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.
Hank Roberts Says (27 mai 2009 at 1:15 PM):
“(it’s not only local, and you’re talking about charismatic fauna, not the ecosystem)”
Nope, I’ve been talking about the whole ecosystem. You’re the one who introduced charismatic fauna – see post #924, and search for prior references to Bambi :-)
“this is your opinion, with no cite yet, and ignores the descriptions of reproductive failure in the literature; it’s a sink, not a source, of animals”
S.A. Geras’kin, S.V. Fesenko, R.M. Alexakhin, Effects of non-human species irradiation after the Chernobyl NPP accident, Environment International, Volume 34, Issue 6, August 2008, Pages 880-897, ISSN 0160-4120, DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2007.12.012.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V7X-4RPVJ40-2/2/5f9524e2205b4b52f7cd97a3c7d73f6c
It’s a review article, and most of the sources are quite a bit older, but as the article points out, there are no current comprehensive studies.
“There are more animals, but they’re not reproducing as well…”
Perhaps not. There are conflicting reports, varying by species & area. What’s clear is that both animals & plants are reproducing well enough to maintain populations – quite aside from any inwards migration effects, because after all the predators migrate too, and usually faster.
Which, BTW, partly explains your sink vs source theory; the other part being that predators are “controlled” by humans outside the exclusion zone, therefore increased mortality from predation would be expected within.
“…you did read about the birds, right?”
By birds, you mean the Moller et al. study (studies, rather, since there have been several) of barn swallows? Yes, and I also read the letter criticizing it: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2412919 (Curiously, this same AP Moller seems to be the only source I see for a lot of things.)
“Don’t just proclaim what you believe and argue with some guy on a blog — use a library. Read about it. Test what you believe.”
You hold the egg like this, granny :-)
990:
“Mark,
The use of storage systems as opposed to secondary resources such as bio-mass or high hydrogen fossil fuels was the issue I was trying to address.”
Yup, and that’s fine and I’ve never disagreed with that reasoning. If you’d used it. That reasoning doesn’t lead to “storage systems are not a solution” however and THAT is what I was taking you to task on.
So if you want to converse with me, please stay on that topic.
If you feel that that wording was incorrect and unnecessary (since you now say what you were talking about by saying that storage systems are not a solution is not that storage systems are not a solution but that other systems are better than storage) then withdraw it.
re 995, made up. That’s where the number comes from. But any number is positive. Electric cars are a net benefit over ICE’s now.
The only problem I have with your thread is that a plug-in car NOW is better than a car that moves its own generator about with the rest of the vehicle, which isn’t what you seem to be saying. So waiting to produce an all-electric car until we’re not using any fossil fuel generation is ridiculous.
Jim Bullis posts:
Please God no.
If you want to write a song, it’s not enough to make every other line rhyme. You have to fit the meter as well. The number of syllables, or at least the number of beats, is not a free parameter.
James, citation please, for this:
> What’s clear is that both animals & plants are reproducing well
> enough to maintain populations
Clear to whom? Published where?
and for this:
> quite aside from any inwards migration effects
Who claims to have shown this? Where?
and for this:
> because after all the predators migrate too, and usually faster.
Your cite for this please? You believe it why? Of which predators?
and you continue to act as though bioaccumulation and migration over time and across the chain of fission products is not a concern.
Citation to the studies? There are plenty of studies from Hanford and Oak Ridge on what happens when fission products are moving through ecosystems and groundwater.
You started off off asserting there’s more wildlife in the exclusion zone so the accident at Chernobyl is an improvement.
You do the “scientists differ” handwaving argument — lots of attention is being given to this and the studies aren’t all in agreement.
Studies done through the long nasty collapse of the USSR. Why? There’s a known problem. The details are being worked out.
Notice the similarity with the claims climate chante isn’t a problem? We know the basics of the physics and biology involved — and how this works over time. You’re doing the stock routine — “can’t be a problem because it hasn’t happened yet.”
It’s tiresome. You brought this up because you claim you want to protect the desert and say Chernobyl is an improvement for wildlife.
Well, Hanford’s a desert. That one’s had decades more to work out and the research has been far better funded.
Bioaccumulation of fission daughters over time; fission products moving through the ecology — not an improvement, over the time the events will work out.
Like global warming. Most of the problem hasn’t happened yet. We know it is happening. We’re working out the details.
There are good smart people working on what you claim you care about.
None of them use the arguments you’re promoting. Think about it.
#1004 Barton Paul Levinson,
“California, here I come,
Right back where I started from,
–”
That made a lot of money over the years.
I guess it was a song, not a poem, and you kind of have to fit the phrasing to the tune.
Anyway, it seemed kind of funny and still to the point. Maybe the point was not so funny, and it was probably irritating to the plug-in zealot crowd.
Hank Roberts Says (28 mai 2009 at 9:57 AM):
“James, citation please, for this:
> What’s clear is that both animals & plants are
> reproducing well enough to maintain populations
Clear to whom? Published where?”
Oh, to anyone who bothers to look at recent pictures, and note that there are no lack of for instance annual & short-lived perennial plants. Do you really need someone to go there and count each one, then get the study published, I assume in the International Journal of Bean Counting?
Though speaking of bean counting, there’s this: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/pr900034u
“and for this:
> because after all the predators migrate too, and
> usually faster.
Your cite for this please? You believe it why? Of which predators?”
Don’t you bother to observe the world around you? What will you want next, a cite for the fact that mammals have four legs?
If I thought you really wanted to know the answer, I’d suggest reading a good book or two on ecology. However, I begin to realize (ok, I’m slow) that you’re just exercising a variant on your “distract with irrelevant Google search” technique for avoiding issues.
#1003 Mark, #998 Furry
At least Furry looked at the referenced study. Also, she did it carefully enough to see the words that contradicted the chart that shows the actual numbers. But neither of you seem willing to look at that Figure 5-1.
That report is a classic case of how the hoped for conclusions prevail, regardless of the data. Fortunately, analysts tend to want to get the truth out, so they perversely stick in the data.
The management type words are not exactly wrong, but they do assume a future of power generation that is something of a hope. I also do not think they get my point about how low priced coal dominates the scene. There is a curious mix of verbage in that report, where in the “EPRI” section they crptically state the “marginal” effects in power selection, but do not go into it enough to clarify. I suspect some of the EPRI folks understand what I am saying, but NRDC brought the funding.
Anyway, for people interested in real numbers, not made up, look at that Fig.5-1. Study it. Talk could then be meaningful.
I repeat the link: http://www.miastrada.com/references The report is Reerence (2). The key chart is Fig. 5-1 on page 5-2.
Managing the Health effects of Climate Change
Launched in London, UK, May 13, 2009
“A collaboration between The Lancet and University College London, UK, resulting in the first UCL Lancet Commission report, setting out how climate change over the coming decades could have a disastrous effect on health across the globe. The report examines practical measures that can be taken now and in the short and medium term to control its effects.”
http://www.lancet.com/climate-change
Links to articles, presentations, and audio files are provided on that page.
Jim @ 1008:
1). Coal generation is facing an uphill battle and will FOREVER.
2). You have to look at the total life of the vehicle, not just one year.
3). An HEV bought tomorrow will continue to spit out CO2 until it is junked with no future potential for reduction. A PHEV will spit out less and less as the grid is improved.
4). Every PHEV not built this year will potentially reduce the PHEV fleet for the next 8 or 10 years. We need to build the fleet NOW, not after you’re happy.
James, if this:
Currently, 23 years after the accident, the soil in the close vicinity of CNPP is still significantly contaminated with long-living radioisotopes, such as 137Cs. Despite this contamination, the plants growing in Chernobyl area were able to adapt to the radioactivity, and survive.
constitutes an improvement, then God spare me all such.
James, Hank (passim)
This may shed some light (warning pdf.) http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/infobase/eisler/CHR_29_Radiation.pdf
RADIATION HAZARDS TO FISH, WILDLIFE, AND INVERTEBRATES:
A SYNOPTIC REVIEW by Ronald Eisler
Biological effects of the Chernobyl accident on local natural resources were documented by Sokolov et al. (1990). They concluded that the most sensitive affected ecosystems at Chernobyl were the soil fauna and pine forest communities and that the bulk of the terrestrial vertebrate community was not adversely affected by released ionizing radiation. Pine forests seemed to be the most sensitive ecosystem. One stand of 400 ha of Pinus silvestris died and probably received a dose of 80-100 Gy; other stands experienced heavy mortality of 10-12 year old trees and as much as 95% necrotization of young shoots; these pines received an estimated dose of 8-10 Gy. Abnormal top shoots developed in some Pinus, and these probably received 3-4 Gy. In contrast, leafed trees such as birch (Betula sp.), oak (Quercus sp.), and aspen (Populus sp.) in the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station zone survived undamaged, probably because they are about 10 times more radioresistant than pines. There was no increase in the mutation rate of the spiderwort Arabidopsis thaliana, a radiosensitive plant, suggesting that the dose rate was less than 0.05 Gy/h in the Chernobyl locale. Populations of soil mites were reduced in the Chernobyl area, but no population showed a catastrophic drop in numbers. By 1987, soil microfauna–even in the most heavily contaminated plots–was comparable to controls. Flies (Drosophila spp.) from various distances from the accident site and bred in the laboratory had higher incidences of dominant lethal mutations (14.7%, estimated dose of 0.8 m Gy/h) at sites nearest the accident than controls (4.3%). Fish populations seemed unaffected in July-August 1987, and no grossly-deformed individuals were found; however, 134+137Cs levels were elevated in young fishes. The most heavily contaminated teleost in May 1987 was the carp (Carassius carassius). But carp showed no evidence of mutagenesis, as judged by chromoso-mal aberrations in cells from the corneal epithelium of some carp as far as 60 km from Chernobyl (Sokolov et al. 1990).
Several rodent species compose the most widely distributed and numerous mammals in the Chernobyl vicinity. It was estimated that about 90% of rodents died in an area that received 60 Gy and 50% in areas that received 6-60 Gy. Rodent populations seemed normal in spring 1987, and this was attributed to migration from adjacent nonpolluted areas. The most sensitive small mammal was the bank vole (Clethrionomys glareolus), which experienced embryonic mortality of 34%. The house mouse (Mus musculus) was one of the more radioresistant species. Mus from plots receiving 0.6-1 mG/h did not show signs of radiation sickness, were fertile with normal sperm, bred, and produced normal young. Some chromoso-mal aberrations were evident, namely, an increased frequency of recip-rocal translocations (Sokolov et al. 1990). During the early period after the accident, there was no evidence of increasing mortality, decline in fecundity, or migration of vertebrates as a result of the direct action of ionizing radiation. The numbers and distributions of wildlife species were somewhat affected by the death of the pine stand, the evacuation of people, the termination of cultivation of soils (the crop of 1986 remained standing), and the evacuation of domestic livestock. No changes in survival or species composition of game animals and birds were recorded. In fact, because humans had evacuated and hunting pressure was negligible, many game species, including foxes, hares, deer, moose, wolves, and waterfowl moved into the zone in fall 1986-winter 1987 from the adjacent areas in a 50-60 km radius (Sokolov et al. 1990).
I couldn’t find the Sokolov paper referenced but a free preview of a later (1992) paper from the same author is available here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/k0312044407014g3/
Finally got my last post through the spam filter (fancy running a science site where you can’t write the words recip-rocal and chromoso-mal, blasted spammers!
Anyway, both papers I reference above were written less than 10 years after the accident. What happened after that? A google of the title of the paper in my second link throws up the the following from 2000:
http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/chornobyl/wildlifepreserve.htm
Which states: “In reality, radioactivity at the level associated with the Chornobyl meltdown does have discernible, negative impacts on plant and animal life [4,5]. However, the benefit of excluding humans from this highly contaminated ecosystem appears to outweigh significantly any negative cost associated with Chornobyl radiation [8].”
Unfortunately all three of the above references are unobtainable for me (at least in English).
There’s this from 2004 though:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v380/n6576/abs/380707a0.html
High levels of genetic change in rodents of Chernobyl: Barker et al.: Nature 380.
The abstract states: “BASE-PAIR substitution rates for the mitochondria! cytochrome b gene of free-living, native populations of voles collected next to reactor 4 at Chernobyl, Ukraine, were estimated by two indepen-dent methods to be in excess of 10 -4 nucleotides per site per generation. These estimates are hundreds of times greater than those typically found in mitochondria of vertebrates, suggesting that the environment resulting from this nuclear power plant disaster is having a measurable genetic impact on the organisms of that region. Despite these DNA changes, vole populations thrive and reproduce in the radioactive regions around the Chernobyl reactor.”
In short, it seems from my very superficial google research that the weight of evidence seems to be more in James’ favour than in Hank’s. This surprises me as I set out expecting to find that James was wrong – this doesn’t seem to be the case in this instance, unless Hank can show more recent evidence to the contrary.
Once I get back to work and my ISI Web of Science access I’ll try to find more recent work than 2004 and see if the conclusion remains the same…
Chris 1013, voles with severe genetic problems don’t survive term.
Voles with slight genetic problems don’t survive long.
But if there’s a human settlement to be put there (with all them humans with their concrete, ratcatchers and, of course, cats) voles don’t survive long at all.
Jim 1008, the link didn’t say that electric vehicles now are worse than petrol powered ICE.
One set includes batteries and full lifecycle costs of both generation and vehicle and that the lifetime is poor, the other one assumes that the cost of refining is no cost, that the maintenance is optimistically low and the lifetime rather longer.
Include the cost of getting the fuel to the pump and stabilising foreign supplies if you want to include full lifecycle costs to electric vehicles.
The ONLY thing current electric vehicles don’t have in their favour is long range of a full tank of gas. Given that the UK average trip by car is less than 2 miles, this is hardly a requirement…
Chris S., questions of “improvement” imply a teleology–ie., “better for what?” is always an implicit question.
Your cites show that Chernobyl may be “better” in the sense of increased population for some species, at least in the relatively short term. But this is said to result from the “excluding humans.” The reductio ad absurdum of this approach would be that sometimes imputed to environmentalists by the opposition–that is, species suicide “for the greater good.”
Not too far off Hank’s Gaia cartoon.
Chernobyl is not “better” for any humanly desirable purpose, and the fact that life is highly adaptable doesn’t change that. In fact, the adaptations pose problems for non-adapted organisms as contaminants spread much more readily through the food web.
James writes:
Yes, James, if you want to argue about whether are less or more plants than before, or compared to other areas, you really do need a number rather than photographs.
Nuclear will remain part of the energy mix, but it won’t save us:
Re Chernobyl vs. sprawl, it seems clear that:
1. Sprawl is bad for wildlife;
2. Radioactive contamination is bad for wildlife.
Must we debate the relative badness? If we want a world with wildlife, shouldn’t we curtail both stressors?
ChrisS, sorry about that voles article.
That voles article was, maybe still is, much promoted on the septic side of the bogusphere. It appears, and they promote it this way, to show that voles with quite a lot of measurable radiation damage continue to thrive in the exclusion zone.
Check the citing papers to see the subsequent history. The people using that article for PR never do, or don’t tell you about it.
Always check, don’t rely on something some guy on a blog posts
There’s like meeting a straw man on the road and getting into an argument with it, while the person who set it up watches and laughs.
Getting back to the original theme of this thread, here are two studies that show how ecological factors control the basic economics of the cod fishing industry:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090526202809.htm
ScienceDaily (May 26, 2009) – “…Cod fishing is of highest intensity in shallow water in Iceland and it selects against genotypes of cod adapted to shallow water. The new PLoS One article reports a significant difference in Darwinian fitness (relative survival rate) between shallow-water and deep-water adapted cod. The shallow-water fish have only 8% of the fitness of deep-water fish. This difference can lead to rapid elimination of shallow-water fish in only a few generations with drastic effects on the population and the fishery.
Here, we see that human activity is having a feedback effect on local ecological factors via exerting evolutionary pressures on the natural resource (fish stocks). The parable of the greedy farmer killing the goose that laid the golden eggs fits well with this situation – but are there any fixes? Perhaps:
A strategy that would remove selection pressures against shallow-water adapted fish would seem to be the answer. The authors speculate that immediate establishment of large no-take reserves might be the right strategy by relieving selection pressures on all genotypes.
That means that natural variability as well as climate change has to be factored into decisions about how to best regulate fishing in the Atlantic Ocean – and relying on economists with no knowledge of ecological factors will result in disaster. Ecological knowledge helps politicians make good economic decisions, in other words:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020095843.htm
“As climate change continues, environmental conditions for cod will be affected. Research on cod in other seas has underlined the importance of high stock levels for its capacity to cope with environmental change. Climate change will thus underline the importance of adaptive management,” according to Thorsten Blenckner, Baltic Nest Institute.
One clear fact is that when fish stocks drop below certain levels, the only thing that can be done is to ban fishing entirely (as with endangered species laws) – but as research shows, driving fish stocks so low can change the overall ecological situation such that stock recovery is just not possible. Simple ecological models are also not very good at predicting how such complex situations will play out over time.
Can we apply the fishing issue to the fossil fuel issue? Not really – since fish and fossil fuels are fundamentally different. Fossil fuels are a one-time resource, not a sustainable resource by definition. They are a very abundant one-time resource, but as domestic U.S. oil depletion shows, they are exhaustible. Combusting fossil fuels to generate energy unavoidably increases the CO2 content of the atmosphere and oceans, with far-reaching consequences.
To make the analogy between fishing and energy generation sound, you would have to restrict the comparison to renewable sources of energy. If you wanted to apply it to fossil fuels, you would have to assume that each time you took a fish out of the ocean, it was never replaced. Anyone could see that if you relied on fish for food in that case, sooner or later you would have a big problem – but you can bet that if the economic structure of the society was based on control of fishing rights, there would be many vested interests who would oppose any change.
As a good example of that, the Saudis are now publicly attacking alternatives to fossil fuels. Their PR angle provides a nice glimpse into the oil industry mentality, and also shows how the finance sector thinks:
Indeed – that’s why the finance sector insists on U.S. guarantees and subsidies for fossil fuel projects ($18 billion for the Alaska-Alberta tar sands gas pipeline, for example) over decade-scale time frames – while any renewable energy legislation is always given a one-year expiration date by Congress. This is a deliberate tactic of the lobbyists who actually write the energy bills, because they know that without long-term guarantees, investors will not put money into renewables – thus, long-term guarantees are restricted to fossil fuel projects. The U.S. press won’t cover this story, and even actively censors efforts to discuss it – ABC refused to run the advertisement produced by the Alliance for Climate Protection, for example:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/10/algore-television
I guess ABC is going to be banning any military recruiting ads that feature the Statue of Liberty… clearly, that image would not be “incidental” to the message… “Orwellian” defined, courtesy of ABC.
It’s not a tragedy of the commons – it’s a tragedy of democratic failure, aka a tragedy of political corruption – one that extends into academic and media institutions as well as into the various branches of government. This is why there is only one Renewable Energy lab in the U.S., which is owned by the DOE and managed by a private consortium that includes the primary backer of FutureGen, Battelle Memorial Institute (owner of the non-disclosed ‘intellectual property’ involved). There is zero financing in the federal budget for research into renewables, which is why no public university devotes any effort to securing such financing – instead, they set up public-private partnerships with established corporate giants like Exxon and Schlumberger. Likewise, the main media institutions are controlled by shareholders with huge investments in fossil fuels, and rely on linked industries for much of their advertising revenue (which, taken together, explains ABC’s reluctance to run that ad).
As far as the majority shareholders, the academic leaders, and the corporate CEOs – their idea of economic recovery appears to involve jacking fossil fuel demand up to the old highs, period. As shareholder decision after shareholder decision shows, any long-term ecological concerns are irrelevant. That’s the case at every single meeting of Chevron and Exxon shareholders – any such proposals are routinely voted down by large margins.
This is obviously a psychopathic / sociopathic viewpoint, even bordering on nihilistic. I imagine the internal rationale is that if one maintains control of one’s share of the wealth, one will always be able to crank up the air conditioning. That’s lunacy – did the captain’s quarters on the Titanic survive?
Not that anyone has ever said “Cool — good of you to work on making the grid work better!”, I just signed formal patent application papers for an invention that will allow Distributed Renewable Generation owners to respond better to price signals. While there are inventions in this field (duh), the more the merrier. And the relevance of this is that higher priced generation tends to be more polluting. So, my current filing, as well as the others in this area of the art, will have the effect of reducing generation using the most polluting sources FIRST.
>”Nuclear will remain part of the energy mix, but it won’t save us:”
I wouldn’t draw that conclusion from a delay and overly optimistic cost estimate for a single (newly designed) reactor in Finland. I still have to see a large project finishing on time and within its original budget frame – and if we’d measure every advancement in technology merely from the smoothness of its first realization, we’d never be getting anywhere.
> “This is obviously a psychopathic / sociopathic viewpoint, even bordering on nihilistic. I imagine the internal rationale is that if one maintains control of one’s share of the wealth, one will always be able to crank up the air conditioning. That’s lunacy – did the captain’s quarters on the Titanic survive?”
I’d say it is human. Face it: the (distant) future state of the planet, as generated by a computer model, is at least for most people less scary than the prospect of losing “wealth” today or tomorrow. And I’m shure this doesn’t exclusively apply to Exxon shareholders but, perhaps even more so, to the people who will probably have much bigger problems than cranking up the air conditioning. I spent a year in Africa with a health organization (in order to avoid military service) and the people we attended to didn’t care about anything else than somehow surviving the next couple of hours. Everybody of us would behave in exactly the same way if we were in the same situation.
#1015 Mark,
You have a way of using words that does not fit the facts you look at. That is a frequent trick of the plug-in crowd regarding this chart.
The linked reference (the EPRI-NRDC study at http://www.miastrada.com/references, Reference 2, Fig. 5-1) shows that a plug-in hybrid is worse for CO2 than that same hybrid that has not been modified. I would call this a valid comparison. (Look at the second bar and the third bar of the chart.)
That same chart shows the CO2 from “conventional vehicles,” being worse than either. For those looking to understand the situation and not mostly trying to propagandize, the gain from making the car into a hybrid being greater than the gain from making it into a plug-in hybrid would prove that the plug-in part was not the reason for improvement. The first bar of the chart indicates CO2 for that conventional vehicle. That is more or less the same car that becomes the hybrid or the plug-in hybrid. While that fact is not completely clear, the PHEV is precisely the same car as the HEV.
Since the plug-in step actually degraded the situation, those looking to understand would say that the plug-in modification would be better left undone.
However, the relevant form of power generation on that chart that I am referring to is coal. That same chart also shows every possible form of power generation so whatever imagined generation system of the future is accommodated. Take your pick. Guess what; if electric power falls free from the sky, electric vehicles do fine in the comparison.
That gets back to the coal argument, but for me it is not much of an argument when coal is hugely abundant at $1 per million BTU and natural gas is maybe sufficient and a million BTU of that costs $3.84 for July contracts and up to more than $8 at several times over the next six years. At one point a year or two ago, natural gas was over $12.
That same chart even tells you what happens if Tinker Bell comes along and captures the CO2 for us.
More than a thousand comments in response to “The Tragedy of Climate Commons”. A record for any weblog. Well done RealClimate!
The article states that a clone being built in France is also falling behind schedule and over budget, for similar reasons (in this case, starting with cracks in the foundation slab and poorly trained welders). Seems more like a project management than technological issue, but fact is, the more complex a project, the harder it is to manage and execute.
NASA’s project to land a man on the moon before 1970 …
Not sure if the above project came in within budget, though.
bobberger wrote: “I wouldn’t draw that conclusion from a delay and overly optimistic cost estimate for a single (newly designed) reactor in Finland. I still have to see a large project finishing on time and within its original budget frame …”
Over 8,500 megawatts of new wind turbines were installed in the USA in 2008, which is more than 42 percent of all new generating capacity installed that year. And over 2,800 more megawatts of wind generating capacity was installed in the USA in the first quarter of 2009. All of it on time, and within budget.
The AREVA reactor in Finland was supposed to be the flagship of a “new generation”, modular nuclear power plant that would be faster and cheaper to build than earlier designs. Instead it is mired in the same problems that have always plagued nuclear power.
#1022 Furry
Somewhere I said it was “useful,” which is about the highest praise that ever comes out of me. Good use of solar resources is the best way to chip away at the cost problem for these. And of course, I am speaking of the capital cost mostly.
Hopefully, we will someday come to a common understanding that $1 is less than $3.84. Or maybe there is something in the decision making process that I do not understand. Yes, you can get 50% more electric energy out of natural gas using a combined cycle machine, but that does not make up the difference in cost of fuel to make the input energy.
Are we assuming that coal will be banned by our government? Of course that would make a difference. But if everyone is running around in plug-in Yukons, I think that legislation banning coal will be difficult to get through Congress.
Hey, you all might find this interview / debate quite interesting. It is between a representative of the Council of Canadians, an environmental / social justice organization trying to stop the privatization of everything Canadian, and some guy on the Business News Network, presumably a representative from the oil sands industry.
In particular, I found the last statement made by the oil sands rep to be very ironic and enlightening. He said that if the Council of Canadians woman was now given a few thousand shares of one of the oil companies operating in the oil sands, she’d soon forget what she was campaigning for, and that raising the stock value is really what we should be focusing on. What an admission! He basically admits that it’s all about short term profits and nothing more! He is admitting that the whole oil sands industry is corrupt to the core! I couldn’t believe it.
http://watch.bnn.ca/squeezeplay/february-2009/squeezeplay-february-4-2009/#clip136631
Actually, no, he’s claiming we all share his values, and are incapable of being different.
He’s wrong, but I doubt he’ll ever realize he’s wrong.
1025, but not 100% of all our electric power comes from fossil fuels, Jim (1025). But 100% of the power of a petrol-powered ICE comes from fossil fuels. Transmission losses are equitable with losses from having to transport petrol to the pump and the power station is just more efficient than an ICE in a car.
Your reading only doesn’t say what I say it does when you leave out the FACT that you’re not treating both sides fairly.
Jim 1019, yes.
However, when someone is trying to say that #2 isn’t true (James wants to say it’s good for wildlife to have radioactive blood, maybe the spiders swing from threads better…) you have to bring in the relative badness of both 1 and 2 to show why animals are living in a radioactive area.
> “Over 8,500 megawatts of new wind turbines were installed in the USA in 2008, which is more than 42 percent of all new generating capacity installed that year. And over 2,800 more megawatts of wind generating capacity was installed in the USA in the first quarter of 2009. All of it on time, and within budget.”
That may be but that was proven technology which had been installed thousands of times before. But innovations in windpower suffer from much the same problems like any other technology. Anybody remember “Growian”? It was supposed to be the largest windturbine of its time, full of new ideas that were supposed to make wind more efficient and reliable. Even before they finally finished it way over budget in 1983, it turned out to be a spectacular failure and when they deconstructed it only 4 years later, it had delivered less than 500 hours of production. Fortunately nobody drew the conclusion, that “windpower doesn’t work”. Instead they learned from their mistakes and made it better with, it must be said, some success. EPR deserves the same sort of faith, imho.
bobb says: “I’d say it is human.”
Yes, the “human nature” argument – I’ve heard that one trotted out too many times to recall, once by a professor who was attempting to explain the persistence of scientific fraud. However, that’s just a cheap excuse for a lack of responsibility – “no one else is behaving like an adult, so why should I?”
That’s societal failure, not “human nature”, and it is largely based on high levels of ignorance – or, worse, on high levels of “academic collegiality”, which apparently means refusing to censure one’s co-workers for their venial and/or dishonest activities. As noted previously, in the academic world this came about via the spread of public-private partnerships, which resulted in a rise in secretive and proprietary research – which, lacking transparency, is more susceptible to perversion via manufactured data and the like (look at the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel corporate relations with academics under Bayh-Dole laws – and then you have the finance corporations and the student lo-an arrangements).
In the end, you have American university departments acting as the R&D and marketing arms of major corporations – and when the shareholders of those corporations also control the large media corportaions, you can forget about getting accurate information from either U.S. academic leaders or media executives – instead, they’ll just say whatever they think will make their financial sponsors happy.
The “human nature” argument has been debunked time and time again – when in reality it is just an excuse for the worst kinds of abuses. In this worldview, there are “do-gooders” who fight the tide of human nature – it’s the secular version of “original sin” as in “we are all sinners, it’s just human nature.”
So, are scientists, engineers, businesspeople, politicians and other who are pushing for replacing fossil fuel combustion with renewables all “do-gooders”? No – they simply have enough information and knowledge to understand the consequences of not doing so. Washing your hands prevents the spread of many diseases… so is hand-washing an idealistic or a pragmatic activity? The same goes for studying climate and energy, and for replacing fossil fuels with renewables.
If you want some literary support for this general theme, see Albert Camus, The Plague:
…the narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worst side of human nature.
For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share that view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.
On the whole, men are more good than bad; that however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything…
Academic and media institutions have a job, and that is to raise the general level of knowledge and to fight against ignorance – but what we see in the U.S. is that academic and media institutions have been actively distorting information and engaging in the promotion of ignorance for the benefit of vested financial interests, who share the loot in return. Examples are legion. Some researchers attempt to avoid this by sticking to narrow research topics that are inoffensive in nature, others hop on whatever gravy train is running by – but they all know what kind of questions not to ask (assuming they want tenure and ‘collegial acceptance’). The same goes for any media professional.
For example, a physicist in the U.S. can make a career out of studying fiber optic cables, or out of cosmology – but solar photovoltaics? Not going to happen – too disruptive to established energy interests. What pile of money does the solar PV researcher turn to for financing? And what university will hire researchers who have no hope of getting federal grants? Not only that, under public-private patent agreements the researcher’s work might end up in the hands of Exxon – who will put it on the shelf and keep others from using it.
You can call that “human nature” if you like, but I’m not buying it. Instead, try calling it by its real name – “propaganda”. The only real solutions to this problem are those which increase transparency and ensure the independence of media and academic professionals.
Ike
I’m afraid you’re totally on the wrong track there. People worrying more about themselves than about somebody else they don’t even know IS human. People worrying more about themselves in the near term than about somebody else they don’t even know in the distant future is even more human. For that it doesn’t take any propaganda or conspiracy whatsoever.
And your view of the media’s position in this whole issue is almost identical to that of the “skeptics” – only the other way round. From closely following the related news here in Europe, I’d say that most of the mainstream media does in fact treat the entire climate change issue far more alarming than even the worst case outcome from any model in the AR4 could justify. And most of the public seems to react “human” again – they lose interest because most of it sounds too scray to be true or too unavoidable to be worth really caring about it any more. (And maybe they heard the end of the world proclaimed once or twice too often when it was about acid rain, the ozone hole, overpopulation, oil crisis, birdflu, swineflu, the current recession and what have you).
Another problem is that the whole warming thing is being trivialized (does that word exist in english?) by too many people claiming to have just the thing required to get rid of the problem. Almost any carmaker these days makes “climate friendly” a selling point. Fluorescent lightbulbs, wind turbines popping up all over the country (at least here in Germany) and justifying just about any new tax or raise in prices with climate change leads to people believing they’ve done enough or at least something. “I’ve got a Prius, I rescue the earth more than you do.” – its human.
Just look at the plugin-hybrind vs. hybrid discussion in this thread. Will it help saving the world to decide one way or the other? Surely not – but discussing it anyway is human.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not at all saying, that this is an excuse and that we should do nothing more because of the human aspect. All I’m saying is, that we have to take human nature into account when we really want to make a difference. Ignoring it, assuming that its in fact nothing like that but manipulation through propaganda or treating it like some disgusting emotional defect that should be beneath anybody won’t help.
#1032 Mark
Yup, not all electric power comes from fossil fuels. But the important question is, “What will be used to make the electric power to drive a new electric load?”
I think I have made it clear that coal it will be.
Whatever you conclude, the linked reference (the EPRI-NRDC study at http://www.miastrada.com/references, Reference 2, Fig. 5-1) lets you pick the fuel and the power plant type, whatever you might wish to imagine. And it purports to have taken account all the processing, and deleivery effects.
As to the mythical efficiencies of the central power plants, the truth is they are stuck with the same peak temperature limits that “ICE” machines are stuck with. That limit mostly being due to the temperature at which NOx compounds are formed since the nitrogen part of air is hard to avoid in all fossil fuel burning systems. The coal plants on average in the USA are about 33% efficient in producing electrical energy from heat energy, so that includes heat loss in the electric generators. 7% loss in transmission gets power to a house, net efficiency of 31%. (Peaking natural gas plants are maybe a little less efficient, and combined cycle natural gas plants may get about 50% in comparable operation. And yes, natural gas takes less energy to get to the fire point and causes less CO2 along the way.)
Now we could look at another reference at the same link,(the Argonne study, Reference (5), page 9, lower right corner, at http://www.miastrada.com/references). Referring to the “production Prius,” the exact terminology used is “Avg. Eng. Eff.– 38.2%.
Just for fun (Ike Solem #1035 might appreciate evidence of how independence can get lost, even at a national laboratory), while you are there you might notice that the plug-in modification called the Hymotion Prius (which was the intended star of the study)turned out to degrade the Prius engine efficiency to 32%. Since Argonne is proud of being a proponent of plug-in cars, they fought bravely to not notice this little fact. (Actually, if the Hymotion folks knew what they were doing they could probably fix this.) But the fact remains, the EPRI-NRDC study shows that the for the PHEV (plug-in hybrid)case studied, more CO2 is released than if the car is just left alone as a hybrid. (And by the way, in the earlier discussed EPRI-NRDC study, the result was for electric operation only about half of the time.)
And #1035 Ike Solem,
Though I agree with you in general, I think your example of physicists not working in the PV field is not a good choice. Physicist have been a big part of the semiconductor industry throughout its existence. I like to say they are really engineers when they get working on that practical kind of stuff.
Ike Solem @ 1035:
Were you aware that British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell both have photovoltaic products?
As for Exxon, they haven’t had a solar patent assigned to them in 18 years.
http://ecosyn.us/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Exxon+Solar+Patents
(There were none for “ExxonMobile”)
There are enough very large corporations involved in solar research these days (Samsung being one and Samsung is HUGE) that I’m thinking your fears are unwarranted.
But also, the patent process doesn’t really work well that way. All patents are published, so if someone can come up with a way that is sufficiently different using the previous patent as a starting basis, the previous patent effectively becomes worthless. With an ongoing stream of innovations in the PV field, trying to corner that market is a losing proposition.
Mark Says (30 mai 2009 at 3:44 AM):
“However, when someone is trying to say that #2 isn’t true (James wants to say it’s good for wildlife to have radioactive blood, maybe the spiders swing from threads better…) you have to bring in the relative badness of both 1 and 2 to show why animals are living in a radioactive area.”
Humm… Maybe you could let me say what I’m trying to say for myself, instead of substituting your own words? I have never argued that radiation is good for wildlife, just that it’s LESS BAD than the ordinary effects of trying to live amongst a sizeable human population.
Or to be quite specific, that the net effect of the Chernobyl accident appears, on the evidence to date (which I’ll agree is not complete) to be positive. Now there are a couple of corrolaries to this that might be worth thinking about. First, the obvious, that even if the effects aren’t a net positive, they’re surely a long way from the “Dead Zone” of the anti-nuclear mythos.
Second, consider that the Chernobyl area was not all that densely populated before the accident. (And there are still some humans living & visiting there). Suppose we did the comparison against say Manhattan, Las Vegas, or other urban area of your choice? Or for that matter, against an equal area of the industrially farmed midwest?
Now if you want to go further still, I’m sure I’m not the only person who’ll argue that biodiversity is a net good. Beyond that, we get into the teleological questions such as what constitutes a good life. For me, one basic necessity is that no one should have to live in a city. (I recognize that there are some who claim to want to. I class them with people who find pleasure in the whips & chains variants of sex: if it makes them happy, fine – just don’t force it on me.) It’s not the extreme of species suicide for the good of the biosphere, but living so that you have a good biosphere to enjoy living in.
Ike Solem Says (30 mai 2009 at 8:39 AM):
“For example, a physicist in the U.S. can make a career out of studying fiber optic cables, or out of cosmology – but solar photovoltaics? Not going to happen…”
Why do you think this? Aren’t you one of those who keep on pointing me to Google? OK, go to Google Scholar and search for “photovoltaic” papers in chemistry, materials science, & physics in 2008 and 2009. You should get about 9300 hits. Do the same for “fiberoptics” and you should see about 5000 hits, “cosmology” about 12,000. Seems as though photovoltaics is hardly an orphaned field…
Just for fun, I used to work down the hall from a guy whose lab investigated an obsure phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance. Repeating the same search on that, I get a bit over a thousand hits – not bad for such an obscure subject. Except, of course, that it’s what makes possible all those $100 hard disks that hold multiple hundreds of gigabytes of data…
I wish I could read all the comments here. Just wanted to point to some tables of potential solar electricity prices I made:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/04/aerosol-effects-and-climate-part-ii-the-role-of-nucleation-and-cosmic-rays/langswitch_lang/it#comment-125648
(Note the follow-up comments, which have some clarifications and corrections.)
back to the original topic… Just heard the leader of the opposition here in Australia say that there is no point in Australia legislating to create an emissions trading scheme until we see what the US is going to do, because that will set the standard for the rest of the world.
Jim Bullis,
If you talk about cogeneration, is this the kind of product that you mean? The site is partly in Dutch, but you’ll find some information in English too. Incidentally, last night I saw a television ad for promoting these kind of central heating boilers. So that’s how far it has already progressed over here. I have heard a consumer price (after subsidy) of 3500 euro for one of these.
As to your post 29 May 2009 at 2:1 PM
You say that the reference #2 you provide ‘proves’ that plug in hybrids are worse than a normal hybrid. You can only say that by cherrypicking the worst option from figure 5.1, which is ‘old coal’. In all other cases plugins are equal or better. If plugin hybrids need more electricity and more powerplants are going to be built, then obviously they aren’t going to be ‘old coal’.
Here is another, more recent report from Argonne about this subject. They do a very thorough job by looking at the generation mixes in different states and also using the concept of ‘marginal generation mix’. I think this quote summarizes the report quite well:
“Furthermore, the WTW GHG emissions advantage of CD over CS operation
disappears by moving from the California to the U.S. generation mix, and it is even reversed by moving to the Illinois marginal generation mix, thus surrendering the potential GHG emissions benefit of PHEVs […]. In other words, the improved energy efficiency and GHG emissions of PHEVs over regular HEVs could be entirely negated by the energy penalty and GHG emissions associated with the electricity generation in power plants. Such implications underscore the significance of the employed electricity generation mix for charging PHEVs.”
WTW = well-to-wheel
CD = charge depletion = electric only operation
CS = charge sustaining = hybrid operation
The reason to move forward with PHEV’s now is that the shift to low carbon electricity and electric road transport must take place simultaneously. What’s the use of all that clean energy if we don’t have electric cars? What’s the use of all those electric cars if we don’t have clean energy?
As for the ‘marginal generation mix’, it is not all in the hands of government/big business. There are ways you can influence that as an individual. You can buy solar panels, or invest in wind farms, eg Meewind (‘Tailwind’, sorry Dutch again, but google translate does a reasonable job to give you an idea) is such an opportunity for individuals to invest directly in an offshore wind farm and create their own marginal mix.
Ray Ladbury shows an amazing lack of understanding of the real world.
“Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the most successful fishermen could buy out the less successful, who could then go about some other line of work and add to the economy in other ways. Nah! That’s just crazy talk!”
What part of “subsist” is too complex for you?
If the poorer 50% had an option other than a subsistence on poor catches of fish, don’t you think they would have taken it up?
And your “solution”? That the top fisherman (the top 5 already catch 20%) pay the bottom? Why would they do that? They already catch the entire, supposed sustainable limit. Your logic is hopelessly flawed. If they reduce their catch, their incomes reduce. If they reduce it to match the 50% that catch 10%, i.e. the only rate that maintains 100 fishermen and catches 20% of the current catch, then they move to a subsistence level of income.
The premise of the article clearly shows that 20% of the present catch is insufficient to provide for the welfare of 100 fishermen. Yet there are 100 fishermen. Making a subset “pay” for the others to not fish still divides the same total fish take amongst 100. No magic “capital” appears from thin air no matter how much you wish it.
James, show me a single solar research institute in the United States. Show me one university that has such a program, compared to the number of nuclear engineering and petroleum engineering research centers.
Take Berkeley, for example. They have a nuclear engineering center, but no solar engineering center – and their only proposal for a biofuels research center was nonsense, as it would have been owned and controlled by BP. BP has not shown much interest in pursuing a technology that would undercut all of its fossil fuels sales, either. That general theme was also seen in the Berkeley-Novartis deal and many other public-private partnerships.
For a more realistic search, try the following:
“nuclear engineering” site:.edu 418,000 hits
“petroleum engineering” site:.edu 45,500 hits
“solar engineering” site:.edu 1,910 hits
“photovoltaic engineering” site:.edu 169 hits
Obviously, there is a huge government bias towards certain kinds of energy research in the U.S. – and I wonder what percentage of your photovoltaics papers came from the U.S.?
However, can you really blame the large research universities, who have a symbiotic relationship with the federal government’s science finance system? Drug money comes from the NIH, a wide variety of basic science funding comes from the NSF, and energy money is supposed to come from the Department of Energy, a highly politicized outfit with a terrible track record on renewable energy, and zero budget for solar.
They will put aside $2.4 billion for fraudulent “clean coal” projects, which pretty much proves that DOE decisions are not made on the basis of science, or even of public opinion, but rather on the basis of politics – fossil fuel interests can lean on the President and Congress in order to control DOE decision making; that doesn’t happen so much with the NSF and NIH because they were set up as independent institutions who distribute lump sums delivered by Congress, with the decisions on funding done by internal peer review. This is a different kind of peer review than the pre-publication peer review of journal articles, far more politicized – but there are no earmarks involved. This is quite unlike the DOE, where political pressure is the norm – thus, if a bunch of coal-state Democrats lean on Steven Chu to provide funds for FutureGen, is he going to oppose them? Especially if this is what Obama wants – more money for coal, nothing for solar?
Obama did make a trip to promote the biggest solar installation in the U.S., (Nellis AFB, Nevada) and announced some additional funding for “geothermal and solar” – which is an odd mix of subjects, as what does geothermal have to do with solar? Will it be 90% geothermal, 10% solar? Notice also that no money has been set aside for academic research:
The funding is intended to help the solar and geothermal industries overcome technical barriers, demonstrate new technologies, and provide support for clean energy jobs.
Thus, the situation with renewable energy research remains unchanged. Universities are not building new energy research institutes, and the federal government is not making funds available for such research. Here are the May 15 Chu announcements that provoked so much disgust:
1) “U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu today announced at the National Coal Council that $2.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be used to expand and accelerate the commercial deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.”
2) “Clean Coal Power Initiative: $800 million will be used to expand DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative, which provides government co-financing for new coal technologies that can help utilities cut sulfur, nitrogen and mercury pollutants from power plants.”
3) “Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage: $1.52 billion will be used for a two-part competitive solicitation for large-scale CCS from industrial sources.”
There are a host of smaller coal projects – but nothing similar for wind, solar or advanced biofuels. When it comes to government financial outlays, it is mostly going to coal, some to nuclear, and a tiny fraction to solar – just enough so that the politicians can say they are supporting it, but not enough for it to take off.
So, that’s coal – and now, we have the “leftist” Council on Foreign Relations picking up where the “rightist” Heritage Foundation left off – did you know tar sands are safe, clean and wonderful for the climate?
http://www.oilwatchdog.org/articles/?storyId=27518
Not even the DOE under Bush would finance FutureGen, because the technology is a fraud. What does that say about this “new agenda” being led by a “green guru”, as the press puts it? Similarly, one of Obama’s close advisors is Warren Buffet, who has massive holdings in the coal-rail-utility business (Berkshire’s core business, apparently), he was also a major driver behind the effort to expand Canadian tar oil production. If the financial backers of the politicians won’t support renewables, will the politicians do so? Only if they are not reliant on those financial backers for survival – and that’s not the case, is it?
Thus, it would be unwise to let up any pressure on the new administration – because you can bet that the fossil fuel lobby is pushing as hard as it can to water down, stall and dismantle every effort to limit fossil fuel emissions and expand renewables.
Nice work, Patrick. Can you summarize it all for us, as in how close the economics are for someone living in a sunny place like Los Angeles, to getting cheaper electricity by covering the roof of their house with solar panels, versus buying it from the grid and a coal fired power plant?
Is solar twice as expensive, 4 times? Is it getting dramatically cheaper with time so that at some point in the near future it will reach grid parity for the average homeowner in SoCal? If so, when this occurs, the above debate over the plugin hybrid vs the serial hybrid will be moot since the vehicle owner could get off the grid. If this is coming soon, then really what we should be doing is getting as many plugins out there as we can in anticipation of this event. Or, at least, make the hybrids out there easily convertible to a plugin mode.
freespeech,
And yet, [edit] just such arrangements are being implemented all over the globe–from Chesapeake oyster harvests, to crabs to salmom to crabs. Fishermen are not morons. They can observe diminishing catches as well as the rest. The fact of the matter is that the successful fishermen are in a position to buy out their less successful competitors, and after all, not everyone is meant to be a fisherman or a farmer or an autoworker for that matter.
Not every game is a zero sum game. Sometimes the answer to giving folks a bigger slice of the pie is to make the pie grow. And if it can’t grow in fishing, it will have to grow somewhere else–raising algae to turn into fuel for the fishermen’s boats, for instance. Nah, again, that’s just crazy talk.
> real world
You’re misreading it. It’s an analogy.
Freespeech, you’re assuming these people have no food source but fish. No snails, no seaweed, no coconuts, no long pig. If so, yes, they’ve doomed not only themselves but their potential offspring by overshoot — they’ll diminish the capacity of the ecosystem to support so many top predators for generations. Dieoffs happen.
William Catton, carrying capacity, Homo colossus, overshoot, crash, die-off, Easter Island, overpopulation, Human Overpopulation, Science, Ecology, … http://dieoff.org/page81.htm
Usual answer, there’s a heck of a rich island next door, invade them.
Once you run out of islands, the whole archipelago starves. Fermi Paradox illustrated.
Pushing the sustainable limit, any one overreaching year, or one standard catch during one bad year, starts the resource decline.
A few big fishing operations can screw up. So can a lot of small ones; recent evidence is that even before steam engines, fishing had already seriously depleted the ocean. We knew from anecdotes but now finally the research numbers are coming in.
Getting the science done _before_ the critical time is the issue, eh?
Try a different one — banks and consumers. A thousand local banks can provide credit for a couple hundred million customers. Five international banks can slowly buy out the local banks and handle all the customers.
If a local bank gets greedy and screws up, how bad is it? If a local bank just tries to change the local law so it _can_ get greedy, how likely is it to succeed?
If several huge banks cooperate, get state and national laws changed, so they can and all become more greedy and screw up, how bad is it?
Experiment. See what happens. Oh, yeah, we did that already.
Feb 26, 2009 Popular Mechanics Solar panel drops to $1 per watt: Is this a milestone or the bottom for silicon-based panels?
A solar power milestone was reached on Tuesday when First Solar Inc brought its manufacturing costs for solar panels down to $1 per watt. But a study from the University of California and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs suggests that this might be the bottom for a price-point — if solar power is ever going to scale up to become competitive with other forms of energy. Here are the new challenges facing the solar industry and some suggestions to make a brighter future. Engineering faculty Cyrus Wadia, Paul Alivisatos and Daniel Kammen contributed to this research.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4306443.html
http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/faculty/faculty-in-the-news/faculty-in-the-news/smartfolder_with_newscenterdate_and_sidebar_view?b_start:int=40
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2008/10/03/berkeley-lab-and-university-of-california-berkeley-announce-india-energy-rd-program/