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23 comments on The Bullroarer - Tuesday 3rd February 2009
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23 comments on The Bullroarer - Tuesday 3rd February 2009
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You two are just pissing in the wind. Are we not damaging the environment at an accelerating rate, whole ecosystems unraveling? Are we not exhausting finite resources, upon which we depend for our every need, 1000's of times faster than they were laid down on earth? Is the population not still growing without any sign of abating? Are all political and economic leaders not committed to perpetual growth (human and material), growth which today relies entirely on fossil fuel, and other finite resources? In fact are not the majority of people in all countries clamouring for more growth, not less? Is not geopolitical tension escalating as the earth becomes more crammed and less yielding of its fruits?
I'm sorry it is you who need to show us the evidence that your fantasy eco-consumption future is more credible than the evidence that lies before your very eyes.
Speaking of wind, if you require, on average, 150 sq km's to support a wind farm that can supply roughly 1000 megawatts, as this place in Germany, then how much area is needed to make up for just a 2% decline in the oil supply (ASPO suggested post-peak decline rate) per annum. 2% is not even that steep really, only a shade over 120,000 MW's (electricity equivalent). Well, how much surface area, steel, concrete, diesel, roads, electricity towers, undersea cable etc needs to be installed to mitigate just one years decline in equivalent energy? Come on, you're clever guys, do the math.
Then reconcile that with the fact that, despite years of heroic effort, global wind capacity is only just over 120,000 MW's now, and the wheels have fallen off the world economy, casting a long shadow over your hopes and dreams.
As for me I live comfortably (for now), own a business, pays a good living, don't fly anymore, own 1 10 year old car, have 4 pushbikes, (of which I should ride more often), walk to the local fruit market if the weather's nice, installed energy saving this, and eco-friendly that - often at great expense. For instance, my hot water went down recently, I coughed up $6000 AUD to install a heat pump (still waiting for my nearly $2000 in clean energy rebates from one government or the other), which work like reverse air-cons, heating water from the surrounding air. However my neighbour, faced with a similar problem just fitted a classic electric hot water storage system, running off-peak. He only forked out $1500, and what's more his hot water bill will still be lower than mine, despite doing the right thing by the environment and all.
So, if my neighbours' aren't compelled to switch from old hot water systems (and why would they if the economics don't stack up for them anyway?), then all my, and your, efforts are in vain. Unless we change institutionally then our individual efforts, as laudable as they might be, are in vain. If all new renewable energy is installed merely to supplement existing fossil fuel use, then it's all in vain. Mitigation of the myriad problems besetting us today is a chimera without it.
You say that, then tell us further down that you're busy 'eco-consuming' yourself. If your hot water went down, and you have any conviction that 'building new' was killing the Earth, you'd not have bought a new one.
Electricity is 5 times more efficient than Heat Engines, so it's really 5000W. And you can still do things under the turbines, as they don't actually take up 150km2.
Incidentally, it's not '120,000mW's'. It's 120,000mWh's (assuming the figure is correct). Likewise, the offshore Wind farm will produce a hell of a lot more mWh than just 1000 each year. The Farm is expected to provide 3tWh of electricity per year, which is some 25,000 times greater per year than a 2%pa decline in Oil supplies (3tWh / 120kmWh, or 3,000,000,000,000 / 120,000,000).
Sounds like the best time to make a Renewables push, to me. Governments can force it through as 'nation-building', because private industry sure isn't going to be investing and building much of anything for the next decade.
Replacing filthy, polluting, finite-resourse consuming fossil fuel infrastructure with clean, non-polluting, renewable infrastructure is in vain. Gotcha.
1) It's MW's pal. A 5 megawatt wind turbine delivers, well 5 megawatts of electricity, at full capacity, so you'd need 20,000 of these monsters to deliver the same amount of energy as that contained in a 2% oil decline. Actually more so, since the things never run at 100% efficiency.
2) And since there is no wind turbine that can build another wind turbine, and still leave a useful amount of energy left over to do other things with, then I guess you're stuffed, and have to turn to fossil fuels to do the heavy lifting of running the rest of society.
3) Renewables projects are being shelved faster than even future oil projects, in the current climate.
4) None of your business what I do buddy. Your mate asked a question, and I responded.
5) Yep, all that shit is in vain, so long as we keep exhausting finite resources and our population keeps growing.
Almost everything you said there is wrong.
Try and tone down the attitude, and add some references that back up your wilder claims, if you can find any...
Dear Big Gav; please explain which of the following statements are wrong, or wildly exaggerated, unless we are living in parallel universes, or something?
Are we not damaging the environment at an accelerating rate, whole ecosystems unraveling?
Are we not exhausting finite resources, upon which we depend for our every need, 1000's of times faster than they were laid down on earth?
Is the population not still growing without any sign of abating?
Are all political and economic leaders not committed to perpetual growth (human and material), growth which today relies entirely on fossil fuel, and other finite resources?
In fact are not the majority of people in all countries clamouring for more growth, not less?
Is not geopolitical tension escalating as the earth becomes more crammed and less yielding of its fruits?
> Are we not damaging the environment at an accelerating rate, whole ecosystems unraveling?
I never said we weren't - in fact I've been documenting this process for years.
> Are we not exhausting finite resources, upon which we depend for our every need, 1000's of times faster than they were laid down on earth?
There are few truly finite resources (oil, gas and coal are - almost everything else isn't).
We don't need to depend on these for our every need - we could do without oil, gas and coal completely if we could be bothered changing our energy and transport systems.
> Is the population not still growing without any sign of abating?
No it isn't. Most models show population levelling off around 9.5 billion people around 2050. Lots of countries already have negative population growth. Educating women and giving them economic opportunities accelerates this trend.
> Are all political and economic leaders not committed to perpetual growth (human and material), growth which today relies entirely on fossil fuel, and other finite resources?
Economic growth does not depend on finite resources (aka oil, gas and coal).
> In fact are not the majority of people in all countries clamouring for more growth, not less?
Yes. That isn't a problem.
> Is not geopolitical tension escalating as the earth becomes more crammed and less yielding of its fruits?
I see no evidence that there is more geopolitical tension today than there was at any other period of time in the past 5 centuries.
There is significantly less tension (and wars underway) now than there was during most of the 20th century.
1) You get billed in *Wh's, so rater capacity in *W is irrelevant.
2) There is no ICE that can build another ICE, no Oil refinery that can build another Oil refinery, no supertanker that can build another supertanker, no pipeline that can buiold another pipeline, no petrol station etc etc. You use the energy to run a seperate machine/s that can build another of whatever it is you want. Cars, for example, are built by machines that run on electricity.
If we need Fossil Fuels to do the 'heavy lifting', I guess all that mining equipment and Heavy Rail that runs on electricity is a big waste of funds by the companies involved, eh.
3) So?
4) You told us what you do.
5) Population is the key.
As Kiashu mentioned above, your collapse fixation is the same as the Science! or The Market! crowd, in that nothing is required from you. This is a dangerous mindset.
1. Wind and solar needs to be collected, concentrated and stored to provide energy when we need it, where its needed which costs money and energy. With FF's nature did all that for us already.
2. No kidding. All that, 5MW monster wind turbines and cars, either directly or indirectly, rely on a fossil fuel based economy. A reliance which is only increasing due to the imperatives of population and economic growth.
3. So seeing that projects of this scale take many years to come online, aren't you the least bit anxious that the infrastructure meant to replace oil won't be there, once we go sailing over the peak oil plateau?
4. Kiashu was coming across all "holier than thou". I was merely being frank about my living arrangements. Forgive me for being born in modern times, I'll just go off with the local hunter gatherers, since discovering that modern life is a cruel joke, except they've got TV's and cars now too.
5. The laws of biology, ecology and physics are a real downer for the perpetually optimistic.
5. The laws of biology, ecology and physics are a real downer for the perpetually optimistic.
Many so called "laws" are more like guidelines anyway... especially when it comes to biology and ecology where some of the underlying models are stochastic.
Newtons law of gravity was great until Einstein crashed the party.
Or more irreverently whatever happened to phlogiston and the ether?
A little respect for uncertainty please... a science career is built on exploring it ;-)
Is "Doomer Determinism" the apocalyptic vision that atheists have instead of the Fundamentalists determined view that "the end times" are nigh?
Many so called "laws" are more like guidelines anyway... especially when it comes to biology and ecology where some of the underlying models are stochastic.
Priceless! Let's see. There have probably been over 20 million species in existence since life began on Earth, all, bound by the same biology, reliant on the natural environment, and subject to the immutable laws of thermodynamics. Yet somehow, because you say so, humans, just one of these species, is somehow exempt from them. I'd say that the odds of that are ~20 million to 1 against!
You get to use the "because you say so" phrase only when someone says what you allege they said... Rocket Man... and this is at least the second time you've tried this on in this thread.
I did not say that humans are exempt from any of the so called laws that you continually propose TOTALLY determine our fates. But nowhere in your "immutable" laws is there anything that says "were doomed - Doomed".
I am uncertain of "our" fate.. and despite the current crop of elected leaders hope, that "our" future can be better. Your strident certitude that all are fools who can not see the future YOU see written in the immutable laws you worship on the other hand - zealotry is always unattractive.
I take your ridiculous underestimate of the number of "species" that have ever existed as an indicator of your general level of comprehension. There are millions of "species" of bacteria in the soil beneath our feet... all of them having had evolutionary predecessors - presumably now extinct...
There are millions of species of insect, NOW.
Which leads into your silly statistical argument. You can't use probability in this way to win roulette!
Just as you can't use probability in this way to argue that the sun will forever rise...
About the laws of thermodynamics... these state that the fate of the universe is a cold entropy "death"... eventually. But it is less clear about the rate at which individual systems within the universe approach this fate... which is why systems like the Earth, with a continual input of energy can actually have localized decreased entropy. A point Gav made but which you missed... willingly or through lack of understanding.
I can have an explosive mix of H2 and O2 sitting in a bottle... the forward reaction for which is thermodynamically favored by its Delta G... and yet nothing will happen. For the next step we turn to Kinetics. All laws have limits... THATS NOT TO SAY we are exempt... merely stating the obvious. The applicability of Thermodynamic laws to the analysis of human behavior is not as certain a proposition as you seem to believe. Sure, we cant perpetual motion machine our way out of this, but we can change. Well, some of us...
If you were a skeptic, you might having something to contribute.
Maybe you are the antagonist in the Monty Python Argument Sketch?
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Further correspondence will not be entered into.
SaturnV I admire your lifestyle (and nickname - most powerful machine ever created, eh!) and I hope you stick around TOD long enough to see that people here have some useful and nuanced information that can help you to stop worrying. The future appears challenging, but there's no need to panic when one reads somebody else's doomy (and in the case of the wind farm, wildly inaccurate) projections.
Big Gav is right on the beam about population growth going into reverse once people (esp. women) have even a modicum of economic stability. Fortunately we are getting to the point where around half the world's population already live in countries at sub-replacement fertility. This is a cause for celebration! (And if we pulled our fingers out and did something about making small social security payments to the world's poor, then this trend would be dramatically improved.)
Renewable energy *can* power society, but we face an interesting time in the next 20 years, since the Peak Oil Cliff will probably arrive in 2012 before the Renewable Power-Up has occurred. This will be a WW2-sized emergency, but I think that humans don't concentrate unless we have a challenge, and this will prove to be our "finest hour".
Cretaceous, thanks very much for the kind welcome. I don't envy my lifestyle nearly as much as you might. I have lived at much lower standards than I presently enjoy, but today have the pressure of raising a young family, which makes it difficult to escape the dominant economic and social mantra. Some of my clueless relatives feel sorry for me because I drive an old car, even though I can afford to buy a new one, or because I send my kids' to the local public school (2 mins by foot down the street) instead of driving them 20 kms each way to a private school where they can be "better connected" in the future. Given the fateful trajectory we are headed down, I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear talking about the future like it's going to be some rerun of the past, only faster.
I'm sorry, but I don't share your optimism, even if I did, not sure what good it would do since the world is filled with people determined to take it the opposite direction to the one you so hope for. All the best anyway!