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Wind Power Falls Under $0.01/kwh
js7a writes "Colorado State University's Rocky Mountain Collegian reports that, "as of June [the price of wind power] dropped to 1 cent per kWh." Even without further expected improvements in turbine technology, the U.S. would now need to use less than 3% of its farmland to get 95% of its electricity demand satisfied by wind power. Plus, wind power is the only mitigation of global warming, because if the whole world converted to wind power in 15 years, the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600. Don't say goodbye to coal and oil, yet, though; unless cell technology increases substantially, when we run out of oil we will convert coal to synthetic fuel." Update: 09/15 13:40 GMT by T : Note: the "1 cent" figure refers to the premium paid for the power over conventionally supplied electricity, rather than the final per-kWh price.
This is a subsidized price. The article says students can pay this, but it doesn't say what the cost is to produce the power. I expect that even at $0.045/kWh the payback on the windmills is 15 years.
-AD
From the article: "If you have any interest in our environment, it only makes sense to put out the little cost that it takes," Travis Kimball said. "It's the absolute least you could do."
No, the absolute least you could do is nothing - which most of the Colorado residents are doing it seems. While it doesn't surprise me that initial takeup is going slow, it is a little disappointing. Giving uni students the choice is a good start, but Mr. Citizen would probably be more likely to spend the extra money on a bigger TV - than cleaner electricity.
the U.S. would now need to use less than 3% of its farmland to get 95% of its electricity demand satisfied by wind power
Does that take into account the amount of energy lost when transporting electricity from the point of generation (farmland) to the point of use (everywhere except farmland)? Also what would the monetary cost of doing this be?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Only if we still HAVE an environment at that time :P
I'm willing to be that the effect is negligible, or at the very least much less disruptive than the global warming caused by the fossil fuel burning that the wind power replaces...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Yea, sounds nice, but you will kill all the birds and ruin the million dollar view
Oil is going to be around a lot longer, there are massive deposits too far away to reach. But the question is can we survive with all that carbon in the atmosphere?
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
Sure, and fusion power, solar power satellites, or artificial photosynthesis could make the whole discussion moot in a couple of decades. Right now, no.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
As auxillary power, even on a national/global scale, nothing bad. As backup power, I do appreciate wind power. However, the "save the earth" hippies don't understand, it can't be more than that. Or it could have significant effects. Just like hydroelectric does, this would change something horribly, I feel, if we were to set up wind farms big enough to provide the majority of our power.
We need fusion. There is no excuse for the minimalistic funding fusion research gets. And in the meantime, we need to seriously consider fission.
IIRC, modern nuclear energy is perfectly clean (Other than the waste, which can be safely stored, and who knows, in the distant future perhaps burning it up in the sun would be cheap enough)... And modern reactor designs seem to have a virtually nil chance of a meltdown. I seem to recall some sort of Canadian reactor that used pebbles of material or something. CANDU reactor or something?
:p
Heck, even Chernobyl only happened because they turned off all the safties; it was an inherantly safe reactor until they manually fucked it up.
Anyhow, nuclear plants don't have to be in farmland (Less power lost on transport), are clean (Perhaps a smaller effect on the environment than wind power?), are safe, and best of all, produce much more stable output.
That and hydro. Which, while it has an impact on the environment when installed, after that it seems to me to be pretty clean. Heck, Quebec serves all of it's millions of people with a few hydro dams, and we have some of the cheapest power costs in North America.
Oh, and there's also the ever increasing efficiency of solar. And heck, while we're at it, fusion will be around eventually, perfectly clean radiation-free energy, as I understand it. Yes, it's far off, but if you invest in a worldwide wind power network only to have fusion come out and be a much better option, that's a huge waste of money. In fact, take the money you would have spent on all those wind generators, and put it into fusion research
Statements like this just bug me, because it's such a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. And this attitude is SO pervasive among the enviro-people.
We will NEVER EVER run out of oil. Never. Ever.
What WILL happen is that eventually oil because more expensive to pull out of the ground as the reserves get lower. At that point, other sources of energy get more economical, and we inevitably switch over.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Use the power to pump water uphill and store it in a reservoir or heat a large amount of water. There are plenty of ways to store large amounts of electricity.
Which is dandy if you've got someplace to store the water (for starters).
There are plenty of ways to store electricity, sure. The problem is finding cost-effective ways of storing electricity.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"Plus, wind power is the only mitigation of global warming, because if the whole world converted to wind power in 15 years, the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600."
Just where did this emptyheaded "fact" come from I wonder. What does this person think happens to the electricity when it's used? Turns into magic pixie dust maybe? Almost all the electricity used today is CONVERTED TO HEAT! The miniscule amount of energy derived from electricity that is actually radiated off of the planet in the form of light(non-IR that is) which could potentially extract energy from the atmosphere and "get rid" of it is totally negligable. The idea that wind power can somehow reverse global warming is so far beyond asinine its hard to put into words.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
While your argument looks good on the surface, it relies on the assumption that all of these turbines would be quite close to each other. The larger the geographic spread of these windmills, the more assured you are to be getting at least *some* power *all* of the time. It's the same reason that investors like to keep a variety of stocks in their portfolios. The probability that a single area will not have sufficient wind to generate power is relatively high, but the chance that all the air in the entire country will suddenly just decide to stop moving is basically 0. Yes, this does require building alot more windmills, and thus invest alot more money, but that dosen't stop the concept from feasible.
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
It appears as if the claim is that by drawing energy from the wind, you will actively cool the planet. That's not a valid argument, as the vast majority of the electricity consumed in the world ultimately dissipates as heat, so you'd be putting that energy right back somewhere else. If your computer draws 70 Watts, it is a 100.0% efficient 70 Watt heater, which happens to do some pretty things along the way. To cool the planet this way, you'd have to take the electricity and beam it out into space as laser or microwave energy.
Good Laugh. Think of an ocean that is more than 100000 feet deep (~30000M deep). Do you think that structures that are less than 100 ' (30 M) (less than .1% of the depth) on the Ocean floor stand, could stop (or even slow down) the water that is moving. Our atmosphere is simply an ocean of air.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well I know I'll probably get modded down for not being super "green," but I think it's important to point out another effect of installing these things.
National Beauty.
The main thing that causes me to think about this is when I am driving through the midwest doing photography, I get so annoyed at the powerlines ruining the landscape. Honestly they are really kind of depressing. At least with powerlines you can usually find a way to reframe the shot to cut them out, but these windmills are really big.
of course cleaner air would be pretty too.
it's just a thought
I didn't think the problem was running out of oil, I thougt the problem was not being able to get enough of it out of the ground to meet the demand.
The carbon did essentially start in the atmosphere, but the climate wasn't the same then. But do we want the climate to be the same as it was then?
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
Young man, we obey the laws of thermodynamics in this household! Each time we convert the energy we lose a little (or alot depending on the method employed.) Therefore, these types of storage systems are suboptimal. Say you lost 2% on each side of the transfer, you end up with a net loss of 4%, and this is not including loss across the transmission lines and after a while these seemingly small losses add up and you're sitting at an overall efficiency somewhere in the 70-80% range.
So yes, you can store it, but you will lose alot of it in the process.
Uh...Who cares if we lose some energy in the process of storing it (which will happen with any solution, due to the laws of thermodynamics that you brought up yourself) when the source is nearly infinitately rewewable? If you come upon a magical tree that grows gold in the forest do you not bother taking any of the gold because you can't transport all of it?
It makes sense, if we burn coal, the acid rain tends to fall downwind. If we put in a wind farm down the road, we hurt ourselves, since our local climate dries up (and we all have to spend more money on skin moisturizer). Why should we put up windfarms that hurt ourselves when we could be using coal and causing problems to those folks 200 miles downwind?
IMHO, Oil is also heavily subsidised by the govt.
Oil has hidden costs that is never taken into consideration, because it's borne by the govt & not the oil company.
I am talking about the cost of fighting wars for
oil.
[reality] Wind power is NOT continuous, but demand is. What do you think will happen on a nice HOT summer day, when there's "not a breath of wind"? And, everyone wants to run their A/C? Yep, it'll be time to fire up the the old reliable coal/oil/gas/nuke plant.
n sert your own local fauna here].
And, you can't store electricity (like someone suggested pumping water up hill) because if the site was viable for this purpose, it's already in use for it. Think about it: How many folks would want to live near a body of water where the level went up and down dramatic amounts on an unpredictable basis (i.e., non-tidal)?
Oh, and someone said something about 3% surface area gets you 95% power? Right. Try telling that to the 3% of folks who currently own that land. Think they're gonna give it up just like that? Hardly.
Lastly, for every environmentalist that advocates wind power, there's another one standing there bitching because the wind turbine interferes with the mating/migratory/feeding habits of owls/eagles/geese/ducks/bats/moths/butterflies/[i
So, the bottom line is: you have to have a diversity of energy sources that includes some wind, sure, but also includes coal/oil/gas/nuke/waste/bio/geo. Then, very few people are real happy, and very few people are real pissed, and everyone gets reasonably priced electricity anytime you flip a wall switch.
[/reality]
Brilliance doesn't need a sig.
Seriously, there are some legit arguments out there but you are just off in tin-foil hat land. To respond to your points:
1) Wrong. We cannot, at this point, build a mechinacly perfect device. Nanotechnology at least will be required to do that. We can build very good devices, and we DO. Perhaps (likely) you are too young to remember cars from the 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. They required an amount of matenence just unheard of today. You realise that for well made cars liek Accords, they frequently go 100,000-150,000 miles and require NO major service, just oil changes and the like? Try that with a 60s muscle car, not happening.
Further, as with most things, the cost of precision in parts (which is what leads to less wear) is linear for a bit, then steeply exponental. There is a certian point at which it just isn't worth it to make things better. For X dollars you can have a car that lasts on average 100,000 miles whereas it would take 4X dollars to make it average 120,000 miles.
2) You think companies make money off of flouride? I think my friend that YOU have been giving the chemical companies money, albeit of the small, illegal, methlab variety. Flouride isn't patented, is cheap as hell to produce and is added in very, very, very small quantities to the water. There is fuck all money to be made in it. The money is made in perscriptrion drugs that are patented.
3) Please don't. You are worse than most. You don't even start with a reasonable argument and then take it to absurdity, you just start off in lala land and get worse from there. There are arguments that we have an overly capatalistic society but flouride in the water is sure as hell NOT one of them.
Get a grip.
"Plus, wind power is the only mitigation of global warming, because if the whole world converted to wind power in 15 years, the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600." Wind power isn't a unique solution. We can use wind to take energy out of the atmosphere and mitigate global warming. We can use solar to prevent energy from going into the atmosphere and mitigate global warming. Or we can stop pumping catastrophic levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to mitigate global warming.
Little stuff has no effect, and chaos theory was a load of bullshit.
Man, you're right! Every small thing we do could have an effect on *anything*! We'd better stop building skyscrapers. Hell, we'd better stop building any buildings altogether. Also, we better stop airplanes and other craft from flying around. In fact, why don't we all just stop moving altogether? It's the only way to keep the environment safe! Chaos theory says so!
Seriously: why do people always assume that "chaos theory" means "BAD THINGS HAPPEN!!"? All it means is that systems become unpredictable if they're complex enough.
ps: one bit of your ECC memory failing causing your computer to crash has virtually nothing to do with chaos theory.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
WHy do we need to make coal into synthetic fuel when we can make biodiesel to use in normal diesel engines?
Alright, first of all I simply don't believe the statement about less than 3% of the US farmland being required. I would very much like to see how this statistic was calculated. I would point out that very few places are appropriate for wind turbines as the power is proportional to the cube of the wind speed (meaning if your wind is half as fast you get 1/8 the energy). See wikipedia for more detail.
Now I don't know the cost of fossil fuels per kwh but one has to ask if wind power is so cheap why isn't this the primary power source being built today? It isn't like companies are evil villians who want to deystroy the enviornment and they already get tax benefits for using eco-friendly approaches. My guess is that once you factor in the price to purchase the land, errect the turbines etc.. it is considerably more expensive. Furthermore you have the very significant issue of people objecting to it as an eye sore in their backyard. Moreover, if we were serious about truly getting rid of our energy dependence and polution problems we already have a tried and tested means, nuclear power. The french already use it for most of their energy.
So if we have these options, for instance nuclear power or even wind turbines, why aren't we doing something to stop global warming. After watching the media coverage and talking to many enviornmentalists I am forced to come to the surprising conclusion that it is the *enviornmentalists* who are primarily responsible for global warming. Sure they have done us a great service in bringing these things to our attention but their uncomprimising positions guarantee we stay with the worst alternative.
Every time someone proproses a solution to the energy problem, for instance nuclear power or even wind power enviornmentalists protest. In the case of nuclear it seems primarily based on fear of radiation (despite the fact that coal power plants release tons of radiation per year directly into the air). When someone proposes wind power they protest to save the birds who might be killed (even if these are only demands for bird safety measures this means it increases costs.)
Quite simply we need power and other resources which will hurt the enviornment. This means we MUST comprimise on those power solutions which hurt the enciornment the least. However, most enviornmentalist groups refuse to take this sort of realist stance objecting to any project which hurts the enviornment in any way. If the companies and the government take flak from greenpeace both ways what incentive do they have to do the responsible thing?
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While offtopic another good example is yuca mountain. Enviornmental groups are now sueing to stop yuca mountain because they can't guarantee it's safety beyond several thousand years. As a result instead of storing nuclear material in a place which will be very safe we store it in pools all over the country. WTF!?
A responsible citizen doesn't just protest everything he thinks is harmfull. He delibrately considers the *realistic* options and supports the best one. Returning to nature and stopping our power usage is not one of the realistic options.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
You do realize, wind (oh yeah, and those missle silos) is the only reason we still defend North Dakota against the invading Canadians (currently the border guard consists of a 15 year old basset hound named Earl and a hand painted sign that say "Turn back, hoser, eh?")
But really, North Dakota is the windiest state in the nation, and there isn't that much to interrupt there...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Oil and wind power don't equate. Most of the US electricity supply is produced using coal.
Another poster has hit it on the head though. As it is, oil is being consumed just about as quickly as it is being extracted. Most suppliers are extracting oik as quickly as they can as it is, with too few new discoveries to make up for drying fields. Estimates vary, but pretty much all of them agree that the extractible oil will be gone a few decades before year 2100.
As noted before, the production limits are getting thin, with demand increasing. The cost of oil will have to go up as more people want it but less of it can be produced, a problem that could come to a head in a decade or two.
While this would be nice, the process of using hydrogen as a fuel is realistically not that efficient. First of all, electrolysis of water to hydrogen gas + oxygen is only about 30% efficient, if I recall.
Also, hydrogen is quite difficult to store. Hydrogen is not very energy dense, meaning that it really can not store a lot of energy for the amount of volume that it takes up, even under fairly high compression. Add to this that compressed hydrogen is relatively dangerous and requires expensive tanks, this adds to the cost. Even morseo if the hydrogen is to be used for transportation.
However, some technical solutions may be found to facilitate storage, or even increase efficiency of electrolysis. The question would come down to this: is it more efficient to drive essentially the whole power grid by wind, storing it as hydrogen (or some other method) in times of excess in order to convert it in lean times, or might it be more effecient to build wind turbines so that at peak power, they provide most of the energy for the power grid, and at other times more easilly stored sources of energy (fossil fuels, bio-diesel, etc) are used to fill in the deficit.
Realistically, if we are to keep increasing our power consumption, we are going to have to utilize as many forms of energy as we can, and use them where they are the most appropriate. In places with steady winds, wind forms can be constructed. Places with very little cloud cover would be ideal for some form of solar energy. Geothermal energy where available. Biodeiesel can be made from waste organic materials, as well as fresh materials (E.G. corn oil + alchohol) grown specifically for that purpose. Nuclear power (both fusion and fission) both have the potential to produce incredible amounts of power, but they both have their drawbacks which may be overcome by technology. And then of course we have the old standby of fossil fuels, but those are a fairly limited resource, and should only be used where absolutely necessary (at least in an ideal situation,) or where the other energy sources are counterindicated for some reason.
And on top of all of this, we will have to develop more efficient ways of doing things. Design cities in a more efficient manner. Of course make vehicles and other tools more efficient through technology and consumer choices. Provide incentives for using electricity in off peak hours of power consumption (or rather penalties for using electricity during peak usage periods.)
There does not seem to be one magic bullet for our energy need problems. And I highly doubt that we will find one in our future. The real answer lies in careful evaluation of all the pieces and using every tool available to make the system work, and keep it working for as long as we want to keep society going as we know it. Now, some may question whether we _SHOULD_ keep society growing and growing, but I'll leave that to the philosophers. Or at least a different thread.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
You can store energy, but you will lose a portion of it in the process.
You will lose some of it, not a lot. A lot would be a significant amount, or perhaps "more than half" depending on who you talk to. Pumping water uphill and later using the downhill flow to drive a turbine or waterwheel can be up to 66% efficient using present technology, which means you're losing 34%, which is "one third" or "some" but not "a lot." (which is two words, by the way: a lot)
The power supply inside your computer is about 80% efficient at turning AC line voltage into the regulated DC voltages needed to run your hardware.
The internal combustion engine is about 20% efficient at turning gasoline into motive force. Now that is a lot of energy loss.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
There are two variables; the utility companies keep trying to have one "stable" grid, when it would often be more efficient to have multiple grids with different levels of power quality.
The other issue is that with multiple wind farms in geographically diverse areas on a single grid, the spinning reserve from conventional generation really need to support only a smaller percentage of the load.
If real time capacity information is available to the consumer (or can be inferred from the grid frequency), control networks can reduce the load to further reduce the need for spinning reserves. (Ramp down a chiller, let the temperature coast up a degree or two; do the same for fans on VFD's. Dim the lights a little. If the grid can see a 10% drop in consumption as a result in the reduction in capacity, things are more efficient for everybody. Nobody wants to pay for spinning reserve...
I don't think they'd actually use the farmland, since that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. If you generate the power in the middle of nowhere, then you have to transmit it.
/. - who cares about facts when you can just pull stuff out of your root?)
On the other hand, if you generate it where it's required, you don't have to transmit it over long distances. For example, if you put the turbines on top of tall buildings in a city, the buildings can use that power and reduce the load on the grid.
There's a skyscraper being built that uses three turbines to provide most or all of its power. I can't remember, since I read about it a few years ago. (It might be as realistic as a space elevator, but this is
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
There is no shortage of oil in this world, there is a shortage of cheap oil. That shortage is mostly artificial, oil companies have not been investing in infrastructure in the middle east for the last 15 years, and what's there is old and wearing out. That investment is not going to happen as long as there is the current level of political instability in the region. It's now been demonstrated, that invading and installing a puppet government actually decreases the stability of the region, and invites all kinds of attacks on foreign sponsored oil production infrastructure. In simple terms, the well has been poisoned.
There's lots of 'extractable' oil in this world, it just cant/wont be extracted for 25 dollars a barrel. Personally, I'd rather see us burning cheap middle east oil in the short term, and leave our own reserves in the ground for the grandchildren to enjoy, they can sell it to the usa for $100+ a barrel after the middle east has been sucked dry.
Are you kidding? Plop down one wind generator in front of Capitol Hill while Congress is in session and the world will have more energy than it can use in a thousand years.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
That the Flywheel is always forgotten?
1. You build wind power to reduce the use of fossil fuels, not to make the grid blackout-resistant. Widespread blackouts are caused by faulty control mechanisms, not the method of power generation. Why even bring this up?
2. Having a company in financial difficulty do *anything* can be problematic. This issue is of significant concern.
3. On what do these sources base their conclusions? Studies of bird deaths due to wind turbines show pretty minimal numbers, even with the old CA turbines that were unusually dangerous for raptors. Estimates are around two birds per year per turbine (compared to somewhere around 10/year per mile of road with average traffic). Maybe you should dig up your roads and walk everywhere instead--but that's no good, you need to get places, but electricity comes for free from nowhere! Er, wait.
4. If there's really not enough wind, then building these towers is really stupid. Building wind farms where there is no wind is a good way to bankrupt one's company once again. However, are the NWS stations on ridge-tops? You can have huge differences in wind-speed based on local terrain. You make a good case against building a wind turbine on top of the National Weather Service stations. You need to provide more information, however, to show whether the 30 year records are relevant. The company's
report claims that the ridge crest is a local wind corridor. Wind corridors are real, so your objection is only valid if they are wrong that it is a wind corridor, or if they are right but that even so there is insufficient wind. (Also keep in mind the difference in wind velocity as you go from ground-level to 80m above the ground.)
5. Ice is apparently a red herring. There simply isn't evidence that thrown ice is a danger, despite many installed wind farms in ice-prone areas. Besides, there are good physical reasons to think that ice would not be thrown a great distance (e.g. turbines are based on airfoils, and ice coatings don't preserve the airfoil shape, which is the whole problem with plane wings icing).
6. I have heard the new large 80m-ish Danish turbines. They're not that loud, and I don't personally find the noise that annoying. It's mostly sort of whooshing as the blades go past; the new designs have very little mechanical noise (unlike some of the old eggbeater designs in CA). It's hard to even hear them from a reasonable distance away (a few hundred meters). Why do you think that they are LOUD?
Anyway, it's nice that you're helping your dad out and all, and it's good for people to be involved in their community, but are you really arguing against it for the reasons you've given? Or is it instead because you don't like the look of giant windmills on the top of your ridge crest, and figure that if you can shoot it down you won't have to see a coal-fired power plant there instead?
People do this kind of thing all the time, often without realizing it. E.g. people where I used to live wanted to cut down all the trees for "fire protection", despite the fact that the shrub and annual grass that would have replaced the trees were a bigger fire hazard than the trees. Curiously, there was an extremely strong correlation between people who wanted to cut trees for "fire protection" and those whose views stood to improve the most, but only a weak correlation between people whose houses were near trees and the same desire.
Aesthetics are important. If that's the real reason you or your dad is fighting this, best to recognize it now so you can recognize when you're prone to believe something false because it provides an excuse for your position. Then if you still want to spread misinformation to the city council, or whatever, well, that's up to you. That happens all the time. At least you can be intellectually honest with yourself (and with readers here).
This is why we have a national grid - the wind is *always* blowing *somewhere*, so you just have a large decentralised collection of wind farms which can technically provide 150% of the capacity actually required.
At 150% production you get really cheap electricity without guilt because it's completely clean. We can then sell the electricity to our neighbors or invest it in interesting projects like hydrogen etc...
Then, when 50% of the turbines aren't turning because the wind aint blowing where they are, you still have 100% requirements coming from the rest of the wind turbine 'pool'.
Large. Decentralised. Network. That is how wind power will work.
-Nano.
Do you have any answers? Or just questions? Remember, no is sometimes the right answer, but it never solves a problem.
Answer: subsidized wind farms
Answer: subsidized rooftop solar panels
Answer: subsidized biodiesel
Answer: higher investment in fusion research
Answer: tax disincentives for using energy-inefficient products
There are a lot of things that could be done by the government to wean people off fossil fuel, but inertia is a strong factor, and oil industry lobbying doesn't help.
and the environmental damage from all of those wind farms could be significant.
Environmental wind damage... RELATIVE to WHAT???
FARMERS DO NOT BLOW UP BUILDINGS.
On the other hand, rich Saudi oil sheiks do. With our money. Come to Manhattan sometime, and look at the FUCKING CRATER.
I'm sure the Fox News and the anti-American Arab crowd will team up to mod me down, but fuck them I *love* my country and people need to remember what REALLY happened!
1.) Same reason why no company has build the perfect car that last forever. Could we, absolutely? Will corporate america allow it, hell no!
ummm... Technology is constantly improving, if we built cars that lasted for ever none of us would benifit from new tech in our cars.
Suppose that 20 years ago they started to build cars that would last 100 years. How many more people would have died without ABS and air bags? How much more oil whould we have pumped out of the ground becasue we didn't have computer controlled fuel injectors. And how much dirtier would the air be without the improvments in polution control?
Even if we could build a car that would last for ever, I don't think we should...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
You just don't get it :-) To most "Greens," people are the problem. Paul Erlich typifies that attitude when he says something like, "I don't know that the planet can support two billion people, especially if they live like Americans." What an evil person. So many "Greens" want almost all people to live on the farm, till their 40 acres with hand plows and MAYBE oxen, eat only what they personally grow or breed, and kill half their children through disease and starvation. Just so long as the "Greens" can continue to live in their marble towers and dictate to the "rest of us" what is acceptable and what is not. After all, that's the "natural" state of humans (c.f. Africa). Lousy POS.
Last time I checked, thermodynamics didn't work like that.
(See, it's all well and good to extract the energy from the atmosphere, but you're just storing the energy for later. As soon as you use it, it ends up as heat.)
So we're all selfish hyprocrites. That doesn't change the fact that the "greens" are right that overpopulation is the reason for environmental problems. The planet can not sustain infinite population growth. Plenty of species have died off when their numbers grew too big for their environment. Technology can only go so far to delay that.