74 comments on Oh All Right (or Friday Open Thread 2) (from a conference no less...)
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
74 comments on Oh All Right (or Friday Open Thread 2) (from a conference no less...)
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- Passive Solar Design Overview – Part 1
- Radical Retrenchment - A Reference Model
- TOD:Campfire RSS feed
TOD:Europe
- Energy Policy: SER-2 [01] Introduction
- The Russian Bear?
- The Permanent Oil Crisis Conference in Amsterdam, January 21 & 22, 2009
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Friday 9th January 2009
- 2009: Predictions for Australia
- The Bullroarer - Tuesday 6th January 2009
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
“It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
—Upton Sinclair
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Heading Out
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Economists (Sailorman excepted?) seem to believe deeply in the substitutibiliy of resources as availability/cost change, and we have centuries of specious examples like whale oil to kerosine. A more relevant example may be Easter Island's collapse fromf the exhaustion of timber, which ended access to ocean protein and trade and allowed erosion to destroy their agriculture.
Lawyers (Chuck Schumer) seem to value victory over truth, believing that words trump reality.
I don't have sufficient data on engineers vs. physicists, and little at all on chemists. I find society as a whole is poorly educated about science, and thus has been rejecting the evidence for global warming and man's contribution to it. The anti-science diatribes of the religious right don't support accepting science. The Bush administration's editing of NASA and land management reports to fit their preferred business conclusions, of course, are a faith-based denial of what we wish weren't true.
A few, a very few kids take the hard math, chemistry, honors physics options. Most kids take the easy, the nonquantitative way.
Unless you've had chemistry and physics some calculus in high school, the chances that you will remedy these deficiencis in college are very slim. When I was in the MBA in finance program at U.C. Berkeley, every one of my profs was brilliant--millionaires and multimillionaires, every single one of them. They could all think quantitatively--but not a single one of them had what I would call even a moderately adequate science background. Possibly none of them understood or could explain the laws of thermodynamics, and all (or almost all) of them had been brainwashed by the economists to believe in the infinite ability of markets to find good substitutes for what we might be running out of in the way of resources.
Not all economists are ignorant of science, but the great majority are. On the other hand, economic historians--who often have a lot of knowledge of the history of technology and some of the history of science--do tend to understand the kinds of things we talk about on TOD quite well. Believe it or not, many (possibly most) economists despise economic historians and do not talk to them--partly because of different vocabularies, but mostly because "economics" has way more prestige than "economic history," which is viewed as a branch of the despised discipline of history.
Acadademicians mostly do not talk to people outside of their own particular departments, and this parochialism leads to invincible ignorance in all to many cases.
Just because something is "scientifically" plausible does not mean it is engineering wise do-able.
Engineers have to deal with the messiness of the real world as opposed to the mathematical beauty of scientific theory. In the real world, signals have noise. In the real world, memory cells get hit with soft errors. In the real world, entropy rules. In the real world, materials have frailties and economic costs. So when people dream about how "they will find some other technical way of doing this" --i.e. converting coal to liquid fuel-- they are really barking up a fictious tree in a nonexistent forest. Humanity has been incredibly lucky in some respects because of the ease with which some technologies (i.e. computer chips) can be practiced. That luck is not going to appear everywhere.
I recall the average length of time between a structural materials science breakthrough (metal matrix composities, carbon-carbon composites) and engineering application was measured in decades (plural).
This is the concern I raised, and which Sailorman sneered at, with respect to proposals to pour billions more into fusion research. We know so little about the scientific feasibility (it does work on the sun) that we have no idea whether a solution, even if possible, would have undesirable side effects (e.g., intolerable radioactivity of proximate materials) or how long it might take or what or how much resources such a solution might require. Not something on which to bet your mortgage payment.
My main points were
- If it could be made to work, then the benefits would be huge enough to justify an outlay of $100 trillion over a period of forty years.
- No qualified physicist that I know of has stated that fusion power cannot be made to work.
- Rationally, using the Laplace criterion of 50:50 probability, it makes sense to give fusion a shot even if there is a 50% chance that it fails after another forty years and $100 of trying.
Who ever said that worthwhile things were quick or cheap or easy or certain to work?Where did you see me say it can't be made to work?
I don't know of anyone who can predit technology 40 years into the future.
In fact, I agree you didn't sneer at my suggestion; you made it an ad hominem attack on me.
What I try to do is to vigorously attack what I think is fallacious reasoning (and NOT the person putting forth the line of reasoning).
The Laplace criterion says that when you do not have any good basis to predict odds from two possibilities, then go with 50:50.
Of the nuclear engineers I know (only four or five--one is mechanical now), most think that fusion can be made to work and none was outright negative--but all emphaized the huge expense and practical problems. Of the high-energy physicists I've known (more than one hundred, mostly working at Laurance Radiation Lab and Livermore, some of whom worked for decades on thermonuclear energy development) there is a consensus that thermonuclear energy will eventually be made to work, but there is disagreement as to how much progress in basic research (if any) needs to be done.
For forty years high-energy physics research has been starved for funds. No wonder we have made little progress in getting toward practical applications of thermonuclear energy.
BTW, many engineers in 1900 were sure that powered flight could not work. Many engineers on the Manhatten Project flat out gave up on problems that were then promptly solved by physicists.
Were I going on a sailing cruise, I'd rather have engineers as crew, because they are cautious and check everything and know about Murphy's Law, and they are wonderfully ingenious about fixing stuff. Were I to be on a race, I'd rather have physicists for crew, because they are ready to think outside the box and take gambles that may pay off--or may fail bigtime.
Currently, I think we are in a race.
If we're looking for good solutions, we all need to be careful about our reasoning, and to refrain from misrepresenting and from attacking each other.
Don't confuse "high energy physics," almost all of which is "elementary particle" kind of research with fusion research. The former has no possibility of contributing to successful fusion power, or much of anything else. (In fact, that was the domain of my own doctoral and early post-doctoral years of research, but I realized I wanted to study more tangible areas.)
I haven't been following fusiion research recently. There's a laser implosion version pursued mostly at LBL, I think, and there's various versions of magnetic confinement pursued in many locations. They all have huge EROEI problems, as well as scaling problems. My expectation is that it will take a very long time, an inderminately long time, to solve these and many associated materials problems. If resources were unlimited, sure, go for it. But it's not only oil that's in limited supply. (We probably do have a surplus of physicists relative to market demand, actually. (mild irony intended))
Hell, we have poured hundreds of billions into trying to free Iraq, and everybody in power knew that was never going to happen, even before 1 dollar was spent. Fusion is a much better bet, plus the money (at least some of it) would go to scientists and engineers instead of slimy defense contractors.
Economics without history is nothing but a cargo cult.