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What Gore Didn't Say About Solar Cells
AmericanInKiev writes "Computer World posted a piece on Al Gore and his claim that solar cells will improve at the same rate as microprocessors. Vinod Khosla on the other hand has expressed disappointment that the doubling rate for price/performance of PV is 10 years rather than 18 months for transistors. Which of these two has the facts on their side?" Before anyone has him inventing the Internet again, note that Gore's claim as related in the article is much milder than that Moore's Law applies to solar cells per se -- namely, he's quoted as saying "We're now beginning to see the same kind of sharp cost reductions as the demand grows for solar cells." An optimistic statement, but not a flat-out silly one.
But to start us off on topic, is there any evidence that the cells will increase beyond their current 10% conversion rate?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
In response to the controversy, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn argued that, "We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he 'invented' the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet."[101] In addition, Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, stated: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is -- and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a "futures group" -- the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen." - Wikipedia
Bruce Perens.
Someone please turn up the sun.
...it's the best news for the development of this kind of technology imaginable.
You can't get (smart, institutional) investors on board on the promise of likely/possible breakthroughs in technology. However, if you can demonstrate that the price per kilowatt-hour will be competitive with fossil fuels in the reasonable near future then you will get the level of investment required to finally take these technologies mainstream.
I believe we are already at that point. Here in Australia we suddenly have wind farms and novel renewable energy projects appearing IRL all over the place when previously they were often announced but rarely built.
Read Pynchon.
Right. And governments are toppling to the Metagovernment every day.
It would seem the choice of attacks against Mr Gore would be strawman arguments. Does that suggest that people are finding it hard to tackle his views directly or fairly and so have to resort to such ridiculous attacks?
(I actually know very little about Gore, this is really just a question based on him being the target of such things so often)
"Think about what happened in the computer revolution," Gore said on NBC's Meet the Press program recently. "We saw cost reductions for silicon computer chips of 50% for every year and a half for the last 40 years," he said.
That's Moore's law to the inth degree. True, we didn't assert that Moore's law applies to PV, but He 's asking a nation to embrace an energy policy based on this comparison.
Moore's Law talks about the complexity, not speed or performance. That's why it doesn't apply to either solar cells or digital camera sensors.
Digital camera sensors, especially, as it's not the complexity that kills ya, it's that it can't get physically smaller and still capture as much light (independent of the # of pixels). CPUs get cheaper because they get physically smaller, and thus require less silicon. The same deal with silicon PV cells - you don't want to make them smaller, you want to make them more efficient at converting light to electricity. Solar cells will indeed get cheaper (MUCH cheaper) very quickly (within the next few years, you'll see several competing technologies, in fact), but not due to silicon processes, but because they're going to be made without silicon (or with much less silicon, or silicon of a much lower grade than CPU-grade silicon (they've been competing for the same Silicon resources all this time)). I'm just sayin'.
It's the only way we can stop global warming!
So Al's Internet is responsible for all the massive datacenters causing global warming huh?
Bite me
I firmly believe that solar is going to boom in the next few years and start covering every piece of cheap land on the globe. I feel that there is a lot of money to be made in energy in the short run when solar supplements the grid. And there is money to be made in energy in the long run as we phase into plugin hybrids and the demand on the grid gets huge. Of course like most nerds, I have a "not in my lifetime" long run view of an eventual Dyson Sphere of solar power in space which probably doesn't start out trying to be one, but instead starts out as Sim City microwave power plants. On a reverse note, people think the innermost planets cannot be habitable due to their temperatures from the sun, but can't we just pull a Mr. Burns and block out the sun? We could then send energy through focused beams to collectors.
God spoke to me.
doubling rate for price/performance of PV is 10 years rather than 18 months for transistors.
Ten years isn't a bad rate. It's not like oil is going down, so PV has a fixed target. We don't expect to get out of the oil addiction in 5 or less years anyhow. We need to invest in the future. Investment may hopefully speed up progress, but if not, a 10 year rate looks fairly good right now.
Table-ized A.I.
His idea for a 10 year Kennedy-esque-moon-mission-analog of rapidly transforming our energy base from one of fossil fuels to renewable energy is not only a great idea economically for the long term but also great for the short term. Any time a country is in an economic slump, the best way to relieve it is by instituting widespread public works projects. Not only do they create short term wealth and job opportunities, but they have sustained maintenance work as well as the overall betterment of society through the finalization of said public work.
A recent poll (I think it was from last Thursday) said that over 90% of Americans are FOR the rapid mobilization of wind and solar power. It seems everyone's on board for this.
Except BOTH PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES. Which is quite mind-blowing since the populous as a whole is ALL FOR IT and if either did support such a plan, it would net them a HUGE amount of voters from both political parties. It seems everyone I talk to has energy on their mind, a couple have said that they'll vote for whichever candidate would push for Gore's plan or one like it.
Which leaves me to wonder, if neither Obama nor McCain seem to have any desire to embrace it, is it finally time for a viable third candidate, one who represents the publics opinion? Could we be seeing/should we deserve to see a candidate Gore?
Since I cringe each time the Candidates energy plans are butchered - and it happens often.
ie. McCain has said Oboma is AGAINST a 300 million dollar (Xprizey) thing for a vehicle battery. and Oboma is opposed to nuclear.
Well, I've never heard Oboma suggest that electric vehicles are a bad idea or anything disparaging of their development, second, I've actually heard Oboma speak rather embracingly of Nuclear - provided as he says - we can solve the storage problem.
McCain would obviously spill oil anywhere he could find it.
AIK
As mentioned previously, Moore's Law does not apply here.
However, the use of nano-tech (to increase light collecting surface area), multiple layers (to absorb more frequencies), and lenses/concentrators (to focus more light on the collectors), and thermo-electric converters (to convert heat from the panels into electricity) should be able to push efficiencies well passed the 40% range at reasonable cost. Of course, these improvements will be "5-10 years out" for the foreseeable future.
Granted, he never said "I invented the internet", but it's not hard to get that from "I took the initiative in creating the internet". What he presumably meant was something like "I took the initiative in starting programs that ultimately led to the creation of the internet", which is sort of what the following sentence more vaguely tries to say. But just the flat-out "I took the initiative in creating the internet" does read like a claim that he, well, created the internet.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If the amount of resources that were poured into nuclear development in the 50's were poured into solar development today, solar development would probably be double that of microprocessors. Sure, solar development is advancing today faster than ever before, but even today, the effort is miniscule compared to what was dumped into nukes.
The Admin and the Engineer
With current technology it is impossible to convert to PV in any meaningful timescale mostly because PV has so much embodied energy.
PV's energy payback time is something like 10 years. That means that if we set a goal to make 20% of electricity from PV, you'd have to find 2 years worth of spare electricity to make the PV.... and where's that going to come from? This problem marginalises current PV into only ever being a bit player in the energy world. Or, to turn it around, if we can find 10% of spare electrical capacity to channel into making PV then that will limit the PV conversion rate to 1% per year. Or if it is only 5% spare then that makes a 0.5% conversion rate - not even enough to cover increasing demand.
PV will only be practical for mass generation when it comes from vastly different technology.
Wind is more viable, in some areas.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Moore's law is a measure of the maximum number of transistors per single integrated circuit changing over time. Evoking Moore's law to explain greater efficiencies of production or advances in technology that produce cheaper products are unfortunately all too common.
When you say 'cheap land', just how cheap do you mean? Seems like a simple math problem for Slashdot.
X = width of land
Y = length of land
G = generation ammount per square foot for an average month
E = electricity wholesale price
(((X*Y) * G) * E) > (monthly rent/lease + payroll + maintenance + taxes)
Of course, if the E (electricity wholesale price) is too low for this equation, we could fudge it enough by subsidizing solar power and or increasing taxes on all other forms of power.
Ten years isn't a bad rate. It's not like oil is going down
Actually it's exactly like Oil is going down, since it's down below $120 a barrel again and gas prices are also coming down too (unlike in the past where reduction in oil didn't seem to translate into reduced cost for gasoline).
Oil is a resource, and like any resource prices fluctuate. One thing to consider is that with oil prices elevated the ability to extract it from other sources (such as shale) becomes economical, and may for far more than ten years provide cheaper power than solar can. Especially since solar power is not as universally applicable as oil.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
go work as a roofer for one summer...I bet ya you'll bingo to where we might be able to fit the next *billyun* solar panels... anyway, the EU is going to slap a few hundred square european big distance measuring units up of solar in the sahara desert, and pipe it to europe, in all the papers lately. While some people hem and haw and debate and keep shelling out the big bucks for energy and keep pharting around with "studies" and hoping mr backyard hydrogen fusion reactors will save them, others are doing something about it now, using the tech we have now, because it got "good enough" some years ago. I bought some solar pv 9 years ago, same as I bought earlier way more expensive computers 20 years ago. why? I want to be part of the solution, not just part of the whining about things problem. a real geek solves problems, wannabes play video games and wait for someone else to do it and crybaby around because it isn't perfect yet. And it is getting better, every day, lot of new dedicated to solar fabs going up, dye based solar is coming, solar concentrator tech is getting commercialized. Snooze ya lose, early adopters get the benefits, same as early adopters of computers got the benefits!
His idea for a 10 year Kennedy-esque-moon-mission-analog of rapidly transforming our energy base from one of fossil fuels to renewable energy is not only a great idea economically for the long term but also great for the short term.
I just had to question the assumption here so many people make that going to all renewable energy on such a short timeframe is indeed desirable and does not bring with it great costs to the society that attempts it.
Moving away from oil dependance is a great idea for so very many reasons, but to focus only on a few things like solar and wind and ignore the huge costs of transition, all while basically forming a religion around the effort that will brook no debate of directives handed down from on high - scary stuff.
To paraphrase Franklin, when passion begins to govern she never governs wisely. And there is WAY too much passion and far too little rational discussion of all the options on the table of moving away from an oil based economy on a timeframe and using technologies that make sense.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Applied Materials, the largest maker of semiconductor fab machinery, makes fab gear for solar panels. Their CEO likes to show graphs of cost per watt vs. year, and there's a steady decline, at roughly the same rate as LCD panels. Applied Materials solar cell fabs are using technology borrowed from LCD panel fab, and they're now making 5 square meters of panel at a time. The machinery for manufacturing such huge panels is appropriately large, and that's part of what's bringing the cost down. Despite much hype, no single improvement has produced a big drop in panel cost. But the cumulative effect of continuous improvement is working.
Applied Materials people make the point that installation is now half the cost of the completed solar system, and the solar industry needs to move beyond the "guy with a pickup truck" level of installation. Bigger panels reduce installation cost, and they're working on panels that are roofs themselves, instead of being installed on top of roofs.
The actual rate of price drop is maybe a factor of 2 per decade. Which isn't bad. As the Applied Materials solar division head says, "This is a great business. Everybody else's costs are going up, and ours are going down. And we're nowhere near market saturation."
It's important to remember what you imagined/pretended he said so you can write a response to that instead of what he actually said IRL.
anata sekai o kakumei surush ga nai deshou? Anata no susumu michi wa yoi shite arimasu.
Everyone thinks the government has to take action. Now that the free market sees an impending shortage of oil (thanks to Chinese demand), it is creating oil high prices and alternatives: something the Saudis and oil companies are afraid of...
The 'solutions' are
1) solar concentrating balloons (because balloons are cheap) http://www.coolearthsolar.com/
2) Lithium (eventually sodium) iron phosphate batteries that are long lived and will fall in price after millions of tons worth are made every year for BEVs.
3) Very efficient and lightweight BEVs, like the Aptera. This allows for less expensive batteries and motors. It also uses less energy.
Yes, lithium phosphate batteries came about with government funding at UT Austin, but it will be companies that make them cheap. Yes, solar energy has to be stored, like in compressed air in underground salt domes.
Still, would some bureaucrat have come up with these ideas a few years ago? I think not. Europe has put down billions on solar and wind and they will continue to do so for the future. Us americans should save our money and then buy version 2.
Let's just forget about Al Gore. He may have some good points. He may have some made some bogus claims. But what really matters is the facts. Let's look at the facts and judge technologies on their own merits, not based on what Al Gore has said about them and what we think of him.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The simple solution is plant more trees. More trees is more shade. More shade is more tolerance to higher temperatures (90 degrees in the shade feels cooler than 72 degrees in the sun). More trees is more hiding places / homes / food for pray/animals. Trees / plants also absorb sunlight, reducing the greenhouse effect.
Ok, so maybe that's not an energy solution, but I think a lot of our problems stem from urbanization and the lack of trees. The hippies are right, in this sense. Parking lots are a good place for trees, and having them for shade would help keep our cars cool as well. Trees are nature's natural climate stabilizer.
The reason why computer chips have kept to Moore's Law is that the whole area of research has constantly attracted huge funding from very big companies, who had an interest in it. Perhaps we could have seen something similar for solar cells and fuel cells, if there had been enough investments. It is worth noting, however, that developing these technologies would have gone against the interests of some very major players: the oil and coal companies. If we could suddenly produce energy cheaply, simply by erecting solar panels with an efficiency above 50%, why would we buy fossil fuel? We all know that those things are bad for our environment, and there is every reason to suspect that research has been actively stifled by the fossil fuel producers.
There are no obvious, physical reasons why a solar cell shouldn't be able to reach a substantial efficiency - recently there has been a number of articles on that very subject suggesting efficiencies in the 80'es - and of course it will become much cheaper to produce them, just like it is now absurdly cheap to produce computer chips.
But apart from that, there is so much energy floating around in our environment: wind and water, just to mention the two most obvious. Don't let anyone dupe you into thinking that the only way to utilize that energy is by making huge powerstations that are plugged into the main grid. Centralised power production is geared towards extracting energy from concentrated sources, like fossil or nuclear fuels, whereas wind and water power mostly occur in relatively low concentrations, which will make distributed production more efficient - like in one windmill per household, if one can imagine such a thing, or a small number of large windmills per smallish community.
Perhaps you can explain why we have Temperature increases across seven planets?
Here's an article from a few weeks ago I remembered reading, seems relevant. They claim a 40x increase with products available within 3 years.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/solarcells-0710.html
Quote: "CPUs get cheaper because they get physically smaller, and thus require less silicon." Totally wrong. CPUs are cheaper not because they use less silicon. The die (the actual chip, without the encasing) of an Intel Core Duo is about the same size of that of the original Pentium. What drove the prices down is the new scalable processes in place in manufacturer nanofabrication facilities. Back in the day fabrication was done in 4 inches wafers, with a yield a much lower die per wafer ratio. Today's 12 inch wafer allows the production of more dies per wafer. The cost of silicon has nothing to do with it. Silicon is one of the most abundant elements, and also easily available (read: cheap).
Lets have a look at actual data:
http://solarbuzz.com/
During the last decade there was only a very mediocre decline. Scaling up solar cell production in the last few years actually brought prices up again due to silicon shortage.
However the price of solar cells is expected to decline sharper during the next years
1) Many new solar grade silicon fabs are coming up, hopefully driving down the cost of solar grade silicon
2) Thin film solar cells which can be produced at lower cost (but at the expense of efficiency and reliability) are gaining more and more market share and are improving.
As many other people pointed out, the scaling of solar cells is inherently different from that of microelectronics. In integrated circuits you are actually able to reduce the size and increase the density of your circuits.
For solar cells the material consumption per watt is pretty simple:
Vol [cmÂ/W] = thickness [cm] / efficiency [W/cmÂ]
Efficiencies for mass products are currently stuck somewhere between 15% and 20%. There are limited ways to work around this (concentrator cells, multijunction). This figure of merit is not expected to scale.
Reducing the material thickness is obviously the only option. Since the material thickness depends on physical properties (direct/indirect band gap) there are hard limits as well.
It boils down to the fact there there is no technical scaling model or road map to improve solar cell similar to integrated circuits. The main lever is simply in manufacturing intelligence and cost.
Personally I think the most interesting ramifications of this are that we will see (short lived) phase where companies can survive based on superior manufacturing technologies. Over time these differentiators will becomes less significant and cost is only defined by environmental factors such as cost of energy, raw material and labour.
This is why the solar cell industry will not be a pleasant place to work in in ten years, as interesting as it looks now. Outsourcing and consolidation will be swift and brutal. Even today companies are looking into places such as Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia (!).
Oh yeah, they'll be like 20% efficient then 40 then 80 then 160...talk about idiotic. Just because of that simple fact, they obviously won't double in performance for any repetetive time period. It has to end eventually. Also I think with interest in solar technology going up lately, I think the innovation will spike then slow down. It's more of a logarithmic pattern or whatever that is. You know where it takes more and more effort to keep improving further. Kinda like speeding up to near light speed taking more and more energy as you get closer to 100%. And the cost of improving the quality of electronics increasing higher and higher as it gets closer to perfect. It's proven to be pretty cheap to improve efficiency as it is now but when we're at like 80% efficiency it's gonna take a heck of a lot more effort to get from 80 to 81% than it did to get from 20 to 21% and even more to get from 81 to 90% until it's just not feasible to get any higher.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
As I write, the grandparent of this post scores 4, and the parent 2. The parent of this post is unquestionably informative: it appropriately corrects the record for any /. readers who voted for Bush over Gore because of the negative spinnage from 2000 - which we still see 8 years later in this post's grandparent.
For which, God help us all. Mod parent up, please.
Khosla is one of the planet's largest investor in biofuels. He has engaged in rather disheartening attacks on any plan that suggests electrons can replace liquid carbons molecules. See his recent statements on how plug in hybrids will forever be "toys."
He may very well be right in some instances, but given the vitriol he has spilled against alternatives to his investments, it's hard to trust his statements as honest assessments.
Gore, on the other hand, has been even handed in suggesting there is no silver bullet to our energy and climate crises.
All that being said, PV cost and efficiency has historically been closer to Khosla's estimate than it has been to Gore's. But that has been mostly as a function of investment. Now that billions upon billions are being invested in the space, I think we'll see the cost curve start to look more attractive.
"Before anyone has him inventing the Internet again, note that Gore's claim as related in the article is much milder than that Moore's Law applies to solar cells per se -- namely, he's quoted as saying "We're now beginning to see the same kind of sharp cost reductions as the demand grows for solar cells." An optimistic statement, but not a flat-out silly one."
Slashdot: so yeah, the title to the story we are showing is about what this guy sayd, but you shouldn't take too seriously what he sayd!
Who cares what Al Gore says? He's an idiot.
Roofs get replaced in Florida every 30 - 40 years. A cost effective roofing solution would take advantage of the fact that you need to spend money on a new roof anyway, so that reduces the cost. (I mean: If a solar roof costs $20k, and a standard roof $10k, than than solar roof incrementally only costs $10k, but the government subsidy will be based off $20k, making it even cheaper).
If prices of Solar are down around $1.80 a watt, and that should drop to $1/watt soon, we're on our way, because does anyone think that the cost of energy is going down? Oil is the most volatile, because it's the most convenient, but energy is energy.
A plug-in hybrid car for houses with solar roofs and a power grid that used Coal/Nuclear/Wind for the "differences" would do great... need to do something clever because at night there is no solar, but solar could still take up a huge chunk of residential power needs... which is something.
Anything we do to decrease our demand for fossil fuel based energy drastically drops the price, or at least gives us an advantage over people paying full price. If small increases in demand drastically push up prices, small decreases in demand can do the reverse.
Solar roofs take advantage of the fact that people need to replace roofs periodically anyway, so there is a built in subsidy there.
Many things drop in price with demand, but technology does not necessarily improve because more people work on the problem. Cancer and AIDS is a good example. Even Viagra was discovered by accident, showing sometimes it isn't even the people at all. A case more relevant would be Electronic Cars. Just like everything else electronic, many just assumed Electronic cars would take over in a matter of time, because the technology was just assumed to get better. Well, it didn't. In fact, now many manufacturers have given up on the idea because, well, they couldn't improve batteries. They hit a limit they couldn't breach. They've found better ways to do similar things, like with Hybrids. But will Hybrids now double in MPG with added research? I highly doubt it.
I find solar very similar. I am no expert, but seeing that the fundamental science behind current solar cells seems to have reached its full potential pretty fast (like, decades ago), it seems quite clear anything beyond that is incremental, not exponential, or even a multiple, for that matter.
The recent slashdot post about someone installing solar panels and talking about the experience also goes to show how lame the process actually is. These things need to be plug and play. Someone is not doing their part to make things easier. The market isn't built that way.
I'm for all plausible technologies for generating electricity which don't emit CO2. I think there's hope for large wind and solar-thermal generating grids, but these will come online too slowly and still cost too much.
That's why I'm convinced that we'll be burning coal till my death unless we also supplement these with a big deployment of nuclear. I'm also a leftist-environmentalist, but I really feel betrayed by Gore.
The waste heat after it leaves the coal fired power plants is about 30 degrees Celsius at best. You loose another 4 or 5 intransport. Not much you can do with it when it gets to its destination. Radiotors would have to be huge to give off any effective heat.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
By definition you can't get more energy from a photovoltaic than the total energy that is being deposited on the surface. You can only go so high. While there are fundamental limits to what a CPU can do, also by definition you can theoretically shrink it many orders of magnitude more, you can make bigger chips, you can play games with the driving current, the transmission medium (photonics anyone?) etc. In short one you have control of the input the other you don't.
"Finally I get to save the earth with deadly lasers instead of deadly slideshows."
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
The problem, though, is that we don't have much gallium. Definitely not enough to build whole square miles worth of solar panels.
Gallium is only found in trace amounts in Zinc and Bauxite ores. There is no gallium-high ore. Mostly we get a little of it as side effects of producing aluminium. It's enough for silicon doping and leds, but that's about it.
Even at the rate at which we're already using it, there's an estimate that the (easily accessible) reserves will be depleted by 2017. Can you imagine the rate we'd use it up for solar panels? Not to mention we'd need to dig out and process a _heck_ of a lot more bauxite than we currently do, to get that much of it.
So it seems to me that that plan is dead right there. There is no obvious way how to get lots of it, and the price will likely only go up from here.
Err, not really. You can use steam to produce electricity. Nuclear power goes the same route, btw. IIRC some 80% of the world's electricity is produced by steam turbines.
So, I don't know... any particular reason why we _can_ use heated water to produce electricity, if we heat it with coal or a nuclear reactor, but not if it was heated by the sun? It's the same process and with the same efficiency.
Plus, it seems to me that, from a pragmatic point of view,
1. A significant part of the world would rather have convenience, rather than sacrifice themselves for the greater good. I'd rather have a small stove in the kitchen, rather than a huge solar contraption. Plus, I'd rather cook when I want to, not just when it's sunny outside.
2. The world seems to have decided already that it wants solar-produced electricity.
3. We're actually pretty good at producing electricity from steam in the meantime. The big power plants get about 40-45% of the energy out of the fuel and converted into electricty. That's good enough.
But more importantly, it's better than what even the best uber-expensive prototypes of solar panels can do. So I'm kind of wondering, dunno, what's with the obsession with solar panels?
4. Transporting hot steam or hot water is pretty wasteful too. _Storing_ it, even more so. It needs a lot of insulation, and even so there are losses.
And it's done already, btw. I live in a town where the power plants also provide the hot water.
Let me tell you, when I want to take a shower in the morning, I first have to waste some cubic metre or two of water (no, seriously) just so I actually get hot water. Everything that was past the big insulated pipes, comes out as cold water first.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How exactly are the proposed huge solar panel farms going to be kept clean?
I can't help but wonder if it will be petrol driven cars whizzing around them constantly as cleaners do their stuff
It'd be one thing if, despite not personally creating the internet, he sponsored the Internet Creation Act of 1975 or something. But he didn't do anything nearly that direct to even legislatively create the internet. Rather, he simply supported a bunch of generic programs that arguably had a role in the creation of the internet.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If he had said, as you suggest, "I helped write a push through a bill that set the ground work for the internet", there would have been no joke, because it would've been a believable claim. "I took the initiative in creating the internet" is making a much stronger, and unsupportable, claim to have had a larger role in it than he actually did.
In particular, he didn't even sponsor a bill that created the internet. The strongest statement that he could legitimately make is that he sponsored a bill (the 1991 "Gore Bill") that significantly sped up the development of the internet, which had in fact already been created. Still a quite useful role, but I guess it wouldn't have sounded as cool for him to just say something like "I sponsored a bill that helped accelerate development of the internet" or something.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I wonder how many efficient battery and solar cell designs are owned by the oil and coal industry.
Just sayin'
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
clearly Al Gore is wrong, if he's talking about Moore's Law - but he doesn't actually mention moore's law, right? he has no real idea of the pace of semiconductor innovation probably, it just sounds good to the general public as a comparison. BUT...we don't need THAT much of an improvement in PV for it to make a serious dent in terms of an energy source for homes. We don't need a doubling in power every 18 months - one doubling would be fine, two would be magical. the cheaper PV gets, the more people you see with it, the more people talk about it with their friends, the more people consider the investment. it is, without any doubt, already catching on. here is an open source project studying a type of distributed generation: http://www.solarnetwork.net/ and conservation is really what's needed.
Well, no, not necessarily. VOIP, or for that matter any kind of a packet-switched phone network, is also useful for the military. In fact, the very idea of a packet switched network came from a very military problem, back in the 60's.
Remember, it was the the nuclear scare era. The threat that half your missile silos might be cut off and not know if they should shoot or not, was a major fear. Mutually assured destruction only works if it is mutually _assured_. What do you do if a nuke or two took out a comms hub, and the rest of the army is suddenly cut off from all communication?
The Russians, for example, dealt with it by instructing all officers that if they're unable to contact the higher echelons, they should assume that the nuclear war has begun and shoot all missiles immediately. When the USA learned about that, well, now that was an even bigger scare. In theory it would only take one good earthquake to start a nuclear war. (I say in theory, because the Russian officers did prove repeatedly that they're very reluctant to start Armageddon over a technical glitch.)
A lot of the motivation in researching packet switched comms was, don't laugh, the hope that the Russians would steal that and thus end the above-mentioned threat.
So basically, VOIP was tested because VOIP was what the military needed. No more, no less. It doesn't prove that either it, r the underlying network, were meant as something for the masses or not.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A Solar Energy analyst I hired to evaluate my house said that it takes 22MWh to grow enough silicon for 1kW peak output. If you consider you need 22,000 hours of full, peak Sun just to cover the energy expended to grow the panel (not including the energy to package it, ship it, install it, and so on), it's pretty clear that unless you have a steerable panel and live in a place where you can get 4-6 hours per day of "full" Sun, PV quickly becomes a non-starter.
For example, where I live, and given the orientation of my house, the solar analyst said I'd get, on average, about 700 hours per year of Peak Sun Equivalent. At that rate, it would take 31 years just to cover the energy cost of growing the silicon in the panel, while only saving me $115 per year per kW of PV panels installed. He instead recommended a solar hot water system to augment my electric water heater. It's about 1/10 the cost and with a good tank, will net more energy than the PV will.
its all dependent on investment. if the investment that has been put into oil and oil related technologies were made into ME, you would be even using my humble self as a global renewable source of energy today ...
ok, a bit exagerrated. but you get the point. its all about the money. invest into shit, and in 10 years youll be using turd in your car.
Read radical news here
The longer that Oil stays high priced, the faster that VC money will head into AE. Do nto believe it? Look at Kyoto. More nations have spent a load of money trying to AVOID being constrained by it. Only in the last are VC's spending some real money on AE. Why? Because the costs of energy is up.
I do have to say that I would like to see oil stay above $100/bl fro the next year. Of course, it will easily remain that high as W. and Iran keep playing verbal games leading to price increases that support both Iran and W's favorites oil companies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The broken window fallacy is about replacing one window with another window and having the side re-investment of money. Instead, this is the fundamentals of econ. That is, when something is perceived as being too high price, it gets replaced when the first low costs item can do so.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
OH, you mean science by committee - a committee of scientists cherry-picked by the U.N. to support their mission of taxing and therefore controlling global energy, and by extension, global wealth? The same IPCC report is not a peer-reviewed publication, nor were any participating scientists asked to sign off on it. It's basically the minutes of a largely political, rather than scientific, meeting. The U.N. has a real hard-on for trying to shift wealth from the U.S. and Europe to a bunch of tin-hat dictators. When was the last time they did anything for us other than hold our coats while we did the heavy lifting? U.N. peacekeepers are a fucking joke. They basically sit there and watch human rights abuses take place right in front of their very faces and don't fire a single shot. Additionally, a U.N. resolution, as we've seen time and time again, is as toothless as a 90-year old man. If you want to see the world's premiere example of decadence, corruption, and outright evil cloaked in self-righteousness, look no further than the U.N. Oh, and PAY YOUR PARKING TICKETS, YOU DIPLOMATIC BITCHES!!!
Well, except it's still inaccurate.
The Internet today is worth anything because of the hundreds of other bits and protocols that were tacked on top of it. E.g., probably Tim Berners-Lee's WWW concept was _the_ one thing that took the Interent from the ivory tower of academic curiosities and made it useful for the common man. Or Gopher, that made for a nice boost while WWW was still in its infancy. Etc.
_Technically_ the Internet may mean just the network layers that allow connecting different networks, but that's not what you interact with, and it's not what the ISPs' marketing sells to Joe Average. What makes it _the_ Internet isn't just the underlying TCP/IP protocol, but the whole eidifice of applications and protocols on top of them. You know, the things you can actually _use_ without a C compiler and sockets.
At any rate, what Gore championed wasn't that. It was ARPANET, a toy for the military. It didn't include much of a vision of anything that later made it _the_ Internet. It was just a way for a general in Washington to be reasonably confident that he can reach a missile base in California, all the way across the continent, and tell them to launch the missiles. That's it.
Even so, the result was technically impressive, but really failed to deliver anything it had promised. It just wasn't of much use for the army, so it got declassified. Not because Gore was teh uber-champion of Internet for the common man, but merely because he fucked up and didn't deliver to the army what he promised. That's it.
It was from there that other people took that failure, and added the bits and pieces that turned it into a success and into a tool for Joe Average.
So basically it's a bit like crediting Karl Benz with inventing the tank. You know, 'cause he made a car, and later someone else added a bigger engine, treads, armour and gun(s) and got a tank. But, hey, if you want to, you can still see it as just Karl Benz's car.
Regardless of whether he "invented" the Internet or not, his taking credit for it is still highly misleading and a bit bullshit.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Given that Gore's running mate Joe Lieberman now campaigns for McCain and fully supported the war in Iraq, I wonder just how much different eight years of Gore/Lieberman would have been.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Economics is a barrel of laughs compared to thermodynamics.
You're right about that. What we really need are efficient solar panels and energy dense batteries. With those two technologies, cars, heating, everything could be done with electricity from the sun. Talk about freeing up several hundred billion dollars in oil/coal money which could stay in the good ole US of A.
J
In 1993 (+/- a year or so), I co-wrote the grant proposal for our NGOs (non governmental organizations) in Los Angeles to the NTIA (National Telecommunications Infrastructure Administration?) which I believe was one of the things Gore got funded. In it we provided 5 community organizations in Los Angeles with internet links (T1 lines), networks, computer classrooms and training to private citizens (kids mainly) from diverse ethnic communities.
We got $100K from the NTIA followed by $150K from PacBell and $100K from Pacific Gas & Electric (I may be a little off on some of these numbers). I think it lasted a couple years. Lots and lots of kids got on line back then. I did it on a volunteer basis but learned a lot.
Nuclear weapons were developed at a frantic pace in the 1950s mainly because they provided a much cheaper deterrent against the USSR than a large standing army in Europe. In short, they were cost effective.
Solar cells have, in one form or another, been around longer that nuclear weapons. We have had silicon cells now for 50 years, and a lot of money has gone into making them highly efficient for satellites and cost effective for remote equipment.
About the only way to improve silicon is through micro machining it so that the light enters the depletion region from the side rather than through a transparent electrode.
Nano technology or dye molecules to capture light are getting a lot of attention now, vastly more than nuclear weapon technology.
what a shame so much noise has been modded up past my threshold while this gem lies fallow
It's silly because Al is a Silly person. Period.
He is the leader of the neo-pagan church often referred to as "the environmental movement." You don't have to dig too deeply into the church of Gaea to see that the same old "progressive" values of eugenics and destruction of individual liberties are alive and well. You thought the eugenics movement that was popular in the U.S. with the academic left prior to WWII had been discredited and destroyed by the horrors of the Holocaust, but in fact it only went underground and is now beginning to resurface. You thought the idea of The State as god had been dealt a coup de grace with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that individual liberty had prevailed. But the fact is that a growing number of people are content to hand over their rights to The State in exchange for the illusion of security that comes from living in a cage. Oooh, it's a scary world out there. Don't worry, the State won't let you lose your house, your job, the State will feed you, educate you (just don't ask to have a say in what is taught).
This has been quite thoroughly debunked; see http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
I'm not pleased to see a decent and honorable person like Gore lampooned for something he never even said. He received a Webby in 2005 for lifetime achievement, and Vint Cerf has also defended him.
The efficiency numbers you see on these things are by and large the product of someone's imagination.
The testing procedure involves the solar company building a very small sliver of a PV cell under lab conditions (not mass manufacture conditions) and then sending it to a test facility. The smaller that sliver is the more likely the efficiency numbers are inflated. The more experimental a technology is the harder it is to manufacture anything big enough for meaningful results. This means that all these reports of 37% efficient PV technology being 5 years away are probably incorrect.
My friend works in an office that does energy retrofits of government buildings and one of the lists they have is the factor for each PV manufacturer between what the manufacturer claims their panels will do and what kind of energy the panels actually generate in the wild, based on monitoring previous installs they've done themselves.
These efficiency numbers are all academic until you've tried the cells out in the environment from which you need to generate energy.
Really - Is it "possible" or pretense?
That really is the question. Is it possible that the delivered price of Solar PV could drop 50% in a period of 18 months year after year?
That is not the question. Savings now are coming from scale, and that has also been a savings mechanism for chips. We only need to see one more factor of two drop from the current cost of solar to do better than coal: http://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2008/JULY/FIRSTSOLAR_170708.htm
Variable cylinder engines. They made some in the past (cadillac that I remember but probably others) that worked but still sucked, but the tech is better now. They completely shut off cylinders on the highway once you are rolling good.
AlGore is a moron that is milking his moment of fame. He has no scientific knowledge or ability.
I have watched solar tech for decades as I find it fascinating. However for a reality check go to Circuit Cellar and read the articles on the editors own system. Solar is still wildly expensive with the only chance of reasonable payback needing massive rebates and tax incentives. Guess what you (and me) still pay for those and the payback is the same merely hidden.
Further while cells have improved and progress continues that is FAR from the whole system. You need inverters if you want to grid tie and they are a big portion of cost. If no grid tie then you need inverters AND batteries. Then add in the expert installation needed that is unavailable in large sections of the USA (yes the world does not consist of LA and NYC). Then add in maintainence.
Solar has advanced and does make sense for some applications. Solar will continue to advance in all probability with the sensible applications expanding. Someone MIGHT make systems more plug and play reducing the need for expert solutions. However government mandate will not make this happen.
The cap and trade scam just creates another huge middle man skimming market. Like we don't have enough of them already.
>> "We're now beginning to see the same kind of sharp cost reductions as the demand grows for solar cells."
And therein lies the great deception... many people believe that such technologies will get cheaper as they become more widely used. Just subsidize it to "jump-start" the market, and voila! Free energy! Or so goes the sales pitch.
Unfortunately, people who have studied economics for more than five seconds understand that increased demand leads to higher prices, not lower prices.
CPU prices don't come down because people buy them, they come down because Intel make better ones year after year. It's (at best) questionable whether that level of innovation will be possible with solar energy. But if it is possible, then subsidies won't be needed.
As I noted above, a single nuclear power plant could have provided all the bomb fuel we ever wanted. 109 more reactors gives new meaning to the word 'overkill.'
The Admin and the Engineer
In general, increased demand will increase the price of a good unless supply increases. This is of course typical since more demand means more money to be made by supplying firms. Nonetheless, a statement along the lines of new demand will bring down prices is at least incomplete (if not misleading or false).
Solar roofing panels have been out for a long time now, you can buy them already from several sources, since years ago, google "integrated solar roofing panels" or "BIPV". Now, there are "near" roofing solutions called solar shingles, those only replace..the shingles.. but you can get the full roof things as well. It guess it depends on how far down you want to call the roof. On a normal stick frame, if you want to call from the entire truss on up the roof, no, they don't exist, but on top of that, yes, they do exist.
Check out the company called NanoSolar.
They have developed technology for PRINTING solar cells, and can produce large panels of solar cells for 1/10th the cost of silicon cells.
They are a private company, with several hundred million in capital. Their factory began production this spring, and are cranking out solar cell panels for dirt cheap to commercial interests.
Sales to the general public will begin in early 2009.
www.nanosolar.com
"Thin-film solar films are more than 100x thinner than silicon-wafer cells and thus have correspondingly lower materials cost.
Combining the materials-cost advantage of thin films with the process cost advantage of Nanosolar's 100x faster process technology leads to the best of both worlds.
The result is the world's most cost-efficient solar electricity cells and panels"
"We're now beginning to see the same kind of sharp cost reductions as the demand grows for solar cells."
Well, on a theoretical level there may be cost reductions. But as a person who closely tracks the price of modules, THE COST PER WATT IS STILL HIGHER THAN IN 2002!
Before 2002 we had constant slow reductions in price... the price has been crazy ever since then.
I've seen several working stirling engines built by hobbyists. I've seen some commercially available ones for setting on top of woodstoves, too - they work quite well at that scale, using the heat from the stove to turn a fan which pushes steam from a kettle out into the room, thus moderating humidity in the home.
From what I've seen, a stirling engine the size of a skyscraper would be required to provide enough torque to run your clotheswasher. The mass of the pistons is so low, and the size of the radiator is so huge, it's just impractical for nearly any real use at this time.
Geeks love nuclear power and stirling engines, they see those 100% theoretical efficiency numbers and get all excited. But once you visit a nuclear plant & meet Mr. Smithers, or actually build a stirling, the scales come off your eyes.
Well, I thought it was clever.
I finally updated my sig, but now it's lame.
You nailed it exactly. You can get tremendous price breaks on rural land by being one mile from the telephone/electric poles. That price difference pays for (or severely drops) the solar install by eliminating the expense of paying to put the poles in. It's the same money you are spending, but it goes to something YOU own and not bigelectrico, inc.. Most places they charge you per pole and it is a lot. It also can help keep your local property tax lower, a perpetual cost benefit. And solar with batteries means you have a whole house UPS system, plus it is much cleaner power than what the grid usually provides. "Peace of mind" is an intangible but worthwhile consideration. If the grid was all that reliable, why do data centers have huge UPSs and generators? It just depends on what people want, me, I want the independence and the reliability of home made power. Ask folks what it might have been worth who went through week long outages and lost their plumbing from freezing and had no heat and lost their food, etc what that peace of mind might be worth, or opposite,a heat wave and "rolling blackouts" or dirty power brownouts because the grid can't cut it. We were living previously on an estate that had whole house solar, we had an ice storm, near a week the area was without power, we didn't miss a thing, everything just kept on working as normal. Dang cool beans and stuff. I didn't even realize the local grid was down until at night and I saw no lights all around, very few. we were up a mountain and I was used to seeing streetlights and houselights, etc in the distance and it was near total blackout.
If nothing else, solar cells are limited by the basic energy density of solar radiation.
Clear, Dark Skies
It's just that the truth doesn't catch up with the myth.
What would a poll say about it now? And about Love Canal? Loveboat?
Googling around...
http://www.currykerlinger.com/birds.htm
http://www.currykerlinger.com/studies.htm
And some quotes to sum it up:
"Window-crash bird mortality is our focus, with the intent of providing some pespective on the near urban-myth status that has been attained regarding wind-tubine caused bird mortality. Historically and presently, the biggest piece of the dead bird pie is, without doubt, attributable to window-crashes. From Audubon Magazine: "Millions of birds perish every year from crashing into glass windows...such small glass kills can add up to big trouble, believes ornithologist Daniel Klem of Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania"."
"This argument is one of the main ones against wind farms, but is simply not true. The only windfarms to ever kill birds where the very old ones built using high speed blades, and no real gearbox. Those farms would spin at very high speeds, killing birds.
The modern farms spin at much lower speeds - just look at one and you'll see that it moves very slowly! Most birds are able to avoid these blades, and even if they are hit by them the chance of death is very much lower than the chance of death brought about by the high speed blades. The simple fact is, windfarms kill very few birds, certainly far fewer than will be killed by the effects of global warming, industrial pollution, collisions with peoples cars, with windows and with buildings etc."
-- Boycott Shell
Created DAMMIT, created. He wasn't some putz who knocked a couple of ideas together and simply invented something, no, he was the very Hand of God without which the internet could never have been invented.
"...sharp cost reductions as the demand grows for solar cells"
Since when did higher demand lead to lower costs?
No surprise there.
Algore is all about tricking people into buying into his latest scam.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Boston Consulting Group, 1965. "Learning curve" is the rate that prices decline for every doubling of aggregate production. It is 20 - 40% for everything from eggs to computer chips. Moore's law isn't even a special case, except that the demand for the chips and low costs produced very rapid doublings of aggregate production.
Solar is, without doubt, on the curve. Several curves, in fact, as there are competitive technologies.
There is something far more egregious than Al Gore's mischaracterization of solar cell technology. For all the years he's been out there giving his presentation on global warming, he never talks about the damage done by animal agriculture. According to the United Nations FAO report, the best thing we can do to reduce global warming, to reduce the costs associated with type 2 diabetes and obesity, and to preempt the diseases of affluence is to reduce our consumption of meat and dairy products.
Why doesn't Al Gore talk about methane, which is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2? Not only does methane hang around for longer than CO2, when it degrades, it breaks down into CO2.
Personally, I'm doing my part. I no longer eat any meat or dairy, and I get all my vegetables from local farmers' markets. When appropriate, I try to encourage others to cut down on meat and dairy as well, as I've become too aware of the damage to health and the environment that it causes. Heart disease killed my father at 54, and his father at 55. Both were avid meat eaters. I cross my fingers that I will live more than just another 14 years.
Apart from the 400 liters of methane produced by each cow every day, there's the water pollution and disease caused by pig farming, the waste of agricultural land producing soy to feed cattle, and the suffering of the animals themselves, which I find impossible to ignore.
I just found this story through Google, which gives a few more statistics in relation to some protestors urging Al Gore to talk about these things.
http://www.vivavegie.org/pr/algore/AlGoreDemo/index.htm
I realize that the media and popular culture are finding it more and more acceptable to ostracize people like myself, who are expressing concern about this problem. Whatever the majority of people do - in this case, eating meat without much thought about it - the media feels it can be the enabler. And people sure do like to be told that what they're doing is just fine, and that whoever disagrees is some kind of nut.
Meanwhile, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes are exploding all over the world. And as affluence grows, these problems are increasing. All these problems cost the society, in medical expenses especially, whereas a little prevention could do so much more. But the food and pharmaceutical industries like it! Which is kind of sick. One would hope that the health and well-being of people would be the first priority, and that corporations existed to benefit the society - or at least not to dumb it down and harm it. But instead they suppress and distort information, demonize vegetarians and animal advocates, and tell young people that milk (not yucky broccoli) does a body good.
Recently I've been looking at sites like "Consumer Freedom" (an industry thinktank) and sites targeted at farmers and the animal industry. It's a little embarrassing to see how far these groups stoop, and how they tacitly expect people to agree with their ideas. They call anyone who threatens their bottom-line "kooks" and "radicals," and their readers feel empowered and enabled to think of concerned people that way. And the mainstream press is leaning towards the same kind of demonization, which makes it possible for countries like Austria to jail advocates without reason and without evidence.
In fact, people who advocate for animals, regardless of how peacefully, are roundly called "terrorists" now, and it's even been enshrined in laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. It demeans the good will of so many people, and enables the mainstream to discount anything that relates to animal advocacy.
Thing is, nobody likes the facts, which is understandable. People like their cheeseburgers! But the thing is, we can't just live at the level of children who eat what we like because we like it and it feels good in the moment. I mean, fine, do what you want, but with awareness! Eating meat at the level we do require
-- thinkyhead software and media
Unlike Digg, you can pretty much killfile people you don't agree with here. Learn the interface.
"Super liberal" is a laugh, though.
I suspect that many people realize that when first created, the internet was closed to themselves. It was an elite ivory tower kind of thing. You know - the kind of thing a guy who rides on private jets and limosines would like.
As I recall, it was closed to people below a certain level of education and native intelligence. Oh, and patience, too, at least until ethernet got rolled out and speeds went up over 300/1200 baud. When I was a kid I used to climb into a second story window in the middle of the night to get ARPANET access. Rich people were among the last to get on board the Internet, shortly after the stupid people.
I am not a bible thumper nor am I a republican but I'd like a citation of scientific PROOF that "global warming" is caused by man and/or that this is something nature hasn't dealt with before. PROOF... Not insane babble. Proof. I don't deny global warming. I don't deny man MAY have something to do with it. I insist on evidence to show that it will cause harm in the long run. Frankly if the Earth gets so hot that it forces us to do stuff to thwart that (like use solar energy) then it is a great thing.
Let me get this straight - if I can't prove to you that a bus is about to hit you, and that it's being driven by your mother-in-law, you refuse to step out of the bus lane? Why in the world do you care about that level of detail?
Somebody that wants to stop pollution, because pumping garbage into one's air supply is retarded, I can understand that. I see what happens when you put too many fish in a tank (ick). People who publish rants like yours... I just don't get it. What are you going on about? Why do you think it should be possible for someone to spoon feed you totally accurate data about past and future events?
Wasn't there an article on slashdot the other week, about how the natural sources of gallium will likely to be exhausted in ten to fifteen years?
Again, if Gore had said he made "significant contributions to promoting the Internet before it was popular" there wouldn't have been the controversy. But he didn't. He said he "took the initiative in creating" it, which is false.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Everyone knows that no one person created the internet, which is why it came across as so comical when Gore claimed he "took the initiative in creating the internet".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
More than 60,000 Windows programs won't run on Linux.
Wow, I didn't know there were that many crappy programmers.
Your well-reasoned counterarguments to my points, and your restraint in not using personal attacks in place of logic have caused me to change my mind. Thank you, sir.
BZZZT!!! Blah blah blah hope. Blah blah blah change. Same failed liberal ideas, shiny new wrapper.
al gore doesn't mention a lot of things.
for example:
1. his $30k monthly energy bill.
2. the carbon emissions of his private jet (equal to about the annual carbon emission of an average usa citizen).
3. the fact the earth is cooler in 2008 than it was in 1998.
so far as i can tell, al gore basically leverages his name to advertise for his businesses. apparently, he's netted many tens of millions of dollars for his efforts.
caveat emptor.
A flat carbon tax is still a stick approach, I propose a full carrot approach, don't tax, give full tax *credits* for those new ways of doing things you want to promote. We have some partial credits now, but it isn't enough, then need to be full, and carryover for some years if we want to see widespread adoption of alternative cleaner energy sources and better cars, etc.
...Bush's description of huge solar cells floating in space, shooting energy down through the atmosphere via a laser? Why did the story just die? Hell maybe I dreamed it.
Anyway I need an alternative-energy zealot to explain why and how this will or will not work, assuming I didn't just make this whole thing up.
I'm afraid Mr Gore brings these responses upon himself. To anyone in science he is the Poster Boy for a little bit of knowledge and too much confidence is a dangerous thing. Which is exacerbated by his little regard for the unintended consequences of his proposals, even if you were to uncritically grant his premises.
However if you wish to view the merits of the other side; which is opposed to his 'religious' views. May I suggest the BBC multi part special 'Great Global Warming Swindle' yes you heard that right Debunking man-made global warming. Another solid review is done at Steve Milloy's excellent web site, www.junkscience.com .
Far too much R&D is going into chasing high efficiency stuff that is on the road to a dead end. Far too little is going into researching non-silicon alternatives.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Please don't try to coopt the global warming issue to promote the animal rights issue. Like a bunch of people recently tried to hijack the Sierra Club by claiming that illegal immigration is an environmental issue.
Animal exhalations of methane and CO2 are not directly related to global warming because animals consume living matter. The carbon they emit was in the atmosphere just a few months ago. Cows, in and of themselves, are 100% carbon neutral.
The only carbon we really need to be worried about is that which comes out of deep stores. The CO2 that is produced by burning fossil fuels was last in the atmosphere millions of years ago. By adding it back into the atmosphere now, we are disturbing the current balance. A balance which, by the way, all living emitters of CO2 are part of. Even if we kill them and eat them.
Now it is true that the agriculture industry (not just the meat industry--the entire ag industry) burns a lot of fossil fuels to produce and ship their product, and that contributes to global warming. But the solution to that would be the same as for trucking--replace the internal combustion engine and gasoline.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
1) Polls can EASILY be worded to get people to say one thing in question one and another in question - and the two answers can be diametrically opposite and irreconcilable.
2) Being "for" something is not the same thing as supporting a particular method of getting there.
To demonstrate:
Q) Are you for clean air and water?
A) Yes
Yet somehow people aren't coming out in large numbers calling for the immediate cessation of all transportation, sewage, power production, distribution, etc.. To assert a disconnect from the above question and answer and the following statement is to be short-sighted, biased, or plain ignorant.
Other examples:
I am for ethanol powered transportation, but against government subsidy and mandates.
I am for better wages but against a minimum wage.
I am for solar energy, but against government subsidy and mandates.
I am very much in favor of lightweight (not tiny, light weight) vehicles, but against government mandates for the matter.
Polls are worse than elections. Elections at least count a clear decision. Polls simply reflect what the pollsterpollee interaction induces.
Making inferences and policy from polls is today's reading of entrails.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
We deny the value of the lives of the animals we eat, we deny their feelings and their suffering,
It's not just animals. Plants have feelings and feel pain too! We need to learn how to make food artificially, without killing living things.
Wind is already the cheapest power available per kilowatt-hour. Subsidies aren't necessary to bring this change in power generation about, just some continued high oil prices and some entrepreneurs like Pickens. The government could be of more help with pure, risky R&D into solar, geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power generation--the sort of US government-funded risky research that has worked so well in the early years of the Internet or in giving the pharmaceutical industry its best ideas.
Would techniques to burn lines into silicon at wavelengths that could match light at various angles improve absorption?
Or, for example, if one built cells not using flat silicon, but in bubbles, they would capture more light at odd angles -- it wouldn't be "as" efficient/unit silicon versus flat at ideal angles, but it should gather more energy overall. It should even be easy to create sunflower-type auto-following of the sun using different metals with no moving parts to get worn.
But depending on the chip complexity -- it might will be able to progress much faster than now, but at 38$ for something the size of a fingernail, it would make for expensive .01 are (m**2) slabs.