The reasons why the Green New Deal won’t really work are fairly subtle. A person really has to look into the details to see what goes wrong. In this post, I try to explain at least a few of the issues involved.
[1] None of the new renewables can easily be relied upon to produce enough energy in winter.
The world’s energy needs vary, depending on location. In locations near the poles, there will be a significant need for light and heat during the winter months. Energy needs will be relatively more equal throughout the year near the equator.
Solar energy is particularly a problem in winter. In northern latitudes, if utilities want to use solar energy to provide electricity in winter, they will likely need to build several times the amount of solar generation capacity required for summer to have enough electricity available for winter.
Figure 1. US daily average solar production, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
Hydroelectric tends to be a spring-dominated resource. Its quantity tends to vary significantly from year to year, making it difficult to count on.
Figure 2. US daily average hydroelectric production, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
Another issue with hydroelectric is the fact that most suitable locations have already been developed. Even if additional hydroelectric might help with winter energy needs, adding more hydroelectric is often not an option.
Wind energy (Figure 3) comes closest to being suitable for matching the winter consumption needs of the economy. In at least some parts of the world, wind energy seems to continue at a reasonable level during winter.
Figure 3. US daily average wind production, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
Unfortunately, wind tends to be quite variable from year to year and month to month. This makes it difficult to rely on without considerable overbuilding.
Wind energy is also very dependent upon the continuation of our current economy. With many moving parts, wind turbines need frequent replacement of parts. These parts need to be precisely correct, with virtually no tolerance for change. Sometimes, helicopters are needed to install the new parts. Because of the need for continued high-technology maintenance services, wind energy cannot be expected to continue to operate for very long unless the world economy, with all of its globalization, can continue pretty much as today.
[2] Depending upon burned biomass in winter is an option, but we already know that this path is likely to lead to massive deforestation.
Historically, people burned wood and other biomass to provide heat and light in winter. If biomass is burned for heat and light, it is an easy step to using charcoal for smelting metals for goods such as nails and shovels. But with today’s population of 7.7 billion people, the huge demand for biomass would quickly deforest the whole world. There is already a problem with growing deforestation, especially in tropical areas.
It is my understanding that the Green New Deal is focusing primarily on wind, hydroelectric, and solar rather than biomass, because of these issues.
[3] Battery backup for renewables is very expensive. Because of their high cost, batteries tend to be used only for very short time periods. At a 3-day storage level, batteries do nothing to smooth out season-to-season and year-to-year variation.
The cost of batteries is not simply their purchase price. There seem to be several related costs associated with the use of batteries:
- The initial cost of the batteries
- The cost of replacements, because batteries are typically not very long-lived compared to, say, solar panels
- The cost of recycling the battery components rather than simply leaving the batteries to pollute the nearby surroundings
- The loss of electric charge that occurs as the battery sits idle for a period of time and the loss related to electricity storage and retrieval
We can get some idea of the cost of batteries from an analysis by Roger Andrews of a Tesla/Solar City system installed on the island of Ta’u. The island is in American Samoa, near the equator. This island received a grant that was used to add solar panels, plus 3-day battery backup, to provide electricity for the tiny island. Any outages longer than the battery capacity would continue to be handled by a diesel generator. The goal was to reduce the quantity of diesel used, not to eliminate its use completely.
Based on Andrews’ analysis, adding a 3-day battery backup more than doubled the cost of the PV-alone system. (It added 1.6 times as much as the cost of the installed PV.) The catch, as I pointed out above, is that the cost doesn’t stop with purchasing the initial batteries. At least one set of replacement batteries is likely to be needed during the lifetime of the system. And there are other costs that are more subtle and difficult to evaluate.
Furthermore, this analysis was for a solar system. There seems to be more variation over longer periods for wind. It is not clear that the relative amount of batteries would be enough for 3-day backup of a wind system, or for a combination of wind, hydroelectric and solar. The long-term cost of a solar panel plus battery system might easily come to four times the cost of a wind or solar system alone.
There is also the issue of necessary overbuilding to make the system work. On Ta’u, near the equator, with diesel power backup, the system is set up in such a way that 40% of the solar generation is in excess of the island’s day-to-day electricity consumption. This constitutes another cost of the system, over and above the cost of the 3-day battery backup.
If we also eliminate the diesel backup, then we start adding more costs because the level of overbuilding would need to be even higher. And, if we were to create a similar system in a location with substantial seasonal temperature variation, even more overbuilding would be required if enough capacity is to be made available to provide sufficient generation in winter.
[4] Even in sunny, warm California, it appears that substantial excess capacity needs to be added to avoid the problem of inadequate generation during the winter months, if the electrical system used is based on wind, hydroelectric, solar, and a 3-day backup battery.
Suppose that we want to replace California’s electricity consumption (excluding other energy, including oil products) with a new system using wind, hydro, solar, and 3-day battery backup. Current California renewable generation, compared to current consumption, is as shown on Figure 4, based on EIA data.
Figure 4. California total electricity consumption compared to the sum of California solar, wind, and hydroelectric production, on a monthly average basis. Data used from the US Energy Information Administration through June 30, 2019.
California’s electricity consumption peaks about August, presumably due to all of its air conditioning usage (Figure 5). This is two months after the June peak in the output of solar panels. Also, electricity usage doesn’t drop back nearly as much during winter as solar production does. (Compare Figures 1 and 5.)
Figure 5. California electricity consumption by month, based on US Energy Information Administration data.
We note from Figure 4 that California hydroelectric production is extremely variable. It appears that hydroelectric generation can vary by a factor of five comparing high years to low years. California hydroelectric generation uses all available rivers, so any new energy generation will need to come from wind and solar.
Even with 3-day backup batteries, we need the system to reliably produce enough electricity that it can meet the average electricity generation needs of each separate month. I did a rough estimate of how much wind and solar the system would need to add to bring total generation sufficiently high so as to prevent electricity problems during the winter. In making the analysis, I assumed that the proportion of added wind and solar would be similar to their relative proportions on June 30, 2019.
My analysis suggests that to reliably bridge the gap between production and consumption (see Figure 4), approximately six times as much wind and solar would need to be added (making 7 = 6 +1 times as much generation in total), as was in place on June 30 , 2019. With this arrangement, there would be a huge amount of wind and solar whose production would need to be curtailed during the summer months.
Figure 6. Estimated share of wind and solar production that would need to be curtailed, to provide adequate winter generation. The assumption is made that hydroelectric generation would not be curtailed.
Figure 6 shows the proportion of wind and solar output that would be in excess of the system’s expected consumption. Note that in winter, this drops to close to zero.
[5] None of the researchers studying the usefulness of wind and solar have understood the need for overbuilding, or alternatively, paying backup electricity providers adequately for their services. Instead, they have assumed that the only costs involved relate to the devices themselves, plus the inverters. This approach makes wind and intermittent solar appear far more helpful than they really are.
Wind and solar have been operating in almost a fantasy world. They have been given the subsidy of “going first.” If we change to a renewables-only system, this subsidy of going first disappears. Instead, the system needs to be hugely overbuilt to provide the 24/7/365 generation that backup electricity providers have made possible with either no compensation at all, or with far too little compensation. (This lack of adequate compensation for backup providers is causing problems for the current system, but it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss them here.)
Analysts have not understood that there are substantial costs that are not being reimbursed today, which allow wind and solar to have the subsidy of going first. For example, if natural gas is to be used as backup during winter, there will still need to be underground storage allowing natural gas to be stored for use in winter. There will also need to be pipelines that are not used much of the year. Workers will need to be paid year around if they are to continue to specialize in natural gas work. Annual costs of the natural gas system will not be greatly reduced simply because wind, hydro, and water can replace natural gas usage most months of the year.
Analysts of many types have issued reports indicating that wind and solar have “positive net energy” or other favorable characteristics. These favorable analyses would disappear if either (a) the necessary overbuilding of the system or (b) the real cost of backup services were properly recognized. This problem pervades studies of many types, including Levelized Cost of Energy studies, Energy Returned on Energy Invested studies, and Life Cycle Analyses.
This strange but necessary overbuilding situation also has implications for how much homeowners should be paid for their rooftop solar electricity. Once it is clear that only a small fraction of the electricity provided by the solar panels will actually be used (because it comes in the summer, and the system has been overbuilt in order to produce enough generation in winter), then payments to homeowners for electricity generated by rooftop systems will need to decrease dramatically.
A question arises regarding what to do with all of the electricity production that is in excess of the needs of customers. Many people would suggest using this excess electricity to make liquid fuels. The catch with this approach is that the liquid fuel needs to be very inexpensive to be affordable by consumers. We cannot expect consumers to be able to afford higher prices than they are currently paying for fossil fuel products. Also, the new liquid fuels ideally should power current devices. If consumers need to purchase new devices in order to utilize the new fuels, this further reduces the affordability of a planned changeover to a new fuel.
Alternatively, owners of solar panels might be encouraged to use the summer overproduction themselves. They might set the temperatures of their air conditioners to a lower setting or heat a swimming pool. It is unlikely that the excess could be profitably sold to nearby utilities because they are likely encounter the same problem in summer, if they are using a similar generation mix.
[6] As appealing as an all-electric economy would seem to be, the transition to such an economy can be expected to take 150 years, based on the speed of the transition since 1985.
Clearly, the economy uses a lot of energy products that are not electricity. We are familiar with oil products burned in many vehicles, for example. Oil is also used in many ways that do not require burning (for example, lubricating oils and asphalt). Natural gas and propane are used to heat homes and cook food, among other uses. Coal is sometimes burned in making pig iron and cement in China.
Figure 7. Electricity as a share of total energy use for selected areas, based on BP’s 2019 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Electricity’s share of total energy consumption has gradually been rising (Figure 7).* We can make a rough estimate of how quickly the changeover has been taking place since 1985. For the world as a whole, electricity consumption amounted to 43.4% of energy consumption in 2018, rising from 31.2% in 1985. On average, the increase has been 0.37%, over the 33-year period shown. If we assume this same linear growth pattern holds going forward, it will take 153 years (until 2171) until the world economy can operate using only electricity. This is not a quick change!
[7] While moving away from fossil fuels sounds appealing, pretty much everything in today’s economy is made and transported to its final destination using fossil fuels. If a misstep takes place and leaves the world with too little total energy consumption, the world could be left without an operating financial system and with way too little food.
Over 80% of today’s energy consumption is from fossil fuels. In fact, the other types of energy shown on Figure 8 would not be possible without the use of fossil fuels.
Figure 8. World Energy Consumption by Fuel, based on data of 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
With over 80% of energy consumption coming from fossil fuels, pretty much everything we have in our economy today is available thanks to fossil fuels. We wouldn’t have today’s homes, schools or grocery stores without fossil fuels. Even solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and modern hydroelectric dams would not be possible without fossil fuels. In fact, for the foreseeable future, we cannot make any of these devices with electricity alone.
In Figure 8, the little notch in world energy consumption corresponds to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. The connection between low energy consumption and poor economic outcomes goes back to many earlier periods. Energy consumption growth was unusually low about the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s and about the time of the US Civil War. The vulnerability of the financial system and the possibility of major wars are two reasons why a person should be concerned about the possibility of an energy changeover that doesn’t provide the economic system with adequate energy to operate. The laws of physics require energy dissipation for essentially every activity that is part of GDP. Without adequate energy, an economy tends to collapse. Economists are generally not aware of this important point.
Agriculture is dependent upon fossil fuels, particularly oil. Petrochemicals are used directly to make herbicides, pesticides, medications for animals and nitrogen fertilizer. Huge quantities of energy are necessary to make metals of all kinds, such as the steel in agricultural equipment and in irrigation pumps. Refrigerated vehicles transport produce to market, using mostly oil-based fuel. If the transition does not go as favorably as hoped, food supplies could prove to be hopelessly inadequate.
[8] The scale of the transition to hydroelectric, wind, and solar would be unimaginably large.
Today, wind, hydroelectric, and solar amount to about 10% of world energy production. Hydroelectric amounts to about 7% of energy consumption, wind about 2%, and solar about 1%. This can be seen on Figure 8 above. A different way of seeing this same relationship is shown in Figure 9, below.
Figure 9. World hydroelectric, wind and solar production as share of world energy supply, based on BP’s 2019 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Figure 9 shows that hydroelectric power is pretty well maxed out, as a percentage of energy supply. This is especially the case in advanced economies. This means that any increases that are made in the future will likely have to come from wind and solar. If hydroelectric, wind and solar are together to produce 100% of the world’s energy supply, then wind and solar, which today comprise 3% of today’s energy supply, will need to ramp up to 93% of energy supply. This amounts to a 30-fold increase in wind and solar between 2018 and 2030, based on one version of the Green New Deal’s planned timing. We would need to be building wind and solar absolutely everywhere, very quickly, to accomplish this.
[9] Moving to electric vehicles (EVs) for private passenger autos is not likely to be as helpful as many people hope.
One issue is that it is possible to mandate the use of EVs, but if the automobiles cost more than citizens can afford, many citizens will simply stop buying cars at all. At least part of the worldwide reduction in automobile sales seems to be related to changes in rules that are intended to reduce auto emissions. The slowdown in auto sales is part of what is pushing the world into recession.
Another issue is that private passenger autos represent a smaller share of oil consumption than many people would expect. BP data indicate that 26% of worldwide oil consumption is gasoline. Gasoline powers the vast majority of the world’s private passenger automobiles today. While an oil savings of 26% would be good, there would still be a very long way to go.
One study of EV sales in Norway suggests that, with large subsidies, these cars are disproportionately sold to high-income families as a second vehicle. The new second vehicles are often used for commuting to work, when prior to the EV ownership, the owner had been taking public transportation. When this pattern is followed, the savings in oil use from the adoption of EVs becomes very small because building and transporting EVs also requires oil use.
Figure 10. Source: Holtsmark and Skonhoft The Norwegian support and subsidy policy of electric cars. Should it be adopted by other countries?
If one of the goals of the Green New Deal is to level out differences between the rich and the poor, mandating EVs would seem to be a step in the wrong direction. It would make more sense to mandate walking or the use of pedal bicycles, rather than EVs.
[10] Wind, solar, and hydroelectric have pollution problems themselves.
With respect to solar panels, a major concern is that if the panels are broken (for example, by a storm or near the end of their lives), water alone can leach toxic substances into the water supply. Another issue is that recycling needs to be subsidized, to be economic. The price of solar panels needs to be surcharged at the front end, if adequate funds are to be collected to cover recycling costs. This is not being done in the US.
Wind turbines are better in terms of not being made of toxic substances, but they disturb bird, bat, and marine life in their vicinity. Humans also complain about their vibrations, if the devices are close to homes. The fiberglass blades of wind turbines are not recyclable, and many of them are too big to fit into standard crushing machines. They need to be chopped into pieces, in order to fit into landfills.
Adding huge amounts of 3-day battery backup for wind turbines and solar panels will create a new set of recycling issues. The extent of the recycling issues will depend on the battery materials used.
Of course, if we try to ramp up wind and solar by a huge factor, pollution problems will rise accordingly. The chance that raw materials will prove to be scarce will increase as well.
There will also be an increasing problem with finding suitable sites to install all of the devices and batteries. There are limits on how densely wind turbines can be spaced before the output of one wind turbine interferes with the output of other nearby turbines. This problem is not too different from the problem of declining per-well oil production caused by too closely spaced shale wells.
Afterword
I could explain further, but that would make this post too long. For example, using an overbuilt renewables system, there is not enough net energy to provide the high salaries almost everyone would like to see.
Also, the new renewable energy systems are likely to be more local than many have hoped. For example, I think it is highly unlikely that the people of North Africa would allow contractors to build a solar system in North Africa for the benefit of Europeans.
Note
*There are two different ways of comparing electricity’s value to that of total energy. Figure 7 uses the more generous approach. In it, the value of electricity is based on the amount of fossil fuels that would need to be burned to produce the electricity amounts shown. In the case of electricity types that do not involve the burning of fossil fuels, these amounts are estimated amounts. The less generous approach compares the heat value of the electricity produced to the total heat value of primary energy sources. Using the less generous approach, electricity corresponds to only about 20% of primary energy supply. The transition to an all-electric economy would be much farther away using the heat value approach.
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I was watching a documentary about bill gates in 4 parts ,in the 3rd part bill gates talked about a safer nuclear reactor using spent fuel rods as the energy source that sounded like good news because at least we would not have the danger of the spent fuel rods on our plate maybe a scaled back energy system with an emphasis on self sufficiency minimalist living based on an unwasteful lifestyle would be the solution to the end of growth
Debated several times already.
The only country with running spent fuel reprocessing program on industrial scale is Russia. Mainly France and US came third-half way close but abandoned these programs in 1960/70s..
I’m not dissing Gates, as he (and his friends) has got the funds and army of scientist to do it, but I doubt he has got the political clout to make it real soon. If I am not mistaken he himself said his project could be deployed first in other countries, not US.. perhaps the situation changed with the current administration, but the local state govs could block it.
Once the safe spent fuel rod reactor is up and running in a country where it would be politically feasible to do so, proponents could point to it as a partial solution to the spent fuel pond storage issue that has long been Fast Eddy’s biggest worry.
On the other hand, resolving one worry tends to open up the road to others, especially in the case of hard core doomers like us, who will grab onto any sliver of despair, no matter how tenuous.
LOL!
LOL! Sounds like a formula for manipulating mess. But is there a PERFECT MESS, I wonder? I try hard to find it. Oh, here’s one: distribute nuclear waste in thousands of places, so if any go bad, it won’t kill us all.
First we burn the easy stuff, then we move onto more elaborate devices of energy production. Why make it complicated when FF:s suffice I would say.
Well, at least for a little longer. Then we cut back and open the big R&D wallet.
Nuclear fission reactors output 65% of their energy as waste heat. One of the most “sensible” ideas I ever encountered (decades ago) was to put the reactors in the centre of cities, and use the waste heat to keep the people warm. Good physics; terrible psychology.
Some NPPs are by design connected to district (cogeneration) heating loops (or now upgraded), but for safety and base load grid priority reasons it’s not obviously the entire theoretical potential of the overall “waste heat” .. It should be easily .pdf googlable..
Paul-Frederik Bach has shown that subsidies for renewables has tended to lead to less cogeneration in Sweden. Cogeneration is somewhat like nuclear. It doesn’t do well with negative and very low prices caused by giving wind and solar priority.
I am sure that China’s move to get coal generation out of central cities is having a similar impact. People point out that heat pumps are an inexpensive way of heating. Unfortunately, they really are a whole lot more expensive than cogeneration. Cogeneration gives close to free heat.
I have a geothermal heat pump.
My impression is the hole cost 100k to drill, the pump costs 100k, the whole thing saves 10k/year and maybe the pump doesn’t last much more than 10 years.
Seems you have got a relatively large system installed and peace of mind in the end.
Now imagine you opted for wood burning instead, to do it “properly” needs large chain of not cheap equipment (splitting machines in several steps for turning raw tree logs into small pieces of wood for burner), plus forklift or tractor, suitable terrain around barn-shop etc..
It’s always a trade off between time, effort, capital, reliability, ..
For example some people would be fine with natgas, but when the trans national link goes dry, not a wise move suddenly etc. That could be applied to any option, in the end every decision (rational analysis) is just a bet more or less.
No, people in Sweden burn wood pellets. In the olden days the storage facility at home was oil, then it became purely electrified. Nowadays it’s a combination of burning wood pellets in the north, electric heating, heat pumps and central heating networks with coolant water from industry.
People have stopped complaining about high electricity prices, so now the providers and the state try to increase the prices for being connected to the grid.
People with models that claim that energy costs will always go up manage to decide that these are helpful. I don’t know enough about them to say that they can’t be helpful. But I think they are mostly a way to use more energy now in the hope of saving some later.
Pellets are way more expensive (200-300%) and finicky to particular type/model of pellet burner.. I discussed the raw splitting wood method because DJ hinted at larger consumption site. Yes, it’s possible to have large sized pellet burners or cascade of them as well, but this is insanely more expensive vs the raw wood splitting, which would pay for itself x-times sooner than any pellet system installation.. But raw = extra work (well doing large batch once in a year)..
Yes, instead of hitting the gym, grab the axe and be a man.
https://youtu.be/hbBZj1qOgiY
If you happen to feel a little weak and wimpy, then apply some Rule #5
https://youtu.be/unkIVvjZc9Y
Transition to Little Ice Age (LIA) ~1.5C and previous (Middle Ages) warming period peak to this bottom in the graph totals therefore swing of ~2.5C.. Obviously there is no guarantee it has to now spike up again, but it is likely.. http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_neuchatel.php
There is also a bit more recent (lake)pollen study from Eastern ClubMed, suggesting the Bronze Age ending up with ~250yrs of Dark Age (~1150-850BC) period corresponds with severe drop in agriculture activity..
It is hard to know what all to believe. The thing that is very clear is that the climate has been changing a whole lot
It is also clear that man has thought for a long time that he could change the climate. He could do rain dances, or sacrifice a child to a rain god. Now we have a different version of, “We can change the climate, if the just try hard enough.”
“We can change the climate”
At the physics level, there is no doubt we could change the climate. Enough material blocking sunlight in L1 can make the earth as cold as you want it. It may or may not be cost-effective.
I learn something new every day. Geoengineering solutions seem to be what many would favor.
If you want to know the details, google Dyson Dots and Robert Kennedy.
It would be possible given a huge investment in asteroid mining and space industry. If we need it by 2100, is 80 years enough for that much development? I don’t know.
We have known about our fossil fuel problem for a very long time, since at least 1956. We have had a hard time getting past that issue. That is a bit less than 80 years, but gives an idea.
What’s interesting is that recently the scientists are starting to think sunlight blocking from an asteroid smashup caused the first ice age on earth. This has not been entirely established, but it is looking likely.
Simple! Move the Moon to the L1 point. Problem solved forever.
(Of course, this can’t be done and wouldn’t work anyway, but it might establish my credentials as a hyper techno freak)
Please, please, do not throw Greta into a volcano. She’s far too cute. Angela Merkel, on the other hand, …
What happens if the backup power generation comes from NetPower’s super-liquid C02 gas generator (Allam process)?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/23/net-power-developing-multiple-zero-carbon-natural-gas-plants-exec-says/#6e37c1f58ac2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allam_power_cycle
Sequestering CO2 is very iffy. It is possible to sell the CO2 to an oil drilling company to help pressurize its wells. But then the CO2 likely comes back again, very soon as the oil is extracted.
Getting CO2 to go underground and stay there is not all that easy.If you do it wrong, it just escapes later. The escaping CO2 tends to settle like a blanket to the earth, and cut off the breathing of oxygen. There are lots of liability issues. I will believe it when I see it.
I just learned that digging up grassland contributes as much carbon as cutting down forests. Building and other forms of land development remove a lot of carbon storing vegetation and soil. A great deal of this could be avoided.
Going back to being hunter-gatherers would be very helpful, if we could stay away from burning down whole forests in order to increase the kind of food we prefer. This seemed to be an issue in ancient times.
We really don’t know how the many areas of the earth changed from areas suitable for farming to desert in a relatively short time. The Sahara seems to be one such area. The area around Jericho down to Sodom would seem to be another such area. Also the area where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers come together had a much better climate in Bible times than today. The big desert in Australia seems to some extent to be man made.
I’m not sure about hunting in a grossly overcrowded human sphere where prey animals have disappeared. But we can surely do a lot of gathering from industrial discard, plastic containers, paper and cardboard, especially. Tropical territories need almost no temperature remedies, but might need disaster protection. Soil can be prepared in much smaller and coherent ways in urban spaces than at present. Compared with what can be done to house people and prepare food in urban spaces, we are at at a virtual standstill now. Many from all walks of life are wising up, bu progress is too slow.
Civilisations find forests and leave deserts.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F7%2F74%2FWhite_Cliffs_of_Dover_02.JPG&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FWhite_Cliffs_of_Dover&docid=qVQJ418j8c4PWM&tbnid=19jPkdZ4ek21fM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwjcpJShhoLlAhXJyKQKHQfJAY0QMwhwKAAwAA..i&w=2048&h=1536&bih=790&biw=1079&q=white%20cliffs%20dover&ved=0ahUKEwjcpJShhoLlAhXJyKQKHQfJAY0QMwhwKAAwAA&iact=mrc&uact=8
On the contrary, carbon sequestration is easy; the trick is to store it as a solid, in the above case calcium carbonate. And it’s not that hard: even single celled critters know how to do it. The downside, though, is that we cannot make them work faster, so we must pollute more slowly.
I haven’t heard the issue expressed that way before. We humans make bones. Or are supposed to make bones. Some of us have problems in this direction.
Nature creates and destroys deserts all on its own without any help from humans. Although humans did mess up the soils of Mesopotamia by practicing inappropriate irrigation techniques and created the desert of Baluchistan through over-grazing, the really big changes are due to natural cycles.
As a rule, a cooler Earth is a drier Earth and a warmer Earth is a wetter Earth, just as one would expect given the laws of physics, as evaporation rates vary with temperature. Currently we are several thousand years past the dizzy heights of the Holocene Optimum and meandering gently towards the next glacial period, so the Sahara and many other deserts can be expected expand in the millennia ahead.
https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/fcc0e6f0da4a6785815a71d6ca7b69d2619c93a2/11-Figure10-1.png
“Russia’s central bank in its risk scenario does not rule out oil prices falling to $25 per barrel in 2020, it said in its updated macro economic forecasts on Monday.
“The risk scenario could be triggered in case of lower demand for energy products around the globe and worsening prospects for global economic growth, it added.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-russia-economy-cenbank-forecasts/russia-central-bank-does-not-rule-out-2020-oil-price-at-25-bbl-in-risk-scenario-idUSKCN1VU203?rpc=401&
I am afraid the central bank of Russia is right.
also from UK Reuters, on the sidebar of that Russia story:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-fusion/uk-government-to-invest-in-nuclear-fusion-power-plant-design-idUKKBN1WI13F
“LONDON (Reuters) – The British government said on Thursday it will invest 220 million pounds ($270 million) in the design of a nuclear fusion power station to enable a commercially viable plant to be constructed by 2040.”
only 20 years away!
“China aims to complete and start generating power from a nuclear fusion reactor by around 2040.”
two countries!
the human race is saved!
The first laboratory nuclear fusion was achieved in the 1940s using “magnetic confinement”. The Tokamak, developed in Russia in the mid 60s, was adopted by almost all researchers as the basis for research in the early 70s.
We have been working on this problem for over 70 years, and have got nowhere. I doubt another 20 years will see significant progress. My suggestion is we make more use of the nuclear fusion reactor Nature has most thoughtfully provided: the Sun.
we did until the 1700s,
then that fusion reactor jumped our population x 7
when we’ve dropped back to 1, then we can carry on using the old fusion reactor as before
The situation is more nuanced as the Chinese are active both in international projects as well as already building their own devices-reactors for these experiments, and the leapfrogging stuff obviously remains home. So, the UK is very likely not on equal footing with China at the moment. Anyway, we discussed nuclear and beyond nuclear technologies several times already in detail, and Europe/US is evidently decades behind.. in industrial capacity as well as the research domain.
The UK is busy educating the best Chinese graduates here, in Cambridge – and has just built a whole new town to accommodate them! Sometimes I see only Chinese near the labs……
There are a lot of US actuaries who are of Chinese background. I am fairly sure that there are many more Chinese background actuaries than black. The path to becoming an actuary is passing a series of exams. It helps if people have a knack for logical thinking.
” a knack for logical thinking.”
Not surprising given what Clark says about the genetic selection in China. Incidentally, the Han Chinese have about half a standard deviation advantage in intelligence. That’s around 7 IQ points. What offsetting this curve does to the right side is amazing.
The “hafu” offspring of my Swedish friend and his Han Chinese woman is fiendishly quick witted and imaginary, at least compared with my relatives, Swedish, kids. Let me say something like this; it is clear that the Chinese invented money. The symbols of wealth ships with the DNA.
To Gail; not only do you have to posses the ability of logical thinking, but I would say for thinking in general.
Plus, the ego in East Asian cultures have less prominence compared with the west. We are egomaniacs of the first kind. The Chinese wants to earn money more than they want a career and gain access to power.
I think the significance of ethnic/racial/genetic differences in IQ is overstated. Statistically, the Chinese have smartened up in recent decades just as Europeans and Americans have been dumbing down. Among the factors, compared with a hundred years ago, the Chinese take a lot less narcotics, do a lot more studying, and have a lot better nutrition, while the reverse is true in many parts of Europe and America.
Also, we should always remember that most people everywhere are dumb bunnies who would have trouble mending a fuse, let alone knocking up a working fusion reactor in the garden shed.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/223/018/0c4.jpg
During twenty years in Singapore, I became convinced of the Chinese ability for logical thinking. Most of my students were Chinese. (The Indian students were often experts in cheating.)
One problem was that they were sometimes unwilling to “think outside the box”, hence my lectures on systems reliability. Another was their ingrained unwillingness to question authority, even when said authority was provably wrong. Hence my dozen case studies on classic examples of systems failure and their causes (almost always human error, and almost always errors at the higher levels of responsibility. If I were not now retired, the 737 Max would join that list)
And I respectfully disagree with TIm: the genetic grounding of human intelligence is much understated, if not actually denied. As I once said in another forum (from which I was immediately banned) “Even affirmative action cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
You should read the Clark paper I have cited. It is fairly supportive of your views.
TIm, most of the IQ ranking is simply hardwired because of the legacy path of the human story. Several branches of humanoids left Africa in punctuated waves, developed further outside of Africa, commingled among themselves while living in various biomes, and commingled some more. That’s why Japanese, Chinese and Koreans lead the pack, white Europeans follow, other races (which got outside in latter waves and commingled less or never) are filling the lower parts of the ladder..
Sorry, it’s not an attempt to rehash some old racial theories, it’s a fact, some don’t want to debate or acknowledge it. Besides IQ and compatibility with “civilization” is not everything, so what..
Too much innovation has gotten us into trouble. We cannot live in a situation with too much wage and wealth disparity. Africa was doing well, until the policies of the more “advanced” countries got them into trouble. One issue was rising population due to antibiotics and cheap imported food. But the cheap imported food marginalized the local agricultural economy. It became more and more difficult to earn an adequate living. An increasing share of the people wanted to migrate, adding to world tensions. Debt financing effectively transferred most of the benefit of new infrastructure to the countries that lent the money.
Without fossil fuels, physical strength will be more highly valued. Big black men will do particularly well. Even white men will do well, if they are big and strong enough. Women will need to move back into their traditional childbearing role, because of a much higher infant death rate. Of course, all of these things will only happen if a remnant survives.
It’s fine to disagree. And the heritability of traits is a huge complex subject. But if IQ is bound up so tightly with genetics, why did I have an IQ of over 140 as a young man while my two brothers, from the same parents (unless my mum was covering up an affair with the milkman) and attending the same primary and secondary schools, only barely manage to clear 100? Surely if IQ is bound up tightly with genetics, our scores should have been as close together as three shots at a target by Clint Eastward or Steve McQueen?
Generally, Chinese, Japanese and Korean kids do an awful lot of swatting. They are born and raised in a culture that compels them to study hard and long and to obsess over test results and grades, at least until they finish high school. This helps make them smarter than they would be if they just hung about outside the drugstore or went skateboarding in the park all day every day.
If you keep practicing IQ tests and refining the skills needed to do well at IQ tests, you will slowly but surely increase your IQ, all other things being equal.
Genetics or nature is trotted out as an explanation for so many things these days—from sexual orientation to criminal tendencies to the chances of developing breast cancer for instance—that environment or nurture tends to get overlooked. All human beings share around 99.9% of precisely the same genetic code. My brothers and I probably share around 99.99%. But individual human beings are exposed to vastly different environments, even in the womb.
I’m not saying genetics doesn’t play a part, just saying genetics is not the be all and end all of IQ or intelligence. I believe there are bigger factors in play. For instance, in the US, children who are read to by their parents regularly are statistically more likely to go on to develop the habit of reading on their own, and children who grow up in two-parent households score roughly 45 points higher on literacy reading assessments.
“IQ is bound up tightly with genetics, our scores should have been as close together ”
That’s not the case unless you are an identical twin. There are at least 30 genes that contribute to IQ. You got them, your brothers did not get as many.
Tim, it seems you consider such a small generic difference as insignificant. Are you really sure it plays no role, or does it fit better into your other beliefs?
I consider this as a typical flaw of early conclusion from quick witted people living in a civilization where most people are inferior in their mental capabilities.
For example, Freud never doubted his hypothesis, while Jung always was in doubt of his. Doubt is the true telltale sign of a profound mind. It is very fundamental in the scientific method: Always make your theory able to be disproven by experiment.
Regarding biomass – there’s a wood pellet company in an adjacent city, and it has literally hundreds of pallets of reject pellets left around the perimeter of the plant, covered in plastic and left to get rained on and rot, I assume. I guess that they’re getting greenbux subsidies to operate.
I liked solar until it was dumped all over North carolina. They cleared forest and converted farmland for them, surrounded them with fencing (probably stresses the already stressed wildlife), and are slow to maintain the properties (mowing grass and overgrowth.) Then, there was that phony, Dan McReady’s election campaign, who, I assume, made millions selling solar.
I’m turned off to big-green.
There are many cottage industries as well as simply household economizing on available industrial rejects. For example, you can even match modern low sulfur coal burner with added extra %pellets to some degree (reprogramming the dosage/air intake etc) or eventually even run some models of pellet only burners on such rejects (moisture/size) as well.. Not mentioning other potential uses as in mixing for compost etc.
Depending on your situation I’d not hesitate to contact the plant to get it ASAP in bulk as much as possible. As in deeper crisis these opportunities will vanish very quickly..
That’s good advice and I’d like to see the reject recycled, but it would be a logistical challenge to get it to the house. They’ll probably just dump it in a landfill. After working in a plant for a few months, I’m amazed at how wasteful things can get, since margins and profit are the only motivating factor for operation.
By way of contrast, the old craftsman who taught me bookbinding, liked to say ‘I am a parsimonious man’, and by following his lead in using every scrap and minimising waste have been able to weather a 80-90% drop in business – carrying no debt of course. I can always reach out and find a nice piece of leather or board for a job, with time……
I’ve also spent this summer and will spend the winter making furniture from scrap wood left with me by a builder who gutted a house. Some of it was burnt, if too full of nails, etc, every useful bit has been sorted out and will find a function, made with hand tools only, and the remainder will be burnt and go on the garden as ashes.
And now I’m converting nasty boxy bookcases using scraps and the remnants of high-quality plaster cornice left over from building work here, so I will have a library that looks very 18th century. Total cost: my time and some screws.
But this is not maximum speed and high efficiency: low waste does not work like that. It is a medieval approach. I’m glad my grandfather taught me the basic use of hand tools long ago: I actually love sawing by hand, or slowly sinking a screw-hole.
O rimembranza! I remember how, almost 60 years ago, my uncle Donald showed me not only how to sink a screw hole, but also how to countersink it so the screw ended up flush with the wood. It is quite remarkable how in earlier centuries we had enough quality time to build beautiful furniture by hand, and to build beautiful cathedrals by hand that are still the envy of the world. And with all our modern leisure, we have no time even to love and cherish our own children.
But I agree with Gail: there is no road back; only (perhaps) a road through.
“countersink”
My dad was an expert cabinet maker. I saw him drill and countersink
screws when I was a child. But about the time I was in junior high,
someone invented a power drill that combined the pilot hole, body
drill, and countersink in one piece. I don’t think he ever used a
separate countersink after that.
I tried to find a picture, but oddly, while I still have a set of
these combination drills, they don’t seem to be manufactured now.
If possible, can you post some pictures? Sounds magnificent.
All very good common sense points. One underlying assumption though seems to be that we must continue living the way we are now, with tremendous built-in waste and extravagance. The whole modern lifestyle and easy tech oriented occupation of this planet by humans is not sustainable, neither is the shear number of humans on the planet. Until these two factors are accounted for and addressed no real solutions will be coming to our rescue.
Another important point is that there is no “reverse” gear. We can’t go back to horse and buggy, even if we want to. There aren’t enough horses. There aren’t services that handle manure clearance. We could not do our just in time shipping with horse and buggy.
In fact, there isn’t much we could go back to. We have way too many people in the world to feed them with the old fashioned methods. The seas are getting more and more depleted of fish. The soils are getting more and more depleted of the minerals not included in standard fertilizer mixes. We live so close together that getting infected by microbes others are carrying is a big concern.
We know from past history that a lot of past civilizations collapsed. Or their populations died in epidemics. Or they lost wars to groups that didn’t seem very strong. These are the outcomes we need to be concerned about.
“Another important point is that there is no “reverse” gear. We can’t go back to horse and buggy, even if we want to. There aren’t enough horses. There aren’t services that handle manure clearance. We could not do our just in time shipping with horse and buggy.”
I’ve said it before Gail, but you really should put qualifiers in front of those statements. Perhaps we can’t go in “reverse” gear pre-collapse, but after collapse hits and most of us go the way of the Dodo, anything (that isn’t energy/resource intensive or socially/technologically complex) is possible… for those few who survive, anyway!
Who knows… maybe the world will even get a fantastic fireworks show before the curtains close? 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMhBYdjGArA
Cheers,
-GBV
lovely video, quite charming… thanks…
I meant we can’t go in a controlled way backwards. The economy can collapse, and we can fall back to a much lower level.
We add new layers of complexity, but take away the ladders that get ourselves to the new higher layers.
“Or they lost wars to groups that didn’t seem very strong.”
A prescient remark: Saudi Arabia is in the process of losing just such a war:
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2019/09/30/three-saudi-brigades-annihilated-in-devastating-houthi-offensive-in-saudi-arabia/
The facts seem clear, but the article’s analysis is marred by a lack of historical context. What the Houthi did in Arabia is almost a replay of what Arminius achieved at the Battle of the Teutoberger Wald in 9 AD. Then, three Roman legions; now, three Saudi brigades. Much the same force size.
And the Germans even used a tactic to deprive the legions of “air support”, by fighting in a dense wood where archers were ineffective. Likewise, the Houthi attacked the Jizan and Riyadh airports, immobilising both fighters and helicopters.
The whole attack seems amazingly complex. And I never cease to be amazed by the background of my readers.
It is only be the many useful comments of my readers that I am able to put together the real story. This is really a self-organizing system as well. Many Thanks to all!
Thank you, Gail.
And thank you also for your ability and willingness to synthesise our comments into a broader and compelling picture. One reason, of many, that this has become my favourite discussion forum.
Another, however, is the almost unfailing courtesy of its contributors. An example to me, and one I shall endeavour to emulate.
On the whole, past collapsed societies never ‘went back’: they merely lost the top levels of high complexity, leaving them with the original lower levels – agriculture, herding, fisheries, hunting -which had more or less been undisturbed (although exploited) by the complexity- centres.
There was no need to find new ways of doing things, or to reinstruct people in long-dead technologies.
This is the principal mistake the ‘Go back to the 1850’s’ people make.
What would be the top levels today, and how many levels could we lose before losing it all?
UN, IMF, EU, sure if slow enough.
That is a good point. If we lose the highest level of complexity, what do all of the computer programmers do? What so all of today’s farmers do, with all of their fancy inputs and machines? There are very, very few of us who could make do without the top level. We don’t know the correct skills. We can’t farm with draft animals animals. We can’t do subsistence farming with a stick and seeds.
The Vegans and phony Greenies want to get rid of the last real hands-on farmers in the West, the hill farmers and their flocks. The real building block of civilization.
Although they are now, of course, part of the industrial system, use ff vehicles, etc, they are the very last remnant of the low-energy consumption style of farming, and of farming as a way of life.
If they had to, they could walk their flocks to towns to sell.
As a thought, I wonder how much genetic engineering it would take to get mutton to taste like beef? For another thought, how were humans selected to like this particular kind of meat?
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass:
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
(Thomas Hardy, In the Time of the Breaking of Nations, 1916)
Thank you! I love Thomas Hardy’s books. People just pick up in the middle of the night and go on a walk of many hours to visit someone.
YES! 7.5 billion needs to go to 0.5 billion humans. That will have to be done by Mother Nature. Humans now who ever draws first will be blasted down by 7.5 billion others.
A .5 may be way too much.
Extinction soon is a possibility.
We just about went extinct (easily visually in the genetic record) about 70,000 years ago.
This time will be more challenging.
Gail mentions ‘ladders’ that depend on the very system we have now. And I agree with her that throwing those out to return to a simpler state breaks down intricate interrelationships that forestall chaos for us in the West. But I’m always wondering why we can’t maintain the ladders without the crazy waste and savagery. We would do what it takes to maintain the ladders, including some unpleasant things, but we wouldn’t do them out out of the mindlessness which now prevails. One thing I find problematic is, a) the assumption that the species can’t evolve, and b) that to evolve means we’re all floating up in the clouds like angels. That would be vertical evolution, which I believe is nonsense. But why can’t we evolve laterally–spreading a wider net of benefit at a very low level of improvement? Tantamount to a high volume, low profit business model?
“the species can’t evolve,”
Gregory Clark gave a specific example of evolution which is to say differential selection in the run-up to the industrial revolution. For around 20 generations in the UK, those with at least moderate wealth (which takes a list of skills) had about twice as many children living when they died as the poorest segment of the population. Google Genetically Capitalist.
He made a case at the end of the article that the Chinese had been subjected to less intense but similar selection over a much longer time.
Not long ago using the UK’s big medical database, someone found about 30 genes that are associated with wealth. As I recall, only two of them overlapped into genes for intelligence.
If advanced technology hangs together for another few decades, we will see gene-editing of human babies Directed evolution if you will.
In Britain the poor had their children taken away from them, and placed in menial occupations – never a chance to rise, locked in to the lowest tier of the class structure……
“n Britain the poor ”
I think Clark makes the case that most of the poor children died in the frequent famines. That’s not surprising given the effect of poor nutrition on disease susceptibility.
In any case, they did not show up on probated wills.
Did everyone have a will? Or did some (poor) just live and die?
“Did everyone have a will?”
You might want to read it. http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf page 17
“Wills were not made by a random sample of the population but were instead made by those who had property to bequeath. But the custom of making wills seems to have extended well down the social hierarchy in pre-industrial England. In Suffolk, in the 1620s 39 percent of males who lived past age 16 made a will that was probated.9 Higher income individuals were more likely to leave a will, but there are plenty of wills available for those at the bottom of the hierarchy such as laborers, sailors, shepherds, and husbandmen. “
In England, all men were admonished to make a will. This is the exact text, from the Book of Common Prayer of 1159:
“And if he have not afore disposed his goodes, let him the make his wil. (But men must be oft admonished that they set an order for their temporall goodes and landes,when they be in health.) And also declare his debtes, what hee oweth, and what is owyng unto him, for discharging of his conscience, and quietnes ofhis executours.”
The text is almost identical in my own prayer book, a gift from the school headmaster upon my graduation. “Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light unto my paths.”
Interesting! In any case, this practice left a lot of data on assets and surviving children for Clark to figure out that the population was under serious selection for many generations. He makes the case that the industrial revolution was an outcome of this selection.
I think that we evolve in a certain direction, until we reach a limit in that direction. Then, a civilization collapses, and remnants may go forward in a new direction, based on the resources available. How that new civilization evolves is not up to us, with our wind turbines and solar panels. It involves truly renewable, sustainable technologies.
The more the topic gets studied, the more it looks like every collapse of civilization was due to bad weather.
“Evolve” has a couple of meanings that are worth distinguishing.
Civilization does evolve at the level of memes. New ways are discovered to do things or some ideas just catch on better. Humans have long needed sharp edges, and stone, bronze, and iron define ages.
Humans evolve by natural selection. See Clark.
Yes, Soviet collapsed because of a bad vodka growing season.
Good point. But compared to say Rome, The area of the USSR didn’t suffer a huge population drop. Areas did split off.
DJ; Venezuela too. Bad weather, not corrupt and incompetent socialist government seeking to enrich themselves at the detriment of everybody else.
It’s funny how when the state becomes the people, collapse is imminent. The capitalist genes inside us abhors the disgusting mediocrity of letting soulless humans run the show.
I am now visiting Chicago for a few days. I was amazed by the how the public library looks now. It now has huge sculptures on top that look like they are from a fantasy novel. The big department stores have all disappeared. In their place are all the little stores a person sees in malls everywhere. There are an incredible number of homeless in the downtown area.
It looks like only the city has money, and it is spending the money on bizarre sculptures.
I can see evolution evolving on its own. And most certainly not dependent or not dependent on wind turbines and solar panels. People and groups will do what they do. People and groups learn and change in mysterious ways. They also might not change in any desirable way. We might better be guided by faith. I find it too ambitious to think about anything but the present and near term future…the next five years, let’s say. That can involve me in every way. It’s also likely that we have more control over the present, and close-by than events years hence and distant.
I guess we all are a little fatigued from the old ways of being useful members of BAU buying shit we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like. It’s probably why we are here sharing ideas and heckling each other – for the most part. Stuff is a bit “meh”.
It just seems so fake, so devoid of content and any meaning whatsoever. However for the ‘symbol’ minded people, in the words of George Carlin, that’s all they got. The eternal mysteries of the universe and existence itself is not compelling, so they continue on their merry way towards serfdom and total and utter irrelevance.
Richard Dawkins discusses “vertical” evolution in his “Climbing Mount Improbable”, another treasure in my library. By which he means the evolution of more complexity better adapted for survival: eyes, for instance. But it is not linear: the octopus eye is far better than the human eye. (Maybe after the fifth day God became a little forgetful?)
He also discusses in many places “horizontal” evolution; that is, radiation into different environments. Which of course is what Darwin observed in the Galapagos Islands, and which started the whole modern version of the theory.
An industrial case study of radiation is the spread of personal automotive transport, which adapted quite well to local conditions (as I have seen in five continents), and which in my view provides an insurmountable obstacle to the effective spread of electric vehicles.
The same reasoning could be had with regards to railroad. The railroad network made the auto impossible to spread. Well, perhaps, not after all.
Kowalainen, before the interstate highways, the auto was useful only for short journeys. Its big competitor was the streetcars. Greater Los Angeles alone had over 1500 miles of track.
But the auto companies (aided and abetted by corrupt politicians) systematically destroyed it all. Ably assisted by the Automobile Club of Southern California, which through most of the 1930s lobbied for the demolition of the streetcar lines.
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Tide, wave, and current can provide reliable energy. Geothermic too.
Tide and wave are expensive and short lived, from what I have seen. Machines operating in salt water don’t last very long.
Also, electricity cannot be stored except at a fairly high cost (using batteries or whatever). It becomes too expensive to make use of intermittent electricity.
Geothermal is better. It can provide continuous heat or electricity. I have even heard of one that could be ramped up and down. The ideal sites are near active volcanoes. There needs to a continuous source of the heat, or after a few years, the benefit goes away.
Geothermal has been around for quite a while, but has never grown very large. I don’t think that tide and wave have ever gotten beyond the experimental stage.
All of these electricity types need electric transmission lines to where they can be used. If the cost is not sufficiently low, customers cannot afford them. Expensive electricity is basically unusable. Citizens cannot afford goods made with its output.
Physics comment: most geothermal energy is generated by radioactive decay. The elements in question have half lives measured in billions of years, so from our time perspective the resource is inexhaustible. Unfortunately, it is available only in localised, scattered spots on the Earth’s crust, so will indeed have the energy transmission problems you mention.
Extracting the energy from hot springs, as the Romans did and the Japanese do, is essentially non polluting. But digging wells and running pipes down them does generate substantial pollution, not just CO2 but some nasty sulphur compounds also.
Good points! I had an opportunity to visit the big geothermal installation on the Big Island in Hawaii a few years ago. It is located at quite a distance from the more heavily populated areas of the island, so a lot of long distance transmission is required. There is indeed a lot of digging involved, and the process involves boiling water to get steam. It has much in common with many fossil fuel generating techniques.
The Puna Geothermal Venture on the Big Island of Hawaii was generating 40 MW before the 2018 eruption closed and covered part of it. The Big Island uses about 100 MW. Oahu Island, where most people in Hawaii reside, uses about 2 to 2.5 GW. Even on active volcanoes, the resource is limited. There might be about 100 MW available on the whole of the Kilauea East Rift Zone, enough for the present population of the Big Island. The risks to infrastructure are obvious.
This article makes some valid points, but does not address many other considerations, and so gets the big picture wrong. For a more balanced point of view, read “Our Renewable Future” by Heinberg and Fridley, which is based on a far more thorough survey of the scientific literature.
Given Tverberg’s peak oil background, it is astounding that she doesn’t point out that a new economy, based on renewable energy is coming, whether we plan for it or not, simply because the era of cheap fossil fules is coming to an end. The Green New Deal will simply make the transition, and the outcome, far more palatable: If we just try “to maintain existing consumption patterns…we will eventually reap the worst of all possible outcomes – climate chaos, a gutted economy, and no continuing wherewithall to build a bridge to a renewable energy future” (p. 193).
Part of a GND will be a great deal of research on better technologies and alternatives for energy storage to handle the intermittency of wind and solar. And if the roadblocks prove to be too formidable, then we’ll just need to bear down harder on the economic contraction that will happen in any case: “If energy usage in the United States could be scaled by significantly (70% to 90%) then a reliable all-renewable energy regime – based more on hydro, goeothermal, and biomass, but with solar and wind insituations where intermittency is not a problem – becomes much easier to envision and cheaper to engineer” (p.186).
Heinberg and Fridley also point out that “industrial societies will need to keep using fossil fuels for some applications until the very final stages of the energy transition, and possible beyond, for non-energy purposes” (p. 192), that is, for critical needs in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, etc., where viable substitutes have not been found. However, the volume of such residual fossil fuel usage will be very low compared to today, with minimal impacts, and will match costs that are far higher than today as new supplies become every more inaccessible and difficult to extract, process, and distribute.
This is a far more balanced view of not just the challenges facing a Green New Deal, but also some of the options. And we can expect substantial progress on some of the newer technologies.
You say, “Renewable energy is coming, whether we plan for it or not.” This is not true. The types of energy that are commonly called “renewable” are simply extensions of the fossil fuel economy. There is little likelihood that that they can continue for long after the fossil fuel economy.
Richard Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute get donations by promising hopeful solutions, whether those solutions are really viable or not. In fact, people involved with selling solar panels some of the supporters of the site.
It is possible that some people who are now living as hunter-gatherers will continue in the paths of their parents. Perhaps there will be some others who can adapt. But I really doubt that solar panels and wind turbines will play a major role.
Heinberg and Fridley haven’t figured out that fossil fuels are leaving us through low prices. However badly we may need them, we don’t have an option of keeping them. The situation we are facing is overshoot and collapse. Peak oilers came up with the idea that a whole new phenomenon of Peak Oil could come along. We could get oil and other fossil fuels out indefinitely, thanks to rising prices. This is complete nonsense! The problem we encounter is falling prices!
Read some of my recent articles. Collapse is very common. Producers go bankrupt because of low prices. We can expect worse financial crises than in 2008.
By the way, unlike the Post Carbon Institute, I don’t solicit or accept donations. My site is entirely free.
And this is one of the many reasons your work is so credible. In almost all aspects of human life, simply following the money (or its equivalent) will reveal the forces really involved. Just as in the financial/investment world, so it is with so-called renewable energy and many causes of the day — those talking the loudest tend to be “talking their books.”
“What makes all doctrines plain and clear?—
About two hundred pounds a year.
And that which was prov’d true before
Prove false again? Two hundred more.”
(Samuel Butler, Hudibras)
For any other gold bugs out there, that was
fifty troy ounces, or USD 75,000. At least,
as of today. Who knows about tomorrow?
Good on you, Gail
Let’s listen to what George Carlin and Alan Watts have to say about hope.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/e1/8a/c8e18a7cf997046c6ed9eb4b72bf9d1c.jpg
https://www.mkwtees.com/pub/media/catalog/product/cache/image/700×560/e9c3970ab036de70892d86c6d221abfe/f/u/funny_hopeamazonf.jpg
https://media.makeameme.org/created/brace-yourself-socialist.jpg
This is a ridiculous hit job masquerading as an article, I don’t know where to start? Let’s just identify a couple problems, first the article says electricity use in winter is higher then summer because of heating and lightingexcept it isn’t because most heat is currently fossil fuel based and it completely ignores that most electricity is used during the day when business and industry are consuming, which bodes well for solar. Second the author says that wind production varries greatly by season and year to year and shows a graph that seems to agree. Unless you read the graph. For sure wind power varries by season but it does so predictably and drops off in the summer most when solar panels are producing most. And it does not change year to year at all, if you look at the graph you will see that the variation year to year is a steady increase in generation year after year that is very likely due to increased construction. Last but not only by any stretch the author says maintenance is very difficult on wind turbines so they will break a lot, simply they don’t, but does he really believe we don’t know how complex neuclear, Gas, and coal plants are? Do they not need maintenance, do they not break? And that maintenance means jobs for highly skilled workers, sounds like a win win to me.
You don’t do a very careful job of reading what I write.
At the beginning of my article, I am talking about total energy. This includes both electricity and other types of energy, such as natural gas used for heating and gasoline used for transportation. Near the poles, there is a need for more energy for heating and lighting during winter than during the summer months. The problem when a person tries to use devices to capture renewable energy is that by the time you have installed enough devices to provide for the higher level of heating and lighting needed in winter, these devices produce way too much for summer. There is no way to store the excess from summer to winter.
I agree that my solar energy graph simply shows the effect of adding more solar panels. What I am talking about is the relative amount between summer and winter. Many places need more in winter than summer. Solar panels do the opposite. Even in places that use a lot of air conditioning, solar panels give way too much in summer, compared to winter, relative to what is needed.
I didn’t talk about how demand is distributed within each 24 hour period, because I assumed that 3-day batteries would fix this problem. Solar panels tend to give too much in the early morning hours, and not enough when people are getting home from work in the evening. They don’t work without batteries or some other approach.
I can’t seem to agree with John Michael Greer and his analysis on Peak Oil. I tend to agree with Gail’s take on PO. JMG, tends to think that things will be just fine as we progress on to harder to extract oil.
https://www.ecosophia.net/waiting-for-the-next-panic/
Thanks for the link. JMG doesn’t really discuss my view among those in the past. I am sort of from the apocalyptic view, but coming from a financial point of view, not a climate point of view. Financial problems could greatly reduce international trade, very quickly.
If JMG understood this, he might change his mind.
JMG is a English major, with some crazy past views
Good writer- but be very cautious.
Thank you for another excellent post, Gail.
JMG seems to think that there will always be some sort of financial fix cobbled together, over the medium-term, and he also over-estimates supplies of viable tight-oil.
He calls anything else ‘catastrophic and apocalyptic’ thinking, which is not quite fair.
Pingback: Understanding Why the Green New Deal Won’t Really Work – Olduvai.ca
Maybe this has been discussed here previously, but one thing to watch is at what point is the overbuilding occurring. There maybe even more overbuilding going on than is apparent.
Take a PV Solar Farm: A really small one. It has 2 500kva generators. So to feed this total of 1 mva of alternating current output, how much direct current from the Solar PV modules are you going to design in?
Back before the Chinese overbuilt the market and the price on PV modules dropped, you might have seen a 1.1/1 DC/to AC ratio. You might still see this ratio where other factors (such as a roof top location, or expensive land) restrict how many PV modules (our DC inputs) can be installed.
But with the price of pv modules collapsing, but the cost of the inverters staying somewhat fixed, the inverters have become the more expensive part of the equation. So now the ration is often as much 1.4/1 DC input to AC output. So what you will see with a farms AC output is that it will drop during low irradiance months (winter) and climb up during Spring. But at a certain point, the inverters maximum output in AC will be met, and they will start “clipping” the output.
So by oversupplying DC and clipping, to some degree, you can regularize the AC output of a solar pv system. And if you want to make sure you get the most out of your expensive inverters, this is what you do. But it can mask a lot of overbuilding that goes on at the system level.
Interesting!
March and April tend to be very low demand months because neither heating or cooling is needed. Weekends when businesses are closed tend to be particularly low. Adding more solar then is rarely helpful. In summer, it might be helpful, if there hasn’t been an attempt to build up to the level needed for winter. But lower in winter is not helpful most places.
And exactly what is the cost drivers of these inverters one might ask.
1. The engineering effort to develop them.
2. The specialized Gallium Arsenide semiconductor devices.
“But it can cost about $5,000 to make a wafer of gallium arsenide 8 inches in diameter, versus $5 for a silicon wafer, according to Aneesh Nainani, who teaches semiconductor manufacturing at Stanford.”
https://www.futurity.org/gallium-arsenide-solar-cells-885992/
Prof. Tad Patzek has written a series of 7 articles on the “New Green Deal”, starting with http://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-new-green-revolution-aka-grand.html . Most important for me was, that there will be enough copper: http://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/2019/07/green-new-deal-v-constraints-delusions.html
Another important point was, that the “Green New Deal” itself would require very large amounts of energy – as the above article has already mentioned to some extend.
As far as agriculture and thus food production, as well as “climate change” are concerned, there are proven, effective, energy saving and resource saving solutions. Google for example with “Elaine Ingham soil food web “, “David Montgomery soil”, “Gabe Brown”, “David Johnson soil”, “Singing Frogs Farm” and “rain for climate” to find some ideas and examples. By learning to use this principles and improve the soils, biomass production in general an be increased too.
the original “new deal” was only made possible by colossal inputs of virtually free energy
unfortunately it has become part of popular hysteria that chanting ”new deal” will make it happen again
it won’t because the cheap energy that made it happen 85 years ago is no longer available’ And while Roosevelt may have had a dark side—he wasnt an out and out crook like the present incumbent
Another favourite which i saw today—we need another “Pearl Harbour”—where on earth do these fantasies come from?
The “new Pearl Harbor” line was taken from a paper published by a neo-conservative policy group called “Project for a New American Century”: Dick Cheney, Eliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush… the usual suspects.
And they did get their new Pearl Harbor, didn’t they?
I haven’t had a chance to look at Tad Patzek’s work yet, but my guess is that a big thing he misses with respect to supply is the role price plays. Also, how well the world economy is working matters. There is indeed a lot of many materials available, but if recession cuts back demand, not much will be extracted.
Part of the problem is the way materials are mixed together, both in extraction and usage. If I remember correctly, nickel is used both in batteries and in stainless steel, but stainless steel uses a whole lot more. Higher demand for nickel in batteries doesn’t necessarily translate to more mining. The price tends more to follow the general demand pattern. How many goods buying goods using stainless steel are there?
How much did the world’s economies change between 1938 and 1948? What if all that effort had be directed toward modernization without blowing up most of Europe and Asia and killing 10s of millions of people? If we are to believe climate scientist and treat climate change the same way we fought the Axis powers it can be done.
There are millions of acres of land in the southwest that can be covered with solar panels. My neighbor in north Florida was offered four million dollars for 500 acres of his farm land to build a solar farm. He wanted five million so the power company bought a farm 15 miles away. At this moment utilities workers are putting in the power lines that run a quarter mile from my home from there to the major transmission lines another mile from my home.
There are millions of open acres in the northwest that can be dotted with wind turbines. My sister’s in laws in Colorado have 14,000 acres of range land that hardly supported 200 head of cattle. Now all it sports are a few dozen pronghorn antelopes. The wind blows continuously.
Are going to do any of this? Not until we have a Pearl Harbor event and probably not then but it is not if but when. The good times will grind to a halt. Personally I plan on having enough solar capacity to power my home and a stockpile of supplies before the next election.
if you’d been reading this blog for very long, you’d conclude that wind and solar PV are not going to replace what the consumption of FF has been providing for our lifestyles.
“Personally I plan on having enough solar capacity to power my home ”
How much battery?
Have you read the article at all?
Lets imagine your WWII parallel of effort is undertaken, you still have to “overbuild” all the alt. energy systems as Gail mentioned, by factor of ~3-6x depending on other vectors in terms of seasonality and integration into the grid, assuming current level of overall living standards.
Besides, during WWII the US was manufacturing giant, not so much these days..
The people(skills), factories, are no longer there. Not mentioning the social. demographic/ethnic, political, profiles are very different as well.
Your Next (New) Pearl Harbor event already happened ~18yrs ago, and the meager spoils out of it have been eaten out already.
What is more likely in the future is process of Balkanization for the US, this was mentioned two or three articles previously. Simply, regions of the US retain greater self governance over others, also including energy. This would likely rhyme with existing military installations and coal, natgas infrastructure, existing rail or waterports etc.
But obviously at fraction of today’s living standards level, actually beneficial in some sense.
ps 14,000? acres not able to support 200head of cattle is simply a question of past mismanagement (long term – aggregate).. “you” should start doing something about it.. it’s not that hard..
“ps 14,000? acres not able to support 200head of cattle is simply a question of past mismanagement (long term – aggregate).. “you” should start doing something about it.. it’s not that hard..”
I was stating that the land is too poor now to support more so placing thousands of wind turbines there would not cover up productive land. Until the 70’s is was, it had a creek flowing through it. Then the rain patterns changed and it got too dry to grow grass so they had to drill wells to irrigate hay fields. The added expense made ranching unprofitable. Their oil well does produce 2 barrels a day so that helps a little.
I appreciate the additional details, but still the pasture management even with lower moisture situation could be altered, longer resting periods for the indiv pasture plots etc..
In mediaeval Europe, the rule of thumb was two acres per cow. So 14000 acres could support 7000 cows. Well, if water is the problem, couldn’t somebody dig a canal? Sucking water up from below ground is a stupid idea: expensive and unsustainable, because it depletes the water table. And if that is infeasible, goats can be raised with a lot less water.
Also, goat ranching does not need resting periods: they evolved to graze only what the plants can safely lose.
Capitalism depends on eternal economic growth, so even without WW2, we’d have continued stripping Mother Earth bare of her materials. The end would have been postponed, that’s all.
In the beginning God invented entropy, so that we create some pollution whatever we do, and recycling more than 40% to 60% of physical materials is not possible. And eventually we run out of resources or else they get too scarce and expensive to extract.
I think entropy has been factored into the universe deliberately, so that we get a bit of creative destruction. That leads to diversity, because civilisations cannot persist for too long. And Mr God enjoys a bit of drama and has fun watching the occasional disasters and tragedies befalling us, in addition to the wars etc. that our human nature makes us prone to. If everything was sweetness and light for eternity, that would be a bit boring. Mr God has a longer timescale than us, so he’d get bored if things weren’t getting smashed up every century or two. According to some religions and philosophies, we are all just God experiencing himself subjectively, so any harm to us is just harm that He is doing to Himself. It’s therefore of no consequence, and particularly not on a timescale of eternity.
“AS flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport. (King Lear, Act IV scene 1)
“AS flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport. (King Lear, Act IV scene 1)
*LIKE*
It is not capitalism that is the problem, it is the government corporate complex that stipulates eternal growth through the hysteria of building social and economic behemoths with its social “engineering” projects. It is a cancer for Gaia. It deprives her of biodiversity and intellectual diversity. It is a conformist sect of eternal growth. Be alike, think alike, do alike. Dissenters will be banished and purged.
Indeed, it’s free markets and private property is essential for the process of evolution of semi-conscious apes, we evolve fastest in a collaborative competitive process. The soulless consumerism and brutality of the state and corporate interests must, and will go the way of the dodo, either voluntary or forced down the collectivists throats by the righteous hands of the governing principles of Gaia itself with no central ruler or authority. It is the system itself which is the supreme ruler of the process, not any a insignificant subsystem which seeks to dominate the surroundings and ecosystem.
When the Greta process finishes, expect deep cuts in FF production to curb the consumerism and mass hysteria. Nerds and tech runs this show now. If this does not happen voluntarily expect more drone strikes out of nowhere directed towards the overspecialized subsystems. It is about time to throttle back the madness of the government corporate complex.
Yes, it does seem that current ways of living and lifestyles will not be possible without fossil fuels. It seems equally obvious that current ways of living and lifestyles will not be possible with fossil fuels.
A few graphs showing the annual fossil and renewable energy consumption in the Bahamas, Paradise CA or Houston TX might lead to some interesting insights. As might a longitudinal study of the household energy consumption of farmers and former farmers in the Midwest.
Keep up the interesting work Gail!
that must be some good stuff you’re smoking there, Bentley.
How do you consume renewable energy as opposed to fossil? Paint your wires green?
“The Reserve Bank of Australia could be forced into unconventional policy measures such as money printing to save the economy from stagnation if its latest round of interest rates cuts fail to stimulate growth, economists have warned.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/03/economists-warn-reserve-bank-could-be-forced-to-print-money-if-rate-cuts-fail-to-deliver
“Data released by [Australia’s] Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries on Thursday showed total sales for September skidded nearly 7% to 88,181 vehicles from a year earlier. For January-September were down about 8% from the same period in 2018.
“The weak data will disappoint the Reserve Bank of Australia…”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-australia-economy-salesfigures/australian-car-sales-slump-again-in-september-as-banks-tighten-lending-idUKKBN1WI0DU
“One of the engines that drove a global economic recovery after the last two downdrafts in America – the relatively shallow one in 2001 and the catastrophe that began in 2007 – was China. As the financial crisis escalated, Beijing opened a floodgate of credit and cut interest rates, which stoked demand for everything from Australian coal to German cars.
“We’re unlikely to see anything like that this time…”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-03/china-isn-t-willing-or-able-to-pull-global-economy-from-recession
“Once a poster child for China’s regional banks, Bank of Jinzhou became the centre of storm in the country’s banking industry, undermining confidence in the sector in the process. Beijing came swiftly to the rescue, with the asset management arm of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China saying at the end of July it would spend up to 3 billion yuan (US$419 million) to recapitalise the lender…
“But it appears the state funds are not enough for the troubled lender.”
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3031389/saga-chinas-bank-jinzhou-raises-questions-about-health
“The construction sector activity in the UK continued to deteriorate last month, the latest survey report from Markit Economics showed this Wednesday. The final Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) came in at 43.3 in September, down sharply from 45.0 recorded in August…”
https://www.fxstreet.com/news/uk-construction-pmi-unexpectedly-drops-to-433-in-sept-gbp-usd-keeps-the-red-201910020833
“German private sector activity shrank for the first time in 6-1/2 years in September as a manufacturing recession deepened unexpectedly and growth in the service sector lost momentum, a survey showed on Monday.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-economy-pmi/german-private-sector-shrinks-in-sept-for-first-time-in-over-six-years-pmi-idUSKBN1W80IX
“Euro zone business growth stalled in September as an ongoing contraction in manufacturing activity is increasingly affecting the services industry, according to a survey which showed little chance of an improvement this month.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eurozone-economy-pmi/euro-zone-business-growth-stalled-in-september-pmi-idUSKBN1WI0OL
“The World Trade Organization gave President Donald Trump the go-ahead to impose tariffs on as much as $7.5 billion worth of European exports annually in retaliation for illegal government aid to Airbus SE.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-02/u-s-wins-7-5-bln-sanctions-against-eu-in-wto-aircraft-fight
I blame Boris, the original sin…… 🙂
Germany really is having problems. I wonder how Deutsche Bank will do.
I wonder how much of it has to do with having Europe’s most expensive electricity (thanks, solar!). Something like 30-35c/kWh.
Deutsche Bank is a zombie. And, in the best horror movie tradition, it will survive by turning other banks into zombies. A classic collapse cascade.
“Markets hate uncertainty. It’s a well-worn truism that is trotted out every time the pound plunges on the latest Brexit twist or stocks swoon on another Twitter tirade from Donald Trump.
“But one index empirically shows that businesses and investors are facing a level of uncertainty never seen before and that could be hurting the world economy.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/10/02/global-uncertainty-has-surged-record-high-killing-growth/
“U.S. equity markets on Wednesday were ensnared in a two-day tailspin that has pushed the benchmark indexes to one of the worst starts to a quarter since the 2008-09 financial crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -1.86%, was down more than 500 points, or 1.9%, at 26,078, with a two-session skid of more than 3%, representing the worst start to a quarter since the last three months of 2008.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-sp-500-on-track-for-worst-start-to-a-quarter-since-2008-financial-crisis-as-recession-fears-accelerate-2019-10-02
“Global stocks sold off heavily on Wednesday after poor US jobs data compounded a string of weak manufacturing reports and geopolitical concerns, a pile-up of risks that sets the stage for a rocky fourth quarter.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/markets/global-stocks-sell-off-as-economic-fears-mount-1.4037960
“As domestic oil and gas production grows and becomes increasingly important to the U.S. economy, the fortunes of the industry increasingly have macroeconomic as well as microeconomic implications.
“The last slump in oil and gas drilling contributed to the mid-cycle economic slowdown in 2015/16, which helped fuel the political discontent that resulted in the election of populist President Donald Trump to the White House.
“Now the pattern risks being repeated as oil and gas companies cut back on new well drilling and completions in response to lower oil prices, with ripples felt throughout the entire supply chain.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-oil-kemp/column-us-oil-drilling-slowdown-hits-wider-economy-idUKKBN1WH1WK
“Murray Energy Corp., the U.S. coal giant that had pressed the Trump administration for help averting bankruptcy, may be headed toward default.
“The largest closely held coal miner in America failed to make multiple payments to lenders this week, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-02/murray-energy-skips-debt-payment-and-considers-strategic-options
We’re going to need a LOT of copper and aluminum for those billions of additional electric motors and wiring, and steel for all the wind turbine towers. Chile will be the new Saudi Arabia.
The New Deal proponents must have missed how locals react to any proposals to construct virtually any new dam outside China, where they disappear you if you try and organize any opposition to the Communist Party. In some US states, they are tearing them down to make the rivers more ‘natural’. They will get naturally dead from starvation if the electric grid fails for any reason for more than a month.
The financial system can fail too. Without functioning banks, nothing much happens in any highly industrialized country.
Great post about an all renewable energy system.
But was it at all about GND? Where would the money come from? Even if printed huge amount of resources diverted. How many years (months?) of replacing 3% energy before elected leaders lose power. International competivity for a GND country.
There were a lot of topics I wasn’t able to cover. These are some of them.
This article is biased and presents a straw man idea of a zero carbon economy. Is the author receiving money from the petroleum industry, or does he have a idealistic commitment to a fossil fuel driven economy?
Yes a zero carbon economy is not that simple, but if we really want it to happen (and we have no choice) there are workarounds for all of the problems. No mention of changes in consumption patterns here, nor smart grids, smart appliances, carbon neutral synthetic fuel production in times of renewable energy surplus, or international electricity grids to balance out fluctuations in renewable output. For one example of how this could totally work simar to a green new deal, read the Zero Carbon Britain 2030 report:
https://www.cat.org.uk/info-resources/zero-carbon-britain/research-reports/zero-carbon-rethinking-the-future/
I expected some of this kind of response. We would need transmission lines from north of the equator to south of the equator. We would need the size of the south’s electricity production to ramp up hugely, and they would need to be willing and able to send the huge amount they produce to those in the northern hemisphere.
Smart grids and smart appliances are for smoothing out time-of-day fluctuations. Dishes can be washed while people are sleeping, for example. But we have not had much success in getting people to stop eating dinner after they get home from work, in the evening. They are hungry then. If they are using solar power, the sun is going down, so energy supplies are low. We need to train people to gorge themselves in the 10 am to noon hours, and starve themselves later. Also, winter hibernation would be a good skill.
People have got to binge Netflix in June and abstain November through March.
Just because someone doesn’t tell the fairy tale you;d like to hear doesn’t mean they are biased; and the suggestion that Gail is corrupt and in the pocket of the oil industry is simply ridiculous – some people do have a thing called integrity, you know.
Actually, everyone’s biased and everyone’s supported by the oil industry, all seven and a half billion of us give or take a few hunter gatherers.
Richard’s apparent total cluelessness about reality and his commitment to the Climate Hysteria Complex make one wonder whether he is in the pay of the Davos elite, or does he simply have an idealistic commitment to neofeudalism and genocide?
> “the transition to such an economy can be expected to take 150 years, based on the speed of the transition since 1985.”
Why did you pick 1985 as the starting point from which you tried to deduce the rate of change?? The transition is *non-linear*!!!
The fossil fuel industry is indirectly subsidized to the tune of $5.2 trillion a year.
An escalating carbon fee and dividend needs to be adopted, and the fossil fuel industry needs to be nationalised, gutted and ultimately euthanized.
The data only goes back to 1985. I am not aware of a source where I can get consistent world electricity production back farther than that.
Also, if you look at the chart, in recent years, clearly Japan’s electricity consumption as a % of the total is flat. But so is that of the US and Europe (for a shorter period). If we are looking at a world that operates in many pieces separately, it is only the developing world that is shifting to electricity.
94% of that widely disseminated $5.2 trillion p/a figure consists of “post tax-subsidies”, ie externalities or the alleged financial cost of damage to the environment caused by our use of fossil fuels – air and water pollution, climate change etc. It is not money that is simply given to the fossil fuel industry.
But of course it is not just fossil fuels that are damaging to the environment – it is the entire human modus operandi of leveraging them to feed an ever expanding global population and convert raw materials into goods and services at an ever greater rate year after year.
“Energy companies? Well, if we don’t want the companies (or global corporations in general), and the waste produced by the energy, resources and manufacturing associated with fossil fuel systems then all we need to do is stop consuming,” suggests David Korowicz, with tongue firmly in cheek.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-03-25/anger-complicity-in-a-time-of-limits/
Fossil fuels provide tax payments far in excess of whatever subsidies they receive. In some countries they literally support millions of people directly. And as has already been explained to you, the whole modern way of life is dependent on hydrocarbons. Euthanizing their use means euthanizing most of the people on the planet.
Another problem is how to keep the purchasing power for such costly green electricity: the low interest rate policy does not solve the problem of the declining purchasing power. The declining real income (the wages minus loan repayments and inetersts) starts to depress the consumption and the need for new electricity generation. This is also one of the reasons of the current economic slowdown. If the population ages, the problem is even bigger and the probability that the loans can not be repaid goes up and up. The collapse of the system is thus inevitable.
Everywhere one sees creeping impoverishment of the bulk of the population, the ‘consumers’ who are meant to carry everything.
For instance in Spain, the government is now more or less admitting that adequate state pensions are not going to be possible in the near future, and that property owners should be able to draw down home equity in an official state scheme in order to survive – not good at all!
These people will not be able to buy expensive energy…….
An excellent solution, if you are a modern politician. Let the older generation convert their home equity into income. They will then die penniless, and leave their children with nothing. Which allows us to ignore the problem for about one generation.
In other words, kick the can down the road. And when we run out of road? No problem: we (the politicians) will have retired to our gated communities on huge index linked pensions that are shielded from reality.
In my more pessimistic moments, I think that the key to our predicament is our insane and despicable notion that we can steal from the future to enrich the present. Until the Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return. (Rudyard Kipling, 1919)
I think the problem of massive overbuilding of renewables isn’t as bad as you think. Power in excess of the current need can be fed to plants electrolyzing water to make hydrogen. The hydrogen can be stored as backup fuel, or fed to F/T plants to make hydrocarbons.
The problem is the scale of the excess generation capacity: that way the energy production consumes too much resources, so, in fact, it reduces the demand for energy itself. The energy production must not occupy too much physical space. It must be relatively compact in its requirements for space.
I agree with you MG! We cannot fill up all of our agricultural land with solar panels and wind turbines.
” cannot fill up all”
That is certainly true. Somewhere I have seen a graphic illustrating the area required for SBSP rectennas. It was a great deal smaller than the area needed for conventional PV and they could be placed over farmland.
You are absolutely right, it can be done. It appeared in Scientific American and was done by a retired civil engineer for a cost of about $500K plus what appear to be contributions from various companies. It looks pretty straightforward, don’t you think?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hydrogen-house/
Dennis L.
Quote from that link: “Although the device cost $500,000 to construct, and it is unlikely it will ever pay off financially (even with today’s skyrocketing oil and gas prices), the civil engineer says it is priceless in terms of what it does buy: freedom from ever paying another heating or electric bill…”
That has to be one of the dumbest statements I’ve seen all week. So it has a negative return in monetary terms and probably in energy terms as well, but it’s “priceless”…pretzel logic on display.
If he’s storing hydrogen in his house, no wonder it was so expensive. Do you have any idea what a pain (read: expensive) hydrogen is to handle and store?
Sorry for this off topic posting. It seemed like the kind of subject that comes up in discussions now and then.
Thanks; puts a pretty harsh light on a, shall we say slimy, side of Scandinavia. Similar problems, with considerable overlap in the sources of capital responsible, occur in British Columbia. https://therevelator.org/british-columbia-wild-salmon/ Some humans sure seem to have a propensity for selfish behavior.
Would it be fair to say that your bottom line on this Gail is, essentially, ‘no way, no how’? In which case aren’t you just saying that it isn’t possible to stop us from killing ourselves as we drive the climate and ecosystem into energetic states that result in our population collapsing (or even adding humans to the million or so species expected to go extinct in the next century)?
I think the population collapses first. The climate and ecosystem fixes itself, in its own timeframe. Without human interference, it will do whatever it does. Predecessors to humans lived through ice ages, so some people may live through whatever climate change occurs.
“” is the most important word.
GAIL, HOW DARE YOU!
YOU HAVE STOLEN MY DREAMS AND MY CHILDHOOD WITH YOUR EMPTY WORDS.
I like your last name.
I’ve said similar things in other places, trying to be funny, but people have tended to believe I was serious.
Looks like you’re learning from Trump with that last name for Greta. I wonder if that will catch on and everyone in an argument will make up a denigrating name for the other person. That way collectively we can incorporate 3rd grade tactics into our discussions.
Duncan has been referring to Trump as “Cheeto Jesus” for the past three years and I can’t recall you ever raising any objections. So I ask you quite sincerely and earnestly, do you object to people making up denigrating names period, or only when they make up names for people whose views you agree with?
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Us4hi3Mf8CsU/
https://i.redd.it/zu54gk3xh7p31.jpg
My only quibble would be that my research/reading leads me to believe that Nickel-iron batteries will outlast solar panels; maybe 2-3 cycles?
But my focus has been on a remote location low-tech shack with a small fridge and washing machine as the only 240 volt items. Solves my small problems, not the worlds intractable ones.
Yep, often the situation on Hawaiian Islands.
Remote locations, with solar panels as an energy solution.
Often for minor refrigeration and minimal lighting.
I lived a year in Micronesia without electricity or running water.
After a few months, you don’t notice.
Of course, this is pretty light usage. China’s manufacturing is not done with solar panels plus backup batteries.
Yep, one needs to be light and minimal.
It actually frees you.
I wonder if we would at all have solar panels and batteries if we all lived in shacks with minimal electricity or none, “light and minimal”.
I’ve been trying to learn more about energy use in industry and one of the ideas I’ve been latching onto is that world supremacy (in the sense of which nation(s) is/are the predominant economic and military presence(s)) is going to depend on still having *some* well-protected and dispatchable supply of fossil fuel. Why? You need to be able to refine/smelt metals and form them into large pieces. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program for how seriously the US took this idea, having learned the lesson from how the victors of WWII divided up the spoils.
This is a very good and educational analysis, but I am unsure whether you are wed to the notion that fossil fuels, particularly oil, is a fixed, depleting resource. I argue that minerals should not be thought of differently from ordinary goods–and that in business/economic terms, renewables are more ‘depletable’ than oil, gas, etc. The theory of ‘resourceship’ is here: https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2012/Bradleyresourceship.html
“Moving to electric vehicles (EVs) for private passenger autos is not likely to be as helpful as many people hope.
One issue is that it is possible to mandate the use of EVs, but if the automobiles cost more than citizens can afford, many citizens will simply stop buying cars at all.”
Today, I happened to be servicing a customers’ 2012 Chevy Volt. The original price tag on that vehicle was $47,000 which included a $7,000 government rebate. He said he bought it from a dealer in Texas who had the car on the lot unsold for 2 yrs. He purchased it for $27,000 and last year he had to have all his batteries replaced because apparently the Texas car dealer did not maintain the batteries which caused them to prematurely fail.
He said it was covered under warranty, almost barely as his warranty was about to expire. If it was out of warranty it would have cost him around $8,000 to have all his batteries replaced. The new Tesla’s are in the $50-60K range and the new Audi EV is an $80,000+ vehicle. Porsche has a new EV in the works which will be pricey as well.
EV’s for the most part are not priced for the average consumer.
The depreciation will kill a person. If you buy the car new to impress neighbors, you will have a difficult time getting reasonable trade-in value for the car.
And a lot of the depreciation is related to the batteries. Were they maintained properly? How many charge cycles are on those batteries etc? Because have to drop thousands on new batteries is not something a 2nd or 3rd customer is willing to do after buying the vehicle.
Gas powered vehicles are much easier and less expensive to maintain vs the EV counterparts. OTOH, this customer is a banker so he has the money to spend and told me he would never buy another gas powered car which I found odd that two gas powered cars were in his garage.
I’m afraid you are mixing up together several price levels.
Expensive upper segment/luxury EVs indeed start at ~$60-80K,
while city car econoboxes start at ~$20K, and mid sized / compact SUVs at ~$30K..
In addition as mentioned few days ago the Chines now also come with “larger” sized segment cars but fitted with citycar performance only, e.g. their Buick station wagon, no real highway speed nor range available because of snail <<100kW drive train components and smallish battery <<40kWh. This silly pretending trend might be mid term successful as it fits human nature..
There is also the issue of true mass production, which doesn't exist yet (only partially for TSLA) at the moment, followed by S Koreans, and VW. The Chinese case is special as mentioned above.
For that outlier negative case with Chevy Volt there are more success stories, as the batteries are usually good for millions of km if not treated badly. But you are right that if the car changes hands through several "very dumb" parties which have no clue, incentive, or instructions keeping it at least half charged sitting at the lot this could happen.
The EVs perhaps could have had better chance if the push started in 1970s, this time it's too late, that doesn't mean that few million copies per year could be churned out before the final proper collapse stage.
And those neglected batteries go on to pollute somewhere, without ever having fulfilled their task, one supposes?
it’s not the vehicle that’s the problem
it’s having a purpose for it
having a vehicle does not enhance your lifestyle
it consumes your lifestyle, unless you have enough surplus energy to feed it
its only other (energy return) function is as a chicken coop—in which case you feed the chickens
“ [5] None of the researchers studying the usefulness of wind and solar have understood the need for overbuilding…”
Ohh, *this* researcher understands! I don’t even use the term “overbuilding,” preferring to not even consider conventionally-generated electricity and renewable electricity to be the same good unless the latter’s generation is scaled up and storage-backed so it can meet the demand profile of the former at all relevant time scales (diurnally, annually, and even longer in the case of wind). My analysis of a hypothetical all-PV Georgia calls for an absolutely eye-popping land area of panels and a battery assembly that would dominate Atlanta’s skyline (or, alternatively, a half-billion-ton, kilometer-long flywheel made of solid stone) if a business-as-usual demand profile were required. Gail is right to wonder about the industrial operations, institutional continuity, and materials flows associated with *just the maintenance* of panel farms, wind farms, and battery facilities to say nothing of their creation and dismantling.
“Understanding Why the Green New Deal Won’t Really Work”
Because you’d kill maybe 7 to 7.5 billion people. Try feeding 7+ billion mouths without fossil fuel inputs. Try growing crops to feed 7+ billion without fossil fuel inputs or raising livestock without fossil fuels. Greta Thunberg and the AOC cabal can’t seem to figure this out. The entire global infrastructure and the globalized “Just in Time” delivery network is dependent on fossil fuels. Without the J.I.T. delivery system all of your supermarkets and Walmarts would be empty in a matter of days.
“Try feeding 7+ billion mouths without fossil fuel inputs. Try growing crops to feed 7+ billion without fossil fuel inputs or raising livestock without fossil fuels.”
And when the fossil fuels go away, these people will die anyway. No need for lifeboats; the good ship BAU is unsinkable. Just like the Titanic. A fantasy just as unreal, and as unsound, as the advocates of the Green New Deal.
Truth: this is not a problem, it is a predicament, and the only way through is a narrow passage indeed. Or, as William Catton said, a Bottleneck.
OK, Robert, so what is your answer? Wu Wei: do nothing. Nature will bring about a resolution far better than anything we could contrive. Better for Gaia, if not for us, but nevertheless the best solution. We are the tenants of the Island Earth, and if we are to be expelled, we probably deserve it.
I think that the 7 billion are toast. Any future plan that has a population figure of over 1 billion is delusional. 200 amps of 240 volt electricity to everyone that signs up is delusional. Intermittent is the least of our problems. Power to pump water for irrigation any way we can get it will be the focus. No irrigation makes that population more like 100 million.
Debt is cancer. We need income. Sunshine is the only income we’ve got.
Hi Gail, it seems corporations remain focused on big picture solutions when a rejiggering of old tech would do the job on a small scale – steam.
Excess solar energy can be stored in bladders below ground as superheated water and run through steam engines to be recovered into electrical energy as needed. All we need is to have some entrepreneur to design systems to suit homes, commercial buildings, or communities.
Personally I would love to see oil companies redesign their gas stations to sell either the power or the parts to their community.
On Wed., Oct. 2, 2019, 3:57 p.m. Our Finite World, wrote:
> Gail Tverberg posted: “The reasons why the Green New Deal won’t really > work are fairly subtle. A person really has to look into the details to see > what goes wrong. In this post, I try to explain at least a few of the > issues involved. [1] None of the new renewables can easily” >
Very well done summary but as you said there are even more issues. You could have included another section on issues related to mining and processing the rare earth minerals used in batteries and wind turbines. There are environmental problems associated with the nasty processes needed to extract the minerals and the fact that large volumes have to be processed. There are even human rights issues because child slave labor is apparently being used. Finally, there are no sources operating in the US so we would reverse the current trend of becoming less dependent upon unstable countries.
All this makes me think that advocates of the green new deal are energy innumerate.
The last time I checked, a degree in law (or politics!!) was far more useful to a career politician than one in the physical sciences…..
adding the word “Green” to Roosevelt’s phrase was never going to work
but you”ll never convince the daydreamers