The Oil Drum

Lucky for us, the solution to both problems is the same.

1) Conserve. Cut our energy needs thus prolonging our supply of oil and coal. Cut our 'nasty' emissions by burning less fossil fuel.

A watt of power that we don't consume is one that we don't have to generate and "one watt" less pollution.

2) Get more 'green' energy on line. Same results, plus building for an oil-free future. Or at least for a future in which we use oil only when absolutely necessary.

So we build less efficient windmills, PV panels, wave generators than what we might be able to build 10, 20 years from now. Big F-ing deal. Right now we can build 'good enough to make a difference'. And that will give us some breathing space to make better devices down the road.

We can recycle those old mills and panels when the energy required to recycle is substantially less than that which would be created by the new mills/panels.

Time to fire up the plants and crank out some green goodies.

IMHO.

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edit:

Let's throw another problem into the mix, along with global warming and 'peaking stuff': Health.

We're spending a lot of money because we're dumping so much 'nasty' into the air. We're hurting a lot of people. We're hurting a lot of growing things.

Getting more green power on line has (at least) a triple payoff.

Decreasing the power of certain oil producing nations and reversing some cash flow problems might be a couple more reasons....

The prospect of the arctic being ice-free within the next decade stuns me. It's another order of magnitude (sort of) rate of increase in the rate of increase.

There is this snippet from Kolbert's "Field Notes from a Catastrophe":

"Obviously, if you get drought indices like these, there's no adaptation that's possible. But let's say it's not that severe. What adaptation are we talking about? Adaptation in 2020? Adaptation in 2040? Adaptation in 2060? Because the way the models project this, as global warming gets going, once you've adapted to one decade, you're going to have to change everything the next decade. [David Rind, GISS climate scientist, p111, Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe]"

I'd never thought of it that way but had focused on "what is the right paradigm" and how important it might be to jump to it directly. The requirement for a radically changing series of adaptations pretty well shoots holes in all the lifeboats. Restructuring our entire resource base decade over decade just to keep up - not going to happen.

cfm in Gray, ME