Imagine a group of 100 fisherman faced with declining stocks and worried about the sustainability of their resource and their livelihoods. One of them works out that the total sustainable catch is about 20% of what everyone is catching now (with some uncertainty of course) but that if current trends of increasing catches (about 2% a year) continue the resource would be depleted in short order. Faced with that prospect, the fishermen gather to decide what to do. The problem is made more complicated because some groups of fishermen are much more efficient than the others. The top 5 catchers, catch 20% of the fish, and the top 20 catch almost 75% of the fish. Meanwhile the least efficient 50 catch only 10% of the fish and barely subsist. Clearly, fairness demands that the top catchers lead the way in moving towards a more sustainable future.
The top 5 do start discussing how to manage the transition. They realise that the continued growth in catches – driven by improved technology and increasing effort – is not sustainable, and make a plan to reduce their catch by 80% over a number of years. But there is opposition – manufacturers of fishing boats, tackle and fish processing plants are worried that this would imply less sales for them in the short term. Strangely, they don’t seem worried that a complete collapse of the fishery would mean no sales at all – preferring to think that the science can’t possibly be correct and that everything will be fine. These manufacturers set up a number of organisations to advocate against any decreases in catch sizes – with catchy names like the Fisherfolk for Sound Science, and Friends of Fish. They then hire people who own an Excel spreadsheet program do “science” for them – and why not? They live after all in a free society.
After spending much energy and money on trying to undermine the science – with claims that the pond is much deeper than it looks, that the fish are just hiding, that the records of fish catches were contaminated by being done near a supermarket – the continued declining stocks and smaller and smaller fish make it harder and harder to sound convincing. So, in a switch of tactics so fast it would impress Najinsky, the manufacturers’ lobby suddenly decides to accept all that science and declares that the ‘fish are hiding’ crowd are just fringe elements. No, they said, we want to help with this transition, but …. we need to be sure that the plans will make sense. So they ask their spreadsheet-wielding “advocacy scientists” to calculate exactly what would happen if the top 5 (and only the top 5) did cut their catches by 80%, but meanwhile everyone else kept increasing their catch at the current (unsustainable rate). Well, the answers were shocking – the total catch would be initially still be 84% of what it is now and would soon catch up with current levels. In fact, the exact same techniques that were used to project the fishery collapse imply that this would only delay the collapse by a few years! and what would be the point of that?
The fact that the other top fishermen are discussing very similar cuts and that the fisherfolk council was trying to coordinate these actions to minimise the problems that might emerge, are of course ignored and the cry goes out that nothing can be done. In reality of course, the correct lesson to draw is that everything must be done.
In case you think that no-one would be so stupid as to think this kind of analysis has any validity, I would ask that you look up the history of the Newfoundland cod fishery. It is indeed a tragedy.
And the connection to climate? Here.
I’ll finish with a quotation attributed to Edmund Burke, one the founders of the original conservative movement:
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
See here for a much better picture of what coordinated action could achieve.
re 550: “I never argued that consumer pressure was by itself adequate in all cases”
And this is one case where it is entirely inadequate.
Recall this thread was initially about the need to limit exhaustion of a sustainable resource – something humans have not always managed to do, even against a background of stable climate. In the case of Easter Island, there were plenty of fish in the sea, just no means to catch them after all the trees were cut down. In the case of the Monterey Bay sardine fishery (1905-1964), they began pumping fish out of the bay so fast that they could not recover (mainly driven by the fishmeal and fish oil industries, not for food). In the Monterey Bay case, greed was the driving factor – and scientists who predicted the collapse were ignored and had no say in policy.
Today , fishmeal is often contaminated with persistent organic pollutants, such as PCBs and the like, plus mercury. Not only have we removed so many fish that numbers are falling, we’ve also dumped so many pollutants into the atmosphere and ocean that everything is getting contaminated. If we continue in this way, it is pretty certain that human beings will face the loss of wild fish protein as a food source, as did the Easter Islanders.
Adam Smith also touched on the matter of population growth, but here he assumes ecological and climatic stability – but his argument fits with the modern view, which is that if you work to raise the overall standard of living and make sure women have equal economic and political rights, population stabilizes because fewer children are born, but more is invested in their care – assuming climatic and ecological stability:
“Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it. But in civilised society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce.”
Notice, however, that this did not work for the Easter Islanders, who in the end were subject to the same fundamental ecological and physical limits, regardless of social standing. When food and fuel runs out, civilizations collapse – and then populations either plummet or migrate, as nomadic herdsmen did when their grazing lands were struck by drought.
How many national crisis have started off as food and fuel riots, after all? If you accept this reality, then you would want to ensure food and fuel supplies. To do that, you would be best served by choosing ecological economic analysts to help draft an economic plan for future solvency – not Marxists or neoclassicals.
Mark sez:
Stephen Hawkings apparently disagrees with you.
But, that doesn’t make EL right. EL’s saying the equivalent of “since mathematical systems must be either incomplete or inconsistent, we can’t prove 2+2=4”:
This is just … wrong.
The implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is more philosophical than practical. The fact that we can’t prove everything or know everything doesn’t place a practical upper bounds on how many things there are left to learn or prove. The knowable unknowns out there will keep humanity busy learning for awhile …
Chris @ 537:
The article is pretty typical — I have a 2.8KW peak array and it can produce upwards of 100% of my power. We’ve had an unusually cool, cloudy and rainy spring, though it has been warmer of late. So long as the clouds don’t dominate the day, and the temperatures stay in the low 90’s, I leave the electric company turned off.
The finances were fairly simple, though I didn’t receive any rebate money from the state or electric company. I’ve been using the invention disclosure award money from the Three Letter Computer company I used to work for to pay off the 2nd m0rtgage I took out to pay for the system. Federal income tax credits took off a fair bit, and will again this year, and if I expand the array (which I plan to do to help keep the motorcycle charged) I’ll receive still more tax credits.
The biggest issue at the moment is that TXU Energy refuses to pay the money they owe me for the electricity I export (“sell”). My solution has been to leave the electric company turned off as much as possible, rather than selling by day and buying by night. With the differences in cost for them to buy the power in the first place, they are losing money on the deal. Not that I care …
I have toyed with the idea of installing solar thermal collectors, but I’d prefer to bury the storage tank and the thought of digging in the limestone-mixed-with-hard-clay soil I live on is not appealing.
There are ways to design a system so it expands very easily, and that’s a great way to save money — some of the components can be oversized fairly cheaply, and that saves on upgrade costs and installation down the road. I started with 2.1KW, have 2.8KW now, and plan to expand to 5KW or more over time.
Tokyo Tom @ 544:
The “billing” problem you described is not a ‘real’ problem, in that it isn’t breaking things. While the technology exists, to some degree (electric meters with wireless reporting capabilities exist), I suspect deploying what you’ve described is fraught with problems as it means the “Retail Electric Providers” in deregulated areas (where “generation”, “transmission” and “sales” are all split apart) would find themselves in a real-time book keeping nightmare. That administrative cost would have to be added in and I’m not convinced it would benefit anyone, besides full-employment for bookkeepers, in the long run.
There are some other errors in your post, mostly about long-range transmission lines, but most of the post is spot-on.
James wrote: “Once again, who is suggesting spreading ANY technology indiscriminately?”
Well, I certainly advocate spreading wind turbine technology, and concentrating solar thermal technology, and solar photovoltaic technology, and solar space & water heating technology for buildings, indiscriminately to all nations and peoples of the world.
I’d be happy to see all nations — including North Korea and Iran, including oppressive regimes with militaristic ambitions — building and using these technologies to harvest clean, endless, free wind and solar energy. I’d be happy to see the developed nations who are advanced with such technologies giving them away indiscriminately to the developing world where many people are in desperate need of clean energy, especially electricity.
Why not? There is no reason on Earth to restrict access to these technologies because they are inherently benign.
On the other hand, an expansion of nuclear power large enough to have any significant impact on reducing GHG emissions will necessarily involve spreading nuclear technology all over the world. Remember that the scenario suggested by the MIT study involved tripling the world’s nuclear generation capacity just to keep nuclear’s share of electricity generation constant at around 16 percent.
And since that technology can be directly applied to making the most destructive weapons the world has ever known, such an expansion would require constant, pervasive, intrusive monitoring and controls to keep it out of malicious hands — the very sort of monitoring and controls that have already repeatedly failed to prevent nuclear power technology being used to facilitate the development of nuclear weapons under the cover of civilian nuclear power programs.
You say that you are only talking about expanding nuclear power in a small number of countries, e.g. the USA and the UK. There are two problems with this. First of all, such a limited expansion will not have much impact on reducing the world’s total GHG emissions. Secondly, there is the problem of somehow preventing other nations — including oppressive regimes with militaristic ambitions — from doing the same.
Re 539 “You can still build a model that describes the entire universe;”
We aren’t trying to build a model that describes the entire universe.
> solar thermal
> storage tank
I wish I knew of better storage options. It’s hard to store “warmth” — Marathon’s finally offering their tanks available without any heating element (plastic with a long warranty, not thin enameled steel). That lets you put a solar thermal heat exchanger in the bottom port, and use the as storage to feed prewarmed water to a gas-heated tank or tankless system. Or of course you can leave the upper electric element in and boost it with excess electricity when available. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to put all that summer heat into something (sigh).
The old “basement full of gravel” thermal mass notion didn’t work. Nor has anyone come up with a better material than plain water to store heat longterm. Something that would hold a lot of heat with a phase change at warm temperatures (like paraffin or lard) but be as harmless as water — not available yet.
Pushing excess heat into the ground under the house with a geothermal loop using the mass under the house — nice idea if you’re building a new house.
Wait for supercapacitors, or nanomech — masses of tiny little coil-spring-on-a-chip energy storage devices that will wind up all summer then unwind and stay warm with frictional heating through the winter…..
CTG Says (14 May 2009 at 5:33 PM):
“What will happen to sea levels if we continue with BAU emissions levels? Hint: they won’t go down.”
Gee, you’ve actually noticed that? So, given the long list of serious effects from BAU CO2 emissions, why do you reject as PART of a solution, technology that has been proven to work reliably, has known costs, very little environmental footprint, etc?
“The only scenario that makes any sense is to drastically reduce (worldwide) CO2 emissions over the next 2 or 3 decades. Please do tell us how that is achievable without using wind, solar, hydro etc?”
Build nuclear power plants. Not, you understand, that I think we should do that exclusively: it’s just one of the many “wedges”, most if not all of which will need to be used if we’re to achieve that goal.
Paul Krugman has a very incisive column up this morning speaking directly to the topic of this thread and hinging on China’s responsibilities as producers versus our obligations as consumers to account for our collective carbon output.
He’s not optimistic.
Gavin, I think Krugman’s article would make an excellent top level post showing how your science steers us inexorably into public policy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/opinion/15krugman.html?_r=2&hpw
CTG wrote: “The only scenario that makes any sense is to drastically reduce (worldwide) CO2 emissions over the next 2 or 3 decades. Please do tell us how that is achievable without using wind, solar, hydro etc?”
James replied: “Build nuclear power plants.”
The MIT study I cited above — which advocates expanding nuclear electricity generation — says that we need to approximately triple the world’s nuclear generating capacity by 2050 just to keep nuclear power’s share of electricity generation constant, at around 16 percent.
Specifically, what’s the scale of nuclear power expansion that you advocate, that will have a significant impact on reducing worldwide CO2 emissions over the “next 2 or 3 decades”?
FurryCatHerder Says (14 May 2009 at 10:37 PM):
“What ever are you talking about?!? An imperfect “green” energy supply isn’t going to cause coal-fired plants to dump massive amounts of CO2 anywhere.”
It is if it’s not able to meet demand, so that the fossil fuel plants have to be run to make up the difference. Or if halfway through the process of building, you go broke from the extra costs of the storage that you never though about when you started.
“Do you understand that “Balancing Energy” is one of the critical problems which needs to be solved for renewables to work, and that “Balancing Energy” is a net-zero energy process if done properly?”
Err… Yes? Haven’t I been hammering away trying to get people to understand that it’s a real (and costly) problem with intermittent generation? But it’s not net-zero energy, as there are always losses. (Except maybe for using hydro – there you might even gain a bit.)
“Here — this is 16 hours of solar power. No added CO2 emitted due to all the spikes and imperfections.
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/FurryCatHerder/CloudyDay.jpg
Kindly explain where all this extra CO2 was emitted.”
Where did your power come from when the PV arrays didn’t supply enough to meet your demand? Where does it come from at night?
Re #537, Yes I read that article and then I realised that his 3500 KWhrs he uses each year are low for a family in the UK.
http://www.home-save.co.uk/energy/why_switch_supplier/average_energy_usage/
It is usually around 5,500 for a 3 bedroom house. I mean we can all give up our flat screen TV(s), PC(s), Laptop(s), stereo(s) etc or turn them off at the plug but his average use is very low and he does not mention when he generated the electricity in relation to when he used it, ie the Winter when you generate little but use more.
Its a good idea he has but it aint the norm now is it?
James @ 558:
Texas would need about 60 new nukes, assuming 1GW per nuke. Do you have a realistic plan to produce all these nukes?
Barton Paul Levenson Says (15 May 2009 at 4:21 AM):
“What’s the monetarized cost of losing, say, the Mojave Desert to photovoltaic, compared to the monetarized cost of losing the trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure tied up in dozens of coastal cities…”
You could pose that as a philosophical question, I suppose: what’s the worth of a unique ecosystem compared to that of cities, which we have in great plenty? But that’s a question we don’t need to ask, because it’s not a case of building PV arrays in the Mojave vs losing coastal cities, but of building PV arrays in the desert vs putting them on all the south-facing rooftops in California, or building a couple of nuclear plants, or turning down the airconditioners that keep most buildings uncomfortably cold in summer*, or doing any of a large number of other things that would provide a greadter reducion in CO2 emissions at less cost, and without major environmental impacts.
*Seriously. I worked at a lab in the Bay Area for a couple of years, and had to keep sweaters & fleece jackets in the office to wear inside in the summer.
#558 James
If you extrapolate context into the future you can see that in a more largely populated world with resource scarcity problems the likelihood of nuclear war becomes more viable on an escalating scale in relation to the latitudinal shift (droughts, human migration, etc.). So just saying ‘nuclear’ presents the expected introduction of new problems.
Report to the Pentagon:
The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change
http://www.uscentrist.org/news/2008/the-age-of-consequences/
What is working now has a different context in the future. As things progress, do you really want more weapons grade plutonium available as more and more people need money and would trade plutonium for wealth.
The risk/reward gets dicey.
On the other hand, 4th gen. nuclear does not produce weapons grade plutonium. That is a safer option for the future compared to current technology in that field.
And yes, we are going to need a lot of wedges in the plan.
James @ 561:
Wind or batteries. My life is carbon negative and I work very hard to keep it that way. Mostly because I save a ton of money being carbon negative …
FurryCatHerder Says (15 May 2009 at 11:44 AM):
“Texas would need about 60 new nukes, assuming 1GW per nuke. Do you have a realistic plan to produce all these nukes?”
Do you have a realistic plan to produce the same amount of power (including reliability) with solar or wind? You do realize that that’s a good part of what I’ve been arguing about? When you expand solar/wind to that scale, the construction costs &c appear to be just as great, if not greater, than building nuclear power.
In relation to which, I came across a site for what looks like an interesting book that addresses some of the issues: I’ve only skimmed a bit of the on-line version so far, but here’s a link for the curious: http://www.withouthotair.com/
FurryCatHerder, SecularAnimist, TokyoTom, Hank Roberts:
If you want to talk about the use of technology in the modern world, you have to talk about intellectual property law, which can either promote or restrict the adoption of renewable energy technologies, depending on how it is applied.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/11/science-research-business
You also have to talk about the difference between what investors call ’emerging technology’ and ‘disruptive technology’, and also of the foundational role that independent basic science plays in technological development. Generally speaking, venture capitalists want to get behind emerging technology, while established economic cartels want to suppress disruptive technology. The extent to which cartels are able to do so is typically proportional to their influence over government decision-making processes.
You also have to consider whether academic institutions are supporting the venture capitalist approach, as was the case in the growth of the computer industry in Silicon Valley, or the investor-controlled cartel approach, as is currently the case in the energy and pharmaceutical sectors of major U.S. universities.
The concept of “disruptive technology” applies to solar energy. If you read George Monbiot’s article in the Guardian, he addresses the issue, but misses a major point in the subtitle:
“Science research in Britain is now all about turning knowledge into business, rather than the beauty of exploration”
What is he missing? It has to do with the specific example he uses:
This doesn’t apply only to the professor who studies nothing but “the fuzz on bumblebees” (Edison). Let’s say a university research group has a project centered around fast-growing algae that live in high salt, high temperature environments. On one hand, this is an ideal biofuel source, as fresh water is not required. On the other, this is a perfect source of robust photosynthetic proteins for physical analysis – and the more you learn about photosynthesis, the more chance you have of developing better solar photovoltaic systems, even completely artificial photosynthesis – a Haber nitrogen fixation process for CO2 (CO2 + H2 -> CH4 + H2O, vs. H2 + N2 -> NH3).
You could easily imagine five or six PIs, and a raft of postdocs, grad students and professional techs working on that project at one university alone – the standard situation for pharmaceutical research in a breast cancer group, for example. What kind of “economic impact report” will they have to write?
To be honest, they will have to point to the disruptive economic impact of revolutions in electricity generation and hydrocarbon production. What if they work in a country that is heavily reliant on the global trade in fossil fuels for income? They will have to include possible damage to trade income in their analysis, won’t they?
Take another example – a research group that specializes in the study of persistent organic pollutants in marine mammals, fish and birds from all over the Pacific Ocean. This kind of research revealed bioaccumulation and global transport – chemicals like toxaphene were showing up in remote Arctic lakes (the cold temperature precipitation effect), and whale and sea otter blubber was loaded up with PCBs and diesel fuel residues, among many others. Now, when this group writes their economic impact report, do they have to include the potential costs of lawsuits against polluting industries in their report? To be honest, they would have to.
Sometimes, it’s not just the technology that’s disruptive to the established economic cartels – it’s the knowledge itself. How to manage the “intellectual property commons” is thus something you have to address.
John Reisman wrote: “On the other hand, 4th gen. nuclear does not produce weapons grade plutonium.”
On the other hand, 4th generation nuclear power plants don’t produce any electricity either, because they don’t exist, and are unlikely to be developed, commercialized and deployed on any scale where they could make a significant reduction in CO2 emissions within the relevant time frame.
Nuclear power plants — either the actual designs that actually exist and can actually be built today, or the science-fiction ones that won’t be buildable (let alone tested and proven) for decades or longer — simply cannot be built fast enough, in sufficient quantity, to make any significant contribution to reducing CO2 emissions within the time that such reductions need to occur.
Wind and solar can be, and are already being, built very quickly, and are already being deployed in quantity, both as large centralized power plants and small-to-medium distributed generation, all over the world. There is a reason that billions of dollars of private venture capital are going to these technologies every year, and there is a reason that they are growing at record-breaking double-digit rates every year.
And one of the reason that private investors are extremely wary of nuclear power is the very strong likelihood that new nuclear power plants that are started now, may very well be unneeded and obsolete by the time they are operational, unable to profitably sell their electricity in a market flooded with cheap wind and solar generated power.
And indeed, if the ultra-cheap high-efficiency thin-film photovoltaics being developed and manufactured today by companies like Nanosolar really take off, then in the not too distant future most electricity may be generated locally from small-scale, distributed PV, and large centralized power plants of any sort may be a risky investment.
John Reisman wrote: “And yes, we are going to need a lot of wedges in the plan.”
The problem is that we don’t have infinite resources, and resources that are invested in less effective solutions are not available to be invested in more-effective solutions. Nuclear power is among the least effective and most expensive solutions — apart from its very serious problems and risks. By diverting resources from more effective solutions, it hinders rather than helps the effort to reduce emissions.
James @ 567:
It’s already being done. You do realize that more wind, solar and hydro are in the process of being deployed, or planned to be deployed than what could realistically be done with nukes in the same time frame?
Several gigawatt-per-year solar fabs have either recently come on-line or are under construction now. Each of those fabs will output the equivalent of 5 of those 1GW nukes a year — more if tracking equipment is used, rather than fixed collectors. Thin film integrated with building products is a hot technology as well, and one I’m trying to get into myself.
In the area of reliability, as I’ve said, in the past two years I’ve produced (with others, wasn’t just me) something on the order of 30 patentable ideas which are at various stages of filing and examination that will solve, to some degree or another, the problems of “reliability” and “stability” that have been raised. I just checked the USPTO and sadly none have published yet. Those “ideas” are more advanced that what’s presently out there (wireless pager-based demand response management being the most common), as well as what’s in the pipeline that I know of (Internet active managed demand response from companies such as GridWise). Some have been published out on http://www.ip.com, but I lost access to that site when I was invited to leave the Three Letter Computer company.
The short answer is that the train is leaving the station. The people who will benefit are the ones who adopt early — green power programs have been running close to 100% subscription. Meaning, late adopters will be stuck on dirty power with it’s current upward price pressure. Sucks being them.
FurryCatHerder wrote: “Texas would need about 60 new nukes, assuming 1GW per nuke. Do you have a realistic plan to produce all these nukes?”
James replied: “Do you have a realistic plan to produce the same amount of power (including reliability) with solar or wind?”
I guess that means that no, you do not have a realistic plan to produce all those nukes. Well, neither does anyone else.
On the other hand, multiple realistic plans for deploying large-scale wind and solar power generation have been put forth.
For just one example see the article “A Solar Grand Plan” in the January 2008 issue of Scientific American:
Where is the comparably detailed and specific plan for nuclear power expansion to accomplish similar goals?
And that’s only one such plan for a renewables-based energy supply. Ausra, a developer of utility-scale CSP technology, published a peer-reviewed study in March 2008 showing that over 90 percent of the U.S. electric grid and auto fleet’s energy needs could be met by solar thermal power with thermal storage. And DOE data cited by the American Wind Energy Association show that the wind energy resources of only four midwestern states exceed total US electricity consumption.
James replied: “When you expand solar/wind to that scale, the construction costs &c appear to be just as great, if not greater, than building nuclear power.”
You’ve said that repeatedly, but where are the actual numbers — not back of the envelope guesstimates based on assumptions but actual real-world numbers — to back it up?
Ray Ladbury – Stephen Hawking is a recent convert who has accepted the implications of Godel’s theorem. Although I disagree with him on one basic point, this information has been around a lot longer then he has been letting on. He almost comes across as admitting it grudgingly.
Jacob Mack – I’m not really referring to usefulness. Mathematics is incomplete and will always be incomplete, but I don’t know of one person who would consider it useless. I’m simply referring to the idea of completeness. Will a day come when a physical theory is complete? Obviously, I am arguing no; however, I believe physics is very useful and can accomplish great things. Only a fool would believe otherwise.
553 “The implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is more philosophical than practical. The fact that we can’t prove everything or know everything doesn’t place a practical upper bounds on how many things there are left to learn or prove. The knowable unknowns out there will keep humanity busy learning for awhile …”
The implication implies that there is no upper bounds all together, and humanity will be learning forever.
People knew long before Cantor that the problem existed. Galileo even took a look at the problem. He drew a circle on a piece of paper and made the assumption that it had infinite sides. Galileo drew lines from the center of the circle to each infinite side, and he was able to fill the circle; however, he tried making the circle larger, and he ran into a very large problem: Gaps between the lines. (try it yourself) So he decided that physics would use infinity, but it’s something we cannot understand. Newton pretty much the said same thing, and he decided it was in God’s hands.
While Cantor wasn’t the first to see it, he was the first to press it, and Cantor earned a large number of enemies. After his death, Godel set out to fix what cantor had done, but he actually sealed the deal. Incompleteness theorem is the last nail in the coffin.
You cannot set any kind of bounds because you will be inconsistent.
SecularAnimist do you know of an unbiased, objective study comparing the costs of coal vs wind? By objective and unbiased I mean a study not done or financed by advocates of coal or wind. I’m finding a lot of data out there is useless – like asking a preacher if prayer works.
James wrote: “Do you have a realistic plan to produce the same amount of power (including reliability) with solar or wind?”
Please don’t confuse variability with unreliability. Both solar and wind are extremely reliable. They are variable, which is a completely different matter. And their variability is to a great extent predictable, and manageable.
Nor is energy storage the intractable or costly problem that some suggest. We already have multiple scalable options for energy storage, including chemical (batteries & fuel cells), thermal (molten salts with CSP) and kinetic (compressed air, pumped hyrdo, flywheels).
Indeed, you yourself have mentioned the idea of combining residential-scale flywheel power storage with rooftop PV as a solution for widely deploying distributed energy generation, which could potentially reduce the need for large-scale, centralized electricity generation of any kind.
EL, if you think there is any actual specific practical relevance of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to climate models, I wish you would say what it is.
I’m as bad as anyone and probably worse than most when it comes to prolonged off-topic digressions, and personally, I’m fascinated by subjects like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, but in all honesty I don’t see how it’s relevant to climate models.
Doug, it seems upon reading the Krugman op-ed that consumer pressure could potentially play a role, since China’s growth has been driven by exports of consumer goods.
What would be needed, I suppose, would be competing products that were reliably certified to have been produced with relatively lower emission intensities. Is there any prospect of–well, let’s call it “carbon transparency?” (Though I’m inviting all sorts of quips about diamonds here, I suppose.)
A lot of folks will preferentially buy fairly traded coffee; I’d think the same would apply to, say, electronics, clothing and toys with smaller carbon footprints.
Duh. I guess the sarcasm tag should’ve been made explicit.
Oh, sure, I can set bounds like “I’m going to model the length of time it takes a baseball to drop 60 feet at sea level to within the accuracy of my stopwatch” and get it right. The fact that I can’t create a physical theory that encompass the universe, life, and everything (despite knowing the answer is “42”) doesn’t mean I can’t do anything.
You can repeat your claim endlessly, won’t change it.
Again, the problem is really philosophical, not practical.
Michael wrote: “SecularAnimist do you know of an unbiased, objective study comparing the costs of coal vs wind? By objective and unbiased I mean a study not done or financed by advocates of coal or wind.”
I think the study by Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, which I cited above, is objective and unbiased, and as far as I know it was not financed by advocates of coal or wind. It addresses a wider range of impacts than just the dollar costs, including environmental and national security impacts.
I’ll say it :)
Climate models will never be able to model everything in the multiverse, if EL and Hawking’s are right about the implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem …
Oh, that’s not really a practical implication, oh well.
#569 SecularAnimist
I’m with you on what works. I know 4th gen. is still not there. I was only using it as a contrast.
My plan is ranked this way:
1. Awareness (this has the best chance at better policy direction and energy use reduction).
2. Energy efficiency and consumption reduction (this is connected to awareness of course)
3. Electrical Grid improvements & Renewables: Solar, Wind, Hydro etc.
4. Carbon Capture and Use technology
5. Then the back up plans like 4th gen. nuclear (maybe only 10 years away though, but still not sustainable… eventually you run out of thorium also)
I understand the limited resource capacity. The wedges I am referring to are the points above as in reduce consumption, and increase solar, wind, hydro, (and possibly thorium) etc.
Thorium reactors are potentionally/predictably less expensive that current nuclear and easier to maintain, it’s a good back up plan as far as I can tell, but I have no problem with dropping it if it really is not needed, I’m still looking at the pragmatics.
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/energy
Thorium reactors: http://www.dauvergne.com
potentionally? Oops :)
Doug Bostrom – I agree with him on China’s emissions. The projections on China’s emissions are huge.
However, I disagree with him on:
“As the United States and other advanced countries finally move to confront climate change, they will also be morally empowered to confront those nations that refuse to act. Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports. ”
China is the banker of the USA. If china wants to refuse, the USA can do very little.
577 – “Oh, sure, I can set bounds like “I’m going to model the length of time it takes a baseball to drop 60 feet at sea level to within the accuracy of my stopwatch” and get it right”
If you can get it right, prove it. Construct a mathematical proof illustrating that every outcome is predicted by your model. What you mean to say is that you can get close enough to be useful with your model. Being useful and being complete is two different beasts.
#576 Kevin McKinney Says:
“What would be needed, I suppose, would be competing products that were reliably certified to have been produced with relatively lower emission intensities.”
10 years ago I had bit of exposure to electronics manufacturing in China. One of the factors guiding our decision making was that if one were not careful one could be promoting corner-cutting when it came to treatment of workers, disposal of waste, fulfillment of contracts, the whole responsibility polygon.
It was actually possible with a good deal of due diligence and the help of a factor working in China to make this possible but our confidence in the process was never high. We ended up building in Canada. The main difference for us is that Canada sports a legal system that can provide the necessary governmental and judicial backstop to transparency and honesty. If there’s no price for deceit, we will end up being deceived. China can’t supply that, or not with sufficient certainty to deter ethical shortcuts.
That choice cost money but we were in a market that was not too viciously sensitive to price for our product.
It does seem that having a real government with real rule of law always seems to entail costs that consumers are reluctant to bear if they have any choice. Think of Walmart as a microcosm for that concept. They cut corners so they cost less and consumers flock to them.
I completely agree with one of Krugman’s central tenets: government is necessary, government is good. This goes from the bottom all the way to the top. We have building codes because we know people will be killed if we don’t– human nature is that way. China does not have a handle on that and one result is a lot of tragically two-dimensional schoolchildren. We need oversight and the threat of real harm to malefactors wherever there is a chance to make a reckless and dangerous buck.
I don’t see any solid evidence that acting as individuals looking out for own interests we can be trusted to make choices that are good for our collective well being, or not in enough numbers. History tells us so, the present moment tells us so and it is folly to imagine we might suddenly enter an exceptional and permanent era of Goodness.
In my humble opinion, heh!
Good one James, you’re funny. Oh wait, you were being serious?
Remember that we are talking about global warming, so the solution must be a global solution. How much nuclear power would be needed to make a difference?
Look at China – only 2% of China’s power is nuclear. They have plans to build 100 new plants. By the time they come online, that will still only be enough for 5% of their projected energy requirements.
How about India? 30 plants in the pipelines, which will leave nuclear still producing less than 10% of their energy.
Clearly, for nuclear to be a significant part of the mix, you are talking about building thousands of new reactors all over the world. What would the cost of that be, James? And what about the environmental impact of nuclear?
Besides, it’s not just about what fuel is used. Part of the problem is the centralised generation model of electricity generation. How does nuclear fix that? Oh, it can’t. Whereas the technologies you are so reluctant to embrace can. In fact, for renewables to work most effectively, distributed generation has to be part of the solution.
I know that the electricity companies are not keen on people generating electricity on the roofs of their houses, and things like that, for obvious reasons. Why do you object?
El, # 582 you are simply mistaken. As for your comment response to me, that is also dodging the bullet. You are making vague over generalizations. You should read more Hawking and evidence how incomplete math and science are. We can use Newtonian mechanics ot make exact predictions about locations of bodies in space and calculus to ge very close to an exact rate of change; saying that not all math or science gives us a perfectly correct value is really very elementary and obvious. For example in quantum mechanics the measurements are often approximations, but how does that support you contention that math is all incomplete? This would make an interesting philosophical discussion on infinite space or regression between 2 points, but hardly does climate science any justice. Yes there are many approximations made and probabilities estimated regarding future climate and even the trends are not 100% exact, but they need not be for accurate measurements and plausible predictions. Infromation philosophy and various theorems are great dinner conversation.Math alone is not very useful here, but it is an indisipensable too; perhaps it is out application of it that is limited and not the math itself.
SecularAnimist: “I think the study by Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, which I cited above, is objective and unbiased”
Did you ignore everything I posted on the issue on the need to include path-dependent analysis? Jacobson lumps kansas coal-fired ethanol in with Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, for example – that’s a huge bias right there.
Second, Jacobson has no coal fired carbon capture projects from which to draw real-life energy consumption estimates from – it’s the equivalent of claiming that we don’t need to worry, because ‘one day’ fusion will save us all.
John P. Reisman:
“4. Carbon Capture and Use technology”
Can you describe even a single plausible instance of the use of such technology in a coal-fired electricity generation system, one that has publicly available performance data? If you can, please let me know – the closest thing I’ve found is a computer based performance model from 2005, and I think the model is proprietary – I’ve been trying to get all the outraged climate model transparency people to contact DOE and Battelle and the FutureGen Alliance on this, but to no avail…
Perhaps your foundation could file a FOIA request to the above parties with respect to FutureGen ‘carbon capture’ data – neither the NYT or the WP is at all interested. How about the OSS Foundation? Would they be interested in investigating the matter?
It is relevant to the “intellectual property commons”, because the DOE Secretary was talking about sharing such property with China – but does it even exist? If so, why have no new patents been filed on any FutureGen process?
If we could burn coal without producing any emissions, that would be fantastic – like a magical smokeless light that provides heat and warmth… in the sky. It’s called the sun, and collecting photons and using them to energize electrons doesn’t involve and mass transfer – thus, no emissions.
Of course, I realize you may have been talking about the fossil fuel-free photosynthetic production of hydrocarbon fuel, i.e. solar and wind powered agriculture, which is a very different issue from coal carbon capture.
All in all, I think this shows that the phrases “carbon emissions” and “carbon capture” are just too vague to convey much useful information.
#582 EL:
We’re locked in a peculiar embrace with China. They do hold a lot of our debt. However there is well-grounded speculation they can neither afford to collapse us as an export market nor serve themselves well by destroying our currency. They’re trying to develop other markets but progress there is slow and has even been arrested of late.
Meanwhile indications are that the drop in growth rate from astronomical to merely stellar China’s ecomomy has recently suffered is revealing what a metastable system the despots running the country have created for themselves. Necessarily they’ve created a highly educated middle class to run and grow the country as well as an aspiring underclass who have quickly become accustomed to steady improvements in material well being. A powderkeg for social unrest. I suspect if push came to shove the present masters of China would prove more amenable to playing grownup than we think. I also suspect we have a chronic drout of political courage so we may well never know for sure.
Ike Solem wrote: “Did you ignore everything I posted on the issue on the need to include path-dependent analysis? Jacobson lumps kansas coal-fired ethanol in with Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, for example – that’s a huge bias right there.”
Jacobson states in the introduction to the study that “The two liquid fuel options considered are corn-E85 (85% ethanol; 15% gasoline) and cellulosic-E85 … other fuel options, such as … sugar-cane ethanol … were not examined”, “simply due to the additional effort required and since the options examined are the most commonly discussed.”
Since Jacobson did not even include sugar-cane ethanol in the study, and thus had nothing to say about it, I don’t see how you can say that he “lumps it in” with “kansas coal-fired ethanol”.
Ike Solem wrote: “Second, Jacobson has no coal fired carbon capture projects from which to draw real-life energy consumption estimates from – it’s the equivalent of claiming that we don’t need to worry, because ‘one day’ fusion will save us all.”
I’m not sure what point you are making. It’s true that no coal-fired electric power plants with carbon capture and sequestration exist, so there are no real-world examples whose impacts can be studied. Jacobson’s footnotes indicate that he used information from the IPCC working group III for coal with CCS.
I’m not sure why you think this reflects a “no need to worry” attitude towards coal with CCS, or suggests that Jacobson is suggesting that it will “save us all”.
While Jacobson did rank the two forms of ethanol fuel that he considered in the lowest tier, he ranked coal with CCS along with nuclear power in the second lowest tier, and concluded that “diversion to less-efficient (nuclear, coal with carbon capture) or non-efficient (corn- and cellulosic E85) options represents an opportunity cost that will delay solutions to global warming and air pollution mortality.”
So, I’m sorry but I really don’t understand your complaint.
And in case you’re wondering why FutureGen data might be something the public has a right to see:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/05/doe-stimulus-dumps-24-billion-on-carbon-sequestration.ars
“Friday, in a speech to the National Coal Council, Steven Chu, head of the Department of Energy, announced that the stimulus package will also fund major work towards carbon capture and storage, which could allow us to avoid many of the consequences of continued burning of fossil fuels. The planned spending, which includes $800 million specifically for cleaning pollutants out of coal plant exhaust will total $2.4 billion, which should provide the nascent field a significant boost.
Not even Samuel Bodman, Bush’s DOE secretary, could reconcile reality and hope in order to support this nonsense:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9861073-54.html
This is an example of a tragedy of the commons brought on by restricted knowledge – billions to be wasted on bogus technology that will never be implemented in any commercial coal plant – and why? Capturing even 90% of the CO2 emitted from any large coal fired plant would suck up most of the energy from the coal, leaving little to send to the consumer – and then there is the issue of removing all the sulfur, nitrogen, mercury, arsenic, etc. from the CO2 stream. Plus, the 30 million tons a year of CO2 to dispose of. There’s only one word for it – ludicrous. (10 million tons of coal per year produces 30 million tons of CO2).
By comparison, a nuclear power plant of similar scale uses 200 tons of fuel per year, and a solar or wind plant of similar scale uses 0 tons of fuel per year.
Likewise, that much coal-fired generation will still require billions of gallons of water per year. The same is true for nuclear, with nuclear requiring a bit more water (this is why, for the engineer, the central issues with nuclear reactors have always been about heat transfer – and poor heat transfer design is what did Chernobyl in).
So, if coal is worst, and nuclear is better, and solar and wind are best (in terms of a complete ecological-economic analysis), then rational policy would be to leave existing nuclear capacity as is, dump a lot of money into wind and solar, and to start shutting down coal plants each time a new wind or solar plant is completed.
It’s not really about “nuclear vs. solar” – or about ownership ideologies – it’s about not dumping 30 million tons of fossil CO2 into the air above a power plant each year, while also keeping the lights on at night – and doing that for all coal plants as quickly, cheaply and efficiently as possible.
There is some interesting work on supplemental data which needs to be added to the anecdotal example in the post, commercial fishing interests trying to develop a sustainable regulatory regime. Namely, at Florida State University, professor Coleman has developed a new way to measure accuracy in maritime sport fishing reported catch data, and actual catch, with impacts. FSU’s Mote chair also conducts yearly symposia at which international experts present scientific papers.
There seems to be some filter about html links, here is the link @589:
http://www.marinelab.fsu.edu/faculty/coleman.aspx
Sample of the winter 2008 Mote symposium schedule:
http://www.bio.fsu.edu/mote/Full%20schedule.rtf
Doug Bostrom – I look for China to eventually turn towards domestic production as opposed to exports. Some of the Asian economic meetings have indicated a desire to do that. It could cause a lot of trouble if China made progress on the domestic front. I’m concerned with our postion with China for more reasons then climate change.
Jacob Mack – You can use Newton’s work for pratical applications; however, it starts breaking down in certain situations. Einsteins relativity works until you attempt to use it in the quantum world. Relativity has a few other issues as well, but it has very been useful to mankind.
People keep saying incompleteness is not pratical because it’s not useful for building a house, but it’s still interesting.
Ike Solem #590 — You say: “It’s not really about “nuclear vs. solar” – or about ownership ideologies – it’s about not dumping 30 million tons of fossil CO2 into the air above a power plant each year, while also keeping the lights on at night – and doing that for all coal plants as quickly, cheaply and efficiently as possible.” I completely agree.
That is the problem in a nutshell. We are stuck with our fleet of pulverized coal plants, and India and China are quickly building even more to meet their increasing power demands. Yes, it is good to deploy solar and wind, and even nuclear, as quickly as possible, but what most people don’t appreciate is the scale of the problem. Wind is just a drop in the bucket.
Coal IGCC projects like FutureGen, which does carbon capture out of an oxygen-blown gasifier (avoiding nitrogen ballast), might be the next generation of coal power, but the real problem now is post-combustion CO2 capture out of hot and dirty pulverized coal plant flue gas having a 75% nitrogen ballast. And once we capture it, then what? Sequestration is not going to work. Neither will chemical capture (amine or chilled ammonia).
Above, at #88, I proposed a solution. Your thoughts?
No, we say it’s not a practical concern because it doesn’t STOP US from building a house.
Yes, it’s interesting. You draw some ‘interesting” conclusions from it, too. It’s actually interesting enough without the inaccuracies IMO but hey, whatever.
Yet if we set the appropriate bounds it actually is 100% accurate within those bounds and within that model it doesn’t break down.
Ike Solem #568 — You bring up an important issue: the tension between pure and applied science. What we need is mission-driven applied science directed to scalable and realistic solutions to the CO2 problem. What we’ve had in the past for the money given to academic researchers at universities and national laboratories is hot fusion, hydrogen cars, particle physics, string theory, sequestration, and other money-pit projects that have starved alternative innovation and have borne no fruit for clean tech.
The venture capital model does not work for disruptive technology research and development in the clean tech sector. Maybe it used to, but it doesn’t now. Unless you can show a working model, you can’t get a hearing. VCs and angel investors are not interested unless you are already shipping product and can show them how you will give them 20 times their money back in 3 years.
So “free enterprise” does nothing to develop innovation in clean tech, and it is foolish to believe what “free market” zealots often preach: that the American system will innovate us out of problems. The “free market” of corporate giants will stomp on a startup, and not by accident, unless that startup has some intellectual property.
Inventors these days are accused of killing jobs and being “trolls” impeding corporate prosperity. There is no government support for incubating and developing new clean technology ideas. The inventor has to find all the money himself to build his prototype, in a depressed economy. So although there will now be a big research push with more federal dollars, the money will go to the usual pure science dry holes.
#595 Wilmot:
Your post #88:
“An alternative to sequestration and mineralization is cracking the CO2 to make CO. The bond dissociation energy for taking off the first oxygen is 5.5 eV — in the same neighborhood as water electrolysis. Simultaneous CO2 and water electrolysis (”syntrolysis”) produces syngas (CO + H2) which can be burned or processed into vehicle fuel. So there is a way to make CO2 into a resource instead of a waste product.”
I bet you’re tired of answering the reply “yes, but if you synthesize hydrocarbons from a waste CO2 stream and then burn them, you’re only briefly delaying the arrival of the CO2 into atmosphere and using -more- energy to do so”?
You go on to suggest use of renewable energy sources to pump up the “syntrolysis” hydrocarbon energy storage system. Presumably that is not completely efficient, so why would we not use the renewables in conjunction with storage methods where the energy is not stuffed into hydrocarbons, ultimately passing the CO2 into the air in an expensive way?
I must be missing something; I think you’re talking about using this as a transitional technology to wean us off hydrocarbons but it seems like a pretty indirect way to arrive at a renewable capture system as our primary source of juice.
EL says “People keep saying incompleteness is not pratical because it’s not useful for building a house, but it’s still interesting.”
Actually, Godel didn’t want it to be useful. He hated applied math. No he hated the very idea of applying math. It was supposed to exist for its own sake like beauty. Odd duck, Godel. BTW, although he was mostly a recluse, he and Einstein did spend a lot of time together in the last years of the former’s life. That’s a wall I would have loved to be a fly on.
#595 Wilmot –>#88 Wilmot:
On the other hand, maybe you should work out what would happen if you made polyethylene instead of fuel? Maybe the total energy vs. mess budget would work out?
“Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”