Why new ideas take time to have impact
Posted by Heading Out on May 23, 2008 - 10:00am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: algae, pilot plant, time [list all tags]
As an opening warning, today I am going to write a piece of fiction. Not that it suggests that I am trying to emulate James Kunstler, nor is it going to have the drama of the Science fiction/Fantasy by authors such as David Weber, Lois McMaster Bujold, or Jim Butcher that, to pick but three I avidly devour. No what I want to do is to try and explain is why it takes new ideas about 20-years to go from idea to significant market impact. I thought it might be amusing to do this by following a totally fictitious idea *cough* from concept to impact level to show some of the barriers to progress. Dixie Lee Ray once tried to do this in explaining why, even if cold temperature fusion worked, it could not be an instant contributor to the national energy supply. Unfortunately I have lost that reference and so you are stuck with this, should you choose to read it.
Let’s begin by saying that our protagonists are three faculty members: you, a young female electrical engineer called Angela, me, a somewhat old plant biologist called Burt, and Charlie, a medium career nuclear engineer. We are having a beer after classes end and I comment that in some work I was doing in Russia on birch trees I had noticed that one of the ponds on site had a thin oily scum on it. I’d brought samples back for testing and it seems as though the cause was algae, in the water, that was weeping a lipid. We all troop back to the lab for a look, and on top of the little reactor that I have built there is this thin film, but the water below is quite muddy and turbid, and this has been sitting there for quite a while. You suggest cleaning up the layers with a little applied electrical potential, and Charlie suggests a little radiation might weaken the algal cell wall and increase yield.
You have a little start-up funding left from your admin faculty appointment and hire a grad student to work on this, and within a few months the tank now contains an almost clear liquid in which, about half-way down, there is a thick band of the green, irradiated algae slightly disturbed by the flow of air and CO2 coming from spargers at the bottom of the tank. At the top of the tank there is now a relatively thick band of oil, which is happily growing under the stimulation of the normal lighting in the lab. The grad student writes up a dissertation, and in a moment of caution you decide to patent what has been done, which makes the defense closed, and the report, for a short time unavailable to the public. The student was able to achieve a yield of lipids from the algae that calculates into 12,000 gallons/acre/year of biodiesel. So now, about eighteen months from the initial meeting in the bar we have some experimental data, but money has now all run out, and we need to start to get external support, since among other things you would like to get tenure.
(Working through a colleague you get some funding from a mining company to use the electrical potential idea as a means of settling out fines in mining operations, that also works and leads on to you becoming a recognized expert in that field, which gets you tenure, and brings in money – but we will forgo that part of the story for now).
So where to get the money for the new idea (which you call IPEA – for Instant Production of Energy from Algae)? Well the nation is aware that there is a problem with gas prices and so we presume that it shouldn’t be that hard to get some funding from one of the government agencies, and so we write off proposals to the usual suspects. Surprising to us, they are all rejected – to summarize those rejections we find that they range from just poor odds with some (acceptance rate about 1 in 15), through one agency where the reviewers comments dealt only with noting that none of the three of us had peer-reviewed publications in the area, to a suggestion that we find an international energy distributor (petroleum based suggested) to work with. (We try that, but though we talk to more than one corporate vice=president and they promise to call back . . . .they never do, not even the ones running the adverts on TV).
Now, while we had been writing these proposals the campus had been trying to show how up-to-date on research in areas of national need they are, and so they had been publicizing the work that we have been carrying out, and between us we have given a number of local presentations to small groups and state organizations. At this point Derek enters the picture. Derek works in the venture capital field, and after visiting the lab, and seeing the results negotiates an agreement with us and the University to form a company to exploit IPEA. By the time that all the agreements, and funding is in place it is four years since that initial meeting in the bar. (This isn’t MIT, folks).
With funding now available it takes only another year of accelerating the lab-work and tweaking current levels (very low) and species modification and irradiation to the point that the yield in the lab has reached 15,000 gal/acre/yr and it is time for the first field test.
We negotiate a small site on University property where we dig a small pond, and line it with clay. One of the mechanical engineering grad students comes up with an ingenious device that harvests the oil layer and feeds it into a vertical column, where it is trans-esterified and converted into biodiesel and glycerin by the time that it gets to the bottom. It took a year to get the permits to carry out these tests, and it takes a year of running the pond to show that it will produce oil consistently in all seasons (hey, they survived Russian winters), and to acquire data on production yields with time. A simple ground source heat system laid with the pond keeps the temperature in the water warm enough for sustained growth, and the data confirms that the lab predicted yields are achievable. The small amount of biodiesel generated is used in university vehicles, bringing publicity to the campus, and expressed interest and support from the Governor of the State.
As we enter the eighth year since the creation of the idea, we are now ready to move to the first prototype of a full-scale farm. Over the year that the trials have been going on we have talked with one of the mining companies that support your other work, and they will make one of their abandoned quarry areas available, since this will give a pond that is already carved in shape, and just needs sealing. It is five acres in size. However, at this scale it is now necessary to get the necessary permits for air and water, and since this interferes with normal land reclamation plans, additional inputs must be made to the state to allow modification of the mine’s earlier approved reclamation plans. To get these permits, and to install the equipment for the farm takes two years, even with the head start of the year of pre-planning that we did while the first pond was being tested. Again we run the system for a year in order to validate the seasonal and diurnal production rates. Half-way through the year a contractor, who has been bringing in the pasteurized sewage that is used as the algal nutrient, draws the supply from the wrong tank, and feeds the pond raw sewage instead. Production doubles, but the tests are continued for another year to ensure that there are no additional health issues generated from the change. We find that the site works best when we break the pond into modules that are about a quarter of an acre each.
It is now at the end of year eleven, and over the course of the two years of field testing approval has been obtained to use a mine tailings site as the location for the first full production farm. The site is two square miles in size. The farm site is near a power station that will provide the CO2, and a small town that will provide the sewage and labor. (This fosters the new Governor’s stated goal of re-building rural communities). However issues of air quality (there is a faint smell of oil given off by the lipid as it floats over the pond) and risks to wild life, and other areas of concern from national environmental groups extend the time needed for permitting by another year, and mean that it will take a full three years of testing and validation of this farm before the Government will approve the process for franchising and full scale development.
At this point, although successful at every point it was tested, IPEA is still only producing 30,000 (gal per acre) x 640 (acres per sq mile) x 2 x .75 (efficiency factor)/(42 x 365) = 1,880 barrels/day. With biodiesel by this point getting $25 per gallon on the market, it is however, not unprofitable, and Derek is able to franchise the concept to some 200 sites over the course of the next two years, with each requiring their own permits and engineering. At the same time the modular concept becomes popular with farmers, who set up small ponds on their own to produce enough for local needs. It takes a further three years to get the larger sites into full production, and thus it is a full twenty years after that meeting in the bar that you sit in your office and contemplate the impact that your idea is finally starting to have on international supply. (By this time I am in a rest home, and Charlie has long ago moved into the nuclear industry, from which he recently retired).
Derek comes to visit and brings a handsome present (though not from a top jeweler you note). He wants you to have it as a remembrance of the work you helped found. “But what about our basic patent?” you ask, thinking that this would now fund your retirement.
“Oh, that ran out three years ago,” he commented, as he closed the door behind him.
Well that’s the story, and obviously I shouldn’t quit my day job. But hopefully you can see that there is no “quick fix” that will allow a new idea to solve market demand in the short term. Depending on the solution, and the permits needed for large construction (Nuclear times are much longer than those I have cited) this process could be extended considerably beyond the times given. One cannot circumvent the steps upward in scale that must each be judged and evaluated before the next step is taken. Thus each step takes pre-planning, permitting, and operational time before one can move on to the next.
There have been some ideas that I have seen that, being simple, have been adoptable by industry in a relatively short time, but they have been based on the use of a tool developed by one industry into another. Where a new concept is introduced, particularly where it needs a supporting infrastructure, a twenty-year time frame is much more likely to be the case for the time needed for significant impact.
(Note - it is the Editor, not the author, who currently has a cold - grin)
The student was able to achieve a yield of lipids from the algae that calculates into 12,000 gallons/acre/year of biodiesel.
The issue I would raise here is that this seems to be above the theoretical limit. You are aware of Krassen Dimitrov's work in which he calculated a maximum possible yield - based on solar insolation hitting an area - of 1.24 gal/m2/yr. What you have translates into just under 3 gal/m2/yr.
I am curious to understand the disconnect. Is Dimitrov in error? If so, what is the error? I really want to understand this.
Notice also the part about the idea being totally fictitious, and the algae "happily growing under the stimulation of the normal lighting in the lab". The algae have mutated under irradiation and acquired the ability to tap energy from the basic zero-point energy structure of SPACETIME ITSELF.
How shall motoring gain nuclear cachet?
What Dimitrov??
How many galons of diesel worth shines per year on an acre (Or square meter)?
Let's see:
1350 J/m^2/s Specific Solar power
* 60 s/min
* 60 min/h
* 24 h/day
* 0.5 ligh/day Minus night
* 0.5 IntegralCos(incident angle)/light (Consider some rays at an angle)
* 365 days/year
* 80% SunnyDays/year Discount for bad weather and solar eclipse
* 4047 m^2/acre
/ 39.8 MJ/L Compare to Heat energy of Diesel
/ 3.78 L/gal
= 229,049 Gallons/acre/year of diesel at 100% efficiency
/ 4047 m^2/acre
= 56.6 gal/m^2/year .
What would the ??? Dimitrxx assume only 2% solar convesion efficiency?
I get a better yield %% growing potatoes, that actually taste well!
And I haven't even saturated them with CO2, optimized water, or fine-tuned nutrients!
Okay... dude, all that incident solar calculation has been done with real numbers at nrel.
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas/serve.cgi
using a flat recieving surface like water would have to be and neglecting albedo differences, that gives us a maximum of 5 kwh/day/m^2 (arizona)
= 18 mj/day/m2 = 6570 mj/year/m2 = 43 gallons/m2/yr. that's at 100% efficiency.
Now, photosynthetic efficiency for algae is from 3% to 6%.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/w7241e/w7241e05.htm
Now, bear in mind that the best algaes produce 50% of their mass in lipids. The rest is nonuseful biomass. That's the show.
The reason that I want to go back and re-read Dimitrov is that he broke the efficiency down into several steps as I recall, and I think he made an incorrect assumption in one of them. Until I have gone back through his numbers, and then compared them with some experimental results, I would prefer not to conjecture on where the error might be.
Well, that is current best case.
But we had for a sake of an argument a hypothetical case, where more efficient algae could be (imagine) invented.
Dimitrov writes While the lipid content of microalgae, on a dry cellular weight basis varies between 20 and 40 %, lipid contents as high as 85 % have been reported for certain microalgal strains.
So all we have to improve efficiency of that strain. It is said that 80% of each quantum of visible light is used in photosynthesis. So all our hypothetical group could do is to engineer it, so that more of the light enters photosynthesis and less is converted to heat.
Do you know of any provend fundamental physical barier for such an improvement of efficiency, other than experience from past algeae performance?
OK. One: As long as the biomass is composed of many cell, it needs overhead such as cellular wall and nucleus. Let's take 10% off our estimate. Still pretty high. What's your next argument against possibility of increasing chances for more photosynthetic 'hits' ?
Well, my next suggested probable limit would be that only 50% of the spectrum is photosynthetically active in chlorophyll based systems. I HAVE heard that there are filters that can be put in place that absorb non-usable frequencies and re-emit them at usable frequencies, but those have inefficiencies of their own and are a leeetle pricey.
Next is that not 100% of the surface of the pond will have an algae cell in the correct position to absorb the photon. There will always be debris, turbulent blank spots, dirt, etcetera (or in this case, oil scum) that tends to block or deflect incoming photons.
After that, there is the 3-6% current best case for total energy conversion. Not that that can't be improved upon, but can the energy conversion efficiency AND the lipid fraction both be improved upon in the same species?
This is not necessarily the way that algae are going to be optimally grown. I used the idea of a weeping algae to overcome one of the harvesting problems - there are ways of harvesting, but I wanted to write a story that was relatively short and uncomplicated, and so invented this method to make the lipid separation easier. There are however validated ways of increasing algal yield, I just need to go through the conversion process to see where the gain is achieved, there are at least two different possibilities and so either I or that mythical student will have to do a little more homework.
It's okay, I understand that for the purposes of the story it doesn't matter, you were going for "major breakthrough" and you got it. I am really not trying to make your life difficult with excessive critiquing of what was an excellent summary of the path from conception to meaningful impact, this is just a side-thread about the nature of the "theoretical" limit.
BTW, I just looked into the albedo issue. It is a major one.
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/3rv.html
At a rough guess water will accept *maybe* 1 kwh/day/m^2 in the arizona sun. The sun crosses the sky at 15 degrees per hour and a mere 5 degree incident angle drops the absorbed light to 50%. So you'd get 40 minutes at above 50%, then another 40 minutes at 35-50%, 80 minutes at 13-35%...
I recall that if you do not chlorinate pools and hot tubs in Arizona, they will soon become filled with yellow-green algae. Am not sure if you could keep a pure algae strain in a pond as other species might quickly infiltrate and compete against higher lipid algae.
In some Florida offshore areas nitrogen from onshore was entering shallow water via rivers and streams. This caused algae bloom. The algae shaded out the sea grass that was the habitat of shrimp and numerous species of fish. It also depleted oxygen from the water. The growth rate of algae might be limited by nutrients and available oxygen.
These early algae models were not very efficient in their predictions of labor, energy, harvesting & processing costs, plant and equipment prices, land rent or mortgage costs, other borrowing costs, taxes etc.
With subsidies the California solar industry is growing quickly. One may need to compare the amount of energy provided per dollar between all types of renewable energies including wind, solar, hydroelectric, tidal, geothermal, and biomass. Some wind and hydroelectric projects were advancing without subsidies. A few geothermal projects were profitable without subsidies. Solar preheating of water before it entered water heater tanks has proved to be economical in areas not too far north.
With ethanol there has been some success in Brazil, yet it is causing the loss of forest habitat and creating greenhouse gas that was not properly considered by those promoting ethanol. In the United States it was calculated that to meet govt. ethanol standards forty percent of the grain (corn + wheat) might be required. Such a rapid increase in acreage of corn planted is not happening in 2008. Other nations' biofuels programs might also lead to grain deficits and spiking food prices. Grain prices tripled since 2005 when ethanol use became mandatory.
Food price increases cannot all be attributed to rising energy costs, else the price of homes, cars, clothes, electricity, etc. might have tripled.
Here is one system which would seem to minimise problems of contamination as the algae is kept in contained units:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/04/01/algae.oil/index.html
Algae: 'The ultimate in renewable energy' - CNN.com
They also claim far higher rates of production per acre, due to growing the algae in vertical containers.
There are many reasons that forest habitat is being lost in Brazil, ethanol production from sugarcane is NOT a major contributing factor to this particular problem.
Massive monoculture of any sort does indeed have major effects on other ecosystems in Brazil and is most certainly not a completely benign influence. However it would give your otherwise excellent points a lot more credibility of you and others checked your facts and stopped propagating this myth. You can get a good overview of where and what kind of habitat is suitable for sugarcane production in Brazil by looking at the maps in this pdf file.
http://www.biofuelsnow.com/Ethanol%20From%20Sugar%20Cane.pdf
As for
Neither were any of consequences of using fossil fuel and building a global economy based on a single non renewable energy source, which sort of makes the consequences of using ethanol in Brazil pale in comparison.
Ride a Bike or take a Hike!
Well, my next suggested probable limit would be that only 50% of the spectrum is photosynthetically active in chlorophyll based systems. I HAVE heard that there are filters that can be put in place that absorb non-usable frequencies and re-emit them at usable frequencies, but those have inefficiencies of their own and are a leeetle pricey.
Is that 50% by wavelenght bandwidth or 50% of radiated power?
Obviously, chlorophyl does not use green light and reflects it as a waste.
If we managed to develop black chlorophyl, that would be great.
Also, I see great solar energy loses in evaporation. If the oil film itself cannot contain it, we'll need to build a greenhoise for the algae or keep it in glass pipes.
The next problem is thermal management. Warmer environment likely increases photosynthesis rates. However, cooked algae probably refuese to work. If we cannot manage heating or cooling by some simple means, such as mass of the water or controlled evaporation, there will be large energy loses on HVAC.
I see 2 natural means of thermal management:
1. Thermal capacity of large amount of water
2. Photosynthesis itself should have cooling effect, since it is energy taken. So at hight temperatues the increased rate of photosynthesis should sel-regulate temperature. But we need to keep the system at or below peak photosynthesis rate. If we blow past it, lots of added cooling woud be needed just to keep algae alive.
The answer comes in several parts - the easy one is to say that this is a work of fiction and the numbers could be considered that way, however there is a real, and more complicated, answer.
In the Redhawk tests they were able to considerably improve on the base NREL target of 50 gm/sq m/day, which gives the 3,500 gal/acre/day which is the commonly cited yield for algae over things such as rape or soybeans.
This is roughly 3.5 times the baseline and translates to 12,100 gal/acre/year. However, even at Redhawk they were only just starting to tweak the process in the right direction.
The reason this differs from Dimitrev's theory can perhaps be explained by analogy (albeit imperfect). If I sit by a river and drink a cup of water whenever I want to it is a little inaccurate to assume the relative efficiency of the process is the total power of the water as the input, and the cup of water that I drink as the output. But that is the way that the equation is being presented. There are controlling parameters on the way in which algae handle light that can be adjusted, in the same way as, to work the analogy again, I could now put a cup in both hands and drink twice as fast - without changing the input.
Kudos for using the word "sparge."
Years later I still dream about going into work and streaking out my C. reinhardti stocks.
This is roughly 3.5 times the baseline and translates to 12,100 gal/acre/year.
But that appears to be the growth rate of the algae, and not oil production. NREL indicated that the high oil % happened when they starved the algae. That bumps the % oil up, but growth ceases.
But that is the way that the equation is being presented.
It would be more helpful for me if you can point out which parameter/equation that Dimitrev used is wrong. I have long hoped that he was wrong, but I feared that he was right. If you can convince me that he was wrong, I will be grateful. And I am not being facetious.
If you will forgive me I believe you are generalizing from the particular. It really depends on the species that you are growing in regard to growth rate, and lipid content, and there are a number of other factors that also come into play, that Dimitrev did not factor in.
Since the experiments with which I am familiar come at the issue from a different approach I will have to revisit Dimitrev's work in more detail ( I have it, I just have to find it) to pin down exactly where he made the error.
Incidentally, if this were more than a fictional enterprise, you might recognize the name of one of the corporate vice-presidents.
And in this hypothetical, purely fictional world, at what stage in the 20 year enterprise would 2008 be?
About year 3.
Something is really wrong with this calculations:
In the Redhawk tests they were able to considerably improve on the base NREL target of 50 gm/sq m/day, which gives the 3,500 gal/acre/day which is the commonly cited yield for algae over things such as rape or soybeans.
50 g/m^2/day ----- NREL target
* 4047 m^2/acre
/ 850 g/l ----------- Diesel density (even if all dry contents were oil)
* 3.78 gal/l
= 900 gal/acre/day
3,500 gal/acre/day is 4 times overestimated.
The growth rate—an average productivity of 98 grams/m2/day (ash free, dry weight basis) and reaching a high peak value of 174 grams/m2/day—surpassed previous lab growth rates and exceeded all expectations going into the project.
This is roughly 3.5 times the baseline and translates to 12,100 gal/acre/year. However, even at Redhawk they were only just starting to tweak the process in the right direction.
No. 3.5 times baseline translates to 3150 gal/acre/day .
However, notice that 174 grams/m^2/day is already 35% photosynthesis efficiency over theorethical 493gm/m^2/day average solar output !
[ 493gm/m^2/day = 56gal/m^2/year / (365 day/year) * 3.78 (gal/l) * 850 g/l ]
So there goes Dimitrov's limit of 2% maximum efficiency - 17x overcome.
My apologies but i got one of the units wrong. Inadvertently I typed 3,500 gl/acre/day when it should have been 3,500 gal/acre/year - which it is in most of the other discussion.
With apologies to Al Bartlett:
Once upon a time, there lived a little bacterium in a bottle...blah blah blah, you know the story - the bacteria have a doubling time of 1 minute. They start growing at 11 am in the morning, at 11:58 the bottle is 1/4 full. Some mathematically minded members of the bacteria community realize that the bottle will be filled by 12:00. So they send out their best and brightest scouts to search for new bottles to live in. One of these brave bacteria, who goes by the name of "Heading Out," accompanied by his crack team, discover an entirely new empty bottle, the size of the one they were just living in. "We're saved," he cries, "saved!" Other search teams manage to discover another two entirely empty bottles (bringing the total discovery to three), while physicist bacteria in the home bottle design quantum teleportation devices that will be able to handle the overflow by rapidly teleporting large numbers of bacteria to the new bottles. Then the clock struck 12:02...
Yes but this time we are using the exponential function to grow energy, not to use it.
You can deflect the point of my allegory by choosing to misinterpret it, if you like, but I suspect you understand what I'm driving at even if you don't want to really accept it.
definitely, we are still not attacking the root problem of growth, which is not sustainable. Perhaps this peak oil crisis will help people to realize this before it is to late and humanity ins thrown back into an era of war, famine and complete ignorance.
Couldn't have put it better myself. Unfortunately I'm not sure if the peak oil crisis is helping at all. It seems to me like many people on TOD understand the exponential function when applied to production and consumption of oil, but don't seem to be able to transfer this basic piece of mathematics to other obviously finite resources such as water, air, land etc...
Now it's my turn to promise I'm not being facetious... I'm really not and I'd like to understand. Why does a technology like this inherently support a growth economy?
I think it's an excellent question. I think the evolutionary geneticists on TOD would say to you: "It's in our genes to grow and grab as many resources as we can. We're only doing what we are programmed to do." However, IMO, this is a rather self-fulfilling "just so" story. Because certain people behave a certain way in their lives, grab everything they can and run the world, they turn it into a self-fulfilling scientific theory.
So indeed, why does technology have to support a growth economy? I believe our brains are powerful enough to remake our world as we choose. I can make up "just so" stories, just like others do on TOD. However, I think that when technologists shy away from the root of the problem (growth), their work is likely to be in vain.
Why do people refuse to see the obvious? I suspect that the prospect of a steady state or slightly declining economy and world population (since we're in overshoot already) is very frightening to the people who sit on top of the pile. (Basically people like us who drive cars, have jobs, eat three square meals a day and have access to the internet and time to waste writing stuff on it like this.) Because, while we grab the most and grow our consumption exponentially, there is just enough "trickle down" to stop the peasants from ransacking the citadel. A transition to a steady-state/slight decline without redistribution of wealth and resources to the poor will probably result in one outcome: revolution, and it will probably be messy.
Guess I haven't answered your question, but I think it's a good one all the same.
Why would they say anything so ill-informed?
That is quite definitely not in our genes ... over the first 99% of our time on earth, it is clear that we did not work under a uniform locust model.
Since we have our genes in common with the people in the first 99% of our time on earth, then if we have a society built on a foundation of institutional rules that mandate "grab as many resources as you can" for large, self-reproducing organizations, we certainly cannot blame that on our genes.
Well, that's rather understandable! When you consume oil, you no longer have oil, you now have water, co2, and some heat. When you consume water however, 99 uses out of 100 you still have water (sometimes it's yellow is all). Same with land, you really can't "consume" land, you can only change around the uses, strip malls may be some work to turn back into forest, but it can be done.
Of course, nothing works well at all for any length of time under exponential growth curves, so eventually we are going to have a stable or declining human population on earth (my bet is on a declining one...soon). Whether the limiting nutrient is oil, water or spotted flurgles is kind or irrelevant, there will be one and most likely soon.
I always cringe a little however when I hear talk of "sustainable" because I do not think it at all likely that the genie will go back into the bottle gracefully, "using less" is a profoundly difficult proposition in a world as intertwined as this one. I have serious doubts that we can return to an idealized 19th century subsistence farming lifestyle and still retain any of the trappings of modern life, including medicine, computers, electrical grids, or effectively anything else. Globally, 80% (give or take) of primary energy is fossil fuel based, there is a reason for that. It has nothing to do with corporate greed, it has to do with energy density and EROEI.
The much touted numbers, for example, the US is 5% of the population uses 25% of the oil are also highly misleading. For example, the EU is 7% of the population and uses 18% of the oil. Not as bad as the US, but still very very not good. Were the US to drop itself to European oil consumption, that would offset Chinese demand growth by *4 years*. So we're looking for a change that is all-together larger, and I just don't see it happening.
Cringing at hearing talk of sustainability is like cringing at hearing talk about the second law thermodynamics. The world is finite and we are going to have to come to terms with this fact sooner or later. Using less is not a profoundly difficult proposition. It is a profoundly simple one. Humanity will collectively use less whether we like it or not. The question is whether we will do so in the stupidest way possible thus maximizing chaos and suffering, or whether we will use less in an intelligent manner which will minimize chaos and suffering. I must admit that, at present, the evidence that stupidity will triumph is strong, particularly when the world is filled with people who cringe at the idea that two plus two equals four.
It isn't the word, it's the common usage. Thermodynamics is set in stone and the ultimate goal is either a steady state or an energy budget that produces only excesses sufficient for colonization of other planets/moons or whatnot. My issue is that so often when I hear talk of "susainable", the speaker is thinking of going back to amish style methodologies, the road from here to there is bloody in the extreme.
Wind power for what it's worth, solar power when it attains feasibility, nuclear power, biomass energy FWIW, population control, PHEVs, and so many other aspects of the situation can if deployed rapidly enough (already probably too late for that) allow a road from here to sustainable (for a given population) that isn't bloody, but it is going to be *hard* and it needs support on the positive side, not just opposition to the nonsustainable alternatives. I do not like the idea of returning to sustainability by returning the first world to african standards of living. There has got to be a better way.
There truly are many many people that talk of sustainability that envisage some hippie utopia, which works at current in very small pockets only because they are very small pockets within a fully fleshed wealthy society. Subsistence level farming is a viable method in todays economy only because there are enough people willing to pay a large premium for organic produce that the organic farmers themselves make a living. Take that away and the problems begin in earnest.
For an example of "using less is profoundly difficult", exports to the US make up over 30% of the chinese econoy, stop that revenue flow and china will most probably have a civil war quite rapidly. Unintended consequences indeed.
Thanks for the clarification, but you should be more careful in your use of language. The use of the world "always" in the statement: I always cringe a little however when I hear talk of "sustainable" seems to imply that you believe that all people who are promoting sustainability are unrealistic morons. There are certainly plenty of unrealistic people on both sides of the sustainability debate. You have those who believe that advancing technology will allow the stock market to go on rising for centuries into the future even in the face of a steep decline of fossil fuel supplies, and you have those who believe that we can create a "green" version of suburbia and consumer culture merely by doing more recycling and extracting biogas from cow manure. However, as far as I am concerned any person who is not actively promoting rapid movement towards real sustainability as a major goal of our economic activity is, by definition, a clueless moron.
The difficulty of moving towards a sustainable economy that you refer to is the difficulty which results from trying to pursue two contradictory goals at the same time. If you are constantly scarfing down ice cream and cake, and then trying to lose weight by excessive exercise you are going to have difficulties. If the primary goal of individual economic actors is to gain security by accumulating as much private wealth as they can by whatever method is most convenient, then attaining sustainability is not merely difficult; It is impossible. We cannot create a system of sustainable economic production unless it is our primary goal to so. Instead sustainability is at best a secondary goal and in many cases a tertiary or non-existent goal. All new investments in economic infrastructure should be directed towards obtaining sustainability. We do not need brilliant workaholics spending seventy hours a week figuring out how to pack more features into our cell phones. Our current economic system is structurally insane. I guess you can argue that curing insanity is a difficult task, but the direction we need to travel towards survival once the insanity has come to an end is pretty easy to understand. It will be time enough to bemoan the difficulty of the path when we have started moving in the right direction.
Well... Suggesting the necessity that TPTB completely overturn the entire set of incentives and societal structure is .... Well, unrealistic is putting it very mildly. Frankly, my biggest problem is that people like you that have the correct long term goal in mind seem to tend to oppose short term improvements (thus the cringing). It is as though you have the impression that we CAN go from our massively consumptive society to sustainability in one step, there is no path from here to there other than death. For the case of PO, drilling ANWR would do nothing to improve our sustainability, but it *would* buy us a little time time that we desperately need and time that will be well spent if my read on the consternation I am seeing in the masses is correct. Opposing interim solutions is just as insane as opposing long term goals. Frankly it won't do us much good to be trending toward long term sustainability if we do so in the midst of famine and war.
What I would actually like to see is a multi-pronged approach incorporating everything that works for as long as it works. We're going to need all the oil we can lay hand to and the time to start drilling is...3 years ago. We're going to need all the CTL we can make and the time to start displacing the coal with wind and nuclear is 8 years ago. We're going to need all the wind, nuclear and biomass energy we can lay hand to and any time would be fine to start earnestly building those. Nuclear fuel is admittedly finite but the thing that we most need is TIME. If nuclear can buy us 50 or 100 years then it's suicidal not to take that time.
Incidentally, I see absolutely no contradiction in trying to get individually rich while advancing sustainability. A fabulously wealthy but still sustainable person might own several hundred acres, an ethanol still, a wide variety of PHEVs, acres of PV cells, and all the rights to a small hydro plant. In fact, best odds of solving this problem in my opinion come from people trying to get rich off of PO by marketing better alternatives.
Rather than trying to make there be no "next big thing" that gets everyone rich, why not make sustainable technologies the next big thing and make a bunch of brilliant innovators rich on the proceeds?
I wholeheartedly agree with your comments on buying time - we desperately need it to mature our energy technologies and allow more sensible insulation standards and so on to take effect.
I would also like to comment on the idea of sustainability and zero growth that is current here.
Even if we were in such a state overall, then no new paradigm would be started in business.
That is because even if the overall output is stable, the constituents of it are in flux, and to survive businesses need to put themselves in the growth part of it.
For instance, in a high energy cost world then the airline industry would be contracting, but the manufacture of buses might be expanding.
No business would aim at stability, and to do so would be a death wish.
A look at the history of zero-growth societies also shows pretty conclusively that they are very conflictual.
In the middle ages, for instance, since productivity was hardly moving then the best way to improve your lot was to grab someone else's land and peasants to farm it.
Since when does manufacturing jet skis, SUVs, muscle cars, 100 watt per channel stereo systems, 60 inch plasma screen televisions etc. have anything to do with preventing famine? Since when does using nitrogen fertilizer, potable water, gasoline powered tools etc. to grow neatly manicured laws have anything to do with preventing famine? There are a whole host of actions that could be taken with very great speed which would free up production resources which could be dedicated toward creating sustainable infrastructure. Yes, many people would experience career turmoil as they transitioned from doing useless destructive work to doing truly useful work, but that turmoil could be handled if we had the social will to do so. I am not opposed to any specific energy technology, not to nuclear energy and not even to the extraction of non-conventional fossil fuels. But I am opposed to continuing an incredibly wasteful economic system whose primary goal is to increase the total volume of economic transactions as quickly as possible.
The only justification for using all possible means to keep the current economic system "healthy" (i.e. to keep the stock market growing) for as long as possible is the claim that such a strategy will allow time for alternate energy technology to advance so that when the wheels finally fall off of the growth machine and we really have to get serious about sustainability we will have a better set of technological tools available. I am skeptical that this is truly a better strategy than eliminating wasteful forms of economic production and dedicating the saved resources towards creating sustainable infrastructure. Furthermore the strategy you suggest carries the risk of creating disastrous ecological debts for which our advanced technology may not be able to pay.
Your comments about brilliant innovators getting rich in a sustainable economy shows that either you do not believe that economic growth will come to an end or that you do not understand what the end of economic growth means. Not all investments increase our wealth. Repairing roads, highway bridges, railroad bridges etc. does not make us rich. Such investments prevent our wealth from decaying away. If we have to replace our coal and natural gas fired power plants by technology that is more expensive then such replacement is not going to make us richer, it will merely prevent our wealth from decaying away as it would if we had no replacements. If our collective productivity becomes stagnant or declines it is impossible to have a class of people consistently increasing their wealth without making the rest of society poorer. This is a matter of simple arithmetic. Maybe you have an Ayn Rand like belief that human ingenuity will increase our productivity forever no matter what resource limitations we run into. I don't have such a belief. A fundamental change of orientation is needed and I do not really see an evolutionary way of getting from here to there. Either you think you can get richer forever or you don't, and your fundamental economic strategy will change significantly depending on which belief you hold.
Who said anything about maintaining production of all the "waste" activities? Not me for sure!! However, they similarly cannot just...end, they need to taper out at least a little. All those activities do create economic activity and a large population segment depends on that economic activity, if it were to simply end without a "next big thing" then you have the economic collapse we are all so worried about. What I would hope to see happen would be for oil production to increase to whatever levels are needed to maintain the price at $150-$200/barrel for 4 or 5 years. That'd be enough time for that price point to percolate through the economy, for next gen cars to hit the roads, for suburbia to wither slowly instead of turning into an unemployment wasteland, for world economic growth to level off, and breathing room all around. That little bit of breathing room is worth almost any price, because if the death spiral continues for much longer, the world economy will simply stop.
It isn't going to happen because everything that would stabilize the price is too little too late with too much opposition.
I am of the opinion that if we can surmount this crisis, there's no particular reason why total productivity couldn't increase another few orders of magnitude, insolation is a very very large number of kwh/year and that is the only theoretical limit to "sustainable" world energy usage. We do need to clear this set of hurdles though and I am having enough trouble seeing how that can be managed from an engineering standpoint. Throw politics into the equation and the difficult engineering/industrial challenge becomes an utterly hopeless social engineering project stacked on top of an insanely difficult engineering/industrial project.
First thing we all need to do is stop opposing *anything* that is even sort of in the right direction. In fact support things that are demonstrably bad ideas, just make your support contingent on getting concessions that ARE int he right direction. Exxon wants to drill ANWR? Fine, BUT 25% of their gross revenue from ANWR goes to new windfarms.
Incidentally, brilliant innovators can get rich by making purveyors of old technology no longer rich. Te acquisition of wealth by one individual does not necessarily need to be taken from society as a whole, it can come from many sources.
On that note, there's no particular reason why things couldn't continue to improve. New technologies can coninue to cause economic fluctuations and benefits to everyone without mandating increased overall energy flux.
The strategy you have outline above will do nothing to eliminate waste. Waste will be moderated only insofar as an economic recession forces consumers to change their consumption patterns. Once the solar revolution which will allow order of magnitude improvement productivity is in full force all this waste many other extravagant varieties will appear. Up to this point I thought you might be semi-rational. It is now clear that you are completely insane. Enjoy your delusion. I am sure you sleep better at night than I do.
I doubt it. The "if" in "if we can surmount this crisis" is a very very big one. I for one am intensely skeptical that we can. You are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem that's clear from your insistence that we must have equality and hippie paradise.
The crisis we are facing is a crisis of finitude. My solution of reducing consumption and fairly sharing economic output while we develop new infracture will physically work. In may not work practically because there are more people in the world like you than like me.
Your solution of using any and all means to keep the economy growing as fast as possible (If there is a single line in anything that you wrote that indicates that you have some other goal please point it out to me.) will not physically work. If I have to choose between a strategy which, if followed (however unlikely its adoption might be), would in fact solve our problems, and a strategy which leads inevitably to disaster I will take the former. Maybe no solution exists whatsoever, but people like you are definitely not part of any possible solution.
A) I stated that "sustainability" was an absolute requirement for long-term (just can't get there from here in 1 step).
B) I said that the wasteful activities would have to "taper out".
C) My "possible order of magnitude growth" was for *after* the present depletion curves had been halted and *after* solar power became the primary source of energy on earth.
D) An order of magnitude of total economic/energetic growth is *still* a finite amount.
E) I *never* said anything about "keeping the economy growing as fast as possible". I said that somewhere in here would be a good time to pause and take stock and allow the conservation of resources to have some time to work through the worlds economies without crushing them and creating a mad max scenario.
F) It has been implicit all along in everything I wrote that the current consumptive patterns could not possibly continue. Even my "making brilliant innovators rich" comment has nothing to do with "growing the economy". Even in a status where an absolutely fixed number of KWHs are produced annually, any efficiency tweak to an existing process would have the effect of freeing up resources that were formerly consumed on that process. That would make those resources available for previously unperformed/expensive processes and bring down the price of the improved process. That allows room for 2 industries to gain wealth without consuming 1 additional "new" kwh or making society generally poorer. In fact, it would make society materially wealthier as product A is cheaper and product B is available. This probably sounds to you like economic growth, and it is. However, since it is resource consumption/utilization that is finite, not the exchange of units of "currency" or even goods, that isn't really an issue. Spaceship economies can still grow. In fact any new resource added to a specaship economy translates directly to growth if the recycling % is high enough.
Equal distribution most probably means everyone starves. It provides no incentive whatsoever to innovate. It provides no incentive whatsoever to produce. It provides no incentive whatsoever to conserve below your quota. It provides no realistic basis by which any economy may function or has ever functioned above the 20 person "commune" level. I am not a fan of that as a large-scale policy.
I approve of trying to keep oil prices under $200 if this effort includes radical demand reduction efforts in addition to production side efforts. Trying to stand still or decline slowly when external factors leave you no other choice is still trying to grow as fast as possible. The only "elimnation of waste" pointed to by anything you have written is that enforced by physical necessity (e.g. if Detroit cannot make money by selling SUVs they will turn to PHEVs).
I have worked in Silicon Valley for 22 years. Every company here is trying to increase its volume of sales as fast as possible. In an economic system in which the security of your family depends on how much money you have socked away in stock funds and savings accounts no other economic goal makes sense. Unless social action is taken fix this structural problem the economy will always try to grow as fast as circumstances allow. You may hope that this growth willl take place by efficiency increases only so that the net consumptin of energy and other resources will not increase, but this is just an idle dream. The current economic system has proven over and over that it does not give a rat's ass about resource conservation or long term stability. All it cares about is making next year's bottom line as big as possible. It will confine itself to efficiency improvements only if grim hard necessity forces it do so.
Of course I am very much in favor of efficiency improvements. But I have a different idea about what use we should make of such improvements. At present if we figure out how to manufacture product A with less energy, less materials consumption, etc. we then say: "Great. Now let us start manufacturing product B and let's manufacture and sell as much of it as short term resource constraints will allow." Instead we should say: "Great. Now we can take life easier (What a concept. The purpose of technology improvement is to liberate us, not to us chain to the wheel of ever increasing consumption. Yes I know it's a 'hippy' idea. The hippies were not entirely fools). Or: "Let use the savings to help improve the manufacturing efficiency of some other existing product." Or: "Let's use the savings to manufacture some other existing product in more environmentally friendly manner." And so forth. The fact that such a common sense idea is regarded by so many people as brain dead 'hippy' idiocy is evidence of the deeply pathological nature of growth addiction.
If it is indeed true that voluntary simplicity (I do not mean 19'th century pastoralism. I mean committment to a very slowly changing, adequate level of wealth.) and mutual support is an impossible dream of liberal morons, then I fear that our future will be a nightmare.
I think that $150-$200/bbl oil will "naturally" cause a fair amount of demand destruction. The all out production effort to keep it at that price for a few years is to allow that demand reduction to happen. After a few years, slacking of the production efforts and allowing the price to go up again (probably to $350/bbl) and holding that level for a few years to allow THAT hit to settle in.
For myself, I am unambitious enough that I am far more interested in living calmly and having free time to read and to post to TOD or whatever I feel like doing than I am in accumulating physical items, but that's just me, I really can't begrudge others desire to have more unless they try to take mine (and that's what the 12 gauge is for). The desire to accumulate accolades of whatever type (respect, money, power, whatever) seems to have been the impetus behind almost all of the accomplishments of mankind, both the great and the terrible. Where the accolades were withheld, for whatever reason, the accomplishments ceased. So, given that "simple" country guys like me are background for the actions of the "great" accumulators, my best bet is to see to it that the best way for the accumulators to accumulate is to benefit me by so doing. Seems to me that the more rigidly the game is defined, the greater the incentive to "cheat", the greater the ability of those with friends or influence to use the rules themselves to strip me of what is mine. OTOH, the more loosely the game is defined (and I really think that game is the best term) the less incentive exists to work around the rules, the more the accumulators must ask me politely and deal with my desires in order to get me to give them what is mine.
Incidentally, if you think that a relatively fixed total energy pool apportioned according to which activity provides the greatest economic is "an idle dream" but, a "voluntary simplicity" system in which the bulk of people give up the "selfish" accumulation of accolades in favor of..... I think that you have a very very serious misread on human nature. The fact is, humans are highly unpleasant, territorial, violent, monstrous creatures. Get used to it. That fact is what we have to work with, and we have come an awfully long ways by acknowledging that and channeling our monstrosity.
I have no problem with people competing to accumulate accolades. The ancient olympic games were about public honor and not about multi-million dollar advertising contracts. The Greek mathematicians had no idea that the theory of conic sections or of irrational numbers would ever have practical applications. They were pursuing pure intellectual beauty as they conceived it. However, I do not doubt that most of them lusted after priority of discovery and the praise of their intellectual peers. I do not object to competition per se. I object to competition for the specific purpose of gaining as large a piece of the economic pie as possible. If the size of the pie is fixed then such competition leads to social chaos (At least my intuition tells me that it does.), and if the size of the pie is not fixed then such competition leads to a desire to increase the size of the pie as rapidly as possible and thus to resource depletion.
From the point of view of personal self-interest I have every reason for wanting the BAU economy to hold together for a number of decades longer. I am 52 years old and in relatively good financial condition. The men in my family tend to stay reasonably healthy until they are in their late seventies or early eighties and then keel over and die from massive heart failure. Another two and a half to three decades would probably see me safely to the end of the game. However, my best engineering judgment tells me that a comfortable middle class retirement is not in the cards, and thus my impractical dream of hippie salvation. Believe me, I understand the relatively low probability of its realization.
I would be more inclined to compare the greek mathematicians (specifically those) to the modern day university environment. In the modern university environment (publish or perish), tenure is granted to professors, then they more or less do as they please. They have no particular forward career path in terms of money, but can gain enormous social prestige from the results of their research.
The Ancient greeks have a tendency to be quite idealized, primarily because history is written by the victors. Those whose writings we are basing our knowledge of the civilization on were the rich. In fact, the very rich. Greece was a slaveholding nation with a very low population density, difficult terrain, poor soil, and very small landmasses. Those factors tend toward isolationist subsistence lifestyles, it is therefore no particular surprise that that was adopted. The ability of the individual to "claw his way up" was extremely limited, and we will note that there were several uprisings of the slaves and poor citizens. In addition, there were a multitude of wars between the city-states for acquisition of the farmland of their neighbors.
I am far more interested in ways in which it is possible to muddle through than in ways we could reach idealized Utopian societies that never existed and run contrary to human nature. The first is an economic/engineering issue, the second is a total social reallignment. The one is possible in the near to moderate term, the other will take centuries. In the meantime, I do not begrudge the president of solar one his big freakin' yacht, or the president of exxon his mansions, they both gave value for money.
All of this is why we need to have a radically different approach to solving our problems.
1) An accelerated development process, like we had in WWII for airplanes and ships, would speed things along tremendously.
2) A progressive tax, a decent social safety net, and a commitment to income equality would make it easier to develop projects like these publicly, without the Dereks of the world trying to reap all of financial benefits, while imperilling the rest of the planet.
3) How could you let your patent run out? Jeepers. You really needed a fifth character, called "Esquire" to assist you in all of this.
"a commitment to income equality would make it easier to develop projects like these publicly"
Since this idea has been around for 100's of years, I guess that you could point to case histories that would prove this point.
What do case histories have to do with it? The Greeks experimented with democracy 2000 years before the emergence of modern republican forms of goverment. The question is what is the physical reality that we are facing and will our current economic system have the flexibility to deal with it?
In a resource limited world maintaining social cohesion will either require rough income equity or a hierarchy of privilege justified by some system of theological myths. One can argue that such a myth system already exists: The Bill Gates's and Larry Ellison's of the world are men of god-like powers, and the United States has special moral virtues which entitle it to consume a fraction of the world's resouces far above the size of its population and so forth. Unfortunately for those who benefit most from the current system the poor people of the world are not buying into the myth with great enthusiasm.