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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."
I'm telling you... it would work.
The current situation is "unsustainable"? Tony, you're shattering my view of the world! I always thought oil supplies etc. would last forever...
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Blair actually disagrees with Dubya on something.
Next up, he's going to be accused of supporting Al Qaeda's scheme to cripple American industry with this 'global warming' nonsense.
On the bright side, it's mentioned that sustainable energy sources are less susceptible to terrorist attack.
:/
Yeah let's see them terrorists blow up the sun. The jokes on them though even if they do, they'll just kill themselves too. HA!
Oh, kamikazes. yeah
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
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 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 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
2:09 PM, Feb 23, 2003
Shortly after receiving a telephone call from US President Bush, Tony Blair announced that he was wrong about alternative energy, that it is actually part of an "Axis of Evilnessity". Blair also said he recently read in some college essays on the internet that alternative energy would help fund terrorism. It was also revealed that the UK will be joining a "league of allies" in the US-led "War on Liberals". "I believe, and I think the people of the UK stand behind me on this, that we should do whatever Bush says, if it helps kill terrorists."
Sounds like another arguement for my hydrogen powered Jeep. GWB mentioned it in his State of the Union Address too.
No telling what the British are thinking though, with all of that renewable energy sitting right there under the North Sea.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
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
this white paper, a few weeks ago,about the governemnt setting targets
for CO2 and renewable energy levels, instead they've set aspirations
(see the BBC , The Sunday Herald
and The Telegraph).
Most people seem to share the view that New Labour 'aspirations'
mean absolutely nothing, and we'll probally end up in 2050 with
more coal/gas/nuclear (best option in my opinion) powerstations than
ever before.
Oh, I'm a Republican
I got a small schling
I like to bomb niggahs
and make a lot o' bling
I got a bunch o' friends
in high up places
They helps me get dem
government graces.
You think I'm smart
I just know who's who
I couldn't run a fruit stand
without the red white & blue
I'll drop some crap
about Jesus the Christ
You'll buy it all
and vote for me twice
'Fact, Jesus is comin'!
Real soon, now!
So we gotta prop up Israel
That ol' sacred cow
Don't need no history
Don't need no schoolin'
I got my ideology
To keep me a shootin'
Liberals! Faggots!
Commies and queers!
Socialist hippies
Full o' pussy tears
Propaganda's m'friend
But I calls it "fact"
Even though I don't read
'Cept for Chick tracts
Facts? No! Don't need em here!
We're conservatives! We work on FEAR!
Don't like what we say?
Well FUCK YOU, bud!
We'll shove it down yer throat
and tell ya it's good!
The crucial assumption that the earth will become 6 degress warmer within the next century probably stems from a IPCC study. But the IPCC study is being disputed - mainly for grossly overestimating the 3rd world growth. And with a more reasonable estimate of the economic growth, the resulting CO2 emission and therefore also the resulting global warming will be substantially lower.
4
See for instance here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/print/2003/2/17/15110/519
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
Renewable or sustainable? Nuclear fission is not renewable, but is sustainable in the long run (possibly with breeder reactors) and looks like the only way to reduce CO2 emission levels while keeping the energy production comparable to the current levels.
(Solar/photovoltaic consumes almost as much energy to make solar cells as they produce over their entire lifetime and yield toxic waste, solar/thermal has a poor ration of conversion to electricity, windmills and dams need to be spread over very large areas -- think whole countries -- to produce the same quantities...)
And nuclear reactors would still be vulnerable to terrorism. But they are not PC anyway.
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
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.)
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
Somehow I don't picture solar energy working very well in the UK. I would think their high degree of cloud cover and rainy days would put a damper on such a project. Are there any existing (and reasonably efficient) solar plants in the UK?
Given their island nature, wind power might be reasonably useful. Current windmills in the UK seem to be bringing in 2MW per turbine. Of course, this is small in comparison to the 38GW that's currently being consumed by the UK. (Wh / hours_per_year)
Divide it out and they need only build 19,000 wind power turbines to power the country's electricity needs.
There is certainly value in installing as many affordable renewable energy sources as possible. However, for general purpose usage in all countries, the world's energy needs won't be solved before commercial fusion is available.
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.
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.
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://
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
I live in Norfolk which has some cool wind turbines going. Like this bad boy in Swaffham. They're going to build another even bigger one there soon. They are building the UK's biggest wind farm on the sand bank just off the coast here. They are even talking about converting some of the old wind mills/pumps that used to drain the marshes here to generate electricity which I think would be really good if it means more of them are preserved and serving a useful purpose.
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?
--
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.
this is such a bunch of tripe!
First of all.. if we were to take the encylopeadia Britannica and stack all the books up.. then the thickness of each page would represent more than 100,000 years of the earth's history. This means that the last ice age which ended about 10,000 years ago and was at peak 18,000 years ago would be within 1/5 of the thickness of the last page.
There were 8 ice ages in the last 2 million years and that is within the last 20 pages.
Within the last 2,000 years (2% of the thichness of the last page) there have been several warming and cooling periods denoted by such names as the little ice age and the medieval warm period . Crocs were in the themes during Roman times... (little warmer).
look here to see a chart showing global temperature over the last billion or so years. This is the paleomap project an they have done increadible work.
Check out the university of Carleton, Tim Patterson has an excellent course on climate change and this is being broadcast on TLC as well.
On Chris Scotese's web site you will see that for 90% of the history of the planet for the last 650 million years or so, the earth was about 20 degrees warmer than now. If you look at the miocene maps you will see that 14 Million years ago the planet was warmer.. and a lot wetter..
BTW... the time scale on Chris's chart is not linear. If the chart is re-scaled it tells the same story but is even more dramatic. (We leave the re-scalling to the student as an excersize).
Look here if you want to know why Britian is so keen on renewable energy and specifically look at these charts which show the decline rate of North Sea oil production. Britain will become an oil importer within 2 years. The decline rate of North Sea oil production is more than 15% per year. The chart shows how feilds deplete. You can see how the big plays are drilled first and last the longest... and thereafter smaller and smaller fields are brought online until they give up and stop drilling. This is where Britian is now. One of the stats is that Britian has about 250 barrels of oil per capita. That is it! On to renewable because the oil resource is gone.
The real issue of climate change is this. Water in the atmosphere is far more significant than CO2. Firstly H2O is at a far greater level so the question becomes... how would we express the level of H2O in the atmosphere? Secondly there is uncertainty in the measurements. Thirdly, irrigation and agriculture increase the H2O levels. Most of that water pumped onto the fields will evaporate and plants do transpire!
CO2 levels are in the range of 0.036% and this of course is a plant nutrient.
So we are left with adding 2 numbers for instance.
H2O = 0%-4.0% +/- what? a percent?
CO2 = 0.036% +/- 0.0005
You can see these numbers here in table 7a-1.
Since the warming response is most likely due to the weighted "sum" of the CO2 and H2O and all the other green house gasses of course, then we need to "add" the H2O levels to the CO2 levels. Well - the numbers are in the preceeding paragraph and I don't know how to add them. We don't even have a good handle on the uncertainty of the H2O levels... but, My guess is that irrigation and agriculture have increased the H2O substancially.
So - we end up with the anaolgy to the encyclopeadia. Almost all of the data for climate modeling has been collected in the last 100 years and this represents 1/1000'th of the thickenss of the last page of the stack of books. Meanwhile all the other pages are basically ignored. The geological history of the planet shows that the planet is usually (90% of the time) about 20 degrees warmer than now. So most likely the planet will warm back up. But we don't know when and we might get another ice age or several before this happens. Anyone for 10,000 feet of ice over Toronto? Who votes for palm trees in the artic circle?
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
From: Australia Rules and regulations
Vehicles up to 30 years old including Forward Control Vehicles:
15% Duty + 10% Gst
4WD 'Off Road' Vehicles & Commercial Vehicles:
5% Duty + 10% Gst
Back in the days when the UK energy market was nationalized, one provider took out a full page advert describing how they were going to solve the energy problem with solar power. The Earth's axis of rotation would be moved so that Britain was in the tropics, thus making solar power efficient. The ad went on to explain the effects on some other countries of the world, and how this was an entirely desirable and justifiable state of affairs: it was our turn to have some nice warm weather for a change.
Considering the published date, it's no surprise that the final line of the ad was "April Fuel!"
IIRC they were slapped on the wrist for wasting 50k of taxpayers money.
Ian.
A physicist is an atom's way of thinking about atoms
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.
Problem solved. That will be $100 please.
Clickety Click
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?
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?
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.
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.
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
You make many other assertions, and toss off known cost effective energy producers such as wind with "[...]noisy, ugly blight on the landscape[...]" and "Someone is making big bucks selling the Brooklyn Bridge here[...]". I hope British Petroleum and Texaco aren't making a dire mistake with their wind investments. Or it might be that your rant is more political than factual?
Cheers,
--Maynard
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.
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.
> 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.
I wonder how much energy could be extracted from gym equipment?
The longest transmission line in the world is the "Inga-Shaba", a 1700kM 500kV single-phase transmission line in western Africa. That's 1056 miles, roughly the distance from New York City to Chicago. However, its max capacity is 560 MW because of reactive line losses, equivalent to the output of one medium sized fossil fuel plant. This past summer, the mid-Atlantic states alone hit just over 60,000 MW for an instananeous peak. In 1999, the United States consumed 3.45 x 10^9 MW-hours of energy.
... a quick Google search could have answered your construction question (numbers for off-shore Alabama):
That is the problem with solar power, any type of generation really, you cannot concentrate it. Energy is lost as heat, proportional to the resistance of the wire, which is proportional to the distance of the line. So #1, even if you can generate it, you can't transport it that distance. #2, the more you concentrate, one cloudy day would wipe out the majority of your generation... remember, this is not a 365-day guaranteed capacity source. Not to mention #3 that a common sand storm in the desert would crack and scratch your glass, driving up repair costs.
What you would need is a 100% distributed system, maybe one station per square mile across every population center in the US, minimizing the path between generation and consumption. Now, try to get local approval from the municipalities to install it (and junk up their landscapes). Then, calculate the maintainence costs to visit each one of these locations... astronomical.
Finally, your whole "war on terror" argument is, for lack of a better word, crap. Every statement you've made is an approximation, and your solutions assume the ideal. It's a thinly masked anti-war rhetoric pretending to pass as fact. If the war were really about oil, we'd drill it ourself on our homeland, and be done with those dictators in the middle east. Then you finish it off with a snide remark against the President's home state
Q. How long does it take to drill these wells? A. Miocene: 1 to 2 weeks; Norphlet: 6 to 12 months
Q. How much does it cost to drill these wells? A. Miocene: $750,000 to $2 million; Norphlet: $15 million to $40 million
Q. What is the average daily drilling rig cost? A. $100,000 to $120,000
Q. How much and long does each well produce? A. Miocene: 2 million to 15 million cubic feet per day for 1 to 10 years, Norphlet: 10 million to 126 million cubic feet per day for 10 to 20 years
From StudyWorks Online: "For example, the consumption of oil in the United States reached a peak in 1978, then decreased by almost 20 percent by 1983 as more fuel-efficient cars were introduced and less oil was used for electricity. However, gasoline consumption increased again in the '90s as gas-guzzling SUV's and small trucks became more popular. Nonetheless, oil consumption is currently increasing by only 1 percent per year, and consumption in 1999 was only 3.5 percent higher than it was in 1978." Get those SUVs on a normal fuel usage plan. Improve gas-electric hybrids. Encourage more efficient fossil fuel generators. What we really need is efficiency, not alternative generation.