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.
> Georg, qu’est-ce que tu as fait!? – gavin
Pas drôle :-(
James, you think Chernobyl was a net improvement?
How many more Chernobyls would it take to achieve utter perfection?
Is there a red heifer in this future you’re looking forward to, maybe?
And you failed to read the list of problems with switchgrass, did you even click the link to understand what the man’s saying there?
I suppose once I’ve noticed the first, the second should be no surprise.
> Sarkozy
I commend the Babelfish translation of that article on Sarkozy’s prospects, apparently, for joining the French government. It says in part:
“… Here, one fears to see it cutting down on his prerogatives, there, to sow the storm, him which s’ was put at back the teachers, ten years ago, while calling with ” to degrease the mammouth”. L’ former minister of l’ education of Lionel Jospin takes down its telephone on a tone bougon: ” I n’ have anything to say. I am in my laboratory in the train d’ to write a scientific article. The remainder, c’ is of l’ agitation.”…
James wrote: “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 …”
So according to you, solar thermal power stations cause unacceptable environmental damage — even though they have zero GHG emissions, require no mining for fuel ever, and could produce nearly 100 percent of the USA’s electricity supply from one percent of the USA’s desert lands, which is less than half the land that is currently used by roads, less land than is used by railroads and airports, and less land than has been despoiled by the ongoing environmental catastrophe of coal mining — and in contrast, the meltdown of Chernobyl was a “net improvement” to the environment.
Oh yes, and destroying every major city in the USA with nuclear weapons would be preferable to deploying solar thermal power stations on one percent of the USA’s deserts.
And to think, I had mistaken you for a serious person.
I would mention the ongoing, severe environmental damage inflicted on fragile desert ecosystems by uranium mining — which would worsen dramatically with the need to mine enough uranium to fuel the hundreds of new nuclear power plants you want to build in the USA alone — but given that you are OK with the environmental damage that would ensue from a large-scale nuclear war, that probably wouldn’t trouble you very much.
I know that promoting sustainable fisheries wasn’t exactly the point of this post but something might be learned by taking the analogy a step further and looking at how one person is thinking outside the box, literally when it comes to open ocean fish farming.
Even more interesting is that he gave up trying to make it work in the US because there was too much red tape. This, interestingly enough, at the same time that the red tape surrounding renewed off shore drilling for oil and natural gas was being cut. So Drill baby drill but don’t try environmentally sound fish farming…
http://openblueseafarms.com/
In re James @616 (and others)
Many of those “huge tracts of land” can be the roofs of various buildings and car parks. One plan for solar that I’ve discussed with potential investors is purpose building covered parking as solar farms — with the added benefit that it creates premium parking that can then be charged for, creating a dual revenue property.
So, it’s not carved in stone that all this “land” is actually “Land”. I’m on holiday at the moment so I don’t have the site plans from the last farm I considered, but my recollection is that 7 acres is about a megawatt, and 7 acres is also about 300,000 sqft. The number of warehouses / warehouse complexes of that size in most cities is fairly substantial. Adding solar to the rooftop of a warehouse produces two benefits — reduced thermal load and energy. You’re now free to use your imagination to figure out another area where I’m heading.
My company is looking into some interesting wind generating concepts, which I’m going to spare you, because I’m supposed to be enjoying myself today.
As regards your other comments, the observation that Picken’s wind plans became more expensive because … oil became more expensive … is a JUSTIFICATION for his plan, not a repudiation of it. Were his plan in place, those who are benefitting from green power would have had a significant advantage over those who were stuck in the old ways. My own experience was that while my neighbors saw their electric bills skyrocket, mine didn’t. But I have solar power for much of my needs. Do the math.
#690 Pete:
The world can sustain 9 billion? Ignoring for moment that you’re indulging in speculation, why should it? Is there some compelling requirement to add another 3 billion to our population? Why would we choose to make all of our diffculties a third more intractable, impossible as they already appear?
The world’s not “sustaining” 6 billion. We’re only awakening to a nightmare of unsustainability for the present load of passengers. We’re not only rapidly exhausting one our prime energy inputs but also discovering that it is actively toxic; it has to go, along with an enormous chain of dependencies that in parts allow the illusion of sustainability. Meanwhile, in the food department we’re required to produce another agricultural miracle while coming to grips with what is becoming increasingly obviously a nitrogen and phosphorous eutrophication crisis coupled with what threatens to shortly be a significant net loss of productivity. We’ve depleted native and secondary supplies of many vital metals and are now using increasingly absurd chemistry and ever larger amounts of energy to wring a few useful atoms out of tons of dross rock. Ironically, attempting to ameliorate many of these problems requires large amounts of fresh water, meaning that we’re confronted with choosing between drinking, feeding industrial plant or irrigating crops.
All of these things can be “fixed”, but the repairs will be ever so much easier if we don’t rut ourselves into folding another 3 billion into the equation. I think a real fix is going to involve the dawning recognition that even 6 billion makes the heap of problems we face essentially intractable in the long term.
We’re like a car that’s had the lights left on and now the battery is dying. Increasing the load is really stupid and in fact the headlights ought to be turned off.
You mention China. China has been roundly criticized for their one child rule. The application of the law is cruel, wrenching to see. Yet China’s government is attempting to directly address the issue of what upper bound their population can attain without drastic collapse or presumably a sustained misery index. It’s politically ugly, but arguably less ugly than trying to ignore the issue.
#685 James
You say, “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.”
I reply: If you have a right answer and a very wrong answer, does that mean you have two meaningful answers? However, for starters there are two meaningful questions:
First question: What is the energy efficiency of the motor propulsion system? For that you can get a fairly good answer by determining the efficiency from the input heat quantity and the mechanical energy out of the rotating machine in the car. You can reasonably include about 10% loss for transportation, mining, etc. for coal, maybe about 20% for gasoline.
Second question: What is the quantity of CO2 emissions associated with operating that car?
There does not seem to be much argument against including all the effects here. However, it seems to be a common error of people thinking that coal will not be the source of the energy. There is substantial reserve capacity in coal systems and it is the least cost way to meet any new demand for energy, as from a car as a particular example.
It is not reasonable to expect a power company to choose natural gas as its source as long as it costs three to ten times as much to use that fuel as it does to use coal. California likes to believe progress was made by banning coal, which forces the choice to be the high priced option. This government action over-rides reasonable business operation, but the cost penalty is immediately shifted to the public. The cost has not been extreme for the California public since the extra demand for natural gas caused by this government action is relatively small in the national natural gas market, and any marginal increase in price that California might have caused is countered on the energy market by the effect of the out of state operators shifting to more coal. Thus the natural gas price is more or less anchored by the coal market price.
My main point is that the action of California should be judged as to its effect were the whole country to do the same. (I did not make up that rule of ethics. I think Aristotle said something like that, a few years ago.)
#676 Lawrence Brown
You say, “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.”
I reply: We just need to adjust to the actual efficiency for coal fired power plants conversion from heat to electric energy which is 33% in the USA. Then thrown on a 93% efficiency for the average USA distribution line path to get a 30.7% efficiency for the heat to electrical energy availability point.
I think I made the case above that the actual response to new loads, whatever they might be, will be burning of coal.
Attempting to get ahead of the argument, it should not be imagined that bringing on of new renewable sources will reduce the use of coal. Rather, such new sources will reduce the use of the most expensive fuel option.
The BIG FINAL TWIST:
The real output is not at the rotating shaft. Service to human activity should be thought of as the real output.
Thus the system efficiency should include effectiveness of the vehicle. Mostly this can be simplified to mean to effectiveness in transporting a single person. Now the inefficiencies of aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance of tires, and effectiveness of energy retention through the acceleration and deceleration process. If we could get these things right, the effect would ripple back through the chain of effects to greatly reduce coal use.
There are enormous quantitative opportunities here. I would prefer not to have to go to nuclear power as the solution. Fixing what we have now seems possible, so maybe we can defer the nuclear power argument until it is proven to be unavoidable.
#690 Pete:
Fred’s post (#705) reminds me of part of the depressing litany of disaster I forgot to mention. Namely, we’ve mined the oceans to create a temporary ballooning of our population. Now more and more we’re down to “whitefish”. It’s the same deal as mineral resources, except we’re talking about foodstuffs. When the last of of the “whitefish” have been snarfed up it looks as though there’ll be plenty of jellyfish available, if we can turn it into something resembling food using chemistry.
That’s with the current population.
Re mine #706 and James #685
I did not address the wrong answer which comes about if you start with a “full fuel tank or a fully charged battery.”
That is like having a three mile race where some have to go three full miles and others get a two mile head start.
This widespread misconception seems to have come about from belief that heat energy and electrical energy can be equated. Probably this arises from the fact that the same units can be used in measuring each type of energy.
Please excuse my harshness in this, but this was taught in freshman physics which had to be taken by anyone with a degree in engineering or the hard sciences. I have to confess, my memory was a bit fuzzy on this as well, so I bought a used text by Sears, Mechanics Heat and Sound, Addison Wesley, 1950 since this was the closest I could get to my old Sears and Zemansky text that disappeared after about forty years of dragging it around.
Maybe people should be allowed to keep their college degrees if they at least go back and read the chapter on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (By the way, that law hasn’t changed since 1950.)
Why do I have to be so mean about this? Failure to get this right is now causing some very badly misguided work to get inappropriate priority. Federal and state laws are being passed as we speak that inappropriately favor electric vehicles. Being nice does not seem to work.
re 708, nope calculate the stored energy that can be released by your engine.
If that is a petrol engine, that would be the chemical energy POSSIBLE to get out of petrol. Diesel likewise, and so on for all the other chemical stores.
And do the same with the energy stored in a battery.
Heat energy isn’t what you want. Stored energy.
And to be fair, either you include all the costs of energy to get that gallon of petrol/whatever to your car with the costs to get that battery full. Or forget it.
Forgetting it will, one hopes, be a slight downer for electric cars since it doesn’t have to use non-local energy sources to the degree currently in practice.
In other news, after years of insistint that any changes were not only impossible but potentially fatal, free-marketeers begging for government handouts find no problems with California-izing U.S. automobile emissions and mileage standards:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/business/19emissions.html?hp
Re #711 Mark,
Stored energy in a battery had to be come from heat through a process. The heat engine in the car corresponds to the heat engine in the electric power plant. For fossil fuels, economic laws dictate that coal will be the choice.
I will leave it to others to explain how we get from heat of the sun to solar, wind, or hydro power. There must be plenty of expertise here from the climate physicists on that subject. It is a good thing that the sun is free, but we are a long way from having enough systems in place to put these in the reserve capacity category.
#711 Mark,
Yes, the cost of getting the gasoline to the tank is relevant. I threw in the 20% loss for this. I would be interested in a better number if a documented source for this was available.
#713 #711
Mark,
The problem with analyses of the efficiency of getting from crude oil at the well is that it becomes an endless debate.
At the core of this is that all fossil fuels have huge overheads. Coal can fairly be charged for having the greatest of future consequences. Oil can be charged with military expense for foreign operations. Natural gas is also not free of entanglements.
On top of that, the oil refining operations are not simply analyzed. A problem here is that gasoline and many other products are made from crude oil, and the proper allocation of energy and emissions needs to assign some of the damages to the other products.
I would be glad to have some better numbers for this last part.
As for the far reaching implications, those are out of my department, and debates on these are not likely to ever yield consensus numbers. So I am willing to settle for comparison starting with the heat point, with a correction factors as I have mentioned. We should be able to make progress on that basis.
Re #707, You are talking about western life but that is not the lifestyle that we need to live now is it. What we need to live is the same as it was in Europe 5000 years ago in the Neolithic where we consumed zero net carbon. Farming was adequate and the population was small and could never grow much more.
The billions presently on the planet will be curbed if the energy begins to run out but even so we will do enough to sustain a global population of many billions just not all watching wide screen TV’s and driving around in cars eating hamburgers for entertainment. China’s and Indias population have been large evne before coal, oil and gas were used.
James – “Personally, I’ll take the nuclear war – at least most of life outside the targeted cities would survive.“
When a nuclear attack happens, the target cities are completely wiped out; however, nuclear detonations put up huge amounts of smoke, and the smoke blocks sunlight, and everyone else dies from starvation. Even a very small exchange of modern nuclear weapons can be quite deadly for people on the opposite side of the world.
Mark – I posted about godel, and now your saying axiom a lot LOL.
Doug Bostrom – I really agree with their one child rue. Other countries need to have a similar policy because overpopulation is out of control. I know people may think I’m crazy or cruel, but it’s very very very very very very very very very very dangerous. If we collapse the food chain, we are in so much deep sh*t. The problem is only worsen by global warming because global warming depletes resources. I personally see two clocks ticking down.
Gavin – I have an idea for a topic. “What are you going to do about global warming?”
I’d like to see a post directed at the individual level. Quite frankly, I could compare and contrast wind power all day long, but those problems are now in the hands of engineers. I think it would be interesting for people to comment on how they are going to help reduce emissions as a person. Are people considering ideas for reducing emissions in their own profession? Just a suggestion =P
Belated response to Philip: no, I wasn’t being sarcastic at all. (Perhaps you confused me with someone else? I often post on the desirability of renewables to dig us out of the hole which we have dug for ourselves.)
I completely agree with you about the suitability of Texas summer days for solar, and thank you for the informed elaboration on the idea. That I-35 4-km array sounds good to me!
#717 EL:
“What are you going to do about global warming?”
I should probably spend less time reading the comments on RC. Laptop=27W. I don’t care to think about the amount of time I’m spending here just now, hopefully it’s just a phase.
My son and I are (oh too slowly) assembling a pair of hot water panels for the roof. Even here in the NW they can help. We’re attaching them to a moderator tank to feed the “main” hot water tank. Lines are in place for a demand heater but that involves natural gas which I’d rather not bring into play. I say go for the low quality, cheap-to-obtain heat first, if you can use it. What requires less intelligence and technology than heating water, yet it presently consumes 20% of my household’s electricity.
#707 Pete:
“What we need to live is the same as it was in Europe 5000 years ago in the Neolithic where we consumed zero net carbon. Farming was adequate and the population was small and could never grow much more.”
In other words, you agree that population control is a problem. Yeah, the population would -try- to grow, back then, but then starvation and attendant pathologies would take care of the situation. Happily we’ve since learned that we don’t -have- to behave like jackrabbits.
Even better, it turns out there’s a happy medium between the point where we behave like dumb beasts and the other end of the continuum where we -again- behave like dumb beasts.
Properly managed we can enjoy more or less poetic lives where we get to look back in time through big telescopes, see inside the Earth with seismic waves, make beautiful paintings, create abodes that are more than a box with a roof and breathing holes, the list goes on. We can do this on a fairly sizable scale as long as we keep our genes or magical thinking under control.
708 Jim says, ” We just need to adjust to the actual efficiency for coal fired power plants conversion from heat to electric energy which is 33% in the USA. Then thrown on a 93% efficiency for the average USA distribution line path to get a 30.7% efficiency for the heat to electrical energy availability point.”
You forgot the batteries! There’s a 25% immediate loss PLUS an equivalent delayed loss (costwise) from battery degradation. Now you have to add a capacity factor to account for battery weight and size and electric vehicles drop to perhaps 10% efficient. That’s using lead acid numbers. NiMH might be a tad better (anyone seen the numbers?), so say 15% efficient. Electric cars and plug-in hybrids are seriously bad ideas as long as fossil fuels are used for electrical production.
FurryCatHerder Says (18 May 2009 at 11:39 AM):
“Many of those “huge tracts of land” can be the roofs of various buildings and car parks.”
You do realize that that’s pretty much what I’ve been arguing against all along? Not putting solar panels on existing roofs (or covering existing parking lots), which in my opinion is a good thing, but about the sort of solar farm that takes existing wild land and builds over it.
Your comment does bring up a point that might make my position a bit clearer. It’s not about solar, really, but about the destruction of wild land. I’d be just as opposed if that land was to be covered with parking lots, warehouses, shopping malls, or anything else.
“As regards your other comments, the observation that Picken’s wind plans became more expensive because…”
I honestly don’t think that was my observation, I was just trying to find some costs for building wind farms, and that’s what Google came back with.
re 720, and there’s a reduction in partial combustion clogging up the engine if it’s an ICE.
“Mark – I posted about godel, and now your saying axiom a lot LOL. ”
Why the laughing out loud, El?
Axiom was to Rene, not you.
Godel doesn’t apply.
I fail to see the humour.
#720 RichardC:
Battery energy dissipation during charging varies according to initial state-of-charge but 25% loss falls solidly in the “hyperbolic exaggeration for rhetorical impact” bracket for EV applications, as well as being a gross oversimplification. With regard to heat and vapor liberation (which is what you’ll see w/lead acid batteries) it’s intuitively obvious letting alone doing the figures that 25% of the juice going into a cell is -not- lost during bulk charge.
In point of fact, during the bulk charge phase a lead-acid battery is over 90% efficient at absorbing charge. If the battery is used only at the extreme low end of its capacity (ie, very small use of total capacity) the overall efficiency is lower. This condition would only rarely apply to an EV application.
Other battery chemistries are similar.
All that that being said, extremely high rates of charge or discharge are less efficient but again for a pure EV that’s not really an issue, or won’t be where they’re deployed in a sane fashion.
Now why should I believe anything else you say? I could remark on your oversimplification of the mass comparison between IC and EV systems but you’ve already struck out with just one swing of the bat so why should I go into any detail there?
Battery charging information:
http://photovoltaics.sandia.gov/docs/PDF/batpapsteve.pdf
Barton Paul Levenson Says (18 May 2009 at 7:08 AM):
“How many thousands of Ukrainian kids got thyroid cancer?”
Seems to be considerable disagreement on that. My synopsis is that the usual anti-nuclear sources say “lots”, others say “few, and most of those could have been prevented by prompt administration of iodine”. I don’t have sufficient knowledge to form a sound opinion either way.
Whatever the merits of those conflicting claims, however, they have nothing whatsoever to do with the effects of Chernobyl on the Earth, or on the local ecosystem.
Kevin McKinney Says (18 May 2009 at 8:23 AM):
“Chernobyl a “net improvement?” Solar requiring “total environmental destruction?””
Yes. The so-called “Dead Zone” around Chernobyl seems to be teeming with life, including species not seen in the area for decades or centuries before the zone was established. How is this not an improvement for the Earth? WRT solar farms, just read the plans. The land would be scraped bare, and regularly treated with herbicides to kill off any plants that somehow managed to survive despite having most of their sunlight blocked.
Doug Bostrom Says (18 May 2009 at 11:41 AM):
“The world’s not “sustaining” 6 billion. We’re only awakening to a nightmare of unsustainability for the present load of passengers…”
That’s really what it’s all about. Worse, of that 6 billion, about half have to live crammed into cities, while the infrastructure that provides them with bare sustenance eats up an ever-growing fraction of the landscape and only a small fraction ever have a real chance at any sort of decent life.
Sure, it’d be nice to believe that the world might suddenly come to its senses and voluntarily copy China’s one child policy until the population declines to a sustainable level. (I think the phrase “a snowball’s chance…” applies here.) The best reality can do is offer a choice of which of the those Four Horsemen we’ll ride with.
Doug Bostrom – There is a lot of power consumed by computer technology, but the technology may also help reduce wasted energy. I may do a little research in that area.
I think it’s going to take every profession to deal with global warming. Unless people on the mechanical, nuclear, or electrical engineering side pull something out of their rear end, every professional needs to come up with ideas in his or her own profession to deal with emissions and global warming.
I just don’t think the current ideas are going to be enough. I believe they are going to fall short by a large margin. There are too many complexities involved with global warming. I’m fully convinced that it is going to take a collaborated effort across multiple professions to deal with this problem. Renewable energy technology is not viable on its own to deal with our energy consumption. Renewable energy can help slow down some of the emissions, but it’s not going to solve the problem.
I believe some discussion on the individual level is warranted.
Jim Bullis, Miastrada Co. Says (18 May 2009 at 11:45 AM)
“I reply: If you have a right answer and a very wrong answer, does that mean you have two meaningful answers?”
No, you have two right answers, but the answers are to different questions.
“First question: What is the energy efficiency of the motor propulsion system?”
This tells you whether your Hummer is a more or less efficient vehicle than for instance my Lotus Elise. And would give you the same answer if for instance you stuffed either the Hummer or the Lotus full of batteries and made an EV of it.
Here you don’t include anything for mining, supply chain losses, etc.
“Second question: What is the quantity of CO2 emissions associated with operating that car?”
Which of course answers the question for the whole supply chain.
Where these two answers, both correct in their own domain, is when someone claims that his electric Hummer is more efficient than your gasoline Lotus – something that might even be true if he’s getting all his electricity from his PV panels. Then understanding the answer to the first question provokes you into converting the Lotus into an EV, and you’re ahead again…
#725 James:
“WRT solar farms, just read the plans. The land would be scraped bare, and regularly treated with herbicides to kill off any plants that somehow managed to survive despite having most of their sunlight blocked.”
Just to keep the scales of fanaticism even, it’s mandatory for me to mention once again that there are gajillions (a technical term for “plenty”) of acres of land already denuded and saturated with various agricultural chemicals and just begging to be coated with PV panels, solar troughs, hamster wheels, whatever. Treatment w/herbicides won’t be needed; vegetation can be kept down w/electrically powered mechanical devices (lawnboys aka “Solar Efficiency Maintenance Groundskeepers” w/electric string trimmers). Dusting could be a problem where these devices are deployed in areas of little or no rainfall but I sort of doubt it would be a completely insurmountable technical challenge to arrange mechanical dusters to do that.
Ok James, your turn to say the opposite!
Re Jim ,#708. I was too optimistic in my 35% to 40% efficiency for large coal electric plants. It looks like your 33 percent is closer to the mark.I hope we do phase these climate changers out for the planet’s sake. If the cost of emitting carbon is enacted, alternative renewable fuels will stand on a more level playing field. Fouling our nest, ought to entail costs.
Gas powered cars are woefully inefficient,by any standard. Heat and frictional losses leave only about 15 percent of the chemical energy stored in gasoline,remaining to deliver kinetic energy to the wheels. All the more reason to strive for significantly better fuel economy standards.
#727 James
Your comment to my comments which were to other comments leave me lost completely.
Trying to set a few things straight:
(1) I do not have a Hummer. The last time I did anything that stupid was in 1968 when I bought a Ford Country Squire. I had a shred of justification in family size at the time. However, I pull back from actually criticizing anyone who buys what they decide that they need. My approach is only to give people positive options.
(2) RichardC of #720 gets the right idea, except maybe his statement is a little strong. If there was a way to force the supply of electricity to be from natural gas, a given vehicle could be somewhat better as an electric vehicle than it would be as a hybrid. But it would not be a lot better. Put another way, making a conventional vehicle into a hybrid can be a good thing. For the most part it would be better to stop there and not to do the next step of converting it to electric plug-in capability.
However, electric propulsion methods can be very useful in reconfiguring cars into a form that have very low aerodynamic drag. Now the balance shifts hard in favor of the electric system, even though it will be driven by coal fired power generation systems.
And another however, go one step further and put in a small heat engine and generator in the highly efficient body to get a longer range of operation while keeping the battery load modest.
And again, another step could be to turn the small heat engine and generator into a cogeneration system when parked next to your house, doing this only when the household can use the heat. Use natural gas since to run the engine in this mode, and now you have doubled or tripled the amount of electricity to be had from that natural gas, compared to what central power plants can do. That would almost make natural gas competitive.
Much as I resist the concept, a little help might now be reasonable to expect from government where a mild cap and trade or whatever would be enough to swing the balance away from coal to natural gas. This would, in the end, be a massive improvement in the whold CO2 emission situation.
Complicated, yes. Worth it all, very much so.
#726 EL:
It’s a massive problem, no doubt, unprecedented in scope and size and intricacy. I believe a lot of us are subject to the same sort of innumeracy that makes AGW so difficult to believe for the slower uptake crowd; we fail to understand the magnitude of the replacement problem. Our brains are not really set up to deal with something so deep and so broad.
I think innumeracy somewhat explains why we hear a lot of back-and-forth on pet technologies here on RC, as well as attempts to rope off one or another impact of replacement. Proponents of narrow solutions fail to fully comprehend we’re on the horns of a dilemma the magnitude of which does not permit the luxury of parochialism, or mutual exclusivity.
What you say about the requirement to fully integrate different disciplines seems completely true. While scrutinizing energy replacement alternatives we tend to overlook how all the bits and pieces fit together.
For instance, (sounding like a stuck record here), feeding 3 billion more people is not going to work like the previous multitude’s addition.
Agronomists assume that all the inputs that were available to the first green revolution will be ready for duty as we undertake a radical expansion of our food supply. That’s not true. The ocean is done, finito, collapsing; we’ll be extremely lucky if we can husband it back to something approaching what it was 100 years ago. Engineers will struggling and quite likely failing to maintain our current energy dissipation via the fixed production network, meaning that expanding thermally intensive fertilizer production is not something we can assume will happen. Simultaneously petroleum powered agricultural machinery will have to be made much more efficient and then eliminated, to be replace by an entirely new fleet. Even while all that is going on, we’re apparently going to be losing a lot of arable land, including submergence or dessication of some of the richest (deltaic) acreage available.
Are we really going to manage that? As well as the work requirement to perform a swap-out of hydrocarbons?
We’re missing demographers in the climate-fix mix. We’re missing public health agencies. We’re missing the Pope. We’re missing a lot of experts that are needed to slow down our reproductive rate. They’re not integrated into the portfolio of expertise being brought to bear We’ve fooled ourselves into thinking we can engineer and innovate our way out of any sort of mad trouble we’re capable of causing. Nope, instead we’re going to literally eff up part of the solution we need; engineers are going to be 5 thumbs in a dam with 10 leaking holes.
#730 Jim:
You’ve mentioned your affinity and suggested uses for natural gas over two dozen times on this thread.
Leaving aside the question of how burning hydrocarbons is going to solve a CO2 emissions problem, let’s look at the practicality of being cavemen and burning up our natural gas even faster than we’re aleady managing.
“We” (U.S.) appear to be using about 10TCF/year of natural gas. “Our” (U.S.) proven reserves are about 240TCF. The absolute best-case natural gas resource estimate, throwing in every last wildcatter’s pipe dreams, are that “we” have about 1200TCF available.
So what we’ve actually got in hand, stamped and approved by reservoir engineers working under the lash of extremely pushy industry executives, is 24 years’ supply of natural gas. Less, actually; DOE prognosticates that we’ll be sucking from the ground harder, very soon. We -may- have 100 years’ supply but given what we all know of the wild optimism of the petroleum industry let’s say it’s more like 50 years.
If we were to substitute transportation fuel requirements with natural gas we’d see those time estimates plunge. Why would we do that? Especially, why would we do that while spewing out the same problem molecules as before?
I still don’t get the case for trading one source of CO2 for another. Call me dense if you like, then straighten me out.
re 698:—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—-
Perhaps here where you will get a more informed class of troll, but in the world where I work it will take far longer. I remarked to a co-worker, who is sure global warming, let alone human triggered global warming does not exist because a radio talk show host tells her so, that my little hobby the old philosophy shoppe was releasing the next in its series of “secular humorism” magnets: An Autumn scene with the motto Entropy Wins!
Entropy Wins!
She asked “What’s entropy?”
Need I say more?
Doug Bostrom – In a basic nutshell, you can summarize the problem of global warming as follows. If you put a frog in a frying pan, and you crank up the heat quickly. The frog will jump out of the frying pan; however, if you put a frog in a frying pan, and you slowly increase the heat. The frog will lie there until it cooks to death. Ours is a world of frogs, basking in the slowly increasing warmth of a frying pan. While the old frog story may sound like a childish saying from grade school, it summarizes the complexities involved into a neat little package. People do not see the urgency of the problem.
The people who see the problem are not fully comprehending the complexity of it. At first glance, some people may think they only need to alert others about the frying pan; however, people generally do not respond to the threat of disaster; instead, they react to disaster. Observer the coastlines in America when a hurricane is predicted to make landfall. Some people who have never experienced a hurricane think they can just ride it out. When the hurricane makes landfall, they want out. Global warming has the same problem, and nobody has experienced the disaster.
While people don’t see the urgency of global warming, they do see the potential sacrifices being requested by scientist. Nations see the potential to lose their ability to compete with other nations. Rich and powerful people see lost revenues and control. The list is endless.
The problem only gets worse when you add another frying pan: Overpopulation. We are rapidly depleting our resources to the point that we may collapse the entire food chain. While some people may refer to me as inhumane, we need to place caps on childbirth world wide. If our overpopulation problem continues, the world will slip into war over resources, and averting global warming will likely be completely off the table at that point.
I believe we need to have every single profession taking a hard look at global warming. We especially need very good artist. Many people cannot read or write, but art can reach them. Augustus once united the entire roman empire with art.
#732 Doug Bostrom
How the heck could I call you dense when you and I agree almost completely on every point you make? My study of natural gas reserves bears out your statements.
All I hope for is that we squeeze all the electricity we can out of natural gas. The best we can hope for is that we stretch out natural gas as much as possible and that renewables will truly get affordable in the meantime. Maybe even fusion will get possible, or at least the French way of doing nuclear will help us out. How about that for foolish optimism?
If it turns out that Boone Pickens is right, and I trust him not at all, maybe things will go better. I am not counting on that.
I do not see any practical possibility that we can abruptly cancel coal. There is far less chance that China will do that. They double our rate of coal use even today.
Truly, we seem to be in trouble.
My perception of the future is that the best we can do is to cut demand for energy. I do not feel comfortable that this will be enough, but I do think there are some big improvement that we can make.
I just heard on the news that the present Waxman Markey legislation is being written to give away emissions allowances. What a joke. But it shows the political impossibility of government action that amounts to anything.
#675 James
I feel compelled to comment on your statement:
What the hell are you talking about? Net improvement? Please don’t say that the net improvement is that wildlife and really poor people are residing in the exclusion zone.
A friend of mine was in Chernobyl when the accident happened, most of her friends are dead from cancer already. She gets anxiety every time she gets a stomach ache, wondering if this is it for her too.
I’m not sure how it is possible to be more irresponsible or callous in a remark; other than making such a statement anonymously.
Oh and there is that little problem of radiation, and the concrete cap they put over the hot spot is disintegrating.
Pursuant to my #732 post on natural gas, it’s worth mentioning that combined cycle natural gas generating plants are capable of something like 60% efficiency. If waste heat is captured for other purposes that figure can increase slightly. The same gas deployed in a massive fleet of automobiles forced to rotate a myriad of redundant parts, retarded by air drag and rolling resistance, steered by friction and recovering only a fraction of available kinetic energy when forced to change velocity and even worse involving wretchedly crude IC engines will quite obviously result in vastly poorer overall efficiency.
So if we’re absolutely bent on burning our natural gas endowment in a feckless bonfire, let’s do so where the party will last a little longer and get us a little more drunk on hubris.
But surely I’m missing something.
Holy Carbon Capture, Batman! Secret negotiations between China and U.S. on combating climate change:
Read it here, then dissect all the imperfections:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/18/secret-us-china-emissions-talks
# 703,731.The electric powered car predates the internal combustion engine. I cannot fathom that had we stayed on course and rejected Ford’s mass production techniques which put the elcetric car out of business,then this conversation would not be occurring. Also no engine is as powerful as the electric motor. We can make an affordable and effient electric car; it is industry which prevents this from happening. Still, I just do not see cogeneration as a feasible option. Also we do need to produce more electricity independent of coal and with the burning of coal in conjunction with capture techniques.
Re #719, Oh now we come to the crux of the matter don’t we, controlling ourselves. Well you can forget that for every generation wants to improve on the last and thats the problem. Each new generation does in many material ways improve on the last and in law and in how we can act but it requires lot of hydrocarbons to do that.
Hoever the earth only gave us all of this hydrocarbon energy once and we have burnt it, soon to be all of it. Funnily enough we discovered science before it but until that time we had only managed modest energy gains from water wheels and burning peat and wood to keep warm. Once thermodynamics was established and the nature of heat engines the floodgates opened to oue new industrial future.
The problems lie in the west and in westernising other cultures of which we have encouraged the largest blocks of population on the planet to make all of our things for us. Modest growth is enough to overwhelm us, in the early days of oil, gas and coal discovery and usage growth was strong but it has stagnated in recent decades but still now that we encourage global growth its groes again and this time its global.
We can develop alternative energy sources but it will still limit us unless we crack fusion and therefore until we throw away the mantra of progress and prosperity through growth (now called sustainable growth I believe) and adopt one of steady state economics then we will be looking down the barrel of a less than happy future.
Virgin Galactic wants to take people into space, we put more cars on the road globally every year, replace existsing ones every year, build new things every year (China in building projects unprecedented in their history to solve their economic growth issues) and so it goes on.
What is this happy state we can live in ?
That last post was rushed. What I meant to say is that I cannot fathom we would be having this discussion over electric vehicles or coal plants if we had moved forward with electric production technology. We need the electric car to make a real comeback which is still a better alternative to hybrid vehicles.
James writes:
And my impression is that you haven’t read any of the relevant literature on the subject. That, or perhaps you consider the WHO and the authors of the journal articles in Environmental Science and Technology and so on to be “the usual anti-nuclear sources.”
Chernobyl was a disaster. 31 people died immediately, another two dozen later, thousands of people got cancer, a multi-billion-ruble plant was shuttered. The wildlife the pro-nuclear psychos keep lauding is there because the humans who usually wipe it out are afraid to go near the plant; there’s no evidence–zero–that that lush wildlife is especially healthy.
You just don’t want to admit that there are any serious problems with nuclear power. Like every pro-nuclear crackpot on the internet, your approach is not “the problems are controllable,” but rather, “There are no problems.” That kind of idiocy is why the propaganda from your side has failed so abysmally.
James wrote: “WRT solar farms, just read the plans. The land would be scraped bare, and regularly treated with herbicides to kill off any plants that somehow managed to survive despite having most of their sunlight blocked.”
Perhaps you would like to explain to us how uranium mining is a “net improvement” to sensitive desert ecosystems.
In particular, perhaps you would like to explain how the vastly expanded uranium mining in areas like the immediate vicinity of the Grand Canyon, which will be needed to fuel the hundreds of new reactors you advocate building in the USA alone, will be a “net improvement” to the environment.
One for Gavin…
I received a copy of Climate Change: Picturing the Science yesterday and started reading it.
But i also noticed that it was published in China. Now I live in the South of England, which means that the book has a higher carbon footprint than i would really like.
Being a member of a local environmental group (click on name/link) it is a bit disappointing to find that the book has been printed by a mainstream publishing company that may take less care about environmental issues.
Would it not be a good idea if mainstream climate scientists like yourself got together and agreed to set a higher standard when publishing your material?
Maybe the various institutions could get together and create a new publishing company that carefully audits its carbon footprint and has clearly defined policies when it comes to publishing.
Alternatively maybe you can find an existing publisher that would satisfy these conditions?
[Response: Thanks for buying a copy! The issues in publishing – particularly for full colour glossy pages – are tricky. Getting good quality at a reasonable price is very hard, and had it been printed elsewhere the costs would have been much greater. The difference between printing in North America vs. China doesn’t make that much difference for the copies shipped to the UK however. You might also bear in mind that first time authors don’t have a huge amount of leverage on these kinds of issues and are generally grateful that any publisher is even willing to talk to them… ;) Let us know if you like it though. – gavin]
James Wine [184]
That ‘No hoopla, no fanfare, no alarm bells. No screaming headlines’ comment seems to me to add up to ‘no debate’—just government decree.
But the success you claim for Sweden comes with nuclear power as well as the hydro, does it not—much of the nuclear power from Norway?
And Sweden is now moving to end their phase-out policy for nuclear power, by replacing existing reactors.
Almost a half of Sweden’s electricity is from their ten nuclear power stations , and there have been times when five out of the ten were shut down due to a variety of safety concerns.
You have a big hydro capacity , but that’s not environmental virtue—that’s just the luck of the draw.
Sweden enjoys and fosters this view that the world has of it—the one you describe—of pristine and gentle democracy—but it’s not the true picture.
There’s any amount of commentary from a wide variety of sources, that tell a different story—that far from being the ideal society, Sweden is much more suffocated by the heavy hand of government and Leftist and ethnically biased political correctness, than most of us would want to see in our own countries —– the Left wing parties in my country have certainly aspired to reconstructing Australia in the image of the Swedish Social democracy, but have thankfully so far only managed to implement a small part of their plan, due to the commonsense of Australians and their innate resistance to big government.
It’s changing though—thanks to the AGW issue, which the Left sees as their Trojan horse—their big opportunity to force their policies on a frightened populace.
[edit – ridiculously off-topic]
EL @ 734, This post is your most insightful to date. Indeed, in organisms who evolved in an environment full of immediate threate (e.g. leopards, snakes hyenas…) it is perhaps understandable that our alarm responses are not ideally suited to long-term threats. Humans, do, however, have the ability to overcome their base natures and work together for the common good against long-term threats. Small pox has been eradicated, malaria confined to tropical areas where it is endemic, and we now build buildings that can withstand earthquakes–rather than rebuilding each time one occurs.
The thing I find interesting in my travels is that the rest of the world mostly gets it. I’ve had quite sophisticated discussions of climate change with villagers in Brazil and Madagascar. Even back in 1991, I remember having a converstion with a very old man in a mango grove in Togo about how much the climate had changed. Most of my colleagues in Europe understand the threat and the imperative. It is only in the English-speaking world–Aus, NZ, the US, the UK–where idiocy prevails. One has to wonder why this is so.
Damn, ReCAPTCHA is gettting spooky: paid casandra
Regarding the population problem, it is serious, but we are in much better shape than we would have believed possible in 1970:
“Globally, the growth rate of the human population has been steadily declining since peaking in 1962 and 1963 at 2.20% per annum. In 2007 the growth rate was 1.19% per annum.” (Wikipedia)
The trend in growth rate is still downward, and significant areas will soon experience negative growth–Western Europe is one. Indeed, Japan has had negative population growth since 2005.
James, the fact that wildlife isn’t equipped to recognize slow radiation poisoning doesn’t make Chernobyl an environmental success story. You have no obligation to care, of course, but your credibility is taking a real beating with me at least, and this last response didn’t help.
John, my comment was actually based not on my experience here–you are right, this is a unique forum–but that on a general news site that I frequent. Already there it is pretty consistent that denialist comments get a “thumbs down” by about 2 to 1, if made early in a thread, where there are enough responses to represent the general readership. (Later on in a thread it’s just a shouting match between habitual debaters on each side–few regular readers bother at that point.)
Moreover, the denialist claims being made by posters on these fora are such that a high percentage are likey to be falsified in reasonably short order. It doesn’t take any understanding of entropy to recognize that the fifth-warmest April in 129 years does not much resemble an incipient Ice Age, to take one current example. Ordinary readers will (and do) notice.
[Captcha gets adamant: “Boston cindered.”]
Boston managed sea level rise just fine.
captcha ‘potful Use’ What the enviros have in mind.
Care to explain what the heck you’re talking abou tin 748, Mike?
Did throwing tea in the harbour absorb the seawater and solve the rising tide issue?
Heyyy wacht that!!!!
You know something???
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KA8AaGA9e0