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You have very little faith in the climate change activism! It appears there is significant momentum building at the moment with even Exxon shifting their position slightly, US evangelicals met with Hansen and others last week and made positive noises and the British government is hinting that Bush will bring up CO2 emission targets in the State of the Union on Tuesday. I think things are moving fast.
My thinking regarding coal over the next few decades goes along these lines: Can coal substitute for declining oil and gas enabling business-as-usual and GDP growth to continue through the 21st Century? I say no. In that case we have contraction, falling global GDP. In that situation I can't see where the demand for this massive coal burn is going to come from. During depressions energy consumption falls, whether the depression was caused by peak oil isn't really relevant, if we have depression coal demand is likely to fall inline with global productivity.
Climate change activists always ignore or dismiss human nature. The fact is we will not accept any restrictions on our rights to the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed, including the right to breed. That means when oil and gas become scarce we will burn coal, wood, garbage, old newspapers, and anything else we can find to keep warm. It means when the lights go out we will do anything to make them come on again. And it means when the cars and trucks run out of gasoline we will find some other means to keep them running. So the planet is going to get baked, fried and london broiled. That's human nature.
Well, look at what the Kim family did - they burned their SUV's tires! They got out on a little-traveled road, city people trying to take on the rather trackless Northwestern US wild, and the wild won. So they ended up burning up their SUV's tires to keep warm, they didn't form a "nest" out of their clothes and sleep huddled naked together which would have been toasty-warm, restrict their moving about to the warm hours, and do some foraging, they didn't discover the hunting/fishing cabin about a mile away with provisions, they burned their SUVs tires. Mr Kim eventually took off on his own to try to find help, Mrs Kim and kids stayed put and were rescued.
The reason I find burning the SUV's tires to ironic is, it's very polluting, they'd have had to do it outside of course, which means most of the heat wasted, and what if they'd been found by some kid with an ATV or motorcycle who could have gone and gotten 5 gal's of gas and driven 'em out of there? Nope they rendered their vehicle useless.
I see this as a microcosm of how humans, not just American humans but most humans will act.
Fleam,
With all due respect, I think the problem for the Kims was starvation, not heat. They had no food and they were slowly starving to death. Also, I believe there is an ongoing investigation by the Oregon police department as to why the search for poor James Kim (deceased Silicon Valey high tech guru) and his wife and 2 children was so botched up.
But yes, I agree that the Kim saga is a warning to the rest of us about how unprepared and uneducated we are.
Unfortunately true. We need nukes, because burning uranium is much less globally destructive than coal.
Of the Socolow and Paccala 'wedges' which Al Gore alludes to in An Iconvenient Truth, 1 wegde = 1bn tpa of carbon abatement in 2050.
Current emissions 7bn tpa. 2050 emissions, business as usual, 15bn tpa.
That is equivalent to 1000 new nuclear stations (to replace the existing fleet which will be finished by then, and build a net 500 new reactors).
So yes nuclear is part of the solution, but only 1/8th of what is required to stabilise CO2 emissions at their current level. I don't know of any reasonable nuclear engineer or scientist or economist who thinks we can build more than 20 reactors pa, worlwide.
Carbon Capture and Storage on large coal fired power plants is another wedge.
Why? They're only about 1-2 billion in a 50 trillion dollar economy.
It may be a 50 trillion dollar economy but I doubt my hairdresser (who contributes to that economy) would be able to contribute much towards building a nuclear power station!
She cuts the hair of construction crews and engineers that would otherwise be working on coal plants.
If you are including the cost of the construction crew's haircuts then the power stations cost more than the 1-2 billion you mentioned.
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Chris Vernon wrote:
BUT what if peak is more like a plateau with a slow squeeze on economic growth as Stuart Staniford has argued? In that case, no depression, maybe not even a permanent recession.
Further, our transition to dirty coal might emit enough extra CO2 to offset the lower emissions as a result of shrinking GDP based on cleaner fuels.
With GDP falling, I don't see climate activism amounting to a hill of beans. The only reason it's enjoying a surge now is that people think they can afford it.
The only reason it's enjoying a surge now is that people think they can afford it.
It's not even that - the only reason it's enjoying a surge now is that people are not asked to pay for it. Even affordable but somehow reducing the standard of living price will be deeemed unacceptable - as we are witnessing in Germany and Denmark for enxample, where green enthusiasm is waning as costs grow and reality starts to kick in.
If the recession is due to lack of oil (meaning high prices), then there will be someone who cures this lack offering CTL oil for a slightly lower price.
Only if the recession is caused by other factors, raising the oil supply obviously will not make a difference and therefore not be employed.
Cheers,
Davidyson