Scientific American's Path to Sustainability: Let's Think about the Details
Posted by Gail the Actuary on November 9, 2009 - 10:10am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: hydroelectric, scientific american, solar photovoltaic, solar power, sustainability, wind [list all tags]
Scientific American presents "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030" in its November issue. In many ways, it sounds good. But let's think about the details: What would the end result look like? Would it really be sustainable? What would the costs really be? Is there any way we could afford to do what is proposed?
The authors of the article, Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, propose substituting wind, water, and solar (WWS) energy for all other forms of energy by 2030, not for just the US, but for the world. The types of energy sources that would be eliminated include the following:
• Petroelum (including gasoline, diesel, propane, heating oil, etc.)
• Natural gas
• Coal
• Liquid biofuels, such as ethanol
• Wood and other biomass
• Nuclear
All that would remain would be wind, wave power, tidal energy, hydroelectric, geothermal, and solar. Because of the ambitious timeframe, the only techniques that can be used are ones that work at large scale today, or are very close to working.
What would we end up with?
Essentially, we would need to change all of the world's infrastructure to use either electricity or solar or water power directly--by 2030. What might this mean?
• Airplanes. The authors propose that airplanes be powered by hydrogen powered fuel cells (with the hydrogen be made by hydrolysis using WWS energy sources). I understand that hydrogen is three times as bulky as gasoline, explodes easily, and escapes fairly quickly from its holding tanks, making it difficult to store for very long. It seems like airplanes and helicopters would need to look more like blimps, to hold the necessary fuel. Unless the explosion issue is solved, the popularity of hydrogen fuel cells would likely be pretty low.
• Ships. The authors don't tell us how ships would be powered. Clearly sailing ships would meet the criteria, but would be quite slow. Because of their slow time for passage, we would need a lot more sailing ships than the types of ships we use now, because so many would be in transit at a given time. Barges could float down rivers, and if the current isn't too strong, could perhaps be towed back in some way (boat with fuel cell?). Ships powered by hydrogen fuel cells might also work, but they would have the same issues as for airplanes. Because of their long trips, leakage would be more of an issue than on airplanes.
• Automobiles and Trucks. According to the authors, these would be powered by batteries or hydrogen powered fuel cells. There are several issues--the technology is only barely there for automobiles and trucks--for example, I don't know of anyone working on battery-powered technology for long distance trucking. Fuel cell technology is very expensive. David Strahan in The Last Oil Shock says that the current cost is about $1 million dollars per car. He quotes the chief engineer at Honda as saying it would take 10 years to get the cost down to $100,000 a car.
Minerals shortages are also likely to be a problem for converting autos and trucks to batteries or to hydrogen fuel cells. The Scientific American article mentions following materials as being in short supply: rare-earth metals for electric motors, lithium for lithium-ion batteries and platinum for fuel cells. The article mentions recycling as a partial solution. Analyses published at The Oil Drum, such as this one, indicate that we would likely run out of rare materials fairly quickly, even with recycling.
• Farm equipment; bulldozers; cement mixers; and other heavy equipment. Would need to be converted to electric. It is not clear that the technology (or rare materials needed for the technology) exist to do so.
• Heating of buildings; heating for cooking and baking; hot water heating; commercial heating; heating of grains to remove excess moisture. Would need to be converted to electric, or in some cases solar. This would be true, even where heating is now done over wood or charcoal fires, such as in Africa or China.
• Mining and manufacturing. Would need to be converted to all electric. Presumably oil and natural gas extraction would continue, but at possibly lower rates, because of their uses for non-energy uses, such as textiles, asphalt, plastics and lubrication. Drilling for oil and gas would be converted to electric as well.
What steps would be needed to build all of these things?
It seems like we would first need to figure out what the end point would look like, and then work backwards.
We are told that the authors of the Scientific American article think we would need the following:
• 3.8 million large wind turbines
• 90,000 solar electricity generating plants
• "Numerous geothermal, tidal, and rooftop photovoltaic installations"
Besides these, we would need to build all of the new airplanes, ships, cars, trucks, heavy equipment, and new appliances that would be needed under the new regime. Individual homeowners would need to get their homes rewired for the larger amount of electricity they would use--especially if they are converting to electric home heating.
One thing we need to plan for is a greatly expanded and improved electrical grid. The Scientific American article indicates that the variability in generation would be mostly smoothed out by combining electrical transmission of many different types--wind, hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, and wave--over a wide geographical area. To do this will require considerable long distance transmission, often between different countries--including some that may not be friendly with each other. The grid will also need to be upgraded to be "smart," so automobiles can draw electric power at the times of day when it is not needed elsewhere.
Once we have figured out what the new system will look like, we will need to figure out what kind of factories are needed to build all of the devices for the new system, and what raw materials the factories will need. Some of the raw materials can perhaps be obtained by recycling, and some factories can perhaps be obtained by converting other factories, but this won't always be the case. It is likely that new factories will need to be built, and new mines opened, especially for the rare minerals.
By the time we start seeing many finished good produced, it is likely that we will be at least half way through the 20 year period. In part, this is because we are still working out technology details (for example, how to efficiently build a hydrogen fuel cell powered airplane). Also, once we get those details worked out, we need to build mines for raw materials and build the factories to make the new devices. It is only when we get those steps taken care of that we can build what we really want--the airplanes, the new ships, the wind turbines, the solar PV, and all of the rest.
When sizing the factories, we will need to size them not for "normal" production levels, but for converting the economy quickly to use the new power sources. For example, under normal circumstances, if earth-moving equipment is expected to last for 40 years, we would expect to need factories to make 1/40 of the world's needed earth-moving equipment in a given year. But if we need to ramp up to replacement in 10 years, we will need 4 times as many factories. (What do we do with the excess factories at the end?)
How much would this all cost?
The authors tell us that they expect the cost of the new WWS energy generation equipment would be $100 trillion over 20 years. But that doesn't include the cost of all the new infrastructure to go with it--the new airplanes and ships and cars and trucks, or the electrical transmission lines. In total, the cost will be far higher than $100 trillion--lets guess $200 trillion--to be paid for over the next 20 years.
The Scientific American article gives the impression that the costs will be low, because it looks only at the cost the new electricity generation, and assumes that cost of generation will go down with volume and with additional research. It also implicitly assumes that debt financing over a long period, such as 40 years, will be used, so we don't have to pay for the cost of the new system before we start using it. But how realistic is that?
The cars, trucks, boats, airplanes, coal fired power plants, etc. we are currently using won't have much trade-in value once power is generated by WWS, and the new equipment will likely be fairly expensive. So we will be faced with buying new high priced equipment, with little trade-in value from what we used previously. In many cases, businesses would not normally be replacing equipment this soon. The debt that was taken on to pay for all of our current equipment won't magically go away either--it will still need to be paid.
So how will we pay for all of the new equipment? The governments of the world are pretty much maxed out for borrowing. Companies are not going to be able to take on a project of this magnitude either, especially since they already have debt to service. It seems to me that the only way a program such as the program of WWS fuels replacing other fuels can be financed is through increased taxes that would cover each year's expenditures, as they are made.
So let's think about how much this would cost. $200 trillion over 20 years amounts to $10 trillion a year, spread over world economies. The US share of this would be something around 21%, based on the ratio of US GDP to world GDP. So let's say that the US would need to fund $2.1 trillion a year. Let's compare this to current taxes. In 2008, US Federal, State, and Local taxes combined amounted to $4.1 trillion according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. In order to collect $2.1 trillion more, a tax increase equal to slightly more than 50% of all taxes currently paid would be required. If the additional tax were collected as a percentage of "personal income" (which includes wages, social security income, rents, dividends, etc.), it would amount to 17% of personal income. It seems unlikely that a tax of this magnitude, or even half of this magnitude, would be agreed to by tax payers.
If such a tax were passed, after a few years there would be benefits that would start offsetting its cost, and might lead to a lower tax, and after 2030, perhaps lower costs overall, because it is no longer necessary to purchase fossil fuels. The benefits that would start offsetting costs would be sales of electricity and other energy, and sales or leasing of vehicles and other goods produced. Many of the sales of goods would be going to replace automobiles that had worn out, factories beyond their useful life, and ships that no longer had value to the owners.
But there is a remaining issue. There will be a lot of assets which would still have considerable value in 2030, if it weren't for the new law. For example, a new car with an internal combustion engine that was manufactured in 2028 will still have considerable value, and a gas fired stove a homeowner owns will still have value, even though he needs to replace it with an electric one. A coal fired power plant built in 1980 is likely to still have value, apart from this law, and so will all of the tankers used for international transport of oil, and all of the natural gas pipelines. Should the owners of these assets be compensated for value of their otherwise-useful assets? There is nothing built into the tax to do so.
It would seem to me that these owners should be compensated, even if it takes a higher tax to do so. In part, this compensation could come in the form of "trade in" value, if a new automobile or electric stove or other item is purchased. But suppose the assets that lose value belong to businesses, and aren't easily traded in for corresponding asset--such as a coal fired power plant, or natural gas pipelines. I would argue that compensation for the remaining value of these is really needed as well.
The assets that will lose value because of the new law are typically owned by a company. The stocks and bonds of these companies will generally have a wide variety of owners--very often pension plans, insurance companies, endowment funds, and individuals saving for their retirements. If the otherwise-useful assets of these companies are taken without compensation, the companies are likely to default on their bonds, and the stocks of these companies will lose value. This will mean that some pension funds will not be able to pay their promised payments, and some life insurance policies will not pay as promised. If there is no compensation to these companies by a tax or some sort, the loss will flow through the system and hit others--with retirees likely hit the hardest. So there will be a loss to the system, one way or another.
How sustainable would this system be?
There are a number of weak areas in this system:
• There are not likely to be enough rare minerals (and even not-so-rare minerals), to make all of the desired high-tech end products. Recycling will help, but it is likely that the system will run into a bottleneck in not very many years.
• The system will use a huge number of electrical transmission lines. These transmission lines are subject to all kinds of disturbances--hurricane or other windstorm destruction, forest fires, land or snow slide, malicious destruction by those not happy for some reason (perhaps those unhappy by wealth disparities). Fixing lines that need repair will be challenging. We currently use helicopters and specialized equipment. These would need to be adequately adapted to a system without fossil fuels.
• If electricity is out in an area, pretty much all activity in an area will stop (except that powered by local PV), and there will be no back-up generators. Residents will not be able to recharge vehicles, so they will quickly become useless. Even vehicles coming into an area may get stranded for lack of recharge capability. Food deliveries and water may be a problem. The current system at least offers some options--back-up generators, and cars and trucks powered by petroleum that one can drive away.
• Operating the system will require a huge amount of international co-operation, because the transmission system will cross country lines. If one country becomes unable to pay its share, or fails to make repairs, it could be a problem.
• All of the high tech manufacturing will require considerable international co-operation and trade. This could be interrupted by debt defaults by major players, or by countries hoarding raw materials, or by difficulty in producing enough ships and airplanes to handle international trade.
• The system clearly can't continue forever. It could be stopped by a lack of rare minerals, or international disputes, or lack of adequate international trade. The system doesn't provide any natural transition to a truly sustainable future. For example, food production is likely to still be done using industrial agriculture, with the food that is produced shipped to consumers a long distance away. It will be difficult to transition to a system which is truly sustainable at the point the system stops working.
What would a reasonable timeframe for transition be?
It seems to me that a reasonable timeframe for a transition such as that discussed in the Scientific American article would be 50 years, rather than 20 years suggested in the Scientific American article. With such a timeframe, there will be a little more time to fine tune technology, so as to find cost-efficient solutions that scale well. We also have more time to use the factories that are built, so that we don't have to overbuild, just to meet a deadline. Costs are likely to much easier to handle, since there will not be as much of an overlap issue. In addition, there will be much less problem of having to dispose of other-wise useful assets.
The problem is that we really don't have 50 years to make a transition. We already are on the downslope. We should have started back in the 1960s with a project like this.
It seems to me that all we can do is a very much reduced version of an approach such as the one described in the Scientific American article. Given the timing, we may not even want to do an approach such as described in the article. The approach described assumes a high level of international trade continuing long-term. This is a fairly optimistic assumption, given the difficulty of air and ship transportation without fossil fuels.
Instead of the high tech approach advocated by Scientific American, we may want to find solutions that can be done locally, with local materials. For example, we may want to encourage local agriculture. For industry, we may want to look at solutions that have worked in the past, such as wind powered factories, as discussed in this recent post. These were built with local materials, and were used to power factories directly, without conversion to electricity. With such solutions, a transition to a truly sustainable future will be much more of a possibility.
A few points:
1. Why does the government have to do it all? Gail's taxation plan assumes they will. I agree it may be wise to have the government set up the transmission network as a catalyst to get wind and solar going, but the government doesn't have to own every power plant. Nor does the government have to own every car and airplane.
2. Pass a ban on new fossil and nuke plant construction. As more/replacement power is needed, then it will be constructed from one of the favored sources. Although I think 20 years is too short a phase out for recently constructed powerplants, establish a schedule (maybe by 2050) to have them eliminated.
3. The use of explosive hydrogen will replace the use of totally non-flammable petroleum products? For pete's sake, when will people stop repeating this canard about the supposed danger of hydrogen? A gallon of gasoline fumes is roughly equivalent to a stick of dynamite, and it's characteristics of pooling and evaporating make it particularly dangerous. Hydrogen will of course tend to float away.
4. I would include the use of electricity generated from manure to methane plants. Probably better to burn the methane than to let it into the atmosphere.
I think Gail's comparison to the tax take was partly just that - a comparison. It shows that 2.1 trillion dollars is a lot of money. However, if it doesn't come from government then how will the investment be made for this super ambitious plan? For example, it's a high risk plan, so one wouldn't expect private companies to put in such investment. If it's mandated by government, as a way to get it to happen, are you saying that private companies should be forced to invest funds at this rate?
The risk of explosion may be overdone but the other points about hydrogen powered planes are valid.
I made similar comments to Gail's in a Sciam blog post about the article and in a largely supportive article by Tom Whipple. I think we'll see a lot more of these grand schemes as it starts to become obvious that energy is a problem. They might also be proposed for climate change reasons but I don't think there is the slightest chance of any government proposing such schemes for that reason.
It is all about preaching to the converted. The rest will not hear.
Olduvai Theory is not liked by the general public. Jim Kunstler is never taken seriously.
Our present High-tech society and our planet with 6 Billion people really does not have a benign solution. We can wish, hope, and pray all we want but our present industrial creation is a pyramid upside down.
1) Governments are totally incapable of doing anything except incremental Status Quo. The answers will not be on the "big scale". Already the US cannot maintain much its infrastructure, let alone actually do a massive re-engineer. Its back to the Bill Gates's in a garage to get new ways to do things.
2)The nuclear scientists tell us Nuclear re-breeders are a solution that can span another few hundred years with no worse results than we already have.
Oil, gas and Coal-- after India and China each have three cars in their back yard like in the US-- will be long gone, so need no action. CO2 is fast losing its "Monster" status as the "Climate Change" game evolves to what it really is.
3)Hydrogen containment is probably the single most important problem for the industry and seems to have no workable solution for our types of transportation. It is far more than just its explosive nature.
Bio Diesel could be a viable fuel for limited jet travel.
4) During WW2 many many small Austin and Morris 10HP cars were seen riding down the road with a massive balloon gas bag on the roof.
5) High tech sailing ships are faster than the old clippers and need very few crew members.
6) An "All Electric" (no fossil fuel)society even if all the "Alternate" generating means were possible seems not to be even remotely capable of maintaining even close to the Status Quo.
The real problem we have is still thinking that the Status Quo is the only business model. The Biblical admonition that the "Sins of the fathers will be visited unto the offspring to the Third and fourth generation" is most appropriate.
6+ Billion people will not be the world population counted by our great grand children.
Re: Hydrogen Storage, I read about this a couple of years ago, I don't know if this is still being pursued today.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070821112346.htm
Re: Your closing point.
An example of this is the BAU kind of thinking is that these transitions can only be financed by taxation.
On a personal level I would be more willing to contribute my time and expertise, pro bono, to a group of people actually doing something locally than I would be willing to be taxed. Maybe we could find a way to give people credit for their tax bill if they gave of themselves to the communities where they live. Just another of my crazy thoughts, I guess.
On the energy storage system, I imagine the issues are the amount of energy that is required for such a system--which is likely to be an important determinant of cost.
Regarding the proposed new system, I don't see people's time as the most important cost factor--instead, it is likely that energy costs will play a very important role--we will need to burn a huge amount of oil and natural gas and even coal to make a program such as this work. Many of the new devices that are needed (for example, electric cars) are very energy intensive to make because of the need to mine the necessary minerals, make the various components, and then assemble the cars.
The costs become so huge, the amount research needed so large, and availability of debt financing so unlikely, that it is hard for me to envision a program such as this without government sponsorship. It may very well be that the private sector can play a big role in this--I have not tried to break this out.
You made some interesting points which seemed reasonable to me.
However, I found this statement to be cryptic to me:
Are you saying that CO2 is not the primary driver of a mankind-enhanced greenhouse effect? Or are you implying that climate change is not mankind-induced or perhaps not of major consequence compared to other challenges we face?
I also looked up Austin 10 hp cars
http://www.austintendriversclub.com/
so I have the sight picture on what kind of cars you were referring to...except the part about the large gas bags on the roofs. My guesses: 1) Filled with methane which the engines were adapted to use? 2) filled with a lifting gas in an attempt to lighten the weight through the wheels (pretty absurd)...I haven't had enough coffee to figure this one out...
The bag on the roof held "town gas", made from the gasification of coke and distributed through the gas mains for cooking and heating (and originally for lighting). It is very easy to mix fuel gas with air in the correct proportion to make an easily-ignited mixture; for years the problem with using gasoline wasn't getting the liquid, it was building a reliable carburetor.
According to the Galactic picture, assuming the Cloud chamber effect of Solar and Cosmic ray theory as driving the earth's temperature we are approaching an secondary ice age.
There are however, many planet centric effects with the bobbles and the wobbles and the sun etc which are causing some extreme temperature changes.
The science on my last read said that we have not yet even got one degree warmer as a planet.
Adding together all the CO2 content on the planet caused by industry it was small compared with the CO2 tied up and fluxing in and on the rest of the planet and its atmosphere.
Primordially they say that we used to have up to 10,000 ppm CO2 during the great oil and coal creating forests, and the temperatures extrapolated bear no correlation to CO2 content.
Very sadly, the "Fringe" who are now becoming more and more correct Have analyzed and charted the "Climate Change Scam" to a series of Political decisions starting under Margaret Thatcher and taken on by Reagan for political reasons.
Some honest scientists document how "Global Warming" related research slowly became the only way to get funding.
--- http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming.html
here is one I did keep.
I am sorry If I sound like a crank, unfortunately I never keep a record of evolving events to prove my points. However, as an "Intellectual" all the many many credible arguments presented to me about the minor part played by CO2, carried far more weight for me than all the present propaganda and "Politically correct" science emanating from CNN, FOX, BBC, and Mogul owned news media, all with vested interests.
Personally, I feel that we are being herded in directions which we will regret.
Don't worry you don't sound like a crank at all! It's obvious you are one!
Re: your delusional reference to yourself as an "Intellectual".
Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Ad hominem attacks really don't contribute much to the discussion.
The reality is that reality is not following the theories very closely. It looked similar for a couple of decades, but in the last decade temperatures have been doing their own thing. The conclusion one could draw is that the theories need a bit more work.
The bigger reality is that in the global context you really can't do anything about it - what will be will be. So it's best to be prepared to adapt to whatever happens. You have your ideas about what that may be, I have my own.
The great thing about delusions is that everybody has different ones.
And the models are being adjusted. This article reports on one of the freshest most detailed studies run on climate data.
Since I live up north I keep a weather eye on the current extent of the arctic sea ice. Where and for how late in the season that ice lies off the coast does seem to have major impacts on our local weather..
We like to watch the aurora in these parts as well, which of course is directly related to the solar winds which supposedly cycle regularly. The beginning of this new cycle has been right quiet this time around (click on the solar activity comparison plots bar graphs and you have access to plots going back as far as 2001). An active solar cycle is supposed to add a 1/2 degree or so if I recall therefore a weak active cycle should have some dampening effect on global temperature rise.
We live with daily weather and are lucky to remember six or eight successive seasons accurately. No great wonder there is a lot of disagreement on the climate change phenomenon. Even large changes historically have substantial up and down temperature swings while trending one way or the other. How much of what is going on can accurately be attributed to our civilization's carbon release has not come back as a sealed verdict yet. But as many have said, given the range of consequences our possible courses of action can bring about, the prudent course would be to substantially lower carbon emissions rather than take the chance at all the AGW modeling is hogwash. Fossil fuels are a bank account at the very least, and draining a bank account without investing it in something that will replace the principal it formerly held first is just plain stupid.
FMagyar is correct.
Sometime you DO have to call a Spade a "Spade".
Neither does argumentation by assertion. You are full of crap. The science could not be clearer. There are no papers, anywhere or by anyone, that support your position.
The science could be much, much clearer, but at this point in time it's not.
The ski resorts here in the Canadian Rockies are open, and I'm going skiing tomorrow, so global warming can't be that bad yet.
If I couldn't ski, then global warming would be a problem. At this point it's not.
The science is very clear, has been for a while.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
How about a history lesson of the development of the science of global warming?
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html
(or you can buy the book)
For extra credit, you can find the link and read John Tyndall's 1861 paper.
(yes, that is EIGHTEEN Sixty One. n.b. "Carbonic Acid" is what we now call CO2, "Oliogenic gas" is what we now call ethane.)
The full IPCC 4 report is quite long, but they have a very good FAQ on the physical science basis:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-faqs.pdf
Of the history of the science and denialism - this video is great.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio
Don't want to watch a video?
www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/Presentations/Oreskes Presentation for Web.pdf
All your other questions answered, though not as clearly and easily as one might like (sorry).
http://www.realclimate.org/
Hi FMagyar,
That was a most interesting site you posted on my delusions. Were I a young man I would probably take note but at my stage in life I kind of know who I am and my capabilities.
Very sadly the bell curve predicts that half of us are dumber than a horse. I can live with that.
Gr
"Vanishing glaciers jolt smokestack China"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6907919.ece#cid=...
"AS an expedition from Chinese state television worked its way across the remote Tibetan plateau earlier this year, the explorers were amazed by what they found.
The plateau has been called the world’s third largest ice store after the North and South Poles. Yet according to Chinese scientists, the “third pole” is warming up faster than anywhere else on earth.
The TV team found bare rock where glaciers had retreated. Lakes had dried up. Lush grassland had turned to desert. The livestock was dead, the farmers impoverished.
They brought back a visual lesson in global warming so stark that censors allowed the programme makers to broadcast a frank exposé."
BBBaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!
Human's have always been herded in directions that they regreted. *Smirk*
I have always wondered what the world looked like before most of the oil layer was set down into the rocks. Having the oceans rise and the climate change is only bad for you if you have Lots of investments on the sea coasts that can't be moved, which we do, but didn't have 10,000 years ago. The biggest killer of species is humans, not climate change, though that happens over time as well.
I never understood the need to waste so many things, or trash the planet. As a Christian I don't think that is something God wanted us to do with what He gave us. Living humble sustainable lives doesn't seem to be the agenda of some people that call themselves Christian, and that also irks me. If I could influence the rest of the world to live humble sustainable lives I would. I can only do my part.
Charles.
"whatreallyhappened" also promotes liars who claim that the Nazi Holocaust was greatly exaggerated, they are definitely not a credible source even if a small part of what's on that website is true. A stopped watch is right twice a day.
"3)Hydrogen containment is probably the single most important problem for the industry and seems to have no workable solution for our types of transportation. It is far more than just its explosive nature. "
Hydrogen is much more easily handled when it is bonded to carbon. IMHO, hydrogen produced from renewable electricity will need to be converted to a hydrocarbon and used in the exisiting infrastructure either as liquids or gas. Hydrogen on its own is too problematic for storage and distribution and requires new end use technology that is proving elusive. Renewable hydrocarbons are already being produced in the form of bio-fuels. The next big research push should be how to crack CO2 using renewable energy, maybe concentrating solar, and using the carbon and hydrogen yielded from electrolysis of seawater to create new hydrocarbon fuels. I have no idea how scalable something like this could be, but I believe it has a better chance of success than hydrogen powered aeroplanes and fuel cell ships.
The reason I assumed this would be a government program is I don't see how debt will work, and only the government can pass tax laws. Perhaps a way could be figured out for it to have more private company involvement, but for at least for thinking out how much this would cost, but I didn't see an easy way to do it. Maybe apart from the taxes collection and the initial research and planning, there might be a way of transferring the program back to the private sector.
"Cash for Clunkers 2.0"?
The notion that people and companies who make stupid financial decisions should be rescued from that stupidity is certainly a product of a world of excess.
Assuming such a tax scheme could be imposed, in likely a much more resourced challenged world, what justification would there be for excusing such poor judgement?
Unfortunately, pensions are funded based on the continuation of BAU. If companies make what turns out to be stupid financial decisions, these result fall through to owners of the bonds--insurance companies, pension plans, lots of individual owners. Traditionally utility stocks and bonds have been considered safe long-term investments, good even for widows. It is these owners that suffer.
Another issue is secondary fallout, if a utility company or other owner of some of these assets goes bankrupt. We assume electrical service will continue, but will this necessarily be the case? If we get enough bankruptcies, it will be hard for any government organization to come in, pick up the pieces, and keep electrical service available to all.
Traditionally utility stocks and bonds have been considered safe long-term investments, good even for widows. It is these owners that suffer.
Like my in laws.
No amount of persuasion can get them to reconfigure their portfolio despite the massive hits they're taking.
They even gave us BoA stock last Christmas.
The energy co-op near my lifeboat, http://www.wolverinecleanenergy.com/ is planning a new coal based power plant in Rogers City despite the Michigan Public Service Commission saying they “failed to demonstrate the need” for this plant.
Of course supporting Wolverine’s grant application were U.S.Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow, U.S. Congressman Bart Stupak and Governor Jennifer Granholm.
Liberal Democrats all. I would've expected this from Republicans.
A sane populace would remove them quickly from their seats of power before their stupidity and shortsightedness ruins one of Michigans remaining livable areas and their outcry would force Wolverine to change its plans or face closure.
But the BAU mentality wins every time, the good people of Rogers City are swayed by the promises that the fly ash will be harmlessly interred or that when the wind blows from the South and the East it won't carry the stench that wreathes nearby Alpena constantly or the surrounding land won't be stripped bare by the 10% "renewable" biomass stipulation these same liberals insisted be part of any base load generation.
The company claims that Michigan is currently "a net importer of power.Our new power plant will make the state more self-sufficient and create much-needed jobs."
How importing coal from the removed mountains of Appalachia makes us more self sufficient is just another of the lies.
Businesses like this and the people that invest them deserve to fail but they need to fail soon before they doom the rest of us.
This would be a mistake on the order of Easter Islanders cutting down all their trees. Nuclear resources in the USA are sufficient to run the nation's electric grid for hundreds of years, if we stop throwing fuel away because it can't go into a LWR. The DOE had 8000 tons of thorium nitrate, which is sufficient to replace about 20 years of coal-fired power in the USA. The systems which can make use of this fuel have fallen out of political favor, so it is buried in Nevada in a waste dump.
Attempting a nuclear ban means planning for the lights to go off. You'd have blood in the streets over that.
This is a case of picking winners based on political pull, like ethanol from corn. It would be a much bigger and dumber mistake.
My comment on this is at
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5941/557615#comment-557688
The only way to continue industrial civilization is to implement fission breeders, the best of these are the MSRs; currently the most developed fission breeders are those the Indians are developing; probably it should have been either the MSR from the ORNL program shut down in the 1970s or the IFR from Argonne shut down in 1994.
The MSR would be the simplest design that could be built the fastest, it is likely the safest design, and it has the greatest fuel supply available.
The abundance of electricity that would be available can be used to make artificial liquid fuels.
Wrt to hydrogen fuel cells, I had heard of the approach of using ammonia salts as hydrogen carriers, it appears comment
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5939/557936
( or http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5939#comment-557936 - I'm not sure what is the favored way on TOD to quote other comments)
has more to say about this.
Perhaps it's time to deeply examine and think about what kind of civilization we want and how we can sustain it.
For the record I'm very much for having a civilization that gives us access to the fruits of science and technology and provides us with fulfilling healthy lives where each and every individual can aspire to achieving the highest level of attainment be it in the arts, music science, architecture, agriculture, medicine or whatever they may feel is their particular path.
I have traveled the world quite widely and happen to be fluent in at least three very different cultures so I will say that I'm sure my perspective is both privileged and unique, but from this, my perspective, I think Industrial civilization as it exists all over the globe today, FLAT OUT FAILS! in all the important things that civilizations are supposed to provide.
I'm pretty much willing to toss most of it in the dustbin of discarded ideas of all civilizations past.
I don't purport to have any concrete solutions or explicit recommendations for our many dilemmas but I do think we all need to stop and reassess where we are going. What we have now, very simply, is not working.
is just what I would like to see too, and it's what I think is entirely (technically) possible.
AFAICS, the urbanized world causes the greatest move towards sustainability, not least because it involves the empowerment of women, who are more educated and economically involved, and have greater control over how many children they will have.
The urbanized world requires energy, because an urbanized world has less people doing the farming i.e. food production.
Fission breeders produce the least CO2 and can produce the least wastes of any kind of large energy production. They are the most sustainable because they have the least impact on the environment and the longest lasting fuel supply of non-solar energy.
Whatever kind of enlightened future society you want, surely it is most likely to happen in a world that has access to the most abundant and clean energy.
"The urbanized world requires energy, because an urbanized world has less people doing the farming i.e. food production."
I'm not sure this follows. We already have quite an urbanized society and a fairly small portion of our energy goes into farming.
We may need some energy for a sustainable world, but as Magyar says, our main task is to stop and reflect a while on what makes life worth living, and how much of that really requires massive amounts of energy.
Just throwing more energy into the mix before we reconsider these basic questions is basically throwing more fuel on a fire already raging out of control.
That's good news.
But it doesn't change the fact that nuclear power can be, if it is the MSR or a like nuclear technology, cheaper, safer (less CO2, less damage to wildlife), more reliable and less visually intrusive than renewables (Jacobson's WWS), whether we want BAU or not.
I don't think you will change the course of BAU by a prescriptive process. It seems to me that increasing sustainability appears correlated with increasing security. Increased security of life requires that the basics are affordable and available. Renewables perpetrates scarcity and unreliability. People who are scrambling for the basics are harder on the environment than people who have the basics. Technology should be used to provide the basics to everyone, not restrict it.
There are lots of good uses for cheap clean abundant energy. For example, I'd very much like to see the space elevator built. I'd also like to see every one in the world have clean water. These are quite different uses of technology, but they can both be done easier and sooner if there is clean cheap abundant energy available.
If building a space elevator is a high priority for you, we really don't have much more to say to each other.
Best wishes'
dohboi
"I don't purport to have any concrete solutions or explicit recommendations for our many dilemmas but I do think we all need to stop and reassess where we are going. What we have now, very simply, is not working."
+1x10^6
Thank you.
I am not fluent in many cultures (if you don't include profanity), but I see that the purpose of living is to provide a future usefulness, not to consume resources sans moderation.
The question at this point is, "are we too late?". I think the answer is "yes". Partly because when it comes to the climate triggers we have induced, we need to start thinking "Venus" instead of "tropical", and partly because the most powerful entities (who make decisions for us) are morally and economically bankrupt. None of the fantastic plans for 'saving' industrial civilization can be paid for with the System of systems that is now failing.
"Industrial Civilization" is an oxymoron.
Industry, like the economy, is a side-effect of civilized (city-based) activities by human groups servicing each others' needs. Money is supposed to be a tool that works for people, not the other way around. SOME people figured out how to accumulate money selfishly via bullying and coercion and scheming business systems, and the rest now think that they have to service the money instead of each other.
It really doesn't take money to make money, but a lot of money can accumulate more money that should be circulating among smaller entities.
It only takes muscle and brains to build a better mousetrap. It takes money to sell one that doesn't work.
Dan
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to sell fish and the oceans boil."
It may make a catchy head line for
It may make a catchy headline for a magizine cover but the reality is that senario has a 0% chance of happening. SA should put some useful effort into the discourse of reality. We have a massive investment in fossil fuels that not going to be abandoned. Coal, at gas, nuclear are still going to be around in 2030, along with a little and very expensive oil and synfuels.
Essentially the goal is to reduce the proportion of coal and tar sands (CO2) as much as possible through efficiency and alternate sources. If you don't believe in global warming go to Alaska (even Sara Paline believes it).
I think this cap and trade debate is key right now. We've got to get Cina and India onboard. If we do it and they don't, we're screwed (expect a trade war). And remember that term oil shock, its coming soon to a town near you. So lets get with it (nat gas!, biofuel?). Until then the worlds going to be lurching through depressions and unstable energy prices.
"We've got to get Cina and India onboard."
We've got to get ourselves on board and quit using Chindia as an excuse for our lack of leadership and vision.
Not only a 0% chance but it's suicide to try. This scenario - essentially rebuilding everything already built on the planet - will run out of resources on Day 2. It's our present level of economic activity that is killing us. Amping it up to the level required will just kill us that much faster. And everything else. Perhaps if we could turn the entire sea into self-replicating gray nanobots it might work. It would still suck more to live with an implementation of this plan than without.
This plan is so totally ridiculous.
Or maybe I missed the footnote - the one where the US Military marches across the globe killing 9 out of 10 people. And somehow not turning every square inch of the planet into a toxic stew. Destroy the planet to save it. Right.
Most interesting to me is how totally unhinged the herd has become. That something like this could pass editorial review in Scientific American astounds me. Probably it passed review by the advertising department and the publisher. Or maybe all the editors only nod OK so they can pull down another few paychecks.
cfm, the growlery, gray, me
Dryki, glad to see you still around here posting.
The authors of the article in SA, are putting out a wish list of what they want to see happen, for whatever real reasons. But business as usual is not here to stay very long. As someone else said, if this had been started 30 years ago, we might not be having many of these discussions. But we live in a world driven by the need to get as much as we can and then die the richest man on the block.
Nearly 7 billion souls on earth and no end to the things we could improve, but won't be able to given the time we have and the unwillingness to live in harmony.
The SA article was a nice idea for a fictional story though.
Charles
I didn't think I could put those thoughts in an article, but at least some of them went through my head.
We are no closer to figuring out how to detoxify nuclear waste now than in 1945.
Thorium and its byproducts are toxic for incomprehensible lengths of time.
What is the EROEI of babysitting the nuclear excrement for millennia?
There is no firm technical barrier between so-called peaceful nuclear energy and nuclear weapons production, it's mostly a political choice. That is why a fully nuclear economy would require a police state to monitor the materials, as predicted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's "Barton Report" (Halloween, 1975).
Nuclear power is carcinogenic and mutagenic.
Some biological processes can detoxify some of the crud generated by fossil fuels (see the book "Mycellium Running" by Paul Stamets for some examples). But radioactivity is not a chemical process, so no biological process can turn radioactive atoms into non-radioactive, stable atoms.
The only safe nuclear power station has a 93 million mile evacuation zone. We might be able to power a much smaller, steady state economy with solar energy, but there is no way our globalized, hyper consumption society will continue overconsuming without fossil fuels (or even with less fossil fuels). There's no free lunch. Sorry.
I'm pretty sure you either don't know what you're talking about or you're deliberately lying/ignorant.
To use phrases like "an incomprehensible length of time" is to avoid any real analysis. Try this:
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/2009/11/nuclear-composting.html
There is nothing incomprehensible about the lengths of time mentioned.
To say "no biological process can turn radioactive atoms into non-radioactive, stable atoms" is again to ignorantly or deliberately obscure anything like a scientific knowledge of the issue. Radioactivity decreases by the process of the half life naturally. Given enough time there is no need to do anything other than put the materials in question somewhere safe until they decay to background levels. There are a very few actinides that take a long time to decay; these can be processed, by non-biological means, so that they are reduced to non-radioactive levels far sooner than they would by their own decay process - in the US one of many programs to develop the methods to do this was cancelled by the Clinton administration. But cancelled or not, there are certainly processes available. The MSR can be configured to minimize the need for these processes and to a large extent incorporate those that are most effective. The use of the term biological is ignorant at best.
I have no idea what you mean about a 93 million mile evacuation zone. You cite nothing in support, and I suspect, again, you don't know what you are talking about or you are being deliberately silly.
The rest of your statement is confused, even if you mean well. Nowhere did I say that I want to see a "hyper consumption society". I support the continuation of the benefits gained from a civilization based on scientific endeavor.
EDIT: it appears I was confused about who was replying to whom. I would retract the sentence "Nowhere did I say..." since it appears you weren't talking to me anyway.
The 93 million miles is about the distance to the star we orbit, a safe enough distance (for a 'few' more years) as long as our atmosphere has the proper percentage of the right components and our magnetic field remains intact. Really not in the same league as the other types of nuke plants here being discussed
If we built Moonbase Alpha would that help?
It certainly would stoke permatopia's fears. I personally think we can address the waste issues here on earth, and I do think they can be effectively addressed. To paraphrase oldfarmermac, nuke power could well help us avert a nuke war.
Someone (could we volunteer oldfarmermac?) should tell Jacobson and Delucchi that.
Goodness gracious! Next thing you'll tell me is that we've learned nothing about detoxifying cadmium, mercury or lead! Oh, wait...
Thorium is naturally occurring. So is uranium. These can be transformed from atoms with half-lives of billions of years to fission products with half-lives of tens of years down to seconds. The "toxicity" of an isotope with a 30-year half life becomes essentially zero in less than the existence of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
To support this claim, you have to account for the reason that no nation has ever built weapons from the products of PWR's. There's plenty of plutonium in the spent fuel, but for some reason (like the hyper-abundance of isotopes 238, 240 and 241) the weapons makers prefer to operate special reactors to produce what they call "weapons-grade" plutonium with a lot less of the above. Now why would that be?
Whereas biological processes can and do turn relatively non-toxic metallic mercury into extremely poisonous methyl mercury; on the other hand, the only thing required to eliminate radiological hazards is time.
You look like someone who has swallowed Dittmar's propaganda uncritically. I'd pity you if I didn't have a raging case of compassion fatigue.
groundhogsteve on November 7, 2009 - 10:33pm asks:
Why government taxation?
Since fossil fuelers won't take environmental responsibility, say by including the entropy costs in their product, the govt could level a tax to reflect the damage. Such tax would encourage a switch to cleaner alternatives. When virtual monopolies of essential products fail their social responsibility, govt has to step in--hence roads, schools, and public utilities commissions.
The Hindenberg was a PR disaster for hydrogen.
It is interesting that there is no mention of changing consumer habits or increasing efficiency. Those two are by far the least expensive ways to reduce carbon output and reduce the volume of new hardware needed. Painting roofs white and insulating are not very sexy or dramatic, but they work, and some minor subsidies and PR would accelerate the process. As far as bigger government programs are concerned, subsidizing or 0% financing solar water heaters so they are nearly as cheap as gas or electric ones would take another big bite out of consumption as well as educate the public about how renewable sources actually save money.
I really think that our consumption habits will change, either through voluntarily changing ourselves or having the earths changes forcing change on us.
If magazines delved deeply into numbers and the foundational principles of science, they would become textbooks, and no one would read them.
Commercial airplanes converted to run on fuel cells??!!!! Don't them mean that hydrogen should be liquefied, stored and combusted in flight, like it's done in a rocket? Imagine replacing a Boeing 777's giant kerosene-powered turbine with an electrically powered fan - they'd need a super-heavy gazzillion-watt fuel cell to power that. Even if they combusted hydrogen, imagine the thick trail of white water-cloud coming out the engine. They'll definitely have to come up with a better medium than hydrogen in which to store energy with high volumetric density.
As usual, no mention of overpopulation and over-consumption. Popular science tries to pave the way for human desires to come into fruition; it never challenges them.
Well said!
I believe Sci-Am must instead say this to its readers.
"The single most abundant source of natural resource used to produce food, transport it, provide you your jobs, provide transportation to the cops, your flight trips, the plastics from china, etc., etc., is going to decline soon. We used the term 'humans' to make it sound scientific but the fr!gg!n reader here is a human too. That means, you will feel emotionally affected with every damn thing you interact with (including this article). Needless to say how such a depressing article is bound to affect you emotionally.
Therefore, we don't expect you to accept this right away. Afterall, each of you, our dear readers, are mere game strategies. Even if we told you the truth, you're not designed to accept it as-is without playing it out in your heads. 'What game?' you ask? Its a pointless game called Life. You might pass from "Denial" to "Acceptance" over a long period of time. In the meanwhile, if you're interested in understanding the predicament humanity is in...
provide references to books and stuff on the web"
Even if SciAm did that, the masses will be left unaffected by and large. Very very few will get to know the truth. Given our ancient source code, the majority will probably end up thinking that all changes to one's own lives (ex: a job loss) that happens due to peak oil will be interpreted as caused by "someone" (ex: "the company / banks / country were badly managed").
There are desire-driven elements at play and many irrational outcomes do happen. I guess, things are beyond repair and only a collapse will give us all an opportunity to rethink about ourselves. Or so I hope.
Probably, the very same desire-driven engine has different plans for us and our so-called wisdom/intellect/knowledge is yet to experience the hangover of the party to even wake up to a realization. I don't think we'll realize. We'll only "PANIC!". Don't call me a doomer - I call myself Yeast.
New Scientist did something not too far from this last year in a special report on how economic growth is killing the planet.
I didn't notice it make the slightest difference.
You mean this one?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026786.100-special-report-why-po...
The author of the article, Tim Jackson, has now released a book "Prosperity Without Growth".
I declare an interest as a member of his research group. ;)
Tim Jackson's model, though, is oddly like all the other popular steady state economy models. It avoids fixing the intrinsic problem of growth economies. It achieves economic stability with what amounts to human enforced resource limits that come sooner than the natural ones would. You might call it resource rationing, to say it bluntly.
That is still a clear step ahead in realism from the schemes that propose perpetual efficiency multipliers to reduce the resource intensity of the economies by 50% every 20 years so the economies can continue to double in scale every 20 years, of course. I'm being sarchastic in how I phrase that, of course. The people proposing those schemes would shrink at hearing the implication of "decoupling" if they heard it without all the fine phrases it is usually decorated with. The level of common sense is not high in the published work on this!
What they're all trying to avoid is the solution for economic sustainability that JM Keynes first realized, and Ken Boulding and I noticed too, is the only physically possible one. That's for economic climax to occur by the people with investment earnings spending enough of their investments to relieve all the growth pressure.
Hopefully that spending, equal to the entire return on investment of the whole economy(!), would be used to achieve something admirable. That might be like trimming our total energy use and making the LARGE and relatively uneconomic investments needed for coming into real balance with the earth and sustainability....
We can't have the latter as long as all the investment funds are tied up pumping the fastest growth possible to use up the cheapest resources people can find as fast as we can... People should start bringing up the question at least, shouldn't they?
Don't we need to figure out how to make economies that can become part of nature?
Maybe we need to start with the realization that happiness, contentment is not dependent on perpetual growth. I think we can go further and say that there is an element of an inverse relationship.
Well, isn't the functional possibility of spending the money used to pump growth for converting to sustainable systems something to keep in there too?
I'm concerned that people are satisfied by having "right purposes" rather than functional plans...
I am just thinking that until we have the right purpose the right plan will not happen. Sort of the question of, do you make money to live(have happiness) or live to make money (no time for happiness).
Spending profits for sustainable systems is using money to live, using them to make more money is living to make money.
Yes the objective is to put functional plans into action, not wallow about in some self-grandiose stupor about having the "right purpose".
That made me think about a show on Hulu.com that I watched ( Vanguard: from Current TV ) talking about how a Thai rainforest was being trashed to feed the ecstasy drug trade, mining Safrole found in a tree growing in the rainforest. They grind the trees up, cook them and move on to another site.
Human's are killing themselves in more than one way. Economies being a part of nature, seems like just what these plant poachers are doing. When will we get to the point where we have destroyed nature to feed our needs.
"as caused by 'someone'": God (pick the religion, it just doesn't matter) is punishing me/them for doing/not doing something the way he/she/it wanted or didn't want. God works in mysterious ways. God's will. God sent 9-11 and Katrina to punish for U.S. for embracing gays and woman's rights and so forth.
I have met an alarming number of people who shrug their shoulders, cast their eyes upward, and throw their intellect on the mercy of some imaginary court instead of thinking for themselves about the reasons we are where we are and the possible paths forward. Even Master Engineers. One of whom I met who showed me his nylon bracelet with a little piece of shiny metal on the back. He said that it was 'infused with negative ions which aligned the poisoned positive neuronal pathways'...he also was wearing a cross around his neck. This person was making ~ 200K/year managing very complex projects. I'm not surprised that these projects have turned out poorly, given the modern voodoo priests and priestliness who work them.
So what you are saying is that anyone with a religious faith is unsuitable to work in engineering. Gosh, there's a bigoted sweeping statement if ever there was one.
One of the least pleasant attributes of the American stereotype, I find, is the bizarre polarization on matters of religion. To an outsider an American is either a rabid hell-fire and brimstone mad preacher who believes the Earth is only 4,000 years old or an equally rabid intolerant bigot atheist who will take every opportunity to try and belittle people of faith. I am fotunate to know that this stereotype is the exception, not the rule, but my goodness some posts on TOD really do try to live up to that stereotype.
Please try to keep your anti-religion to yourself. It really doesn't add to the debate anymore than if someone posted that prayer will solve the ensuing energy crisis.
Thanks, in good faith!
Strawman. What part of "showed me his nylon bracelet with a little piece of shiny metal on the back. He said that it was 'infused with negative ions which aligned the poisoned positive neuronal pathways'" didn't you understand? Do "people who shrug their shoulders, cast their eyes upward, and throw their intellect on the mercy of some imaginary court" sound like coolly rational problem-solvers capable of recognizing and dealing with troublesome facts?
Pot. Kettle. Black. If you defend the irrationality instead of recognizing and criticizing it, you're part of the problem.
no me old mucker, that won't wash. He also just had to mention that the chap in question was wearing a cross around his neck as if to imply that his Christian faith was also a sign of unsuitability to his profession.
And as for you selective quoting of my comment, it is beyond contempt really. So you just mash up the parts of my comments you like to make me sound like what i am critizing. Pathetic.
I say again, there are some who post on this website who have a knee-jerk reaction to have a dig at religion at every possible chance. In my mind it reflects an unattractive by-product of the culture in which that person lives, that he needs to constantly reinforce his own dogma - be it atheist or evangelical. It doesn't help the debate on these boards one iota, so let's leave the God-bashing out, ok?
Pointing out a significant form of irrationality in the general population is hardly dogma.
I thank you for making my point for me so well! You have just dogmatically equated having a religious faith with being irrational. That is just as dogmatic as an evangelical ramming his religion down your throat. Can't you see? Do you (and people like you) not see the irony of your position?
I made reference to this polarization of opinion above as a sour quality of the American make-up. It is something which, mercifully, is very rare in Europe. The biggest irony of them all is that the US was specifically founded with rigid separation of Church and State. Heck, it is written in the Constitution! So how come you are all so bombastic about religion? Surely the US should be a chilled out zone, where you respect each other's position but don't feel the need to force yours onto the other? Isn't that the whole idea of liberalism?
Here in the UK our Queen is both head of state and head of the Church and morning prayers are still said before each daily session of parliament (not many MPs attend, but none the less prayers are read in the chamber) and it is still technically law that all state schools should hold an act of Christian worship each day! Can you imagine that in the US!! But yet religion here quite literally never gets involved in politics, and people do not feel it necessary to inject their faith or atheism into other people's lives.
HAcland - "religion here quite literally never gets involved in politics".
Come on,laddie,pull the other leg.I am an Australian so I have a slightly different perspective.We also have your Queen as our head of state(unfortunately)and here,as in the UK,religion,in all it's various manifestations and with all it's barmy,blowhard bull,is continually getting involved in politics,usually with detrimental consequences.
According to my Oxford Dictionary the word politic and it's derivations,have a broad meaning - one is - "relating to the government or public affairs of a country".It would be surprising if the religious community didn't get involved.
HAcland,
I deeply resemble that remark!
In the US, christians constantly "inject their faith" into politics. Even our historic attempt at getting health reform is bogged down over religious objections to any abortion assistance - regardless of the hardship and health issues posed for many women - especially poor women.
My opposition to religion has nothing to do with dogma - I'm not sure what kind of dogmatic creed you could be referring to. Atheism is not a domatic creed or belief system - it is simple opposition to belief systems that are highly contradictory and cannot be proven.
My opposition is very simple: I think the planet is overpopulated and most religions advocate increasing the population of their faithful. I would like to point out that this is a serious problem for the existence of future generations of humans on the planet. I very honestly do not see how we can solve the coming problems if we cannot control population growth. I do not see any evidence of religions taking a positive lead for this need. There is no dogma involved in my POV.
As long as christians tolerate cults like Quiver Full I find little reason to think they are going to help solve our problems.
http://www.quiverfull.com/
If you are interested in the book they promote you can buy "The Duggars: 20 and Counting!"
" I very honestly do not see how we can solve the coming problems if we cannot control population growth. I do not see any evidence of religions taking a positive lead for this need. There is no dogma involved in my POV. "
Dave, be patient. It took them 350 years to apologize to Galileo. Give them another 350 years and using effective birth control will no longer be a sin.
"As long as christians tolerate cults like Quiver Full I find little reason to think they are going to help solve our problems."
I don't agree with their cultish ideals. But, all I can do is voice my disagreemnet of them and leave it at that, I can't get rid of them, just because I don't like what they preach.
My Christian faith, does not limit me from seeing the problems that our current population faces. I am sad at the thought of people dying because of whatever reason. But I understand that my peaceful solutions aren't going to be inacted anytime soon.
Thanks for posting, Charles.
That is actually an interesting question. Since our founding philosophy seemed to make being able to practice ones own form of religion without persecution very important, how could it have devolved into its present acrimonius state?
I can only offer a couple of observations, as to how much of the differences they really explain I don't know. First I see Europeans as having had such a history of religious conflict (30 years war and whatnot), that they implicitly recognize the dangers of mixing religion and politics. In the US, we missed out on that piece of cultural heritage. Until pretty recently religion wasn't too much used as a tool of politics, but in recent decades, that has become increasingly the case. The BUsh administration can be considered to be a case of one group imposing their evangelical views on the rest of the country. So we've rather quickly come to see anothers religion as a potential threat to having the sort of society/government that we want. I think it takes a while for the various factions to learn to find a workable compromise. We are pretty early on that learning curve.
Guess this discussion isn't going anywhere useful, but since you address me directly:
I honestly don't mind about your invisible friends (if you have any) one way or another. It's my impression you're one of the more intelligent posters in a very intelligent group of people.
However, the notion that delusional beliefs of one sort should get a "free pass" merely because they're widespread - and that is certainly the only reason they do - is a bit grating. If I believed telepathic space aliens were putting thoughts in my head and admitted it, that admission would quite rightly be considered by others as salient to assessing my general mental functionality.
If you have a proposed list of supernatural exemptions to science, post it and I'll weigh in as respectfully as possible. Not sure what the arm-waving about queens and such is about.
IMO your analysis isn't well reasoned in this area. Which beliefs aren't "delusional"? You make it sound like delusional beliefs are of little value, when in reality they are often of huge value-they can literally put fortunes into people's pockets. L. Ron Hubbard was nothing but a big pile of delusional beliefs freely expressed and it made a lowly writer into a megamillionaire with personal power achieved by very few humans, and even fewer of these started at the very bottom like that guy. If that guy had gone to you with his plan (to found and lead his own religion) you would have given him nothing but discouragement. He was delusional and therefore you would be right and he would be wrong-meaning absolutely nothing. Seeing through the game is not the same as winning the game. Often delusional belief systems are at the heart of winning the game-go to any sales seminar. As the USA is now a financial (sales) economy, delusional belief systems are absolutely necessary for individual survival for a high % of the populace-not everyone is qualified to be a genius engineer of some sort.
Wonderful, and worth replying to just so it can't be edited and future historians deprived.
So "delusionality is good".
I'll be letting my SciAm subscription lapse since they seem to increasingly be sipping that kool-aid as well. But they once had a hell of a magazine. I'll take John Rennie over L. Ron Hubbard and spot you 50 points.
I wouldn't describe the censoring of any politically incorrect opinion as "editing" but maybe Kafka would.
The only question I have is... what took you so long? "Science in Pictures", indeed.
If you want to blow your mind, go back to the SciAm of the 1960's and read the "Amateur Scientist" column.
These guys are delusional all the way to the bank (with your money)-God Bless Goldman http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/11/04/goldman-one-ups-gordon-gekko-...
Hi Greenish,
I don't know why I bite on this stuff either - but the grate quotient is very high.
When I read a essay like this post, and follow the more technical parts of the debate, I tend to feel like there is some hope for somewhat of a graceful powerdown scenario if conservation and efficiency (in the broadest sense) are the lead elements. Within that context some mix of technologies could be very helpful.
However, then I reflect on the population issue, and it seems pretty obvious that no scenario has much of chance of success with a growing (or even current level) global population. It is then further evident that many (probably most) of the cultural and political impediments to a significant family planning program have roots in religious beliefs. Getting people to move beyond these belief systems seems to be an almost impossible task.
It is interesting to note that "godless" China (who is frequently accussed of resisting any CO2 reductions) has a one child policy. By some estimates, this policy has spared the planet an additional 300 million new humans. Regardless of the exact number, this is a far more positive action to reduce CO2 than anything I can think of in the christian world.
Religions -we're stuck with them.Lord Chesterfield iirc correctly said something to the effect that when men quit believing in God they do not henceforth believe in NOTHING -they just start believing in something else.
Some of those something elses might arguably be described as National Socialisn, communism, capitalism,nihilism,social Darwinianism.....
So as a practical matter perhaps we ought to be careful what we wish for-we might actually get it and it might be worse.
I tend to be rather sympathetic to the pious because(my own twisted version of this old saying) "but for the grace of God ....we are them".
I am not PC but I do understand the importance of treating everybody in a respectful and dignified way and it distresses me when otherwise very polite and responsible people unload on folks who -thru no fault of thier own -happen to believe is something that ain't so.
In this forum it probably really doesn't matter-it is not likely that many seriously pious folks read TOD-BUT IT IS A MAJOR MISTAKE to make fun of people's beliefs in more mainstream forums.
If I had to point out one single PARTICULAR reason why I don't have much faith in most popular liberal initiatives it would be that the average liberal grossly overestimates the general level of knowledge and mental sophistication of the man on the street.
She gets really bent out of shape when somebody calls her a broad or an addled female , and then she turns around and accuses half or more of the population of being ignorant superstitious louts.The TRUTH of the accusation is not the issue-not if the goal is to achieve change.The issue is that even a person who follows as well as he can the teachings of forbearence, turning the other cheek, etc, develops a lasting and deep seated antipathy towards you and what you stand for.
This my friends is NOT the way to convert people to your way of thinking.
For those who may remember some of my own anti religious rants -I am not yet THAT far gone-I just reserve the right unto myself to call my family and my ancestors and millions of others ignorant when I feel like it-in the same way that a black comedian can use the n word if he feels like it.
We all have to make our decisions the best way we can-which means relying on our own judgement when our knowledge is sufficient-and relying on the leadership and advice of others when it isn't.
The average person who takes his or her religion seriously lacks any significant understanding of the sciences, but he has at least a lyyman's grasp of the world of law, business, politics, and so forth.Being UNABLE(what part of unable do WE fail to understand?)to make sense of the arguments made in this or similar forums, he relies on the judgement and advice of whoever he percieves as his friends and allies.
You have lost him or her forever as an ally or convert as soon as you utter the words ignorant, superstitious, deluded....any place he will hear them.
Why are we suprised when he turns into a "rightwingnut?"
We need to seperate the message from the social commentary when we go out into the world and preach OUR message.Let us not be mistaken-there is no hope of EDUCATING the masses within the time frame available-they must be, if possible, gently lead to the correct conclusions by persausion-logic is inadequate.
Please-no one should interpret this rant in terms of feeling the need to apologize for hurting my feelings nor as a personal criticism coming from my direction.
All I'm trying to say is we should be a little more politically savvy.There is no need to go out of our way to furnish the Jerry Falwells of this world with ammo.
Lotta truth to what you say, Mac. In this instance I'm not trying to convert anyone; rather, I spoke up because it seemed a shame that even on TOD, religion is forced down peoples' throats by some posters and if I stand by and say nothing, I'm complicit. Didn't do any good though. (or harm either, if Falwell is a TOD reader I'll believe anything).
FWIW, I coexist quite well with the religious, including most of my extended family members. May come in handy in the future. I've taught in religious schools.
However, I come to this site for the clear thought and analysis. The incongruity of gods and angels having privileged authority even here is quite depressing. So if one may not speak up on TOD, then where?
I suppose I should have better perspective; historically, being able to question the prevailing religions is a very rare and temporary situation, and it will probably revert to that norm soon enough.
Greenish, You and I are on the same page in this respect.
You are absolutely correct when you say "if one may not speak up on TOD, then where?
I'm just trying in my unpolished way to get folks to think a bit about winning public debates and directing the culture in the direction we need it to go.
I probably should have been an academic myself , rather than an irascable amatuer scholar of everything-I am like the River Platte, famously described by some cowboy as "a mile wide but only an inch deep".But being only an inch deep means that I have at least acquinted myself with the world views of many different classes of people-specialists have trouble seeing the forest, in terms of understanding people.
I fly under false colors here because I live in a fundamentalist community-the locals ARE educationally deprived but you can reason with them-as long as you don't insult them first.
I have quietly counseled a terrifed pregnant fifteen year old girl and her Momma and helped them arrange an abortion-quietly- although both the girl and her Momma and Daddy attend a hellfire and brimstone church -this being possible because my personal style (face to face) is to listen rather than lecture.
Most of these people actually have a gnawing sense that things aren't as they should be and the more intelligent ones actually realize that contrary to Gospel the world is not flat, that dinosaurs really lived , that if Noah and his sons built a boat big enough to haul two of every animal she would have been a hundred times bigger than any ship ever floated,that he would have needed his whole nine hundred years and a million helpers to collect them all, etc, etc.
So knowing that I keep my mouth shut-within the community-people come to me with questions. I can explain the rudiments of evolution to someone interested , and do so without denying his God(Who handily indeed works in mysterious ways!)or insulting him or risking his social standing in the community.
In a place where everyone considers his absolute property rights on a par with his religious rights and his free speech rights and his rights to his own personal armory I never attack property rights.
I just talk about the developer on the mountian spoiling OUR trout fishing and xxxxing in our drinking water and the coal fired power plants in Ohio blowing so much smoke WE can't see OUR horizons anymore and how many wells have gone dry since so many new houses have been built around here.
I talk about how every place I ever heard of the people who sold out half thier farm to developers find out that they have to sell out the other half in another ten or fifteen years because they can't afford the property taxes that come with development.
I don't talk about free trade and peoples rights to do business with the lowest bidder.I do talk about all the poor slobs who are out of work (cause thier jobs are in China)and how we are going to be supporting them on welfare.
The change in thier world view is gradual but it is very real.
You come here to TOD for the "clear thought and analysis".This place is now my home away from home and (with one or two exceptions) every body here is an invisible magic friend even though I may disagree vehemently with them on some given issue.
Being stuck in or close to the house with an invalid I might explode from lack of an intellectual outlet if not for my books and this site.
When I talk to my liberal friends retained from the old days(if you aren't a liberal when you are young you have no heart) sometimes -all too often- I want to screaam at them because they confuse idealism and reality.When I talk to my right wing older friends (if you are not a conservative when you are old you have no brain)I want to scream and force them to recognize that they are being had by the fat cats in the same way that poor white southern trash was had by the slave holding class in the American Civil War.
Here is the only place I can go-the only place I know -where there is a balance struck and there actually is a rational and intelligence discourse underway.
I am convinced that anyone with a modicum of education(enough to appreciate the content) who is a real seeker of knowledge (in the broader sense, rather than a specialist) who once visits this site for a week or two will become a regular, although most will never post comments.
It's a good thing electrons are cheap and I can only type with two fingers(when I'm in a hurry I don't correct spelling)or tptb would have to throw me off the site.
Long live TOD.
The only things I'd ask of you are to use the spacebar before "(", after ")" and after any of ";:.?!". (It's much easier to read, and if TOD had a filter option I'd write one you could use to perform the cleanup; it's a very simple thing to do with the Unix stream editor, sed).
Great thoughts, mac, thanks for them.
Hi Mac,
I respect what you are saying and I'm sure that I'm often about as diplomatic as a Sherman Tank. However, I have never called a religious person ignorant - in fact, I know lots of religious people who are a lot smarter than I am in many disciplines.
But, I do think religious people have been mislead and this results in a form of delusion. I don't blame the person, but I do find significant fault with people who are in religious leadership positions - and particularly those that make a nice profit from this enterprise.
Basically, I find this situation to be quite hopeless. I see no way that world religions are going change their views about reproduction and increasing their numbers. Whether my message is well crafted or I am silent - it will make no difference. It's just so darn hard to be silent.
Hi Dave,
I couldn't agree with you more about our religious leadership as a general thing.
In the near term I you have a valid point about religion and reproduction.But in the longer term, a religion may be viewed in the Zen fashion of a river and its bed-each shapes the other.
Similarly, religious leaders shape thier followers, but the followers shape the leaders too-preachers are like politicians in that the more successful ones figure out where the crowd is headed and get out in front and yell follow me(and God of course).
I make no effort to keep up with the dogma pitched day to day in fundamentalist churches but I can say with confidence that very very few preachers say any thing about birth control or family size or sex, except premarital sex and occasionally homosexual sex(Homosexual sex is considered so bad it is hardly considered proper form to mention it even to condemn it.), both of which are roundly condemned.Abortions are also condemned of course but the subject is not often mentioned from the pulpit except around election time.
The people who glorify large families are a vanishingly small sliver of the entire group.
In the longer run the people decide-the priests keep thier ,mouths shut or they are replaced with more perceptive priests.Witness Ireland with a total fertility rate of less than two children per woman , yet Ireland is about ninety percent Catholic.Poland is also about ninety percent Catholic, with a tfr per woman of only 1.3.
Family sizes in "my" branch of fundamental Christianity are steadily falling and I strongly suspect the locals are having no more than two children per couple on the average although I have no hard data.In my personal extended highly religious family the average is well under two children per couple.
Of course in spite of this good news our local population is growing by leaps and bounds due to an influx of immigrants and the failure of us old folks to considerately die faster.
And of course in the third world the situation is nothing less than desperate.Many tens of millions, probably many hundreds of millions, of people will starve within my lifetime.
Depending on how the cards fall the total could be in the billions-but my guess , backed up by a farming background, is that the dieback will wipe out a fourth or a third or a half of local populations in different years, and that the survivors will mostly make it until they hit another bad year.Once the local population is sharply reduced most countries will be able to once again feed themselves in the short term at least after some fashion.
it was intended to show you that while the US has specific separation of Church and State, the UK explicitly does not as our State is also the Church (kinda). Do you get it now?
If you think religion (ugh I hate that word), I mean the Bible, has anything to do with the politic of America you are sorely mistaken.It was the plan of the notorious Bavarian Illuminati to accomplish three goals in the overthrow of the Old World Order:
1)The emancipation of women.
2)The overthrow of all monarchies.
3)The separation of 'church' and state.
Gee that sounds familiar.Yes HAcland, America indeed has a religion; and it is not the Bible, it is Illumination via the Illuminati.It is no longer a secret order, it is out in the open; an open conspiracy if you will.
Just ask any psychotropic pill popping TV addicted brain dead American, they'll tell you.
Religions and belief systems exist to throw a blanket over the perception of death, which creates considerable anxiety in most humans. Scientific rationality offers no succor to the fearful mind. Open two bookstores, side-by-side, one full of religious books and totems and one full of scientific works and some nice Somso anatomical models and see which one is most visited. I'll guarantee you that most of the pop science works are going to end-up in the bargain bookstore down the street.
"God is all-powerful. God made man and the earth. Everything that happens is God's will. I have nothing to worry about because I'm going to end up in heaven."
God and religion are a ready substitute for learning and science. Swallow a dogma whole and let it expand to fill every nook and cranny of your cranium and then you can lay back and congratulate yourself on finding the one real truth.
Add to this the fact that you've just been dropped naked and helpless onto nasty planet. Someone or something wants to eat you or cause you damage by using your body for reproduction (viruses, bacteria parasites) while you are trying desperately to murder some other being to eat. In the meantime you learn through experience that humans are highly deceptive and competitive and someone is trying to steal whatever you have found to make life easier. Under these circumstances it is desirable to seek a more benevolent reality even though it does not reveal the bare bones of death like true rationality does.
Amen!
Oh but it isn't so simple or grim, myriads of small bacteria live within us and allow us to gain sustenance from what we eat, small creatures battle on our skin some defending our system some attacking. It is frigging amazing our complex biological systems function so well. Viewing the wonders science continually explains thus revealing even new and more amazing wonders is one of the greatest benefits of living in our time as I see it. But as I stated up thread, science accepts its explanations necessarily have limits (Planck time, Planck length, etc) but that those limits are not the limits of physical reality. It is the height of arrogance to believe science can explain ALL to our little minds--science says it can't. An open mind allows for that which is beyond comprehension or proof.
Funny you should mention the beneficial bacteria of the gut. I've had a terrible case of the flux for the last couple of days and I'm tempted to take an antibiotic, a technological weapon of mass destruction and kill billions, good and bad. Could be Crypto. or Giardia, though, maybe a virus, who knows. I will feel fine in unleashing the grim reaper in pill form because those beneficial bacteria didn't make a moral decision to be good bacteria. They evolved in a direction beneficial to themselves and really don't give a crap about us as long as we continue passing great chunks of multicellular organisms through our alimentary systems.
An open mind is for that which is yet to be discovered. Magical thinking often creeps into those spaces left empty in the mind. If science leaves only .0000001% of reality unexplained, that is where many will find God.
granted, but 'for that which is yet to be discovered' cuts a lot of ways. Explaining physical reality all the way to the theoretical Planck limits may just as well leave 99.99999999% of reality unexplained, we would not have any way of gauging the percentage. We are storytellers and rememberers first and foremost, a little magic can lighten things up some. But using it to quell or inquisitiveness, and thoughtful search for answers is more than counterproductive to my mind. The prohibition on eating the fruit from the 'tree of knowledge,' 'tree of life' or whatever the best translation of the story-from Greek I'm guessing, but who knows those stories had often travelled widely and mixed and remixed considerably before there was a way to commit them to stone tablet, paper or whatever--comes to mind as a rank example of just that sort of abuse of magical thinking.
With all the amazing things we are discovering in the micro and macro world around us, I thank God for showing me His wonders. None of it stops me from my faith in Christ's salvation.
You all may call me what you want, I'll not be angry with your opinions.
The stated goal of the SA article is impossible without a large die-off, and then might not be needed so much depending on how many people are left. If I had the power to fix the world I would. By that I mean helping people life decent lives, without trashing our planet in the long run. Peacefully and everyone helping their fellow humans.
I can only help where I can help. Thank you all for your comments. Have a nice day.
Charles.
Dopamine,
Well said sir!
I have to say (as a practicing athiest)that I have been amazed at the depth of religious belief I have seen in good engineers. I always attribute it to the amazing human ability to wall off different parts of the brain to focus on different subjects and never attempt to deal with the contradictions.
I think a lot has to do with the different sorts of personalities attracted to science versus engineering. The former are very much motivated by curiosity about the world, and not averse to taking an unpopular or unusual position. Engineers, usually just want to make an honest living. They pursue their education and craft as a career, not as a mechanism for gaining deep understanding of the world. They also mostly want to fit into the society. At least in the US, the radical (and socially isolating) thing to do is to reject the dominate religions.
It is just a matter of where you put your faith. Science gives us the big bang that we start charting just into the creation of time, expanding space which was nonexistant before the bang, the source of which is unfathomable. Then after we have that all hashed out it ends up about 90% of the universe necessary is relegated to 'dark' or the math doesn't work. I love science, the unravelling of the mystery, but it takes a whole lot of faith to buy into what science is trying to quantify. All could just be some vibrating 'strings' and dimensions may be wound in dimensions, but it could be that all math explains is really just an approximation of the reality, that in the end can be known no better by the true scientist than by the true mystic (only time constraints would seem to make those pursuits mutually exclusive). That said, I have a heck of time with religions, but if the structure religion offers makes it possible for some to navigate through life no problem, except when those say their chart is the one and only chart...then we have big problems.
Is there a religion that thinks other than that "their chart is the one and only chart"?
Look for religions that do not worship an idol. The big problem idol seem to be various books. The people worship the words in their one book of choice, how odd...
not out at the salesman level are far as I have seen, but I have known very deep practictioners who merely professed their faith to be right for themselves and made no further assertions about it
science accepts that it can't explain anything before Planck time, it doesn't claim there was no before Planck time
But religion can't explain anything before Planck time either, it can only assert.
but then I made no assertions, except the whole framework could be far greater and much more sublime than anything science could ever explain. I made it obvious somewhere in this tangled thread that I am not selling religion, but that I do reject BELIEF in the ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that science is truly describing reality rather than the mathematically available approximation therof
Science doesn't claim absolute knowledge. What should be coming under fire here is that which does.
Perhaps the perspectives of two great physicists might help clarify why I think you have that precisely backwards. Science deals with reality and uses mathematics as a language of description.
First you need this free software fro MicroSoft:
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html#data=4|0||6b89dded-3eb8-4fa4-bbcd-7c69fe78ed0c||
Then choose the second lecture titled: The Relation of Mathematics and Physics
Then for a more current perspective try this:
'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
Enjoy!
As long as you remember that these two great physicists are just two smart primates limited to the perceptions possible to a creature with five senses.
They also have the scientific method and inference at their disposal, so they are not strictly limited to the five senses.
Thanks for the links, wish my machine/connection acted better on Feynman, he was a joy to watch. Only got through 20 minutes of him(hours of effort that included watching Krauss and running the meat of his talk repeatedly as Silver whatever attempted to stream). Krauss was fun but does he really equate the absolutely empty space between things with nothing. Empty space requires time to traverse, nothing does not have that attribute. You might be getting my drift. The physical universe (visible and dark) which can only accurately be described mathematically may well only be the discernable 'edge' of reality.
I would be curious to see if the nothing Krauss says the flat universe came from is the same nothing that he equates with completely empty space. It might have to be related as mathematics might not extend very well into true nothingness.
Since I'm not a theoretical physicist, I'll go way out on a limb in saying, that if I understand what he is saying , that "nothing" (at least in physics) is actually "something" and that is what 90% of so called empty space is composed of. He goes further to say that the only given the preexisting condition of zero total energy and the quantum fluctuations of "nothing" could we have had a big bang which produced "something",(our visible universe).
As for the mathematics not extending well into "true nothingness" I'd be flat out lying if I said I had even the most rudimentary understanding of how one might arrive at the mathematical calculations that produced the incredible animation of fields popping into and out of existence within the empty space of a proton.
I'll just accept that Krauss is telling us the truth when he says that this animation is the result very precise mathematical calculations. Though if one takes that at face value then mathematics does indeed extend quite well into "true nothingness".
I'm not arguing with the fluctuations accounting for 90% of mass of visible particles. But empty space is not nothing, it takes time to travel across it and they are not saying the universe appeared out of empty space, I believe, because the universe created space. Quantum mechanics explains very small spaces, I will go out on limb and say they are really stretching it when they have quantum physics explain no space. Krauss unlike Feynman, in the very short exposure I had to both, had moments he came across with all the sincerity of a used car saleman. (Fortunately I did manage to get a decent stream of Feynman's lecture this morning--I've a feeling your posting that link on TOD might have pushed a little more traffic to the site than it was able to handle).
Saying the universe appeared when it was already 10-e43 old indicates the limits of what mathematics can explain not the limits of what is, there may very well be quite some difference there. As it is more likely that I will sprout wings and fly than I will sometime in what remains to me learn enough of mathematics to follow its reasoning to Planck time I of course will only be guessing at how the boys got there, but I am human and have three score years in dealing with the way other humans sell their views of things so some of my insights are likely valid.
Back in the day I read a work by Descartes, where he purported to show the existence of god. All I saw him showing was the limits of how we describe the world with language. Physicists are very likely just showing the limits of how we describe the world with mathematics. Past that it is all belief one way or the other. Feynman hit the nail squarely when describing his preferred way at looking how the physics will end up explaining the universe, loosely he said " but this is just my prejudice and we shouldn't get too attached to our prejudices."
jjhman: One way to understand religions is as a collection of memes. Memes (and meme communities, and religions are communities of memes), evolve and compete in a manner not to dissimilar to the evolution of life. Like genes, memes don't care about the wellbeing of the lifeform that carries, them, they simply compete for mindshare with other memes. The best memes, at spreading win, not the ones that are best for the minds containing them. A really good introduction is Richard Brodie's "Virus of the Mind".
In any case the fact that a religion containing a meme like, "all other religions are false, and if you don't believe in THIS one, you will suffer eternal suffering" are common is evidence that those memes increase fitness (for the meme collection -not necessarily the minds holding them).
Yes, many engineers are "cookbook" practitioners, with no deep understanding of what makes their devices and methods work. This is probably why engineers are prominent in the creationist movement; when you take things on authority rather than understanding, you are reduced to picking someone to follow.
Needless to say I am not that type.
As a wannabe scientist who didn't quite makeit, I've had to have my career among engineers for most of my time. It can be frustrating, but it does put bread on the table.
The military factors large too. Just following orders.
The insensate authoritarians are a huge problem and one that will get far worse.
cfm, the growlery, gray, me
Contradictions!?
What's wrong with do not steal, do not kill, do not bare false witness against your neighbor?
Do science text books teach us these things?Or are these inimitable truths to be put under the subjection of our personal whims?
It is amazing how much knowledge makes one ignorant of truth.
What is "truth"?
I am one who cannot answer that question for you, since I am just as falible as the next man;God knows my life is a litany of failures.
All I know is that the Most High God has never lied to me when I asked Him a question with all sincerity.It is hard to comprehend this with all of the inconsistencies in the world in which we find ourselves in - be it with religious institutions or political dialectics.It is hard to tell the difference between the two, for the simple reason: all of what is of this current system is of the very same ideologies and of the same spirit.
I find that true iconoclasm is the only way to navigate yourself through all of the confusion that is within the world: what I was brought up to believe turned out to be false.When I read the Bible for myself, without any religious bias, I find that it is agreeable with no one organization - and this within itself is liberating to me.Truth can be found anywhere if you have a heart to see it; and it is not predicated upon any mans dogmatic understanding or interpretation, whether reigious or secular.When you reach that point you realize God will never tell you a lie, and infact, God's truth is actually very close to you if you are genuinely concerned about your fellow man and the injustice that is prevalent in our world in which we live.
Trust no man and trust in God; it is not that hard to find truth if you seek after it with your whole heart.It is the beginning of a journey, and God knows what is within your heart.
When you are sitting in a secluded room, all by yourself and muttering silently to yourself, prayers or whatnot, who do you think is the only one listening?
It's you. That's who is listening. It's an echo chamber.
You call your echoed thoughts, God. But you're just another ape, making noises out of one orifice, rehearing it through another orifice and then pretending that "something else" is listening to your meaningless vibrating of the air molecules in the room.
Does your God listen to fish burping under the sea? Are those prayers? Does your God "care" about what the fish intend as they go about burping under the sea? Of course not.
How about bacteria (billions of them) as they excrete one thing or another from their membranes? Maybe they are "praying" too and God cares? Of course not.
By some amazing miracle, your God is interested in one and only one special creature in the entire Universe. You. That's because You and God are one and the same. Get over yourself.
Step Back: Your amusing and popular comment begs a response. Bill Maher covers the same ground in his entertaining flick. Yes, you are talking to yourself-you feel that somehow people using the image of a supernatural force to assist their efforts is "cheating" and just not proper form. Why exactly?
I never said that.
Even I pray during times of stress --hypocrite that I am.
It's just that there are times when you need to admit who you are really talking to.
This can be tested. Answers received by experiment participants individually could be compared with each other and to those received by Pat Robertson.
LOL
Is the statistical data gathered before or after the broadcast of his show?
"...By some amazing miracle, your God is interested in one and only one special creature in the entire Universe. You. That's because You and God are one and the same. Get over yourself..."
All I am saying is I trust no one nor do I care what anyone's definition of the ontological aspects of reality are.Atheistic and academic postulations on the origins of the universe and their perceptions of the future are laughable.Organized corporate religion is no better, for they all seem to be preoccupied with trying to find a consensus among themselves of what God's actual lineaments are.The Creator cannot and will not be defined by us nor can we create Him in (our) own image and to our liking.
I find it odd that you perceive me to think of myself as 'one special creature'.I guess people find it offensive when they are informed their own personal opinions mean nothing in the final analysis.Everyone indeed has an ego, and in our world it is all about control.If you disagree with your professor,rabbi or priest you are marginalized.The Bible in and of itself is a threat to their control over you.
God is very much concerned about all of his creation, it predicates in the Book of Revelation that He will destroy those who destroy the earth and bring proper judgment and equity to the poor and afflicted of the world - whether you or I end up on the wrong side and are judged in the end - only the meek shall inherit the earth.
God is opposed to the proud is not a respecter of persons and He will render to everyman according to their works.
I am not the plenipotentiary of truth; if one questions me to try and define truth in a perceptible way of trying to trap me in my words the only answer to give is - find out for yourself.Neither Barret nor you are in no way answerable to me anyway, it is your own responsibility not mine.Read the Bible for YOURSELF if you are so inclined (if not) so be it....
Sampson,
I've read the Bible. In the original Hebrew.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that G-d does exist, only not in the way that most believe.
If a human being does "God's work" then God's work is done and therefore God does exist in that sense. Churches get built. Synagogues get built (and get burnt down by Nazi swine). Charity monies are collected and distributed. A lot of good things are done in God's name and a lot of bad things are done.
If sitting in a secluded room and muttering to yourself (aka praying) helps psychologically, then great. Keep doing it. You have an absolute right to do it and I will support that right. On the other hand if you gather in a mosque with co-evil planners and mutter hatred and hatch plans to kill other people, that's the devils work. The devil exists in that way also.
It's both real and unreal at the same time. Quantum mechanics at work.
Have, several times. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) the meme did not find me a suitable host for infection. Maybe I should try the Vedic Texts or the Bagavad Gita.
I am one who thinks there is a lot of room for religion. If nothing else, our forefathers had a lot of insights to pass down about many things--how to treat one another, what is important in life, certain practical advice. One doesn't pass this down as a set of stone tablets. There is a whole body of understanding that goes with it.
It is easy for us now to say this or that is absurd (for example, the world was created in 7 days, 6,000 years ago), but if one views the Bible as a collection of stories about how our forefathers viewed the world, that offers us understanding about how we should live today, there are many things that are worthwhile. One can even compare creation stories from the BIble, to creation stories from other literature from the same time-period, to get some insight as to how views differed among the various groups.
There are any number of religions and philosophies that have been passed down, and I expect quite a few of them have something to offer. We now have economics, which seems to play pretty much the same role today, but is even more flawed. But it has a lot of people fooled into thinking it can tell people what is important, how we can be happy, and how we should treat one another.
If we only had one not prone to violence. Maybe Budhhism.
sigh - I'll bite on this, as a former Bible as inerrant truth believer wanting to make amends for all the people I lied to about hell and the end times...
You apparently believe that only religion teaches morality.
You fear - rightly, that without some public morality, there will be (dark) chaos, murder, mayhem, and all manner of bad/painful/ineffective things.
Thus when someone says "religion not (necessarily) good" - you hear "I'm some ivory tower airhead and want to try some grand social experiment of anything goes". (or more sinister: "I've sold my soul to the devil and want to cause disruption, damnation, ...")
That is scary - IFF it were true.
But it's not. Religion is not the only path to public morality.
N.B. scaring people is an old persuasion trick, one oft used by the priesthoods to maintain their cushy sinecures. (a position with no real work).
This is one reason why the U.S. has such virulent religious movements: itinerant preachers can build massive empires of monetary and emotion currency by preaching hatred and division by stirring up trouble against "the other". In Europe, with institutionalized churches, one has to go through official channels, thus the lack of "innovation".
I am going to presume that you haven't read (with understanding) Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and Adam Smith - philosophers of the Enlightenment, who basically came to "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" from reason, not "because the pope said God said".
Another part of why Europe tends to be more civil is not only their history of seeing/experiencing religious dogmatics kill in the name of preserving civility (and one can see to this day bullet holes for various wars in many European cities), but also more respect for intellectuals.
FYI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
If many atheists sound snarky, one can hardly blame them (even if they may be less effective debaters for it), given the murder of Giordano Bruno, and the sentencing of Galileo. Who gives someone the right to kill/confine someone else because they feel insulted?
The fear by atheists/agnostics of religious nuts is well founded.
While I'm here, two definitions:
religion - a set of beliefs and physical practices meant to support spirituality.
spirituality - one's relationship with the divine, the numinous, with God/Goddess/All-That-Is.
IMHO, most religious people are (a) massively ignorant about spirituality, and (b) crassly materialistic and ignorant of being that way.
My prescription is for the religious to move beyond mere belief and seek active, evolving relationship with the Divine, the numinous, the ineffable ... via "technologies" like: meditation, psychical phenomena, mediumship, etc.
Ah - but the priests warn against such "work of the devil"?
No wonder - it would threaten their cushy sinecures and community stature if someone got an evidential message from a departed friend/relative that death is just the dropping off of an outer material vehicle. (and threatens similarly the crassly materialistic atheists who deny parapsychological evidence.)
FYI - some books to read:
http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922
http://www.amazon.com/End-Materialism-Paranormal-co-published-Institute/...
http://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Universe-Mechanics-Participating-Collectio...
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Reincarnation-Biology-Intersect-Stevenson/dp...
(and anything else by Ian Stevenson)
And how 'bout the Pam Reynolds case (not the best video, but what I could find):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnY7gq7B5PY
n.b. 15 deg. C is 59 deg. F.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o47N_UPkGrc
Maybe the religious folks might consider getting a little more scientific, rational and honest, without totally abandoning the numinous.
"first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye". Matthew 7:5
"The great way is not difficult for those who hold no preferences." - Hindu/Buddhist saying.
More exactly: "The great way (enlightenment, truth) is not difficult for those who are not attached to their preferences."
Like say (going back to, ahem!, peak oil), a preference for: Business As Usual... ;-)
Try to use less anger in your posts, even when it seems to you that your opinions of things has been tarnished. Civil conversation is best and will win you more friends than ranting.
Charles.
As a Christian, I'd love to have a humble Sustainable world to wake up to everyday. No worries about trashed rainforests, or dying ecosystems because someone wants to strip mine a rainforest. I wear a cross around my neck, but I understand Peak Oil Production, resource collaspe, species die off, and likely vast numbers of humans dying off because of human natures need to be greedy.
I don't think God sent 9-11 or Katrina to punish us, though He is in control, all the messes around us, and our own aliments and death are the price for Sin.
What I believe and what others believe is likely going to be different, it does not mean that we can't try to work together in a civil way for a sustainable life while we are here abouts living on earth.
No need to flame me for my faith, just understand If I had my way, living on earth would be peaceful and comfortable for everyone.
Charles.
As I understand it (haven't run the numbers myself) aircraft flown full are a relatively efficient way to move large numbers of people and some products (e.g. circuit boards) a long way. If it makes sense energy wise to move people from Los Angeles to London on a 747, then it probably makes sense to manufacture enough kerosene to continue to fly them. Feedstock? petroleum, natural gas, coal. Or if fossil hydrocarbons are unavailable, wood or kudzu or algae.
If, OTOH, it doesn't make sense to fly people from Akron to Chicago, we ought to phase out short distance air travel. Be nice to have a viable alternative in place first though.
Likewise trains and trucks. If they can't run on hydrogen or CNG for some reason and electrifying all the trackage in the US is impractical or isn't cost effective, then make diesel. If Germany could do it half a century ago and South Africans do it today, even 21st Century Americans possibly can manage it.
"As I understand it (haven't run the numbers myself) aircraft flown full are a relatively efficient way to move large numbers of people"
If you did run the numbers yourself, you would find that they are not.
What has to end is our obsession with travel, with moving ourselves and our things all over the globe. It's time to once again source nearly everything from within about 100 miles of where it is used, and keep ones travels mostly to within a similar perimeter.
Ideally, we can keep enough of a communication system going that this will not lead to too much closed minded parochialism.
I disagree with you on this one my friend.
I think BAU travel as in planes, cars, buses etc... probably does have to end, however I went to a screening this past Friday and met these two young guys who built their kayaks from kits and paddled them 1200 miles over 3 months from Alaska to Seattle This is the film they made:
http://www.dudesonmedia.com/PADDLE_TO_SEATTLE.html
I think the way our free time is currently structured is going to change drastically in the future. I could for example imagine people going for a six month sail around the globe. The desire to visit new places I think will never die out in humans at least as long as we survive.
BTW I'm 56 and I can still easily paddle 15 to 20 miles a day depending on weather conditions I can ride 30 to 40 miles on my bike as well. I can hike some 20 miles a day. Plus I know how to sail and navigate. Chances are I will still be able to do this for another decade or so.
Maybe other circumstance will prevent me from doing so but I don't see the obsession to travel ending anytime soon.
I envy you that you got to see the film and talk to those involved!
Perhaps I was wrongly extrapolating the average American's sorry physical shape and pitiful practical skill set into the future. Few currently would be able or willing to undergo such rigors. Of course, those who are able and willing will continue to explore the world. It will be again more like real adventure, I imagine.
But I'm guessing for most Americans at least, when traveling no longer involves sitting on a winged bus then renting a car to drive to the exact same kinds of hotel, restaurants and stores they had at home, most will just not travel very far very often.
Travel will become again what it always had been: travail--hard work (the original meaning was actually 'torture'.)
It was quite special as it was a private screening organized by the kayaking community of the greater Miami area. The official screening was on Saturday.
Fmaygar,
Agreed-bau travel hopping on a plane or marathon auto trips must come to end before too long, either as a matter of social policy or not too much later by physical constraints.
It is WAY PAST TIME FOR AVIATION FUEL TO BE TAXED by the way.
Personally My guess is that there will not be a powered down back to the horses days crash in the near future but that we will change our ways drastically.
Trains will be coming back in a big way and there is no reason that fast frieghts can't pull a few passenger cars.
With modern electronics and a lot of extra sidings I can't see any reason rail trolleys-essentially single car trains can't run intercity and just pull off when a train is approaching.
Nor can I see any reason who Toto's(I hope he isn't sick or something !) light rail cannot be extended out into many urban and even rural areas-light vehicles could be designed to run on light rail but also capable of traveling on standard rails.
We probably could move half or more of our transportation infrastructure or more to some kind of highly flexible rail system in two decades.
If frieght could be gotten to within for example five miles of its destination on a train powered by overhead lines and a single car-equipped with its own battery pack and electric motor- could be detached , it could unload or load anywhere up and down a five mile long branch line which could be built right into a highway;this would eliminate the need for branch line electricity while still being well within the limits of todays batteries-even lead batteries probably.
Such a system could cut liquid fuel use in a big way without requiring any new technology,while also reducing pollution substantially if we achieve a large wind or solar power capacity.
It would also be a good way to balance renewable loads-all those batteries could be topped off with renewable power as available and maybe even used to heplp trim peak loads a little in a pinch.
The main reason you can't is that such cars throw away two of rail's greatest advantages - long trains have much lower energy requirements per ton due to low air resistance and rail has its greatest capacity when all trains run at roughly the same speed - if you try to mix fast (ish) railcars with slow freight either the freights will have to stop to allow the railcars to overtake or there will big gaps in the freights to allow the railcars not to catch up the train in front. This problem is one of the main reasons for building high speed rail in Europe - if you move the fast trains off the old network you can run more medium speed passenger and freight than the displaced high speed services on the existing lines and the expresses can also run faster on the new system. The only problems are cost and NIMBYs.
This would not be worth it - you would waste loads of power hauling the batteries around on the main network, better (and common in the nineteenth/early twentieth century) would be a small battery locomotive for the last stage or minimum wired systems (they need nothing more than timber poles for the overhead) - these could also be combined with tram systems if the passenger demand is there. Better than lead batteries would be the even older technology of NiFe cells - they weigh more than lead-acid but they last indefinitely (with electrolyte replacement every 25 years or so there are century old ones still in service). The extra weight would not matter for a low speed local use locomotive as they usually need to be ballasted to give them sufficient hauling power in any case.
Already done in Europe (even in the UK). Indeed there is a system in (former east) Germany where steam hauled tourist trains share tracks with diesel railcars and freight and have electric trams with diesel generators running over them from the adjacent town system. Substitute the generators with batteries and you have the whole system.
Binglebong,
I with you on the efficiency of the big long train running straight and steady-my idea is that smaller goods trains and local town to town or village to village trolleys would do all the pulling over.Even a heavily traveled main line is not apt to have a major frieght pass thru more than a couple of times an hour in most places.
If the big guys come thru on the hour , there should be plenty of time to run some short hop locals between them.The key thing about good electronics is that there should be no collisions if the system is correctly implemented.
Some sort of minilocomotive might be better than cars that carry thier own motors and batteries for trips down long sidings or it might be better to just offload onto local electric short range trucks.Mostly I was thinking in terms of achieving adequate track front capacity-obviously most businesses cannot be located alongside existing main lines.
OFM
Fair comment if there are already long gaps in the traffic, a lot of the US main lines seem pretty busy to me with very long slow freights every few minutes but I've not been there enough to know if that is just an impression. The other thing to remember is a lot of the US milage is single track and long gaps when you change over the direction of the trains are inevitable (more shunt spurs and sidings would allow a mixed system to work in that case though).
In Europe things are different - busy railways can often have a passenger train every few minutes (5 min headways are not uncommon) with most freight running at night or on separate tracks.
The biggest problem I see is that by the time things got bad enough for the inconvenience of returning to a train plus local road system the available track space would be hoplessy inadequate even with a massive reduction in demand. Country stations in the UK were often spaced based on the maximum range horse drawn vehicles could serve from them rather than being anywhere near any existing settlement, we could do the same thing now but with battery vehicles but no way could we carry anywhere near the present volume of road traffic.
We can obtain hydrogen from electrolysis of water and from there can obtain methanol, dimethyl ether, and gasoline (all viable fuels for ICEs) all from reduction of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide can be obtained from coal and nat gas in the short term and from biomass, sequestered carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide scrubbers in the long term.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy
or
“Chemical Recycling of Carbon Dioxide to Methanol and Dimethyl Ether” in the Journal of Organic Chemistry.
The reduction of carbon dioxide has been demonstrated in excellent yields (up to 99.8%) using catalysts such as copper, zinc oxide, and aluminum oxide, some of the more common catalytic elements. This type of reaction has been known for 80 years and is demonstrated on a pilot scale plant in Japan. It is being scaled up for commercial use in Iceland to take advantage of cheap geothermal energy; and in Japan, Mitsui chemical is building a 100 ton/year plant.
Conversion of hydrogen to liquid fuels is feasible, though will involve some energy loss from the hydrogen itself. It does work and is probably scalable.
Where there's a will there's often a way. If only we yearned for the right things!
If we yearn for BAU to continue, then in the last resort, we might send a mining expedition to the moon and mars to look for precious metals; and maybe we'll invent a special machine to deploy into space which captures energy from the sun and stores it in a dense medium which can be shipped back to earth, where it will help multiply this parasitic race of ours.
Or perhaps we might yearn for our material lives to be slowed down, so that our wisdom has time enough to catch up to our science and technology.
I wonder how the plot will unfold........
I'm sure we are going to get a bit of both. BAU has always evolved tto take advantage of technology. Think back twenty years to pre internet days, none of us felt deprived that it didn't exist. Now it is hard to imagine life without it.
Fossil fuel depletion will cause BAU to adapt. Part of that will be re-jigging the daily arrangements of local life, part of it may be new communications technology to avoid the need for travel, part of it may be new energy sources which will necessarily force adaptation either because of it's avaialbility/scale/cost or the nature of the source eg liquid, gas, solid electricity etc.
@ drofeverything
It was called Hindenburg and the comparison isn't that nice because you can't compare modern hydrogen-tanks with the mantle of the Hindenburg...
@ shox
You can burn hydrogen direct (with modifications) in an gas turbine, so you don't need an vast and heavy electric engine. It works also with an internal cobustion engine - BMW is already running cars with modified conventional engines powerd by hydrogen. Actuel hydrogen is the only realistic medium for the long-time future air-traffic medium (exept of bio-fuels of curse), because it hase the needed energie-density batteries (probably) never will have.
This does not mean that a hydrogen airplain is an easy goal and I also exspect that this plane will be a little slower than our actuall kerogene enginees. But there are definitely no fundamental scientific problems with running airplnes on hydrogen. These airplane maybe smaller and slower and with a much shorter range than actual airplanes but they will fly. Maybe at part with internal combustion engines like in the old days. It may also be more expensiv to fly but i don't agree do doomsters saying will will fly no more, but we will for shure fly less, it will become more luxery than today. Hydrogen will propably be the long-time solution for air-traffic. But for airplanes we will still have some time left for further research because this is a field where the oil will be replaced at last - shurly after 2050.
http://www.mtu.de/de/technologies/engineering_news/others/Sieber_Neue_Tr...
http://www.mtu.de/de/technologies/engineering_news/others/Sieber_Zukuenf...
Another rosy scenario that purports to continue BAU without much pain in the transition to sustainable living.
Main problem is the cost for the infrastructure and new transport vehicles, assuming buildings are simply modified. Old fossil fuel based infrastructure is scrapped and new wind/solar/tidal/hydro based energy system built with whose money?
Only transport mode easily convertable to electric is rail. Airplanes that run on H*2 fuel will be horizon technolgy. The use of fuel cells for transport applications has been discussed numerous times on this site, and Gail has discribed the obvious problems here again.
The only way to greatly reduce high carbon fossil fuel use (coal & heavy oil) is through conservation. Forego taking three or four trips per year by plane. Forego the 25 mile daily commute. Forego the summer house in Florida or on the Mediterranean coast. Forego all those power sucking appliances. Forego maintaining the huge highway infrastructure and lighting it with a million power sucking 500 watt fixtures. Forego a lot of activities that do not clothe, house, feed, and maintain health of the population (like buying derivatives, lawyering, flipping real estate, wedding consulting, and thousands more useless occupations).
The only way to get off fossil fuels is with a huge amount of pain and drastic changes is EVERYONES lifestyle.
Good points.
Buses, bikes, walking, car pools, rail.
As far as aircraft and fuel cells go:
http://www.livescience.com/technology/091013-ion-tiger.html
Note that the Ion weighs 37 pounds and carries ~ a 3 pound payload.
This technology is not going to scale to airliners. A 'Cessna' type bug-smasher carrying maybe up to four people and some baggage for ~ 300 miles on a 'charge' would be the pinnacle of this technology, and that is stretching credibility.
Might as well just use a glider.
Re. BAU...It drives me crazy when future scenarios are based on BAU, i.e., a consumer driven, debt-based, market oriented society. It isn't going to happen. BAU is unsustainable regardless of what the energy source(s) is.
Rather than starting with a definition of the future society and the energy requirements of that society, the cart is always put before the horse by extrapolating from current society.
My own view was stated here in June, 2007: http://www.theoildrum/node/2598#comment-198254 where I foresee a society of very low consumption with people living in either family or affinity groups. One of my additional points in that post was that "energy" was mostly dispersed to the living units. And, yes, population control was a reality.
Todd
Thank you, Todd. My sentiments as well.
Although I should add that I don't really like the term "BAU" to begin with. It's meaning is too vague, and different people obviously use it to mean different things. To some, it means any scenario that involves a continuing high level of technology. To others, it means any scenario that involves high levels of energy consumption. To others, it means -- as you suggest -- continuation of the current socio-economic system: consumer driven, debt-based, and market oriented. Others would assert that all three of those interpretations are equivalent, but can supply only vague generalities to make their case.
To me, it's the perverse incentives inherent in the current socio-economic system that are the most fundamental obstacles to a sustainable culture. I don't think most people appreciate the degree to which current excessive levels of material and energy consumption are the result of artificially stimulated consumption, which follows from the need to have jobs for everyone in a world where technology and competitive pressure are constantly eliminating jobs.
If we can get to a world in which adequate food, clothing, shelter, and sanitation are taken as basic rights, then jobs will be optional. The need for advertising will evaporate, and consumption will plunge.
Thanks Gail--
Good post!
I'll echo that one. Gail is jolly good here ; a well founded realist/skeptic. I'm impressed by her ability to present 'her case' without even using a small spoon of Sarcanol- Cudos for that-
This Chart "How long will it last ?" belongs attached under such postings.
As for the SciAm-magazine ?... well he**, why don't you go consider an article that evaluates why the Big Bang actually took place ? But if the article in Q starts up something like this : "Imagine if the sky was pink and renewable and sustainable energy sources was as easy to scale to running demand as saying Yes .... then ..." well then skip my rant!
Thanks for reminding me of the image of the remaining time for many minerals, even with recycling.
Gail,
What are you saying?
There are only 4 more years of Indium left?
I won't be able to read your wise words on an LCD screen after that ?
OMG
Relax.
4 more years, if the world consumes at half the U. S. consumption rate.
13 years, at the current consumption rate.
After 13 years, the guy with all the old CRTs in his warehouses will be king!
Well, what if everyone continues to double their resource use at the rate of the last 200 years, i.e. doubling about every ~40 years?
I keep wondering why scarcity charts like that don't list magnesium.
That's because magnesium is extracted from seawater. There is essentially no way to run out of magnesium. It is infinitely recyclable and losses can be made up from the oceans.
Dow Chemical investigated the dehydration of ethanol to ethylene with a Brazilian partner. There is no way to run out of ethylene from this source, which means there is no way to run out of polyethylene or any of the other polymers made from ethylene. Flows may be limited, but they remain far above zero. Carbon nanotubes are made from... carbon. Carbon nanotube fabric can now be made at seven meters per minute, and it is stronger than steel. How do you exhaust the supply of that?
How do you exhaust the materials for silicon carbide? Silicon nitride?
Just because our current favored materials are running low, doesn't mean technological society has no alternatives. Biomimicry is the use of techniques adopted from from biology. Making things out of air, water and soil certainly fits.
The way to run out of any of those is to run out of the energy to make or extract them. This is likely to be the limiting factor for aluminum, at least, in the not too distant future.
EP,
I don't know anything about seawater extraction of magnesium, but I do know that some Mg is mined terrestrially...the town of Gabbs, Nevada exists to support the large magnesite deposit just to the SE. IIRC, this deposit is one of the bigger magnesite deposits in the world and I can attest to Gabbs being one of the most wretched towns in the world...nice symmetry eh?
One can't fault Jacobson and Delucchi too much for being too ambitious. I would guess they fully understand that, given the current socio-political climate, only a portion of their program has a chance of actually being implemented. They might as well aim higher than is supposedly realistic. Their intent is to describe what could be done if there were the political will. A good bulk of Gail's criticism is just her pessimism opposed to their optimism (e.g. "It seems unlikely that a tax of this magnitude...would be agreed to by tax payers.") I find that type of criticism has no bearing on whether I should favor or oppose the project being proposed.
Put another way, if the plan is so impossible that it will never happen, why the need to spend so much time on how fantastical it is? Are there good reasons to be afraid of the success of such a plan? I'm sure many TODers will feel there are, and I might well agree on many points. But that scenario (that the plan could do more harm than good) surprisingly isn't very well explored here.
With all that said, I also agree with some of the statements made in this post. I agree with the 20 vs. 50 years statements, and I find the last paragraph of the post very reasonable. I think that a good general argument can be made that, given the costs likely involved, putting all our eggs in such a one basket could be a bad wager. I think it's a bit of a shame that such an argument wasn't developed better in this post.
Finally, I have the following quibble...
I don't know what justifies the word "clearly." The sentences that follow that statement may or may not be mere speculation. We've had a lot of vociferous debates about whether the EROEI of renewables is sufficient to sustain the industrial capacity necessary to keep renewables themselves going. I haven't been convinced either way on the subject. Less absolute terms are in order, IMO.
I don't know jaggedben - but I'll give it a shot
==>> if you understand what fossils gave you - you'll immediately be in position to understand what fossils can take away from you.
(A Reminder : still 85-90% of total global energy utilized for technical purposes are ... ehh fossil... none other methods are even theoretically nearby)
paal myrtvedt reminds us...
"Reminder : still 85-90% of total global energy utilized for technical purposes are ... ehh fossil... none other methods are even theoretically nearby"
Hmmm...and why do you think that is?
Could it be that fossil fuels, despite the contention that we are to run clear out of them any day now (yeah, and I know, "peak isn't about running out..." so why does every scenario created by peak oil aware groups seem to imply exactly that we are in fact "running out"...and damn soon?), said fossil fuels are still priced at such idiotically low prices that no other technology can compete with them on a cost basis?
Hmmm...and if said fossil fuels are still priced this cheaply, how hard is it to get the majority (or even a statistically significant minority) to accept the need for serious change and sacrifice in the effort to create a major change in our consumptive patterns?
Let's just face it: The above creates such a logical conundrum to even the most aware and alert citizens among us so as to be THE critical factor against building support for any alternative other than meltdown should we be on the edge of critical energy and material supply shortages (which are hard to find evidence of even IF one is searching hard).
Even those most certain of critical fossil fuel shortages seem to use so much effort in their attack on any proposed alternative to fossil fuels (talk about a logical conundrum!) that those who do not accept the concept of impending critical shortages will be extremely difficult to recruit to any alternative plan...thus we seem to close off all available althernative paths except one: BAU until the return of the new dark age. Of course by then most people in the developed nations will be so old they cannot survive without the critical medical and social services that only an advanced nation can provide, making the whole discussion moot anyway, except for the relatively young among us.
P.S. And yes, I am aware that the stock markets went down....oops, than back up...and oil prices exploded and then oops, collapsed, and natural gas went to astronomical prices and then oops, really collapsed...and real estate prices collapsed if you were in just the wrong place, but in most of the country there is still a dearth of affordable and decent housing...and the banks melted down (but the credit unions didn't?), and....it really is starting to look like the normal hysterical reaction to a worldwide bubble...and guess what? Things are going along pretty much as they always do after such madness of crowds...but that explanation is just too simple isn't it, it just lacks real drama?
RC
It all looked so darn good...right up till it didn't anymore...
This answers the question as to why governments have to take the lead (notice I did NOT say 'do everything'): The sheeple, left to their own devices, are too busy working, watching TV, playing video games, etc. to notice anything, except maybe all those natural gas industry commercials that trumpeted how we have enough NG to meet America's energy needs for 60 years!...except that now a year later the same lobbying group's ads trumpet that "NG will last us 100 years, and more is being found every day!'.
Only an organization with the scale and scope of a government can start to turn the Titanic away from the berg by investing in technologies which will supplant then replace most FFs.
I can't wait to hear the kicking and screaming...then you definitely won't like my idea for a mandatory 2-child per woman per lifetime limit, taxing energy use, and the plan to close the borders to all but legal immigration.
None of that will come to pass...we will all assuredly have the freedom to mash the accelerator and speed off the cliff.
Well, governments are not really a good bet either are they? They're all solidly committed to using up everything ever faster as the way to create ever more bountiful supply, aren't they? Check the math!
It's a cognitive glitch. No, we'er not "running out".
What we're doing is "running up" our remaining resources, making the short supply of EROI>1 recoverable resources into scarce necessities for speculators to bid up till some industry or population that once relied on them is shoved aside and has to do without. That's more like a slamming door than a limitless supply.
The subject at hand was a hypothetical renewable system that had replaced the world's need for FF energy. So fossils have zilch to do with it. It's separate from the "can we get there from here?" question. (Not to mention the "do we want to get there?" question...)
Of course the word 'forever' in this context is not useful at all. We can suppose that 'forever' in this article is meant to mean 'for a long time', which in these type of discussions here seems to equate to a couple of hundred years.
I read both the SciAm article and the longer "technical" article on which it was supposed based. Very sloppy, poor quality work (IMO).
The most egregious fault is their uninformed and ideologically motivated bias against nuclear power. In order to make it come out worse than WWS in their analysis, they essentially made the equation "nuclear power will lead to proliferation of nuclear weapons which will lead to nuclear war, so the environmental costs of nuclear war must be weighed in to the cost of nuclear power." No mention of the fact that the star performer of the WWS scenario -- the large wind turbine -- uses 10x the amount of concrete and steel as a conventional nuclear plant, per kilowatt-hour delivered annually. Or that newer designs for nuclear plants would score even better. Also no mention of the fact that no nuclear weapons have ever been built, by any country, from plutonium recovered from spent nuclear fuel. The plutonium in spent reactor fuel is heavily contaminated with Pu 240, whose spontaneous neutron emission rate is too high to allow a super-critical mass to be assembled before detonation.
Its treatment of nuclear power aside, the article also suffers from the points enumerated by Gail. Liquid hydrogen could be used to fuel airplanes; Boeing has done serious design studies on that. The operational cost would be very high. The problem isn't explosions; hydrogen that leaks will rise and diffuse too quickly to present a significant risk of explosions. But its super low temperature, high thermal conductivity, and nearly invisible flame do make it dangerous. If you were going to use liquid hydrogen as an aviation fuel, you'd burn it directly in jet or gas turbine engine, not a fuel cell.
The whole idea is stupid, however. If you've produced the hydrogen to use as a fuel, it's energetically down hill to produce synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. The energy you lose in conversion isn't much greater than the energy needed to liquify hydrogen. The authors refusal to consider synthetic hydrocarbon fuels simply points up their ignorance.
Link from two days ago: The Nuclear Green Revolution: The Jacobson-Delucchi plan revealed.
I agree, and since hydrocarbon fuels can be synthesized from CO2 and water, it's basically carbon neutral anyway, but as always the problem is that we need an energy input. In any case, I've wondered about synthetic fuel plants as a way to store energy generated from wind/solar sources during peak generation, but low consumption, periods.
The problem with synthesis of renewable hydrocarbons isn't the synthesis, it's the renewing. Scraping CO2 out of the atmosphere is the rate-limiting step, and absent some breakthrough like algae ponds the demand for hydrocarbon products is going to keep the price too high for mass air travel.
The obvious path is to chemically add energy to renewable feedstocks. The biofuels provide the carbon and then wind generated electricity is used to additionally reduce the biofuels, storing more energy up to or past the energy content of kerosene.
This seems like a much simpler and cheaper way to keep airplanes flying than hydrogen fuel cells. The hydrogen is added to biofuel carbon to make synthetic kerosene or equivalent and current engine designs just burn it.
The US has 1.3 billion dry-tons per year of biomass potential; 368 million could come from sustainably removable biomass from forestlands and 998 million could come from agricultural lands.
http://feedstockreview.ornl.gov/pdf/billion_ton_vision.pdf
Biomass is composed of a mix of polysaccharides (cellulose and xylan) and lignin. If 70% of biomass is polysaccharide (about 40% carbon content) and 30% is lignin ( say 80% carbon content), then about 50% of biomass weight is carbon. So 1.3 billion tons biomass is about .65 billion tons carbon. That carbon can be converted to alkanes using hydrogen from electrolysis of water, giving .75 billion tons of alkane or 5.5 billion barrels of alkane. The US consumes about 7.6 billion barrels a year of oil. Hence, biomass can provide nearly enough carbon for liquid fuel consumption at today’s rates if all carbon from biomass is converted into fuel.
Yup, that's true. It's also true that the losses in the process, and the overhead for the physical plant required, make it absurd to try to continue BAU on that basis. We are much better off converting the end-use to electric power than converting electricity to fuel. In a capital-constrained future, we will do it the sensible way or not at all.
On the other hand, there are possibilities with stranded energy supplies, such as strong winds in places where the electric grid is weak (e.g. Iowa). If carbon is available there (say, from CO2 scrubbed out of biogas) and something like electro-microbial conversion of CO2 to methane can be made to work cheaply, nearly all carbon in such gases might be converted to fuel. CO2 taken from supercritical water oxidation of wastes is another source. Once carbon has been captured and concentrated, releasing it back to the atmosphere is a waste.
Agreed. There will be ~20% loss converting from electricity to hydrogen, additional loss in converting hydrogen and carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide to fuel, and then the ~80% loss in the ICE. There are alot of losses. Electricity is highly preferable and hopefully we can use it for most of our transport needs, but if batteries don't work out for any reason synthetic fuels are an option. I see carbon from biomass as the long-term option for synthesis of chemicals and polymers and supply of liquid fuels for difficult to electrify transport.
Any guess what that price would be?
I agree that the link between civilian nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons production is specious and contrived.
Someday we will wake up and embrace modern civilian nuclear power plants again. The waste stream is tiny, expressed in volume, compared to coal-fired generation. This waste is easily contained and monitored, compared to coal-fired wastes. And yes, this nuclear waste production can be reduced using the right types of reactors which use up a far greater proportion of the fuel...these same reactors can re-use the legacy wastes to generate even more energy and also reduce the amount of legacy waste. What little waste is left is entombed in a well-engineered repository.
Hi Moonwatcher,
I want to agree with you. My only hesitation is the cost argument that will prevent construction of new plants - that new plants are so expensive that funding in this day of limited credit is a real obstacle.
How do you envision this funding issue? And, I really do hope you have a good solution as I think most of the other objections are far less significant.
Another big mistake in the article is that they mention that
NEODYMIUM is needed for the GEARBOX of Wind Turbines.
And that a possible solution to this problem would be to make Wind Turbines without gearbox.
I think that there is a German company that already makes Wind Turbines without a gearbox.
But the NEODYMIUM is NOT needed in the gearbox !!!!
The neodymium is needed for the magnets in a particular type of wind turbine. It is not necessary, it just improves efficiency.
Neodym is used for making permanent-magnetic material (Ne2Fe14B) in a rotating current synchron-electric generator - for the rotors permanent-magnetic material, not in the gearbox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet
If you have no Neodym, you could use other magnetic materials or even an other type of generator without permanent-magnetic material (for example asynchron-electric generator), a little less efficient, but not enough to stop BAU I guess...
We will have no problem transporting people and supplying them with goods and services sufficient for a very good quality of life without burning fossil fuels. We may have problems persuading them to stop burning fossil fuels.
Gail is concerned about the following points:
Aircraft - indeed, hydrogen is a nonsense for aircraft. However, very little in terms of essential goods are transported by air. No more Chilean cherries in New York winter, oh well.
Ships - consider the scale of the issue. Currently, some 34% of shipping tonnage worldwide is devoted to transporting oil [source, p.16]. 96% of oil is burned. SA's article proposes no more burning of oil, so some 33% of world shipping can be scrapped.
World coal trade was about 718Mt in 2003 [source, p2], at the same time as total world trade was 6,500Mt, so that coal was 11% of world seaborne trade by weight. Coal is all burned (even if sometimes liquefied first), and again SA proposes stopping this; so another 11% of world shipping could be scrapped.
I could go on, but the point is clear: just by no longer burning oil and coal, we could almost halve our global shipping, thus halving the demand for fuel for it. This does not eliminate the problem of how to fuel the ships, but certainly makes it easier to deal with.
Automobiles and trucks - these don't need to be fuelled at all. We have some recent inventions called "trains" and "trams", which are in many parts of the world entirely electric, and which can thus be powered by renewable energy.
Many supposed "problems" are like this. When you look at changing every single piece of infrastructure to some new power source, things look difficult. When instead you look at what the infrastructure is supposed to do, things look much easier. We don't need cars and trucks. We need to transport people and goods. Cars and trucks are simply one inefficient way of doing that; other more efficient ways exist.
Farm machinery, etc - electric versions of these exist already as anyone can discover in five minutes with google.
Mining and manufacturing - are largely electric anyway. It's only when going for marginal ores that a lot of fossil fuels are used, eg in open-cut lowgrade mines. Of course, absent fossil fuels, our demand for things like iron ore will drop - electric (not electronic) things tend not to break down as quickly as fossil fuel-powered things.
"We'd have to build lots of stuff" - we build lots of stuff anyway. So it's just a matter of building different stuff. In 2006, the world produced a bit under 50 million cars.
If we can produce 50 million internal combustion engine cars I don't see why we can't produce (say) 2 million electric train engines and 10 million electric cars.
Likewise, we are already building more coal-fired and gas-fired power stations. China alone is building one or two new coal-fired power stations each week. If they can do that, they can whack up wind turbines or solar thermal stations or whatever.
We build lots of stuff already. The only question is what we build: more stuff that burns fossil fuels, or more stuff that doesn't.
"We need to figure out how to do this" - a century or two ago we had this thing called the Industrial Revolution. People harnessed wind and water, then wood and coal, and finally gas and oil, and used its energy to build things. Nobody figured out any Grand World Plan To Burn Stuff. They just went ahead and did it and muddled along.
I don't see why we were able to just stumble along through an Industrial Revolution, but an Ecotechnic Revolution is supposed to require careful planning. I suppose because some people are rather anxious that we should not stop burning stuff, their stock in fossil fuel companies might drop too low.
"So how will we pay for all of the new equipment?" - the same way we pay for 50 million new cars, hundreds of new coal-fired power stations, and billions of plastic widgets every year. As noted above, we're buying all this ecotechnic stuff instead of this burning stuff, not as well as it.
"But if we stop burning stuff, my Valiant won't be worth anything in 2028!" - well, so what? Electric typewriters, brick-sized mobile phones with satchel batteries, valve radios and buggy whips ain't worth much nowadays, too. Things become obsolete, that's life in a technological society.
"Will I get compensation for this?" - no, why should you? When we brought in personal computers, did anybody compensate the typing pool? When we brought in cars, did anyone compensate buggy whip makers? When we brought in transistors, did anyone compensate the valve glass factories? Again, things become obsolete, that's life.
"Too many rare minerals are needed!" - name them, and tell us why they're needed.
"What about all the power lines?" - yes, we couldn't possibly have a system where power lines criss-cross the country. Wait, what?
"When the power goes out, we're in trouble!" - how is this a change from today?
"Operating the system will require a huge amount of international co-operation, because the transmission system will cross country lines. " - Of course, that's impossible. That's why the Danes never sold wind power to Sweden and Germany, and the Swedes never sold hydroelectric power to the Danes, nor Germany nuclear power to Denmark.
Good thing countries never buy vital goods and services from each-other. Imagine if the US were to rely on other countries for most of its energy? However would it cope?
"All of the high tech manufacturing will require considerable international co-operation and trade." - this is a bad and new thing?
"The system clearly can't continue forever. It could be stopped by a lack of rare minerals, or international disputes, or lack of adequate international trade." - are you talking about the ecotechnic system, or the current fossil fuel one?
North Korea shows us what happens when countries try to go it entirely alone. All worthwhile systems require some international co-operation, people honouring contracts, that sort of thing.
"Instead of the high tech approach advocated by Scientific American, we may want to find solutions that can be done locally, with local materials." - see now this at last is a piece of good sense. However, the two are not incompatible. We can have some international high-tech, and some localisation of stuff.
We will have no problem transporting people and supplying them with goods and services sufficient for a very good quality of life without burning fossil fuels. We may have problems persuading them to stop burning fossil fuels.
On this point if peak oil has been reached, then prices will certainly creep upward as production declines. These high prices are what will persuade consumers to buy imievs, leafs, volts, and the like. Coal, oil shale, and natural gas will probably be around for a long time.
On powering aircraft - IDK why no one has pointed out that aircraft have already been successfully tested with liquid ammonia and biofuel. Either type of fuel will work with existing engine technology.
Very good set of points, Kiashu. Especially the point that we're already making equivalent amounts of stuff, just of a different kind. And the point that we'll end up needing to make less stuff. And the point that we're not faced with a binary choice, we can choose both.
I think that the transition will be both easier and more difficult than Gail suggests. Easier technically but harder politically. Just think of all those new products to be standardised. The sheer weight of standards committees will break the back of the transition :-)
(There is cause for hope, though: we now have an agreement on a standard cellphone charger specification across companies and countries. Our landfills are saved! How long did that take? (Rhetorical).)
A couple of nitpicks, though. It's often said - I think Jim Kunstler goes on about it - that urban form is dictated by the dominant mode of transport. In the past trams and trains dictated fairly dense population centres separated by farmland. Cars dictated the current sprawl. Going back to trams and trains may cause issues; what, exactly, I don't know, but I know people won't like it at first. How will you do your grocery shopping by train? Or get the materials for those bookshelves you're making?
A sub-point here is that the baby-boomer generation is reaching "crustiness". People get resistant to change as they age. Baby-boomers have been used to having things their own way for their whole lives. This doesn't bode well for massive changes. (Was this what you were getting at with your last paragraph?)
Secondly, Gail is at least partly right about the need for some planning, because electricity is different. Fossil-fueled engines won out over electric motors, despite a later start, precisely because they needed much less in the way of a dedicated system to operate.
Let me expand on that last point. Edison is credited with "inventing the lightbulb". In fact, he didn't. His great achievement was developing a complete, integrated electricity generation, distribution, and consumption system with all its myriad interconnections, structures, safety features and so on. Edison was a brilliant systems integrator.
Edison also developed better electric cars, but they didn't take off, because they were dependent on an electricity system that didn't exist except in a few places, those being places where most people didn't need cars: densely populated cities.
Gasoline, on the other hand, could be transported pretty much anywhere by train and wagon - kerosene for lighting had been transported the same way for decades. Suddenly, farm-dwellers everywhere could get to church on Sunday, and visit their neighbors. So gasoline won the battle with electric vehicles hands down.
With electricity, if you're using AC and have more than one generator, the generators have to be kept precisely in sync. Easy enough to do with a few large generators, but with a million wind turbines dotted about in groups of a hundred here, five hundred there, coordination needs a bit more thought - especially of the "what could possibly go wrong?" kind.
My own solar power plant has no problems keeping precisely in sync with the AC power grid. I think you can count this problem as being solved.
gregvp - While I agree with most of your post I have to take issue with your comments on the Baby Boomer generation.I am one of these "crusty" types.I am certainly not used to having things my own way for my whole life and I am not resistant to change,provided it is for the better.
It should be obvious that while there may be a few markers of attitudes and behaviour in any generational group this is overwhelmed by the usual human diversity.Age is no barrier to original thought not shackled by conventional wisdom.If you think otherwise I suggest you read more widely.
Generalizing about generations is patently false reasoning and is not helpful in tackling the immense problems we have.
Well, even if slightly misplaced it's really critically important that people think about the learning response time on these things. That's one of the key distinguishing characteristic of real systems thinking. It's unfortunately profoundly missing from most of the eco-technology discussion.
People just pick numbers out of the hat for how fast things can change, not realizing how thoroughly cross connected our economic and social functions are. The systems themselves rigidify, not just the people.
The biggest rigidity I see getting in the way is we set our scientific, financial and cultural models around the experience of perpetual exponential growth over 100 years ago, and forgot all other possibilities. Now people can't even discuss what that is or how something different would function.
We simply can't convert an integrated global system into a scattering of local systems the way most people describe the transition. It would just totally implode and the culture that built it would vanish.
What we need to do most of all is to take our foot off the gas. We're going to be slow in responding to the pressures. The conversation today really seems to be going in the same circles that the one in 1970 was.
People do their grocery shopping without cars in a lot of places, even places that have indoor plumbing and reliable electricity. I used to have a folding wheeled shopping basket that held a week's groceries for a family and stored almost flat. I even took it on buses.
The problem isn't shopping without a car, it's running out of milk mid-week. The current suburban form doesn't have the numerous little corner grocery and whatnot shops that traditional urban areas have.
Been there, done that too. I have variously loaded up my folding shopping cart and walked a pretty good hike, taken a bus with the cart full of potted plants, hired a taxi, had it delivered, and at occasionally hired a guy with a little truck. At one place I lived, I was fortunate to be able to buy stuff for my apartment at a store just a few blocks away and I came home with a toaster, a lamp and a bunch of plastic kitchen containers packed into the cart.
Easy and inexpensive personal car ownership creates land use forms that do not integrate retail and services into the fabric of where people live. Take away easy and cheap and suddenly traditional urban forms make sense again.
It's also worth noting that most of us don't expect fossil fuels to all simultaneously disappear overnight. Thus, there will be a time when the affordability of fuel drops - either because the price rises (as in mid 2008) or because long unemployment makes people poor.
At the moment, in the US and Australia, the corner grocery store is not really viable. It used to be - I worked in one when I was a teenager in the 1980s, and it'd been open for more than twenty years. It had fresh fruit and vegies, tinned food, preserved meats and cheeses, made sandwiches - whatever you could think of.
It's gone now. Suburban supermarkets killed it - the owner just couldn't compete with their prices, the prices they got from their vast buying power and minimum wage underage employees, all made possible by... cheap fossil fuels.
Now, do people want to open these stores nowadays? Yes. Every two or three blocks in the older suburbs (not the McMansions suburbs, but the older ones) we find strips of 3-6 shops. Most are abandoned, but every year or so someone comes along and opens a takeout joint or hairdresser's. Some succeed, most fail.
People would LOVE to open corner grocery stores, to have a small business dealing with lots of members of the community. People would jump at the chance - it just has to be profitable.
With less affordable fossil fuels, the margin of the supermarkets is lost, and the corner grocery store becomes profitable again.
I realise that many people do take the car to drive 2 blocks, but most can manage without it.
It takes a special person to dedicate that 16 hours a day six or seven days a week to try make the small store go. Much of the wholesale structure the small stores relied on for has supply has disappeared as well. Small store chains linked to a wholesale structure is more likely scenario at least near term. I knew families in the Chicago area that kept their grocery stores going up into the late eighties but none of the kids wanted to put in the hours. Those little stores profit margins were only decent in the high end dense city areas by that time.
Actually, I sometimes did my grocery shopping by train since there was a train station close to a grocery store. However, there was another grocery store within walking distance, and bicycling also worked well.
It can be done. You just have to wrap your automobile-oriented mind around it.
For automobile-oriented people, however, it could be a trauma, particularly when they suffer a loss on selling their suburban houses to move to a more pedestrian-friendly neighborhood because they can no longer afford gas for their SUV.
The SUV will have no value in a few years anyway. It costs much more to rebuild the urban landscape than to build electric cars to make suburbia habitable without gasoline, so there's going to be a lot of arbitrage going on there.
Arbitrage of filling the valueless SUV with very expensive gas paid for out of cashflow vs buying a very expensive electric car with savings (due to their being no financing avaialable). The SUV might be good for twenty years because it won't be used much. The sub-urban landscape still has land in it as well as pretty good irrigation and power infrastructure. I see a lot more adaptation in place with current equipment and, not becasue it's the easy option or preferred choice but because many people will simply have no other option.
"Automobiles and trucks - these don't need to be fuelled at all. We have some recent inventions called "trains" and "trams", which are in many parts of the world entirely electric, and which can thus be powered by renewable energy."
This is far to simple. Sure, many cities have rail and trams but what about inbetween?
My mother lives in a village near an intercity rail line but the nearest station is about 15 miles away. How does she get there for work without her own personal transport? How do they get food and other needs to her when the only shop in the village is a postoffice? and if they do get those needs to her how does she pay for them if shes got no work?
Many cities rail infrastructure systems are already stretched to the limit. Take London, England for example. It has a good metro network which could be used for the transportation of nesassary goods for the population but that network is already in full use just getting commuters in and out of the center for work.
There are different problems for dense and sparsley populated areas when it comes to transport and neither are even recognised as an issue yet by a majority of people.
This problem has long ago been solved by the 80% of the world's population that already lives on 10% of the US/EU energy consumption level.
A shuttle bus runs a couple times a day from the village to the rail. Of course the shuttle bus can operate on a tiny percentage of the energy and materials cost for private automobiles. No rocket science required, and most of the planet does it already. An electric or hybrid or biodiesel bus is much less of a financial/technical challenge than converting thousands of private cars to electric or hydrogen.
That sounds reasonable to me. Switching from personal to public transport is a must. But how do you get round the fact many rail lines are almost at full capacity carrying passengers now and in the future will have to distribute needed goods?
London doesnt have a tram network so one could be built. This would go some way to help alieviate the problem but I still dont see a city of 9 million being supported without a plentiful supply of fossil fuels.
Do you think that passenger rail lines are operating anywhere close to capacity at mid-day, at night and on weekends?
Amsterdam tried delivery of freight by streetcar. Here is the promo video. The effort ran into opposition from the passenger operation which claimed the unused "parking" tracks for its own use and CityCargo went into receivership this year. It is likely that without the bureaucratic power-grab, the effort would be a success and an example.
I've heard a story that it's possible to lay down new tracks. But that could just be a crazy rumour.
Anyway, maybe your mother will end up having to move house. A change to renewably-generated and efficiently-used energy would be a change as profound, I said already, as the Industrial Revolution was. Apparently quite a lot of people had to move house because of the Industrial Revolution.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Edison, you can't electrify that factory, my mother might have to move house!"
Yes, London etc already have overstretched railway systems. So again, perhaps people will have to move. In The Oily Smudge on the Future of the City-State I already pointed out that the day of the mega-city might be soon past. Cities of around 1 million rather than 10 million look more plausible, absent fossil fuels.
So either we become a bit more spread out, or else we have cores of a million or so middle-class, with several million people living in slums rarely travelling anywhere or receiving any goods. We have cities like that already today, as anyone who's ever visited the Third World can tell you.
Hi Kiashu,
Thanks for taking the time to make your analysis - I think this is a very useful debate. I am one of those people who are still struggling with what will be the most likely course of events - and how to prepare for them.
If I were to write the Sci-Am article it would have this framework:
- We have a problem (PO, GW, biosphere destruction, etc)
- The root cause of the problem is overshoot of the planet's carrying capacity (pop, consumption, etc). And, there are many, many other problems (debt, political will, actual resources, etc)
- We need to set some goals and objectives regarding sustainability (pop numbers, GHG numbers, timelines, etc)
- Then we come to possible solutions. Sci-Am solutions, Gail's solutions, Kiashu's solutions and mine all should be evaluated in terms of how well they actually satisfy goals and objectives. Like Kiashu said "We need to transport people and goods" - what is the best mix of alternative ways to do this and still meet our overriding goals for sustainability?
My solutions would start with global family planning; low-tech transportation; localization where sensible; giving electricity the highest priority for energy (much as possible from renewables); using as much technology as possible if it is actually beneficial; etc. My optimal solution set would envision a significant "powerdown" with far fewer people living a far simpler lifestyle (assuming we don't all kill each other first). As many TOD folks have pointed out - wishing for a hi-tech way to sustain BAU is just that: a wish. Mother Nature will be the final judge.
"Like Kiashu said "We need to transport people and goods" "
But we don't NEED to do this on anything remotely like the scale we are doing so now. How much energy is used shipping cookies and other products back and forth across the globe that could just as easily be produced locally?
Hi dohboi,
You are absolutely right - we can't possibly meet realistic goals for sustainability with today's scale of global shipping. That's the whole idea: when it comes to transporting people and goods we should be taking a hard look at the total environmental cost of every current practice. Then, we should focus first on what is essential and second on the most environmentally efficient means of satisfying those essential activities. Sorry if I gave the impression that I was advocating a continuation of all the current transportation practices.
Cookies on the high seas in today's ships would not make the cut.
Beasts like this one burn 1600 gallons of heavy oil and hour while pushing 170,000 tons at 25 knots over the sea. Actually fairly effecient propulsion but the crap that fills the shelves at Wallmart probably fills the ships they power.
That thing is massive..just look at the size of that flywheel
Wonder what kind of battery it would take to power that drive shaft.Lots a luck boys and girls.
They start those big two stroke diesels by injecting compressed air into the cylinders per firing order (either direction). There is a 'small' electric motor that is used to turn the flywheel to position the pistons and shaft as needed when doing maintenance, thus the teeth on the flywheel.
I was being a bit sarcastic with my remark about powering the drive shaft of that engine with a battery.All this talk about battery powered transportation, jolly good luck cranking the propellers that would be attached to that engine with batteries.The only way to sufficiently power a drive shaft/or crank shaft of that size is with massive amounts of fossil fuels or a nuclear/steam driven turbine.Diesel electric designs not withstanding since they of course use fossil fuels.
Whenever I think of (strictly) battery powered transportation - I picture golf carts or little two seat cars.
You threw me with the fly wheel reference, I should have been more nimble as your point was part of the reason I posted that pic. That engine produces 80MW of power. Now my local utility has a 27MW nic-cad battery that only weighs 1500 tons. That diesel weighs over 2500 tons so batteries less than double the weight of the diesel could produce the power needed to turn the prop....for fifteen minutes before needing recharging....
No doubt world shipping is excessive, but big ships with big engines are the most efficient bulk carriers man has yet devised.
Critical, basic fact.
Sticking to the basic facts always helps. But facts are easily drowned out by the non-verbal advertising copy that says, 'don't worry, be happy, keep on driving your [100,000 watt] car, and replacing your laptop every other year'. That same Scientific American issue had an article on how to grow food -- indoors, in skyscrapers. I particularly liked the advertising artist's touch of a photocell on top of a 60 story hydroponic food tower. That photocell would probably be big enough to power and cool the CEO's penthouse office.
I suppose it will always be too late to change in time.
Not even the power to weight ratio is as good:
80,000,000 watts/5,000,000lbs. - Deisel engine.
relative equivalent output for nickel cadmium battery -
81,000,000 watts/9,000,000lbs. gross weight of batteries
Let alone how long the battery can operate at optimum performance.Perhaps a 4000 mile long extension cord would help.
But you know, perhaps you could possibly transmit a current without a transmission line and have a receiver on the remote battery pick up the current - much in the sameway a radio can receive radio frequencies.Something like that would surely have effects on biological life though, it is not safe to live near high voltage power lines due to the electromagnetic fields they produce.If you had to work near a battery receiving transmitted power like that it would probably be equivalent to working (in) a microwave oven....scratch that.
darn I just clicked reply without switching browsers and all my 'new' highlight will be gone...I hate when I do that
Wireless power transmission capability could come down the pike, maybe even finding some way to encapsulate the magnetic fields will reveal itself (that might be even a push for sci-fi), oh shucks we have to get through the bottleneck on the near horizon first.
Us oldsters do like sci-fi, the original hokey "Star Trek" popped on our screens only a couple years after we nearly incinerated ourselves with the Cuba thing. As long as I'm on a far flung tangent including TV sci-fi and Kennedy here is an odd (at the very least odd to be aware of) historical fact about 'Dr. Who.' at the very same time Britain was viewing the very first episode of 'Dr. Who' Lyndon Johnson was in the Whitehouse for the viewing of JFK's body...segue way to phone booth flying through cosmos/play theme.... ?-)
Try control-clicking the Reply link to open a new tab; works for me.
That is easier, if this old dog can learn a new trick, thanks
One trick that's not obvious: watch out for the "Flag" link, because it executes Javascript which reloads the page (and clears all your [new] flags). The safe way to use it is to load the comment subthread (multi-balloon link after the time stamp) in a new tab and flag it from there.
I mention this now because this thread has one of the major spreaders of teh stooopid (willful ignorance) making comments, and removing the comments by flagging is far less disruptive than posting rebuttals which just get angry flaming responses.
I like this concept of a Sailboat that can recharge it's batteries while under sail by spinning it's props like regenerative braking in a hybrid automobile. This seems to be pretty new technology and according to the author it is still not quite been put to a real world test as far as its long term reliability. Still a pretty cool idea all in all. I wonder if the concept could scale to large ships as well?
http://www.matternetwork.com/2006/12/diesel-electric-hybrid-yachts-set.cfm
Wind and solar generators should be a no brainer addition to this boat and the author doesn't understand why they are not standard. Neither do I.
Very cool. The weight/space constraints of course will always have to be taken into account. I imagine a diesel would still be considered standard safety gear even if a two hour battery/electric motor system were in place. But ballast is important. Battery systems could be integrated nicely into many designs. That of course would add complexity, which is not always a good thing at sea, but it also adds redundancy-a very nice companion on a vessel.
The 80 MW model is the 14-cylinder; the one in the pic appears to be the straight 6, which produces less than half that much.
I think you are correct, looking at it a little closer. Several different models are clumped on most of the pages with pictures. This does look about square as well which should have clued me right away. None the less, I thought is was amazing something this size was being trucked complete rather than assembled on board in place, any shots of how the shipyard would deal with such out there? It would seem the 14 cyl model would never travel this way.
Just how much forest would it take to make the charcoal for the container ship you propose? ?-)
These big 2-stroke engines can convert 52 percent of the energy of the fuel to mechanical energy !!
Direct-carbon fuel cells can hit 80%, and 70% appears quite practical. Charcoal-electric container ship, anyone?
The transmission line issue isn't a minor point that can be dismissed by simply noting that we already have a lot of power lines. It's a killer.
The average distance that power is transmitted, from power plant to consumer, is currently somewhere in the range of 10 - 20 miles. Under the WWS plan as proposed, the average distance would have to increase to something more like 200 - 400 miles. That's partly due to the fact that the best areas for wind and solar farms are far from the cities where the power is consumed. But more than that, it's due to reliance on geographical supply averaging. "The wind isn't blowing around here at the moment, but hey, there's a surplus over in Nebraska. We'll just import 20 GW or so of their surplus."
A twenty-fold increase in the average transmission distance translates to perhaps a 50-fold increase in the total mass of conductors in the transmission grid. (You can't pin a firm number on it, because it depends on how much of the generated power you're willing to lose in transmission. A mere 20-fold increase would preserve the same rate of loss per mile, but that would mean a 20-fold increase in total losses.) Considering how difficult it is to acquire right-of-way and permitting for even a single new high voltage transmission line in this country, does anybody seriously suggest that we could manage a 50-fold increase in transmission lines over the next 20 years?
Of course, the transmission problem could be mitigated -- at great cost -- by massive use of energy storage systems. The fact that the article's authors fail to even consider that option is just more evidence that they don't know beans about what they're writing about.
Not here in Australia. 10-20 miles (you obviously made the figure up from pure guesswork, but let's take it seriously for the moment) would put our brown-coal-burning Hazelwood power station in the inner suburbs here in Melbourne. Which would be unpopular to say the least. In fact it's about 100 miles from Melbourne. We've not been bankrupted by those long power lines yet.
You seem to imagine that power stations must necessarily occupy a lot of land area, and so must be far from cities. Whereas in fact we can (and already do) fit grid-connected solar panels to supply a frugal use of home electricity on about 6m2 of roof; a profligate (current average) use of electricity would take 18m2. With the average new home in Australia being 220m2, with at least one-quarter this area suitable for receiving solar power, space isn't a problem.
That's domestic use. Commercial and industrial buildings often have large roof space. There are many of 1,000-2,000m2 in my suburb, which is home to a bit of light industry.
Long high tension power lines already take up swathes of urban land here. Put them underground and there'd be space for quite a few wind turbines.
Geothermal power just has to go wherever the heat is, regardless of a city being there or not.
And so on. You just have to use your imagination a bit. Or even just google. The distance isn't an issue, because it's not as great as you think, and anyway lots of countries already do this.
I know the US transmission system was built relatively early, and was based on the idea that each city or town would supply its own electricity. There were a few extra lines between cities, but primarily for use in a case of an emergency.
I know that Jason Makanski in Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What it Means to You says that the US has a "third world grid". The way the electrical system is currently organized, no one really has responsibility for the grid (except for little pieces). Spending on the grid has been declining since 1975.
I wrote a post in May 2008 called The US Electric Grid: Will it be our undoing. An excerpt:
The figure of 10 - 20 miles is from a conversation with a district manager for the ISO for northern California (including San Francisco and the SF bay region). He didn't offer a more specific estimate, but his job involved knowing exactly where all power plants are located and how much each could produce and when. He was responsible for dispatch operations. The context was a session on energy storage systems before the California Energy Commission in Sacramento. The specific topic we were talking about was the headaches caused by having to accommodate erratic output from regional wind farms.
Tell me, if I said that the average height for Caucasion males is 5' 11" (which is a figure I made up from guesswork), would you reply, "Not so! I know a fellow who's 6 foot eight"?
This business of average distance from power source to load is quite complex, and even talking about it in terms of a simple average is a simplification that can be misleading. Obviously there are a great many instances of power plants that are located 100 miles or more from their major load centers. But there are a lot more that are tucked away near old industrial areas of cities. They're typically smaller plants (~100 mW) and often gas-fired rather than coal. While I don't know Melbourne at all, I'd be willing to bet that there are half a dozen power plants within its metropolitan area, and that the Hazelwood power that you mention supplies less than a third of the total power consumed in the Melbourne area.
It's easy to import small amounts of power over long distances ("small", in this context, meaning less than a few hundred mW) but losses increase with the square of the current. Long distance transmission is used mostly for contingency supply and load balancing at the margins. I don't know the actual figure, but I know that the total kWhrs transmitted more than 100 miles in the US is "tiny", compared to the total of wWhrs consumed.
I don't imagine that at all. I was commenting on the SciAm article, whose authors specifically discounted rooftop solar because it was twice as costly as large scale solar farms. Completely ignoring the issue of transmission.
In fact, I believe that the only way that a WWS economy could be made viable would be to rely heavily on very local resources. High efficiency buildings with high efficiency lighting, solar hot water, appliances designed to operate as much as possible from "as available" power, and distributed energy storage for nightime power supply. That's not the world the SciAm article was describing, however.
Roger, it looks like you're labouring under the illusion that the US power grid is typical in world terms. It's not. It's an example of the early-adopter syndrome. Because the US was the first country to be electrified on a large scale, and also probably because of the structure of government and commerce, power plants were built close to consumers.
In other places, this varies widely, depending on electricity generation sources, and it's common for the bulk of electricity to be generated hundreds of miles from where most of it is consumed. This requires extra investment, and there is transmission loss, but neither is a show-stopper, unless you forget to plan for it.
You may be right about the state of power grids in US vs. the rest of the world. But I wan't commenting on the rest of the world; I was commenting about the shift to 100% renewables, coming mainly from wind and solar farms, that the SciAm article claimed was feasible for the US.
The same idea is central to Al Gore's "Repower America" program. Both plans assume little change in total power consumption, and both are non-starters (IMO) because they ignore the issue of power transmission. Their proponents don't realize that they are talking order of magnitude increases in the flow of power over long distances. They implicitly assume that power transmission is free, or at least "down in the noise" in terms of costs.
For the record, I'm not saying that these hairbrained schemes are technically impossible; merely stupid. In principle, we could build the transmission infrastructure to make them feasible. But it would involve one hell of a lot more than using information technology and modest line and transformer upgrades to make the grid "smart". It would ultimately exceed the effort of building all the wind and solar power farms.