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Why Small-Scale Biomass Energy Projects Aren't a Solution To Climate Change
Lasrick writes "Roberto Bissio has an excellent piece in a roundtable on biomass energy, pointing out that small scale biomass energy projects designed for people in poor countries aren't really a solution to climate change. After pointing out that patent protections could impede wide-spread adoption, Bissio adds that the people in these countries aren't really contributing to climate change in the first place: 'Why? Because poor people, whose carbon emissions these technologies would reduce, produce very little carbon in the first place. As I mentioned in Round One, the planet's poorest 1 billion people are responsible for only 3 percent of global carbon emissions. The 1.26 billion people whose countries belong to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development account for 42 percent of emissions. The rich, if they reduced their emissions by just 8 percent, could achieve more climate mitigation than the poor could achieve by reducing their emissions to zero. The rich could manage this 8 percent reduction by altering their lifestyles in barely noticeable ways. For the poor, a reduction of 100 percent would imply permanent misery.'"
Poor people may not have much of a carbon footprint, but if there is no alternative to deforesting your island home, then the impact on the environment would be larger than just how much CO2 you produce.
More music, fewer hits
This entire article presumes that "climate change" is something we should even care about. Talking about 'solutions' to a made up problem is idiotic, at best and at worst just goes to show that slashdot is a strongly liberal/statist enclave.
Right, the rich. That is EVERYONE reading this.
The poorest 1 billion people on this planet do not have computers to read slash dot. As such they will not be taking part in the following discussion.
It should be noted that TFS uses "rich" in the global context. Here, "the rich" very much includes US beneficiaries of taxpayer subsidies such as aid to families and dependant children. If you're reading this on your phone, you are the 1%.
well, 86%, since we're talking about the not-poorest billion.
Just built those damn thorium reactors or solar cells on the moon.
40 (researching materials & systems for reactors) or 500(+?) billion dollar depending on which project you're doing is more or less nothing when it comes to energy production and consumption anyway.
You'd learn other cool stuff to, the later would get us to the moon and who knows maybe a moon base or more space stations and more eyes towards the sky and more belief in science and how awesome humans are, I guess less environmental impact here..
Space stuff are cool, lots of energy is nice.
Just pay.
Reducing their current emissions might not reduce overall emissions, BUT, it will certainly reduce future emissions, which is a lot better than doing nothing.
Most new technologies start off small scale, and there is nothing preventing these from becoming good enough to move back into the "first world". These projects should be celebrated not, put down because they don't do enough. There is no one thing that will do enough, so by that logic, we should do nothing. Which is obviously pathetic.
Small steps, any steps, are good.
That would be a good start, and a good example to others.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I do not think there is a single answer to global energy needs. We need many answers, not just one magic answer. If this technology helps some people, then it is absolutely worthwhile. We need every bit of help we can get. If it's only a small fraction of a percent, that is fine; the technology is helping people and helping the earth. The least you could do is support it.
Dismissing ideas because they won't replace fossil fuels is foolish. Replacing fossil fuels is going to take a combination of ideas, probably in combination with production decentralization.
Most people have ideological blinders on. In politics, it is easy to see. The conservatives rail against the high cost of government (perhaps true although talking only about cost without considering benefit seems stoopid) yet spend their time complaining about the NIH or some silly program that is .000001% of the budget.
Same with energy solutions and climate change. Some folks think batteries are going to save us because apparently their thinking about energy generation stops at the electric plug.
One reason the cost of solar has yet to catch up to the cost of oil is because every time the price of oil goes up, there is more oil available. When the cost goes up, it is profitable to drill deeper and to keep marginal wells and refineries open longer. Basic economics.
We need affordable energy today. I think giving the poor people who need energy today a cheap and hopefully sustainable solution is addressing the issue (instead of increasing it by giving them oil wells and SUVs) but it doesn't address the big sunk costs of dams which are silting up or transmission wires which are growing old or energy generating plants which last for 40 or 60 years.
Same old same old. Most of the folks who present solutions can't even accurately describe the problem and the current situation.
The reason gas prices are so high isn't because of low supply, it's because of high demand, from emerging markets (China and India in particular). While the amount of greenhouse gas used now by low-income countries isn't high, improving their electric grid and using renewable resources will not only decrease the rate of growth in CO2, but it will also be a good test bed for building a new grid. Eventually these new areas will ramp up demand and there will need to be something there.
Do you live in India or China? If not, you're probably in that top 20%. I see you have a computer or mobile device , so that almost guarantees you're in the richest few hundred million.
I make at least $50K, so I'm in the top 0.5% and I'm on Slashdot.
It's not a solution to climate change and never was or will be. It's a solution to getting at least some energy infrastructure in the poor parts of the world. One thing we have to worry about is scaling this technology, since it creates an easy path deforestation (as others have pointed out). Biomass energy production should ideally use only waste biomass from agriculture and such.
> 'Why? Because poor people, whose carbon emissions these technologies would reduce, produce
> very little carbon in the first place. "
So far, haven't poor, third world countries, which were ramping up their industrial capacity, been among some of the larger sources of Carbon? I mean, its clear that we wealthy nations produce the lions share but.... isn't looking for ways to decentralize and get the poor of today thinking about green development.... isn't that part of getting ahead of easily predicted future compounding of the problem?
I mean, is it really fair to say to them "hey you know what...we need to cut our emissions so much that you....you can't have new technology"? Is it realistic to assume that those who have no carbon footprint today, will be happy continuing that way tomorow?
Is this a solution? No likely not, but, I don't think there is going to be A solution aside from embracing the power of "AND".
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Supposedly he buys carbon offsets to bring his footprint down to zero.
You must be new here. Welcome.
One of our favorite things to do is sit around and whine about the 1%, pretending that's not us.
Most of us make over $30K, so we're one-percenters, but we like to engage in class warfare anyway.
is to control the sun. Good luck to that one!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
Supposedly he buys carbon offsets to bring his footprint down to zero.
Yes, what a great message he could send the less-well-off among us: Don't Pollute... unless you can afford to.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The inevitable sea level rise will drown enough of the poorest so that the problem solves itself. Climate stability will be achieved after alll.
I make at least $50K, so I'm in the top 0.5% and I'm on Slashdot.
So, what's it like being a 0.5%'er? What are the Koch's really like?
The EPA says industry accounts for 14% .
Electricity is 38% and automobiles are 31%.
You can reduce the emissions by cars primarily by increasing the production of electricity, while at the same time increasing other pollutants, so there's not much benefit working with cars until you have clean electricity.
You can get about 8% of your electricity cleanly through hydro and wind. That does mean you'll have to put up with windmills in your backyard.
Massachusetts had a big problem there - they wanted wind power, but refused to have windmills.
So where are you going to get the other 92% of your energy? Natural gas is cleanER.
Nuclear is really scary to the uninformed, but by FAR the cleanest. It produces an incredibly tiny amount of really nasty stuff and small amount of safe stuff that's scary because like our own bodies, it's "radioactive". Sun light is a billion times more radioactive, but for decades the "green" PR was so anti-nuclear that they are having a hell of time turning that around.
What ways are that? The article gives no details, just a statement. I'm sure if the suggestions were 'barely noticeable' more people would do them.
That's the point of buying offsets. At least, if you think they work as advertised. Gore's lifestyle puts out X units of carbon; he buys offsets to bring that number down to zero so that he's not actually polluting.
Sorry, poor people, that tech potentially mitigates climate change. No sustainable rural development for you. Buy our industrial ethanol. Or perhaps you'd like a nice molten salt solar reactor.
Sorry, poor people, but you'll have to continue to import your electricity, liquid fuels, and cooking gas, as well as burn your own forests, because upgrading your technology potentially mitigates climate change. Hands off the first world problem, and nevermind those other benefits.
P.S. Pay no attention to the fact that black carbon emissions in the developing world are far larger than black carbon emissions in the developed world. Black carbon only makes things look dingy. It has no relationship to either climate change or lung disease. We'd could invest in small scale technologies to the poor, but instead we're going to ignore you and write Jeremiads about U.S. CO2 emissions.
What do you suggest, then? Maybe someone can calculate what the effect would be if the Americans paid as much petrol tax as the Europeans. (I mean: the effect on CO2 production; not the political repercussions).
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Getting free Biogas for cooking, lighting or produce electricity plus a better fertilizer is nothing to sneeze at.
Has anyone actually proven that carbon offset actually do anything beneficial? All the items I have seen from various global warming groups is they are nice to have people focus on what they call a problem but overall are a distraction.
If you want to see something really interesting compare the following groups and see what they charge to plant a tree:
1) Arbor Day Foundation
2) TREE AID
3) A carbon offset company, like Al Gores.
He's right that, on average, the people in poor countries aren't the immediate problem. He's also right that we should be doing something about the immediate problem.
However focusing _solely_ on quick fixes to the immediate problem is exactly how we got into this problem in the first place. If we focus only on reducing the carbon output of the rich, then by the time we've got that under control we'll find that those poorer nations have developed the same kind of ecologically unfriendly economies that the rich nations have now, and we'll have to go through the whole fight against the same entrenched interests all over again.
Unless of course he's proposing that the poor nations should not or can not become economically developed, which i just don't believe to be the case. (If we want any kind of long term peace and stability on this planet we're going to have to bring everyone up to about the same economic level, but that's an argument for another post.)
He's making the same mistake that many a slashdotter does when a story comes up about someone spending time and money on the "wrong" thing. (Most frequently "on space" rather than "fixing stuff here on Earth.") We are not in some giant 4x game where we have to focus all our research and all our industry on a single project at a time. We can invest on improving the efficiency of developed nations while at the same time improving the capacity of poor nations in an ecologically friendly way.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Don't forget hot showers. The carbon footprint of manufacturing solar hot water panels is even too high.
Cold water showers can get a person clean, at least if he cares about Mother Earth.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Tree-planting is just one of the things they do. I'm not sure what the rest are, but last time I looked there's a whole range. But yeah- if the offsets don't do what they advertise then Gore buying them doesn't offset his lifestyle.
That's an incredibly short-sighted and static viewpoint. Which two countries increased their greenhouse gas emissions the most in the past few years? China and India - both developing countries. Unless you intend to keep these poor countries poor for the foreseeable future, they're going to modernize at some point. The logical way to proceed is to get them hooked on clean energy from the onset is to prevent growth in carbon emissions in the future. If you just say they don't pollute enough to matter, you're eventually going to arrive at a state where the rich nations drop their carbon emissions to near zero but global emissions are still increasing because those formerly-poor nations are now burning coal.
There's a tremendous opportunity here in developing nations. Like many of them skipped landline phone networks and jumped straight to cellular, they can skip the coal and oil plants and jump straight to hydro, nuclear, wind, and eventually solar.
Bissio adds that the people in these countries aren't really contributing to climate change in the first place: 'Why? Because poor people, whose carbon emissions these technologies would reduce, produce very little carbon in the first place. ...because CO2 isn't causing any global warming in the first place.
Other than that, a pretty typical pointless greenist article...
he buys offsets to bring that number down to zero so that he can claim that he's not actually polluting.
TFTFY. The accounting on carbon offsets is totally bogus.
A windmill should not be able to credit any offsets until its manufacturing and operation costs are netted out, which can be 15 years of operation or more. Solar panels have only gone over unity in the past few years. etc.
People are getting credits for growing forests *that they were going to grow anyway*. No new behaviors are being created in these cases.
The primary value of carbon credits at this point are as an essential ingredient in greenwashing solutions. An honest market in carbon credits could exist (and there are probably a few small extant examples of this), but their primary purpose, currently, is not fulfilled by honest accounting.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Gore actually buys offsets from himself!
He owns an offset company - he pays into the company to buy offsets, then takes the money back out again as salary.
But then, all greens are hypocritical serial liars
My health insurance just went from $430 / month to $950 / month. It feels kind of like a cucumber being shoved ...
They are doing it with out a big dirty coal power plant and large government investment.
Even poor people can afford 1Kw home solar systems. 3rd world businesses can too, enough to run a welder, or a mill . Most of the 3rd world are actually in sunny areas so its pretty viable to do this.
Next 5 years we will see an explosion in solar power in the 3rd world. With this and cheaper electric peddle bikes, things will change with transport too. Instead of 4 million travelling about on 2 stroke bikes, some will commute on electric power.
Biomass will still be used as it always has in heating and cooking gas.
Look to 3rd world for the future. Not to the west, still driving around in hungry 4wd petrol trucks to work.
to Americans the "1%" means in the USA, that is $394,000 and above annual income.
On planet earth that's $34K and above
And there is also the issue of dependence from imports.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I don't think using these absolute numbers makes sense: someone living say, in London will need a lot more income to sustain himself than someone in a village in India.
Carbon offsets are the papal indulgence of the twenty-first century. The only thing they actually achieve is allowing affluent people to manage their guilt.
> Even poor people can afford 1Kw home solar systems.
> 3rd world businesses can too, enough to run a welder, or a mill
At the average installed cost of $0.90 / watt, a 1 Kw solar system costs as much as most people in the world make in 10 years. Poor, globally, is under $1,500 / year.
A welder?!?! A little welder for auto repair is 200 amp @ 120V - 240V, or at least 24,00 watts. That's $21,600 of solar panels to run that welder.
"Climate change" does NOT need to be "solved" and even if it did, for whatever reason, need to be, we're not the ones that are going to do it. The planet and simple economics will solve it for us, well ahead of any other well-intentioned path to hell.
It's become pure ideological agitprop at this point. There is no truly rational debate going on when an AGW advocate calls someone who disagrees with him/her a "denier" and any contrary argument is seen as nothing short of fanatical neo-religious heresy. Climate science is about as settled as the Kennedy Assassination is among conspiracy nuts. This has marked modern environmentalism from Rachel Carson onward, though even Carson's intellectual dishonesty and outright fabulism look rather tame compared to the current IPCC drivel. The UN wants us - the Western world, chiefly - to make mega-trillion dollar financial commitments based on a pack of lies so insincere, fact-challenged, and informed by fanatical cognitive dissonance that Joseph Goebbels could take lessons from the professional bureaucrats who come up with this nonsense.
This is not a puzzle. The only sustainability we should be remotely interested in is financially viable fuel production and generation of energy, period. Coal and natural gas are the most likely exponents of this today, especially in the U.S. where we're sitting on massive natural gas reserves that we could conceivably not exhaust for several hundred years. Nuclear is ironically the most viable for massive, cheap energy production yet it is a non-starter in the U.S. and much of the Western world as any new plant faces a 20-30 year quagmire of NIMBY lawsuits and harassing environmental legislation that in turn makes new plants financially untenable. It doesn't matter how "good" a reactor design is. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, all eminently avoidable (in hindsight) accidents that have soured nuclear energy perhaps for time immemorial. In fact in two of the three accidents if automated systems had actually been allowed to work would never have been heard of. Fukushima as it turns out was a bad design (well, technically, so was Chernobyl but you had engineers goosing the system beyond its limits and basically screwed a big chunk of Russia and the earth as a result).
Meanwhile, short of a Luddite return to the earth or a visit by the Borg, we need ever-increasing amounts of energy and we need it at a price point that won't bankrupt everyone. We need to concern ourselves with THAT reality and not whether the oceans are going rise 0.2cm over 100 years.
Maybe someone can calculate what the effect would be if the Europeans lived and worked in countries that you couldn't drive straight through in a few hours and didn't have massively subsidized public transport infrastructure. (I mean: the effect on CO2 production, not the political repercussions)
The rich, if they reduced their emissions by just 8 percent
would reduce the GDP by more than 8 percent, and incomes of the poor by huge amounts. Cheap energy is how we afford our modern conveniences and manufactured products.
First off the poor make more CO2 than this guy thinks by doing things like not draining rice paddies and burning coal in inefficient stoves to heat their homes. Mainly this whole carbon thing does not work. Temperatures have been flat for 16 years and all the climate models were wrong. When will these guys stop smoking their own dope and come back to reality?
This is the exact same statement, with different locations:
Someone living on 5th Avenue will need a lot more money to sustain himself than someone living on 8 Mile.
That is accounted for in an elegant way. The guy in London chooses to spend money to buy something - the London life. He does NOT have to spend any more to sustain himself because he could go live in India. If you can afford to buy the uptown lifestyle, you are more wealthy than someone who can't.
It even works for things like taxes. Taxes make the cost of living higher, but the money buys us things like keeping the wars thousands of miles away. So the higher cost of living buys a wealthier lifestyle. Unskilled wages in London really is far wealthier than India.
If you didn't believe paying more for London buys you a nicer life, you'd move to India. Of course there are minor differences due to efficiency. Texas might be cheaper per value than New York because in NY you're paying someone to tell you what size soda to buy, but those effects aren't dominant.
Agreed.
But mod points are distributed evenly, it seems, among insightful humans who would mod you up and retarded man/bear/pigs who would do the opposite.
Nuclear:
Requires a 8X5 meter pool of water to store the used fuel for a few years.
Coal / biomass / ethanol:
Belches millions of pounds of noxious fumes into the air.
A hard choice?
a) citation please
b) that seems unlikely, since dividends or capital gains would be more tax efficient
c) Climate change deniers wouldn't recognize logic if it spat them in the face.
no taxation without representation!
If the offsets don't do what they advertise, it isn't Al Gore's fault that they don't.
no taxation without representation!
And cold showers help you suppress those dirty, dirty thoughts!! You shouldn't care about anyone but mother earth! :)
Seriously, though, there are lots of ways of saving energy without forsaking hot showers forever. And solar hot water panels are such basic technology that I'd be very surprised if their energy footprint outweighed their benefits.
no taxation without representation!
Why are we even discussing this before we have sufficient evidence that reducing carbon emissions is the optimal strategy?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
We're actually using more gasoline today than we were ten years ago, when it cost half as much. That's even though so many of us are unemployed.
We're using alot more fuel than we were ten years ago - 10-15% of that fuel used to be food, that's the only change. We're burning a lot of ethanol and slightly more gasoline. Overall fuel usage is right about on trend. It's just more expensive fuel is all.
As the one who started a thread-war about Ayn Rand yesterday, I just want to state I have no connection to this guy.
.
Carry on.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
You must be new here. Welcome.
Wait.
What?
Uh, thanks.
I think.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If the offsets don't do what they advertise, it isn't Al Gore's fault that they don't.
When it is his company he's buying them from, it is.
Generation Investment Management is a multi-national (offices in New York and London) investment strategy company. In other words, they exist to make a profit off of investing in ... whatever they can make a profit from investing in.
The "About Us" page claims there are 55 people who "represent[s] 16 countries and speaks 21 languages." The only financial disclosure I can find at that site lists "Investment Management" remuneration at a total of GPB19,742,000. That's US$31,567,458, or an average of US$574,000 per "investment manager".
Now, how much does Mr. Gore pay in "carbon offsets"? I can't find a number, but this NY Times article says that a competing company (TerraPass) would charge about $1300 for a house such as Gore's.
$1300 spent for at least a $574,000 income? (And as Chairman, you can't expect Mr. Gore to make less than the average for his employees, can you?)
This article defending Gore reports Gore's office saying:
No, I think even right-wingers can understand what's going on.
Let's assume you and the commenter above you are both correct. 3600 X $3.50 =$12,600 USD.
10% of countries have a GNI less than $1,200 / year. So for the bottom 10% of countries, that's still ten years of income for the solar power.
Since the system lasts about ten years before it needs to be replaced, 100% of all their income, every penny they make, would be spent on solar power, leaving $0 for food, etc.
Carbon emissions do not make you happy.
In order to light to contemporary standards a home would take several tons of wax candles.
Even conventional light-bulbs are _way_ more efficient. LED ones enormously so.
My new (larger) monitor that uses half the power my old one did is not in any way inferior.
A well insulated and designed home that uses less power to heat or cool is not any less livable.
Some devices may actually have negative carbon emissions.
Consider the Ipad (or nexus 7, or ...).
They will use several (3 or 4) watts viewing video or surfing the web.
If they displace (by the owners choice) the use of a 'conventional' computer or TV - especially if it's an older one - they can come out strongly negative in total.
In fact, the fertility rates in the developed world are much less than in poor regions. The fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa are more than twice that of the developed world. Therefore a poor person's carbon footprint is much higher. http://www.econ.yale.edu/~pschultz/cdp925.pdf
When you do the math, nuclear turns out to be the most expensive option. http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-Electricity_scenarios
France sells billions of dollars of power they generate to other countries. Their energy cost is among the lowest in the industrialized world, and it's nuclear.
The infographic you linked where someone is imagining what-if scenarios is nice and all, but in the real world, the actual cost that is really paid is low for nuclear.
France has been doing nuclear in a big way for almost 40 years, they aren't imagining what they think it might cost.
Most older American homes, while energy inefficient, are otherwise well made and will be habitual for many decades to come. I am 61 years old and while many new homes have been built in my area all the old ones have always been there. Very few homes built after 1930 have been replaced and most will last another 30 years. These homes have no insulation in the walls and can't be retrofitted. I live in a 32 year old mobile home with a 300 sq ft attached apartment. My power bill is now less than $2000 a year. This is for five adults. My new roof has more insulation under it and is painted white. That, and replacing my failing central AC with window units saves me $400 a year. Any other improvements would have to be done with borrowed money. It would take very low interest rates to make any thing economically feasible.
IOW, "Let's feel sorry for the US because it's so much bigger than most countries"...?
Nuclear power has a negative learning curve. France is trying to move away from it. You can read about the opportunity cost of building new nuclear power plants here. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly Even existing nuclear power is turning out to be uneconomical. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf
Because climate change doesn't require a solution.
That is, until we know enough to define at least what is actually bad about the climate change that will occur over the next 100 years.
You should try to solve a problem that you truly understand virtually nothing about. It just leads to bad and worse solutions, piled on top of each other as your understanding shifts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can understand you want to promote your business, mdsolar, but be intellectually honest. France is currently building three more reactors and designing the next generation. Electricity is their third largest export because they generate it at a muchlower cost than their neighbors.
Far from moving away from solar, they are thoroughly enjoying it's benefits and building more.
There's evidence for this at last? Really?
[citation required]
Biiig problem since the last ice age. Seems to have slowed down now. When was the last time YOU actually checked?
Need Mercedes parts ?
Solar break-even is measured in years...wind is measured in months....
Nuclear: Requires a 8X5 meter pool of water to store the used fuel for a few years.
Coal / biomass / ethanol: Belches millions of pounds of noxious fumes into the air.
A hard choice?
That's assuming you do it right.
Chernobyl irradiated half of Europe, and generation after generation will suffer higher incidence of birth defects and cancer because of it. Fukushima has proven that we didn't learn our lesson. Even if the doomsayers are wrong about the material leaking out into the Pacific, that would mean they're only wrong this time.
I'm not afraid of nuclear power -- I'm afraid of middle managers and accountants.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The US does have a massively subsidised public transport infrastructure: they are called the airlines.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Don't forget hot showers. The carbon footprint of manufacturing solar hot water panels is even too high.
Is it the second hand central heating radiator that's the problem, or the black paint?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The energy payback of a wind turbine is 3-6 months *not* 15 years. A solar panel will pay back in 6 years or less.
The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of a wind turbine is about 18:1 (conservative, other sources say 25:1), the EROEI on a solar panel is about 6:1. By comparison the shale oil in the US only has an EROEI of 5:1.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
15 years?!? Welcome to the future, buddy.
Time to throw out the old bookshelf and update your knowledge...
London smog was cleared up by making everyone burn cleaner. Even in the incredibly corrupt and privileged Victorian and post-Victtorian era. Then they started cleaning up the Thames.
Biogas and alcohol do not have to be big, centralized, or made out of food corn, raised on prime quality land.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blume+"alcohol+can+be+a+gas"
http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_on_winning_the_oil_endgame.html
And "rocket" stoves, biogas in India (and elsewhere), etc.
"Why a Part of The Solution Isn't The Whole Solution". Wow!
What percentage of the offsets go to his salary? (Hint: it's not very large.) Are staffing costs built into the formulae used to compute how much carbon is offset by each dollar spent? (Hint: yes they are.)
It should be noted that TFS uses "rich" in the global context. Here, "the rich" very much includes US beneficiaries of taxpayer subsidies such as aid to families and dependant children. If you're reading this on your phone, you are the 1%.
You're kidding right? I mean, if you're reading this on your 10 year old laptop running windows 2000, you are still "rich" compared to easily 1/2 the planet. You're probably not the 1%, but probably the 10%.
Is it the second hand central heating radiator that's the problem, or the black paint?
wouldn't it be great if Al Gore's mansion had those out back.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Nuclear or coal? False dichotomy!
Solar, wind, and water are better choices.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The reason is that we continue to look at this idea of emissions tied to per capita. It is NOT about a person's output. It is about an economies output. If society had ANY smarts, they would focus on the emissions / $ of GDP.
The problem is, that the worse nations, such as China, will NOT make any cuts. The right way to solve this, is to have large importers, such as America, put on a tax on ALL GOODS (local and imported) based on the emissions from where the final assembly AND THE PARTS come from. It should be assessed based on REAL co2 emissions / real GDP (not PPP GDP). The real CO2 emissions can be seen via sat, such as OCO2 which will be launched next year. It can measure the Co2 ENTERING into an area and exiting. So, CO2 (out) - CO2(in) via sats would be the real emissions.
If all of the western nations, esp. America, was to do this, and break down the local goods based on states/provences/regions/etc, then it would encourage leaders of local areas to look at how they are emitting and clean up. And yes, if China continues to add 2 new coal plants / week, they will pay a steep price.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
> Now it's $3.50 a peak watt?
As the first part of that sentence said that's, assuming you and the other person who "corrected" me are correct.
If $1 is right for PEAK watts at noon, $3.50 is about right to get the same watts at 10AM or 4PM or when there's one cloud in the sky.
Alternatively, they can spend the extra $2.50 / watt on batteries, inverters, etc.
> Where did you get 10 years from (a dark place)?
That's an average, more or less. If they want to have power in the early morning, late afternoon, or when it's cloudy, they'll need to replace the bank of batteries of every 3-5 years.
With no batteries, they can only have that power available for three hours per day, the solar cells will lose power over the course of several years.
After five years they've lost SOME power. Sellers of solar power point out that they still produce some power after 30 years.
So figure for the cells themselves 15 years as a rough average before they weaken too much to get the job done. So we've got some parts that last three years, some that last 15.
So yeah, solar is neat and at all. A neat rich man's toy. Hopefully one day it'll be more than that.
> Solar, wind, and water are better choices.
Wind is great. In certain parts of California, if you don't mind a windfarm.
Water is great. At two or three locations in North America where you have giant waterfalls next to big cities.
Solar is - expensive as hell, and all those huge lead acid batteries are nasty for the environment. It's a cool toy, though.
Alternative energy is great for the 8% of cases where it works. For the other 92%, it's time to set aside 1960s political propaganda and get moving on a sustainable path.
7.117 billion * 1% = seventy-one million
If all the richest 1% lived in the us
313.9 million / seventy-one million = ~22% of the usa.
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Smartphone-Ownership-2013/Findings.aspx 56% of American adults are now smartphone owners
If all the rich lived in the usa then 3-4% would be able to read the web on their phones.
----
using a more worldwide view
http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/smartphone/
There are already more than 1.08 billion smartphone users in the world
1.08 billion )/ 7.117 billion = 15%
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Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
Seriously, is this based on taking the actual emissions from the local area and then dividing it by the person, OR is this based on 'educated' guess work, or is prorating from other areas based on what somebody claims?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, Solar has a decent modal. Basically, create a system that encourages others to lower the costs on a home and then taking the savings for X years. That way, for those that can not afford to add the insulation, others will do it just for the savings.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I seriously doubt it. The rich buy more items from outside of the USA, than the average American does.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Here is why this will never work. You will notice that EU was historically burning about double the coal that North America did. Fact is, that has been the case for the last 100 years. BUT, Europe dropped their rate down to a bit below north America's. In the mean time, Asia's is growing faster than what others can cut. Until the world accept that ALL NATIONS must lower their amount, little will change. This idea that China can output more CO2 than the entire west combined and that Asia accounts for about 60% of coal usage, and within another 3 years, China will account for more than 50% of all of the CO2 emissions, shows that we can not win this. Esp. when you have ppl like this that points to the per capitia output of the west, while ignoring the total emission issue.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.