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.
Wilmot McCutchen says: “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.”
OK, now you’ve struck a nerve! Research at national labs and universities has been key to producing many of the gains we’ve seen in energy efficiency and renewables. Ever hear of Art Rosenfeld? Did his main work at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Look him up if you haven’t. High Tc Superconductivity–university research. Solar cells–a lot of the research was done through NASA and DOD for space. Digital cameras? Ditto. Believe me, I could go on all night, but hopefully you get the idea. National Labs and Universities produce some very practical, useful and profitable work. Personally, I think that if you turn loose the creativity of these institutions on the problems we face, you’ll see tremendous progress–and you’ll produce the next generation of researchers in the bargain.
# 594 El, you are certainly correct about Newton and Einstein in that context. Loop quantum gravity and quantum entanglement may in fact pave the way to greater insights and some sort of paradigm shift. The quantum computer may be developed in the next 10-15 years and quantum effects upon gravity and singularities may lead to a new elegant and well evidenced working theory. Still we can never just abolish Newton or Einstein’s calulations or fundamental premises. Now, I am not suggesting that you are implying that either. I am merely reminding you that these facts aside these theories work extremely well under the circumstances for which they are applied. I have no doubt that in the future quantum mechanics and other important sciences will lead to better approximations of truth, or the isness of reality. There is always a looking glas, but if you look at through good and clean glass, the perception of reality is far more clear.Your name reminds me of the character from Death Note.
# 596…absolutely!
And for all the well-meaning ethanol-freaks out there in the climate-commons, the news is out that eliminating ethanol from the bio-fuel cycle gives over 80% gains in kilometres travelled for a given area of field growing your biomass.
Its too simple, and certainly not good for share prices in the ethanol industry: Grow a biomass, harvest it, store it (there’s your energy storage system), burn it in a maximum-efficiency system and use the recovered heat to drive an electricity generator, charge up the vehicle battery and away you go.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;1168885/DC2
http://gas2.org/2009/05/08/bioelectricity-more-efficient-than-ethanol-for-transportation-study-shows/
In regard to agriculture – how to feed us – we will rapidly approach the point where it is uneconomic to use oil-fueled vehicles for farming.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SEFnews/message/8077
To help with the manual farming effort there are lots of great examples of electric farm machinery in operation. The evening job of stoking up the boiler on the tractor recharger unit with biomass from the farm should become the chore of every farm boy – same as feeding the horses once was.
http://www.econogics.com/ev/evtools.htm
But be quick!
(Captcha: prophecy carryover)
EL, OK, this is going way, way off topic, but I think you are misinterpreting Godel’s incompleteness theorems. In reality, Godel was trying to support his argument that mathematics is an empirical science–that is you can’t prove everything from self-consistency alone as the positivists sought to do.
However, science is by nature empirical. We aren’t really “proving” things so much as trying to elucidate how they work. So I’m not sure what we can learn from these particular results of Godel.
#587 Ike Solem
I’m not talking about coal at all. When I refer to ‘Carbon Capture and Use’ I am referring to biomass and pyrolysis.
There are lots of experiments in process around the world. The output is energy positive and carbon negative. Plus you can extract byproducts that can be burned into the electricity grid.
Another great byproduct is fertilizer that enhances microbial growth and water retention in the soil. This in turn increases nutritive value of food products and also increases crop output.
Off topic:
This new paper from Bowyer et al. (Nature 459, 243-247; http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7244/full/nature07979.html) has become another scrap of food for the trolls around. With respectable (well, they get a lot of attention) sites like Slashdot making quotes like “This confirms suspicions that have been around since the 1990’s, and likely plays havoc with global models of climate change.”, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more of it for a good while. It’d be helpful if someone at RC has the time to do a writeup about this one.
#419: Missed this:
“Slavery was brought up because of the idiotic contention posted that owning something means you take good care of it. And, BTW, some Libertarian philosophers have touted “voluntary slavery” as a solution to unemployment. You see, you have a property right in yourself, so you also have the right to sell it.”
Barton, I don`t speak for Rene, but I think the chief point is the largely uncontroversial contention that people are more likely to take better care of things that they own, relative to the possessions of others or things that nobody owns. Feel free to quibble about the failures of property rights, but are we completely disagreeing on the big picture and what drives the “tragedy of the commons”?
As for slavery, surely you can recognize that what those libertarians are discussing are still voluntary transactions between consenting person, not the theft and enslavement of others by violence and force. They are just not the same.
As to the former, do you have any idea about the ways that many of our forefathers funded their expensive passage to the young colonies/US? Ever hear of “indentured servitude”?
Ray Ladbury,
well put.
Yes, he’s not only arguing from proof but making a philosophical argument
The argument is that you can’t measure everything about the box if you’re in the box, because you’re part of the box.
At least, that’s what EL argues.
Irrelevant to determining if climate models work well enough to support conclusions that lead to particular policy decisions.
That’s the best response to EL, I think: irrelevant to the discussion.
FurryCatHerder Says (15 May 2009 at 12:57 PM):
“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?”
No, I don’t realize that at all. This recent news report http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/us-wind-energy-industry-under,811555.shtml puts wind current construction at 4.4 GWatts. This is nameplate rating: using an optimistic 40% capacity factor gives 1.76 GWatts of actual generation. Do you think it’s unrealistic to construct two nuclear reactors per year?
For solar, this article http://www.prlog.org/10201627-solar-photovoltaic-industry-trends-in-the-us.html puts US solar installation last year at about 1.1 GWatt. With a very optimistic 0.5 capacity factor, that’s 0.55 GWatt actual generation. So wind and solar together add up to the construction of 3 1-GWatt nuclear reactors per year.
Now you may have sources that say differently. If so, I’d like to see them. Mine are just the first things returned by a Google search.
As for hydro, I don’t think you will find a lot being constructed in the US. Indeed, there are dams being removed, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, in order to restore river flow & allow salmon to spawn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_removal
“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…”
Source? And how does 1 GWatt of solar cell production per year equate to 5 1GW nuclear plants? I think your math is backwards: it will output at most (with tracking equipment) 0.5 GW.
“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.”
As I’m sure you realize from your comments, there’s a large gap between patent and working product. To take an example, consider the idea of storing the excess power in the batteries of electric cars. Not that bad an idea* in principle, but not really practical when there are only a few thousand such cars on the road.
*Though it does have its potential problems. Consider using them with a mix of wind & solar power. The wind blows hardest in the evening & early night, charging all those cars. Around dawn the wind drops off – and before the sun rises high enough to bring the solar on-line, all those cars are out on the highway, using up that stored electricty for their daily commute :-)
“…green power programs have been running close to 100% subscription.”
Is it possible that this is more a reflection of the limited amount of “green” power than anything else?
Ray Ladbury – “However, science is by nature empirical. We aren’t really “proving” things so much as trying to elucidate how they work. So I’m not sure what we can learn from these particular results of Godel.”
I’m speaking of rigorously proving a physical theory by showing no other discovery can be made, and the theory is complete and consistent.
“It was supposed to exist for its own sake like beauty. Odd duck, Godel. ”
I think it had more to do with a mixture of philosophy and Cantor’s work. Example explanation of incompleteness by Godel:
“A completely unfree society (i.e., one proceeding in everything by strict rules of “conformity”) will, in its behavior, be either inconsistent or incomplete, i.e., unable to solve certain problems, perhaps of vital importance. Both, of course, may jeopardize its survival in a difficult situation. A similar remark would also apply to individual human beings”
“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.”
I believe Einstein was consulting Godel on his attempt at a Unified Theory.
SecularAnimist Says (15 May 2009 at 1:07 PM):
“I guess that means that no, you do not have a realistic plan to produce all those nukes. Well, neither does anyone else.”
OK, here’s the basis of my realistic plan: http://www.mnes-us.com/ Call Mitsubishi, ask them how much and when can they start?
“On the other hand, multiple realistic plans for deploying large-scale wind and solar power generation have been put forth.”
See my previous post with regards to how much is actually being done.
“For just one example see the article “A Solar Grand Plan” in the January 2008 issue of Scientific American:”
Yes, and so we come full circle. Though at least the authors are honest about what their plan requires: “To convert the country to solar power, huge tracts of land would have to be covered with photovoltaic panels and solar heating troughs.” In other words, the total environmental destruction of that land. Personally, I’ll take the nuclear war – at least most of life outside the targeted cities would survive.
“…but where are the actual numbers — not back of the envelope guesstimates based on assumptions but actual real-world numbers — to back it up?”
As you folks are always advising me to do, I used Google. Typed in “wind farm construction cost”, and got these back on the first page.
http://www.greendaily.com/2008/06/11/price-tag-of-the-worlds-largest-wind-farm-spirals/
http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/522095/soaring_cost_threat_to_wind_farm_plan/
http://www.caller.com/news/2009/apr/22/taft_wind_farm/
> Grow a biomass, harvest it, store it …
http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2007/10/fuelish-fantasies.html
Brief excerpt follows, from a long thoughtful cautionary essay:
“… I’m sorry. I really am. But just as ethanol from corn was never going to work-
Ethanol from switchgrass IS NEVER GOING TO WORK.
Or Butanol, or “bio-crude”, or whatever; from miscanthus, or hybrid willow, or “cellulose”.
The systems required do not work; and cannot be made to work; this is a blind alley; a waste of resources needed to find real solutions….”
…
“… The whole process of harvesting, stockpiling, storing- is very far from trivial. What we already know about storing grass, learned from experiences with hay, indicates that scaling it all up to the huge levels envisioned is not at all straightforward. And may just not be economic; ever….
…
“… My point – is not that all research on cellulosic ethanol should cease. My point is- we had really better be looking for other answers to our problems. This one is very very far from being a sure thing. ….
My plea is for hard, hard thinking, before we commit our hope and precious resources to blind fantasies. We don’t have time or resources to waste. We need more discipline in our projections for the future. Does this work? Does this fit in place? What happens next? And next?
And next?
————–end excerpts—————
Don’t argue with excerpts. Read the article. Please.
Nigel Williams Says (15 May 2009 at 8:44 PM):
“And for all the well-meaning ethanol-freaks out there in the climate-commons, the news is out that eliminating ethanol from the bio-fuel cycle gives over 80% gains in kilometres travelled for a given area of field growing your biomass.”
Misses an important point, though, which is that the ethanol, biodiesel, or other biofuel provides an energy-dense fuel for those applications where electric power won’t serve – as for example when you need to drive your plug-in hybrid farther than its battery range.
Interesting news is coming out about another commons, the airwaves, and the people who try to own them. Bottom line — when someone says “smart grid” look very carefully into what his company was trying to sell last time. It might be one of these:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/New-Docs-Show-FCC-Glossed-Over-BPL-Flaws-102422
in 582 this dribbled out of EL: “Being useful and being complete is two different beasts.”
And if it isn’t “right enough”, it’s completely useless.
Completeness isn’t a DEMAND of any theory.
There are answers that may well be complete, but when we come to modelling the climate we don’t have to model in the complete theory of gravitation that includes the ability of spontaneous creation of black holes and wormhole production, do we.
So “being complete” is completely worthless.
#606 John P Reisman
“I am referring to biomass and pyrolysis.”
Yes – namely Biochar put back into soil. First book on the subject “Biochar Environmental Management – Science & Technology” ed Lehmann & Joseph just published by Earthscan. Gives the most up to date story including economic analyses. Biochar is not a fertilizer as such but helps in developing a “living soil” but providing surface area for microbial growth, reduces leaching of fertilizer and thus further energy reduction in terms of fertilizer usage, with increase in crop yields up to 30%.
Because of the relatively short term photosynthetic carbon flux between plant and atmosphere, and since this is 58 Gt pa vs anthropgenic emissions of 7 Gt pa (according to Lehmann & Joseph) just 1% of the net annual photosynthetic flux into long lived (> 100 yrs) biochar would mitigate almost 10% of current anthropogenic emissions.
Although not a complete solution, and economics still not quite there it seems, algal capture of CO2 and NOx from fossil fueled power stations holds promise. Presently the technology envisages extracting the algal oil for biodiesel and using the resdidual biomass for biogas production. But this just improves the overall efficiency of energy gained per ton fossil fuel used. Direct pyrolysis to generate electricity and biochar would, I expect, be more efficient (see # 604 wrt bioethanol) and actually sequester some of the carbon.
By the way – has anyone calculated the present global number of people per sq m of “livable” land area compared with maximum population density of Easter Island before it collapsed? Have we exceeded it or a way to go yet?
Gavin, thanks for starting this thread – some useful debate happening.
captcha: effort blacken
Biochar could give a new meaning to having a black outlook on life.
The economic arguments seems to go round and round, but not get too far – at least as far as they are cast in “what’s the least cost way of addressing this problem”. I wondered if this is actually an economic problem at all – that is, one of resopurce distribtion as measured by money.
The history supports the contention that commons are fine if well-managed, but not if they are not. If this is a global management issue (and a very serious one at that – comparable to the threat of a serious pandemic or a major war) then the issue is essentially political – and the economic choices boil down to which methods are the most effective in mobilising resources and in meeting the threat – money cost is a second order issue. Rationing, embargos, tariffs, crash programs and heavy diplomacy have all proved effective: why should they not all be on the menu?
I am not sure that the assumptions underlying the more pure economic analysis are not at odds with the reality – eg that we can have some version of business as usual, and can reckon the costs of various courses of action and still radically reduce global emissions.
I notice, for instance, that the argument does not take in various forms of international coercion – why not?
Peter T
Adding to Ray’s response, remember that a lot of research done in private industry doesn’t pan out, either. Explorers don’t *always* find the New World, sometime they get lost, or sink. Same with research. Research isn’t funded with an expectation of universal success, just as capitalization of the exploitation of innovation by venture capitalists etc isn’t done with an expectation of universal success.
Progress comes because a percentage of fundamental research and exploitation of results by applied science and engineering succeeds. We don’t need 100% success.
The money that you claim is “wasted” is just part of the cost of advancing our knowledge in a world where we don’t have the ability to predict what will, and what will not, pan out.
“And for all the well-meaning ethanol-freaks out there in the climate-commons, the news is out that eliminating ethanol from the bio-fuel cycle gives over 80% gains in kilometres travelled for a given area of field growing your biomass.”
Again, this is an example of bad accounting – what is the best and worst method of making biomass? The best is algal biofuel, by about a factor of ten, if you include water and land use issues. The worst is coal-fired industrial corn ethanol grown with an abundance of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Even before you start the ethanol conversion process, there is a huge range in the amount of fossil fuel needed to grow an acre of crops – and remember, we used to use no fossil fuels at all in agriculture, for thousands of years. Intensive industrial fossil-fuel based agriculture has only been around since the 1940s or so.
As far as type of biofuel (all hydrocarbons, like fossil fuels), that ranges from gases to liquids to solids – with the gases (biomethane) burning the cleanest, followed by ethanol, biodiesel, and particulate biomass – wood chips, etc. So, the “80%” number is nonsense – it all depends on whether or not you use fossil fuel in the production process.
In Kansas and the Midwest, coal power is regularly used to distill ethanol. In Brazil, this is not the case – so an honest accounting would thus treat Brazilian biofuel from sugarcane differently than Kansas coal-ethanol – but people like Jacobson and Pimental and Patzek lump them all together – which looks like a conclusion in search of evidence, not objective research.
Keep in mind that with oil prices far off their $140 peak, oil companies and financiers are working hard to lift the price of oil back to its old high so they can recoup their losses from the price crash. Their main enemy is declining international demand for oil.
Let’s say we increase ethanol production using fossil fuel agriculture techniques – that’s represents an even bigger decline in the demand for oil. Toyota and others are introducing plug-in hybrids that get 100+ mpg, and electric cars are also taking off, despite government interventions that boost old fossil fueled cars like GM (they get $30 billion, Tesla gets nothing – not too surprising, since fossil energy interests seem to control all branches of the U.S. federal government).
What does all that mean? Well, farmers will have a new hedge against falling corn prices – ethanol conversion – and that will lead to a new and more robust agriculture sector – one that doesn’t rely on subsidies and foreign exports for viability. Consumers will have more fuel choices – and fossil fuel demand will drop to new lows.
That’s the way the future looks – and remember, the stone age didn’t end for lack of stones.
(Thanks John for the clarification – that’s why phrases like ‘carbon footprint’ are so ambiguous… but $3 billion for FutureGen is still a fraudulent ripoff of the taxpayer, and the people who are promoting it know it.)
#5978 Wilmot: “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”
This is really a problem, in that there is no independent federal organizing agency in charge of energy research, just the DOE, which is highly politicized – it should never have been made a Cabinet position, but should have been set up along an NIH or NSF model. Thus, coal and oil interests are still calling the shots at the DOE. It’s not too surprising, in that Obama is a coal state Democrat (Bush was an oil state Republican). Bush gave lip service to renewables, so does Obama – just look at the DOE funding decisions:
$3 billion for FutureGen ‘carbon capture’.
$50 billion for a ‘Nuclear Research University Program” to expand nuclear engineering departments.
$0 for solar R&D, solar research university programs, and solar demonstration projects.
Our government was run by oil interests for the past eight years, and now it appears to be run by coal interests – just based on the monetary outlays, which seem to me to be more important indicators of real intentions than all the speeches and statements combined.
Mark – If we could have completed theories and physics, we could have done some very powerful things at least in theory. Some physicist refer to it as knowing the mind of God or Old One. As far as climate science goes, imagine being able to predict where a tornado will touch down in 100000 years, how strong it will be, how many people will die, and what their last words will be.
I don’t see how people still hope for that after Godel. Forget Godel, uncertainty principle was suggestive enough about quantum physics. It’s just not going to happen.
I’m dropping this conversation to crawl back on topic.
Further to #620, apparently the success rate of VC ventures is around the 10% level.
To be honest, a stunned chipmunk could do as well.
But that’s hardly a reliable ROI, is it.
632: we aren’t TRYING to be complete. We’re trying to explain what’s going on and use that knowledge to predict likely outcome.
Just because you have no complete biological theory, that lion in the Serengeti walking up to you licking their chops will have you thinking “I’ll get in the car” rather than “I wonder if the lion has eaten sufficiently?”.
So Goedel and your obsession about completeness (which as MANY have pointed out has naff all to do with physics) is irrelevant.
Hank, ethanol is just CH3-CH2-OH – and it is formed via the fermentation of sugar by yeast, a process that was most likely discovered in fermenting fresh fruit. The specific application of the technology for some goal has to be stated before one can say that “it works”.
Are we talking economics? In that case, a farmer can take a perishable crop and convert it to ethanol, if market prices are low. If food prices are low, we can assume that famine or shortages are not a problem, so “food vs. fuel” is not an issue. “Fuel vs. rotting food” is the issue. Ethanol can be stored in a tank for a long time, but that’s not true for most crops.
Are we talking health? Currently, half of U.S. corn production goes to animal feed, i.e. confined animal feeding operations – such as the swine facility in Perote, Veracruz that produces a million hogs a year, and is 13 miles from the little village of La Gloria, where the first H1N1 swine/avian/human hybrid flu virus appeared. Just a coincidence? A ban on factory farms would lead to a reduction in demand for corn, but ethanol can easily make up that demand.
Are we talking about the energy supply? It’s likely that only a limited amount of fuel will come from photosynthetic biomass – but if we only produce 10% as much biofuel as fossil fuel, we can still use it to provide a lot of transportation power, especially in remote rural areas (EVs are best for cities). If ethanol plug-ins can get 100 mpg, and they should be able to, then ethanol does work well as a major sustainable fuel source.
Are we talking about the atmospheric content of long-lived greenhouse gases? Photosynthesis takes CO2 out of the air and converts it to sugars, fatty acids, proteins, etc. If the sugars are converted to ethanol or methane or gasoline and burned, the CO2 goes right back into the atmosphere. Sum zero – unless the farms and ethanol stills are all powered by coal.
Are we talking about ethanol as an end-all, or as a part of a steadily progressing photosynthetic carbon fuel industry? You can also convert biomass to methane, methanol (a key chemical feedstock), gasoline-like hydrocarbons, and biodiesel (esterified fatty acids). The general rule of thumb is that the smaller the molecule, the cleaner it burns (methane > ethanol > biodiesel > wood chips). Ultimately, algal biodiesel & ethanol have the highest production efficiency (by a factor of ten), but that needs more technological investment than corn ethanol. Beyond that lie non-biological artificial photosynthesis strategies using silicon PV, fuel cells, and similar gadgets.
The main issues are really about reforming agriculture across the board, and throwing out much of the ‘advances’ of the Green Revolution – i.e. the intensive use of fossil fuels on farms – in favor of farms based on solar and wind power, that involve no fossil fuels at all.
For those who claim fossil fuels are critical to large-scale agriculture: Take the history of rum in the Caribbean, for example. First, it was produced on slave plantations in the era of sailing ships. Then, it was produced using fossil fuel powered industrial agriculture (the Cuba-Soviet sugarcane program, for example, was a deliberate attempt to mimic the “green revolution” in a communist guise). Both approaches involved immense human and ecological costs, respectively. Today, Brazil has a sugarcane production system that is very close to being fossil fuel free – and unlike cattle and soy, it doesn’t result in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
Slavery was deemed immoral, but polluting the global atmosphere and oceans and degrading the biosphere is still deemed a matter of economic necessity, as was slavery in its day.
If you want to stop polluting the global atmosphere and oceans and land surfaces (which are not all ‘commons’, by any means), you have to eliminate fossil fuel combustion from the energy mix, and yes, it is technically feasible. That’s all there is to it – and I’m sure Hank agrees with that?
It’s not Gödel standing in the way of being able to do this…that’s a lost cause without Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
The practical limitations on what’s possible tend to be far more mundane.
#623 >crawl
Without a leg to stand on, that would be advisable.
Ike, I often can’t figure out who you’re arguing with. Not the guy I pointed to, I hope. I see nothing on his page you could disagree with.
Ray Ladbury #601 — Thanks for your thoughtful response to my #597 regarding applied vs. pure science. The NASA research (solar panels and digital cameras) is an example of what I mean by mission-driven research, which I would like to see much more of relating to clean tech. I would class Paul Chu’s discovery of high Tc superconductivity another example of applied science. I share your hope that the national laboratories will pioneer scalable solutions and that a new generation of innovators will turn their talents in this direction.
Lee Smolin’s recent book, “The Trouble with Physics” is the source of my angst. He says that the mandarins of string theory get all of the money and all of the students want to work in that field, instead of grubby old applied science.
I will be researching the work of Art Rosenfeld of LBNL as you suggest. Thanks again.
dhogaza #620 — I never said “wasted” in my #597 as you accuse. You get my point, that pure science has its place, but now that we have an emergency it is time to redirect our money and attention to applied science, whatever its chances of success. Let’s look at lots of things, without being limited by theoretical fetters. Let’s look in areas where there is some likelihood of practical progress, instead of particle physics and The Theory of Everything. We’re desperate, no?
I have been trying to suggest caution in measures to control CO2. The heart of my concern is the economic impact. However, there may be a way to make that impact manageable, as I try to explain below:
Long term, significant CO2 reduction will not happen with a “tricks and traps” energy policy. Cap and trade, with whatever machinations about allowances, is a trick and trap system until the cost of an effective version of that effort to reduce emissions is appropriately acknowledged. The trick of rebates to the public to pay for increased electricity costs does not work for me. It is a trap to set a plan that will inevitably be a pit of high expense. Then will be the deeper trap of triggering further economic crisis, which if anyone has noticed, is already extreme and precarious.
Watch out, here comes Third World Economy of America.
There has to be a law of physics-economics that says that banning use of the only low cost and abundant fuel will lead to economic repercussions.
However, there could be a way to deal with the expected cost question which would be to make certain that natural gas supplies would be made sufficient. Thus we could be reasonably assured that the cost of reduced coal usage would be manageable.
Somehow we have to pay. Will it be nuclear? Not my choice. Are renewable systems of the appropriate scale affordable? Not that I can see in a reasonable time frame.
Why not try to write a cap and trade with teeth that is tied to development of natural gas supplies. With an assured source of affordable, cleaner fuel, we could reasonably plan to eliminate coal. I need more than Boone Pickens to reassure me that such supplies are in place.
Perhaps environmentalists would be willing to compromise to allow strictly controlled drilling wherever necessary to assure adequate natural gas sources. That might be a worthwhild environmental trade.
Looking ahead, we should probably get seriously working on using the natural gas a lot more effectively than we do now in electric power generation. My limited studies of natural gas reserves leave me somewhat less optimistic than Boone Pickens, so even with a major national effort to develop natural gas supplies, it seems likely that a program to greatly improve efficiency of that fuel use will also be needed.
Fix the natural gas supply question and it will go a long way to getting enthusiasm for a cap and trade law. It might even be written to be effective.
Doug Bostrom #598, 600 — You ask what good it is to crack fossil fuel CO2 only to dump it into the atmosphere by burning the synfuel you make by carbon recycling. You suggest that making polymers might be a better use for the syngas from syntrolysis, rather than synfuel. These are reasonable questions.
I agree that polymers might be a better use for syngas. However, only hydrocarbons have the energy density to use for vehicle fuel, so we will need synfuel as we transition to plug-ins. I hope you agree that the Hydrogen Highway will not happen.
As I discussed incompletely in my #88, what wind and solar need is a reason to be deployed so they are producing much more than the 20% limit for integrating variable power sources on the grid. The excess wind and solar capacity has to be either stored or used for something. Cracking CO2 is a way to use solar and wind power that would otherwise go to waste.
For example, at night, when there is lots of wind, there is already the spinning reserve (inertia) from coal and nuclear to meet demand, so what do you do with the wind turbine output? One storage solution that has been proposed is using the wind power to pump water uphill into a reservoir.
CO2 cracking is another storage solution, which directly reduces the emissions of a coal-fired power plant by working on the CO2 itself.
Ike Solem Says (16 May 2009 at 10:03 AM)
“Ethanol can be stored in a tank for a long time…”
But improves if you store it in say an oak cask :-)
“If ethanol plug-ins can get 100 mpg, and they should be able to, then ethanol does work well as a major sustainable fuel source.”
Should be able to get way better than that, if you’re just considering fuel, not electric use. I’ve averaged better than 70 mpg over the last 6 years (from a car built in 2000). If I had a battery big enough to drive even the first 10 miles of each trip, or to hold say the braking energy from a 4000 ft descent, I’d easily be over that 100 mpg.
“The main issues are really about reforming agriculture across the board, and throwing out much of the ‘advances’ of the Green Revolution – i.e. the intensive use of fossil fuels on farms – in favor of farms based on solar and wind power, that involve no fossil fuels at all.”
Or take your ethanol production to the logical limit, and do no “farming” at all. Given that research http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/newsservice/NS_details.php?release=061207_3059 shows that a mixed prairie produces more biomass per unit area than any crop (and doesn’t require annual planting, fertilizer, weed control, etc), you just grow your prairie, run a mower over it occasionally (simulating the effect of grazing by buffalo &c), and convert the result to ethanol. You produce ethanol at low cost, and have a nice, healthy ecosystem instead of a factory farm.
You could even take the process quite a bit further, if you’re the farmer. Allow a few buffalo to graze, then you have meat production and can even get city types to pay for the privilege of doing your “harvesting” for you: http://www.rockin7ranch.com/buffalo_hunting.html
#626 Ike Solem,
The idea of long term storage that ethanol enables rings a bell of practicality. That seems like a possible path to a rational system.
A long felt discomfort with using feed grain or anything that is produced on cropland can be somewhat eased by the idea that surplus agriculture production during abundant years could be made into ethanol and stored.
Cellulosic ethanol seems dangerous, either because it will turn out to motivate use of land that otherwise might be used for food production, or that it will end with us mowing down our forests.
If algae can be grown fast enough to matter as a fuel supply, even that might end displacing food production capacity of some sort.
Ethanol production tied to a storage system concept could have a leveling effect on agriculture markets. That is interesting, though whether it will work on a meaningful scale is a remaining question.
re: #624 Mark
Stunned chipmunks: this comment is not very useful, and to put it mildly, does not enhance credibility.
What you seem to think is trivial is actually very difficult. The people who are good at it are very, very good and even they know that most things won’t be very successful, even with a lot of work.
Even the best ones screw up (John Doerr & Segway come to mind), but if it’s so easy to do better, you should become a VC. In any case, the 10% success rate idea just confuses people, as it’s not the primary metric VCs think about.
See R2-D2 over at Dot Earth for a short discussion of real R&D portfolio management and processes, who does R&D these days, and what VCs do and don’t do.
#621 Ike Solem
You say, “Toyota and others are introducing plug-in hybrids that get 100+ mpg, and electric cars are also taking off, despite government interventions that boost old fossil fueled cars like GM (they get $30 billion, Tesla gets nothing – not too surprising, since fossil energy interests seem to control all branches of the U.S. federal government).”
I respond: Do not blame Toyota yet for the “100+ mpg” hybrid. That nearly fraudulent, if not entirely fraudulent claim is from US promoters who are adding batteries to Prius cars, in spite of Toyota’s saying it voids their warranty. Some of the “100+ mpg” claims are being hammered back by myself and others who find this kind of gibberish in guise of a performance specification to be intellectually insulting as well as damaging as a distraction from real efforts to improve car performance.
The “100+ MPG” turns out to be entirely arbitrary depending on the ratio of the car miles driven on electricity and the car miles driven on gasoline as a gasoline hybrid.
This only begins my tirade against phony plug-in stuff. The short version is that the inevitable response to such plugged in charging is coal fired power generation, regardless of the imagined “power generation mix.”
#633 Wilmot:
I see portable storage of hydrogen rapidly poking into and beyond the bleeding edge of our materials science and still failing to produce a generally practical result once all the accounting is done. Hydrogen ends up looking less attractive than plain old batteries, icky though batteries still are. Unless the main objective is flogging a proprietary technology licensing scheme I don’t see hydrogen as much more than a special solution for special applications.
Turning back to compounding stack gas into useful substances while simultaneously capturing carbon and coming out ahead on the energy budget, is the reject heat from a thermal plant of sufficient quality to help with this? I have no intuition on that, I’m not a chemical engineer, but even the very best combustion thermal plants are rejecting something like 30% of their input, a lot of energy when you’re looking at gigawatts of generation capacity. There’s no such thing as perpetual motion so I’m supposing a few hundred megawatts would go only a little way toward boosting the process you describe; do you have any better idea of that?
Biofuels, including algae, require NPKS nutrients, typically supplied as fertilizers. P is in somewhat short supply, currently being mined at 0.8% per year of minable reserves. At that rate it runs out in about 120 years and the so-called reserve base is not economically recoverable.
Of course upping the rate of consumption shortens the time until gone. It is as essential plant nutrient and not replaeable with a substitute.
> phosphorous
Fortunately that bioaccumulates, so if we quit burning it up, it would be smart. One of many articles on where to find phosphorous:
“… 59–89% of deposited STP [soluble total phosphorous] was derived from fossil fuel combustion. Elemental composition of fossil fuels and airmass backward trajectories suggested that a large part of anthropogenic P originates from coal combustion in China….”
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2004.10.028
I did a google search for “wind power construction cost” and “nuclear power construction cost”, limiting the results to the last month to eliminate stale information, and found the following:
“China’s offshore wind farm is ongoing construction near the Shanghai East China Sea Bridge, the China Business News reported. The new wind farm is comprised of 34 wind-driven generators, each with a capability of 3,000 kilowatt (kW). The constriction cost of the wind farm is CNY2.4 billion ($351 million) and has an installed capacity of 100,000 kW.”
“building of the wind farm is going on well since the first turbine was installed on March 20, 2009. Shanghai citizens will have access to electricity generated from the East China Sea by the time the 2010 World Expo opens in the city.”
http://www.energy-business-review.com/news/china_updates_on_offshore_wind_farm_construction_at_shanghai_east_china_sea_bridge_090417
“Officials with E.ON Climate & Renewables began pouring the foundations for the towers on March 1, said company spokesman Bobby Blount. The first tower went up April 4 and the estimated date of operation is early October…”
“The $200 million Papalote Creek Wind Farm will have 109 turbines, 397 feet tall. They will generate 179.85 megawatts of power,”
http://www.caller.com/news/2009/apr/22/taft_wind_farm/
“As for Duke Energy, it has filed an application with the NRC to build two new reactors at its facility in Gaffney, S.C., about an hour southwest of Charlotte. The cost for this project, according to Duke Energy spokesperson Rita Sipe, is estimated at $11 billion, but it could increase due to inflation over the project’s long timetable—at least nine years.”
“However, nuclear fuel costs are lower compared to coal, peat, wood and natural gas—but not renewable energy sources. Nor do the overall costs include disposal or recycling (also known as reprocessing) of the radioactive waste. In the 1990s, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences studied the feasibility of recycling plutonium; a report concluded that 62,000 tons of spent fuel would cost $50 billion to $100 billion.”
“What’s more, the Government Accountability Office, the investigational arm of Congress, estimates half of all U.S. Department of Energy lo an guarantees to nuclear power providers are defaulted on.”
“There is no long-term solution to the problem of what to do with nuclear-generated waste, merely the hope that something will be worked out. Those hopes may dwindle further in the face of what has happened to France, once vaunted as the nation that did nuclear “right.” First, French attempts to build new reactors in France and Finland has been financially disastrous, much like that of the American nuclear industry in the 1980s. The Finnish Olkiluoto reactor is now 55 percent over budget, while the Flamanville project in France has exceeded its budget by $1 billion less than a year into construction.”
http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A393820
A significant portion of the increase in cost for wind power in mid 2008 was the inflationary spike in oil prices, which fed into increases in energy and goods prices across the board. The cost of nuclear isn’t immune to these forces; I’m not an economist, but I suspect that due to the 9+ fold differences in lead time, nuclear is probably more vulnerable.
I would also qualify the “no long term solution to the waste problem” with the word DEMONSTRATED. I am in favor of pursuing liquid metal(lead) cooled metal fuel fast breeder/actinide burner technology; most of the underlying technology required has been demonstrated: the Soviets used lead cooling in submarine reactors and have a lot of knowledge of alloys, construction, and operation; various scale demos of fast breeders, metal fuels & reprocessing, and core stability to upsets including scram failure have been made; given a choice of burying the thousands of tons of spent fuel currently in “temporary” storage and hoping it stays safe for thousands of years, or reprocessing/burning it up with a net gain in power produced, I vote for the latter, but it isn’t going to be cheap or quick; my ill informed gut feeling is 15-20 years and 2X current PWR nuclear costs, with faster being more expensive and vice versa.
Another point I would like to make is that the low cost of nuclear power is based on 24/7 full output calculations. When it’s a hot day in Texas, and everyones air conditioner starts running full tilt, more power has to come from somewhere; if that somewhere is a nuke that has been running at 75% output, then the cost of power from that nuke should be adjusted upward for the idle factor. If it comes from some other standby power source, then that should be included in the cost of power for the nuclear base, but usually isn’t when someone is arguing how cheap nuclear really is. Of course, this cost is included in your power bill; in NC, “Under the new Construction Work in Progress guidelines signed into state law in 2007 as part of Senate Bill 3, the bulk of the costs for these proposed plants will be passed on to consumers—even if the plants are never completed.”, so the economic risks of nuclear power won’t be born by the managers who make the decisions, or the investors who stand to gain if nuclear is profitable, but the public. Yet another example of big business externalizing costs (into the “Commons”) and internalizing profits.
#618 Hugh Laue
Right. I forgot to mention the microbial enrichment (which I believe is connected to the moisture retention in part, some experiments are dealing with temperature to establish best carbon structure). One process a friend of mine developed increased crop yields 49%! Pretty good.
I think the algal work shows some promise but I also think fast growers in other areas may prove out, but there are still questions in need of answering.
There is a group in Germany testing pyrolysis in the sewage treatment process also and that shows promise.
your captcha: effort blacken
How apropos :)
Mine is more odd:
captcha: relive Nixon
In another example of bizarre accounting practices, the EPA is now weighing in on renewable fuels:
The Environmental Protection Agency last week proposed new renewable fuel standards that, for the first time, would factor things like worldwide deforestation when calculating the environment impacts of biofuel production. The proposal was hailed by environmentalsist who have long argued that production of ethanol, for example, has depleted global food supplies, forcing farmers elsewhere to clear forests — a major source of carbon emissions — to make up the difference. – The Washington Independent
The funny thing is, for decades rainforest conservationists have argued that the clearing of land for cattle and soy production was the number one culprit in deforestation – because global sugar demand has held steady. Now, you have the fossil fuel industry trying as hard as possible to stifle the growth of both fossil fuel-free agriculture as well as fossil fuel-free ethanol – and using environmental front groups to do so.
What is also remarkable is that these EPA moves do not include the environmental costs of tar sand oil from Canada, or heavy sour crude from Venezuela, or shale oil from the Midwest – just biofuels. Odd, isn’t it? This is happening at the very same moment that David Chu is proclaiming a $2.3 billion grant program for FutureGen.
The fossil fuel industry is not willing to give up any market share at all to competition – and the federal government has been going along with that agenda, by all indications. If not, where is the $2.3 billion federally financed solar energy project?
No, we just have a $2.3 billion federally financed coal project, $18 billion in guarantees for a Alaska-to-Alberta natural gas pipeline for tar sand production, and so on – and take a look at what Obama’s new ambassador to China has to say about coal:
Coal is one of our State’s most abundant resources and has long served as an anchor to some of Utah’s rural economies. As exciting new coal technologies are developed and implemented, Utah’s energy policy team will monitor these activities and formulate policies for the most economically and environmentally responsible uses of Utah coal.
http://energy.utah.gov/energy/governors_priorities/coal.html
Sending a coal advocate to be ambassador to the world’s biggest coal consumer is not really going to be seen as a push for renewable energy – although, it’s no longer a push for renewable energy, it’s a push for freedom from imported oil…
Can we look forward to a $2.3 billion grant for a coal-to-gasoline demonstration project as well, to go alongside FutureGen?
Doug Bostrom: “I don’t see hydrogen as much more than a special solution for special applications.”
That’s probably not true. Unless you want to rely on fishmeal as a nitrogen source, synthetic production of nitrogen fertilizer is going to be a must – but it can be done without fossil fuels. You simply need a non-fossil source of H2, and that can be achieved using water-splitting via electric current (which is what green plants do, as well).
The most likely use for renewable hydrogen generation is thus in the chemical industries, and eventually, as part of artificial photosynthesis – add H2 to CO2 using solar power and you get fossil fuel free methane from the atmosphere, a completely renewable fuel that avoids any intermittency issues – the ideal ‘biofuel’, as it would require little agricultural land. (Notice, however, that biofuel crops are perfect for cleaning up contaminated soils.)
#621 Ike Solem
I agree, there is a terrible amount of fraud going on right now. As Tony Curtis once said in the movie ‘Operation Petticoat’ – “Where there is confusion, there is profit”
I have not examined FutureGen but it would not surprise that it, and/or others like it, is a facade or a distraction, or a misappropriation or sort, just by the odds.
This is an unfortunate reality. The guys that have the great ideas/methods are losing money to the corporations that are more experienced at spitting out formatted proposals with all the right rhetoric.
Such antics will likely delay some of the best development methods and/or directions, imo. Losing resource capital to inefficient processes are not so affordable in the grand scheme of things.
Doug Bostrom #638 —
I presume the reject heat is the heat rejection into the atmosphere from the cooling towers, in the form of vapor, which is necessary for the Rankine cycle. The internal energy, or heat, in the flue gas does indeed help get to the cracking energy for turning CO2 into CO, but not much.
The enthalpy of carbon dioxide at 900 K is 37,405 kJ/kmol of which the internal energy (heat) is 29,922 kJ/kmol. Since there are 22,727 moles per ton, the internal energy in a ton of CO2 at 900 K is 22,727 mol/ton x 29,922 J/mol = 0.68 GJ/ton. Cracking a ton of carbon dioxide (22,727 moles) takes a total energy input of 12.08 GJ (5.5 eV per molecule = 531.4 kJ/mole, x 22,727 = 12.08 GJ), and the internal energy is 0.68 GJ/ton, so 11.4 GJ/ton is the net energy input required for cracking a ton of carbon dioxide. That is what wind and solar would have to provide, because fossil fuels produce more CO2 than they crack.
Removing the second oxygen atom, to produce bare carbon atoms for nanotubes or other forms of solid carbon, requires 257 kcal/mol, or an additional 1075 kJ/mol.
The cracking energy for CO2 -> CO (531.4 kJ/mol) is comparable to the cracking energy (493 kJ/mol) required for water electrolysis.
For each mole of CO2 cracked, a mole of O2 is produced. Oxygen is used for oxygen-blown gasifiers and for oxyfuel combustion, to save the trouble of stripping the nitrogen ballast attendant on using air instead. The air separation unit uses 43.78 kJ per mole of O2 so cracking a ton (22,727 moles) of CO2 to yield 22,727 moles of O2, saves 0.99 GJ. For each metric ton of oxygen (31,250 moles) the energy saved is therefore 1.368 GJ. You can take that benefit as a deduction from the required cracking energy of 11.4 GJ/ton of carbon dioxide.
#644 Ike Solem:
I think you misread what I wrote, or I wrote it poorly. I don’t think hydrogen is viable as a energy source for for –transportation– applications due to our inability to create a practical portable storage technology suitable for that context.
re bioethanol
“A new study by researchers at North Carolina State University has found that growing duckweed on hog wastewater can produce five to six times more starch per acre than corn.”
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1702767/superplant_produces_ethanol_eliminates.html
http://www.claytonnews-star.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=106&twindow=Default&mad=No&sdetail=836&wpage=&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=2111&hn=claytonnews-star&he=.com
google “cheng stomp duckweed ethanol” for more references. Duckweed is used to treat municipal(human) wastewater as well, and efficiently recovers phosphorus (plus N, K, micronutrients, and, a double edged sword, heavy metals – e.g. chromium, cadmium; it can be used to clean contaminated water, but the resultant crop can’t be used as feed)
Brian Dodge Says (16 May 2009 at 4:50 PM):
“China’s offshore wind farm is ongoing construction near the Shanghai East China Sea Bridge, the China Business News reported. The new wind farm is comprised of 34 wind-driven generators, each with a capability of 3,000 kilowatt (kW). The constriction cost of the wind farm is CNY2.4 billion ($351 million) and has an installed capacity of 100,000 kW.”
Perhaps putting things on a common scale would clarify things a bit. 100,000 kW = 100 MW = 0.1 GW. Actual generation from a wind turbine (capacity factor) is about 0.3, so unless I’ve dropped a decimal point or something, the Chinese are paying $10.5 billion for 1 GW of wind generation. (And that’s at Chinese wage rates for construction workers!)
I didn’t find the size of those Duke reactors in a quick search, but 1 GW/reactor is fairly typical. That would mean that Duke’s paying $5.5 billion per GW – and that in a country where wages are high, and the regulatory environment is designed to make nuclear power uneconomic.
“The $200 million Papalote Creek Wind Farm will have 109 turbines, 397 feet tall. They will generate 179.85 megawatts of power…”
Well, that’s better than China, only $1.1 billion per GW, though the linked article doesn’t say whether that figure is nameplate rating. If it is, divide the price per GW by the capacity factor…
#646 Wilmot:
No such thing as free lunch, but your answer goes through the budget really nicely. Thank you.
I still find the idea of sequestering carbon into a nice friendly polymer such as polyethylene very attractive. Think of all the bathtub toys we could make.