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.'"

Comments

Madagascar

[OglinTatas]

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.

Re:Madagascar

[Anonymous Coward]

See also: Haiti.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8520/8578860427_9cb7a29b78_o.jpg

Re: Madagascar

[Eugriped3z]

Contrary to what seems to be your belief, deforestation is a choice and it's not made exclusively by the poor. Nor are the poor resposible for the vast majority of habitat destruction such as deforestation. But it is universally the institutionalized quest for wealth in the hands of the ecologically ignorant that leads educated people to sacrifice the natural world without consideration for the concern for the consequences. In the words of Michio Kali, "Classical economics (in the absence of valuation of natural systems) is a form of brain damage.

Re:Madagascar

[alexander_686]

And the main post also assumes that CO2 is the only driver in global warming. I have seen studies that suggest that soot from poor people's cooking stoves are just as much to blame. (Soot is very dark so is absorbs a lot of the sun's rays. Glaciers are shinny so they tend to reflect heat back into space. When soot lands on glaciers it darkens the glacier, causing them to shrink. A good example of a positive feedback loop. )

Re: Madagascar

[Eugriped3z]

Sorry, the above quote was from Dr. Michio Kaku. (mkaku.org)

Re:Madagascar

[fritsd]

Is that the border between Haïti and the Dominican Republic, by any chance? I read about that in one of Jared Diamond's books.

Re:Madagascar

[Princeofcups]

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.

You are allowed to complain about them deforesting when we move everyone out of the suburbs and reforest our own country to what it was.

Re:Madagascar

[mythosaz]

I'm not the OP, but yup - that's it.

Wikipedia has a macro-scale image.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Haiti

Re:Madagascar

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

That's what confused me about this piece: I don't think that I've ever heard anybody sell one of the various 'new, improved, not-dreadful, biomass heat/power device' ideas as being about CO2 emission. It's (1) generally the case that biomass is treated as 'carbon neutral' for accounting purposes, since its fuels all pulled their carbon out of the air, mostly within a few decades or less (indeed, some first-world burning of sawdust and other low-quality woody stuff in otherwise fairly conventional power plants is treated a 'green') and (2) it's common knowledge that desperately poor people simply don't have the capability to liberate much carbon. Really, with our material culture as it is, 'poverty' and 'can't afford fossil fuels in more than negligible quantities' are practically synonyms.

However, poor people do tend to source the biomass that they can afford from places that really can't take it (whether it be some ecologically fascinating and delicate patch of rainforest, or a fairly banal chunk of woodland that just can't supply charcoal for the two million slum dwellers who live nearby without turning into bare dirt and washing away). and their reliance on low-tech burning technology produces some truly brutal pulmonary and related mortality from particulate matter and incomplete combustion soot, generally in ill-ventilated housing, around which women and children spend too much time, in addition to overall poor efficiency.

You'd have to be really dumb to sell just about any intervention targeted at the bottom billion as a serious measure against atmospheric CO2 levels, they are just too poor to be responsible for much; but there are a lot of issues with their fuel sourcing and use that can plausibly be improved for not much money.

Re:Madagascar

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is that the border between Haïti and the Dominican Republic, by any chance? I read about that in one of Jared Diamond's books.

The policy of having a brutal dictator who considers the country his fiefdom and applies a shoot-to-kill anti-deforestation policy has few virtues; but the contrast along that particular border does illustrate one of them...

Re:Madagascar

[alexander_686]

Considering that there is now more forest in North America today than when Europeans first arrived, I am not sure what your point is.

Suburbs are great for trees. Every house has 2 or 3. Owners actively planting them. Most cities have a urban forestry division, If you want a obvious example just look at any great plain city with satellite imagery. There should be no trees there yet that is all that you see. We can debate about old growth, the biodiversity, and habitat but the number of trees has grown.

Re: Madagascar

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Poor people do do a lot of the grunt work of habitat destruction, though, whether it be slash 'n burn agriculture or illegal logging.

It isn't the guy who earns less in a year than a teak shower seat costs (and at Lowes, we aren't talking the luxury stuff here) who is 'responsible' for the illegal timber market in any serious way, he couldn't afford to drive the destruction of much of anything.

However, if he were incrementally less poor and powerless, he'd probably be a much more useful ally for protection, or at least exploitation with an eye to long-term value maximization, rather than a convenient pawn for smash and grab extraction.

Re:Madagascar

[Charliemopps]

Prior to the arrival of European-Americans about one half of the United States land area was forest, about 4,000,000 square kilometres (990,000,000 acres) in 1600, yet today it is only about 3,000,000 square kilometres (740,000,000 acres). Nearly all of this deforestation took place prior to 1910, and the forest resources of the United States have remained relatively constant through the entire 20th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_the_United_States

You're just flat out wrong.
And this doesn't even take into account the heavy deforestation caused by Native Americans prior to Europe's arrival. There is significant evidence of terrible ecological problems caused by large populations of Native Americans and their changes to the environment.

Re:Madagascar

[techno-vampire]

Coming into the San Fernando Valley, especially through the Sepulveda Pass, it looks like you're driving into a forest. Most of the valley is filled with single-story homes and most of them have, as you point out, one or more trees that are taller than the homes. Mostly what you see is trees, with occasional tall buildings sticking up. And, considering that the area would be semi-desert without water being brought in from hundreds of miles away, those trees couldn't survive without human intervention.

Re:Madagascar

[kraut]

Positive in the negative sense ;)

Having better cooking facilities can improve the lot of people in poor countries in lots of other ways. More efficiency => less time spent gathering fuel. Less smoke and soot => fewer health problems. Etc. etc.

Re:Madagascar

[kraut]

If you think 2 or 3 trees on an American-sized plot of land makes a forest? Have you ever seen a forest?

Re:Madagascar

[TapeCutter]

The contribution of soot to climate change is dwarfed by our GHG and aerosols emissions, however it would have been much higher in the mid 20th century before clean air laws were instituted throughout the western world. Some soot lands on ice and speeds up the melt as you describe but most of the soot falls directly into the ocean which absorbs the extra heat it is carrying. The ocean is a gigantic heat sink, it is steadily warming due to our efforts, it's temperature defines the type of climate we have. Due to it's sheer size it has an immense thermal inertia, even without humans it will continue to warm for at least another 50yrs just to reach thermal equilibrium with the current +/-ve climate forcing from humans. The rise in ocean temps over the next 50yrs will represent the human induced climate forcings of the last half of the 20th century.

The economic equation is fairly simple, spend the next 50yrs replacing the vast bulk of the dirty energy infrastructure built over the last 50yrs with clean infrastructure solar/wind/nuke/tidal/geothermal/did I leave someone's pet project out?). By mid-century we are no longer changing the climate, by the end of the century the climate has reached a new stable thermal equilibrium, which, all things being equal will slowly cool down to pre-industrial temps in a millennia or two by absorbing the extra carbon into the Earth's crust.

The ability of the Earth's crust to absorb the extra carbon would be severely curtailed if the oceans became too acidic for shellfish to grows shells, but at that point the Earth's surface will look like an overworked goat farm and it will make little difference to the goat herders who survive the rapidly accelerating "sixth great extinction" we are experiencing today.

Sure it will cost a gazillion dollars to replace that infrastructure but we've already spent that building the current infrastructure, and since coal plants don't last forever we will be doing it all over again in the next 50yrs anyway. Civilization has outgrown coal like we outgrew the horse and cart, it's time to push the luddites, vested interests and useful idiots back into the political wilderness where they belong. It's time to put engineers in the driver's seat, preferably arrogant showmen like Edison, Jobs, Gates, who can assemble other people's inventions into a viable industry.

My personal favourite is hydrogen fuel cells for most portable energy needs such as cars, you could also use you car to supply several homes with electricity, or just build a fuel cell generator into the home, we can get rid of a lot of the fragile wiring that blocks out the modern sky, no more wide area blackouts every time the wind changes direction. But there's not much point doing that unless you can produce bulk hydrogen cleanly cheaper than you can produce it the dirty way. Doing it with sunlight or wind is a great example of a closed loop. H2O + energy => H2 + O2 => H20, the troposphere is more or less chemically saturated with H2O so it simply falls back into the ocean within a week or two. So if we are really lucky the 22nd century will be warm and damp and the mass migrations inland will have ceased.

Re:Madagascar

[alexander_686]

Well, maybe. The impacts of various items on climate change are not well understood. Each year something new is figured out and models have to be updated.

According to your chart aerosols are a major factor in cooling – not warming. It's 8 years on and scientific opinion is now it is believed to be a minor factor.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21587194-researchers-are-beginning-understand-aerosols-and-clouds-better-result

As for the increase in warm in oceans, don't worry about the crust. The crust can take it. It is the other possible effects that you should worry about. And we don't know enough about the ocean to know what will happen.

Re: Madagascar

[tulimulta]

Please stop propagating this myth that slash and burn agriculture equals habitat destruction. In Southeast Asian context, it's the big palm oil and logging companies that destroy the forest. Slash and burn agriculture is a sustainable agricultural technique. Only when there is not enough forest to allow for a long fallow period (because of aforementioned companies, or population growth, or government intervention etc.), the system collapses. But there is a built-in mechanism to prevent destruction of the forest permanently. Generally, the shorter the fallow period, the less successful the cultivation is going to be (less nutrients, more weed growth because of imperfect burn), which makes people avoid making swiddens in forests that haven't rested properly.

Re:Madagascar

[Stephan Schulz]

I have seen studies that suggest that soot from poor people's cooking stoves are just as much to blame.

Soot in general has non-negligible impact, yes. Food from poor people's cooking stoves, on the other hand, has not. First, it's a small amount, compared to industrial and other sources. And secondly, since it comes from small fires without much updraft and without high chimneys, it mostly settles locally. Not too many poor people live close to large glaciers.

Re:Madagascar

[Half-pint HAL]

And, considering that the area would be semi-desert without water being brought in from hundreds of miles away, those trees couldn't survive without human intervention.

Ah, so pumping millions of gallons of water out of rapidly diminishing aquifers is now good for the environment, is it?

Re:Madagascar

[alexander_686]

It has a larger impact then you might think.

Most industrial processes burn at a higher temperature and have filters – both which reduce the type soot which is big and black. And soot from a simple campfire can circle the earth. Not much mind you but it is the big black stuff.

Sorry that I can't cite anything but I don't have time to look up all of the articles. There was one brilliant one. These will have to do.

http://www.economist.com/node/17519770
http://www.economist.com/node/18175423

Re: Madagascar

[pnutjam]

well said, wish I had a mod point today....

Re:Madagascar

[techno-vampire]

No. Much of our water comes from the Colorado and Owens Rivers.

False premise.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: False premise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I second scientific ignorance and unreserved faith in books written by men who didn't even know that a planet was much less an atmoshpere or the disciplines of ecology or climatology.

Be gone foul demon! Trouble me no more with your vapors or temptations.

I am a man of the book and have no need of your prattling.

Re: False premise.

[kraut]

If you think that Ayn Rand is philosophy, and that having read Ms Rand makes you "very well read in philosophy", we can only hope for your sake that you're only 15 and you'll grow up in a few years time.

In the meantime, you seem to be using an awful lot of words that don't mean what you think they mean. "Liberal", "censoring", the aforementioned "philosophy", and "fuck". Oh, and "statist".

You may want to politely enquire with your English teacher about the possibility of borrowing a dictionary; if it's not to "statist" or "liberal" for you, your local library may have one.

Now get the hell off my lawn!

Re: False premise.

[kraut]

Now that's a remarkably asinine response from a self-proclaimed scholar of philosophy.

Re: False premise.

[Zontar The Mindless]

Rand's works are not philosophy so much as they're extremist pseudo-intellectual quasi-anti-Bolshevik shit-fits.

She basically tried to do with political philosophy what Aleister Crowley tried to do with religion.

It also bears noting that Rand died poor and virtually friendless after screwing over most of her own inner circle in one way or another over the previous couple of decades.

Re: False premise.

[Half-pint HAL]

Typical response to someone who is incapable of supporting their argument with facts and so must resort to the default position of argument ad hominem.

FTFY.

The Rich

[Anon-Admin]

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.

Re:The Rich

[Nrrqshrr]

i don't think that the richest 1 billion people on the planet read /., either...

Re:The Rich

[fatphil]

Pretty sure I'm in the top 100 million. Knowing what wages are like in the US compared to over here, I'd be surprised if more than a handful of those with technical IT-related jobs there aren't also in that top 100 million. Slashdot readers that aren't in the top billion would probably be in the minority.

Re:The Rich

[interkin3tic]

We won't be taking part in the discussion either. That gets decided by lobby groups and politicians, all of whom are playing hot potato with the future. No one wants to be in office or be leading the fossil fuel industry when carbon can no longer be written off as externalized costs. That's why you hear only discussions of non-binding resolutions to limit carbon on the next guy's term.

The voters and consumers themselves are also trying to convince themselves it's not real, so lobbyists and politicians can't take all the blame. Most of us too want someone else to make sacrifices. "WHAT? YOU'RE GOING TO RAISE GAS PRICES BY A WHOLE FUCKING CENT!?!? AND MY ELECTRICITY BILL!"

Honestly, I'm confused as to why we're not throwing money at researching iron fertilization. Seems like that's the lazy way out. I don't think that's the BEST solution, but it's just what I'd expect us to do, we avoid the problem and avoid having to limit carbon. Could really mess up the ocean, but the ocean is already going to be messed up. Reminds me of the anti-nuclear environmental movement back in the day: by rejecting imperfect solutions, we are basically limiting ourselves to no solutions, since a perfect solution doesn't exist.

Re:The Rich

[Half-pint HAL]

The problem is, the rich always like to kid ourselves on that the poor people are the problem. We're "clean", they're "dirty", so we like to hear about ways they can make themselves "cleaner".

Ironic then that our daily shower in electrically-heated water is pretty dirty in ecological terms.

Re:The Rich

[bzipitidoo]

I've looked into solar water heating. It's not so easy as you might think. Texas has a real dearth of reasonable solar water heating products. You have to do it yourself, or pay a lot of money. One company had a solar water heater sytem for only $17,000. Used lots of copper piping and sheets. That's crazy. With government incentives and discounts they got it down to a bit over $5000. Stlll too high, I can get a low end, 6 year warranty gas powered tank water heater for $350. Probably last 10 years. Gas bills for hot water run about $20/month. At about $300 a year for hot water with my current setup, it would take at least 15 years to earn back that up front cost for switching to solar. That's too long. Assumes the solar system would last that long, not to mention the house. Probably be stolen by copper thieves in the first 5 years.

Solar water heating can be done much cheaper. It's frustrating that reasonably priced systems are simply not available where I live. I see no reason why solar water heating can't be done for $1000. I'm hoping there will be a price breakthrough before I need a new water heater. The cheap tank was my way of buying time for that to happen.

where rich $5K / year

[raymorris]

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%.

Re:where rich $5K / year

[Anonymous Coward]

well, 86%, since we're talking about the not-poorest billion.

Just built it

[aliquis]

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.

Re:Just built it

[CanHasDIY]

Just built those damn thorium reactors or solar cells on the moon.... the later would get us to the moon and who knows...

Couple points:

A) it's l-a-t-t-e-r [LAH-ter], not l-a-t-e-r [LAY-ter].

B) the latter would be solar cells on the moon; I assume by "would get us to the moon" you mean as in, "would get us to the moon to install them?" Or did you mean to say the former, thorium reactors, would "get us to the moon?"

Interesting ideas, but your sentence structure and grammatical quirks make it difficult to derive just what exactly you're trying to say here.

Re:Just built it

[aliquis]

... too press submit just as you notice built rather than build.

Re:Just built it

[aliquis]

A) I didn't even know that word existed. "Senare" och "det senare" would be the same word in Swedish.

B) I obviously mean that it would give us a reason to get to the moon again (not necessary in meat-bag form) and do some space stuff which is always cool.

What I'm trying to say:
Start planning, researching and building those damn thorium reactors or just plan, research for and decide that we're going to build solar cells on the moon. Both are doable. We just have to decide we want to do them and put some effort into getting there. It make sense to do both / either. As for doing research the gains may not go to the one who did the research so as such I think it make more sense to do that on a government or cooperative level but whatever. Either alternative need some intense funding to get going to, which is also easier to do on a larger cooperative scale.

A magazine I've read mentioned we got the models for the molten salt thorium reactors but we need to have decent materials to build the pipes and (research?) the filtering equipment. They put the figure into getting that research done at 40 billion. Sure it also take some time but the sooner we start the sooner we'll get done with it.

The same magazine (different issue) also talked about solar cells on the moon, there was some guy arguing for it if I remember correctly (and if so he may have done that for some time), he put the price tag at 500 billion which of course is a lot of money but it also say about that was put into searching (? (building to?)) for new oil each year and if one look at it that way it's obviously very doable from an economical point of view.

Both options seem rather good and better than many other options at least.

Re:Just built it

[aliquis]

Imho mans presence on another former dead space rock would be less of an issue than the current one.

The two issues I would have with it is that a) it of course transport more energy which will be turned into heat here but I guess the effect of that is at least smaller than the one of greenhouse gases and later on melting polar ices and such and b) possibly some issue with the electro-magnetic transfer of the energy over to the earth (but I don't know if that's an issue?)

Thorium we already mine whatever we want it or not. We need much less of it than we would need uranium, the reactors may be safer and supposedly you only needed to store the left overs for 300 years to make them no more harmful than regular granite. Which of course is a huge advantage over the uranium reactors too.

India for whatever reason (lack of developed reactors?) is instead building (at least one) reactor which will instead run on uranium (somewhat in the normal way I assume) made from the thorium they have. Which doesn't seem all that cool.

I don't see why it's better to fuck this one up sooner than we could use a lifeless (?) rock and help prevent messing this one up at least all that much.

But then again more energy and progress will likely consumer more natural resources and destroy things on this one regardless. If only we had picked ecological materials and construction for everything everywhere so what we left got turned into soil again and whatever wasn't organic we possibly let be.

Re:Just built it

[kraut]

I'm all for cool long term research projects, but they're expensive and the outcome is uncertain. Otherwise it wouldn't be research.

Wouldn't it be more practical to start with things that we know work and are cheap to do?
* Stop wasting electricity on AC. Long term, you want to build self-cooling houses; short term, paint roofs white.
* photovoltaics. Proven. Works.
* Traffic.
    ** Stop using 2+ tonne hunks of metal to transport one person a few miles each day
    ** If you insist on using hunks of metal, #ffs at least make them more efficient. US cars are a disgrace. In lots of ways, but fuel efficiency is most relevant here.
    ** Seriously encourage cycling. It is way more practical for most journeys than you think, and e-bikes make it accessible to practically everyone.

Re:Just built it

[volmtech]

I take it you did not grow up in central Florida. You will not take my AC from me. Self cooling houses are not "cool".

Re:Just built it

[Zontar The Mindless]

Building houses suited for more northerly climates in Central Florida and then using vast amounts of power to cool them is bloody stupid.

Re:Just built it

[volmtech]

Guess what, houses built for northern climes are well insulated to keep heat in. That also works to keep heat OUT. The AC just has to remove internal heat generated. Just as you would not sugest Northeners only heat their house to 50 degrees to save heating oil, electricity is cheap in Florida and cooling a well insulated house adds about $50 a month to your bill.

I grew up in a "cracker" house built before 1915. It had 12 ft ceilings, double hung windows, and a full screened porch on the east side to sit in on hot afternoons. Hot air is hot air. A fan blowing 90 degree air is not comfortable. 80 degree night air at 90% humidity makes sweat soaked sheets. I know heat, I farmed in the Florida summer sun. I served in the engine room of a Navy destroyer that used 800 degree steam. Frigidaire is my friend.

Why it doesn't matter that OP is right

[LF11]

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.

Re: Why it doesn't matter that OP is right

[apc512599]

People always seem to forget the ultimate renewable resource: the human mind. (Insight courtesy of Julian Simon)

Re: Why it doesn't matter that OP is right

[gnoshi]

People always seem to forget the ultimate renewable resource: the human mind. (Insight courtesy of Julian Simon)

Based on what I've seen come out of some human minds, it might be more environmentally friendly to feed the biomass digester than the humans carrying the minds.

(No, I don't actually encourage starving people with whom I disagree)

ideological blinders

[minstrelmike]

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.

Re:ideological blinders

[dave420]

Or maybe we could use your seemingly-limitless supply of straw men as fuel. Problem solved!

Future growth

[Enry]

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.

Re:Future growth

[Obfuscant]

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.

This. The issue is not how little they produce today, but how can we tell them "no" when they want to produce more tomorrow? They won't want to wait for the zero-carbon final solution in a decade, they want to join the developed world today. Any attempt to tell them how bad it will be for the globe if they do would be viewed with the same disdain population control discussions are.

Re:Future growth

[kraut]

Dude, if you call it "gas", the cost of it is ludicrously low where you live. Move somewhere where they call it "petrol" for a while, and wince at what high prices really mean.

Re: Future growth

[Eugriped3z]

By definition, the reason the price of ____ is ____ is because, "that is what the market will bear."

Fundamentally, the idea that neoclassical economics should be allowed to determine the course of human events or the development of civilization has revealed itself to be false. That's the upshot of The Enlightenment as viewed from the midst of the third wave of globalization wrapped in the second wave of industrialization, just before the shit hits the impeller. So the question becomes how to identify the necessary set of values which should replace those that were misidentifed and championed by the Cult of Adam Smith's Incredibly Invisible Hand.

It's officially one world now, according to all good wealthy western outsourcerers, and unless we're going to discriminate against those born to poverty and abandon them to the accident of birth, then redirecting the behemoth will require sacrifice from the first world to the rest. That means subsidized technological development where it's necessary to equalize the chasm of poverty, population decreases and environmental remediation to preserve the ecological integrity of a global system that's in decline and real discussion about what will characterize a heathy, sustainable system of natural and interconnected artifical human systems. It implies far better cooperation than the UN framework for (fill-in-the-blank).

Electrifying rural everwhere, if it can actually done with a net negative impact would be great. If it can't be done without increasing "globalization" as we have come to know it, then it won't matter much in 3 or 4 generations because the catastrophes associated with environmental degradation will include reductions in agricultural output, famine and social dystonia. Since we've "decided" that the natural world is the defacto sewer of industrial man, you can bet that increased envronmental stresses will usher in decreased health to go along with a few panicked incidences of pestilence requiring a little martial law. Don't be afraid, it will all be done for the good of all.

I can't say I believe any of these entrepreneurislisms holds much promise on its own, especially when they are measured in isolation. But if there is hope to be found in any of them, it will become apparent when any of them can be shown to fit into a systemic paradigm with multiple attributes that allow for energy efficiency, reduced environmental pollution, distributed and sustainable local economic development and reduced climatological impacts and a renewed respect man as an ecological participant as well as a social being. We need to establish a new metric for an acceptable level of the energetics of civilization, in much the same way scientists determine the needs of other biological species. Better yet, in the manner of parasitology which requires knowledge of interrelated species and their ecologies.

When you look at today's developments in that light, it's all quite simple.

Re:Future growth

[volmtech]

Yes, but free health care!

Re:Future growth

[Enry]

That high cost in other countries is primarily due to taxes. Maybe I should have said oil rather than gas.

you are almost certainly one of them

[raymorris]

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.

Re:you are almost certainly one of them

[CanHasDIY]

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.

So basically what you're saying here is that measuring personal wealth as a percentage of global finances is pointlessly asinine.

I recall that industrial operations are responsible for somewhere between 60-80% of global greenhouse gas emissions; let's start there.

Re:you are almost certainly one of them

[kesuki]

yeah yeah but obama gave free cell phones to food stamp recipients. so that doesn't fly. also rich enough to afford a computer or a phone could reflect previous work prior to being sacked and unable to find work.
i know a few hobos and at least one of them also loved video games especially grand theft auto. also the internet boom is global now.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm

not targeting climate change

[green is the enemy]

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.

Re: not targeting climate change

[Eugriped3z]

I assumed that methane digestion would form the basis of this type project. India can't possibly do anything else, can it?

another but....

[TheCarp]

> '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".

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[buddyglass]

Supposedly he buys carbon offsets to bring his footprint down to zero.

welcome to /., where the 1% complain about the 1%

[raymorris]

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.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[CanHasDIY]

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.

14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[raymorris]

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.

Re:14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[kesuki]

the real problem with nuclear is the spent fuel needs to be cooled to store it.that place in japan has 12,000 rods being cooled in holding tanks. it needs to be reprocessed into new fuel rods by breeding while the rest is stored as slag with other metals creating a stable alloy that doesn't need cooled storage.

Re:14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[rahvin112]

Electricity is easy to clean up. It's fuel neutral, ie you can produce it any of a hundred different ways. Centrally run it's efficiency can approach theoretical limits. Because of it's massive point source it's easier to install scrubbing to clean the emissions and dramatically reduce the pollution. And it doesn't even have to be carbon based.

Cars on the other hand are hugely inefficient, you have a fuel stock that's being used primary to generate waste heat with very little kinetic energy output (as a percentage of stored chemical energy in the gasoline). If we switched all our cars to electric and used the gasoline to generate electricity we would need about half as much.

We could easily reduce carbon emissions in the west by making driving expensive. The dramatic rise in gasoline price that happened during Bush's second term has reduced US carbon output dramatically. Cars are now more efficient and we're driving less. In total this has reduced gasoline consumption dramatically to the point that the US is now exporting gasoline because we have so much refinery capacity built up in the run-up to the decline in driving.

Re:14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[Half-pint HAL]

Cars on the other hand are hugely inefficient, you have a fuel stock that's being used primary to generate waste heat with very little kinetic energy output (as a percentage of stored chemical energy in the gasoline). If we switched all our cars to electric and used the gasoline to generate electricity we would need about half as much.

{{Citation needed}}.

As far as I've been told, chemical batteries are massively inefficient and generate heat in use, particularly during the recharge cycle. Then there's transmission losses within the electricity grid. Unless you use microgeneration, but that introduces new inefficiencies in terms of spin-up and spin-down cycles. The spin-up/down is less of an issue in gas turbines, but the overall efficiency of a gas turbine is lower than that of a traditional steam turbine, which is why steam turbines still dominate, and gas turbines are restricted to cycling for large fluctuations in demand. Chemical batteries are also very heavy, and don't lose weight as they empty.

And if batteries were more efficient than local burning, why is there such a thing as a diesel-electric submarine, rather than them being fully electric? The battery is only used for stealth mode.

Re:14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[Alioth]

Lithium batteries generate no heat during charging (unless there's a problem with them). NiCd and NiMH did, but no one uses those for motive power any more.

Diesel submarines use diesel because of the tremendous energy density of the diesel. This is compounded by most diesel submarines being built when lead acid batteries were the best batteries we had for motive power. Lead-acid is cheap but it's not at all energy dense, therefore to carry enough fuel to operate for the duration of the mission they need the very high energy density of the diesel. This is probably still true with lithium batteries. The military don't care an awful lot about efficiency, they care about speed and duration, efficiency be damned (unless it's so bad the ship can't actually complete the mission).

Re:14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[rahvin112]

First, gas turbines are for natural gas, not gasoline. Gasoline would be used most effectively (AFAIK) the same way coal is. Modern power plants approach 80% efficiency using all the tricks the industry has. On the other hand the car has a maximum carnot efficiency of about 30%. Real world is in the 20% range.

With idleing and wind resistance and all the other losses on the car the total amount of gasoline energy converted to kinetic energy is around 10%. This is the reason Tesla can make a car that has a battery with 10% of the energy in a tank of gasoline and get the same range.

Re:14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[pnutjam]

Rush, is that you?

Re:14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[compro01]

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.

8%?

Up here in Canada, about 60% of our electricity (actual production, not capacity) is hydro. Quebec is literally about 97% hydro.

Re:14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[Half-pint HAL]

First, gas turbines are for natural gas, not gasoline.

Bzzt. The gas in a gas turbine is the moving medium, not the fuel. You can burn solid, liquid or gaseous fuel to power a gas turbine, same as a steam turbine. There's presumably a reason why all industrial-scale gas turbine generation uses gaseous fuel, but I'm not sure what it is.

Barely noticeable ways?

[mveloso]

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.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[buddyglass]

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.

You can't have that, it might reduce your CO2

[DRJlaw]

"[S]mall-scale projects -- because of their potential to mitigate climate change and support sustainable rural development, without undermining food security or incurring unmanageable expense -- deserve a great deal of attention."

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.

"Bioenergy, the agency argues, can play a significant role in achieving global access to clean energy, notably among the rural poor. An array of modern, small-scale technologies can contribute to this effort. These include efficient cookstoves, biogas for cooking and village electrification, biomass gasifiers, and decentralized cogeneration systems that utilize bagasse (the fiber that remains after liquid is extracted from sugarcane). These biomass-based options, partly by reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that result from unsustainable biomass harvesting, could achieve a 1-gigaton reduction in annual greenhouse gas emissions. They could also reduce, by 60 to 90 percent, emissions of black carbon -- essentially, soot -- which is blamed for 2 million deaths each year."

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.

Re:8% reduction by chaning lifestyle

[fritsd]

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).

Carbon?

[nospam007]

Getting free Biogas for cooking, lighting or produce electricity plus a better fertilizer is nothing to sneeze at.

Re:Carbon?

[Incadenza]

Where are mod points when you need them. By far the smartest answer in this post.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[will_die]

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.

Basic falacy

[Daetrin]

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.

Re:Basic falacy

[kraut]

Of course, the most effective short tern effort would be to slap a 200% tax on gas in the US, and add a huge carbon levy on electricity and natural gas.

You could make it budget neutral by subsidising fuel-efficient cars, public transport, and home insulation.

Sadly, that's never going to happen.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[buddyglass]

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.

Disagree

[Solandri]

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.

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.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

kinda like a cucumber

[raymorris]

My health insurance just went from $430 / month to $950 / month. It feels kind of like a cucumber being shoved ...

Re:welcome to /., where the 1% complain about the

[iggymanz]

to Americans the "1%" means in the USA, that is $394,000 and above annual income.

On planet earth that's $34K and above

Dependence

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

And there is also the issue of dependence from imports.

Shouldn't the title be...

[roc97007]

...Why Small-Scale Biomass Energy Projects Don't Need To Be a Solution To Climate Change

...because that was not the intent, nor is a deliverable, of biomass projects in third world countries.

...or in any country, really. Biomass doesn't have the capacity to be a significant, centralized part of an industrial country's energy usage. But biomass solutions are a good fit to generate power in the third world, and the technology deserves to be pursued for this purpose. (It's also a good solution for small communities in industrialized nations who want "off the grid" for whatever reason.)

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[_merlin]

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.

they can afford 10 years income for solar?

[raymorris]

> 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.

Re:they can afford 10 years income for solar?

[HornWumpus]

Check your math and facts: 1Kwatt*.9$/watt=$900. My home MIG runs on 120V30amps. 3600watts. $3240@.9$/watt. Good enough to weld 3/16. Plenty for sheet metal.

Your 'little welder' is a monster good for welding pipelines.

Re:they can afford 10 years income for solar?

[kraut]

Ssssh! You'll just confuse him with numbers and science!

Joking aside, I think PV has great potential in the sunnier parts of the world. Possibly not for energy intensive businesses like welding, but lighting (hugely important!), internet access, computing are easier to supply via PV. And even relatively (for a small business) projects can be financed via microfinance lenders - e.g. kiva.org. Go and check it out!

Re:8% reduction by chaning lifestyle

[triffid_98]

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)

that's accounted for, elegantly

[raymorris]

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.

Re:that's accounted for, elegantly

[pnutjam]

Your ignorance and skill at over simplification is truly astounding. I am in awe of your ability to compare and apple and an orange as if they were virtually identical, more like an apple and a goat skull...

Re:Still Beneficial

[kraut]

It's all beneficial, but asking someone in the third world to burn less wood to cook their food while you happily burn gallons of gas to drive yourself to the mall is ever so slightly hypocritical.

8 X 5 meter pool of water vs. millions of pounds

[raymorris]

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?

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[kraut]

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.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[kraut]

If the offsets don't do what they advertise, it isn't Al Gore's fault that they don't.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[kraut]

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.

Not so fast, fella

[Tokolosh]

Why are we even discussing this before we have sufficient evidence that reducing carbon emissions is the optimal strategy?

cars burning just as much gas plus ethanol too

[raymorris]

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.

Notice:

[I'm New Around Here]

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.

Re:welcome to /., where the 1% complain about the

[I'm New Around Here]

You must be new here. Welcome.

Wait.

What?

Uh, thanks.

I think.

Re:3rd world becomming first world

[gmhowell]

Look to 3rd world for the future. Not to the west, still driving around in hungry 4wd petrol trucks to work.

Still pushing the Noble Savage concept?

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[Obfuscant]

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:

Gore has had a consistent position of purchasing carbon offsets to offset the family's carbon footprint -- a concept the right-wing fails to understand.

No, I think even right-wingers can understand what's going on.

Assuming you're right, still ROFL

[raymorris]

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.

Re:Assuming you're right, still ROFL

[HornWumpus]

Now it's $3.50 a peak watt?

Where did you get 10 years from (a dark place)? Solar lasts 10 years _on orbit_.

Also the point would be raise their income now that they have some tools to do something with. Even if it's only running nigerian type scams.

I'd give them a hybrid generator welder. But solar is not as bad as you are making it out to be.

Re:if they reduced their emissions by just 8 perce

[queazocotal]

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.

The rich have fewer children

[RogueWarrior65]

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

In someone's imagination. France has cheap nuclear

[raymorris]

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.

Re:if they reduced their emissions by just 8 perce

[volmtech]

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.

Re:In someone's imagination. France has cheap nucl

[mdsolar]

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

Answer

[SuperKendall]

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.

they're building 3 more nuke plants, mdsolar

[raymorris]

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.

Re:they're building 3 more nuke plants, mdsolar

[mdsolar]

"Far from moving away from solar, they are thoroughly enjoying it's benefits and building more."

You speak truer than you know.... http://cleantechnica.com/2013/09/25/france-tax-conventional-power-accelerate-shift-renewables/

In fact, it is the economics of France's new build that is changing their mind on nuclear energy. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/03/us-edf-nuclear-flamanville-idUSBRE8B214620121203

What climate change?

[rs79]

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?

Re:8 X 5 meter pool of water vs. millions of pound

[Half-pint HAL]

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.

Re:Still Beneficial

[Half-pint HAL]

Yes, however I think the people selling such technologies designed it for immediate term benefit to the recipients: reduced costs, improved air quality in the home etc. The real indictment here is that you can't sell the idea to rich backers in the west on the grounds that it will improve poor people's lives, and have to instead manipulate people's desire to "do something" about human pollution without doing the damndest thing about their own overconsumption.

Re:8% reduction by chaning lifestyle

[Alioth]

The US does have a massively subsidised public transport infrastructure: they are called the airlines.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[Half-pint HAL]

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?

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[Alioth]

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.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[buddyglass]

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.)

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:8 X 5 meter pool of water vs. millions of pound

[bzipitidoo]

Nuclear or coal? False dichotomy!

Solar, wind, and water are better choices.

It will never happen

[WindBourne]

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.

You only get power two hours / day? Rich man's toy

[raymorris]

> 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.

Yep all are better. 8% of the time. The other 92%

[raymorris]

> 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.

Re:where rich $5K / year

[catprog]

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%

I wonder how they get 17.6 tons of carbon emission

[WindBourne]

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?

Re:if they reduced their emissions by just 8 perce

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:if they reduced their emissions by just 8 perce

[WindBourne]

I seriously doubt it. The rich buy more items from outside of the USA, than the average American does.

Re:3rd world becomming first world

[WindBourne]

If you think that the 3rd world is raising their GDP WITHOUT coal power, then you are an idiot. China installs 2 new coal plant EACH WEEK. India installs a new one every week or 2. EACH of Brazil and South Africa are still building more coal plants each year, than what the entire west can stop.

And here is why this is total BS.

[WindBourne]

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.