused on the political problem?
The First Law is yeoman,
Net Energy; EROI.
The Second is atman,
Go solar or die.
Be reasonable.
By using fossil fuels you're using solar energy already, concentrated over hundreds of millions of years.
The entropy produced in concentrating them is already gone.
Solar is inefficient with only a few hours of energy delivered per day at peak.
The surface of the earth receives between 5-10 kwh per m2 per day of insolation. The efficiency of transmission is about 15% or
~.075 kwh per square foot or 13.3 square feet for 1 kwh.
And it costs 30 cents per kwh.
A pound of coal, produces 1 kwh of electricity. It is 18.4 cubic inches, a 2.6 inch cube. A pound of coal costs 2.5 cents for 1 kwh.
The Second Law analysis assumes a macro equillibrium. A new equillibrium was established after fossil fuel deposit. That's the one we have to work under.
You need to look at the article. All your figures are unsubstantiated.
The efficiency of coal to light bulb is about 16%. The actual cost of coal (taking entropy into account) is about 4 cents higher than the 5 cents the industry cites. Also their figure is the imbedded price not the cost of bringing a new KW online (it averages in older, cheaper facilities). The extra 4 cents/kwh doesn't include the cost of global warming (that costs at least another 4 cents)--according to the National Research Council (2005). This means that solar electric is already cheaper than coal electric once the full costs are accounted for.
Be reasonable.
" Look, nonsolar sources are not sustainable due to their entropy effects.
Go solar or die… "
" Implicit in a macro interpretation of the Second Law of Thermo is the physical necessity that all nonsolar energy exchanges are unsustainable since they generate more disorder than order. "
Prag, solar energy is fusion energy, a form of nuclear power. From the suns point of view earth is a small lump of matter in space that intercepts a tiny fraction of the suns output. The sun increases the entropy of the universe as any other source of energy does; there is nothing magical about the suns energy.
The sun is going to run out of fuel and swell up and absorb the earth someday regardless of what energy sources we use. Using solar energy will not delay that by one day.
Throughout human history people have willingly transitioned from one energy source to another based on how the new energy source would improve the quality of their lives. Now some people say we should reverse that trend by giving up our dense convenient energy sources and replacing them with low density intermittent, expensive energy sources. That idea is meeting considerable resistance.
Traditionally the U.S. has had a high standard of living because its citizens were the best educated, highly productive and creative. The U.S. spent a significant fraction of its productivity on R&D. all of these things combined with the freedom to develop new ideas under capitalism resulted in a constant stream of new products that we could produce and sell all over the world.
Now U.S. children are “30 something” in the world in math and science, and other countries are passing us by using the same formula that worked for us.
Our leadership is focused on making tiny CO2 reductions using expensive inefficient systems and mandates. Those savings will be gobbled up by the rest of the world faster than we can make them.
U.S. energy policy should focus on one goal.
Develop energy sources that are clean, safe, dispatchable, reliable, suitable for mass production that can be scaled up to any level, and most importantly, cheaper than fossil fuel.
We should be spending $100 billion per year to make this happen. Until we achieve this goal we should forget about small expensive emission reductions and focus on getting the country running again so that we will be able to gear up the new technology when it becomes available.
So? Who doesn't know that. We are talking about solar drived, earth energy.
So? Who doesn't know that. We are talking about how, for the earth, solar derived energy is an ordering input. There might not be anything magical about solar energy, but thermodynamically (to the earth system) it is unique.
Perhaps you live on the sun?
"We are talking about how, for the earth, solar derived energy is an ordering input…. thermodynamically (to the earth system) it is unique. "
What does that mean in engineering terms? Why is it important?
You are asking me to give you a course on Environmental Entropy. That is too much for this venue. See my "Relationality" blog (the August and Sept postings) at http://my.ecoearth.info/
My first impression from reading Gail's post, and the S.A. article, was shock at thinking this is even possible. Do they want us to be driving all the cars that we drive today? Do they realize how much energy it takes to mine, crush, smelt, and form metals, of any kind? Do they understand that on a ship there is a lot more power used than just pushing it through the water?
We have built a system using Fossil Fuels and the other energy sources over a span more than 100 years, replacing it in 20 years is not possible with the world we have today. If we were to ban together as one Human People and work outside of a profit motive ( one big happy Commune ) we might be able to do this in 30 years.
We aren't going to be one big happy family all working for the common good, if we were able to be that, we would have been doing it before now.
If we were to make policy that every home built in the US from 2010 forward had to have solar power collection features, Energy reduction features, and sustainable building technics used in construction. We would do ourselves a lot of good. Passing laws like this though will mean every state in the union doing it, willingly without people trying to fight them in the courts.
Then there is the rest of the world. Did the authors think what OPEC would say about it?
Now I'll go read the posts. Hopefully most of this post is not new thoughts.
Charles.
The scale of the energy problem is immense. I posted some figures on this article back on Oct 27 Drumbeat. To meet their targets over 67 MW of tidal power installed every day. How about a 1.3 GW hydro system built every 27 days. That's 520 very large wind turbines per day. That's 232,000 home PV systems everyday. Projects and programs on this scale are politically unfeasible in democratic societies. In the money dominated plutocracy of the US government it is impossible. In emergency situations the Roman Senate would appoint a dictator for a set period of time to solve the problem. As the authors pointed out such changes in what we manufacture was done in WW II and imply that such a suspension of economic freedom i.e. suspension of the production of certain goods such as new cars, houses, beer cans, etc would be mandatory on an international scale is extremely unlikely. Do they nominate themselves as international dictators in order to make their dream a reality?
+1
Sigh! Another article written with nary a nod in the direction of climate change and global warming. It's sad and disappointing to see the featured authors on this website morph into one-eyed, one-trick ponies. Once again, I urge all people connected with this site to LISTEN to the scientists interviewed here.
Denmark is held up as a model of renewable energy production and use, but it's far from where this vision would go. Denmark reports 34,338 TWh generation in 2008, of which 6,582 TWh was wind power. That is 19.2%. This is accomplished by exchanging a great deal of power with neighboring countries which have lots of hydropower, effectively using their capacity as a battery.
The USA's hydro systems are maxed out already; there is no way to use e.g. the dams on the Colorado as pumped storage because there are no lower reservoirs from which to pump water upward. The energy storage requirements of a WWS system would be staggering, and I see no way to meet them without other technologies. This would be far easier using nuclear power, which provides very cheap zero-carbon heat.
Dr. Barry Brook has a critique of the Scientific American article at the his blog Brave New Climate:
"Critique of ‘A path to sustainable energy by 2030"
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/11/03/wws-2030-critique
By the way, here is one of the latest presentations at Google headquarters about LFTR thorium nuclear power plants:
"Energy From Thorium: A Nuclear Waste Burning Liquid Salt Thorium Reactor"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8
Everybody check out the Gaurdian for some hot oil news just posted.
Regarding Denmark.
Wind enthusiasts like to point out that “Denmark gets 20% of its electric power from wind, therefore the U.S. can do the same thing.” Most people accept this at face value.
The correct statement is that “Denmark generates a number of wind kWh's equal to about 20% of its total electric consumption.” But they cannot use all of their wind power when wind conditions are good, and export about half of it. So Denmark generates 10% of the electricity it consumes from wind.
Denmark has the most expensive electricity in the world, 32 cents per kWh.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/elecprih.html
Denmark consumes half the electricity per person as the U.S., so if the U.S. ramped up to the level of Denmark, wind would account for 5% of U.S. power.
Confronted with these facts, wind enthusiasts point out that the excess wind power goes into the European grid and offsets fossil fuel consumption. But wind produces only 3% of European electricity, and Denmark produces only 0.2% of European electricity.
Electrons do not know political boundaries and the European grid is smaller than the eastern U.S. grid or the western U.S. grid. The U.S. is not a tiny country surrounded by larger countries with large well developed hydro capacity.
The important point is that these facts completely negate the statement that Denmark proves that the U.S. or the world can ramp up to 20% wind.
Get the full details on Denmark in this excellent report.
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/denmark/Wind_energy_-_the_case...
A few excerpts;
" wind power has recently (2006) met as little as 5% of Denmark’s annual
electricity consumption with an average over the last five years of 9.7%. "
" Over the last eight years West Denmark has exported (couldn’t use), on average, 57% of the wind power it generated and East Denmark an average of 45% "
" Wind energy has replaced some thermal generation in Denmark. It has saved an average
emission of about 2.4 million t per year CO2 at a total subsidy cost of 12.3 billion DKK or an
average cost of 647 DKK (€ 87 or $124) per ton CO2. Wind power has proven to be an expensive
way to save CO2 emissions3. "
" The Danish Wind industry counts 28,400 employees… In the long run, creating additional employment in one sector through subsidies will detract labor from other sectors, resulting in no increase in net employment but only in a shift from the non-subsidized sectors to the subsidized sector… In this case the subsidy per job created is 600,000-900,000 DKK per year ($90,000-140,000). This subsidy constitutes around 175-250% of the average pay per worker in the Danish manufacturing industry. "
Denmark has the most expensive electricity in the world, 32 cents per kWh.
Wrong:
Industrial electricity prices before tax (2007):
Denmark (20% wind power): 7.06 cents/kWh
Belgium (55% nuclear power): 9.69 cents/kWh
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-DK-07-001/EN/KS-DK-...
Also:
Belgium (55.1 % nuclear power):
and 13.66 t of CO2/capita
and $47,617 GDP/capita
Denmark (0% nuclear power and 20% wind power):
and 10.94 t of CO2/capita
and $67,387 GDP/capita
http://www.iaea.org/inisnkm/nkm/aws/eedrb/data/BE-npsh.html
Denmark consumes half the electricity per person as the U.S.
And yet it has a much higher GDP per capita than the US.
Electrons do not know political boundaries and the European grid is smaller than the eastern U.S. grid or the western U.S. grid.
Wrong:
instituteforenergyresearch.org
And so much about your beloved Institute for Energy Research:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Institute_for_Energy_Research
But they cannot use all of their wind power when wind conditions are good, and export about half of it.
Besides that the Danes mostly export wind energy during winter time, when less hydro is produced and electricity prices are higher:
http://www.ens.dk/EN-US/INFO/FACTSANDFIGURES/ENERGY_STATISTICS_AND_INDIC...
The Danish government's wind agency published this comment in a local newspaper:
In addition Denmark exports over 90% of its wind turbines with a profit. It's always better to have tax-paying jobs that generate profit by exporting their goods than have a high unemployment rate and support industries that cannot export because nobody is interested in their goods.
Wind energy in Europe definitely needs to be increased, because with less precipitation hydro power plants produce less electricity during winter time, when European wind farms typically double their output.
Oh really?
And the CIA says Danish GDP per person(PPP) is less than Belgium!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Did you know that Sweden, Norway(double the US), Iceland and Finland all consume more electricity per capita than the USA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption
Crazy.
Where would all the copper and aluminum come from to make the circuits for all of this stuff? We are currently experiencing Peak Copper, with Peak Everything following. Face it folks, the Planet Earth only has so much natural resources in it. We need to think in terms of downsizing and slowing down our lifestyles, or Nature will do it for us. We can't pursue all of this stuff without greatly harming our environment. If we do enough harm to our planet, she (Ghia) will greatly reduce our population for us if not completely get rid of us. Uranium is also in limited supply, so where is the resources going to come from for the electrical generation? It is time we humans start to learn to live within our means and not tear up the planet.
Once the wiring and plumbing gets stripped out of all the foreclosed houses and is recycled, that should supply quite a bit of the copper needed.
/sarcasm
Magnificent work, Gail. The amount of thought that you put into even your brief comments is stunning. Most of us TODers are the choir and the comments by many amplify your thoughts and are appreciated. After reading only an abstract of the Sci AM article and your thoughts I reached what seems to be an obvious inescapable conclusion:It ain't gonna happen. Certainly portions of energy alternatives will happen but the plan as envisaged by the authors is a non starter. We are in my opinion, on the cusp of a deep and long deflationary depression with massive debt with a corrupt plutocracy and a dysfunctional political system run for the benefit of the former. What we have built with explosive economic growth in the last 150 years only occurred because of free energy and would not have occurred without it. The problem has been tragically compounded by and debt and credit based economy entering an implosion cycle of deleveraging and dissolution of complex systems and we are being lied to by our government who fears that if the populace knew that the energy underpinnings of a doomed economic system were disappearing. then it would be goodbye American Industrial Dream. The solutions can only be local ones encouraging local transportation, food production and distribution, health care and education. Peak Oil and Peak economic growth are here now and the curves will likely resemble each other. Thank you.
Glad you liked the post!
A very good post in deed!