My hope is that the Native-American Indian Tribes with their independent nation status will be the leaders in forming large, contiguous Biosolar Habitats. If one considers the staggering amounts of money that they are generating from casino gambling, and if these huge sums are put to Biosolar usage across their lands for the benefit of their people--it would do much to alert the rest of the US of the need for 150 million wheelbarrows & bicycles, PVs, windturbines, and relocalized permaculture.
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Nationally, U.S. Indian gambling revenue totaled about $19 billion last year, up 12 percent, but about two-thirds the size of commercial gambling in states such as Nevada and New Jersey, the report said.
Meister expects Arizona to post growth again this year, albeit not as high as 26 percent, and he expects gains to continue nationally.
His report estimates Indian gambling directly and indirectly contributed $19.4 billion in wages nationally, 539,000 jobs, $6.2 billion in tax revenue and additional revenue sharing with governments of $900 million. He estimates total economic output from the industry at $52.3 billion.
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That is alot of money that could be diverted to the Paradigm Shift across Indian Tribal lands.
So you think people that sell tax-free cigarettes, alcohol and gasoline in conjunction with running casinos are going to take the lead in some kind of moral crusade?
I would love to know how you came up with this thought.
You keep hoping the wrong things, Bob. It is not going to happen. Homo sapiens is going to slam into the wall at near full speed. Our only hope is for yet another technological miracle. Barring that, we're screwed.
Thxs for responding. You guys are probably correct, but the many AZ tribes control vast landholdings in crucial habitats. The Arizona tribes have terrible problems with obesity, alcoholism, and diabetes, along with other problems directly attributable to living against their ancient teachings, skills, and culture. PO + GW Outreach would be the best thing that ever happened to them as they could readily adopt their past cultures to biosolar living.
Take the health problems for example. I have read articles saying their tendency to get vastly overweight is due to the fact that their bodies are desert-evolved for the efficiency of highly active laborious lifestyles. Adopting sedentary habits and auto-driving is killing them vs their ancestors covering large distances to glean slim-pickings from the sparse AZ habitats. A early tribal recognition of this fact could lead to active permaculture programs whereby they go back to growing native foods versus Chez Doodles and Soda Pop. What better way to optimize their decline?
I have to dissapoint you about YATM. Physics being what it is has dealt its cards and the solar hand is as good as it gets. And it is a damn good hand, if I may say so... 10000 times the power manking needs, guaranteed for another three billion years...
The difficulties of solar relate to how diffuse it is and therefore to the general problem of collection. Your statement of 10,000 times the power mankind needs can immediately be quartered, because currently there is no feasible way to install solar collectors on ocean surface. Then we can further reduce the collectible surface area based upon other factors, including food needed for agricultural, etc. Finally, the availability of solar is variable based on latitude with more nothern climates having less availability than southern climates. This brings into play problems of distribution and storage.
It sounds all very nice to point to the total solar radiation falling on planet earth but there are real engineering issues that must be addressed to utilize that energy. It doesn't just happen because the energy is there. If that were the case why had it not already happened in the prior thousands of years of human existence? Ah, yes, it DID happen, but the utilization level was so low as to preclude a modern lifestyle or modern population densities.
In other words, the engineering issues are not yet solved on a scale or in a manner that does anything other than ensure massive social upheaval anyway.
Now exactly what were you trying to say again before the bus of reality ran over your pipedream?
Yeah.. like many of us, you miss IP's point entirely.
As long as we hit this wall HARD enough, our bodies will just pop through the hole the collision produces, and land neatly on our bikes which are parked on the other side of the wall.
Our buildout of PV/Wind/Solar Heat/Conservation measures are way too late. (Even Nuclear, for those who look to that route) Who knows if we still have a few years to really ramp them up, or if we will do it even so. More and more people are trying as Grid PV and other commercial products start to ramp up some, but the numbers, as most probably recognize, are dismally small. The lies and distortions of XOM and GM, et al.. are getting some noise, but few Pols can take this info to the logical conclusion.. or dare to anyway.
I do have some hope in the fact that we are spread out over the whole planet, and that some pockets will find solutions where others are getting slammed, or slamming one another. While the international economy is one of the great, chain nets that will pull many, many communities downwards together.. as economic ties weaken, various communities will have the chance to 'refloat' on local assets, and the reduced ability to transport so freely could also have the benefit of protecting various areas by the very virtue of their distances from others. This might once again be a saving grace for the profligate USA, with the oceans as massive borders to migratory flows or invasions, etc. But really, this thinking is more about much smaller areas and communities, which is what I work on, since it beats painting caustic pictures of the 'Road Warriors'. By the way, if they were all attacking each other for fuel, would they really be doing it in a bunch of souped up V-8's, or should we remake it to today's tech and have them all on Vespas and Priuses?
I had a fairly pollyana-ish friend who took the 'Grass is always greener' aphorism and turned it into 'Make your own grasses as green as possible'.. Hard to say it without smirking, but I know it has a good bit of truth in it, nonetheless.
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.."
"souped up V-8's, or should we remake it to today's tech and have them all on Vespas and Priuses"
I suppose what the V8's had that the Vespas & Priuses don't, is it is possible to extend their running life using only metal hand tools.
Greyzone, before denigrating somebody else's 'pipedream', at least get your geographic facts correct. Solar energy is more abundant in the tropics or nearto than it is in either more northerly or more southerly locations.
Hemisphere-centricity aside, he's right. The "total solar flux" argument is the last refuge of the cornered cornucopian. It's a will o' the wisp that blows away at the first breath of common sense.
My statement can be easily cut by a factor of one thousand, because once we start to change Earth's albedo by more than 0.1% or so, the absorbed heat causes global warming directly. Let me show you why that is so:
Currently (2001) it is estimated that we use 4.26 × 10^20J of energy annually. That is roughly 13,500GW of continuous power, most of which is waste heat, of course. Solar radiation on the surface is approx. 1kW/m^2. The exposed side of the planet has an effective area of pi*r^2 = 1.34e14m^2. Thus the power of solar radiation hitting Earth's (completely cloudless) surface is roughly 130,000,000GW and above the atmosphere it is 50% more. 1W/m^2 is the magnitude of the radiative forcing from trapped IR radiation in the atmosphere (energy that has not been used by us at all) that causes global warming. This equals roughly 132,000GW of heating power. These are all orders of magnitude, in reality there is cloud cover etc. which is seriously complicating things.
Thanks to the energy conservation law it does not matter where the heat that causes global warming comes from. It can be trapped IR or it can be heat created by fusion power, to the planet it is all the same. It follows that ANY power generation method will have similar effects on the surface because the only way to get rid of it is by radiation into space! The limit of how much energy we can use in total before we start heating the planet directly (rather than by changing the atmospheric IR scattering) is therefor only one order of magnitude beyond the amount of energy we use already. And since future solar cells will have roughly 40% efficiency (going beyond three junctions seems a waste) and since the thermal efficiency of other power generation methods is also 40%, useful power vs. process it is a wash. I made the assumption here that the radiators are at sea level... you could always put the power plants on stilts above the atmosphere and then avoid the 60% penalty or install the solar panels in space and use them to shade the planet etc., but I am trying to discuss 21st century technology here, not 23rd century stuff.
So if we really wanted to use energy beyond the 1W/m^2 limit (which is on the order of maybe 100,000GW), we would need to start installing planetary air conditioning. It can be done, but we are talking terra-forming or at least terra-controlling technologies here... something I won't speculate about right now.
You see... the point is that solar energy can easily cover what we need right now and then some. But beyond what can be done with solar energy, there is very little room for anything else without really heroic efforts.
"Now exactly what were you trying to say again before the bus of reality ran over your pipedream?"
I was trying to say that I have done my homework. Please, please inform yourself.
much more then would be practical. it creates a feedback loop in which they must produce them faster and faster to get the energy they need to produce them faster to meet demand..
People don't get that. On a flight to the East Coast this year I got to see parts of the Midwest and observed how huge the area of the barn roofs was. It occured to me that one could probably generate more net energy by putting solar cells on the farm barns than by all bio-ethanol efforts in total. But then... solar cells don't vote. Farmers do. So the political influence is all with bio-ethanol.
Sorry Bob, but I have to agree with Keithster. Speaking as a card-carrying Indian living in the Native-American Ground Zero known as Tulsa, Oklahoma, I can assure you that (unfortunately) the tribal nations are as short-sighted and greedy as any other. Our leaders are elected based on the promise of economic growth within our nations, not on a far-reaching view of an ecologically-balanced future. We're just folks like anybody else.
Thxs for responding. I am a fast-crash doomer [realist] myself, but I think some tribes could rapidly modify their reservations to Biosolar lifestyles with gambling income. Sorry, I am not familiar with Native-Americans in the OK area, and what I know about AZ tribes comes from Googling and what I notice from driving around my state.
For example, the Fort McDowell tribe is only 900 members [only 600 live on the Reservation] but in 1996 they each annually got $30,000 apiece from tribal dispersement. This amount is probably much higher nowadays because I know that the casino has been expanded greatly and with the continuing growth of the Asphalt Wonderland: business is booming. With 40 square miles of land for so few people-- there is much they could do to enhance future sustainability if they can shift their mindset. Here is a link:
If I owned that much land and had that kind of annual free money--I would be installing PVs, potable water systems, bicycle paths, permaculture, and so on. Many tribal members have new McMansions and are driving new SUVs [noticed in my last drive], so I guess the Peakoil message hasn't spread to them yet. Sadly, they also ignore my warning emails as I have gotten no response. It is very difficult to get past those gatekeepers that have the power to filter emails, but I keep trying.
I think that once the tribe does become aware, that the much smaller bureaucracy [as compared to Az state govt], will be able to move very fast in adopting Biosolar changes. Once PO+GW Outreach achieves saturation-- it is only natural to try and optimize the decline path ahead. Time will tell.
Unfortunately, it comes down to the average human's short-sightedness. The figures you cite are impressive, but as you point out, this revenue is being spent on the same goods and housing as in the rest of America. While you do make a good point regarding the smaller beauracracy leading to a chance for swift change within a particular tribe, you have to keep in mind that the individuals who make up that tribe probably aren't interested in building a sustainable community. They're interested in buying all the stuff that gets advertised on their satellite TVs.
Anecdotally, I give you my tribe as an example. When we began to see greater income as a result of our successful gaming enterprises, we established a program to provide a free college education to any tribal member who wanted it. The catch? You have to choose between either Gaming Management or Environmental Engineering. Graduates of the latter program are in strong demand to deal with the ecological fallout from our last great revenue boom - leasing tribal lands to oil and gas. Instead of preparing for the future, my tribe attends only to its present needs.
It's not impossible that some far-thinking tribe will implement the changes you suggest, but it's no more likely within the Native American community than it is within groups of educated and thoughtful Anglos, Latinos, or African Americans.
Same for the idea that Native Americans will save the white man's ugly butt. That sounds more like eco romanticism to me.
Here are the facts: solar and wind energy markets have reached $11+ billion each in 2005 and are projected to grow beyond $100 billion some time around 2015. Venture Capital has discovered over the last two years that there is big money to be made in renewable energy and keeps pumping it up on the technology side. Drivers for alternative energy markets are government efforts all over the world to reduce energy dependence and imports from less than stable suppliers. In effect: renewables are becoming the playgound of the adults. Which means more international corporations and big business rather than Mom/Pop tech outlets and university R&D. Banks will want their share in return for the trillions of dollars of loans that it will take to re-tool the world energy infrastructure. When Edison and GE got into the game, it was huge. But it will be completely dwarfed by what will be happening over the next two decades.
I don't think the Native American tribes will get to play a major role in this. They would have to play it mighty smart if they wanted to.
The thing about buying/selling Solar/Wind equipment, is that a company is taking the chance of being the 'capitalist who sells you the rope to hang him with'.. as you can get products that don't require service contracts or visits by refueling trucks. It is one of the most hopeful things about Renewable Energy, and is why I support it over Nuclear, in part, as it allows a broadly dipersed ownership of the 'energy supply' create a more practical level of democracy than always is present on the paper-ballots of a paperless society.
FYI, I think my own, white butt isn't ugly at all. You just have to take my word on it.
I don't see renewables as the endpoint of capitalism. Quite the contrary. The capital expense to make millions of reliable solar panels for a competitive price is enormous. You can't just grow them in your back yard, they are being produced in state of the art factories. MW size wind turbines are enormous engineering challenges. You can't carve them out of a piece of wood in your garage. All of this is hard core technology on many levels. We are talking about industries here that have to grow to close to a trillion dollars a year if they are supposed to make even a dent in our energy future. And they will... we shall see $100 billion within a decade, at which point renewables will be everybody's darling (if for no other than economic reasons) and we will see the trillion worldwide being approached over the next 30 years.
The problem with nuclear is mostly that physics has linked weapons materials like Pu to the operation of reactors. You can't have civilian applications without the practical possibility of weapons. Most countries with exception of Japan, Germany and Switzerland, I think, got into the nuclear energy business as a by-product of their interest in nuclear weapons. Unless we can sort this out with international mechanisms to control the consequences, nuclear is a real pain in the ass. Just look at India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran. We shall see more of that.
I agree for technical reasons but I just can't see that happening for political ones. Who wants breeders in their back yard? Who wants the fuel reprocessing next door? Are we going to move ten times more disguised nuclear material across the country than we do already just because people are afraid of hosting the facilities in their county? I don't see it but maybe it is still the smaller of two evils...
We need to go to accelerator based reactors, which can burn up the long-half-life actinides, in the longer run.
Accelerator driven reactors are rube goldberg machines that keep getting press, but they just suck. Its an interesting, but dumb idea. You can make critical reactors just as safe, and accelerator reactors just as dangerous. If you want to do actinide burning, just use a liquid chloride reactor. If you want to do actinide free breeding, use a liquid fluoride reactor with thorium fuels. Just dont spend hundreds of millions more on a giant accelerator system.
I was not aware those accelerator ideas were still kicking... the Russians loved to talk about them in their nuclear physics textbooks but once you had to deal with a real accelerator meant to produce (a lot of) radiation (I was involved with SNS, ugly, ugly, ugly is all that comes to mind), you rather want to stay away from the idea.
I guess we still haven't seen the final demise of the fusion reactor, either. At least the Tokamak kind looks utterly hopless for its poor economy, but it seems the world is set to burn money in it, if not deuterium/tritium.
Thorium reactors, IF they became reality, could be interesting. How much real effort goes into making them ready for prime-time?
There are some Norwegian research in Thorium reactors. I have only read very short articels about it where it is said that the interst in it is due to Norway having very large Thorium deposits. They probably would like to develop this technology to export Thorium when their oil and gas deposits run out.
I guess we still haven't seen the final demise of the fusion reactor, either.
Oh I'm sure we'll figure out how to economically do confinement sometime in the next ten thousand years... as for the next century, it will continue to be everyone's favorite money pit. Not that there isn't cool stuff to come out of it. Magnetic confinement could be useful for other plasma applications, such as fissioning vapor core reactors and plasma propulsion spacecraft; But its such a waste these applications are mostly icing on a turd.
Thorium reactors, IF they became reality, could be interesting. How much real effort goes into making them ready for prime-time?
If they win it will be have to be on economics, and for that theres still some substantial R&D that needs to be done. We built several test liquid fluoride reactors in the late 60s, and ran one for four years at ORNL, so yeah we can do it using the ORNL specs, but it would be far better to improve on the design learning from the molten salt breeder reactor experience.
If I had to use numbers, I would guess it would take about ten billion and fifteen years to get a really solid liquid fluoride design up. Problems in the liquid fluoride reactor that are identified include a fully hot main loop because the fuel is liquid, so maintenance will have to be reduced and when necissary entirely robotic. Leaks are a possibility that must be accounted for, and so the reactor must be designed to manage a highly radiotoxic molten salt leak. Fortunately, if a leak does occur, the salt freezes and locks all of the fuel and fission products in a solid mass that just needs to be scraped up and put back into the reactor after the hole is patched, but contingency plans for such an occurance needs to be designed into the facility.
On the other hand, theres no cost for fuel fabrication and your fuel and waste stream is 1/100th that of a light water reactor with much of the waste stream partitioned as marketable xenon. Since the waste stream is allready in a molten salt medium, its not unrealistic to assume that further processing could be done to recapture value on fission platinum group metals and rare earths, in addition to chemical separation of stable isotopes to reduce the waste volume further.
According to an economic study I've seen, liquid fluoride thorium reactors could be cheaper than light water reactors or coal. The reduced fuel cost, higher uptime, better thermodynamic efficiency, and so on add up. But in all honesty theres a lot of work to be done to get there.
re: capitalism
Right. I didn't say it fully enough. I think selling PV and other RE equipment does have great business potential, and is being borne out, but it's a different model than selling a consumable supply item like heating oil or electricity. I don't know how much that issue has kept the existing energy 'suppliers' from getting into that field earlier, but for me, there's a world of difference, and still supports my preference for buying my own generation than tapping a needle into my cashflow every month. I would hope that the shift out of an oil economy could propel us beyond the 'forced addictions' models of buying/selling. (I don't consider food an 'addiction' in that sense, but a necessity.. and tho' I don't know how, I have to believe it is not part and parcel of an unhealty business model, as I feel the 'cheap energies' have been)
Plutonium is a problem, and so is the overcentralization of a nuclear powerbase and the dependence on too many layers of infrastructure (mining/refining/grid-power/highways) each with foreseeable weak-links and petroleum dependencies. Mine and refine the silicon and trace components, and you have local, daily juice for a couple to several decades.. acknowledging that this is one BB in the pile. Another will be adapting electrical requirements of various equipment to activate when the supply is available, instead of designing for 'a perpetual supply', which I think is a conceit of our recent decades of unrealistic availability. It'll be what it'll be. I won't likely be backing Nuclear. I don't trust it, for the above and other reasons (including the back-door development of new Nuke Weapons systems, as you pointed to), but I don't doubt that new reactors will be coming online soon and for a while.. my energies will be spent advocating and installing the forms I believe in as Clean, Safe, Long-Term solutions.
Sigh. Like a bad lunch, or an overcharged Energizer bunny, this bicycle and-so-forth meme just keeps coming back.
Now, I live in a city that has a lot of bike lanes, and I even own a pair of Hakkapeliitta tires (which have gone unused so far this season.) So I've got nothing against bikes. (Unlike most of The Netherlands, which, as a continuation of the North Sea floor, may be the flattest land on Earth, my area is somewhat hilly, so the trip percentage has maxed out somewhere in the mid single digit percent range, and that's in the summertime.)
But the last time "we" lived in the 19th century, average life expectancy was under 46. Nowadays it's about 78 according to something I just heard on NPR. Some of that gain owes to antibiotics. But a lot also owes to people who can in effect be kept staggering about indefinitely on life-support even though they may not look it.
So: please go to the mall and look around. Or if you have a downtown area where people circulate on foot, look around there. Or just imagine it in your mind's eye. Whichever way, when you're done looking, please tell me, how many of those folks are young, fit athletes? And on the other hand, how many, even as young as 30 or 35, would be at risk of keeling over if they ever tried to shovel a 20 foot long sidewalk by hand?
It's just not 1850 or even 1900 anymore. "We" have the large population we have, not the much smaller and intensely selected population of the semi-mythical historical past. (Semi-mythical because Karl Marx alluded, accurately IMO, to "the idiocy of rural life", as rural life was then known, something folks choose to forget when they don't feel like expending effort to make it in the world as it is, and delude themselves that their imagined past would be easier or "simpler".) So how, exactly, is the meme supposed to work, or, rather, how is it supposed to work broadly enough to make a difference?
Given the choice of taking a chance on living in a different world, or accepting the certainty of either death or else labor sufficiently hard and awful as to induce the wish for death, I expect that most people will choose to take the chance. Certainly that's how it's playing out so far. Sure, the US Congress and the European Parliament are both good at passing cheap sentiments for the far future, but when those booby-traps finally spring, they are, if need be, gotten around in one way or another.
So, among other things, all of the accessible hydrocarbons are in fact likely to be burned as "we" muddle along to wherever "we" are going. 'Cos here we are, and I haven't got a credible alternative and neither have you nor anyone else.
Hello Samasara,
My hope is that the Native-American Indian Tribes with their independent nation status will be the leaders in forming large, contiguous Biosolar Habitats. If one considers the staggering amounts of money that they are generating from casino gambling, and if these huge sums are put to Biosolar usage across their lands for the benefit of their people--it would do much to alert the rest of the US of the need for 150 million wheelbarrows & bicycles, PVs, windturbines, and relocalized permaculture.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Oops, forgot to include a link:
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0615gambling1...
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Nationally, U.S. Indian gambling revenue totaled about $19 billion last year, up 12 percent, but about two-thirds the size of commercial gambling in states such as Nevada and New Jersey, the report said.
Meister expects Arizona to post growth again this year, albeit not as high as 26 percent, and he expects gains to continue nationally.
His report estimates Indian gambling directly and indirectly contributed $19.4 billion in wages nationally, 539,000 jobs, $6.2 billion in tax revenue and additional revenue sharing with governments of $900 million. He estimates total economic output from the industry at $52.3 billion.
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That is alot of money that could be diverted to the Paradigm Shift across Indian Tribal lands.
So you think people that sell tax-free cigarettes, alcohol and gasoline in conjunction with running casinos are going to take the lead in some kind of moral crusade?
I would love to know how you came up with this thought.
You keep hoping the wrong things, Bob. It is not going to happen. Homo sapiens is going to slam into the wall at near full speed. Our only hope is for yet another technological miracle. Barring that, we're screwed.
Hello Keithster100 and Greyzone,
Thxs for responding. You guys are probably correct, but the many AZ tribes control vast landholdings in crucial habitats. The Arizona tribes have terrible problems with obesity, alcoholism, and diabetes, along with other problems directly attributable to living against their ancient teachings, skills, and culture. PO + GW Outreach would be the best thing that ever happened to them as they could readily adopt their past cultures to biosolar living.
Take the health problems for example. I have read articles saying their tendency to get vastly overweight is due to the fact that their bodies are desert-evolved for the efficiency of highly active laborious lifestyles. Adopting sedentary habits and auto-driving is killing them vs their ancestors covering large distances to glean slim-pickings from the sparse AZ habitats. A early tribal recognition of this fact could lead to active permaculture programs whereby they go back to growing native foods versus Chez Doodles and Soda Pop. What better way to optimize their decline?
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I have to dissapoint you about YATM. Physics being what it is has dealt its cards and the solar hand is as good as it gets. And it is a damn good hand, if I may say so... 10000 times the power manking needs, guaranteed for another three billion years...
If I were you, I would play that hand.
The difficulties of solar relate to how diffuse it is and therefore to the general problem of collection. Your statement of 10,000 times the power mankind needs can immediately be quartered, because currently there is no feasible way to install solar collectors on ocean surface. Then we can further reduce the collectible surface area based upon other factors, including food needed for agricultural, etc. Finally, the availability of solar is variable based on latitude with more nothern climates having less availability than southern climates. This brings into play problems of distribution and storage.
It sounds all very nice to point to the total solar radiation falling on planet earth but there are real engineering issues that must be addressed to utilize that energy. It doesn't just happen because the energy is there. If that were the case why had it not already happened in the prior thousands of years of human existence? Ah, yes, it DID happen, but the utilization level was so low as to preclude a modern lifestyle or modern population densities.
In other words, the engineering issues are not yet solved on a scale or in a manner that does anything other than ensure massive social upheaval anyway.
Now exactly what were you trying to say again before the bus of reality ran over your pipedream?
Yeah.. like many of us, you miss IP's point entirely.
As long as we hit this wall HARD enough, our bodies will just pop through the hole the collision produces, and land neatly on our bikes which are parked on the other side of the wall.
Our buildout of PV/Wind/Solar Heat/Conservation measures are way too late. (Even Nuclear, for those who look to that route) Who knows if we still have a few years to really ramp them up, or if we will do it even so. More and more people are trying as Grid PV and other commercial products start to ramp up some, but the numbers, as most probably recognize, are dismally small. The lies and distortions of XOM and GM, et al.. are getting some noise, but few Pols can take this info to the logical conclusion.. or dare to anyway.
I do have some hope in the fact that we are spread out over the whole planet, and that some pockets will find solutions where others are getting slammed, or slamming one another. While the international economy is one of the great, chain nets that will pull many, many communities downwards together.. as economic ties weaken, various communities will have the chance to 'refloat' on local assets, and the reduced ability to transport so freely could also have the benefit of protecting various areas by the very virtue of their distances from others. This might once again be a saving grace for the profligate USA, with the oceans as massive borders to migratory flows or invasions, etc. But really, this thinking is more about much smaller areas and communities, which is what I work on, since it beats painting caustic pictures of the 'Road Warriors'. By the way, if they were all attacking each other for fuel, would they really be doing it in a bunch of souped up V-8's, or should we remake it to today's tech and have them all on Vespas and Priuses?
I had a fairly pollyana-ish friend who took the 'Grass is always greener' aphorism and turned it into 'Make your own grasses as green as possible'.. Hard to say it without smirking, but I know it has a good bit of truth in it, nonetheless.
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.."
Bob
"souped up V-8's, or should we remake it to today's tech and have them all on Vespas and Priuses"
I suppose what the V8's had that the Vespas & Priuses don't, is it is possible to extend their running life using only metal hand tools.
Greyzone, before denigrating somebody else's 'pipedream', at least get your geographic facts correct. Solar energy is more abundant in the tropics or nearto than it is in either more northerly or more southerly locations.
Hemisphere-centricity aside, he's right. The "total solar flux" argument is the last refuge of the cornered cornucopian. It's a will o' the wisp that blows away at the first breath of common sense.
Right. Could one consider the fission products of all fissionable materials in the Earth's crust and bulk, or all the deuterium in the oceans?
Totally pointless---like pointing to the vast deserts of Australia or North Africa and exclaiming how much luxury truffles they could produce.
Whoa! Big deal! I spoke from a northern hemisphere perspective! Horror of horrors!
Guess what? Most of the land mass upon which solar collectors can be installed is... *drumroll* in the northern hemisphere.
My statement can be easily cut by a factor of one thousand, because once we start to change Earth's albedo by more than 0.1% or so, the absorbed heat causes global warming directly. Let me show you why that is so:
Currently (2001) it is estimated that we use 4.26 × 10^20J of energy annually. That is roughly 13,500GW of continuous power, most of which is waste heat, of course. Solar radiation on the surface is approx. 1kW/m^2. The exposed side of the planet has an effective area of pi*r^2 = 1.34e14m^2. Thus the power of solar radiation hitting Earth's (completely cloudless) surface is roughly 130,000,000GW and above the atmosphere it is 50% more. 1W/m^2 is the magnitude of the radiative forcing from trapped IR radiation in the atmosphere (energy that has not been used by us at all) that causes global warming. This equals roughly 132,000GW of heating power. These are all orders of magnitude, in reality there is cloud cover etc. which is seriously complicating things.
Thanks to the energy conservation law it does not matter where the heat that causes global warming comes from. It can be trapped IR or it can be heat created by fusion power, to the planet it is all the same. It follows that ANY power generation method will have similar effects on the surface because the only way to get rid of it is by radiation into space! The limit of how much energy we can use in total before we start heating the planet directly (rather than by changing the atmospheric IR scattering) is therefor only one order of magnitude beyond the amount of energy we use already. And since future solar cells will have roughly 40% efficiency (going beyond three junctions seems a waste) and since the thermal efficiency of other power generation methods is also 40%, useful power vs. process it is a wash. I made the assumption here that the radiators are at sea level... you could always put the power plants on stilts above the atmosphere and then avoid the 60% penalty or install the solar panels in space and use them to shade the planet etc., but I am trying to discuss 21st century technology here, not 23rd century stuff.
So if we really wanted to use energy beyond the 1W/m^2 limit (which is on the order of maybe 100,000GW), we would need to start installing planetary air conditioning. It can be done, but we are talking terra-forming or at least terra-controlling technologies here... something I won't speculate about right now.
You see... the point is that solar energy can easily cover what we need right now and then some. But beyond what can be done with solar energy, there is very little room for anything else without really heroic efforts.
"Now exactly what were you trying to say again before the bus of reality ran over your pipedream?"
I was trying to say that I have done my homework. Please, please inform yourself.
Hah... so all we need is to cover the whole planet with solar panels? we are saved!
Or. . . how many solar panels would it take to run a factory that makes solar panels?
much more then would be practical. it creates a feedback loop in which they must produce them faster and faster to get the energy they need to produce them faster to meet demand..
EROEI of solar is 5-10 and getting better all the time. No problem. Inform yourself.
"Only" a few hundred thousand square km with current technology...
Our houses 'only' cover a few factors more then a 'a hundred thousand square km'.
People don't get that. On a flight to the East Coast this year I got to see parts of the Midwest and observed how huge the area of the barn roofs was. It occured to me that one could probably generate more net energy by putting solar cells on the farm barns than by all bio-ethanol efforts in total. But then... solar cells don't vote. Farmers do. So the political influence is all with bio-ethanol.
Sorry Bob, but I have to agree with Keithster. Speaking as a card-carrying Indian living in the Native-American Ground Zero known as Tulsa, Oklahoma, I can assure you that (unfortunately) the tribal nations are as short-sighted and greedy as any other. Our leaders are elected based on the promise of economic growth within our nations, not on a far-reaching view of an ecologically-balanced future. We're just folks like anybody else.
Hello Tsulio,
Thxs for responding. I am a fast-crash doomer [realist] myself, but I think some tribes could rapidly modify their reservations to Biosolar lifestyles with gambling income. Sorry, I am not familiar with Native-Americans in the OK area, and what I know about AZ tribes comes from Googling and what I notice from driving around my state.
For example, the Fort McDowell tribe is only 900 members [only 600 live on the Reservation] but in 1996 they each annually got $30,000 apiece from tribal dispersement. This amount is probably much higher nowadays because I know that the casino has been expanded greatly and with the continuing growth of the Asphalt Wonderland: business is booming. With 40 square miles of land for so few people-- there is much they could do to enhance future sustainability if they can shift their mindset. Here is a link:
http://www.ftmcdowell.org/History%20&%20Cultural.htm
If I owned that much land and had that kind of annual free money--I would be installing PVs, potable water systems, bicycle paths, permaculture, and so on. Many tribal members have new McMansions and are driving new SUVs [noticed in my last drive], so I guess the Peakoil message hasn't spread to them yet. Sadly, they also ignore my warning emails as I have gotten no response. It is very difficult to get past those gatekeepers that have the power to filter emails, but I keep trying.
I think that once the tribe does become aware, that the much smaller bureaucracy [as compared to Az state govt], will be able to move very fast in adopting Biosolar changes. Once PO+GW Outreach achieves saturation-- it is only natural to try and optimize the decline path ahead. Time will tell.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Unfortunately, it comes down to the average human's short-sightedness. The figures you cite are impressive, but as you point out, this revenue is being spent on the same goods and housing as in the rest of America. While you do make a good point regarding the smaller beauracracy leading to a chance for swift change within a particular tribe, you have to keep in mind that the individuals who make up that tribe probably aren't interested in building a sustainable community. They're interested in buying all the stuff that gets advertised on their satellite TVs.
Anecdotally, I give you my tribe as an example. When we began to see greater income as a result of our successful gaming enterprises, we established a program to provide a free college education to any tribal member who wanted it. The catch? You have to choose between either Gaming Management or Environmental Engineering. Graduates of the latter program are in strong demand to deal with the ecological fallout from our last great revenue boom - leasing tribal lands to oil and gas. Instead of preparing for the future, my tribe attends only to its present needs.
It's not impossible that some far-thinking tribe will implement the changes you suggest, but it's no more likely within the Native American community than it is within groups of educated and thoughtful Anglos, Latinos, or African Americans.
fast-crash doomer + realism = Lots Of Laughs.
Same for the idea that Native Americans will save the white man's ugly butt. That sounds more like eco romanticism to me.
Here are the facts: solar and wind energy markets have reached $11+ billion each in 2005 and are projected to grow beyond $100 billion some time around 2015. Venture Capital has discovered over the last two years that there is big money to be made in renewable energy and keeps pumping it up on the technology side. Drivers for alternative energy markets are government efforts all over the world to reduce energy dependence and imports from less than stable suppliers. In effect: renewables are becoming the playgound of the adults. Which means more international corporations and big business rather than Mom/Pop tech outlets and university R&D. Banks will want their share in return for the trillions of dollars of loans that it will take to re-tool the world energy infrastructure. When Edison and GE got into the game, it was huge. But it will be completely dwarfed by what will be happening over the next two decades.
I don't think the Native American tribes will get to play a major role in this. They would have to play it mighty smart if they wanted to.
The thing about buying/selling Solar/Wind equipment, is that a company is taking the chance of being the 'capitalist who sells you the rope to hang him with'.. as you can get products that don't require service contracts or visits by refueling trucks. It is one of the most hopeful things about Renewable Energy, and is why I support it over Nuclear, in part, as it allows a broadly dipersed ownership of the 'energy supply' create a more practical level of democracy than always is present on the paper-ballots of a paperless society.
FYI, I think my own, white butt isn't ugly at all. You just have to take my word on it.
I don't see renewables as the endpoint of capitalism. Quite the contrary. The capital expense to make millions of reliable solar panels for a competitive price is enormous. You can't just grow them in your back yard, they are being produced in state of the art factories. MW size wind turbines are enormous engineering challenges. You can't carve them out of a piece of wood in your garage. All of this is hard core technology on many levels. We are talking about industries here that have to grow to close to a trillion dollars a year if they are supposed to make even a dent in our energy future. And they will... we shall see $100 billion within a decade, at which point renewables will be everybody's darling (if for no other than economic reasons) and we will see the trillion worldwide being approached over the next 30 years.
The problem with nuclear is mostly that physics has linked weapons materials like Pu to the operation of reactors. You can't have civilian applications without the practical possibility of weapons. Most countries with exception of Japan, Germany and Switzerland, I think, got into the nuclear energy business as a by-product of their interest in nuclear weapons. Unless we can sort this out with international mechanisms to control the consequences, nuclear is a real pain in the ass. Just look at India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran. We shall see more of that.
And them ferrocious finns!
Yes that is the problem with nuclear. But massive coal expansion is worse.
We need to go to accelerator based reactors, which can burn up the long-half-life actinides, in the longer run.
I agree for technical reasons but I just can't see that happening for political ones. Who wants breeders in their back yard? Who wants the fuel reprocessing next door? Are we going to move ten times more disguised nuclear material across the country than we do already just because people are afraid of hosting the facilities in their county? I don't see it but maybe it is still the smaller of two evils...
Accelerator driven reactors are rube goldberg machines that keep getting press, but they just suck. Its an interesting, but dumb idea. You can make critical reactors just as safe, and accelerator reactors just as dangerous. If you want to do actinide burning, just use a liquid chloride reactor. If you want to do actinide free breeding, use a liquid fluoride reactor with thorium fuels. Just dont spend hundreds of millions more on a giant accelerator system.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
I was not aware those accelerator ideas were still kicking... the Russians loved to talk about them in their nuclear physics textbooks but once you had to deal with a real accelerator meant to produce (a lot of) radiation (I was involved with SNS, ugly, ugly, ugly is all that comes to mind), you rather want to stay away from the idea.
I guess we still haven't seen the final demise of the fusion reactor, either. At least the Tokamak kind looks utterly hopless for its poor economy, but it seems the world is set to burn money in it, if not deuterium/tritium.
Thorium reactors, IF they became reality, could be interesting. How much real effort goes into making them ready for prime-time?
There are some Norwegian research in Thorium reactors. I have only read very short articels about it where it is said that the interst in it is due to Norway having very large Thorium deposits. They probably would like to develop this technology to export Thorium when their oil and gas deposits run out.
Oh I'm sure we'll figure out how to economically do confinement sometime in the next ten thousand years... as for the next century, it will continue to be everyone's favorite money pit. Not that there isn't cool stuff to come out of it. Magnetic confinement could be useful for other plasma applications, such as fissioning vapor core reactors and plasma propulsion spacecraft; But its such a waste these applications are mostly icing on a turd.
If they win it will be have to be on economics, and for that theres still some substantial R&D that needs to be done. We built several test liquid fluoride reactors in the late 60s, and ran one for four years at ORNL, so yeah we can do it using the ORNL specs, but it would be far better to improve on the design learning from the molten salt breeder reactor experience.
If I had to use numbers, I would guess it would take about ten billion and fifteen years to get a really solid liquid fluoride design up. Problems in the liquid fluoride reactor that are identified include a fully hot main loop because the fuel is liquid, so maintenance will have to be reduced and when necissary entirely robotic. Leaks are a possibility that must be accounted for, and so the reactor must be designed to manage a highly radiotoxic molten salt leak. Fortunately, if a leak does occur, the salt freezes and locks all of the fuel and fission products in a solid mass that just needs to be scraped up and put back into the reactor after the hole is patched, but contingency plans for such an occurance needs to be designed into the facility.
On the other hand, theres no cost for fuel fabrication and your fuel and waste stream is 1/100th that of a light water reactor with much of the waste stream partitioned as marketable xenon. Since the waste stream is allready in a molten salt medium, its not unrealistic to assume that further processing could be done to recapture value on fission platinum group metals and rare earths, in addition to chemical separation of stable isotopes to reduce the waste volume further.
According to an economic study I've seen, liquid fluoride thorium reactors could be cheaper than light water reactors or coal. The reduced fuel cost, higher uptime, better thermodynamic efficiency, and so on add up. But in all honesty theres a lot of work to be done to get there.
re: capitalism
Right. I didn't say it fully enough. I think selling PV and other RE equipment does have great business potential, and is being borne out, but it's a different model than selling a consumable supply item like heating oil or electricity. I don't know how much that issue has kept the existing energy 'suppliers' from getting into that field earlier, but for me, there's a world of difference, and still supports my preference for buying my own generation than tapping a needle into my cashflow every month. I would hope that the shift out of an oil economy could propel us beyond the 'forced addictions' models of buying/selling. (I don't consider food an 'addiction' in that sense, but a necessity.. and tho' I don't know how, I have to believe it is not part and parcel of an unhealty business model, as I feel the 'cheap energies' have been)
Plutonium is a problem, and so is the overcentralization of a nuclear powerbase and the dependence on too many layers of infrastructure (mining/refining/grid-power/highways) each with foreseeable weak-links and petroleum dependencies. Mine and refine the silicon and trace components, and you have local, daily juice for a couple to several decades.. acknowledging that this is one BB in the pile. Another will be adapting electrical requirements of various equipment to activate when the supply is available, instead of designing for 'a perpetual supply', which I think is a conceit of our recent decades of unrealistic availability. It'll be what it'll be. I won't likely be backing Nuclear. I don't trust it, for the above and other reasons (including the back-door development of new Nuke Weapons systems, as you pointed to), but I don't doubt that new reactors will be coming online soon and for a while.. my energies will be spent advocating and installing the forms I believe in as Clean, Safe, Long-Term solutions.
Thorium reactors have promise for being safe, generating power with very limited wastes, and for disposing of waste weapons-grade material.
removed duplicate post, sorry!
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Re that first post -
Sigh. Like a bad lunch, or an overcharged Energizer bunny, this bicycle and-so-forth meme just keeps coming back.
Now, I live in a city that has a lot of bike lanes, and I even own a pair of Hakkapeliitta tires (which have gone unused so far this season.) So I've got nothing against bikes. (Unlike most of The Netherlands, which, as a continuation of the North Sea floor, may be the flattest land on Earth, my area is somewhat hilly, so the trip percentage has maxed out somewhere in the mid single digit percent range, and that's in the summertime.)
But the last time "we" lived in the 19th century, average life expectancy was under 46. Nowadays it's about 78 according to something I just heard on NPR. Some of that gain owes to antibiotics. But a lot also owes to people who can in effect be kept staggering about indefinitely on life-support even though they may not look it.
So: please go to the mall and look around. Or if you have a downtown area where people circulate on foot, look around there. Or just imagine it in your mind's eye. Whichever way, when you're done looking, please tell me, how many of those folks are young, fit athletes? And on the other hand, how many, even as young as 30 or 35, would be at risk of keeling over if they ever tried to shovel a 20 foot long sidewalk by hand?
It's just not 1850 or even 1900 anymore. "We" have the large population we have, not the much smaller and intensely selected population of the semi-mythical historical past. (Semi-mythical because Karl Marx alluded, accurately IMO, to "the idiocy of rural life", as rural life was then known, something folks choose to forget when they don't feel like expending effort to make it in the world as it is, and delude themselves that their imagined past would be easier or "simpler".) So how, exactly, is the meme supposed to work, or, rather, how is it supposed to work broadly enough to make a difference?
Given the choice of taking a chance on living in a different world, or accepting the certainty of either death or else labor sufficiently hard and awful as to induce the wish for death, I expect that most people will choose to take the chance. Certainly that's how it's playing out so far. Sure, the US Congress and the European Parliament are both good at passing cheap sentiments for the far future, but when those booby-traps finally spring, they are, if need be, gotten around in one way or another.
So, among other things, all of the accessible hydrocarbons are in fact likely to be burned as "we" muddle along to wherever "we" are going. 'Cos here we are, and I haven't got a credible alternative and neither have you nor anyone else.