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UK to "get serious" About Renewable Energy
Bob Dobbs writes "Tomorrow the UK government will
announce (observer.co.uk) it's going to "get serious" about renewable energy; in the bleakest look at global warming so far Tony Blair will warn that extreme weather will wreak £150 billion worth of damage across Europe within a decade and the current situation is "unsustainable". On the bright side, it's mentioned that sustainable energy sources are less susceptible to terrorist attack."
It means you'll never have to depend upon a foreign country for energy or fuel.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
This is a classic politicians trick. Are you on awkward territory with the liberals? Throw them an environmental policy they'll like. But the trick is make it so far fetched that nothing will happen for 20 years by which time you'll be conveniently out of office. Remember the Hydrogen Care initiative at El Presidente's State of The Union? Next up - a space elevator!
It's depressing that the primary reason for action, quoted, is expressed in monetary terms, and not human ones. This happens time and again, and is a reflection of the values of the times we live in. When we speak of damage to the environment, the future of the human race itself is at stake, but our primary reason for wanting to do something about it is how much it might cost? PLEASE WAKE UP.
Watch for this, watch for how often things are expressed in monetary terms, as though that was all that mattered.
It's nice to see one industrialized nation start looking at renewable energy. (I've heard that Germany has already started a similar program--would someone more knowledgeable care to comment?) It would certainly be nice if the US started getting serious about reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. And started promoting more environmentally friendly lifestyles, rather than give tax-breaks for SUVs.
:Peter
On the bright side, it's mentioned that sustainable energy sources are less susceptible to terrorist attack.
:)
Here in Norway, we use mainly water power. Blow a reservoar, and you got one helluva flood. Of course that's a lot of concrete, but there's also damn many tons of water pushing from behind. So it's not automatic that sustainable = safe... but since I haven't bothered to read the article, this is probably about some other kind of sustainable energy
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Before such measures have any effect on global warming, the following will have to take place:
As we are not even approaching the first step, we have to face the fact that these changes are coming. Not that we shouldn't try to change things - we'll have to have other forms of power when fossil fuels start to run out anyway. But these changes are coming and it is now out of our power to stop them.
The real question is, how is the world's food production going to be affected by the climate changes? From the current predictions, it seems that most intensive farming areas of the world are going to have less water, which is an extremely bad sign. I hope people start planning for this soon.
The most ironic part of the article is the continued push against nuclear power, which is currently the only technology which could produce a significant amount of Britain's power without CO2 emission. We have truly dug a deep hole for ourselves.
(Sorry if this is a bit bleak, it's monday morning here.)
Actually, I don't think it's so much oil (and gas) as the old nuclear power stations coming to the end of their active lives, and the government being unwilling to build new ones (due to the political difficulties it would cause since much of the population here doesn't want new ones being built near them).
so I say the government should give deep tax cuts to companies that build the ethanol production infrastructure so that we can replace Gas with Ethanol in 10 years rather than 20.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
That's not too surprising, especially in Europe. There's not a whole bunch of places to put the waste, for one thing. No desert mountains to bury it under. New Scientist did a piece on the dump near Sellafield, which has the radioactive leavings stored up. It's a light concrete bunker containing enough waste that if a medium size plane were flown into it, it would release radioactive waste equivalent to hundreds of Chernobyls.
Europe's a small place. That kind of thing makes people very rationally concerned.
Oh, not to mention the ongoing problems in the Irish Sea, and the atypically high rates of cancer recorded around some of the existing plants...
I refer you to this article by Steven Den Beste talking about amounts of energy produced by various technologies. (He starts with biodiesel but moves on from there.)
Personally, I think nuclear energy is the only realistic way to go, but like Den Beste, I admit that nuclear power is politically dead. On average, nuclear waste is by far the most containable pollution compared to anything releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. IMHO, being an 'environmentalist' and being anti-nuclear power is nonsensical.
- Necron69
Sadly some of us do consider human life cheap (It's very easy to make, and will be around a long long time). I believe in quality of life over quantity of life, and economics is a reflection of quality of life. When the shuttle broke up, I didn't think twice about the people on board, I wondered what it was going to do to the US financially.
We are all going to die, I promise you that. Spending an extra 2 months out of the year working to fund federal disaster programs affects me directly, and I am not ashamed to say that I care about that. Counting costs and counting lives are equally important, and intimately connected.
I'm not actually saying you are wrong, just that money and life aren't so seperate.
More people should look at wood burning these days. The technology has come a long since the days of an old rusty pot belly stove in the basement. There is a good site about burning wood
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Most renewable enery sources don't work continuously. Solar energy isn't much use during the night or a cloudy day. The wind doesn't blow continuously. There will be a need for as much conventional powerplants as without renewable energy for days with little sunshine and wind.
Bush has been talking about hydrogen-based energy as well. Of course, in the case of Bush, it looks more like a strategy to avoid doing anything substantial on the environment in the short term; if Bush really cared about the environment, he'd mandate increases in fuel efficiency and the like.
I'm not sure why peolpe haven't looked to alcohol for fuel. Some Petrol-burining engines would need minor modifications, others would need none at all.
It's not only ready to go right now, but could be incredibly cheap, and renewable. All you really need is sugar and yeast, and the sugar could easilly come from excess produce, such as corn, so this would also financially benefit the farming industry a great deal.
Sure, it's not solar, it's something that would be feasable right now, and would have 99% of the benefits of solar (burns very clean, does not pollute, would be incredibly inexpensive, would be compact and effecient power, and would put an end to OPEC and all their !@#$%^&* ).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Fossil fuels are causing many problems (environmental, foreign policy in the middle east), nuclear is politically incorrect and subject to NIMBYs and not enough investment is being made into renewable/alternative sources of energy. Duh. Does anyone see the problem with this picture?
--
1) Climatology was still in its infancy back in the 1970's. The "computer simulations" they were doing back then could be done with a few hours on a P800 today. Sure, it's an inexact science. But it's gotten better, and will continue to get better.
2) It's stupid to put sneer quotes around the term "scientist" when referring to government scientists. They're graduating from the same doctorate programs as non-government scientists. Without further evidence, there's no reason to assume that they're any less qualified than their civilian counterparts.
3) Government represents the will of the people (one man, one vote). Microsoft represents the will of its shareholders (one share, one vote). That is why I feel safer about government-imposed standards than standards imposed by a near-monopoly corporation, and why you should too.
4) I have almost zero confidence that any government will be able to fix global warming, but I have even less confidence that unregulated corporations would do so. There's just no incentive to do so.
But corporations are often far more flexible and innovative than governments. The best solution is probably to let the government create the incentives through tax breaks and fines, and give the corporations free rein in deciding how to meet the challenge.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
More people should look at wood burning these days.
No. Not on a global scale, because then it becomes non-sustainable.
Excessive wood burning is one of the major reasons for desertification in developing countries. They experience a population explosion while many people retain their agricultural/nomadic lifestyle. Too many eaten, trampled and burnt plants means rapid erosion.
If you plant one tree for every one you burn, it's OK, but this makes little economic sense, as the energy density of wood is too low and the costs (time, space) too high to warrant the effort in a developed society.
Gasoline at $5/gallon would get rid of the SUV craze, and good riddance.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
To get right answers to the energy question, we must start understanding that
a technology's efficiency rating must subtract the true energy cost of production of all hardware involved and extraction of all resources including the energy and resources consumed by the people involved and
an assessment of the environmental impact of technology must include the environmental impact of the factories producing the energy production devices, the raw materials consumed, the wastes produced, the land covered, and the environmental energy transferred (many transform environmental energy of some type to electricity and transfer that electricity to other locations where it almost always becomes heat).
Almost every "solution" I've seen come from the friends of the environment has huge environmental impacts and many consume more energy than they produce. Let's talk about a few.
Hydrogen - its an energy transportation mechanism, not a source. Its impact is little different than electrical wires with the exception that it allows you to "wire" a vehicle to a hydrogen generation plant that will likely be oil fueled. To date, it is cheaper to mass produce hydrogen from oil than any other substance.
Solar cells (cost) - once again, solar cells are an energy transport mechanism. Because the energy investment in lifecycle support (mining, production, distribution, maintenance, recycling) is greater than the lifetime energy output. Efficiencies would have to be far higher to offset this. Don't forget that you have to produce all the energy that we currently consume + all of the energy consumed to produce the energy. Another big weight on the efficiency rating is that you have to back this with other technologies for storing the energy to supply energy at night and when cloudy, these reduce the overall energy efficiency ratings of the system too, both directly and indirectly through the energy cost of production of the backup systems. On top of that, you have to plan for worse case scenarios because you'd likely supplant much of the other energy production technology. What effect would the fires a couple of years ago in Indonesia have had on regional and even worldwide solar energy production? And they lasted for how long?
Solar cells (environment) - solar cell energy consumption might be environmentally friendly, but the energy production will alter the landscape of an order of magnitude more land than oil. To get the capacities we need we will have to significantly change the reflectivity of large areas of our planet. What will that do to weather patterns?
Various underground organic energy sources - none are sustainable. We should stop just burning these up because they are also our cheapest stores for many other raw materials needed to sustain modern technology, though I'm figuring they will eventually make a bug to turn coal into oil/gas and leave behind an equivalent volume tubular matrix made from non-organic substances in the coal. This will allow for easier, more environmentally friendly extraction (it really ticks me off when they cut the tops off of the mountains). Anyway, suffice it to say that there will still be a massive need for oil even when none of it is used for energy production.
Wind - oh come on. Those things are a noisy, ugly blight on the landscape. Someone is making big bucks selling the Brooklyn Bridge here (and most of them are coming from tax dollars because it isn't a very good business yet except in very special circumstances). Has anybody even bothered to figure out the total energy cost of manufacturing and raw materials on these monstrosities? Not to mention maintenance, recycling, etc. And, once again, you need an entire backup infrastructure. It can't be another infrastructure needing a backup unless you can prove that their needs will never significantly overlap. No energy is free and wind seems far from it.
Inland hydroelectric - already more exploited than I like. So many beautiful rivers lost. So much history submerged. Very sad.
Oceanic water movement - This would include wave, current, and many other oceanic energy production methodologies. How come the environmentalists scream when a nuclear plant puts out heat but don't scream at the combined impact of all of this on the oceanic environment. No reason really. So they will. And rightly so. I can't wait for all the studies about what kinds of weather extremes are being caused by the minuscule reduction of energy transfers from one part of the ocean to another that all of these technologies cause.
????? combination maybe - just an easy way to trick yourself by distributing the impacts. The combination of all the smaller impacts is still as big or greater than the whole impact of other technologies.
So what's the answer. Nuclear of course. Its the only answer. Its environmental effects especially are far more containable than the other sources. Fission at first, preferrably with breeder technology, then fusion. Either way, it should be combined with a hydrogen and electrical distribution system. Perhaps mostly hydrogen at some point. I suspect hydrogen may prove to have a lesser loss in long distance transport than electric.
Even with fusion, we'll eventually need to find a way to radiate more of the energy into space because the heat produced by our consumption will eventually reach levels able to influence climates. Probably about the time we start moving society underground so that we can restore our environment and increase food production.
The interesting thing is that this is exactly the answer Bush has proposed. Hmmm. Maybe not so dumb after all. Its a wise man who seeks wise instead of radical counsel.
Like others have said, Blair's move is just a fig leaf thrown to the lions for political purposes. Unless he means "nuclear power" when he says "sustainable energy", it will have no real impact, not only because it won't last, but because its based on sensationalism and fear, not science.
Has anyone looked at the costs of switching to solar towers vs the cost of war, and how much area would be required? I think that the answers actually look both economically and practically viable.
First the facts
from:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/262
Sorry about the formatting - I can't figure out how to get the 2nd col to line up right.
So a TOTAL area of about 51x51 km of desert would be needed to provide all the households in the US with all their power. Since the household power usage figures are for Australia, you'd probably have to double or trebble this figure for US households (higher per capita consumption etc) but even so, you could practically pay for them ALL for the cost of 7 year's war on terror, or about 2/3 of a single year's annual defence budget, assuming you didn't get more efficient at building them - with practive, the costs of putting one up should drop.
You can extrapolate for the world & see that you could provide power for every man woman & child on earth at the Australian rate of consumption for about 20 times this amount.
Best of all, since it's relatively low-tech, ie. not sensitive military capable technologies - just a bloody big tower & turbines, there should be no issues regarding technology transfer. I would imagine it would be a nicely profitable business to be experts at building these things for other countries.
Isn't it time to start building these things all over Texas or something? How much does it cost to set up a new oil drilling site anyway?
Because it *wasn't* funny.
If it weren't for the timely intervention of the French 300-odd years ago, the American freedom fighters would most likely have *lost* the War of Independence, and the USA wouldn't exist today. Don't forget, your own Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, symbolizing the two nations' common ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity.
It's rather disappointing to see Americans so ready to hate their friends just because those friends should be, on occasion, strong enough to take a moral stance against them. This is the behaviour one might expect of a maladjusted child, not that of a civilised adult.
Even the best of friends can't always be expected to agree. It's no basis for racial hatred, and to show such petulant disrespect for another civilised nation, even in jest, is not only infantile but dangerously arrogant.
When you've got a decent-size property with eucalypts on it, a fair number of of large branches and entire trees end up on the ground, and chopping them up and turning them into firewood is pretty much a no-brainer. On our property, we plant far more trees than are being removed, by the way (as it was overcleared in the past).
I agree entirely that it's not a mainstream solution, but it has its place in less densely-populated areas.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I hate all this talk about how alternative energy is not "cost effective". Sure, the direct costs may seem more, but what about indirect costs? Let's say ohhh sending our military out to the Middle East to protect our oil suppliers, or perhaps a war that will end in a lot of innocent lives being killed. How much is a human life worth? $1.49/gallon?
Renewable energy sources will never be seriously considered in the United States because businessmen here are smart. They know people will no longer have a permanent dependence on their products. Just look at Microsoft, they wouldn't survive if they made a product that didn't crash and was full of bugs.
They'll just start fighting over water instead.
Just to fill you in. A year and a half ago, 19 people boarded four planes, and killed 3,000 people by taking them over, with no regard to their own lives. Suicide terrorism has become standard over the last ten to twenty years, starting with bombings in Israel.
Were 19 people to board 19 different jumbo jets, each with approximately 300-500 people on board, and were to shoot out the windows, or at the fuel tanks, etc, the death toll would be more than double that seen on 9/11.
The world has changed since 1965, Demigod. In 1966, the rules may not have saved many lives. In 2003, the rules do. And you cannot argue, you simply cannot argue, that a gun in a pressurised cabin at 35,000 feet is going to be of any use whatsoever saving the lives of people on board from a suicidal terrorist.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Maybe a lot of inventions related to our own survival could not see the light because of the actual state of the patenting system.
There are more on this here
Because in many cities there isn't a good mass-transit solution. If you're gonna slap a $3 a gallon tax on gasoline the least you can do is put some of that money into building better mass-transit systems, that run on time, and are there more than every 2-3 hours, and only operate 16 hours a day.
And if you wanna talk about gas guzzlers. Buses really are, especially when you've got maybe 4 people on them, because of the above problem with the system.
I agree, car ownership is very costly, especially when you need to get it fixed. That's a real set back to a low-income family. How can you afford the repair when you're barely paying your monthly bills in the first place?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
As for energy policy, I'm less than impressed. Nuclear plays second fiddle, what a shame. The UK will pay a high price in than high electric costs when it uglifies it's landscapes with windmills and it's shores with tideal generators. Reprocessing and the rest of the renewable nuclear power generating scheme was dropped a generation ago by people who feared "nuclear proliferation". The idea was to keep nuclear technology and materials from the rest of the world so that the rest of the world could be dominated and terrorist would not have weapons. That policy has failed because you can't keep nature a secret. We have simply lost the benifits of cheaper and more reliable power generation. The bombs are being made but there is no corresonding peaceful benifit. Here is another paper trying to put the future off two years more. Oh well, at least they are not trying to close plants down and mention nuclear in positve terms.
I like how they predicted a 6 C increase in temperature for this centruy when there was a 0.6 C increase in the whole last polute till you drop, make even Dikens sick, centry.. There has been a radical departure since 1940, others will tell you. Now, three years into this century, someone got out a pen and drew the curve out 97 years, HA! Some reputable scientists might tell you that missing neutrinos from the sun indicate a solar minimum and that temperatures will drop.
What to do? Nothing at all say the Greens, bottle yourself up, stop having children and use as little as possible till there's nothing left in our closed system. No, thank you. Build, make, exploit the rest of the solar system and the universe. Do not go quietly, the system is not closed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> What fool thinks they can have a modern economy
> without supplies from around the world?
Actually, nobody said that. You are setting up a straw man so you can knock it down. Sadly, since this particular rhetorical device is novel to nobody but you, it's not a terribly effective one.
What they said was, wow, here's a good way to reduce dependance on foreign energy sources. And how awful that must be, to make you so desparate to find any reason to argue against it.
>
That's got to be one of the funniest arguments I've ever heard from an anti-environmentalist head-in-the-sand libertarian. (Well, or he could be a Republican, too, but they're pretty thin on the ground around here.) As for nuclear, well, it's a puzzle, isn't it? I mean, those people who are delighted to use the power from a nuclear station don't seem to want to sit on the waste. As long as it's someone ELSE near the storage dumps, though, that's fine. After all, they don't have as much money, so they aren't as important as he is.
> I like how they predicted a 6 C increase in temperature for this centruy
I love how, when we get to the issue of global warming, every libertarian becomes a scientist. In fact, pretty much every credible (as in 'actually endowed with a doctorate and some sort of research or teaching position') scientist now agrees that global warming is a serious, if not THE serious, threat to civilization for the next century, but the head-in-the-sand lobby keeps using data from 20 years ago, when not everyone was so sure. Want new data? Take the old data from 20 years ago, issue a press release by someone without any knowledge of science but with a good name, and bingo... nothing to worry about!
As for comparing today's pollution with that of 75 years ago, it is to laugh. If you assume that carbon dioxide has no effect on the atmosphere, then you can almost sort of pretend to believe that. In the US, that's the blinders we have on our government... CO2 isn't regulated as a pollutant, and so people can point to the pollution figures and prattle on about how they're not really actually getting much worse.
> Now, three years into this century, someone got
> out a pen and drew the curve out 97 years, HA!
Mmhmm. After all, there's really only ONE scientist who actually thinks this way, huh? And obviously you know, far more than any lousy scientist, that anything that messes with your worldview must just be wrong.
> Some reputable scientists might tell you that
> missing neutrinos from the sun indicate a solar
> minimum and that temperatures will drop.
Now, that's about the first rational thing you've said. Of course, this is a hypothesis, supported by only the most tenuous of real evidence. And even then, I don't think I ever heard anything about temperatures on Earth actually dropping... because one of the statements I heard on this was, 'Well, I don't think we really have to worry about this, because the current rate of global greenhouse gas emissions will more than compensate for this effect.' And Bush wants to limit the GROWTH of the amount of CO2 put out per year... so if 100k metric tons were put out this year, he only wants 110k metric tons to be put out next year. But, of course, it's a voluntary program...
> What to do? Nothing at all say the Greens...
Look, another straw man.
But here, I'll try to set up one for you:
Use all you can, destroy what you will. Always be unwilling to admit the possibility that someone else might be right, that you might be doing irreparable damage to the planet, and that, in a few decades, you could actually feasibly wipe mankind completely from the earth. After all, even if they're right, you'll have had a hell of a good time, and you probably won't live long enough to be forced to believe them when they say 'I told you so'.
Oh, wait, that's not a straw man... that's exactly what you said.
-Fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
The secret is chosing the right location: Finland (expecially northern Finland) is very tectonically inert. Everybody would be better off if the nuclear waste was buried here, including Finland! Thisnk about it: we're talking of 20.000-100.000 year spans. If nuclear waste is buried in a non-suitable location anywhere in the world, Finland will be affected (because tectonic movements would eventually break free the waste in the burial points). But if the waste is laid to rest in Finland itself, that would be very safe. For a few million years at least.
Sigged!
> Because the energy investment in lifecycle support (mining, production, distribution, maintenance,
> recycling) is greater than the lifetime energy output.
So many people have debunked this so many times. Why does anyone bother saying it?
> solar cell energy consumption might be environmentally friendly, but the energy
> production will alter the landscape of an order of magnitude more land than oil.
I've heard this one before, but it never fails to amuse me. Why? Well, because a clearcut, and there are plenty of those, is just as big a change in the reflectivity of large portions of our planet. But nobody ever seems terribly concerned with that aspect of them.
> Wind: Has anybody even bothered to figure out the total energy cost of manufacturing and raw
> materials on these monstrosities?
Can you seriously, honestly say that you think nobody has bothered to do this. Do you seriously, honestly think that you're *that* much smarter than everyone else out there?
Wait, this is Slashdot... of course you do.
> Oceanic water movement
The arguments here are just as silly as the 'but don't forget, wind-power will cause the wind to slow down'. Believe it or not, a forest of trees slows down the wind dramatically more. Perhaps we should be thinking about that before we cut down all the trees? (Oops, too late!)
> Nuclear
Yes, its waste products are more containable than other types, at least currently. But they're also impossible to neutralize. They are toxic forever, and in novel and entertaining ways. But, since you're rich, relatively speaking, you can pay someone else to play Russian roulette FOR you.
> Fusion
Someday, maybe. But no time soon.
And man, am I having trouble with the fact that you used the name Bush and the words 'wise counsel' in the same paragraph.
I love your claim that all of this silliness is based on science. It's based on your personal opinions, which clearly haven't even been fact-checked by the other three brain cells in there.
But it's a beautiful piece of evidence that humans in general will do almost anything rather than venture out of their own skulls.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.