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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."
See also last Friday's op-ed by Nicholas Kristoff (no link, sorry -- I read it in print and won't register) in the New York Times -- he talks about fuel-cell cars and it's an interesting and somewhat on-topic article.
It may cost that much for the first 3-4 years, but then the price will decrease. Why? Because noone will bother fixing what was broken anymore. Those who live in disaster-prone areas will quickly become uninsurable, and noone will risk living in those places any longer.
--sex is a renewable resource
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
It is a reasonable assumption that we will develop the technology necessary to reverse the environmental impact of several hundred years of fossil fuel burning. It is also very plausible that the geosystem is not suceptible to our meddling in the first place, and would need no "fixing".
So the only real motivations for us to change our energy sources are economical and political.
Foreign oil funds dictators and terrorism.
:)
Renewable energy (wind, hydro, solar) creates local industries and reduces reliance on foreign energy sources.
It makes political, economic, and ecological sense
In the 70's "scientists" predicted a new ice age.
We don't know for sure what the climate will do but we do know that we are exiting an ice age so common sense would suggest that temperatures get warmer when this occurs.
To say that temperatures are getting warmer due to human intervention is simply conjecture.
The worst thing is to monopolize entire industries by allowing the government and their "scientists" to create the standards for any improvements upon fuels, energy sources etc.
This is like allowing Microsoft to set the standards for the entire computer industry.
People do care about becoming self-sufficient and weaning themselves off of oil but if you allow the government to tell us how this is going to be accomplished you can bet that somebody who is friends with some Senator or Parlimentary leader will get rich and those with truly good ideas will be prevented from bringing their ideas to market.
If the airline industry had been allowed to be completely responsible for its own security, you can bet that at least one airline would be letting you carry your loaded sidearm with you. That airline would more than likely not have suffered on 9/11 (boxcutters do beat seat cushions as offensive weapons) and perhaps garnered a loyal following among law abiding gun owners.
Government is about controlling the market however and so good ideas will always be shoved aside to accomodate those who have political influence. In the wake of 9/11 government decided that the best way to secure airline travel was to ban plastic knives and subject your grandma to an anal probe. If you have any confidence that they can solve global warming then you probably haven't looked into the various problems they've attempted to solve and how their "solutions" have worked out.
Your assertion about solar energy is incorrect. Most solar panels are net energy producers after 5 years of their 30 year lifespan.
w ww.nrel.gov/wind/wind_potential.html
Your assertion about wind energy is also incorrect. The time for most wind turbines to be net positive in energy is a few months. The area required for energy production for wind is much smaller than you say. If 6% of the total land in the US were cultivated for wind power (which doesn't exclude other uses, like ranching), the total energy production would be 1.5 times the total produced in the US today.
The key to energy independance is not just switching sources, but using substantailly less energy. Using less energy is possible without making huge sacrifices, it just requires developing and building smarter.
See:
http://www.awea.org/faq/bal.html
http://
Blair and the British government are BPs bitches. Case in point, their harassment of grease car drivers.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
as it means all countries in the world can stop fighting over energy and work together.
If you want to see what happens in the scenario where your costs are externalised and you rip stuff out faster than it renews, you could examine collapsing fishing industries around the world - everything looks fine for ages, no-one wants to do anything about it, and then suddenly your fishery dissapears.
Different problem - most fisheries are unowned so as fish become scarce the price of fisheries does not go up - there is no one around who starts to make more money because they have a larger reserve of fish than everyone else. Oil is quite different. Oil reserves are mostly owned, so as oil becomes scarce we should see the price of oil reserves increase. What we actually see is a decline in oil prices which suggests that no one in the oil industry actually expects oil to become scarce any time soon.
You were on to a good point when you brought up externalities though - the price of oil does not really reflect its cost of production because it does not include all the money spent of keeping the oil reserves and infrastructure secure. When you include the cost of things like the Gulf War, and the War on Terrorism, then oild begins to look much more expensive than its market price would suggest.
Have you ever seen ice buildup slough off of the blades of a large wind generator in bad weather? It's deadly. The area around wind farms can be used for other functions, but there are times of the year where it's advisable to stay very far away from them.
Even wind farms have their dangers.
Just like in the apparetnly approaching Iraq War:
when the UK acts... Australia mimics...
We need renewable energy but - unlike Holland,
Denmark, et al. - we've been way too slow to
do much with it on large scales.
But - this time - I look forward to an
Australian act of mimicry of the UK...
Before you go too far down the ethonal path (which I like BTW), is it sustainable? That is if every car on the road today burned ethanol, and we had enough plants to make that much, could the farms provide enough production to keep the plants running. (assuming we don't allow poor people to starve)
There is only so much farm land on the earth, and plants are generally considered 1-2% efficent at turning sunlight into energy. (Solar cells can reach 40% in labs, and that was 15 years ago, though realisticely 10% is easy to obtain)
IMHO a more important difference between "environmental" and "business" approaches is the time scale involved. At worst, businesses are interested in short-term profit, whereas the environmental goals are infinitely long-term at best (truly sustainable).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
You can heat things with the sun too, like air and water. This one uses air: http://www.enviromission.com.au/
Yah, it's tall, it's been tested, and it's pretty simple. It's made out of almost all glass, concrete, and some steel. Stick these puppies out in the desert where nobody is anyway. Like in Australia and the southwestern US (*cough* california power problems).
Yes, you're going to have some problems with cloudy days, so accept that there are going to be some days when you're not going to get much power out. So make sure you use the extra electric on good days to make lots of hydrogen. That way we can move a source of energy around the country to places that may have trouble with this type of power (new england for example). You could also fire up some fuel cells to make electric out of said stored up hydrogen when the days are nasty.
So umm... why not?
Mandating fleet fuel efficiency standards, in contrast, results in car manufacturers charging less for fuel efficient cars and charging more for gas guzzlers. That allows low-income families to both buy inexpensive fuel-efficient cars and save money on gas, while being subsidized by people who voluntarily choose to buy gas guzzlers. It seems like a very elegant free market solution to me. And it seems like a much better solution than raising the price of gasoline.
They should make all overweight Americans spend an hour a day making electricity on a bycicle at the gym which would be connected to the power grid :)
On the other hand the North Sea is windy and relatively shallow, and the basic technology for building platforms in it and running cables from it has been long established by the oil industry. Building wind farms in the North Sea actually looks like quite an exciting technical challenge with a real payoff. If the space program kickstarted the 60s high tech economy in the US, perhaps a serious wind farm program would do the same for the moribund, dismal UK economy.
As North Sea oil dries up the UK is predicted to become a net oil importer within 3 years - the stock market is far deader than the Dow Jones - if Blair doesn't do something soon there will be no money to pay the wages.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.