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.
Jim Bullis, Miastrada Co. Says (16 May 2009 at 1:16 PM):
“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.”
Isn’t that sort of obvious? You figure the number on the average person’s typical driving cycle. However, the now 71 mpg (the fuel economy goes up a bit as the weather warms) non-plug-in hybrid is sitting in my driveway right now…
“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.””
Not at all, as for instance if I had a plug-in hybrid, I’d have a good reason to install some PV solar. (Something that doesn’t make a lot of economic sense, given that my typical power bill runs around $50/month.) Even if it did use 100% coal-sourced electricity, it’d still emit less CO2 than burning gasoline directly in an IC engine.
Jim Bulls: consider that a new Tesla EV has an optimal range of 250 – 300 miles on one single charge, and the electric motor operates at 85-95% efficiency.
For the Tesla, “A fully charged ESS stores approximately 53 kWh of electrical energy at a nominal 375 volts and weighs 992 lb (450 kg).”
53 kWh is the same as 1.91 X 10^8 joules, and that’s the fully charged battery.
One gallon of gasoline is the same as 1.3 X 10^8 joules, so if your gasoline engine was anywhere near as efficient as an electrical motor, you would get roughly 160 mpg in a similar size car.
However, gasoline engines are lucky to hit 20% efficiency in energy conversion – most of the energy is just wasted. You can see, however, that the combination of an electrical motor and a gasoline engine can easily hit 100+ mpg – but it still is not as efficient as a purely electrical system.
That’s another example of how utility is not the same thing as energy – the electrical vehicle provides the same utility as a gasoline vehicle, but at much lower energy consumption.
Wilmot:
Any kind of CO2 capture and fixation strategy would probably follow the photosynthetic route, in which CO2 is first incorporated into an organic molecule (via formation of a carbon-carbon bond with a reactive product).
To be concise, plants make a kind of chemical hot potato using solar power, and when that hot potato (a 5-carbon molecule) encounters a CO2 molecule, a reaction takes place and suddenly you have a 6-carbon molecule, which rapidly decomposes into two 3-carbon molecules.
That’s where hydrogen comes in, as it is needed to reduce the carbon atoms and remove oxygen. At the end of the process, the plant ends up with sugars, starting out with CO2 and hydrogen from water.
In thermodynamic terms, it requires 479 kilojoules of energy to reduce one mole of CO2 molecules (a mole is a lot of molecules, 6.022 * 10^23) to the level of sugar. To produce ethanol from sugar, you use fermentation, in which yeast convert sugars to ethanol and CO2, yielding energy for growth from the process.
So, let’s compare now compare octane produced via petroleum distillation to ethanol produced by a photosynthetic/fermentation process.
Octane combustion produces -5430 KJ/mol, or -678 KJ/mol of CO2 produced.
Ethanol combustion produces -1370 KJ/mol, or -685 KJ/mol of CO2 produced.
Thus, the energy yield of these hydrocarbons is independent of the source – fossil fuels or photosynthesis, it’s the same. In the case of fossil fuels, slow heat and pressure cooked off the oxygen over millions of years, while with ethanol and biomass gasification, we are simply speeding up the process using an external energy source.
So, what is the difference in energy costs involved in exploring for oil, drilling wells, pumping the oil, shipping the oil, and finally refining the oil – vs. the cost for ethanol – growing the crops, harvesting the raw material, processing and fermenting it, and then distilling off the ethanol?
How is that cost comparison changed if we attach high costs to fossil CO2 emission to the atmosphere, as science tells us we should? Obviously, it all depends on how much fossil fuel was used to grow the crops and produce the ethanol. In Kansas, they use coal – although it would be just as easy to use concentrated solar power.
An alternative approach that hasn’t gotten much mention here, is reducing energy use through energy efficiency. Buying cars that get relatively high gas mileage, appliances that are use less energy per unit of of output, and installing better home insulation,could go a long way toward mitigating the effects of AGW if adopted on a large scale.
BTW,since it has come up several times in this thread, there’s an original and amusing take in an essay on Godel’s Theorem by Jeremy Bernstein “Inovators: Godel’s Theorem” which appears in his book, “Experiencing Science- Profiles in Discovery”(Basic Books,Inc. 1978).
Bertrand Russell’s barber,Barrett, has a sign that reads “Barrett is willing to shave all, and only,men unwilling to shave themselves.” Of course Russell inevitably asks Barrett if he’s willing to shave himself.
‘Getting anything done’ means working past a number of situations which are concurrent and daunting.
Peak Oil
Peak Minerals
Economic Chaos and Monopoly Control
An international monetary system used as a tool for factional advantage
International trade systemic imbalance
Groundwater pollution and decaying sewage/water treatment infrastructure.
Climate change, food shortage, water shortage
Use of chemicals based on the idea we can use anything that hasn’t been proven harmful : rather than conservative restrictions on adventurism
It’s a kludge doomed to failure : if only because limitless growth violates the boundary of a closed system.
It doesn’t look likely that disaster will be averted. One energy blog that had too short a life included a proposed national energy model to deal with some of these problems as an example of the kind of thinking that would be necessary to even simulate going forward. It unhappily perpetuated a model ignoring robber baron activities all too likely to destroy us all : the impotence of media to convey accurate and useful information an accessory by providing distraction when focus is necessary.
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/
November 2006 archives include ‘Sustainability, energy independence and agricultural policy. What, me worry ?’
It at least expands on http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2007/10/fuelish-fantasies.html cited earlier in this thread : and has a deconstruction analysis of ethanol too – plus a link to another http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/07/vinod-khosla-debunked.html
Re #654, We are a long way from climate disaster, maybe some trouble at 2C but thats 30 years away etc.
Ike Solem #652 — That’s very interesting about photosynthesis energy input (494 kJ/mol) being less than the energy input for cracking CO2 (531 kJ/mol) or water (493 kJ/mol).
Making sugar from CO2 is … sweet! Plants get that cracking energy from sunlight, so the process in a natural setting must be limited by the amount of sunlight on the green area. It is slow, but with a large enough area you could have a good carbon sink. But then we run into the other problem: fresh water to grow those plants is quickly becoming scarce all over the world. The forests we have are working as hard as they can, and we are still falling behind faster and faster. The dry forests are withering and burning. New forests — assuming there is water for them — won’t come online for 20 years, past the time for taking effective action to avoid climate catastrophe.
The bogus CO2 offsets in the House legislation for “cap-and-trade” (Waxman-Markey) mostly have to do with trees. The idea is that coal plants continue to emit CO2 as usual, but they buy indulgences in some scheme where someone else claims the has planted some trees which will be a sink for those emissions. The potential for fraud in phantom tree offsets is even worse than took place in origination that led to the recent crash. Who will actually walk through those saplings and certify that they are thriving? The same government inspectors and rating agencies which have just failed so outrageously? And then there is the market in these phantom tree offsets, which past experience with Wall Street suggests will be an orgy of fraud and greed concealed by incomprehensible complexity.
With a cheap price for the indulgences — less than $20 per ton of CO2 is like coins in a parking meter for utilities, who will just get a rate hike to cover the increased cost — and with 90% of coal CO2 emissions given free indulgences, there will be no incentive to deploy technology.
The EPA’s jurisdiction to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act, which the Supreme Court recently upheld, will be mooted by this legislative end run, so there will be no effective pressure to do something real.
Ike Solem Says (17 May 2009 at 12:42 AM):
“To produce ethanol from sugar, you use fermentation, in which yeast convert sugars to ethanol and CO2, yielding energy for growth from the process.”
This is omething that has puzzled me from time to time. On the one hand, we’ve seen piles of research money spent on hydrogen fuel cells, even though hydrogen’s energy-expensive to produce, and a nightmare to transport & store. On the other hand, significant money gets spent finding better ways to convert plant sugars to ethanol (which contains less energy) so it can be burnt in inefficient internal combustion engines.
Why not instead spend the money on improving a fuel cell that runs on sugar? Such things do exist: http://www.slu.edu/x14605.xml
Lawrence Brown: “An alternative approach that hasn’t gotten much mention here, is reducing energy use through energy efficiency.”
Isn’t that what the entire discussion of electric vehicles vs. fossil fueled vehicles is all about? Clearly, electric transportation is about five times more energy efficient than fossil fueled transportation, per mass transported. Power delivery (acceleration, etc.) in electric and gasoline engines is also similar.
The big difference is in onboard energy storage – even though a gasoline or ethanol engine is only 20% efficient, the energy density of hydrocarbons is much greater than that of any plausible battery.
You can see that from the above blurb on the Tesla Motors vehicle: “For the Tesla, a fully charged ESS stores approximately 53 kWh of electrical energy at a nominal 375 volts and weighs 992 lb (450 kg).”
The equivalent theoretical energy storage of gasoline is about 1.5 gallons, around 4 kg – about a factor of 100 difference compared to electric vehicles. If we include the lower efficiency of hydrocarbon engines (20% vs. 90% for electric), the factor is still around 20 (that assumes you had 160 gallons of gasoline in the car – that’s the mass of the battery – and since you don’t, the normal range of a gasoline car is similar to that of an electric car).
Energy efficiency should be a main goal, for both cars and house – but how to go about it? It seems that the best way to reduce energy use is to have real-time displays that calculate people’s bills for them, or against some other benchmark. For cars, the Toyota hybrid energy monitoring system is a good start. For homes, that requires a meter that has a digital output – which the utilities have resisted installing in homes:
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/an-energy-dashboard-for-buildings/#comment-59247
However, energy efficiency alone won’t solve the fossil CO2 problem, which requires replacing fossil fuel combustion with renewable energy sources. For renewable energy sources to provide enough utility to keep civilization operating, energy efficiency will be key – and it is being engineered in at the outset.
This is because with renewable energy (particularly solar PV) still costing quite a bit, every increase in energy efficiency means larger savings in energy production. This is why solar-roof EVs might be a good idea, as well – to meet the ‘gadget demand’.
On the other hand, with coal – railroad – utility holding companies, energy efficiency limits demand for coal, and thus causes the holding company to have net losses in the coal and rail sectors, even if the utility is showing a steady profit by meeting demand. In other words, investor-owned coal-fired utilities have very clear economic reasons for working against energy efficiency, as does the petroleum industry, which relies heavily on wildly inefficient vehicles for the bulk of their sales.
It’s just like the older ethanol industry – the serious alcoholics provide the majority of the sales, just based on consumption rates.
James wrote: “Though at least the authors [of the “Solar Grand Plan” article in the January 2008 Scientific American] 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.”
Well, let’s look at the article and see what the authors say about those “huge tracts of land”:
So, when compared to the land required for coal-fired electricity, including the land impacted by mountaintop removal strip mining and other destructive practices, solar requires less land per GW-hour of output. That doesn’t seem unreasonable, and it’s a relevant comparison, since what we are trying to accomplish is to phase out coal.
So, how about that “total environmental destruction” you mention?
That doesn’t sound like “total environmental destruction” to me.
Now, let’s look at another proposal, a March 2008 peer-reviewed study from Ausra, a company that develops utility-scale solar thermal power technology. They project that over 90 percent of the USA’s electric grid and auto fleet’s energy needs could be met by solar thermal power, thereby eliminating 40 percent of the USA’s GHG emissions.
And how much land would be required to produce 90 percent of the USA’s electricity from solar thermal alone? Ausra estimates that it would take “a land footprint of 9,600 square miles” which is “less than one percent of America’s deserts, less land than currently in use in the U.S. for coal mines, and a tiny fraction of the land currently in agricultural use.”
Now let’s put that in perspective with some land use figures from SourceWatch:
So concentrating solar thermal on a land area that is roughly one percent of the USA’s deserts, roughly comparable to the land disturbed by coal mines, or to the land now used for railroads and airports, or to half the land now used for roads, or to half the land now used for defense installations, or around one-tenth of the land in “urban use”, could provide 90 percent of the nation’s electricity supply and eliminate 40 percent of the nation’s GHG emissions.
And you would prefer to have a nuclear war, rather than do that.
I think that says a lot about your point of view.
They say a picture is worth a thousand worlds. So look at the picture on this page.
http://www.desertec.org/
Looks to me like solar could do the job.
#652 Ike Solem
You state, “One gallon of gasoline is the same as 1.3 X 10^8 Joules.” And you compare efficiency of an electric motor directly to that of a gasoline engine.
Thus you demonstrate a widespread incorrect perception about energy equivalence.
It is absolutely true that a gallon of gasoline will produce 1.3 X 10^8 Joules of heat. You can also be quite sure that 1.3 X 10^8 Joules of electrical energy will produce 1.3 X 10^8 Joules of heat.
It is a strange fact, but true however, that 1.3 X 10^8 Joules of heat will not produce anything close to 1.3 X 10^8 Joules of electrical energy. The fact that heat energy and electrical energy can be measured in Joules simply does not mean they are equivalent. It depends on the process and that is subject to an enormous effect of the Second Law of Thermodynamics where the conversion is from heat to mechanical and then to electrical energy.
One of the reasons we still use BTU for heat in this country is that engineers like to reserve that unit for heat measurment to help keep the distinction that is lost if kWhr or joules are the units for both heat and electrical energy or mechanical energy.
If a comparison is to be made between internal combustion engines and electric motors, it is essential that the heat engine that is used to generate the electric energy also be included in the calculation. If the comparison is properly made it will be from comparable points of heat production, namely where fuel is burned.
So if you want to talk about efficiency of electric motors, the electrical to mechanical energy conversion causes only a minor part of the loss. The important loss is in the heat engine that is available capacity for electricity generation. Economic laws dictate that the heat engine offering power at the lowest cost will be chosen to fill the demand for electric power. Thus, the electric motor you speak of is unavoidably tied to coal combustion. The only way this can be avoided is if the car was tied to a captive renewable source, but that kind of a system has its own special disadvantages, not the least of which is total system cost.
So if you are interested in making a fair and meaningful comparison the automobile internal combustion engine must be compared with the central power plant heat engine. Then the machinery that couples energy to car wheels can be included as respective modifications. On one hand, there is mechanical couplings; on the other hand, there is the electric power generator at the central power plant, the transmission line system, battery storage with charging processes, motor controllers, and finally the electric motor. The efficiency of the electric motor is clearly not a meaningful basis by itself.
In spite of all this, if the internal combustion engine efficiency is indeed 20% as it typically is, the electric motor system can still come out ahead, though nowhere near with as much margin as you indicated.
Internal combustion engines can be better. Kubota and Yanmar industrial diesels produce mechanical energy from heat energy at about 35% efficiency. They could probably be tuned to do better if the rpm was fixed. But here is the big surprise, the Prius engine measured by Argonne came out at 38% on the UDDS driving cycle.
This 38% came about for several reasons, but one was that the hybrid system as programmed by Toyota optimizes the engine operation amazingly well. In contrast, when the car was measured with the battery additions to make that Prius into a plug-in the engine efficiency dropped to 33%. (I give a shortcut to the Argonne report on this through the References page on my site. Just click my name.)
But as to the “100+ MPG”, yes even the range extended, battery powered Hummer can deliver 100 MPG. This should give you a clue that this is a meaningless claim, though it is disguised as a specification. Even though the Plug-In Prius conversions are not so energy wasteful as the plug-in Hummer the real mpg statement should be something like, “It can get any MPG you want between about 35 MPG and an MPG that approaches infinite MPG.” No, the gasoline will evaporate in the tank before it comes very close to infinity.
#659 SecularAnimist:
“And you would prefer to have a nuclear war, rather than do that.”
That does sound a trifle immoderate. James, what’s up with your don’t-or-die attitude concerning energy sources that don’t involve fissioning atoms? By process of elimination, all you’re leaving on the table is a spray of particles. You say you’re interested in practical alternatives, but when confronted with that possibility your final position is that nuclear war is better? (jumping from fission to fusion, no less).
Acres of figures have been thrown back and forth in this discussion and while nothing’s conclusive it’s clear that direct solar or thermal generation offers an excellent contribution for displacing combustion yet you’re stubbornly opposed.
What gives?
James, if all fossil fuels vanished from the earth overnight, do you really think civilization would collapse? What if we include all uranium?
Under such circumstances, you would have to rely on the big ball of fire in the sky, and subsidiary effects like winds, waves, tides, and also on your local ecology – farms and fisheries and forests, etc. Fossil fuels are literally fossils of photosynthetically captured carbon molecules – marine algae and peat, so there is no reason we can’t come up with a way to manufacture them using the same tactics that plants do – is there? It is just solar-powered biochemistry, after all.
You can complain that solar has low-energy density relative to nuclear, but isn’t that an advantage, particularly for the U.S. Southwest, who will need every drop of water they can get over the next 50 years? The whole heat exchange problem with nuclear is due to the energy density being too high, isn’t it?
For a practical example, a one-gigawatt solar panel installation in the Four Corners could easily replace the entire coal-fired Four Corners Power Station, a joint ownership deal between California’s Southern Edison and Arizona/Texas utilities – and it would bring many construction jobs to the region, as well as preserve their scarce water. It would cover a fair amount of land – but would it destroy the local ecology? Would it pump toxins into the surrounding air and soil year in, year out, all while depleting scarce water supplies? No. Thus, it’s the best option.
If the California Air Resources Board had an unbiased approach, they’d have had to assign a huge pollution cost to all Four Corners coal electricity imports – but no, that was only for biofuel ‘land use’ estimates – you see, cattle and soy production in the Brazilian Amazon is due to the demand for biofuels… it has nothing to do with America’s desire for cheap beef, or Europe’s desire for GMO-free soybeans. It’s getting to be as if every day was April Fool’s Day…
As far as this statement: On the other hand, significant money gets spent finding better ways to convert plant sugars to ethanol (which contains less energy) so it can be burnt in inefficient internal combustion engines
Recall everything Adam Smith said about supply, demand, farming and so on? Ethanol keeps, but fresh corn doesn’t. Say you are a skilled farmer and you grow twice as much corn per acre as your neighbors do – but then, nobody wants to buy it because you grew too much. You can then convert the corn to ethanol, and not leave it to rot on the ground. Economically, this is good for the farmer – but if coal is used to refine the ethanol, it does nothing to reduce fossil CO2 emissions. Likewise, the farmer would have to set up wind and solar on farms to provide power for electric farm equipment in order really be carbon-neutral.
The bottom line is that ethanol as a solution to fossil CO2 emissions only makes sense if no fossil fuels are involved in growing or refining the fuel. Kansas just approved a 800 MW coal plant to fire the ethanol stills, and apparently didn’t even consider wind or solar.
A far better deal for Kansas and Arizona would be for Arizona to sell solar power to Kansas, and then buy ethanol in return. David Ricardo’s comparative advantage in action – but this would be opposed by all the coal-fired utilities, wouldn’t it?
I don’t see how you can argue for nuclear in Arizona – what would they do for water in the future?
#653 Lawrence Brown:
“An alternative approach that hasn’t gotten much mention here, is reducing energy use through energy efficiency.”
Unfortunately we’re -planning- on having another 3 billion persons arrive on the planet during the same period when we’re scrambling to get our energy supply cleaned up. We can and absolutely should wring the last iota of waste out of our habits. If we’re really good at it we can come out ready to supply our next 3 billion companions with juice, with little additional filth to manage.
A bittersweet improvement but you’re so right.
James, most of the available energy in plants is tied up in compounds other than sugar — cellulose, lignin. Plants are well defended.
“… Granted, when the plant dies, the cellulose will eventually break down. But very very slowly, and usually it’s the last molecule to go. Ever see a dead tree suddenly turn liquid? That’s what they’re saying they’ll be able to do, in 5 years. Believe me, the fungi and bacteria would do it now, if they could. The biotech boys are already aware of some of the difficulties ….”
http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/search?q=switchgrass
Re #664, fortunately those 3 billion people are going to be born in places where their energy use it modest or little relative to the wests energy usage. If we take North America, Australasia, Europe and Russia alone then that will make up most of the worlds energy usage. Lets not start blaming global population for carbon emissions, the first 100 ppmv is down to industrial society and the next 100 ppmv (50 years worth) is also down to present industrial society and China and India plus some from South America but its not as much even when projected out. China and india make our goods now and we still consume vast amounts of energy.
Therefore energy efficiency is a good idea, americans need to be driving 50 MPG vehicles as of yesterday (not likely just yet until the cost of oil rockets again) and so does the rest of the industrial world just for starters. However therein lies a problem with efficiency, it makes people do more and hence use more. Its a known problem!
Re #663, Lets get really real Ike about this issue and look at the fact of energy use. Oil, coal and gas dominate world energy usage and if they are approaching their respectve peaks then global warming might just be a side issues unless we go a bit mental about the not sdo easy to extract oils and burn a lot more brown coal to, then it could get nasty.
it is going to take decades to get renewables deployed to a level where it halves fossil fuel emissions, let alone the 80% required. Oil usage (recession not included) grows at 2% per annum, seems nothing at all but its a lot as that 2% becomes a doubling in 35 years (70/2=35). Nasty.
pete best #666 — Good point about conservation. Experience has shown that voluntary conservation in the US gets little public support. It’s a great idea for other people, though.
No amount of pious posturing will get India and China to give up their aspirations to burn as much fuel per capita as the developed countries. We’ve got to deal with the reality that worldwide CO2 emissions will be accelerating, and we’d better get busy soon doing something real about it.
Cap-and-trade is not something real, but a junk market scheme to benefit Wall Street and pretend we’re getting serious.
“No amount of pious posturing will get India and China to give up their aspirations to burn as much fuel per capita as the developed countries”
Except that they have the most to lose: more people and more dependence on natural resources like, oh, glaciers in the mountains meaning that winter rain is released slowly rather than in some massive flood.
Apart from that..?
#667 Wilmot:
“Experience has shown that voluntary conservation in the US gets little public support.”
Except when price is allowed to work its magic. Volunteers line up around the block when consumers are confronted with a sharp shock. I miss the days of $4.00 gasoline here in the US and I’m eagerly awaiting another price rise to help us quickly evolve less stupid behaviors.
#666 Pete:
“Lets not start blaming global population for carbon emissions…”
I’ll happily and I think with ample justification blame global population for nearly every environmental problem we face, and for much strife besides.
Supplying 2 billion people with electrical transformers while pouring PCB waste into the nearest river is way less dangerous than supplying 6 billions. Providing the copper for the windings for transformers to supply 2 billion is less environmentally costly than doing it for 6 billion. Providing 50% of electrical demand from coal for 200 million Americans releases less CO2 than for 350 million. The list of examples goes on and on.
Regarding our next 3 billion compadres, they’re all going to be equipped with bowls waiting to be filled with food, regardless of if they’re reclining in a Barcalounger up in a highrise or squatting on a dirt floor in a grass shack. The “Green Revolution” which allowed us to balloon our population to absurd levels was substantially fueled not just by improved crop varieties but also by the Haber process and related energy-intensive fertilizer production schemes. We got around the first excess few billions by unleashing hydrocarbons to fix our fertilizer requirement. We can’t do that again.
“Oil usage (recession not included) grows at 2% per annum, seems nothing at all but its a lot as that 2% becomes a doubling in 35 years”
And why is that happening?
Re #668, its not going to be easy Mark and whether its glaciers going ot rivers drying up some otherway it will effect us all, although maybe some more than others. Is that what we in the west reckon, its the poor first and then we can stop it to save us ?
Wilmot: “No amount of pious posturing will get India and China to give up their aspirations to burn as much fuel per capita as the developed countries.”
David Chu, current DOE secretary: “China and India would not turn their back on coal.”
I don’t know why it is that so many commentators insist that China and India have no renewable energy goals:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/05/china-to-focus-on-renewable-energy
Or, see this:
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20090515/renewable-energy-sector-grew-120b-investments.htm
Likewise, Australia just announced their own solar PV project:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-05/17/content_11389840.htm
So, is this being matched by any similar U.S. proposals? No, we put aside $2.3 billion for FutureGen, which will likely never produce power as advertised – a shocking waste of taxpayer money not backed up by any prototypes at all – nothing. No venture capitalist or angel investor would dream of putting money into the scheme – but the DOE is dropping $2.3 billion on it. Truly amazing – listen to this:
“This funding will both create jobs now and help position the United States to lead the world in CCS technologies, which will be in increasing demand in the years ahead,” Chu said.
Yes, everyone is just lining up to get 1/10th the power per ton of coal that current power plants deliver – because you can guarantee that if all emissions are captured, that will suck up about 90% of the power output of the coal-fired plant – and burial isn’t even possible, at 30 million tons of CO2 per coal plant per year. Yet, with no working prototype or evidence that it’s anything but a scam, the DOE is going to drop another $2.3 billion on it.
If it’s such a great idea, why don’t the coal-fired utility holding companies finance it themselves? Why isn’t Bill Gates or Warren Buffet stepping up to position themselves at the base of the “CCS economic miracle”?
Simple – the entire project is a fraud. Any independent analyst would tell you the same thing – but coal-state politicians don’t count as independent analysts, and neither do the administrators of our national DOE labs, who have far too many political pressures on them to ever produce independent scientific assessments of politically sensitive matters – and let’s not forget that the new second-in-command at the DOE was also BP’s chief scientist while they were expanding their Canadian tar sands operations.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30766806/
Meanwhile, I see that Michelle Obama, Richard Blum and Mark Yudof all attended the UC Merced graduation – funny thing about Merced, not that the papers mentioned it – they were the first UC to have a dedicated renewable energy program, but it never took off due to lack of federal funding for renewable energy research… so, as an indication of some level of sincerity, how about pushing for a real federal renewable energy research budget for universities, so they don’t have to keep scraping by on private donations?
http://www.ucmerced.edu/news_articles/08032007_donation_brings_uc_merced.asp
#664 Doug Bostrom
Before you spend too much time on the “last iotas” of waste, why not consider the first monstrosities of waste. Iotas don’t get the job done in the face of the real problems.
Check out the big monstrosities at the latest Annual Energy Outlook 2009 from the EIA,and look at Figure 81. (They returned to this silly but still very useful format this year, which they had made more scientific but less informative last year. I say silly because the bar graphs count electricity production of CO2 twice. Thus, the bars add up to a lot more than the totals of the inset.)
I can’t show the chart of Figure 81 on this comment block, so I summarize the quantities:
Of the USA total, the 40% monster is electricity generation, mostly due to coal. The 33% monster is transportation where about 22% of that USA total is light cars and trucks and about 11% heavy transport. Industrial CO2 emissions are about 19% of the total, commercial are about 3% and residential are about 5%. You have to know to exclude the CO2 from electrical use that is the respective allocations of the 40% from electrical generation. But by showing the bar twice, at least they tell us the important information about where the efficiency leverage can be found.
CO2 from electric generation could be cut in half by switching to natural gas. It could be cut to about half of that by converting from central power plants to distributed cogeneration using natural gas. If we use natural gas in cogeneration, we can double or triple the efficiency of use of that resource, and maybe there will be enough to last a while. We just have to get rid of some of the lessons Westinghouse, and subsequently GE, taught us about central power plants.
Now lets whack transportation. Most of the energy losses for light trucks and cars are due to churning air. About half the losses for heavy transport are for churning air and the other half for heating rubber. Engines have to supply 3 to 5 times this energy loss. But a 75% cut in the aerodynamic and rolling resistance means the overall emissions would be cut 75%. We just have to get rid of some of the lessons Henry Ford taught us about cars.
Insulation can be seen to have a rather weak potential, but ok, it could be worth doing, if reasonably affordable.
Real solutions have to support life approximately as we would like to live at a reasonable cost.
Maybe the way to influence the rest of the world is to start showing how things can be done right, so as they advance to a life style following our example, they can see some reasonable options.
Now that we have taken care of the big stuff, bring out the last iota list. If you bring it out now, we will waste a lot of time on money and do a lot of silly stuff that could get in the way. Like plug-in cars that are not efficient, almost useless “smart grids”, and wind mills having a primary purpose of sucking money out of the public.
Wilmot says:
> experience has shown
Says who? You’re being misled. Where do you get your disinformation?
You can look it up. California, Alaska, Sarajevo. When there’s been an energy crisis for whatever reason, voluntary action by individuals has astonished the talking heads. Yet they continue to fool people like they fooled you. Experience has shown they can fool most people, most of the time. You’ve been fooled. Don’t be fooled again.
http://static.uspirg.org/newsletters/winter06/story4.html
“Conservation Lowers Prices
Remember the energy crisis in California during the winter of 2000-2001? To avoid another season of rolling
blackouts and skyrocketing prices, California embarked on a PIRGbacked emergency energy conservation blitz, slashing its consumption by 6 percent within a single year, saving the economy billions of dollars.
How significant is a 6 percent reduction in energy use? According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a 2 percent reduction in electricity and natural gas demand could trigger a 25 percent reduction in wholesale prices within a single year…..’
———–
The Electricity Journal : California Overcomes an Electricity …
What emerged in 2001 was the most successful statewide energy conservation campaign ever conducted.
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1040619001002615
#672 Jim:
By definition every last iota includes the big things, yes? And it’s fairly self-obvious that we’ll start with the low hanging fruit.
“CO2 from electric generation could be cut in half by switching to natural gas.”
Briefly, then the lights will extinguish as the last of the pathetically small and inadequate-for-the-task global resource of natural gas hisses through our combustion chambers. Sadly we’ll also have lost our option to use this excellent resource for other purposes, having burnt it like cavemen.
You keep coming back to natural gas. Why? It’s balloon that would pop as soon as the weight of present demand were dropped on it.
“Now that we have taken care of the big stuff, bring out the last iota list. ”
Surely you’re not advocating –ignoring– free, easy steps we can take this instant to reduce energy consumption?
I don’t think you’re really suggesting that we get really linear and not save where we could do it for free, right now. Why wouldn’t we insist that electronic manufacturers seeking to duck the cost of UL certification cease taking money out of our pockets by passing 19th century technology and costs along to us in the form of external power supplies using ferrous transformers that often dissipate more energy as heat than they manage to pass along to the connected device? The list of effortless savings is quite large, enough to eliminate many combustion power plants right now, for nothing. Why wouldn’t we avail ourselves of the savings in money and filth right now?
Actually, I have an answer to that last question. Our legislators are as butter under the thin edge of the knife of organized constituencies, while by comparison rest of us are as cutting as a zephyr of wind.
Doug Bostrom Says (17 May 2009 at 2:10 PM):
“James, what’s up with your don’t-or-die attitude concerning energy sources that don’t involve fissioning atoms?”
I think you completely misunderstand my position. I could tell you in two words, if they hadn’t been pre-empted by an organization whose tactics (and no few positions) I disagree with. It’s the opposite of the statement quoted by SecularAnimist in #659: “…more than enough land in the Southwest is available without requiring use of environmentally sensitive areas…”. To me, ALL land (and ocean) is valuable, especially those part of it that haven’t been plowed up & paved over by humans.
So we all agree (I hope) that we have a CO2 problem. The question is how to deal with it without our attempts to fix it doing as much or more damage as the problem we’re trying to fix. Solar farms do damage far beyond the value of the power they produce, therefore I’m against them. Nuclear plants have minimal effect on the Earth – even when they fail, as at Chernobyl, there’s considerable evidence that the effects are a net improvement – therefore I am not against them.
The rest just comes down to discussions of technology & economics.
“By process of elimination, all you’re leaving on the table is a spray of particles.”
Not at all. As I’ve said repeatedly, I think solar on existing rooftops is a good idea. Improved efficiency – including just plain not doing some things, like lighting vacant buildings & parking lots – is great. Wind turbines are fine for areas, such as Great Plains farmlands, that’s already significantly impacted, not necessarily in others.
“You say you’re interested in practical alternatives, but when confronted with that possibility your final position is that nuclear war is better?”
For the Earth, yes. Consider the extremes: at one end, humanity industrializes all the Earth to run its (for want of a better word) civilization; at the other a small portion of the land area (most of which is urbanized already) is sacrificed, but the human population & its environmental burden is reduced to a level the Earth can support.
Ike Solem- If the electric vehicle recharges its battery using a fossil fired power plant then it isn’t carbon free,which defeats the purpose of the whole experiment, though as we change to more alternatively powered electrical plants, this will become less of a problem.
A consideration which should be accounted for is if the battery is recharged from a fossil powered plant operating at 35 to 40 percent efficiency.This ought to be taken into account for the final efficiency of an electric car under these conditions. Jim Bullis also addresses this point in #661 above, and he includes other factors, as well.
Since I am not sure it’s clear from gavin’s response, Chip Knappenberger is shilling for Patrick Michaels fake-environmental, fake-science, denialism web site, World Climate Report and his PR firm, New Hope Environmental Services. Michaels is notorious for several reasons*, but perhaps most so for doctoring James Hansen’s climate projection charts – similarly to the way the other notorious anti-science denialist Martin Durkin did with temperatures and sun cycles.
*Including extreme dishonesty about his funding – which shows him to be a cats-paw for the Western Fuels Association, Edison Electric, and other anti-environmental interests and New Horizons as a flack for auto and coal companies, and dishonesty about his status and title in Virginia. and about his relationship to environmentalism.
Ike Solem Says (17 May 2009 at 2:15 PM):
“James, if all fossil fuels vanished from the earth overnight, do you really think civilization would collapse?”
Yes. In better words than I can manage:
“It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted that land for hundred of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed…” (Terry Pratchett, Night Watch)
And in this world, most of that consumption runs on oil & coal. Shut it off, even for a day, and the urbanites start getting hungry. Within a week, they’ll have boiled out of their hives, and will be eating the land bare within walking distance. Of course their numbers will be considerably reduced, as the more ruthless discover that their neighbors are a ready source of food.
“You can complain that solar has low-energy density relative to nuclear…”
No, that’s not my complaint (or at least only indirectly). My complaint is that converting unoccupied land to solar farms destroys whatver ecosystem occupies that land.
“For a practical example, a one-gigawatt solar panel installation in the Four Corners could easily replace the entire coal-fired Four Corners Power Station…”
And how much area is this going to cover?
“It would cover a fair amount of land – but would it destroy the local ecology?”
Seems pretty obvious that it would, doesn’t it? What drives the ecology, if not sunlight? So what’s better, poisoning (and not at at lethal level) or starvation?
“If the California Air Resources Board had an unbiased approach, they’d have had to assign a huge pollution cost to all Four Corners coal electricity imports…”
And they’d have to assign a similar, but even higher, cost for a Four Corners solar plant, because it’s not just a change of land use, but the total elimination of the ecosystem in the area the plant covers.
And another question: why not put that same 1 GW worth of solar cells on roofs in Phoenix and Los Angeles, and save yourself the cost of several hundred miles of high-voltage transmission line?
“I don’t see how you can argue for nuclear in Arizona – what would they do for water in the future?”
Why do you think nuclear power requires using water? Like any heat engine (including those solar thermal plants), it requires a temperature difference. Most plants (coal & nuclear) do use a once-through flow of cooling water, but that’s because they’re located where water’s readily available. It’s quite possible to use closed-loop coolers (like your car’s radiator), that reject heat to the air. Better still, instead of building the plant in Arizona & exporting most of the power to Southern California, you build the plants next to the Pacific Ocean, and send power the other way.
As for water use, have you ever spent time in the Four Corners area? If you have, you will have undoubtedly noticed that things left outside for long get rather dusty. When that happens to the PV panels, the efficiency will drop (see for instance the experience of the Mars Rovers with dust). What do you suppose the plant operators will do then? Something roughly equivalent to getting out the garden hose & washing them?
Hank Roberts Says (17 May 2009 at 3:14 PM):
“…most of the available energy in plants is tied up in compounds other than sugar — cellulose, lignin. Plants are well defended.”
Sure. But you have the same problems in the pathway(s) of breaking those things down to ethanol, no? In fact, sugars are just one step before ethanol, so if you can do e.g. cellulistic ethanol, you should be able to do cellulistic sugar.
Indeed, it’s fairly easy to get at least some sugar from plants: easy enough so that it’s well under $0.50/lbs at my supermarket (bulk prices seem to be in the $0.20/lb range), while even fairly dilute aqueous solutions of ethanol cost a LOT more than that :-)
If ethanol supplies are produced from sugar (or from the starches in e.g. corn converted to sugar), & requires fermentation & distillation to extract (both taking energy) then surely you’re better off stopping at sugar?
> Annual Energy Outlook 2009 from the EIA
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/index.html
> fig. 81
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/images/figure_81.gif
#675 James:
“As I’ve said repeatedly, I think solar on existing rooftops is a good idea. ”
Bingo, ok I understand. We could argue all day about how much intact desert ecosystem would be obliterated by PV plants, but true enough there’s a lot of roof area available. We’d probably have to install something like 50-100% more active PV surface area and a colletively massive amount of additional ancillary gear to get the same amount of energy conditioned for distribution compared to more ideal sites, but that’s a tradeoff worth looking.
I still can’t quite agree on the nuclear obliteration angle, though. Call me an old softy, but so be it. :-P
320 Jim Bouldin
Rene Cheront has done nothing but make sweeping assertions, without any sort of backing evidence or defense, while several of us have provided specific examples demonstrating these to be false based on our knowledge of resource management (and with no response).
Every last bit of the above is utterly false.
– I have supported each point made
– the claimed counter-examples have been flawed to a greater or lesser extent
– I have responded to them (been too busy last week or so though)
– your ‘knowledge’ of resource management speaks mainly of ideological predisposition
Doug Bostrom Says (17 May 2009 at 10:55 PM):
“…true enough there’s a lot of roof area available. We’d probably have to install something like 50-100% more active PV surface area and a colletively massive amount of additional ancillary gear to get the same amount of energy conditioned for distribution compared to more ideal sites, but that’s a tradeoff worth looking.”
Maybe not. There are benefits to putting the panels at point of use, starting with eliminating the need for building long transmission lines, and the associated transmission loss. Then the gear: might it not be cheaper to make millions of house-sized control units, and even high-speed flywheel storage (or other technology, depending on what works best), rather than a few utility-sized ones. And of course the intangibles that come from a more-distributed energy system.
“I still can’t quite agree on the nuclear obliteration angle, though. Call me an old softy, but so be it.”
Can’t say that it’s something I’d really enjoy, either. But my considered opinion is that reasonable use of nuclear power wouldn’t raise the risk at all, and might even lessen it. Ever stop to think about how many WWII-sized wars have been prevented because one or more of the parties had nuclear weapons? Just off the top of my head, 4 US/Europe vs USSR, USSR vs China in late ’60s, Chinese invasion of Taiwan, India/Pakistan. after the Mumbai attacks if not earlier…
#370 dhogaza
…assumes that biodiversity is only of value to those willing to pay to preserve it
…ignores the value of biodiversity that traditional economics doesn’t capture…The fact that many people don’t value biodiversity doesn’t change the fact that biodiversity and the ecosystem services provided by the biosphere are crucial to sustaining human civilization.
Just as the fact that people don’t value the atmosphere doesn’t change the fact that dumping ever-increasing amounts of CO2 into it threatens the well-being of every human on the planet.
The market captures what people think, right or wrong. If there are differences of opinion – such as with biodiversity and the atmosphere – this too is captured.
And let us not forget here the problem of lack of ownership of both of those, the tragedy of the commons issue.
Lawrence Brown Says (17 May 2009 at 7:06 PM)
“…if the battery is recharged from a fossil powered plant operating at 35 to 40 percent efficiency.This ought to be taken into account for the final efficiency of an electric car…”
But if you do that, it’s only fair to include all the energy costs of producing oil and getting it into the gas tank as well. Seems like you have two places (maybe more?) to start from, either of which will give you a meaningful answer. One is the vehicle’s efficiency, for which you start from a full tank or charged battery. The other is the efficiency of the full path from source – oil well, coal mine, or whatever – to miles driven.
#391 RichardC Says:
Rene claims, “Those who own a forest are not compelled to harvest it against their wishes.”
Wrong. Hostile takeovers are designed specifically for that situation. A corporation which takes other factors than money into account can be taken over with money when their book value gets too high for their stock value.
If a takeover occurs, the people who formerly owned it no longer do, so cannot be said to be compelled to be doing anything with it. And noone is compelled to sell what they do not choose to sell.
The hostility in so-called ‘hostile’ takeovers is directed at bungling management, not owners.
#683 James:
“…might it not be cheaper to make millions of house-sized control units, and even high-speed flywheel storage…”
Made in China, presumably. Or someplace that’ll still take our scrip, heh!
I dunno. The attraction of decentralization is big, but golly what a lot of components. I guess the only thing that makes me truly squeamish about the idea is the idea of so many millions of square meters of PV cells -not- optimally pointed; I suppose that’s because PV cells are so relatively precious right now it flys against all my experience to use them so.
I guess when we can get PV production technology squared away better it’d be ok, particularly if we can make the switch to fully organic PV cells.
Organic PV is yet another reason not to burn all our petroleum as though we were still dressed in skins and chipping flint. What a bunch of schmucks we’re going to look to our descendants: “They –burned– it all? What!?”
re 684, it captures what marketing and control let people think.
Why did Nestle buy rowntree but not change the name (similarly with many other companies)? Because Nestle were in a bit of a consumer backlash over their milk supplements to the third world relief (requiring water which is pretty dangerous for a young child there, unlike the purified breast milk…). Their bottom line was shot for a while, so they bought up other companies and kept their name.
Many people didn’t know so they bought the items, ensuring Nestle had money coming in.
Or for a geek version, look at all “anti-piracy” works. Especially Macrovision. Touted with the tagline something along the lines of “Keeping the picture quality high” (with the lie that pirated content would always be low quality) yet macrovision’s protective mechanism is one that degrades the signal recorded to confuse tape copiers.
CDs do the same: “anti-piracy” that puts deliberately bad data on the track and uses the error correction mechanisms to undo it. Error correction that is no longer available to correct any errors that DO turn up. Why do you think CD’s so much more often skip in cars and old players? Error correction is no longer error correction.
How many people know that?
The market works on what people know. PR and marketing try to ensure that people know only what the company or organisation wants them to know. Distorting the free market.
See another example in the UK’s MP expenses row.
re 682. No you haven’t explained. You’ve got an axiom that ownership will make people take care of what they own.
ANYTHING that doesn’t support that axiom (being an axiom, you don’t think it needs explanation, we don’t think it is an axiom) is ignored.
The entire story of this thread is where the fish were owned and yet were exploited even worse (since they knew at that point the problem with fish stocks and sustainability).
And you still merely say, as if it were self-evident truth: “the problem of lack of ownership of both of those”.
Your axiom doesn’t work. Many examples have been given. Yet you still hold to that idea as if it were axiomatic.
Re #669, The world can support 9 billion but not if they all want to live at the energy consumption of industrial westerners which brings up the entire edifice of western life. Our medical science has increased our lives by 2.5 years for every decade that passes right to the point where the balance between birth and death has long been driven far from equilibrium.
This it could be argued is all down to the energy inbalance that humans have stumbled upon and now exploit. However few people ask how much is left and how suatainable it is but its not what has caused the population explosion per se. In the west the populations are relatively stable, hence immigration to bring in the workers as an economic necessity. 2 billion people are living on next to nothing which 1 billion in the western contries live on 100’s of times more consumtpion than they do, the other 3.9 billion live somewhere in between, mainly China and India (2.4 billion with many in poverty and 700 million in Africa). Some of South America live well but not the majority in energy terms.
The answer is relatively simple, the USA was the first to exploit oil for the masses and now 150 years later exploit along with other western societies coal and gas as well and at present have little need or answer to their growing energy needs. For some reason we want to blame China, well the USA does anyway but at 20 tonnes of carbon per head of the population the USA needs to reign itself in, develop its own alternative energy infrastructure and show the world it can be done. At present China just craves what we have and in a very short time span will run into issues with supply which will effect us all.
Its 30,000,000,000 barrels of oil per annuum and counting or if you drivide that by 7 its around 4.5 billion tonnes of oil consumed every year. The USA consumes just over 1 billion tonnes of that or 25% with 4% of the worlds population. So lets get really real about it shall we please.
Begtging bowls are not the main issues.
Sorry, I know it’s totally off topic, but the French radio apparently announced this evening that Mr. Claudre Allègre (a reknowned member of “Ze Noble Order of ze Chevaliers de la Terre plate”) is tipped to become a Minister in the Sarkozy-Fillon government.
TokyoTom writes:
Fry: You know what the worst thing about being a slave is? You have to do hard work all the time, they don’t pay you, and you can’t quit!
Leela: Fry, that’s the only thing about being a slave.
How the arrangement comes into being really doesn’t interest me. Nor would it interest any sane person.
James writes:
Google “nuclear winter.”
[Response: Forget nuclear winter, the quoted statement is simply insane. It is not worth giving a moment’s thought. – gavin]
James writes:
How many thousands of Ukrainian kids got thyroid cancer?
James writes:
Then again, we nearly had global nuclear wars three times, and any one of those occasions could have gone the other way if things had broken a little differently. The last of the three incidents (1962, 1971, 1983) depended on one man (Lieutenant Aleksandr “Sasha” Petrov, Strategic Rocket Forces of the USSR) deciding that the US launch information he had been given was a false alarm.
Lest any of you think that this is speculative, the mood in New Zealand shifted over the span of the past 8 years, from support of doing everything we can to doing as little as we can get away with, with a resulting change in government because “nothing WE do will matter anyway” and “why should we cripple ourselves when the US does nothing at all”. Amateur analysis and professional white-anting are the norm now.
Gavin… taking into account human nature, I suspect we’d better prepare ourselves for at least 4 degrees. The catastrophe will be completely locked in before the citizenry becomes outraged and informed enough to do anything sensible. It will be too late then… and the even worse consequences dictated by other aspects of human nature will prevail. The HUMAN side is so pronounced a problem that democratic processes will, in the end, fail.
BJ
#691 François Marchand: that was an April Fool’s joke:
http://www.scienceblogs.de/primaklima/2009/04/ein-aprilscherz-wird-zum-welterfolg.php
Seems hard to kill off…
[Response: Might not be so funny any more….Georg, qu’est-ce que tu as fait!? – gavin]
James, did you really write the stuff Barton responded to? (I don’t have time just now to look back on the thread.) If so, I think you just lost me–seems like a huge detour into lala land. (Chernobyl a “net improvement?” Solar requiring “total environmental destruction?”) As Ray once wrote, “wow–just wow.”
BJ, I don’t think that the credibility of the denialists is going to last as long as you fear. They are continually asserting the contrafactual, and there are a lot of people who know that now–this will become increasingly obvious generally in the next few years. Yes, it should have been obvious to all before now, and yes, we really do need to “hit the brakes hard” now, so this is far less than optimal. But I think you are more pessimistic than necessary.
Ike Solem
Whether or not you can see how one could argue for nuclear in Arizona, the argument was advanced long ago. The largest nuclear power facility in the US has been operating just outside Phoenix for many years. Palo Verde use waste water (i.e. sewage) from local communities; it won’t run out unless the communities run out of sewage first.
At one point, additional plants were proposed; those would have used dry cooling towers.
Palo Verde– Wikipedia
Arizona is well situated for solar too. However, you are more likely to convince people to reduce the number of carbon fueled plants if you avoid circulating implausible reasons why we should not use nuclear power to replace coal.
Rene, repetition is a propaganda tool. Saying the same thing over and over without acknowledging any other arguments – that’s repetition, not discussion, and shows that you are unable to debate your point – so why bother?
Take a practical examples: the desire of Peru’s government to expand oil exploration in the ancestral lands of Peruvian Indians – who owns the resource? On one hand, you have the land and rivers and forests that sit above the oil fields, and that will be seriously degraded by oil exploration – don’t the Indians ‘own’ their own land?
However, the Peruvian government, which has recently signed NAFTA-style free trade agreements with the U.S. and China, wants to gain revenue by allowing in IOCs, much as Ecuador did with Texaco in the 1970s when it was run by a military dictatorship. They’ve just sent in the military to crush the protestors, that’s our allies for you:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8054043.stm
Likewise, in Ecuador ChevronTexaco is the subject of a multibillion dollar lawsuit for the damaging methods introduced by Texaco drillers in the 1970s and 1980s – methods that would never be allowed within the U.S., such as dumping drilling oil and fluids into open pits and abandoning them, thereby poisoning the entire watershed and groundwater with toxic residues, and also wiping out the fishing.
In any case, it’s not about ownership. For a good refutation of that ideology, see Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
A good book, but not a single mention of ecological or thermodynamic principles, or of how they ultimately set the limits on economic activity. He does show that it’s not about ownership:
“So the case against state-owned enterprises, or public ownership, seems very powerful. The citizens, despite being the legal owners of public enterprises, have neither the incentive nor the ability to monitor their agents, who have been hired to run their enterprises. The agents (managers) do not maximize enterprise profits, while it is impossible for the principles (citizens) to make them do so, because of the inherent deficiency in information they possess about the agent’s behavior and the free-rider problem amongst the principles themselves. On top of this, state ownership makes it possible for political lobbying rather than through raising productivity.”
Is the Peruvian state oil extraction program and example of state-owned enterprises? Is the Peruvian military also a state-owned enterprise that is supporting the state agenda by violently crushing protests by local stakeholders? Obviously, the state ownership problems apply to Peru and the oil that lies under ancestral native lands.
However, what about ChevronTexaco in Ecuador? Did they behave any differently? Not really – as Chang notes:
“But all three arguments against state ownership of enterprises actually apply to large private-sector firms as well. The principal-agent problem and the free-rider problem affect many large private-sector firms as well…. if a private enterprise is run by hired managers and there are numerous shareholders owning only small fractions of the company, it will suffer from the same problems as state-owned enterprises.
Nowhere is this seen as clearly as in the U.S. auto industry, whose shareholders have historically been also invested in petroleum drilling and refining. Those shareholders pressured the CEOs to make gas guzzlers, not fuel efficient cars, because it kept oil demand high. More independent auto companies were responsive to customer demand, and thus starting making fuel efficient cars.
So, that’s a cartel-based economy, not a free-market system. You can also see this in the holding companies that own coal, railroad and electric utility companies – Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, for example, is probably largest owner of commercial rail in the U.S., and they rely heavily on coal shipments for their profits. Buffet also owns Constellation Energy, a utility that owns 12 coal-fired power plants.
Replacing those coal plants would mean an end to rail deliveries – which is why there is no political pressure within the the U.S. government to replace coal plants with renewable energy sources.
That’s not about free markets, is it? 75% of the public favors rapid development of renewable energy – but they’re locked into a cartel electricity system that operates as a legal monopoly and maintains itself via bribery of politicians – it’s a lot like communism, isn’t it? No consumer choice allowed – really, the state-corporate combo knows what is best for us, say the electricity dealers – and isn’t that a communist argument?
Getting a free-market enthusiast to look at the electricity “market” in the U.S. is very hard to do – they just don’t want to talk about it, even if that is where 50% of Wall Street underwriting lies.