A Conversation on Energy Issues
Posted by Robert Rapier on December 21, 2006 - 1:02pm
First of all, let me introduce Jerry. He is a Ph.D. chemist that I met 11 years ago when we both worked on butanol research and technical support for Celanese Chemicals. While I was certainly aware of Peak Oil (I had mentioned it in my graduate thesis), Jerry was the first person who convinced me that the smooth transition to biofuels that I envisioned at that time was highly questionable, and that things might not turn out so well. Jerry is also the father of Ana Unruh Cohen, the Director of Environmental Policy at the Center for American Progress. Ana previously wrote a guest essay on Prop 87 here. Jerry makes around 300 contacts a year with government officials (congress, federal agencies, etc.) in his role as an advocate. Jerry is a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Audubon Society, Wilderness Society, American Solar Energy Society, and a supporter of Worldwatch. He is also a member of the Technical Advisory Group for Colorado Springs Utilities which is tasked with looking at renewables and demand-side management. He lives in a solar rammed earth tire house (pictures can be seen here) in the Rocky Mountains west of Colorado Springs with his wife Diana.
Jerry is denoted in this essay as JU and I am obviously RR. If you want to discuss energy or environmental issues with Jerry (he especially likes to talk about his experiences with solar energy) he can be contacted at jerryunruh42@msn.com.
On Peak Oil
RR: Jerry, you are probably aware that you were my first major Peak Oil influence. You asked me what we were going to do when oil production peaks, and I remember naively saying "Switch to ethanol." You laughed over that.
JU: Yeah, I remember that.
RR: So, when is world oil production going to peak?
JU: We may be at peak right now, but I would say definitely within 10 years.
RR: So, what will the world look like 30 years from now?
JU: If we used wisdom, we could potentially transition from fossil fuels. We could have more livable cities, public transports, electricity from renewable sources powering PHEVs, and household electricity being produced by a combination of solar power and stationary hydrogen. However, it is not clear that we have the wisdom, in which case I see more wars and widespread starvation.
RR: Speaking of wars, tell me your views of the Iraq War.
JU: I get so upset talking about it. I was against it before we ever went in, but look at where we are now. All of those lives lost and all of that money spent on securing oil supplies. The recently released Iraq Study Group Report suggested that this war may ultimately cost $2 trillion. $2 trillion! Do you know what could have been done with $2 trillion? You could have put solar panels on 40% of the homes in the U.S. Imagine the greenhouse gas reduction from that. Imagine the energy security. Instead, we spent it to go to war to protect our oil supplies.
RR: How do you think the U.S. will fare after peak oil?
JU: I think the Northeast is pretty well-positioned. They have many walkable cities and public transport is good. They also have good water and agricultural resources. I think the West is in a bit more trouble. I don't know what California is going to do, because they are so car-dependent. Actually, California does pretty well with per capita energy usage. They just have too many "per capitas."
RR: Jim Kunstler made that same case in The Long Emergency - that the Northeast was better positioned than most places, and that the West is in trouble. By the way, have you read Kunstler?
JU: No, not yet. But he is on my list.
(Incidentally, the books in Jerry's library included Jared Diamond's Collapse, Lester Brown's Plan B 2.0 and Eco-Economy, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, Joel Cohen's How Many People Can the Earth Support?, Garrett Hardin's Living Within Limits, Travis Bradford's Solar Revolution, Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers, and Paul Ehrlich's Extinction. Jerry also informed me that he has given away several copies of Plan B 2.0 to government officials.)
RR: You also believe that some sort of hydrogen economy can supplement solar?
JU: Not a hydrogen economy as it is often presented. I don't believe that we will drive around in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. But I believe that excess solar can be used to electrolyze water and produce hydrogen, and then that hydrogen can be used to produce supplemental electricity in a combined-cycle turbine. The electricity produced can be used to run PHEVs.
RR: I am also a big fan of the potential of PHEVs driven by wind and solar power, but hadn't thought much about a hydrogen tie-in. That would actually be a great way to supply some electricity at night. But do you think solar is practical for everyone, given the implications of people operating their own electrical systems and having to maintain their own batteries?
JU: Ideally, you would have local distribution stations in which the solar power was fed into by the homes in the region. This would also be where the hydrogen was produced. The local stations would be responsible for maintaining the integrity of the system.
RR: I hear what you are saying, and agree that this would do wonders for both Global Warming and Peak Oil mitigation. But then I think back to the comments I made about Al Gore after we watched An Inconvenient Truth. The facts may be incontrovertible. The logic may be crystal clear. The solution may be staring us right in the face. Now, trace out the path for implementing the plan. That is the disconnect I see here. You listen to Al Gore and you think "It is obvious that something must be done." But I look at the politics and wonder how we will get it done.
JU: There are solutions, and some are relatively clear. But again I am not sure we have the collective wisdom to make the transition.
On Biomass as an Alternative
RR: I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the potential for biomass to mitigate peak oil and global warming. On the one hand, I love the potential of biomass gasification, and I think biodiesel and potentially butanol make sense in some situations. On the other hand, I hate what we are doing with corn ethanol in this country. However, you have a different take on the biomass issue.
JU: Here is my problem with biomass. The net primary productivity of some of the most efficient ecological systems in the world is at best approximately 1% capture of solar insolation. Many areas - the forested regions of the West, for instance - are much lower at 0.2% or so. Corn is about 0.5%, but that includes fossil fuel inputs from fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, etc. Of course then if you are going to turn that biomass into biofuels, there are inputs into that process that lower the net capture. While there may be some limited applications in which such poor efficiencies are justified, in general this is a very inefficient way of capturing solar energy.
Contrast this with our solar panels, which convert approximately 15% of the sun's energy into electricity. That is orders of magnitude better than the biomass route. We have numerous rooftops that could have solar panels setting on top of them. There are no issues with soil depletion, and we don't have to worry about planting great swaths of monoculture crops, nor of food competing with fuel. Of course with biomass you can produce a liquid fuel instead of electricity, but there is simply no reason that we can't adopt much higher levels of PHEVs instead of continuing to rely on the internal combustion engine as our primary means of transport. And note that this is with present commercial solar technology. Spectrolab just produced some solar cells with an efficiency of over 40%. Biomass simply can't compete with numbers like that, and it never will.
RR: OK, there are definitely some points there that I haven't considered. The net primary productivity argument, specifically. While I have heard passing mention of this, I have never set out to calculate the potential of biomass from first principles like net primary productivity. Sounds like something I should work on, because this would be a pretty strong argument against biomass and in favor of solar energy.
On Big Oil
RR: So, first of all I have to know if Ana (Jerry's daughter, and a supporter of Prop 87) is ticked off at me over my Prop 87 essays.
JU: Well, she certainly wasn't happy with the way the vote went, but I don't think she is upset with you. In fact, she told me that she has defended you many times when people said "Why are you taking that guy seriously? He works for an oil company!" She would tell them "No, he is very serious and he cares a lot about energy policy."
RR: You can't imagine how often I get that reaction. A lot of people are willing to completely dismiss my opinion because I work for an oil company.
JU: No, I can believe that. The same thing frequently happened to me when I worked for a chemical company.
RR: What really bugs me is that people are so incredibly dependent on petroleum for so many things, and they loathe the companies supplying that product to them.
JU: Of course most people are unaware of the extent of their dependence on petroleum. Look at the clothes we are wearing. They came from oil. Look at the snowshoes we are wearing. They came from oil. But people feel that when ExxonMobil is making $37 billion and they are paying $3/gallon for gasoline - which should be $5/gallon in my opinion anyway - that something needs to be done about that. Those profits simply look ridiculous.
RR: But you know that our profit margins are only about average for all industries. We make about 10% on sales. Profits are high because the companies are huge.
JU: It doesn't matter. Your profit margins could be 2% or 20%. The perception people have is that they are being cheated, and those are the consequences you will have to live with as they lobby their representatives for relief.
RR: That's on my mind a lot, actually. I have been investing a lot of my money into energy, because I think it will do well even in a post-peak world. People will still demand energy, and it is going to be very expensive. Oil companies should do well. But what is the government going to do when gasoline is $6/gallon, and ExxonMobil makes $100 billion? There is a risk there, and I imagine government is going to be very hostile to Big Oil in a post-peak world.
JU: One of the reasons for your public relations problem is that oil companies have been too cozy with this administration. Look at Cheney's energy task force. They wouldn't release the proceedings. This leaves the impression that Big Oil is getting special favors and benefiting from closed-door deals.
What you really need to do is be proactive. If you guys would get behind a revenue-neutral fossil fuels tax - and I don't mean just pay lip service to the idea - then people might start to think you were serious about dealing with issues like Peak Oil and climate change. You (personally) say the right things. Your ideals are good. But those of your industry are questionable. You could also give up some of those subsidies. Do you really need subsidies?
RR: I agree that oil companies don't need subsidies. In fact, 4 out of the 5 CEOs who testified after Katrina said that they don't need subsidies. But I want to point out a couple of things. First, eliminating the direct subsidies would amount to only a nickel a gallon or so. Those subsidies spread across all of the diesel and gasoline we use amount to very little per gallon. I am not defending the subsidies, I am just saying that the effect will be small and more needs to be done like a direct fossil-fuels tax. But the other thing is that oil companies have not even requested some of these subsidies. Some subsidies are put in place because congress wants the oil companies to do certain things; things like drill in a particular location. So, even though oil companies might never even take advantage of this, it gets counted as a subsidy.
JU: Again, it doesn't matter. It would improve public perception if you were to publicly announce that you were giving up all subsidies. Besides that, $6 billion or $10 billion might not mean much to Big Oil, but if those subsidies were redirected to alternatives, it could really accelerate their market penetration. In fact, just getting rid of the oil subsidies would level the playing field for alternatives and allow them to compete head to head with oil.
Right now it appears to the public that the government is in collusion with Big Oil. If you want to change this perception, and the perception that people have of Big Oil, you need to make some serious policy changes. You can only do this by being very serious about solving some of these major issues facing us. Whitewashing will not do it.
RR: I do believe that those who think that Big Oil is going to fade away after oil production peaks are kidding themselves. They have enough cash on hand to get into any energy business that looks promising. I note that 2 of your solar panels were produced by Shell Solar.
JU: I think companies like Shell and BP - despite their recent problems - are positioning themselves to be leaders as oil production depletes. ExxonMobil just doesn't seem to care, and could end up going the way of General Motors.
RR: Speaking of the government and Big Oil, what do you think the new Democratic congress is going to do differently?
JU: Well, first off I think there will be less pressure to drill in environmentally sensitive locations. I think we have a real shot at some climate change legislation, but I also expect Bush to start using his veto power with more regularity. I hope to see higher efficiency standards, higher CAFE standards, and more support for renewables. One wild card is the greenhouse gas case before the Supreme Court. It appears to me that the language is clear that the EPA could and should regulate GHGs. I am cautiously optimistic that the Supreme Court will vote in favor, and this could make a real impact in our fight against Global Warming.
The final section contains information that Jerry put together on their house. Again, feel free to contact Jerry for more detailed information.
Rammed Earth Tire House - Owners/Builders: Diana and Jerry Unruh
(Updated: August 31, 2006)Structural Information
Footprint = 2350 sq ft; Actual floor space = 1950 sq ft.
950 tires (225x75x15) packed with decomposed granite from site.
Total of about 750,000 lbs of dirt used in tires and for interior adobe walls.
Framing: 2x6 studs with double studding in east and west walls and above tire shell.
Roof: Standing seam metal roof with ice and water shield underneath; 1to12 pitch.
Insulation: R-38 in ceiling; R-42 in side walls, R-26 in rear wall.
Windows: double pane with 6 operable 3.5'X2' windows; total window area on South-facing side of house is approximately 410 sq ft.
Skylights: four operable 4'X4', and one operable 2'X2'.
Floor: ceramic tile for heat absorption.Heating
House is passively solar heated with energy stored in thermal mass of tire walls. About 90% of heat comes from solar. Supplemental heat is a propane gas-log stove. For supplemental heating we use about 200 gallon of propane/yr (~ equal to two-third cord of wood or about 185 units (100 cu ft) of natural gas)
Electricity ("off-the-grid")
All electricity is from photovoltaics (1.52 kW) with energy storage in batteries (twelve 350 amp-hr; 1,050 amp-hr storage at 24 volts). The system is 24 volts with all electricity being converted to ac via a Trace 4024 inverter. All lighting is compact fluorescent bulbs. The refrigerator (main power consumer) is a 21 cu ft energy star Amana. Otherwise all electrical devices are conventional, but we turn off "phantom" loads when necessary. In order to run the 240 volt well pump we have a transformer which is wired directly to the float switch on the 500 gallon spherical cistern so that the transformer is only on when the well pump is running. Our average consumption is approximately 5.0 kWh/day. No generator -Backup is from the grid. In almost 6 years we have used only 71 kWh from the grid (most of this consumption has been around the Christmas/New Years holidays when the children and their families have been here).
Propane
Other than the supplemental heating stove, propane is used to heat water, cook, and dry clothes: Water heater - Aquastar 125X LP tankless (on demand); Range - GE profile; Clothes dryer - Frigidaire LP. Propane consumption for these three appliances is ~ 0.35 gallon/day (125 gallons/year), of which about 0.15 gallon/day is for water heating. New addition: Single point electric water heater under kitchen sink; so either electricity (~0.5 kWh/day) or propane can be used.
Summary
Our house approaches net zero energy, when electrical production is subtracted from propane consumption. Our net propane consumption is approximately 0.4 gal/day (gross is 0.923 gal/day). Our net carbon dioxide production is approximately 1.5 kg/day while the average household production in Colorado Springs is > 40kg/day. We plan to reduce heat loss from windows with translucent coverings so that net zero energy is more closely approached. Our net household energy consumption is approximately 0.75 Btu/sq ft-hr. For comparison, the maximum energy consumption for an ultra low energy commercial building designation from LEED is 3.4 Btu/sq ft-hr.
Appendix - Calculation of Heat Rate and CO2 Emissions for Colorado Springs UtilitiesAssumptions
- Lower heating value used for propane calculations
- One gallon of propane weighs 4.3 lbs and yields 86,012 Btu
- One gallon of propane produces 12.9 lbs (= 5.86 kg) CO2
- Our gross consumption of propane is 0.92 gal/day = 79,130 Btu/day
- Our gross CO 2 production is 5.45 kg/day
- Efficiency of coal and peaking natural gas is 32% = heat rate of 10,633 Btu/kWh
- Lower heating value for natural gas is 913 Btu/cu ft & contains 1.2 g-mole/cu ft
- For coal at 32% efficiency, 1.01 kg CO2 produced/kWh = 1.01 metric ton/MWh
- For nat. gas at 32% efficiency, 0.56 kg CO2 produced/kWh = 0.56 metric ton/MWh
- Combined cycle natural gas efficiency is 45.2% = heat rate of 7,540Btu/kWh
- For combined cycle natural gas, 0.40 kg CO2 produced/KWh = 0.40 metric ton/MWh
- Heat rate and CO2 production for hydro and wind are both zero
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Cheers and Happy Holidays from The Oil Drum!
Hello Robert, I appreciate your sharing your work, as always, and expanding the circle your friendship to include us, by interviewing Jerry.
My first question is one of clarification: (I skimmed down and notice that Alan also responded to this, which I hope to get to...time permitting):
"First, eliminating the direct subsidies would amount to only a nickel a gallon or so. Those subsidies spread across all of the diesel and gasoline we use amount to very little per gallon. I am not defending the subsidies, I am just saying that the effect will be small and more needs to be done like a direct fossil-fuels tax."
Could you possibly explain a little more? (And apologies in advance, if I have not understood your views from previous posts.)
My questions are along these lines:
1) By referring to the "nickel or so", do you mean that you believe the benefit of any kind of monetary "fixing", for example, taxes, or subsidies, comes in...where, exactly? Let me try again. Okay, you are saying that eliminating subsidies "only amounts to..." X. (Whatever.)
What is the benefit you would be aiming for as an end goal, in any case? I read your sentence as though you are saying: "Eliminating subsidies is not enough..."
Okay, so my question is: Enough on the road to...what, exactly?
Do you see my point, here? (I'm being completely sincere, BTW.) Are you saying that the end goal you envision is less consumption by the gasoline-buying public? And, across the board - ?
Or, eg.: "Robert's Hypothetical Goal: Americans purchase less gasoline. Strategy: Make gasoline more expensive. How do subsidies fit in? Not much, one way or the other." Would this be a fair reading of this first sentence?
2) Another question: How does the OC profit margin you speak of (I believe you said it's about 10%) compare to the subsidy, when translated to the same "price per gallon" terms?
3) If this is "the goal" or "Goal #1", then could you perhaps make it a little more specific; and also add specificity in terms of elements of the strategy? Example: Goal: US gasoline consumption cut by 10% per year. Strategy: This could be achieved by X.
4) And, can this goal stand alone? Or, must it be accompanied by contingent goals?
5) I have further questions: perhaps to take up later. Say, if the "Goal #1: lower gasoline consumption", on the difference in impact of each strategy (subsidy, tax) an each stakeholder, OCs, consumers, and subsets of consumers - i.e,. households, businessnes, etc.) And, perhaps first, a question: Can the goal be achieved by other means equally valid? For example, if there were a 50 MPH speed limit, this might be equal to X % lower consumption...(?)
There was a post recently that stated that direct subsidies to oil and gas companies in the latest energy bill were $6 billion. If you simply spread that across the more than 300 billion gallons of oil we use each year in this country, you get a subsidy only amounting to $0.02/gallon. So, the point is that taking direct subsidies away certainly won't have much impact.
Furthermore, everything that gets counted as a subsidy is not necessarily being utilized as a subsidy. If the energy bill allowed for $6 billion, that doesn't mean oil companies will take advantage if it's not in their best interest.
I read your sentence as though you are saying: "Eliminating subsidies is not enough..."
Okay, so my question is: Enough on the road to...what, exactly?
Enough to bite into our consumption and to make alternatives seriously competitive.
Another question: How does the OC profit margin you speak of (I believe you said it's about 10%) compare to the subsidy, when translated to the same "price per gallon" terms?
Direct OC profit on a gallon of gas is probably in the $0.20/gal range. If they own the stations, they also get some markup there.
If this is "the goal" or "Goal #1", then could you perhaps make it a little more specific; and also add specificity in terms of elements of the strategy? Example: Goal: US gasoline consumption cut by 10% per year. Strategy: This could be achieved by X.
The goal has to be more than 10%. Nature will make that cut for us if we don't. How high gas taxes would have to go to achieve that, I don't know.
For example, if there were a 50 MPH speed limit, this might be equal to X % lower consumption...(?)
Sure, and I have advocated lowering speed limits.
Jerry
I've been noticing all my adult life that the oil companies have terrible public relations, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps its anger that we have made the rest of the modern world dependent, maybe its the ham-handed arrogance of many of our public figure, maybe just sheer envy of wealth. It seems too easy to the rest of humanity. API (American Petroleum Institute) has started raising money for a big public relations campaign, but they are the lobbyists for big oil, not the independents.
Your friend Jerry Unruh's suggestion, that oil companies take a proactive stance to fund alternatives and get new revenue nuetral taxes to support alternatives, is excellent. I heard an opinion today from my coffee drinking bunc at the local cafe, that they would support a dollar a gallon tax just to even out gasoline prices,the uncertainty is making it hard to plan.
Unfortunately Nancy Pelosi is firmly in favor of a "windfall profits" tax. The last time this was tried it discouraged redevelopment of old oil fields, and penalised royalty owners and independent operators more than the majors, because the majors shifted their production overseas. Plus, it moved the independents and royalty owners to the Republican party, where many remain. It was a domestic disaster, and if we repeat it we're crazy
I would support limiting depletion allowance to deplete actual cash costs, or covering new investment in domestic production or alternative energy production only. I'd support a big import tax.
I do not believe in therapy for drug addicts that tries to make more drugs available for cheap until they decide to sober up. Neither does anyone who works with drug addicts in the real world.
"Once peak hits, we are in a race to the bottom of the oil supply..."
Or are we? I do not see a problem to reduce our oil dependence in a world where one can buy 13mpg cars as well as 50+mpg cars. The consumer choses his model and then has to live with the consequences of expensive gas. They can pay anywhere from one times the bill to four times the bill. Once PO hits more people will chose more wisely.
"As Stuart's VMT discussions demonstrate, the rate at which we can expect normal turnover runs less than the most reasonable estimates of overall decline rates thus the decline rate exceeds conversion rate, stranding more and more of society in an unsustainable situation."
There is nothing unsustainable about sharing a ride or taking the bus. I have been doing it all my life. I live, I thrive. I just don't whine about it.
"Discouraging remaining oil production simply makes that bad situation even worse"
Discouraging exploitation now makes the situation much better ten years from now. If you have a limited amount of cake and you are afraid to be out of cake tomorrow, what would you do... eat more cake today... or leave some over for later?
GreyZone... your logic does not make sense. Please think about it again.
Soon enough we'll see the equivalent of a huge carbon tax, whether it's coming out of our hides in the form of powerful hurricanes or is going to the oil barrons makes little difference. We won't be able to tweak and loosen that if we find that it's a little too sudden to cope with.
If we do have an economic collapse, you can crunch all the optimistic numbers you want and it won't decrease the millions of homeless on the streets or bankrupted people. Starting an economy over was difficult after 1929. With a large energy deficit it would likely be an order of magnitude more difficult.
"Once peak hits, we are in a race to the bottom of the oil supply - can we transition society over to alternatives before the drop in supplies causes disruptions so large that it destroys society itself?"
Q: What do you see as the ideal "alternatives", and how would you incorporate the twin problems of 1) "Jeavons" - or, what I call "need to conserve lest increased consumption overwhelm 'technofix'" and 2) population, (same reason) - ?...into your "alternatives"?
Admittedly some of them, like the Saud family, buy lots of US bonds with the money. That means that your taxes are going to pay interest to slave owning aristocrats who fund terrorists, and this has been happening for years. The only good historical comparison is the nobility in pre-revolutionary France who collected taxes but paid none.
And, pray tell , do you suggest we get out of this situation. We're like junkies slobbering for a fix. An oil cut-off would rapidly throw the United States into a complete economic convulsion, just as too rapid heroin withdrawel killed Jerry Garcia.
So think about it. Domestic production is like methadone for the United States. It will ease the symptons while we taper off. Remember what George Bush said, as he left the room with a sulpherous smell "We are addicted to oil". .
Just asking...
And, if you believe Freddie Hutter, it will be 190 years before the oil runs out. Wonder what kind of mushrooms he's eating in the woods of the Yukon? He probably prays for global warming!
At any rate, it won't be in anyone's lifetime, although in another 20 or 30 years it won't be used as transportation in anything but antiques and toys. We're definitely ending the cheap oil era in less than 10 years, probably 2 years if I'm reading the signs correctly.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Cornucopian. But we're not going to produce enough domestic oil cheap enough to do more than ease the transition, but I see that as worth doing.
And we all know you can't get to it economically. So what is the deal? Are you hoping to drive mine shafts all the way down to the remaining oil?
"And since I'm 55 and diabetic, I expect to be amoung the dead."
I guess you want me to take your agument as that of a desperate person who's got nothing to lose? That wouldn't make your argument any better... it simply would make you a desperate person. Sorry Bob... you got to do better than that.
"And, if you believe Freddie Hutter, it will be 190 years before the oil runs out."
Why would I believe that? Because "Freddie" is a cute name? Please...
"Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Cornucopian. But we're not going to produce enough domestic oil cheap enough to do more than ease the transition, but I see that as worth doing."
Cheap oil is exactly the source of the problem. It does not matter how long you can keep it cheap... people will not change just because you tell them that it will be extra pricy two years from now. The longer oil stays cheap, the harder the landing will be. You of all men should know that. It would be far better for the US to limit production at home right now, drive global prices up and force everyone to conserve. Then, ten years from now when the real crunch hits, we would not only need less, but we would have more left over, globally and especially domestically.
I agree with this assessment, but it's very uncertain.
If the crunch was going to hit in two years, as alluded to by OMBob, could you imagine that the courses of action you have suggested would greatly magnify the crunch, and thus we shouldn't do them?
:-)
The USA is in huge financial trouble because of our profligate ways. Money spent drilling and producing oil wells and reentering oil wells here mostly stays here, is taxed here and provides good, well-paying, honest, productive work for Americans.They spend it in the United States, it has a multiplier effect in the economy making a real product that people need. And that should be obvious.
As far as the economics, oil has always been a crap shoot. But many old fields were abandned with the wells making 10 or 20 bbl/day per well, just the wells weren't good enough to make a profit at low prices. This is particularly true of fields abandoned about 1932-1933 when oil fell from $100 a bbl to 10 cents a barrel.In lots of fields wells were abandoned making a 20% oil cut because of water disposal costs. In many fields the wells were overproduced and coned, and horizontal wells or infill drilling can profitably restore production. Few fields were waterflooded before 1960, and virtually none were flooded with CO2. Sure, its going to cost a lot per barrel to reenter and produce these wells, but its a hell of a lot cheaper than the $500,000 per barrel per day that Shell is spending on tar production in Canada, plus lifting costs, waste disposal costs and refining costs.
I can not look at either problem from my own perspective. I simply can't. Maybe you can and maybe the majority of Americans can, for now, but that does not concern my consciouns.
I think we agree that America has lived beyond its limits. But that is not some diffuse entities fault but our own. We are the only ones who can fix it. And we won't fix it by drilling a few more holes into Earth's crust. The little extra oil we will get from that won't even get you through retirement, far less me and to the kids who are celebrating their first conscious Christmas it won't mean as little as another number in a history book they will probably never read. And sadly enough, even a diabatic these days has all the chances in the world to live longer than the tiny amount of time that your proposed drilling fix can buy us.
I am not talking about Shell having the solution by mining tar. That is just another road we shouldn't bother going down. The richest oil fields in the world right now are in the tanks of our cars. We could have easily stretched the world's oil twofold if we had wanted to. We missed that opportunity. We are missing the last chance to stretch what is left by a third, right now.
The consequences will not be as dire as they will be rather simple. Oil will go to $100 or $120 a barrel and the US government will start raising the gas tax to stop the country from bleeding to death. Either that or the country will bleed to death... it will be black blood but the results will be all the same.
Besides doubling the price of gas by taxing the shit out of it, shutting in our currently producing oil wells therebye putting honest hardworking people out of work like oilmanbob, and shutting down the oil sands production in Canada - do you have any ideas that are realistic?
I like your idea of "steps". Have you given much thought to a "list" of first steps, and if so, could you share?
Personally, my view was that "addiction" was not the best metaphor...perhaps came from the speaker's experience. One can (and people do) live without addictive substances. Although people can use what would otherwise be more-or-less nutritional substances as addictions (I suppose both "over-" and "under-" eating can be viewed this way as well), the primacy of oil is more closely tied to basic survival (food and water), on the individual level, even in the US.
If one wants to use the "addiction" analogy, my suggestion is to take a look at the work of people like Lance Dodes, MD (author, The Heart of Addiction) and others, who put aside oft-repeated conventions and began a fresh exploration. Dodes found the first impulse (in any particular decision to act in line w. the addiction in place) was to respond to an inner feeling of helplessness or lack of control. http://www.amazon.com/Heart-Addiction-Understanding-Alcoholism-Behaviors/dp/0060198117
consider for example the junkie who makes damaging choices to feed his or her particular "habit" and maybe it is not a "physical addiction" at all but only "psychological addiction" in any case it think the metaphor has merit and maybe the "solution" contains a similar metaphor
we may not be able to achieve a 100% cure and different strokes for different folks maybe cold turkey will work for some maybe a gradual weaning will work for some and maybe an alternative addiction will work ............. on and on thanks for the link
The difference between addiction and overshoot is that when remove an addicted substance, you have withdrawal symptoms, but when overshoot removes an available resource, you have death.
I appreciate your questions. In all sincerity, what are your ideas?
The Oil companies are in a similar position to the Railroad barons of old.
Also in general the ice/icebox salesman did not become the refrigerator salesman.
I'd much rather see properly funded small companies grow to be our next energy provides than to see big oil control the area.
Big Oil is that last place I'd look for real alternative energy solutions.
Instead of charging oil companies I think a better approach is to first eliminate all subsidies for the current oil infrastructure and to funnel all tax monies from the oil companies into alternative energy and also of course provide plenty of incentives. Oil companies should be barred from having a controlling interest in alternative energy companies that receive subsidies. So it they want to play the get no help.
And we should remove support for federal highway funding asap. This is probably the biggest and simplest change we need to make to move away from automobiles if we quit subsidizing road construction we can and will convert from automobiles.
I follow your thinking with interest.
"Instead of charging oil companies I think a better approach is to first eliminate all subsidies for the current oil infrastructure and to funnel all tax monies from the oil companies into alternative energy and also of course provide plenty of incentives. Oil companies should be barred from having a controlling interest in alternative energy companies that receive subsidies. So it they want to play the get no help."
I'm curious:
Prop 87 tried something like this: Taking from the oil companies to give to alternative energy. There are a couple of problems with that. First, no doubt it would crimp supplies. Now, I don't think that's a bad thing, but it scares people because they don't know how high prices might rise. The other thing is: Which alternatives get the subsidies?
I would rather see a gas tax and the alternatives compete in the market with higher priced gasoline.
The thing is, though, that people who want to exclude oil companies from the alternative energy business probably can't comprehend the difference in scale between oil and alternative energy. If you really want alternatives to scale up and compete, you need oil companies in there helping make that happen. They have the money and they have the infrastructure.
To put the matter in perspective, the entire ethanol production in the U.S. is about the same as the output from one decent-sized oil refinery.
Thanks.
"...It seems too easy to the rest of humanity. API (American Petroleum Institute) has started raising money for a big public relations campaign, but they are the lobbyists for big oil, not the independents."
In a sense, it was easy - that's the one-time FF boost from Nature, we might say. Who understood the ramifications? Perhaps most people have never wondered about the causes of economic growth - let alone tied it to energy; or the fact, as Nate has said, that humans are the only species studied apart from their resource base. At this point, Richard Rainwater's (Kjell Aleklett's, and others) conclusion seems the only ethical stance: Whose "job" is to inform and act? Those who know.
Hence, I question how a PR campaign (toward what end?) is ethical at this point. So many things about the Chevron ads, for example, (http://www.chevron.com/about/advertising/)seem
disingenuous. And this becomes - in context - further tragic waste of precious resource.
From the first ad "Why should you care?" A: People care about what they know and understand. Why do you cast doubt on my (generic) ability to care - (as though "caring" is the issue?) - when you are not being fully forthcoming with your information?
Having said that, I echo your sentiment of "pro-active" - something from people who understand would be a "different way of thinking".
The energy use is very impressive. Obviously, Dr. Unruh did a good job planning his house. He also proves (yet again...) that zero-energy houses are quite realistic.
I wouldn't quite share his pessimism about the energy future in the West. We not only have plenty of sun here but massive amounts of unused flat roof space. In my own case I calculated that I could easily satisfy my own energy demand with current generation solar panels on the roof of my own home and the building I am working in. My workplace actually has the far better area/occupant ratio because it is a poorly utilized building. Unfortunately, my employer is not quite willing, yet, to invest in solar arrays. But I am sure this attitude will change over the next years.
Relative your second comment, my concern about the West is related to the lack of water and therefore the ability to produce food (this does not apply to the NW west of the Cascades - as I have seen some comments below mention). If we exercise wisdom you are quite correct that the West could supply the energy and other parts of the country supply food. The comment was prompted by Robert worrying about a breakdown in civility and anarchy setting in.
I was wondering if the SW is more what you two are talking about? To me they are ifferent areas. I think I would be more concerned there. Had a niece near Pheonix, AZ said it got to 112 d. F and the pavement was soft - car tires left depressions. With AC 85 d F indoors. Swimming pool was even warmer.
Any comments?
It's still the best way to get food!
Re: the question part about ample rainfall and forests-- though there are large forested areas throughout the west, many of the forests have stand regeneration times in excess of 70-100 years, depending on aspect and harvest technique. Ample rainfall is a condition met in only a very small percentage of the west. With a cold, high altitude location, your firewood won't last many years. I agree with infinitepossiblities, Colorado and the SW are ideal for solar and wind. It'd be foolish to go any other route.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want to be getting through the winter on solar in coastal BC or SE Alaska. Perpetual fog and rain. With no oil, I'd be burning that alder. That tree grows like a weed up there.
It also has quite a bit of potential hydro power that hasn't been tapped. I believe that the Fraser River (approximately the same size as the Rhine) has not been touched for hydropower. There are also several rivers further to the north than the Fraser that haven't been developed. In fact, I believe that British Colombia generates about 90% of it's electric power from hydro.
While solar panels are unlikely to be of much use on the Northwest Coast, other renewable technologies are available.
yeah, who wants to eat fish in any case.
I look forward (apparently a long way forward) to the day when Solar Energy can heat my home with the same eroei as a wood or switchgrass pellet stove.
My girlfriend's house has a swamp cooler and an A/C heat pump unit-- the entire neighborhood was built this way when it was first constructed right after the first 70s OPEC induced energy crunch. Sadly, virtually everyone has now yanked off the swamp coolers except us. They prefer the instantaneous comfort of cool and dry A/C air versus the energy conservation of swamp-cooling. Such is life in my Asphalt Wonderland, but hopefully reality will make these people switch back to swamp cooling as prices rise.
My neighbors, that I have informed about PO and GW, do not take my advice for conservation. They all have outside XMAX lights burning away, and I can hear their rooftop A/C heat pumps going to warm the interiors. We haven't turned on our heat-- a light jacket, or sitting on a heating pad works fine, but I guess that is too much to expect of my neighbors.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I think the Northwest will do OK. Here in Montana, I don't know. We don't have good water resources, and we are really spread out. Very car dependent. It would be a tough transition.
Of course with biomass you can produce a liquid fuel instead of electricity, but there is simply no reason that we can't adopt much higher levels of PHEVs instead of continuing to rely on the internal combustion engine as our primary means of transport.
The commonest concern cited with this approach is the cost, embodied energy, and toxcity of all the batteries required to make this shift.
Have you or Dr. Unruh taken a good hard look at this issue? Maybe it's a non-issue, but any time I hear someone say "there's no reason we can't just do X", I have to wonder if they've looked at every angle.
A poster at R^2 made a a valid point about the relative cost of biomass vs solar PV -- biomass may be much less efficient at capturing energy, but it is much cheaper to deploy, which allows for a much more wide-spread deployment. Obviously I'm not talking about corn, but perhaps a polyculture of native perenial plains grasses, which can be very productive on marginal lands (but it has to be a polyculture: http://tinyurl.com/ygpubh).
Point is, the relative economics of biomass production on one side, and the relatively high emobided energy associated with large Li-ion battery packs, may complicate the question more than Dr. Unruh is giving credit for.
It is true that these perenial grasses will be limited to the lowly 1% efficiency range, but photosynthesis has one big advantage not yet posessed by photovoltaics. Plants can store energy in a very convenient form.
Yes, trying to store the energy by making hydrogen from electricity just might work. But might it just be possible to somehow use either the electricity produced by PV, or solar energy directly, to make a liquid or solid rich in chemical energy???
Batteries store energy, but I too am a bit concerned about the materials requirements for a massive shift in that direction.
A quick word about wood. According to a forester we hired the sustainable yield of firewood in our community is about 0.15 cords/acre/yr. There is no way that all people in our community could heat their house with wood without going beyond the sustainable yield. In our case we could avoid doing any heating since our house will not freeze. The coldestthe house has ever been is 54 F after a night of -20F (we never heat at night). Despite Robert's comment below that it gets cold in the house, one can dress warm and do quite nicely. Most people are not comfortable with that temperature however.
Jerry
I signed up for wind power; therefore, I can apply the amount of electricity I get from the wind against my electricity consumption. But that doesn't mean I get to apply that against my propane consumption unless I buy more wind power that I need.
Therefore, when the sun is out, we are quite toasty with our south facing windows.
Yeah, that's all about the radiant temperatures. The combination of high radiant and low air temperatures is one of the most comfortable circumstances possible to achieve in a buildilng. I very much doubt that you would be comfortable with a mean radiant temperature of 55 degrees.
If we fail, it will not be a failure of science or engineering. It will be a failure of political and social institutions.
The hope (it appears) is to have some underfunded research initiative that will take decades to produce its minimal improvements, so that we can all just say that nothing needs to be done until that research is ready.
It's all about political will, and basic human competence. When oil is more expensive than electricity from coal (not there yet, but getting closer, magic number is around $80/barrel), the will might materialize. Hopefully the competence does too.
It's siply not it. What is missing is long-term planning. Peak oil is a classical example of a problem that needs hard and expensive long-term measures to tackle a problem which lies well beyond the personal planning horizon of most of the people envolved in decision making. One can compare it to such projects as the Alexander's Library or the Great Wall in China. Nowadays we can compare it to the century-old subway systems or to just about any infrastructure project.
Needless to say we don't live in such society today. Our system is focused on the short term. Even infrastructure projects like road building are executed on transient and short-lived grounds.
I think it's easy to say that society today is short sighted, but that isn't really true. You say we don't do major architectural undertakings anymore, to which I respond "internet". A network that spans the globe, and is without a doubt one of the largest and most complicated systems ever constructed by mankind. It has been constructed (for the most part) in the last 15 years. That was a huge project, and it changed people's lives, but at the same time, it wasn't some dramatic drain on worldwide resources, just as I don't think peak oil will be.
People talk a lot about needing 50+ years to tackle peak oil, but I don't think that's the case. We constructed the vast majority of the internet, going from little more than a few prototypes to a true global web in about a decade, and that was without any dramatic policy initiatives. If a thing is within technical reach (a nice post-fossil economy certainly is), and there is a driving need (peak oil will provide that someday, but maybe not quite yet), then things can happen very quickly.
Think back to what life was like in 1990, and you'll see just how far we've come.
Compare that to a project for electrifying our road network. Obviously it would have to be almost entirely government funded and organized, will span in decades and will cost trillions before being able to bring any fruit at all. Just replacing the current "rolling stock" will cost trillions. Add the likely failures and unforeseen problems, and in the end the project becomes unacceptable burden to a society which is committed to satisfying its current needs. Investing in the status quo is always the prefered thing of TPTB.
The internet required plenty of eminent domain to build out, so it wasn't entirely some private sector thing. It was massive telcos working hand in hand with local and national governments the world over. The internet did cost trillions, or at least hundreds of billions so far. Also, the internet was fairly useless until a lot of people were connected. Amazon (for instance) lost money continuously until very recently, because there just wasn't a critical mass of net savy people out there yet.
Also, you talk about things taking decades, but I don't see how any project can be dramatically tougher than bringing good data connections to a sizeable fraction of the world's households, which is what we've seen in the last 10 years alone. It turns out that 100 million houses is a lot, but with 300 million people to do the work, it all works out just fine. Put another way, someone once said something like "Of course China's strict, with so many people you have to be.", which doesn't make any sense. Why is it true that having more people means that per-capita you would have fewer police and judges? It doesn't, the statement is totally nonsensical.
I guess I just don't see how so many of your "obvious" statements are obvious at all, or even true.
Also, the internet was fairly useless until a lot of people were connected.
This is so untrue. ARPANET, the predeccessor of Internet was fairly useful in the military and in education. After the research phase (that alone took 20 years) and the appearance of personal computers in the 80s, internet went out of the laboratories and government offices and from there on its development was exactly what I described - mostly corporate-funded and evolutionary. Yes if you calculate all the investments in infrastructure from 1980 to now you can receive a shock, but you would miss that most of these investments have already paid for themselves in a relatively short notice.
Internet is a classic example of govt assisting some technology in its infancy and letting it to the market eventually. The key for it to happen is that the initial investments were not that significant and went mostly in research.
:-)
That's a tough idea to sell. What is the politician going to say to his voters about it? "Look guys we are starting a very cool project here, but it will require to double your taxes. Argh, by the way you all will need to be buy new cars that cost twice as much, at least for the foreseeble future. But don't worry - in 50 years all of this will pay out and you will thank me". Who is going to vote for him?
A 50mpg compact is being produced with the same equipment as a 15mpg semi-truck. I would actually bet that the presses are smaller and thus MUCH cheaper.
The problem is not that we all have to drive EVs tomorrow. We need to drive 40mpg cars 10 years from now like the Europeans and Japanese. We will drive some EVs 20 years from now. How long do you think production equipment lasts? Ten years? Fifteen?
These changes are incremental, not catastrophic. Everything else falls under "strawman argument". Like the rest of your post.
Like I said (you read my post did you?) I was talking about the real hard solution we will need to go for like building mass transit, railroads etc. if we want to get out of this and still preserve a decent way of life. The long-term planning and thinking to undertake those now is simply absent. And NOT because, they don't know or are incompetent. It's because they don't care.
Al was a senator. He authored a bill that demanded that DARPANet be opened to the public. The military and scientific community was not happy, knowing that now their physics research was going to be competing with the consumers for bandwidth. It happened anyway.
Some years later, he was asked some question or another, and he responded something like "We took the initiative to create the internet..."
This was all completely true. What did the press do? They misquoted it as "Al gore claimed to have invented the internet.", and then of course all the geeks chimed in like fools "I bet RMS would be shocked to hear that..." or whatever. The meme was immediately taken up by the right wing, the various newspapers covered it without ever botherign to investigate what was actually said, and Gore's presidential bid went down in flames, we got a pair of oil barrons draft dogers instead.
The myth still survives to this day. Never underestimate the power of shoddy journalism to ruin the world.
and i dont understand why people are (or were) so damned charmed with dubya's befuddlement i suppose he is a likeable guy to some and it think he would be just great as an owner of a baseball team
BLITZER: Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?
GORE: [lists some actions, then says] ... During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. ... [he then lists other efforts]
It seems very clear that he is claiming his "creation" efforts were as a legislator, not a computer scientist, or programmer, or businessman. Further, his claim regards creating the Internet, not inventing it. There is a difference. I doubt anyone would deny a claim that Henry Ford helped create the American automobile-based culture, but only the completely uninformed would try to claim he invented the automobile.
Gore's initial interest in computer networking and information sharing goes back to his time as a Congressman, but really came to the fore while he was a Senator. In 1986 he aggressively supported increased funding for research into networking. To that end, he worked to get additional funding for networking research into the NSF budget bill. That year he also sponsored the Supercomputer Network Study Act to examine the use of fiber-optic networks to connect supercomputers and major government and university computing centers nationwide.
In 1988 he sponsored the National High-Performance Computer Technology Act to establish a 3 gigabit per second national computer network and to develop and distribute software and hardware to take advantage of the nework.
In 1989 he proposed expansion of the federally-funded national network to include links to all schools, libraries and various state, local and commercial research and development centers.
The High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, sponsored by Gore, aimed at creating a high-speed national computer networking infrastructure, referred to by Gore and others as a "data superhighway." The goal was to connect computers of the country's research, education and military establishments. During hearings and floor debates, Gore and other supporters claimed that the network would one day become a universally available "National Public Telecomputing Network" that would replace the telephone system and tie together the entertainment, communications and computer industries.
Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, two of the true "inventors" of the Internet openly declared that through his efforts in the House and Senate Al Gore made a major contribution to the creation and growth of the Internet. ON September 28, 2000 they issued a joint statement that began: "Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."
Even Newt Gingrich is on record as saying that Al Gore got a bum rap from the press and pundits on this and that Gore was a key leader in Congress in initiating and supporting government efforts to develop the Interenet.
The Internet derives directly from DARPA funded research to create a communications system that would survive atomic attack. The key links were funded by government and research universities. It was not until around 1995 that the Internet moved from non-profit research entity to commercial application.
The period from initial innovation to full consumer acceptance was approx 20 years. Initial adoption used the exisiting POTS telco network with the fibre build out subsidized out of insane stock valuations prior to the 2000 tech crash.
To a degree, the Internet build out was the outcome of the idea that first mover advantage was critical and that the Internet changed all the fundamental rules of commerce and economics. It was not the outcome of "rational" commercial decision making.
Peak Oil response will not represent a source of unending windfall profit, or a means of escape from the conventions of economics, commerce, and natural science; it will represent the forced imposition of a recognition of "reality." This "reality" will call into question some deeply held conventional assumptions and will represent a threat to the status quo rather than an opportunity for unlimited profit through a technical extension of the current economic regieme.
We will simply pass appropriate legislation that commands the Free Markets to come up with clever solutions. End of problem. Simple as that.
You TODders worry too much.
</end of deep sarcasm>
I'd say the George W Bush home in Texas has plenty of bullet points in the long term planning list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Chapel_Ranch
The passive-solar house is positioned to absorb winter sunlight, warming the interior walkways and walls of the residence. Geothermal heat pumps circulate water through pipes buried 300 feet (100 m) deep in the ground. A 40,000 US gallon (151 m³) underground cistern collects rainwater gathered from roof urns; wastewater from sinks, toilets, and showers cascades into underground purifying tanks and is also funneled into the cistern. The water from the cistern is then used to irrigate the landscaping around the four-bedroom homeNot to say that Mrs. and Mr. Unruh haven't accomplished a level of sustainability and independence that sets an example for all of us. I will say, however, that the scale of their home must cost a bundle (in time, resources, effort and cash) to build, maintain and continuously upgrade. It's true that high technologies gradually become more affordable as manufacturing and distribution ramps up, but let's not lose track of the goal to principally reduce and conserve.
William McDonough in 'From Cradle to Cradle: remaking the way we make things'.. makes an interesting criticism of the green/eco movment, in its insistence on reducing, constraining and cutting back as an overall approach to life. He compares it to a Cherry Tree, which produces far more blossoms and fruit than it 'has' to, but that the 'waste' flows back into the system in a useful and bountiful way. He also asks you to see 'efficiency' as a two-sided coin, using the example of the 'efficiency with which the Nazis killed people and disposed of them.' It's always dangerous to use the Nazis.. but there is a trap in efficiency nonetheless, which can produce a puritanical tightness and lack of robustness that is part of the spark of life..
Moderation in Moderation..
Bob Fiske
And every other mans wife isn't either IMHO. Get too firm and you might sleep alone...
I think there is something to this. For the most part we are a bunch of men talking about cutting back and making due with less. Yet we can't even convince our own wives/SO's to go along with it.
It would be interesting to get more female's opinions on PO. I bet that contribution would change the discussion dramatically.
My guess, there would be a lot less talk of cutting back.
Mind you I'm not being sexist here (or trying not to anyway).
One can argue that it is too big. For what it is worth, 2,000 sq ft is the average of the footprint (2,350) and the interior space not including the quite thick walls (about 1,750). We do not have a garage (aren't they usually 400 sq ft +?).
Jerry
I didn't see a number for wood use- only propane? And no clothes line??.
What I am working toward is wood (more precisely, any plant matter) for fuel, so no need for propane. Around here (eastern hill country) wood is much easier to get than sun. My wood stove produces no smoke and no smell. Easy to do.
Surely everybody can agree that simple efficiency numbers ( 1% for wood, 15% for solar) don't mean much of anything. True cost ratios are the only proper indicators.
"Surely everybody can agree that simple efficiency numbers ( 1% for wood, 15% for solar) don't mean much of anything."
That is where you go wrong. The difference between 1% and 15% is a factor of fifteen. It means that your roof can produce more solar energy than half an acre of the best farmland in the world under the most ideal circumstances. Everybody except for the homeless has a roof. We do not have half acres left over to produce energy. We need them to produce food.
"True cost ratios are the only proper indicators."
In which case a correctly done cost comparison will give you the answer that solar energy is already cheaper.
:-)
Here it is raining as usual. I have a porch load of wood. I am living in the middle of 500 acres of it, all mine. I am burning it in my stove to keep those grandkiddies and grandmas running around downstairs warm. It could also be generating my juice. So, why not?
Right, not many people have 500 acres of woods and only a few grandkids. That's their damn fault. They took their choices, I took mine.
Trouble is, there's lots of people like that farmer in Rwanda who told me about how he as a kid had played in teeming forests where now there is nothing but eroded dirt, and his seven kids were not going to be able to survive on the little sliver of eroded dirt they were gonna get from him. And then he asked me what to do about it.
I told him what to do about it hadn't been done by him, or his father or his grandfather, and so there wasn't anything to do about it.
Those were mighty hard words, esp. from a M'zugu who's ancestors might have had something to do with the problem. What would you have said???
So right, it's not for me to blame anybody, but something seems to be wrong somewhere, somehow, when right here in River City caretaking skinflints like me get swamped by the sheer numbers of those who never took care and never skinned a flint.
To get the population down to where wood heat is a sustainable solution, it would be necessary to sustain the catastrophic societal failure that I hope this blog is trying to avoid.
Maybe you can provide a reference. And are you saying all applications or just some?
Your 15:1 ratio is meaningless. Or maybe you sold your goat for some magic seeds which when scattered over the roof sprout PV's? Please, a system to system comparison.
On a more general note, InfinitePostings, have you thought about all the ways the Wars of the 20th century could have been avoided. Perhaps even a nearly infinite number of small actions, which, if they had been undertaken or avoided, might have halted the destruction and waste. The thing is, the probability that the best one of them, if it could be known, would have changed the course of history is rather small, and the probability of a war avoidance impact from the rest shrinks until an infinitesimal likelihood is reached.
You post so much that I honestly can't hope to find the time to read all your commentary, but I do have the lingering impression that you underestimate the fragility of our circumstances. Here we are: in the midst of a changing climate; our primary energy resources declining in quality and/or quantity; the world financial system teetering like a drunk trying to keep his balance as he walks on the edge of a cliff; a huge and growing, worldwide, imbalance of wealth; a population double the size it was a short two score years ago; a population of narrowly skilled individuals mostly led in politics by unimaginative opportunists who turn for advice to people trained for a different era; a prevelance of individual and social inertia...
And yet you repeatedly suggest that there are countless numbers of possible adaptations based on new technologies and social arrangements with a HIGH probability of successful implementation. Do you chant "it is the age of aquarius" in your solar heated shower (it is solar heated, I presume?)?
It is a charming outlook. Yet, I can't help but conclude that your imagination inhabits a fool's paradise.
BTW, if there truly are infinite possibilities, that condition logically implies that there are also infinite possibilities for doom scenarios.
There are relatively few ways that lead to "good" outcomes, while there is an indefinitely large number of ways to foul things up bigtime. This generalization, I believe, applies to all forms of human action.
A: i think it might be because our experience tells us that utopias are very rare ... but that we don't stop to consider the infrequency of doom at the same time.
i think the great bulk of those infinite possibilities are like the world we live in now. it is imperfect, and when measured by things like global average income and global average health care, pretty bad. at the same time ... it's a good deal better than the scary bedtime stories.
Suppose you have a machine that runs, but isn't working very well, a car for example. There are only a few things you can do (diagnose the problem correctly, fix it correctly, maintain it correctly) to make the car run better. However, there are an indefinitely large number of ways in which an incompetent mechanic can make the car run worse or in which the owner can wreck the veheicle through lack of routine maintenance or by reckless driving.
Utopia is not going to happen--by definition.
I am not a doomer, and I do not prophesy doom. Having said that, I believe that there are numerous plausible doom scenarios, and we have many many examples of civilizations that have collapsed. Thus, while utopia is literally nowhere, dystopia is found in many real-world examples. In other words, it is hard to make things better, but it is very easy to stay with business as usual and make them much worse.
How full is our world-glass, right now?
Those of us who don't live in Darfur, or in the path of a tsunami, or on ground about to give way with a city crushing earthquake, might think we are doing ok. We might think we have a lot to lose.
Maybe in a way we do, but maybe in a way life has always been a crapshoot. Rulers have always formed up armies and marched them off to war. It sucks that it still happens, but it is more the sad status quo than sign that we are breaking from the status quo, IMNSHO.
Now, if it were easy to make things better, then I think the U.S. and its allies would have done so. Instead, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and some hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S.-led invasion has made most Iraquis worse off than they were before. It is EASY to screw things up. It is easy to take a horrible situation and make it much worse. On the other hand, it is hard to make a bad situation better, though if you have a well-functioning society (e.g. Sweden) it is less difficult to make a good situation better than a bad one.
In regard to Peak Oil and greenhouse gases we are in a Bad Situation. A few constructive things that can be done probably will--with enough effort--be done. But in a closed system entropy always increases, and as I said in another comment, "Nothing fails like success." Business as usual is going to get us into a hellhole world of hurt. Getting out of the rut of business as usual is enormously difficult.
The mechanic trying to fix your car doesn't care whether the glass is half full or half empty: he or she is trying against long odds to make a machine run better. I think fixing a society (in regard to Peak Oil and global warming) is roughly 100,000 times more difficult and a trillion times as expensive as fixing my thirteen year old car that has 220,000 miles on it.
To add further substance to your example it is useful to remember who supported Iraq in its attack against Iran, who supplied the technology and pre-cursor chemicals for the weapons first used against Iran and later against the Kurds, which state first promoted a Sh'ia uprising and then turned its back once the uprising took place and was brutally suppressed.
The ability of a single nation to create dystopic outcomes for millions of others and not be called to account in any way is deeply saddening.
As is the fact that it happens year in, year out, over the entire course of human history.
You don't need "special circumstances" to make it happen.
I don't know what mood makes me go on this tangent a few days before Christmas, but I think we have a lot of comfortable middle class Americans at TOD worrying about remote dystopian futures (defined as trouble that affects them, not that poor Iraqi).
Do we worry about those dreadful things because we don't have those immediate concerns, and because "In other words, the more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening" ?
I think so. And maybe this is both a "count your blessings" thing, and a caution about attraction to those dreadful futures.
- Born white in the U.S. to middle-class very well educated parents.
- Raised in Minnesota, where "Minnesota nice" still exists.
- Good genes that have contributed to good health.
- Good society that allowed me to stay in college at very low cost until I was thirty years old.
- Born smart:-)
- Born in 1940--before the baby boomers--which made it relatively easy to get and keep a good job with a generous pension.
- Wonderful healthy brilliant children.
- " " " grandchildren.
Now, what I had been born in Haiti . . . ?IMO, just another example of "Pop" psychology.
The Time Magazine article engages a difficult question, about why we so often mis-allocate our concerns:
What are you saying Don, that Avian Flu is the right concern, and that we are right to disregard our day-to-day health?
Has everyone here got their day-to-day concerns in order, before they obsess about peak oil?
I do not assert that people are rational in their evaluations of risk.
Of course I am an exception, 100% sane and rational;-)
But this "dread" business . . . can you cite any peer-reviewed papers on this topic? I still don't buy it.
BTW, on feelings and etc, I am enjoying this at the moment:
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8401269
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.0272-4332.2004.00433.x
Because there is so little substance in cognitive psychology (and also in my own field of sociology) assistant professors are forever coming up with new terms to describe old ideas with the hope that this "novelty" will help them get published. After all, how else can they get tenure?
You're a nice guy Don, but boy sometimes you dodge and weave.
Still am looking for a peer-reviewed paper that develops the "dread" concept, which seems like a lukewarm version of existential angst.
This is the google-scholor age Don, it's a few moments to confirm (as I did last week) that such papers exist, and choose one for you. I can chose another ...
This says the same thing as that Time magazine article, in different words. When strong emotions are involved, people tend to focus on the badness of the outcome ... consider that when you read of "the end of the world as we know it" with respect to peak oil:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/k38h7v8724424463/
I can visualize a combination of peak oil and abrupt climate change leading back to the situation my parents faced in the early part of the twentieth century. (My father lived to be sixty and died of a heart attack. My mother died at age forty-five from cancer.)
Don,
were you writing a book for awhile or something?
merry xmas,
matt
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/12/why_not_impossi.html
Are we gravitating toward the more unpleasant of our possible worlds? Or are we weighing equally those worlds that while not nice, approximate the good and bad of our world today?
To throw another quote that I continue to see as very related:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1562978,00.html
Are we trading dreads?
A technologically-based society is orders of magnitude more complex than an agrarian-based society and thus more subject to collapse on a scale proportional to its complexity. FWIW I don't think the US society has made it completely to this technologically-based state (that many techies think we should do) but we are well on the way and IMO this is why the foundations are shaking and cracking.
So no, I don't think we are on board with the same statistical outlook.
But anyway, if we don't want to go with statistics, tell me how we quantify out risk? Statistics, as flawed as they may be, give us something beyond our respective gut-feel.
A good example to consider in the financial world would be the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998. Their mathematical model is very sophisticated and did them very well, until the expected parameters were exceeded, then it suddenly became worthless. Statistical predictions depend on the data we feed them. If events begin to fall outside of what we are expecting, our models become worthless.
I agree. Though I take some comfort that the MTBF seems to be long. ;-)
I also think a collapse condition would become more obvious, and make us less reliant on subtle clues, as it approached.
Assume there is a fifty percent chance that business pretty much as usual will continue for the next fifty years. Also assume that there is a fifty percent chance that TSHTF next year. Act in accordance with these probabilities.
Similarly, in my daily life I try to follow this dictum: Act as if there were a fifty percent chance that I'll live to age 100 in good health. Also act as if there were a fifty percent chance that I'll die tomorrow. Thus I take extreme cases to balance out risks.
I think it is some of the best practical advice on TOD.
Perhaps there is a TOD reader who knows the technology and inputs who could provide us all with an introduction and better understanding.
You are correct there is no clothesline although we dry some clothes inside on a rack. Since moving into the house we have cut water heating by almost 1/2 and with the addition of the energy efficient shades on the windows at night (about 90% of our heat comes from passive solar, but the windows are also our greatest heat loss), I expect to decrease supplemental heating by about half as well. This would bring our house to "net zro energy.
It is also worth pointing out that, since the house cannot freeze (coldest it has ever been is 54 F), heating is a luxury as is clothes drying. In addition, when we are getting enought sun we use the one point electric water heater for the kitchen. Thus water heating under good sun is only for showers. There are clearly other ways to do this. In a severe energy situation, we could drop the propane use to less than 0.1 gal/day for cooking. With solar cooking we could drop that even more.
Jerry
One problem I see is he has not calculated his total energy usage food fuel etc etc.
The house is a good thing but it only part of the problem.
Also assuming he has enough land the house/land should be a net energy contributor not a user. A wind turbine should be installed.
I think he needs additional solar panels and
electrolysis unit for hydrogen generation. For ease of storage you need a way to convert the hydrogen to methane/propane. Alcohols such as butanol can be synthesized to directly replace gasoline. Micro-reactors are efficient on a small scale.
This would imply the need for carbon feedstock. CO2 extraction from air is one approach.
Finally for food a greenhouse/garden is needed.
If your not into gardening sensors and robotics can easily be used to manage the garden and green house a smart home in general is prob a good idea.
I'd love to see someone tackle the total usage problem.
If we are going to have a robust economy post peak landowner need to have a positive EROI to underwrite the rest of the economy. We cannot support estates that are not productive.
Energy for the required solar cells etc can be dicounted costwise at a lower rate since these goods can be manufactred at locations with abundant natural energy or from nuclear dedicated to energy product manufacture.
What he does have (and you don't) is a house that is close to zero-energy. That is a huge accomplishment.
I did not say independent nor imply it. I just said that estates should be energy positive like they where in the past.
Mt Vernon for example.
With technology you can have lot smaller estate and make it energy positive it does not need to be a traditional farm.
In short I'm not impressed sorry.
If you can't make money of your land you have no business owning it.
2 examples:
Farmland I don't worn but could have bought was $7000 an acre. (60 miles from a top 50 in size US city)
How do you cash-flow that land to pay off the morgage and taxes and still keep it as legal farmland?
The other land that sold for 7K an acre was used for subdivisions. Nearest town of 200 people is 3 miles away.
Land in Zone 3 with the topsoil gone as part of the glaciers that came down from Canada. 3 40 acre parcels, with20 acres underwater (due to a 25 acre lake). How do you make money on that land due to the high taxes of having 'lakefront property'? In the past potatoes were grown, but needed constant additions of ferterlizer. Valued at close to $400,000 (again due to the water)
How do you cash flow that?
Here's yet another advocate of the technofix. The irony is, that ultimately by selling ideas that won't work he is subverting the very goals he wishes to achieve.
'The road to hell is paved with good intentions.'
Better yet, 'the road to hell is paved.'
By the way, I have written serious and well thought out to the Union of Concerned Scientists about their advocacy of what I consider to be ineffective policy. They never responded. Which was very disappointing since I consider myself to be a scientist and would like to believe that we are means to solving problems rather than clueless egotistical proponents of the conventional wisdom.
Basically, the answer is, "NO, you can't have that!" And everybody wants the answer to be, "YES, you CAN have that! See, it's EASY to be green."
So we base our policies on what Kermit the Frog has to say in a cheezy GMC commercial.
I am open to a recitation on your part as to why Jerry's ideas won't work but I don't think it helps the discussion by simply calling him goofy. If only more of us were as "goofy" as Jerry.
My guess is that part of your objection is the size of Jerry's house. While one can certainly argue it is possible to live a high quality life on a substantially smaller footprint, Jerry's house's square footage is well below what the average that is being built these days.
It is also commendable that Jerry manages to almost stay within the available electricity generated by his PV panels each year. My guess is that his PV system size is well below average. Certainly his electricity consumption is well below average.
Where is it indicated that Jerry is simply into the technofix? If he were just into the technofix, he would have a much larger PV system and be consuming like the average American.
While I, too, am very wary of those who want to push tecnofixes, I think we need both technical solutions and major lifestyle changes to address the energy problem.
You hit the crux of the problem. Quote of the day.
I bet the average Bengali would be delighted to live in a 2000 sq. ft home with modern appliances, good water and a mountain view. As far as "goofy", why the gratuitous insult? He's a free man living according to his principles, and appears to be happy. He's creative and productive, and probably a fun person. He's living within his means, and doing something for the world by his example.
You might be pissed about the man because he has done somehting to show that the "techno-fix" actually does work, which takes one of your beloved religious mantras away.
:-)
"By the way, I have written serious and well thought out to the Union of Concerned Scientists about their advocacy of what I consider to be ineffective policy. They never responded."
I guess that should have told you something about the "seriousness and thoughfulness" of your writing?
:-)
"Which was very disappointing since I consider myself to be a scientist"
Pretty much everyone who "considers themselves to be scientist" usually turns out to be a science-wannabe in my experience. What are your credentials? Which journal published your last paper? What's your field? Where did you graduate?
:-)
In other words... YOU ARE A TROLL.
:-)
M.S. Physics UFlorida
Paper with Dr. Steven Detweiler, "Post-Minkowski Approximation to Binary Black Hole Systems". Phys Rev D.
Actually I was a PhD candidate, but I really didn't have the ambition it took to graduate.
The population of Bangladesh uses less energy per capita than he does. Please inform yourself.
That was my point. Living in a remote area with your own house and your own solar panels, and your own Prius (or whatever he drives) and your own PhD in science is a completely unrealistic model for the world.
He isn't helping the world environment one bit. Not one bit. What he doesn't consume , somebody else will gladly consume for him. He is merely taking the price pressure off of their consumption.
Electical appliances have seen major efficiency gains over the past thirty years, yet total electrical use has grown every single year of that time. Why would gasoline be any different?
He can pursue his pet projects. That's fine. But they aren't necessarily exercises in helpful environmental policy.
If I think it is goofy, then I think it is goofy. Maybe there are other serious-minded people on this site who felt the same way. I also think driving a Rolls Royce is goofy. Carrying around a bottle of Evian also strikes me as goofy. Why should I water down my message when I think that the message being sent out is very very wrong?
:-)
"That was my point. Living in a remote area with your own house and your own solar panels, and your own Prius (or whatever he drives) and your own PhD in science is a completely unrealistic model for the world."
That is not what the man does. He simply wanted to have an energy independent house and he made it happen. The same can be done for a lot of people in the US. Or just have them live in a house that uses 30% energy less. Since the US happens to consume 25% of the world's energy, every such success story outweighs ten people in the developing world, easy. Nobody expects the Bangladeshi to EVER have the standard of living of Dr. Unruh. Thus... it numerically matters.
"He isn't helping the world environment one bit. Not one bit."
Yes, he is. He is helping the world with 5 tons of carbon a year. What are YOU doing except for mouthing off?
"Electical appliances have seen major efficiency gains over the past thirty years, yet total electrical use has grown every single year of that time."
Not in CA. Speak about yourself, if you want to. Not everyone is in the same boat. I certainly am not. I can't do as much as Dr. Unruh, right now, but I am doing what I can. Are you?
"But they aren't necessarily exercises in helpful environmental policy."
I agree on that one. Succesful policy would be a $1/gallon gas tax which is progressively raised by 10% a year.
"If I think it is goofy, then I think it is goofy."
That does not make it goofy. It makes you a guy who likes to think goofy thoughts.
"Why should I water down my message when I think that the message being sent out is very very wrong?"
Two reasons:
- You are attacking the wrong person. He has actually done something where others haven't.
- Your presentation sucks. Maybe you should take a class in political sciences about how to convince people. It has a lot more to do with the form of your presentation than it does with the content.
In short: you are wrong about both your target and the way you make your case. If you want people to think you are a troll, you were succesful. If you wanted to achieve something for conservation, you failed miserably.No he is not. No more than I am saving electicity with an energy saver refridgerator. If I don't use the electricy I 'save' on something else, then somebody else gladly will.
The only way to cut CO2 emissions is to put a hard/soft cap on them by raising the price of things that emit CO2. That's how markets work. You don't cut demand with efficiency, you cut demand with price. People can try to weasel out of this simple truth, but like we say about gravity, "it's not just a good idea, it's the law."
The only way to cut cumulative Co2 emssions , is by ensuring that a portion of currently sequestered Co2 remains sequestered. For example, making coal mining in Appalachia illegal. Or making mining tar sands and the other 'junk' oil illegal. That is a solution that helps. It is not a solution that I see people advocating.
The problem is not that easy. It just isn't.
If the world happened to be a zero-sum game, you would be right. Sadly, the world is a lot more complex than that. You can make your argument all day long and all day long it will sound like that made by a five year old in a kiddie fight over a toy. Example: properly implemented carbon taxes would hit China just as much... you would simply slap an import tax on them for every ton of imported goods that is proportional to their total carbon use. That is, if they don't already cooperate. Something tells me China is going to limit carbon faster than the US. It is killing them. Literally.
"The only way to cut CO2 emissions is to put a hard/soft cap on them by raising the price of things that emit CO2."
We are in complete agreement here. And you might have noticed... Dr. Unruh is way ahead of you and has implemented the technological solutions to not having to pay that tax. He is simply ahead of your curve by a lightyear. Is that why you are pissed?
"It is not a solution that I see people advocating."
Carbon tax and gas tax? I mention it in every other post. You might want to read them...
"The problem is not that easy. It just isn't."
Hacking on those who have already done their share is easier? Or more effective? Is that what you are trying to say?
That's ridiculous. First, we do know one thing. He has greatly reduced his greenhouse gas emissions. What we don't know is whether this caused electricity to be cheaper for others, and they just used up the electricity he saved. That is purely speculation on your part.
But, he is doing much to help save the environment. He works tirelessly on this issue. He is currently trying to discourage the construction of a new coal power plant in Colorado in favor of alternatives. Of course in your world I guess this just means that it will make electricity cheaper for everyone else, and nothing will be saved. Well, the people who are transitioning to renewables are going to be in much better shape going forward as energy supplies become more expensive.
I won't diss your friend. I am of those who got religion before the energy price spikes of the 1970's. I might credit Ivan Illich and Georgescu-Roegen, then again I might credit my mother and father who let me go camping and fishing with friends before I was a teen. I learnt the folly of eating all one's goodies the first night and then living on oatmeal, pancakes, butter and fish for the rest of the week.
I have never owned an automobile, even when raising children. When I can walk, I walk. When I can't walk, I ride my bike. When neither bike, nor walking suffice, I use public transit. My wife does the same. When all else fails, we rent a fuel efficient car. Though our income allowed more generous housing and furnishings, we purchased and lived in a small house when our smaller apartment no longer was sufficient for our growing children. Almost all our furniture came from the curb and was restored. I have wood thrown out from 5 neigbouring renovations in my porch.
Eventually, as the kids grew into teenagers, I added 60 per cent more space to the house, but in total, we use 1/2 of the energy for heating as was needed in the original house. I have toured many countries. When it was available I travelled by train or boat. I crossed the Atlantic by boat and moved about Europe on foot, by bicycle and by train, whenever possible. My wife and I travelled widely in Africa by boat, by train, on foot and by bicycle. We did make considerable use of airplanes, though now we avoid them. Maybe we've lost the wanderlust, especially given the awful phenomenom of modern tourism.
I have spent decades promoting and advocating measures to reduce our collective destruction of the environment, both in my various occupations and as a community activist.
So I understand your friend. But like him, I have only "taken the price pressure off of the consumption of others". This is something that I have always known. It is knowledge derived from elementary economics. It is, as a minimum, intelligent speculation.
The reason I act as do, is because I wish to die with a clear conscience. And hopefully to demonstrate to my children and others that a good life can be had while acting to minimize one's contribution to rising entropy. Does your friend believe that waste has been reduced because of his actions?
That said, this phrase, "Well, the people who are transitioning to renewables are going to be in much better shape going forward as energy supplies become more expensive." is non-sensical. I assume you are not referring to current hydro-electric in this use of 'renewables'.
Transitioning to renewables is part of our transition to more expensive energy supplies. As some make this transition, others will enjoy the benefit of their absence from the fossil fuel market. Beginning in some markets (applications), alternatives will become less costly than fossil fuels. It will be a long time, if ever, before fossil fuels are completely, competitively displaced.
In the end, all will share the costs and benefits, one hopes with greater fairness than today, of higher cost, renewable energy. Of all consumers, current and future, early adopters of renewable energy in markets where fossil fuels retain a competitive advantage will pay the highest relative price for energy. When the hydrocarbon platform vanishes, the price of renewables may be in purchasing power terms much higher than early adopters are paying and will pay, but all consumers will be drinking from the same bowl.
That's fine, they/we may sleep better and enjoy life more. Even mainstream economists would likely concede that in a supply driven energy market their/our sacrifice will not impact overall utility.
At any time the most efficient conservationist will enjoy an advantage.
We are beginning to fully appreciate the terrible external costs of fossil fuels. But the external costs of renewables are only just coming into view; for example the destruction of rainforest to allow biodeisel cropping or the use of land for fuel instead of food. Are there undiscovered externalities for PV's and other man-made solar converters? I sure hope not. I don't see how, but we don't know what might be the consequence of scaling up the industry to a meaningful level.
Also, want to know the biggest bundle of people who "consider themselves to be scientists", that would probably be the "Union of Concerned Scientists". :-P
Science is, among other things, a network of institutions - journal and book publishers, educational institutions, government agencies, industrial labs, &c. Lots of people are working their way up the social ladder by way of careers inside this network. To what extent is it smart to rely on this network to generate unbiased information - to what extent will the network tend to favor theories and methods that favor its own perpetuation and dominance?
Science is also a proud attitude that man is like a god, that man can rule nature.
Science is also a humble and sceptical attitude, always aware that the best theories are only as good as the tests they've passed. In fact, science is also a passion for devising ever more ingenious tests to discover the limitations of whatever theory is strutting the stage at the moment.
An important factor in the rise of modern science was the questioning of ancient authority such as Aristotle, and new respect for practical experience as a way to learn about the way things are.
I would like to suggest that when we want to know if somebody's hypothesis has a plausible scientific basis, that rather than resorting to the credentials of the person, we look instead to the hypothesis itself, how it fits in with our best theories of the moment, with practical experience, &c.
The rules are pretty clear... you research and you publish, you are a scientist. You design and "sell" technological product, you are an engineer. You mouth off, you are a troll, no matter what you did in the past.
At least that is how I look at it. The last part is probably open to discussion, but most scientists will probably agree that some sort of academic racord and occupation that produces new knowledge is attached to the job title. This is fairly independent of employment. Anyone can submit to a science journal. If the paper is worth something, it is likely that someone will give it a chance, even if the author is not affiliated with a famous university. It is also true, though, that being affiliated does have advantages. In case of a marginal paper and a good journal those are, at best, marginal, though.
"Science is also a proud attitude that man is like a god, that man can rule nature."
That is total bull. God knows by definition everything. What would he need science for, for God's sake? Science is something you do when you don't know something and are curious...
Science does not rule nature but tries to figure out how it worlks. Engineering does not rule nature, either, it just makes smart use of it.
"I would like to suggest that when we want to know if somebody's hypothesis has a plausible scientific basis, that rather than resorting to the credentials of the person,"
You can tell me ten times that you are the "King of Artististan" and I will laugh about you. Same holds true for claiming you are a scientist. In blogs people claim to be a lot of things and it does not have to be true. If I make an argument I do rely on my science training to make that argument as well as I can. My better ones are all numeric... based on real world data. One of the things I like about TOD is that a lot of people here do the same.
Comming back to the case at hand: I would like to see a numeric argument why a man who is doing what can be done to save energy is worse than a similar man who builds a McMansion and cosumes 20,000 kWh a year. Dr. Unruh could have done the latter. He didn't. That is convincing in my eyes.
Also, I think a scientist is somebody who thinks like a scientist.
Comming back to the case at hand: I would like to see a numeric argument why a man who is doing what can be done to save energy is worse than a similar man who builds a McMansion and cosumes 20,000 kWh a year. Dr. Unruh could have done the latter.
Nobody said that Jerry was worse than a conspicuous consumer. This is called a straw-man argument. It is also a rhetorical device.
In any case, authority is good for exactly one reason. It's nice for people to have some sort of reputation to put on the line. It's not easy or practical to vet every statement by every person, not on a blog like this at least, so it's good for people to have an actual reputation for honesty, so that their statements don't need to be vetted as completely. This rarely really comes up due to the ill-defined nature of the discussion as said above.
I will say however, that whenever I've vetted anything said by the UCS, it has almost without exception been one of the following.
- So poorly defined that there's no point in even considering it further. In the famous words of Pauli "It's not even wrong." A standard example would be things like "That cost is unthinkable." or "Nuclear waste is dangerous for hundreds of millions of years." What type of nuclear waste, you do know there's multiple types, right? Dangerous to whome? How dangerous? Under what circumstances? Unthinkable, that means it's more than the current world GDP, or just more than the cost of some guy's latest gadget?
- Numbers are just flat out wrong. "The world has only enough uranium for 50 years at the present rate of use..." That sort of thing. It's just untrue, a flat out lie. Sounds fairly plausible to the uninformed though.
- Badly misleading. "The US would require 5,000 fast breeders to make enough fuel for the current reactors." True (perhaps, ill defined as #1 above, how large are these breeders, what design?), but irrelevant. Surely nobody thinks the only purpose of fast breeders is to make fuel for the 40 year old non-breeder reactors we currently have. Why compare it in this manner, that's not the point of a breeder at all, so why bring it up unless it's just intended to deceive.
I use nuclear examples because that's what I know, but others are also legion.A personal favorite is the glossing over of all solar's problems. I'm not saying solar is bad, just that many of its advocates resort to extreme deception and outright lies at every opportunity.
"A solar panel produces Y units of energy per square meter. The US used Z units of energy last year, an average of U per second, so we'd need X square meters to provide for all our energy needs." True, maybe, if there were no clouds, etc... This is of course responded to with "but just spread them out, then surely at least some of them will be working at all times". OK, so you just need 3x as many, an adjustment worthy of note, don't you think? Also, only true if the pesky earth would just stop spinning. Night seems to happen with some regularity, and it does affect large swaths of territory. Solar panels, even when separated by hundreds of miles, are not independent random variables. Who knew?
Anyway, this is why I care about credibility. As far as I'm concerned the UCS has built up so much negative credibility that I find it incredible to even consider than anything they say could actually be true. Not that I will dismiss a possibility just because UCS says it, but rather that what UCS says simply carries no information. It's white noise if you will.
You're right about the value of somebody putting their reputation on the line with some claim or other. The thing is, it cuts both ways. On the one hand, they can be judged on the accuracy of their claim, how it fares under subsequent further scrutiny. On the other hand, it can be judged by how much it harmonizes with the agenda of this or that powerful interest. People say things to display their loyalties, or maybe to make a bid to join some club.
One pet peeve of mine, though, is this idea that because I am a scientist who has done a lot of excellent research in area A, that gives me authority to make claims about area B that should properly get a lot more credence that other folks' claims.
Some folks pick up a lot of arrogance with their scientific successes and start making proclamations about all sorts of things they know very little about. Other folks learn through the scientific school of hard knocks that there are many devils in the details, and if they haven't gone around the loop a few times with some class of phenomena or other, they shouldn't claim any special authority in that matter.
Anyway, I pretty much agree with IP, if somebody claims to be a scientist, they open themselves up for legitimate ridicule. Ha! I'm thinking about a scene in a grocery store, where maybe somebody is trying to cut in line, and when folks object, the person says, "But I'm a celebrity!"
If I don't recognize your face or voice, then for me, you are not a celebrity!
If you cannot talk about your own experiments or point to results in the literature or present an analysis of some system using well-established theories - to fall back on some claim of authority like "I'm a scientist" is just ridiculous.
Finally, I was called a troll, which was intended to make me feel like I did not belong. When in fact, I making what I thought to be a well thought out and significant comment. Y'all were laughing at me. That seems a bit intolerant.
I certainly don't think it applied to you. I was a bit surprised when IP whipped it out like he did.
The rest of us peons have opinions which he enjoys trying to discount as worthless while he supplies his TRUTHS.
Its not clear what his problem is. Schoolyard bully, hall monitor, or whatever but its very tiring to be constantly told that your wrong and of course he is right no matter what the subject is. Dirt,oil,air,fire,water...he covers it all.
Of course they don't and, of course, they won't. Dr Unruh has found his way of energy neutral living. He can afford it. Now we have to figure out how to make you energy neutral in a way you can afford.
It's nice that he likes to live in a house made of dirt, and I also find it cool that Jay Leno drives a car that runs on steam, I really do. However, I will say that him telling us that he lives like this is like him telling us whether or not he likes strawberries. This is the sort of help I'd expect from a poet (and I do grant that it's quite poetic), but has little if anything to do with the real world. This is the problem with UCS, a total inability to grasp basic mathematics (such as "how many people live in this country, what's the surface area of the planet, etc...") seems to pervade everything they do.
I didn't assume that six billion people need to live the same, but at the same time, are we going to start covering what color the rich and famous are painting their ballrooms?
If you want a solution to a global problem, then it has to have some global reach. I'm not saying it needs to help everybody, but it should probably be able to help at least a sizeable fraction of them, at least in principal. Lets put this lower bar at around 10 million people. So a subway improvement in NYC might qualify, but a rich snob powering his country club with hamsters on wheels probably doesn't.
Maybe I'm on the wrong site, perhaps this is people magazine.
Now, to put them all together the way he has done might be luxury, BUT, every single one of these things work independently of the others. So if we start insulating homes and put solar arrays on other homes and use recycled material more often, we will achieve substantial savings.
And that is how you solve problems in the real world: by dividing them in managable pieces and solving them one by one.
Dr. Unruh just happens to be one of the lucky few who have the gift of solving all of them at the same time. But the way he did it would work for everyone else just as well.
"If you want a solution to a global problem..."
... I need to start solving it at home. I can not solve it in China. The Chinese need to do that. I can solve it HERE, where the Chinese can't. How hard is that to understand?
"So a subway improvement in NYC might qualify, but a rich snob powering his country club with hamsters on wheels probably doesn't."
A solar panel is something even the not so rich can afford. It will make as much electricity on top of your home as it will on top of Bill Gate's home.
InfinitePossibilities, you hit a home run with that comment. Of course Mr. Unruh is taking personal responsibilty for reducing his own carbon footprint, he's not just sitting on the computer in a climate controlled house, chatting on the internet. I think its commendable, and responsible, and something we see far too little of in our society. It matters that I drive a 10 year old car that gets 33 mpg because it isn't worn out, it matters that I've switched to floresent bulbs, that I have windows and a porch to catch the sea breeze and window units rather than central air and heat. It matters that I ride my bike on errands. What all of us doe matters, because the sum total of our efforts is substantial And with the attitude that what we each do is important, we can change the world.
That made me laugh out loud. I can just imagine a piece like that on the local news.
Not at all. He said, "I am going to lower my ecological footprint and try to live in a zero-energy house." He is helping demonstrate the feasibility of this solution. Not everyone can afford to put solar panels up, but I think, like Jerry, that the government could be doing more to push this solution.
Besides that, even if you really believe that the energy he saves is going to be consumed by someone else, ask yourself whether he will be worse off or better off than the average person as energy becomes more scarce and more expensive.
I'm sorry, but was he not listening to what you said or has he been repeating the alternative energy talking points so long that he ignores anything that may contradict them..
Another says he didn't go far enough. Mid ridge in mountainous terrain is nearly impossible to properly site turbines-and I think Colorado is of one the state leaders for commercial wind generation, but on plains, or ridge top. And gardening in soils derived of decomposed granite, judging from the text and photo background, is more trouble and water intensive than many would like.
Even with the grain of truth in both the comments, the home is a laudable place. And the interview shows a very respectable person.
I can tell you that what he is doing is no picnic. It can get pretty cold in that house during the night. But he is demonstrating that one can dramatically reduce their CO2 production.
There is an out of print and now on-line book on the topic of low water gardening. The basic idea is each plant gets 3-4 feet (or more) about it without other plants.
And you have drip irrigation methods too.
So it can be done, its just not like what many are used to.
In regards the productivity of silicon cells versus farmland it needs to be pointed out that one costs hundreds of dollars per square metre and the other just a few cents.
It also needs to be pointed out that I can and always will price your energy from farmland out of the market if we are running out of food. I don't care about paying $10 for a loaf of bread if I am hungry. How long can you run your car on the ethanol equivalent of a loaf of bread? Half a mile? Are you willing to compete with me for ethanol at a cost of $10 for half a mile?
In short... your comparison is nonsense. You assume that biofuels are cheaper than solar because you haven't been adding in the hidden cost of tax pork and hydrocarbons used in farming.
I was surprised that his spot heater used electric, if he's got sun available for PV, wouldn't he be aiming for heating the Kitchen sink water with solar directly? Hope so. (Hope so for me, too. Got the idea drawn up, but it's another thing to buy materials, put things together and cut holes in your walls, right after you've been trying to SEAL all the holes in the house!)
As far as PV versus Biopower, 'give unto caesar what's caesar's'.. ie, we need to use both, and apply them where they fit best.. scrap biomass (woodchips) in a compost digester, or biodiesel can run your vehicle, a furnace or a generator, but you'd also be wise to have a couple panels running too.. diversify the energy porfolio. But with the PV, you get the power almost without any of your own work added in. Not so with almost any biomass source.. that affects the numbers signifigantly.
Just raw bare-ass biomass can go into a stirling engine and create nice real 120 volt 60 Hz electricity at pretty good efficiency and with no detectable smoke or smell.
Nobody says anything about this. They keep talking about PV. Damn. Around here installed PV with only a grid tie costs about 60 dollars per delivered watt. I got this number from my neighbor who installed a so-called 2.5kW panel on his roof last year. He gave me his system purchase price and his delivered kWhrs/year and I got that number. Even I can do arithmetic that simple.
Of course you can buy that PV panel, but you can't buy the stirling, which would cost you maybe 4000 dollars for the whole 1kW system IF somebody would just put it into production.
Fortunately for the world, not everybody is as pea-headed as the VC's in the USA. There are smart people in Asia and even Europe who are getting up their courage to try stirlings. They also know that there's lots of biomass going to the dump.
Right! Right! IF everybody had a stirling gobbling up biomass, there would not be any biomass going to the dump, and its cost would go up. BUT, right now and right here, there is a lot of biomass going to the dump.
Next year in Jerusalem!
BTW, there is more than one way to skin a stirling.
If you take the cost of the installed PV system, and divide it by the average power delivered, which is total watt-hrs/yr divided by hours in a year, you get $60 system installed cost per average watt delivered.
That is to say, a PV system capable of delivering the equivalent of 100 watts steady state averaged over the year, (delivering 100 watts 24 hrs per day for 365 days), costs installed $6000 dollars.
Of course, if you leave the misty forests of Appalachia, and move to the altiplano of Chile, these numbers will be different.
But those are the measured numbers my neighbor gave me for the here and now.
My somewhat crude one-off stirling, able to deliver 1000 watts all the time for many years, is estimated by serious manufacturing people to have a SYSTEM cost installed of $4000, or $4/average watt delivered.
60/4= 15
I am already burning for other purposes the fuel needed for the stirling, so I don't add that cost-- as a first estimate. Yes, I know about the first law of thermo.
As it is, the comparison of costs per average watt delivered is misleading and meaningless as it relates to economic decision making.
On a related topic (I really don't doubt the advantages you state over Biomass, and am sincerely curious about your sterling prototype).. so, do you have any thoughts on startups that could be initiated here in Maine? Sterlings, Geothermal, conventional Solar ~should be room for more companies here, soon, for whoever is ready to jump in..
I'm just thinking about ideas for potential manufacturing that could be started up here. (as part of my ELP thinking).. I think the potential for companies specialising in retrofitting and tightening old homes, of which we have so many, could be a solid business. Come up with packages that include some generation options, plus passive capture, insulation and window/door replacements, etc.
Dunno.. just want to see how Maine can be aiming towards levels of self-sufficiency. I also want to start finding ways to bring our transp plan forward, restrengthen the rail infrastructure.
Best,
Bob
Just takes the usual- clear goal, hard work, salesmanship, management, money, luck------.
Somebody is gonna find that stirlings are pretty simple and go for the goals I have talked about. Hard for me to understand why it is taking so long, especially in North Europe and Japan, where it seems to me they have more business vision and brains than common around here.
Re stirling- look at NASA space power, the little isotope powered free piston stirlings.What I am doing is like those, but higher power and made for low cost production. Anybody could do it. 19th century engineering. No quantum mechanics req'd.
One comment called for carbon taxes on primary production of fossil fuels. I agree but levied as a rate per ton of CO2.
A simple solution would be to tax oil and coal (only) at a specific rate per ton CO2. I think Nicholas Stern mentioned the "cost" of CO2 as $100 per ton. This can easily be recalculated into a cost per ton for coal and a cost per barrel for oil.
Governments can levy these taxes easily on primary production/import and they can simultaneously reduce/remove taxes on income.
The problem is that this will not happen. The oil and coal industry lobbies are too deeply entrenched with government and the politics are too complex for this sort of a program to occur. Also countries without extensive social services programs will need to implement systems that provide poorer people with an income - again big politics and there are huge infrastructure problems with the management of payments.
So, in summary we are stuffed. Peak Oil and Global Warming are a cliff that is all too visible ahead. Yet, we will all go over the edge (likely driving some stupid SUV) because collectively we can do nothing about it.
Those hanging chads in Florida have a lot to answer for!
If I can be so rude as to go back a few days to what I felt was an issue unresolved. On Dec 16, you wrote about a "Different Approach to Calculating KSA Oil Reserves". You got verbally mugged and while I didn't read the entire post, it seemed like posters were missing the point.
"In 1982, U.S. reserves were 27.858 billion barrels. In 2005, U.S. reserves were 21.757 billion barrels. So we drew down our reserves by 6 billion barrels. Imagine my shock to discover our production over that time period. What would you guess? Six billion barrels? Ten? In fact, oil production from these reserves since 1982 totals 56.9 billion barrels! Amazingly, in the past 24 years we have produced 57 billion barrels of oil and pulled our reserves down by only 6 billion barrels."
Wasn't your point that we produced more than we said that we had? That the validity of our own oil data is suspect?
Thanks in advance. Have a pleasant holiday. Jim
Believe me, I felt the same way, but I don't want to rehash that in this thread. Suffice to say that despite all the talk that this was all common knowledge, the magnitude of the difference between our reserves in 1982, what we produced from that, and how much we drew down our reserves certainly was not.
However, a number of posters had a great time tearing down the strawman that I don't know what reserves growth is.
What I was interested in was that you were dealing in relatively strict proven reserves, and I was wondering how that contrasts to estimated URR with/without advanced technology, proven & probable reserves, and the other probabilistic reserve judgement types, for us and for exporters.
You see, that's the strawman again. People say, "Everyone knows about reserves growth." Of course. But then many people said "Something has to be wrong with those numbers." So, even if someone knows all about reserves growth, those numbers can still be quite a surprise.
What people were surprised about was the strawman they constructed: RR was surprised that reserves grow.
Also RR regarding your reserves post ;thanks for putting the contradiction out for drummers. Too bad you got critized/attacked. At times the high intellectual standards gets used in a nasty form of elitism- that time at your expense.We are all in this together- and yes a no. of us are not scientists or we are newbies and we need basic info-often over & over. Thanks for jumping in, even in an area not your primary expertise-upstream . Thanks again.
Some were full of praise at this man's foresight, creativity, and initiative. However, others found all sorts of faults with its basic design and its various phsyical features.
Some also seemed to imply that the notion of a custom (and probably very expensive) retreat built in the heart of prime tourist country is more of an elitist fantasy come true rather than a workable solution for the masses.
What I admire about Mr. Unruh is that he was able to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. That's more than can be said about most of us (including me).
Over the years I have had some, albeit limited, contact with the 'greenie'/alternative energy crowd; and I would have to say that they tend to be heavily academic, heavily liberal (both culturally and politically), and tend to have a strong whiff of self-righteousness about them. One could see this mentality come through in some of the early Whole Earth Catalogs, which now strike me as hopelessly quaint.
Example: A geodesic dome is extremely difficult to construct properly and has rather poor space utilization for domestic living, yet many of these hippies trying to start communes just had to have a geodesic dome. It was more of a matter of fashion rather than utility. In other words, these new 'alternative living' schemes cannot be separated from ideology.
What I am getting at is that some of these examples of cutting edge, futuristic designs have next to zero chance of being suitable for mass applicability. For example, we don't consume enough tires to enable everyone to live in an earth & tire house that requires 950 tires (do the arithmetic). It's not even clear to me why used tires are a good building material in the first place, other than to demonstrate the recycling of a waste material.
This gets into the area of 'appropriate technology', but that is another big subject.
To sum up, my feelings on the subject can best be expressed by using an automotive analogy: Where price is no object, almost anyone can design a Roll Royce, but it took a true genius (Ferdinand Porsche) to design the VW Beetle, literally the people's car.
I think most people still use the "It is SOOOOO expensive!" and "I can't afford that!" defense to avoid a serious discussion. They rather waste their money on the heating bill than go to the store and get what it takes to lower it.
If you don't have the capital to invest in energy conservation, then you are stuck with paying high year-to-year energy bills.
Poor people tend to drive big junkers that get terrible gas mileage. While they can scrape up the money to put gas in the tank every week, they have little chance of putting a down payment on a Toyota Prius or being able to afford the monthly car payments.
It often gets down to operating costs versus capital costs. Without capital you often have to suffer high operating costs.
He installed a very modest PV array that probably cost considerably less than $15,000. What's the big deal? As I said earlier, also, his home has less square footage than the average being built these days. I believe the average is about 2400 square feet.
Does every approach have to be the solution for everyone, everywhere? Of course not. There are many different approaches to reducing our fossil fuel use and they should be applauded.
I still think, however, that there is a misconception that this is a zero net energy house, which I don't think anyone has really addressed.
His total cost per square foot is similar to standard construction, including the solar array. He could have saved some $ by doing more of the rammed earth labor, but it took him 6+ weeks with both he and his wife helping on very long days as it was to get the earth rammed and the tire walls straight and level.
That some would think him elitist is laughable; I don't know him that well, but both he and his wife are just instantly likeable, friendly people. He is an engineer and she is artistically inclined, and the resulting details may give the impression the house is higher end than it really is.
My problem was with the overall message that efficiency is the key to lowering consumption. It is not. Price is the key to lowering consumption. If you crank up the price, efficiency and/or demand destruction will follow.
It seems like a lot of people think that it works in reverse. If more efficient, then demand will go down. In this sense, they are 'putting the cart before the horse.'
I think this is a destructive message because it gives people the feeling that they are solving a problem when they are not. I think there is an Albert Einstein quote on this website on this topic, about thinking you know something when you don't.
I have a 900sq. ft. house in Michigan. It cost us $94,000 15 years ago. We've increased the attic insulation from R19 to R57. We put in an 92% efficient gas furnace, a whole house fan, all fluorescent (tube and compact) bulbs, a 14 SEER air conditioner, energy star appliances, and a wood burning stove. We live on transit lines, take Amtrak to Chicago, walk the kids to school, and bike to work. We've planted over a dozen trees on the property carefully placed to reduce our energy bills. We grow at least a third of our food. I put in a root cellar this year with a thermostat-controlled fan blown intake. I seal the double-pane windows each winter with an extra layer of plastic.
All of the changes cost us less than $15k, which is good, since we couldn't afford to make more changes than that. I applaud him for choosing to spend his money to save energy. I appreciate his efforts. However, I can't afford to make that level of changes, and we're considered well into the middle class here. He sounds quite well off to me, but I may change my mind after I've paid my kids way through university a decade from now.
I don't think he is trying to promote his house as THE solution, just that people can do something, more than they initially realize, to reduce their energy footprint.
In any case, he inspired me to begin tightening up my 80 yr old house and planning my Solar PV installation, which I hope to have done within the year.
The only problem I saw with his house is that lots have become quite expensive within the urban boundary, so he is located up a mountain about 20 minutes from the urban center. But he's retired and doesn't need to go into town very often. Again, his message wasn't that people should mimic him, but that they can do something.
Pleasantly surprised to see him get a mention here.
Exactly.
- an energy self-sufficient house in a relatively isolated location
- "regular" housing in a walkable urban environment
will show the isolated location to be the bigger net energy user, if the residents use private vehicles.Let's use some U.S. figures from
http://www.epa.gov/otaq/consumer/f00013.htm
Ignore trucks, assume everyone drives cars (I'm trying to derive a lower bound here anyway) - the average passenger car travels 12500 miles at 21.5 mpg, or 582 gallons - 2200 L - per year. The energy density of gasoline is 32 MJ/L, so that's 70.4 GJ. That is about the same as the amount of electricity my family consumes in a year, and that includes heat, hot water, lighting and all appliances in a 3000 square foot house with single-pane windows (the house is about a century old; it was not built for energy efficiency).
And that 70 GJ is for only one car. Most households in the United States have two. The energy equivalency calculation also fails to account for the energy overhead in delivering fuel, whereas transmission of electricity has very low losses (<10%).
Put it another way: at roughly 3 MJ/km (average new car) every km you move away from a daily requirement (work, shopping) requires 6 MJ of energy use. Move 16 km (10 miles) further away and you've added consumption of roughly 100 MJ per day, or 27 kWh. More, obviously, if you make the trip more than once.
I suggest that decreasing travel demand is an easier and more effective way of decreasing a person's "energy footprint" than improving the efficiency of housing.
I of course welcome corrections if my calculations are off.
It makes sense to live in a rural area if one does not have to commute to work.
- All of fossil petroleum has been produced thorough photosynthetic conversion of sunlight to hydrocarbon. As an aside to this I find it interesting that despite so many advances there is still an apparent lack of fundamental understanding of photosynthesis. At least to my knowledge artificial photosynthesis does not seem viable at this time. I did see an article some time back, that I can't find now, which talked about difficulty with obtaining the x-ray crystallography structure of the chlorophyll complex I believe because it was a membrane bound protein or some such and how that was being addressed with recent nuclear magnetic resonance studies.
- Photosynthetic conversion of sunlight to complex molecules including hydrocarbons has been around for what, WAG, 2-3 billion years. Michael Briggs a researcher at UNH considered earlier research performed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Aquatic Species Program and estimated that using an appropriate species of algae, if the technical hurdles (which still apparently remain) could be overcome, "Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in 15,000 square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area of the Sonora desert". http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html A primary difference between algae and more conventional crops is that there is a yield per acre on the order of 100 times greater if proper growing conditions can be met. One early application is Greenfuel Technologies http://www.greenfuelonline.com/ (and others) approach of passing power plant exhaust through algae bioreactors to both decrease CO2 emissions and provide biodiesel feedstock. A second group in Australia, while perhaps not achieving as great a yield per acre, has just begun producing biodiesel using wild algae flora from a sewage treatment plant as feedstock. http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=20282&hed=Poop-Grown+Algae+to+Fuel+Cars%3F
- The current transportation infrastructure is in large part built around petroleum something which biodiesel could make use of, that is to say, no need for new filling stations.
- One bright guy who also sees potential in this approach is J Craig Venter. Venter , after leaving NIH, raced NIH in sequencing the human genome, it was declared a tie in 2002 but I think the pace was mostly set by Venter. One of the current areas of emphasis in his research http://www.venterinstitute.org/ is the, "use of molecular and genomic methods to develop biological sources of clean energy".
I agree that current biofuels production is likely highly inefficient compared to solar and think that using our corn to make ethanol, while it might do some good also seems a bit stupid. However, the best long term solution to transport fuels may be to work to mimic the way nature created fossil fuels in the first place, that is conversion of sunlight not into electricity but into stored chemical energy.Must also say I liked the comment about needing wisdom going forward. Not sure if the world has ever faced a situation where it needs to act cooperatively as a whole to face such common "enemies". Things could get a lot better or a whole lot worse in short order. I have no doubt resource depletion and global warming can be solved, I have a really difficult time believing they will be solved without a whole lot of "difficulties".
The problem with sewage is the toxins.
Examples - paint, thinner, oil down the drains. Old pills, drugs in the urine.
All that would work its way into the duckweed.
Other waste management methods include sending the waste to a cattail field (Starchy edible roots) or to a 45 degree incline pit that has black soldier fly larve (maggots eat crap, crawl out of pit into collection area, then feed 'em to your pigs/birds/fish, take the remainders of the pit and compost/feed to worms)
The problem is, every year we use up thousands of years of accumulated fossil biomass.
Many nines (99.9...%) of sunlight leave the earth without being absorbed by the right algae, in the right high-sediment alluvial plain, followed by the right sealevel ice age to deposit a salt cap, followed by the right seismic and geological conditions to allow the oil to drift upwards and be captured.
But that wasn't my implication - it was that geologically(rather than biologically), a very low percent of stored solar energy isn't released right back into the biosphere and right back into the air as carbon dioxide/methane, or stored in the ground in a form we can't use. Yes, we're burning through thousands of years of stored energy, but in reality, a miniscule amount was stored each year compared to what we could store if we devoted all the earth's land/water to it and applied efficient industrial processes.
In other words: You can't judge future biofuels by the yield performance of fossil fuels.
Thxs for this posting! I was struck by this one quote of Jerry's:
----------------------------------------------------
The recently released Iraq Study Group Report suggested that this war may ultimately cost $2 trillion. $2 trillion! Do you know what could have been done with $2 trillion? You could have put solar panels on 40% of the homes in the U.S. Imagine the greenhouse gas reduction from that. Imagine the energy security. Instead, we spent it to go to war to protect our oil supplies.
--------------------------------------
I agree. Our leaders are incredibly short-sighted with Peakoil arriving soon [now?]. I feel as if a death sentence has been issued to a majority of the world's population by TPTB. Evidently, Jerry feels the same:
-----------------------------------
JU: If we used wisdom, we could potentially transition from fossil fuels. We could have more livable cities, public transports, electricity from renewable sources powering PHEVs, and household electricity being produced by a combination of solar power and stationary hydrogen.
However, it is not clear that we have the wisdom, in which case I see more wars and widespread starvation.-----------------------------------------------------
If the downslope hits hard and fast: the American Southwest will be struggling just to survive, and using precious resources to try and stem a huge migratory influx from Mexico. I also expect to see a huge jump in the growth rate of the ongoing wealth transfer and braindrain as many more Southwesterners will start migrating to Cascadia and the other northern locales that will be seen as a viable survival option.
IMO, the best way to reduce these effects from happening is for the wheelbarrow mindset to overtake the rifle mindset as explained in my earlier post. If NA wants to remain viable, we need a massive transformation to relocalized permaculture and building the largest factories in the world to make windmills, PVs, and whatever other alternatives that exist with sustainable ERoEI.
If the US would trade PVs and wheelbarrows for oil from Mexico: once sufficient Mexicans Paradigm Shift, they would then feel no need to migrate if their habitat was ecologically sustainable. This will be much easier than shooting them which is what I fear will be TPTB option.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
At 325 gallons a year, he's consuming about 27.9 million Btus a year.
Thats equal to 8192 kWh of lower heating value.
My house (which is a normal run of the mill English house) is on track to consume about 7000 kWh a year.
As we only have electricity we run everything on it. And I mean everything.
Space heating, air con, hot water, electric shower, all lighting, all widgets, fridge/freezer, washing machine, electric clothes dryer, plus our cooker and oven.
Assuming Jerry's propane appliances run with an average efficiency of 70% he's only getting about 5734 kWh worth of heat/work out of them. I'll assume the rest goes out the exhaust vents of these appliances.
As thats on top his electricity production/consumption and his passive solar collection, this seems a bit high to me.
After all I live in a drafty, poorly insulated house and I can get by on much less total energy consumption. And its not like I go easy on the heating or the coffee machine...
I like my widgets.
I do realise that almost double the fossil fuel amount must be consumed to produce my 7000 kWh due to approx 50% elec production efficiency, but as I live but 4 miles from a great big 800MW nuke, its safe to say, mine is a nuclear fuelled house.
Just seems a bit strange, thats all.
Andy
Can I enjoy poking some fun being a U.S. Southerner (KY)?....HE LIVES IN COLORADO, FOR PETE'S SAKE!!
All the efficiency in the world ain't gonna' warm you poor chestnuts in that rock strewn icebox without massive imputs of BTU's....MOVE SOUTH, and enjoy life, for a change!
:-) :-) :-) (going down my sis's in Alabama soon, we usually do a little January bar-b-cue grll out :-), I gotta' love it....:-)
RC known to you as ThatsItImout
Let's see what we got...PV, check, and with the new generation coming FAST, and thin film cost and material efficiency, double check...
PHEV (Plug Hybrid Electric Vehicles) and with the battery development coming fast, check....
With wisdom, the possibility of livable cities, check...
propane as a great intermediate step in home heating, check, and Dr. Jerry doesn't mention it's possibility as the "range extender-climate control" fuel in Plug hybrids, but with extreme efficiencies it makes sense...check
And, my FAVORITE sentence of the whole interview:
"JU: Not a hydrogen economy as it is often presented. I don't believe that we will drive around in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. But I believe that excess solar can be used to electrolyze water and produce hydrogen, and then that hydrogen can be used to produce supplemental electricity in a combined-cycle turbine. The electricity produced can be used to run PHEVs."
EXACTLY, or even compressed and handled much like CNG, and used in a small onboard micro-turbine....
Which brings me to my only complaint....what, was it not so very many weeks ago that I was roundly chopped up, sliced and diced for saying the word "hydrogen", and called a jackass, fool, and believer in perpetual motion for even suggesting that it could have a useful place in the energy scheme of things? And now, it's considered the greatest thing since sliced bread....amazing what a PHD can do for exactly the same theory, ain't it folks? Makes me think of the great scene in the TV show "Frazier", when a psychiatrist told Frazier and his brother that they had incurable sibling rivelry, were competitive, envious, territorial, and all around HOPELESS as brothers....to which Niles said "Well, of course dad always said it, but then, he had no credentials." :-)
But, Dr. Jerry Unruh is right. More and more people are starting to see that avoiding the trap of 10,000 conversions, of trying to get the carbon BACK OUT of the hydrocarbon, and hide it somewhere, or trying to grow X crop with Y expense and Z imputs to fish the hydrogen out of it will be more difficult that just getting the hydrogen renewably without the carbon and the conversions....and Dr. Unruh is very perceptive to see that it will NOT be done "as it is often presented". It will NOT work as this giant new infrastructure nightmare "the hydrogen economy", with it's boondoggle complexity....it will be produced in small batch, where it is needed, and consumed close to where it is produced, and the "truckage and haulage" idiocy will fade away....
Anyway, you guys listen to a hillbilly without a PHD who does NOT call himself a scientist every now and then....you will be one up on the laggards....:-)
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
Why would we have excess solar? Would it make more sense to feed it into the grid or produce hydrogen which would then have to be stored and fed into a combined cycle setup. Would this excess solar be used to produce hydrogen at a centralized facility or a on site residence or both?
Assuming this is supposed to apply to a residential or otherwise small commercial site, would it make more sense to store this excess solar in batteries or produce hydrogen.
The same issues could apply to wind in this sense. Since wind represents a tiny proportion of the total electricity produced, why would there be excess wind? Can't the system be set up to always utilize the wind first and then feed in the electricity from fossile fuels?
Now, when and if wind and solar represent a major part of our total electricity, that might be the time to think about producing hydrogen as a backup. But the same issues apply to storage. Would hydrogen then become the storage medium of choice as opposed to pumped storage, batteries, etc.
And, also, we have seen ongoing discussions of using PHEVs or battery powered vehicles as a way to use excess or unused capacity at night. Couldn't we also use PHEVs or BV during the day plugged in at work? In which case, why would we want to produce hydrogen to produce electricity to recharge our vehicles. Seems like too many steps.
Yes, solar electrolized hydrogen can be done, but what is the cost and how does that cost compare to the alternatives.
See. Even PHDs can't get away with examining the issues.
tstreet,
I would like to do more on this, but at this moment, I am short on time...but I do feel your question deserves an answer, at least speaking for myself (the non PHD at the table
:-)
Your first question,
"Why would we have excess solar? Would it make more sense to feed it into the grid or produce hydrogen which would then have to be stored and fed into a combined cycle setup. Would this excess solar be used to produce hydrogen at a centralized facility or a on site residence or both?
--The issue comes back to variability and portability of solar and wind power. If the solar or wind is fed into the grid as it arrives, it means a potentially very variable power source. If it is to be stored, then we are discussing methods of storage. The interesting thing is, in the broadest sense, there are only 4 possible storage mediums for energy:
- Mechanical-falling water, flywheel, falling weights, compressed air, hydraulic pressure, etc., in other words, mass is moved or compressed, to be moved or released at a chosen time
- Thermal- a substance is heated or cooled, and then returned to ambient tempeture at a chosen time. such as heating a substance and capturing the heat at a chosen time, or cooling a substance to liquid, and allowing heat to reheat it at a chosen time (Liquid nitrogen or "liquid air" storage, for example
- Chemical-a substance is chemically altered by energy at a chosen time, to be allowed to be re-altered at a chosen time, such as hydrogen released from water, to be burned or run through fuel cells at a chosed time.
- Electrical-electrons are forced about by energy, and allowed to return at a chosen time, such as batteries, super capacitors, etc. Although chemicals may be involved in construction, the power is released by moving electrons, not be consuming the chemical in the battery (although it may fail after enough usage)
So, there you are, ALL the known ways on Earth to store energy. Now, when you look at these, ask yourself if they can pass one more test: Portabiility. Because we are pretty much in agreement that the first problem is the transportation fuel problem, that is where we need to confront the issue head on. And what we need is a storage medium that is instantly controllable in releasing energy, and dense in energy, and able to be transported. In other words, the closest thing possible to a liquid fuel. That would be of course, crude oil processed into (a)Diesel fuel (b)gasoline (c)LPG (propane) (d) natural gas, or (e) some comparable type of methane, butane, etc., OR, bio-fuel, OR, The valuable stuff that is in ALL of these fuels, in fact the only stuff that burns, yes, hydrogen.When folks say, "why not a battery", I say "how good can you make batteries? If you can make them good enough, why do you need a plug hybrid, or a hybrid at all, why not just an electric car? Because a plug hybrid already has batteries, but to get the flexibility, fast refilling possibilities, needs to carry a liqud, dense, portable fuel, that can be refueled quickly, and that can provide heat for climate control. This is what makes the "liquid fuel" crisis so difficult. Worse, EVERY type of fossil fuel has two more great weaknesses: They cannot be created on site in almost all locations, they contain carbon, which is a liability, and the waste carbon must be disposed of. So, what we have is a situation where we have sun almost everywhere, wind almost everywhere, or one or the other, energy, but no liquid portable fuel! So, we kill the EROEI balance by trucking fossil fuel in, refining, which costs more, then trucking or shipping, which costs more, and then having to dispose of the carbon, which costs more! This brings us to the second part of the question you ask:
"Would this excess solar be used to produce hydrogen at a centralized facility or a on site residence or both?
Depending on need, but common sense would say produce the hydrogen where you use it. Look, here is the whole thing in a nutshell:
The EROEI on oil, natural gas, propane, etc, are going DOWN.
The EROEI on refineries, steel production, production of massive pipelines, production of hauling trucks, is going DOWN.
The EROEI of windmills, solar electric film, and speciality films that can convert water straight to hydrogen by solar-exposure even without the electricicy, are going UP.
The carbon content of fossil fuels are going UP (tar sand, heavier crude, extra heavy oils, etc.) and clean natural gas is being used to try to cleanse them, total idiocy, in which the cleanest of fuels is trashed trying to salvage the dirtiest
The carbon content of hydrogen is DOWN and out....and stays that way. EVEN if the efficiency balance of kilowatts of sunlight or windpower converted to hydrogen is VERY BAD, if the hydrogen can be created in small batch, but ultra widely distributed, the reduction in losses in infrastructure and transportation, and in carbon issues are still FANTASTIC.
Pump hydro? Is it portable, scalable everywhere? Batteries? When they get good enough to provide several hundreds of miles of range, AND heat for climate control, AND withstand almost endless deep charge/discharge cycles, yes, we can throw out the need for liquid fuel, at least in cars and trucks, but until then, that is why hybrid fossil/electric must exist.
Car and energy companies, universities, and scientists all around the world are working on DIRECT from renewable hydrogen, as easily handled and stored as natural gas or compressed methane, with NO carbon issues, and produced all around the world, so no massive infrastructure. I have become more and more convinced that it is the direct way to get to viable liquid fuel, WITHOUT the boondoggle of ethanol, and to do it in small staged investment batches. ONSITE hydrogen by renewable is DIFFERENT IN EVERYWAY than the current administration giant monstrosity of the "hydrogen highway" combined with the almost NASA style complex boondoggle of the transportation fuel cell.
That will not work. It costs too much, takes too long, sucks up too much expensive raw materials, and is MORE complex and centralized than the current fossil fuel industry! It is designed on yesterday's scale, using yesterdays methods, and 1950's era "super centralized planning". It is idiotic.
Decentralized, varied scaled, diversified hydrogen production in small batch, created, used, and returned to the environment with almost no waste of infrastructure and materials, and NO carbon ever captured or released....
The straight line is still the shortest...cut out the middle steps, get the hydrogen FAST and clean, use it or store it, and release, ENERGY, fast, light, decentralized, simple and CLEAN. We are JUST now starting to think in the right way. Most problems are only a problem of visualization.
Thank you. Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
[sorry, didn't mean to create a new thread, just learning the new system]