I did my research, now it's your turn. A quick search found that China's electrical prices were of the same order of magnitude- not enough to destroy my argument.
I rarely pay more than $5 for a GE or Philips CFL. And I would note that the energy cost between a good CFL and a cheap one is probably not material- you still build the ballast, twist the glass, etc. It's just you get more margin if you do it well.
I stand by my argument- there's no frickin way a CFL requires enough energy to manufacture than it saves over its service life.
But do you really consider the other ideas debunked? Really?
PV: Energy payback for PV is ~2 years; lifetime is 20-40 years. So energy balance is very good. Other measures of "worse for the environment" (solvents, etc.) is subjective. Also, what solar technology? Std. silicon? Thin-film? CIGS?
Prius: Do you consider this report to be valid? I don't.
CFLs: This is the same logic used by people that say if you halve my taxes, my income will double (you know, how tax cuts don't really affect govt revenue). For the record, I think mandating CFL use is a much dumber idea than a carbon tax or market, but that has nothing to do with Jevon's paradox. BTW, note in that article the bit about "improved resource efficiency may trigger a change in the overall consumption of that resource. The direction of that change depends on other economic variables." Note the use of the words "may" and "depends on".
It's becoming an old saw that anything that is energy efficient must take more energy to manufacture than it saves over its lifetime.
This is rarely accompanied by numbers.
Take CFLs: A good CFL lasts many times longer than an incandescent, but let's be conservative and say 3k hours for the CFL, 750 for the incandescent. That is conservative. Over that 3k hours, a 15W CFL will save 135 kWh compared to the incandescent. That's $13 at retail electricity rates, $6.50 at industrial rates. CFLs generally cost less than this to *buy*, so you can be damn sure the energy input is less than 135kWh. And that's not even considering the inputs to make, transport, etc. 4 incandescents.
There's no way the upfront energy costs of a CFL offset its savings. BTW same for PV; energy payback is ~2 years for something with a 20-50 lifetime. And that's with standard silicon; go thin-film or CIGS and its better. Wind turbines have a faster energy payback. And so on.
This is actually insightful. Splitting plants and animals into 2 different farms took a good solution (manure as fertilizer) and made 2 problems (the need for inorganic fertilizer and the shit problems of factory farms). There was a piece on NPR awhile back about some innovations involving bringing animals back to the farm.
Modern farming practices illustrate the problems with optimizing pieces of the puzzle, but not optimizing the whole thing.
I daresay that if we collectively hadn't had so much fun mocking Al Gore up to November 2000, we just might be in a better place today.
I'm not a big Al Gore fan, but JFC we are a lot closer to 1984 under the current administration than I ever would have imagined. It would be hard to do much worse.
Hi. I got my MS from MIT studying deep-ocean sequestration of CO2. So I know something about the carbonate system in the oceans.
Anyway, you are correct, over geological time, CO2 concentrations have lagged temperature increases. But your conclusion is incorrect. What you fail to recognize is that the increased CO2 enhanced and prolonged the warming. Yes, there can be other climate forcings, like solar cycles. No one disputes that.
What's different this time is that due to our activities CO2 (and methane, etc) is the primary forcing mechanism. This is because we are injecting it directly into the atmosphere. That's why it is leading this time, not lagging.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, in that increased concentrations trap heat (of course, there are lots of other feedbacks in the climate system, and that's where it gets interesting). Arrhenius recognized this over 100 years ago.
The current net flux of carbon is into the oceans. As a result, it is acidifying.
I am happy to listen to opposing viewpoints. I am not happy to have to respond to the same debunked misunderstandings about CO2 and climate that many skeptics cling to. For starters, show me some negative feedback cycles that can strongly temper a 3x change in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
If anything, you've described a positive feedback (CO2 -> warmer air -> warmer ocean -> ocean can hold less CO2 -> warmer air...)
Oil went from $17 a barrel or so in 2002 to around $70 or so last summer (source
Let's think of an energy-intensive industry that's based primarily on oil. Let's say, airlines. By your logic, flight costs should have increased by 165% to 400+% in that time. I don't know about you, but I fly a lot for work, and I didn't see this. And it's not like airline prices aren't dynamic.
And how you frame the argument...
a) Sure looks like the science is continuing toward a done deal- do take the time to look into the 'it's all the sun' argument. Start with 'solar variation' and 'Attribution_of_recent_climate_change' at Wikipedia.
b) If a), then b). The biosphere is pretty good at regulating things like CO2 level as long as it's not getting pushed too hard (see: status quo)
c) Cooler planet? Who said anything about a cooler planet? The concern is to what degree the planet is hotter.
If by 'enliven' tundra you mean melt it and release all the methane that's locked up in there (thereby enhancing warming), then I agree.
My personal opinion is that reducing carbon intensity is a reasonable strategy that hedges our bets over climate uncertainty, and does not have to doom our economy. For example, in the US we can go a long way with energy conservation and efficiency, things that generally have a reasonable ROI. The US is currently 40th or so among countries in terms of emissions per unit GDP (and the difference is not attributable simply to industry mix, pop. density, etc.).
Unfortunately, debate about global warming is driven so strongly (on both sides) by ideology, that discussion on forums like./ is becoming a real PITA
In the US, natural gas is the #2 fossil fuel for generating electricity, behind coal. Oil is used somewhat, but first went out of fashion after the OPEC thing in the 1970's. Oil now generates less than 3% of our electricity.
The average emissions rates in the United States from natural gas-fired generation are: 1135 lbs/MWh of carbon dioxide, 0.1 lbs/MWh of sulfur dioxide, and 1.7 lbs/MWh of nitrogen oxides. Compared to the average air emissions from coal-fired generation, natural gas produces half as much carbon dioxide, less than a third as much nitrogen oxides, and one percent as much sulfur oxides at the power plant. In addition, the process of extraction, treatment, and transport of the natural gas to the power plant generates additional emissions.
Coal is cheap and abundant in the US (and China, and India...). Those are its advantages. Otherwise, it is an environmental nightmare, from mine to smokestack. If you fully internalize its costs, it might not appear so cheap.
There are reasons for using coal for electricity. Cleanliness is not one of them. Putting the word "clean" in front of the word "coal" doesn't instantly make it so.
However, it's worth noting that it's very easy to lose your shirt doing what your customers want you to do. The trick is to do so and still remain profitable. Enter Mr. Jobs.
I try not to take anything Steve Jobs says at face value. That whole RDF thing. I am impressed by his business acumen, but I don't see him as a straight-talker.
I think the reason Jobs is willing to be very openly anti-DRM now is that he does not see Apple's DRM lock-in business model lasting much longer due to intense legal pressure in various regions (France, etc.). It looks like rather than fight an MS-style battle to the end to protect its lock-in model, Apple plans to suck it up and nimbly move to the next stage in the digital music business cycle, which involves smaller share of a bigger market. It should be clear to observers now that Apple isn't all that interested in market share- they are interested in profit (and superior design).
So, Apple sees that it's locked-in days are numbered, and that non-proprietary DRM doesn't help it's bottom line. The only remaining option is removing DRM and pushing to expand the total market. This option also just happens to provide Jobs with the opportunity to be a hero to the masses for publicly panning DRM, which has a not-insignificant impact on Apple's brand- Apple is just that much more cooler now.
So, kudos to Mr. Jobs. I think he's taken his current stance with Apple's bottom line in mind, but in this case it just happens to coincide with the best interest of Apple's customers. Nicely done.
They have tons and tons of good stuff, but also an equal or greater amount of stuff I don't like. They offer a variety of mechanisms to try to hone in to whatever suits you, but I still find that trial and error takes more time than I would like. That said, I'll take search cost over DRM any day.
Also, if you don't download all of your songs in a month, they go away (no rollover). That's a little miserly, I think.
In my time as a scientist-wanna-be (at Dartmouth, WHOI, MIT), I didn't see a lot of this. What I did see was a lot of tenuous connections in grant writing to whatever topics were hot at the time in funding circles. So yes, e.g. climatologists will find a way to link just about anything they want to research to climate change. But I think that's much more prevalent in grant-writing than in general discourse. Sure, there are some sensationalist scientists out there, but not a lot (name some, please?).
I wonder why you cast such aspersions on scientists (it makes it easier to ignore their inconvenient findings, I suppose?). Most of the scientists I ever worked with worked hard for much less than they could have earned in the private sector (which is a big reason why I'm in the private sector). And they valued precision and rigor, not sensationalism. Yeah, they're human like the rest of us, but I think your characterizations are flat out wrong.
Of course, as I have a degree in environmental engineering (undergrad summa cum laude, then NSF grad. research fellowship), maybe you struck a nerve with me. BTW I can differentiate. And integrate. Symbolically and numerically, even.
"Gliders are a cost-effective alternative to traditional measuring techniques, which involve expensive boat-trips and floating instruments that simply drift with surface currents."
This one goes a lot deeper than previous gliders, opening up a whole lot more of the ocean to cost-effective data collection.
Using your logic, the Apollo 11 mission was not special because it did not go to Pluto (or whatever is the outermost planet these days).
I suppose it's insightful to the good portion of the./ audience who fancies themselves armchair geologists, oceanographers, climatologists, astrophysicists, etc.
It's along the lines of the "duh, it's only the sun that's causing any warming, if there is any." (That'swrong, BTW).
The average heat flux from the earth is less than 0.1W/m2. Compare that to ~ 1000 W/m2 for the sun. Sure, it varies all over the place (see: volcanoes, etc.), but it's not a no-brainer where any heat anomalies the glider detected came from. In general, the deep ocean is quite cold because of that whole thermal expansion thing (also note that seawater is densest a few degrees above freezing (~4 deg C, if I recall). So heating from the bottom tends to cause convection.
You'll note that the scientists quoted don't mention global warming; they are excited to see stuff that they didn't expect. That's good enough to satisfy their intellectual curiosity & need to come up with new and interesting grant proposals.
You'll also notice that scientists in general don't sell newspapers or magazines. It's the journalists whose job it is to butcher the science to sell newspapers and magazines.
Finally, the oceans are very much tied up in our little carbon experiment. A good bit of any extra heat that is trapped in the atmosphere will go into the oceans. Also, a lot of the CO2 that we've emitted is already going into the oceans, which leads to ocean acidification. This is the rate of carbonic acid input (that's CO2 + H2O H2CO3 H+ + HCO3-) is much higher than the ocean can buffer it with CaCO3 (which buffers effectively, but only on very long time scales). In the meantime, hope you don't like coral.
I enjoy your posts, even though I think you are sort of nuts (in a good way). But are you not confusing inflation and exchange rates? I hardly think US inflation is the cause of the weak dollar, though they may share a common source. I'm not an economist, so I hope the guy who wrote the Wikipedia article on the US public debt is:
The ultimate consequence of monetizing US debt is that it expands the money supply which will tend to dilute the value of dollars already in circulation. Thus, expanding the pool of money puts downward pressure on the dollar and upward pressure on inflation. Note that money supply expansion is not the only force at work in inflation. United States Dollars are essentially a commodity on the world market and the value of the dollar at any given time is subject to the law of supply and demand. In recent years, the debt has soared and inflation has stayed low in part because China has been willing to accumulate reserves denominated in US Dollars. Currently, China holds over $1 trillion in dollar denominated assets (of which $330 billion are US Treasury notes). In comparison, $1.4 Trillion represents M1 or the "tight money supply" of US Dollars which suggests that the value of the US Dollar could change dramatically should China ever choose to divest itself of a large portion of those reserves.
I agree with you, but there's a practical problem.
While People don't like regulations, people really, really don't like taxes. Even if a regulation ends up costing people the same or more, for some reason this is more politically feasible than a rational tax to internalize externalities.
I think carbon markets have more promise. "Hey, look, a market-based solution!" is more attractive than another tax. Carbon markets also don't just penalize good behavior less than bad behavior (viz a viz carbon emissions), but one can actually make money via good behavior.
I also think these bans are terrible marketing; it's well proven that forbidding something makes it seem more attractive. Anyone remember the Seinfeld low-flow showerhead episode?
For the record, ~90% of the light in my house comes from CFLs. With a payback period of four months and lighting characteristics that I quite like, I don't need any external encouragement.
Slashdot Mirror
You will note that I was referring to *energy* payback. The amount of energy used to manufacture the cells.
Agreed, the financial payback is much, much longer. When PV hits a 2 year payback, we can dance in the streets.
I did my research, now it's your turn. A quick search found that China's electrical prices were of the same order of magnitude- not enough to destroy my argument.
I rarely pay more than $5 for a GE or Philips CFL. And I would note that the energy cost between a good CFL and a cheap one is probably not material- you still build the ballast, twist the glass, etc. It's just you get more margin if you do it well.
I stand by my argument- there's no frickin way a CFL requires enough energy to manufacture than it saves over its service life.
I'll take a pass on nuclear.
But do you really consider the other ideas debunked? Really?
PV: Energy payback for PV is ~2 years; lifetime is 20-40 years. So energy balance is very good. Other measures of "worse for the environment" (solvents, etc.) is subjective. Also, what solar technology? Std. silicon? Thin-film? CIGS?
Prius: Do you consider this report to be valid? I don't.
CFLs: This is the same logic used by people that say if you halve my taxes, my income will double (you know, how tax cuts don't really affect govt revenue). For the record, I think mandating CFL use is a much dumber idea than a carbon tax or market, but that has nothing to do with Jevon's paradox. BTW, note in that article the bit about "improved resource efficiency may trigger a change in the overall consumption of that resource. The direction of that change depends on other economic variables." Note the use of the words "may" and "depends on".
It's becoming an old saw that anything that is energy efficient must take more energy to manufacture than it saves over its lifetime.
This is rarely accompanied by numbers.
Take CFLs: A good CFL lasts many times longer than an incandescent, but let's be conservative and say 3k hours for the CFL, 750 for the incandescent. That is conservative. Over that 3k hours, a 15W CFL will save 135 kWh compared to the incandescent. That's $13 at retail electricity rates, $6.50 at industrial rates. CFLs generally cost less than this to *buy*, so you can be damn sure the energy input is less than 135kWh. And that's not even considering the inputs to make, transport, etc. 4 incandescents.
There's no way the upfront energy costs of a CFL offset its savings. BTW same for PV; energy payback is ~2 years for something with a 20-50 lifetime. And that's with standard silicon; go thin-film or CIGS and its better. Wind turbines have a faster energy payback. And so on.
This is actually insightful. Splitting plants and animals into 2 different farms took a good solution (manure as fertilizer) and made 2 problems (the need for inorganic fertilizer and the shit problems of factory farms). There was a piece on NPR awhile back about some innovations involving bringing animals back to the farm.
Modern farming practices illustrate the problems with optimizing pieces of the puzzle, but not optimizing the whole thing.
Congrats to anyone who shorted at $25/share- 2x in 3 years isn't bad.
Flamebait? Maybe.
Offtopic? I beg to differ. Grandparent illustrates the trap that many of us fell into in 1999-2000: It's fun to make fun of Al Gore!
It was fun, it was easy, and it had consequences. You may remember that the 2000 election was rather close.
I daresay that if we collectively hadn't had so much fun mocking Al Gore up to November 2000, we just might be in a better place today.
I'm not a big Al Gore fan, but JFC we are a lot closer to 1984 under the current administration than I ever would have imagined. It would be hard to do much worse.
Have you ever been to West Virginia? It's called mountaintop removal.
Hi. I got my MS from MIT studying deep-ocean sequestration of CO2. So I know something about the carbonate system in the oceans.
Anyway, you are correct, over geological time, CO2 concentrations have lagged temperature increases. But your conclusion is incorrect. What you fail to recognize is that the increased CO2 enhanced and prolonged the warming. Yes, there can be other climate forcings, like solar cycles. No one disputes that.
What's different this time is that due to our activities CO2 (and methane, etc) is the primary forcing mechanism. This is because we are injecting it directly into the atmosphere. That's why it is leading this time, not lagging.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, in that increased concentrations trap heat (of course, there are lots of other feedbacks in the climate system, and that's where it gets interesting). Arrhenius recognized this over 100 years ago.
The current net flux of carbon is into the oceans. As a result, it is acidifying.
I am happy to listen to opposing viewpoints. I am not happy to have to respond to the same debunked misunderstandings about CO2 and climate that many skeptics cling to. For starters, show me some negative feedback cycles that can strongly temper a 3x change in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
If anything, you've described a positive feedback (CO2 -> warmer air -> warmer ocean -> ocean can hold less CO2 -> warmer air...)
Where to start....
Oil went from $17 a barrel or so in 2002 to around $70 or so last summer (source
Let's think of an energy-intensive industry that's based primarily on oil. Let's say, airlines. By your logic, flight costs should have increased by 165% to 400+% in that time. I don't know about you, but I fly a lot for work, and I didn't see this. And it's not like airline prices aren't dynamic.
And how you frame the argument...
a) Sure looks like the science is continuing toward a done deal- do take the time to look into the 'it's all the sun' argument. Start with 'solar variation' and 'Attribution_of_recent_climate_change' at Wikipedia.
b) If a), then b). The biosphere is pretty good at regulating things like CO2 level as long as it's not getting pushed too hard (see: status quo)
c) Cooler planet? Who said anything about a cooler planet? The concern is to what degree the planet is hotter.
If by 'enliven' tundra you mean melt it and release all the methane that's locked up in there (thereby enhancing warming), then I agree.
My personal opinion is that reducing carbon intensity is a reasonable strategy that hedges our bets over climate uncertainty, and does not have to doom our economy. For example, in the US we can go a long way with energy conservation and efficiency, things that generally have a reasonable ROI. The US is currently 40th or so among countries in terms of emissions per unit GDP (and the difference is not attributable simply to industry mix, pop. density, etc.).
Unfortunately, debate about global warming is driven so strongly (on both sides) by ideology, that discussion on forums like
In the US, natural gas is the #2 fossil fuel for generating electricity, behind coal. Oil is used somewhat, but first went out of fashion after the OPEC thing in the 1970's. Oil now generates less than 3% of our electricity.
As for natural gas, read this:
Coal is cheap and abundant in the US (and China, and India...). Those are its advantages. Otherwise, it is an environmental nightmare, from mine to smokestack. If you fully internalize its costs, it might not appear so cheap.
There are reasons for using coal for electricity. Cleanliness is not one of them. Putting the word "clean" in front of the word "coal" doesn't instantly make it so.
I would have said the same thing about our planet's carbon cycle. We're running a huge experiment; the results should be quite interesting.
Yes please.
However, it's worth noting that it's very easy to lose your shirt doing what your customers want you to do. The trick is to do so and still remain profitable. Enter Mr. Jobs.
Lance Armstrong can crank out around 300W for 100 miles or so, and 600+ when he puts the hurt on.
When I'm in decent shape, I can hold onto 200W for awhile (either on bike or rowing ergometer), but not long enough to generate 1 kWh in a sitting.
At minimum wage, 1 kWh generated by a human (@ 200W/hour) would cost $25+. Even in low-wage companies this is not cost-competitive. At all.
Human-generated power is a great educational tool, but absolutely trivial as an energy source.
I think you've nailed it.
I try not to take anything Steve Jobs says at face value. That whole RDF thing. I am impressed by his business acumen, but I don't see him as a straight-talker.
I think the reason Jobs is willing to be very openly anti-DRM now is that he does not see Apple's DRM lock-in business model lasting much longer due to intense legal pressure in various regions (France, etc.). It looks like rather than fight an MS-style battle to the end to protect its lock-in model, Apple plans to suck it up and nimbly move to the next stage in the digital music business cycle, which involves smaller share of a bigger market. It should be clear to observers now that Apple isn't all that interested in market share- they are interested in profit (and superior design).
So, Apple sees that it's locked-in days are numbered, and that non-proprietary DRM doesn't help it's bottom line. The only remaining option is removing DRM and pushing to expand the total market. This option also just happens to provide Jobs with the opportunity to be a hero to the masses for publicly panning DRM, which has a not-insignificant impact on Apple's brand- Apple is just that much more cooler now.
So, kudos to Mr. Jobs. I think he's taken his current stance with Apple's bottom line in mind, but in this case it just happens to coincide with the best interest of Apple's customers. Nicely done.
I like eMusic too. Don't love, but like.
They have tons and tons of good stuff, but also an equal or greater amount of stuff I don't like. They offer a variety of mechanisms to try to hone in to whatever suits you, but I still find that trial and error takes more time than I would like. That said, I'll take search cost over DRM any day.
Also, if you don't download all of your songs in a month, they go away (no rollover). That's a little miserly, I think.
In my time as a scientist-wanna-be (at Dartmouth, WHOI, MIT), I didn't see a lot of this. What I did see was a lot of tenuous connections in grant writing to whatever topics were hot at the time in funding circles. So yes, e.g. climatologists will find a way to link just about anything they want to research to climate change. But I think that's much more prevalent in grant-writing than in general discourse. Sure, there are some sensationalist scientists out there, but not a lot (name some, please?).
I wonder why you cast such aspersions on scientists (it makes it easier to ignore their inconvenient findings, I suppose?). Most of the scientists I ever worked with worked hard for much less than they could have earned in the private sector (which is a big reason why I'm in the private sector). And they valued precision and rigor, not sensationalism. Yeah, they're human like the rest of us, but I think your characterizations are flat out wrong.
Of course, as I have a degree in environmental engineering (undergrad summa cum laude, then NSF grad. research fellowship), maybe you struck a nerve with me. BTW I can differentiate. And integrate. Symbolically and numerically, even.
From TFA:
"Gliders are a cost-effective alternative to traditional measuring techniques, which involve expensive boat-trips and floating instruments that simply drift with surface currents."
This one goes a lot deeper than previous gliders, opening up a whole lot more of the ocean to cost-effective data collection.
Using your logic, the Apollo 11 mission was not special because it did not go to Pluto (or whatever is the outermost planet these days).
Oops, ./ ate my brackets. I meant: CO2 + H20 <=> H2CO3 <=> H+ + HCO3- (bicarbonate)
Might as well go all the way: HCO3- <=> H+ + CO3- (carbonate)
Here's the carbonic acid scoop.
I suppose it's insightful to the good portion of the ./ audience who fancies themselves armchair geologists, oceanographers, climatologists, astrophysicists, etc.
It's along the lines of the "duh, it's only the sun that's causing any warming, if there is any." (That's wrong, BTW).
The average heat flux from the earth is less than 0.1W/m2. Compare that to ~ 1000 W/m2 for the sun. Sure, it varies all over the place (see: volcanoes, etc.), but it's not a no-brainer where any heat anomalies the glider detected came from. In general, the deep ocean is quite cold because of that whole thermal expansion thing (also note that seawater is densest a few degrees above freezing (~4 deg C, if I recall). So heating from the bottom tends to cause convection.
You'll note that the scientists quoted don't mention global warming; they are excited to see stuff that they didn't expect. That's good enough to satisfy their intellectual curiosity & need to come up with new and interesting grant proposals.
You'll also notice that scientists in general don't sell newspapers or magazines. It's the journalists whose job it is to butcher the science to sell newspapers and magazines.
Finally, the oceans are very much tied up in our little carbon experiment. A good bit of any extra heat that is trapped in the atmosphere will go into the oceans. Also, a lot of the CO2 that we've emitted is already going into the oceans, which leads to ocean acidification. This is the rate of carbonic acid input (that's CO2 + H2O H2CO3 H+ + HCO3-) is much higher than the ocean can buffer it with CaCO3 (which buffers effectively, but only on very long time scales). In the meantime, hope you don't like coral.
I enjoy your posts, even though I think you are sort of nuts (in a good way). But are you not confusing inflation and exchange rates? I hardly think US inflation is the cause of the weak dollar, though they may share a common source. I'm not an economist, so I hope the guy who wrote the Wikipedia article on the US public debt is:
I agree with you, but there's a practical problem.
While People don't like regulations, people really, really don't like taxes. Even if a regulation ends up costing people the same or more, for some reason this is more politically feasible than a rational tax to internalize externalities.
I think carbon markets have more promise. "Hey, look, a market-based solution!" is more attractive than another tax. Carbon markets also don't just penalize good behavior less than bad behavior (viz a viz carbon emissions), but one can actually make money via good behavior.
I also think these bans are terrible marketing; it's well proven that forbidding something makes it seem more attractive. Anyone remember the Seinfeld low-flow showerhead episode?
For the record, ~90% of the light in my house comes from CFLs. With a payback period of four months and lighting characteristics that I quite like, I don't need any external encouragement.