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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.
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).
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.
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.