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The Future Of Energy
Perhaps even more than exposing the instability of the worldwide economic ponzi system, so far 2011 has been most remarkable for fully demonstrating the fragility of the global energy complex, which in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear crisis (and the moratorium on nuclear energy in Germany now, and soon other places), and the MENA revolutions, have raised the question of what happens in a world in which crude is getting ever scarcer, while the one main legacy energy alternative, fission-based nuclear power, just took a giant step back. The topic of limitations in conventional and possibilites in alternative energy has gripped the general public's mind to such an extent that Popular Science magazine has dedicated its entire July edition to answering that very critical question. As PopSci says: "Oil’s amazing efficiency is one reason it remains in such high demand,
especially for transportation, and it’s also why finding an alternative
will be so difficult. But find one we must. We have already burned our way through most of the world’s easy oil. Now we’re drilling for the hard stuff: unconventional resources such as shale and heavy oil that will be more difficult and expensive to discover, extract, and refine. The environmental costs are also on the rise." So what is the existing line up of future alternatives to the current crude oil-dominated energy paradigm. Below we present the complete list.
Next Generation Nukes.
Nuclear power may have taken a major step back after the biggest nuclear catastrophe since Fukushima, but that does not mean existing Generation III projects (the Fukushima reactor is a Gen II) are not viable and safe. Below is a summary of the key aspects of this program now coming on line in Japan, France and Russia.
In the 30 years since regulators last approved the construction of a new nuclear plant in the U.S., engineers have improved reactor safety considerably. (You can see some of the older, not-so-safe ones in this sweet gallery.) The newest designs, called Generation III+, are just beginning to come online. (Generation I plants were early prototypes; Generation IIs were built from the 1960s to the 1990s and include the facility at Fukushima; and Generation IIIs began operating in the late 1990s, though primarily in Japan, France and Russia.)
Unlike their predecessors, most Generation III+ reactors have layers of passive safety elements designed to stave off a meltdown, even in the event of power loss. Construction of the first Generation III+ reactors is well under way in Europe. China is also in the midst of building at least 30 new plants. In the U.S., the Southern Company recently broke ground on the nation’s first Generation III+ reactors at the Vogtle nuclear plant near Augusta, Georgia. The first of two reactors is due to come online in 2016.
A central feature of this system is an 800,000-gallon water tank positioned directly above the containment shell. The reservoir’s valves rely on electrical power to remain closed. When power is lost, the valves open and the water flows down toward the containment shell. Vents passively draw air from outside and direct it over the structure, furthering the evaporative cooling.
Depending on the type of emergency, an additional reservoir within the containment shell can be manually released to flood the reactor. As water boils off, it rises and condenses at the top of the containment shell and streams back down to cool the reactor once more. Unlike today’s plants, most of which have enough backup power onsite to last just four to eight hours after grid power is lost, the AP1000 can safely operate for at least three days without power or human intervention.
Summarizing a typical Gen III schematic:
Regardless of the safety precautions, existing fission-based power will always carry the risk of a meltdown. Which brings us to...
Thorium-Powered Molten-Salt Reactor
Even with their significant safety improvements, Generation III+ plants can, theoretically, melt down. Some people within the nuclear industry are calling for the implementation of still newer reactor designs, collectively called Generation IV. The thorium-powered molten-salt reactor (MSR) is one such design. In an MSR, liquid thorium would replace the solid uranium fuel used in today’s plants, a change that would make meltdowns all but impossible.
MSRs were developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the early 1960s and ran for a total of 22,000 hours between 1965 and 1969. “These weren’t theoretical reactors or thought experiments,” says engineer John Kutsch, who heads the nonprofit Thorium Energy Alliance. “[Engineers] really built them, and they really ran.” Of the handful of Generation IV reactor designs circulating today, only the MSR has been proven outside computer models. “It was not a full system, but it showed you could successfully design and operate a molten-salt reactor,” says Oak Ridge physicist Jess Gehin, a senior program manager in the lab’s Nuclear Technology Programs office.
The MSR design has two primary safety advantages. Its liquid fuel remains at much lower pressures than the solid fuel in light-water plants. This greatly decreases the likelihood of an accident, such as the hydrogen explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Further, in the event of a power outage, a frozen salt plug within the reactor melts and the liquid fuel passively drains into tanks where it solidifes, stopping the fission reaction. “The molten-salt reactor is walk-away safe,” Kutsch says. “If you just abandoned it, it had no power, and the end of the world came--a comet hit Earth--it would cool down and solidify by itself.”
In addition to safety, Thorium power provides other strategic benefits:
Without the need for large cooling towers, MSRs can be much smaller than typical light-water plants, both physically and in power capacity. Today’s average nuclear power plant generates about 1,000 megawatts. A thorium-fueled MSR might generate as little as 50 megawatts. Smaller, more numerous plants could save on transmission loss (which can be up to 30 percent on the present grid). The U.S. Army is interested in using MSRs to power individual bases, Kutsch says, and Google, which relies on steady power to keep its servers running, held a conference on thorium reactors last year. “The company would love to have a 70- or 80-megawatt reactor sitting next door to a data center,” Kutsch says.
A sample MSR reactor shown below:
Naturally, the transition from fission power to MSR would involve massive costs and a huge overhaul in the existing regulatory regime. Which is why, instead of going the MSR route, why not just focus on a totally different energy creation paradigm, namely...
Fusion Power
The reason fusion power has been the holy grail in energy production is simple: it is the most efficient form of energy creation available. After all fusion power, that at the heart of the sun, is the source of life.
The well-publicized failures of cold fusion may have tainted the field’s reputation, but physicists have been successfully joining nuclei with hot fusion since 1932. Today, research in hot fusion could lead to a clean energy source free from the drawbacks that dog fission power plants. Fusion power plants cannot melt down; they won’t produce long-lived, highly radioactive waste; and fusion fuel cannot be easily weaponized.
At the forefront of the effort to realize fusion-based power is ITER, an international collaboration to build the world’s largest fusion reactor. At the heart of the project is a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped vessel that contains the fusion reaction. In this vessel, magnetic fields confine a plasma composed of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen, while particle beams, radio waves and microwaves heat it to 270 million degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature needed to sustain the fusion reaction. During the reaction, the deuterium and tritium nuclei fuse, producing helium and a neutron. In a fusion power plant, those energetic neutrons would heat a structure, called a blanket, in the tokamak and that heat would be used to turn a turbine to produce electricity.
The ITER reactor will be the largest tokamak ever made, producing 500 megawatts of power, about the same output as a coal-fired power plant. But ITER won’t generate electricity; it’s just a gigantic physics experiment, albeit one with very high potential benefits. A mere 35 thousandths of an ounce of deuterium-tritium fuel could produce energy equivalent to 2,000 gallons of heating oil. And ITER’s process is “inherently safe,” says Richard Pitts, a senior scientific officer on the project. “It can never, ever be anything like what you see in the fission world--in Chernobyl or Fukushima--and this is why it is so attractive.”
Alas, fusion energy is at best decades away:
To fully commercialize tokamak-based fusion, developers must overcome several challenges. First is the matter of breeding the tritium; there are only about 50 pounds of it in the world at any given time because it is not naturally occurring and decays quickly. (Deuterium is not radioactive and can be distilled from water.) Although ITER may use tritium produced by nuclear power plants, a full-scale fusion plant will need to produce its own supply--neutrons from the fusion reaction could be used to convert a stash of lithium into tritium. In addition, physicists must also determine which materials can best withstand the by-products of the fusion reaction, which will wear down the tokamak’s walls. Finally, residual radioactivity in the device will pose maintenance problems because people won’t be able to work safely within the vessel. ITER scientists must develop robots capable of replacing parts that can weigh up to 10 tons.
ITER will begin experiments in 2019 in France. If those are successful, the data produced by the project will aid the ITER team in the design of DEMO, a proposed 2,000- to 4,000-megawatt demonstration fusion power plant that will be built by 2040.
ITER in action:
Fuel
Engineers inject two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, into the tokamak, a high-powered doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber.
Plasma
A strong electric current heats the deuterium and tritium gases and ionizes them, forming a ring of plasma, a glowing soup of charged particles.
Heat
Radio waves, microwaves and high-energy deuterium particle beams heat the plasma. At high temperatures, the deuterium and tritium fuse to form a helium atom and a neutron.
Containment
If the plasma touches the walls of the tokamak, it will scuttle the fusion reaction. The charged particle is confined in a magnetic field made from 39 superconducting poloidal, toroidal and central solenoid magnets positioned around the outside of the doughnut and within its hole.
Lining
The vessel is lined with a steel blanket 1.5 feet thick to protect the tokamak walls from highly energetic neutrons.
Why the need for the above energy alternatives? One does not have to believe in peak oil to realize that crude is becoming increasingly difficult to procure. Per PopSci:
Even if we were ready to mass-produce a new generation of, say, biofueled plug-in hybrid electric cars by 2020, and even if we--in an absurdly best-case scenario--started cranking out those new cars as fast as we now make gas guzzlers (about 70 million a year, worldwide), we would still need another 15 years to swap out the fleet. In the meantime, oil consumption will continue to rise, as demand from fast-growing economies in Asia outweighs any green gains by Western nations.
David Victor, an international energy policy specialist at the University of California at San Diego, says consumption won’t even begin tapering off for another 20 years. At that point, daily consumption, now at 85 million barrels a day (mbd), will have topped 100 mbd. Realistically, says James Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University, cutting global oil consumption to a more economically and environmentally tolerable level (say, 30 mbd) will probably take at least four decades. Before then, he says, “we will use a lot of oil.”
How much? At the rate Victor suggests, we’ll need something like a trillion barrels of crude to get us to the peak of oil consumption sometime in the 2030s--and, in all likelihood, another trillion barrels to get us down the other side, to a point where oil is a vastly smaller part of the energy economy. Just to bridge the gap, then, we’ll have to extract about two trillion barrels of oil during the next four decades--almost double the 1.2 trillion barrels we’ve already burned through since Pennsylvania wildcatters launched the oil age in 1859.
Hossein Kazemi, a professor of petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, says that about half of those final two trillion barrels have already been discovered and are waiting in “proven” reserves that can be exploited profitably using today’s technology. The other half won’t come so easily. By some estimates, the Earth contains up to eight trillion more barrels of oil, but that oil exists in many forms, some of which, such as shale oil, can be extremely expensive to extract or refine. And as we work our way through the easiest oil, we will also be confronted by increasing external costs—real costs that nonetheless aren’t accounted for at the gas pump. A desperate rush to extract oil from unstable nations can topple regimes, for instance, even as extracting it from environmentally fragile spots can do major harm to the land or the sea.
Which means that we face a series of complex choices, not just about where to extract what kind of oil, but also about when to extract it. Going after everything at once may seem wise, especially to oil entrepreneurs invested in specific resources or policymakers unconcerned about external costs. But as engineers develop new extraction and refinement techniques, oil that is expensive or environmentally harmful now may be cheaper or cleaner in the future. With that in mind, what would happen if we considered how best to extract our two trillion barrels not from the short-term perspective of a politician or a businessman, but from the longer view of a petroleum engineer? Which oil would we save for last, and which would we go for first?
Below is a list of legacy energy forms that are currently being exploited and which provide a far lower capital investment need to generate incremental returns:
Shale
Total reserves: 3 trillion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE)
Given the political anxiety surrounding the prospect of importing oil, U.S. policymakers will be understandably tempted to reach first for the closest, richest oil resource. For many, that would suggest shale oil. The vast deposits located beneath Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone could generate up to 800 billion barrels of oil. But policymakers should resist that urge.
Oil shale is created when kerogen, the organic precursor to oil and natural gas, accumulates in rock formations without being subjected to enough heat to be completely cooked into oil. Petroleum engineers have long known how to finish the job, by heating the kerogen until it vaporizes, distilling the resulting gas into a synthetic crude, and refining that crude into gasoline or some other fuel. But the process is expensive. The kerogen must either be strip-mined and converted aboveground or cooked, often by electrical heaters, in the ground and then pumped to the surface. Either process pushes production costs up to $90 a barrel. As all crude prices rise, though, the added expense of shale oil may come to seem reasonable--and it is likely to drop in any case if the shale oil industry, now made up of relatively small pilot operations, scales up.
The problem is that the external costs of shale oil are also very high. It is not energy-dense (a ton of rock yields just 30 gallons of pure kerogen), so companies will be removing millions of tons of material from thousands of acres of land, which can introduce dangerous amounts of heavy metals into the water system. The in-ground method, meanwhile, can also contaminate groundwater (although Shell and other companies say this can be prevented by freezing the ground). Both methods are resource-intensive. Producing a barrel of synthetic crude requires as many as three barrels of water, a major constraint in the already parched Western U.S. With in-ground, the kerogen must be kept at temperatures as high as 700°F for more than two years, and aboveground processes use a lot of heat as well. Those demands, coupled with kerogen’s low energy density, yield returns ranging from 10:1 (that is, 10 barrels of output for every one barrel of input) to an abysmal 3:1.
Coal
Total reserves: 1.5 trillion BOE
Coal can also be converted into a synthetic crude, as the German army, desperate for fuel, demonstrated during World War II. The method of transformation is simple: Engineers blast the coal with steam, breaking it into a gas that can then be converted, by the Fischer-Tropsch process, into gasoline and other fuels. Many energy companies are promoting various coal-to-liquid processes (CTL) as a way to replace oil, especially in the U.S. and other coal-rich nations.
The appeal is obvious. At a conversion rate of just under two barrels per ton, the world’s 847 billion tons of recoverable coal theoretically represent roughly 1.5 trillion barrels of synthetic oil, or a substantial piece of the final trillion.
Like shale oil, however, CTL has significant shortcomings. Its energy return is unimpressive; a barrel’s worth of invested energy nets just three to six barrels of CTL. Moreover, coal contains about 20 percent more carbon than oil does, and converting it to liquid raises the ratio even further. CTL fuels have a carbon footprint nearly twice as large as that of conventional oil--1,650 pounds of CO2 per barrel of CTL, versus 947 pounds per barrel of conventional.
Even if producers installed a vast and expensive system to capture and sequester the CO2 produced during the conversion process, says Edward Rubin, a professor of environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, coal production uses so much energy that CO2 emissions from CTL fuels would still be as great as those of conventional oil. At best, making fuel from coal would get us no closer to a more climate-compatible energy system.
All of that aside, even the supply of coal is not infinite. Researchers at the Rand Corporation concluded in 2008 that replacing just 10 percent of U.S. daily transportation fuel with CTL would take 400 million tons of coal annually, which would mean expanding the American coal industry, which is already straining environmental limits, by 40 percent. Although such an undertaking might be politically feasible in China or other nations, Rubin says, “I have a hard time seeing that in this country.”
Heavy Oil
Total reserves: 1 to 2 trillion BOE
Other unconventional resources may, despite having many shortcomings, become somewhat more attractive as new extraction methods come online. One of these is “heavy oil,” which ranges from the molasses-like crude in Venezuela to the bituminous oil sands of Alberta. For decades, oil traders saw heavy oil as inferior to light crude, which is easier to extract and whose smaller-chain molecules are more readily refined. Heavy oil’s bigger molecules, in contrast, were suited mainly to low-profit products, such as ship fuel or asphalt. But new refining techniques are making heavy oil more renderable into gasoline, and new extraction methods are making it easier to get out of the ground.
At a heavy-oil field outside Bakersfield, California, for instance, Chevron deploys computer-guided steam injection to thin the oil sufficiently to pump out. Even more promising are oil-sands operations in Alberta, where companies are now separating the brittle bitumen from sand and clay and cooking it into synthetic crude. At a conversion rate of one barrel for every two tons of sand, Alberta’s oil sands alone may contain up to 315 billion barrels of crude. As refining costs have dropped, output has reached 1.5 mbd and could more than quadruple, to 6.3 mbd, by 2035.
That said, heavy-oil production also has plenty of external costs. As with the kerogen in shale, the bitumen is processed either in-ground or by strip-mining. Both processes consume up to 4.5 barrels of water for every barrel of oil they produce and yield an unimpressive EROEI of about 7:1. And because heavy oils are carbon-rich, the CO2 footprint of crude from bitumen is up to 20 percent higher than that of conventional crude—not as bad as coal, but not exactly friendly to the environment either. Carbon-capture and -sequester techniques can only keep so much of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Oil-sands operations are sprawling, and as a result, very little of the total CO2 emissions can be captured (one study suggests we might trap just 40 percent by 2030).
If carbon-capture techniques improve, though, heavy oil could make up a substantial share of the final two trillion barrels for a carbon penalty substantially below that of either CTL or shale oil. A further advantage (from the U.S. perspective) is that a lot of heavy oil is located in a politically stable country that’s right next door.
Ultra-Deep Offshore
Total reserves: 0.1 to 0.7 trillion BOE
The “deep” in ultra-deep refers to the depths plumbed by floating oil rigs (typically, anything beyond 5,000 feet). But the more important depth is the distance from the ocean floor to the oil itself. It’s not easy to start an excavation a mile or two underwater, much less one that continues on for several more miles underground (the current record, set in 2009 in the Gulf of Mexico, is nearly seven miles). But an ever-expanding drilling fleet is deploying new techniques in horizontal drilling, sub-sea robotics and “four-dimensional” seismology (which geologists use to track oil and natural-gas deposit conditions in real time) to rapidly expand output. Although fewer than half the world’s ultra-deep provinces have been fully explored, deepwater output in the past decade has more than tripled, to 5 mbd, and it could double again by 2015.
As the Deepwater Horizon disaster made clear last year, though, tapping this resource can involve significant external costs. The pressure in ultra-deep reservoirs can reach up to 2,000 times that at sea level. The oil within can be extremely hot (up to 400°F) and rife with corrosive compounds (including hydrogen sulfide, which when in water can dissolve steel). And the pipes that rise from the seafloor are so long and heavy that the platforms supporting them must be extraordinarily large simply to stay afloat. The biggest discovery in decades, Brazil’s “pre-salt play,” meanwhile, is defended by a 1.5-mile-thick ceiling of salt, which had the beneficial effect of absorbing surrounding heat and keeping the oil from breaking down—but which also, in doing so, congealed the oil into a paraffinic jelly that drillers must now thin with chemicals before they can extract it.
Not surprisingly, ultra-deepwater oil is some of the most expensive in the business. A single drilling platform can cost $600 million or more (especially if the deepwater is in the Arctic, where rigs must be armored to withstand Force-10 winter storms and hull-crushing ice floes), and companies can easily spend $100 million drilling a single ultra-deepwater well. The result of all this effort is a modest EROEI--from 15:1 all the way down to 3:1.
Thus, even as companies scramble to improve safety, most of the research and development in the ultra deep will focus on saving money and energy. Remotely controlled, steerable drill heads, for example, allow companies to drill multiple bores from a single platform (thus lowering costs and the aboveground footprint) and to follow the path of narrow oil seams, greatly increasing oil output. (The record for a horizontal bore, set by Exxon near Russia’s Sakhalin Island, is also about seven miles.) To further cut drilling costs, companies will steadily boost rates of penetration with more-powerful drill motors, drill bits made of ever-harder materials and, eventually, a drilling process that uses no bits at all. Tests at Argonne National Laboratory suggest that high-powered lasers can penetrate rock faster than conventional bits, either by superheating the rock until it shatters or by melting it.
Costs will further recede as companies develop more-accurate “multi-channel” seismic prospecting techniques that will, by combining up to a million seismic signals, help them avoid the ultimate waste of drilling into empty rock. And to better measure the oil reservoirs themselves, companies are creating heat- and pressure-resistant “downhole” sensors (similar to devices NASA developed to monitor rocket engines) that communicate to surface computers via optical fiber.
As the volume of data rises, the industry will also create more-powerful tools to analyze it, from monster compression algorithms (courtesy of Hollywood animators) to entirely new computing architectures. “If we go to a million channels [of seismic data], then we need petaflop computation capability, which we currently do not have,” says Bruce Levell, Shell’s chief scientist for geology. To get that capability, oil firms are working with Intel, IBM and other hardware firms. In the future, Levell says, the oil business “is really going to drive high-performance computing.”
Natural Gas
Total reserves: 1 trillion BOE
Natural gas, or simply “gas” in industry parlance, has long been oil’s biggest potential rival as a transport fuel. Gas is cleaner than oil--it emits fewer particulates and a quarter less carbon for the same amount of energy output--yet today it powers less than 3 percent of the U.S. transportation fleet (mainly in the form of compressed natural gas, or CNG). This proportion is poised to grow, though, in part because the overall supply of gas keeps growing.
With advances in a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” companies can now profitably extract gas from previously hard-to-reach shale formations. Worldwide reserves of shale gas currently stand at 6,662 trillion cubic feet, the energy equivalent of 827 billion barrels of oil. And that doesn’t include the gas that is routinely discovered alongside oil in oil fields and that is sure to be found in some of those yet-to-be-explored deepwater basins.
Gas is so plentiful that, in energy-equivalent terms, its price is a quarter that of oil--a bargain that is already transforming CNG from a niche fuel, used mainly in bus fleets, to a product for general consumption. The Texas refiner Valero, for instance, will soon begin selling CNG at new stations in the U.S.
A gas-powered future could still have some high external costs, though. Fracking can be extremely hazardous to the local environment. The method uses high-pressure fluids to break open deep rock formations in which gas is trapped, and these fluids often contain toxins that might contaminate groundwater supplies. But such risks, which have received substantial media coverage and are now the focus of a new White House panel, may be controllable. Gas deposits are typically thousands of feet belowground, while groundwater tables are much closer to the surface, so most contamination is thought to take place where the rising bore intersects with the water table--a risk that could be minimized by requiring drillers to more carefully seal the walls of the bore.
That said, allocating too much natural gas to transportation might have surprisingly negative consequences. First, it would most likely increase demand for natural gas so much that prices would rise, thereby undermining the current cost advantage. Second, shifting a large volume of gas to the transportation sector would mean pulling that volume away from the power sector, where it is more constructively displacing coal, whose carbon content is far higher than oil’s. But converting specific sectors of the transportation system (delivery fleets, for instance, or buses) could simultaneously cut CO2 emissions and reduce oil demand.
Enhanced Oil Recovery
Total reserves: 0.5 trillion BOE
The resource that comes with the lowest external cost might be the oil we left behind, back when energy was a lot cheaper. Drillers typically end up extracting just a third of the oil in a given field, in part because when they drain reservoirs they also decrease the pressure that pushes oil to the surface, making it more expensive to extract the remaining barrels. In the U.S., abandoned oil fields may still contain a staggering 400 billion barrels of residual oil; worldwide, the figure is probably in the trillions. Extracting all of it is economically impossible, but advances in enhanced oil recovery, or EOR, could boost extraction rates to as high as 70 percent.
EOR could add perhaps half a trillion “new” barrels worldwide. And it could also carry a substantial environmental bonus. One of the most promising EOR methods involves “flooding” oil reservoirs with CO2, which dissolves into the oil, making it both thinner and more voluminous, and thus easier to extract. Once the oil is extracted, the CO2 can be separated, re-injected into the field, and sequestered there permanently. An aggressive strategy in which CO2 is captured from single-point sources (such as power plants or refineries) and pumped into oil fields could increase U.S. oil output by as much as 3.6 mbd while sequestering nearly a billion tons of CO2. And depending on the method, EOR can have an EROEI as high as 20:1.
EOR can’t entirely bridge the gap--but in a perfect world, we would at least begin by tapping those barrels, along with the oil--equivalent barrels of natural gas. That way, we would be using the least damaging resources first and saving the worst barrels for later, when (if all goes well) future engineering innovations will let us extract and consume them more safely and efficiently.
But of course, we don’t live in a perfect world. For now, oil producers will do what they have always done, which is to extract oil as cheaply as they can. And oil consumers will follow suit, buying the cheapest energy they can. We may eventually ask the market to take the true costs of production into account, perhaps by way of a carbon tax or some kind of climate regulation. Or we may not. Energy policy has never been particularly far-sighted. There is little chance that the transition to a clean-energy economy will be entirely clean. It will require trade-offs and compromises, and the cost of those trade-offs and compromises will rise with every year that we wait to get serious about moving away from oil.
One thing is certain: the status quoTM, which is just as entrenched in the legacy financial system as it is in the existing energy paradigm, will do nothing until it is far too late to provide for a contingency plan while it is still feasible and not cost-prohibitive. After all, by the time things get so bad that there is no choice but to move on to something "else" it will be some other, far less entitled, generation's problem.
Source: Popular Science
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Me thinks you missed my point, the system was reporting to the state over 10 times the actual energy it produced. So from the states viewpoint, which is OFFICIAL and will be tabulated in roughly 5 years to see how well the program worked, the array is damn efficient! How many other solar arrays have this reporting error? On purpose? You be the judge...
Hulk, just wanted to give thanks that you're out there- one of the "good guys."
Same to you Seer. I'd like to meet a couple of zh'ers one day, and you are one of them...
I did indeed misread your point. My mistake.
The guys trying to create an executive entry on their resume from those "green" companies need to record big numbers as "accomplishments" so that maybe they can persuade a real company like Procter and Gamble to acknowledge they are real executives and not just political largesse recipients.
Of course, those optimist projections reject weather.
Just think of it, the elegance of a world covered in solar panels.
They get dirty.
So who the fuck's gonna wash 'em?
No (well, OK, most) self-respecting no not even self-un-respecting American citizen will wash windows anymore and that's with a bazillion % unemployment just like the Great Depression.
Same as crops now rotting on the ground in Georgia because aliens (no, not greys or reptilians) aren't available to do the work that nobody else will do.
See. The dreamers don't account for the influx of all of the illegal south of the border solar panel washers, unless, of course, they're considered fast track as Democratic voters then it'll all get fucked up stopped like a big intestinal blockage in Washington and the panels will never get cleaned to generate electricity.
(full disclosure; I'm cynically apolitical.)
I'm long windex and old newspapers...
JJ? Perhaps a bit of Kimberly Clark? Yen
Rain washes my solar penals. Every now and then.
Surely the advantage of Solar is in decentralisation and a modicum of self sufficiency, more efficient forms of energy should be reserved for 'plants'.
And little new space is required: panels on rooftops, thin-film on windows...and while we're at it stick thin-film all over cars, that spend most of their time sat, parked outside, doing nothing but basking in rays.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/13/sharp-begins-eco-house-evaluation-in-japan-aims-for-eco-friendl/
http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/1835/koenigsegg-quant-runs-on-thinfilm-solar-power/
A combination of high-efficiency fixtures, well-designed enclosure and solar power (active and passive) can make a home energy self-sufficient, with two exceptions. In hot & humid climates, air conditioning can't feasibly run on solar. You can keep the home relativey cool but you can't dehumidify without AC. In very cold climates you have to generate alot of heat in the winter, more than passive solar can produce.
Without fossil fuels, we go back to the time of sleeping on the porch in summer in the South and heating only the bedroom at night up North. Virtually any place man lived 200 years ago he can live today without artificial heating and cooling, but it's way inconvenient to do so voluntarily.
... yet you provide no facts. Therefore, YOU are the idiot you refer to.
This is the problem with the oil warriors: they yell down solutions that rely on individuals massing together to form their own grids instead of using tax dollars to build massive plants (nuclear, coal, oil, etc) The real solution is just this- individuals becoming responsible for their own energy production and use. Individuals acting in concert to develop grids on their own.
We should have legalized industrial hemp decades ago. All our cars could be running on hemp oil right now. And our jets.
Fusion has been "decades away" since the 1980's. It's still "decades away" :(
Depends on how fast your rocketship is (travel to/ito the sun) :-)
I was an early proponent of fusion, only later to ask the question: what about the impacts of lots of cheap energy on the physical world? I looked out the window and saw the answer. Yeah, imagine a world in which all 6.5+ billion could consume physical resources like North Americans...
what about the impacts of lots of cheap energy on the physical world?
So, the notion of using all that abundant energy for recycling never crossed your mind in your zeal to keep your lifestyle by preventing others on planet earth from sharing it?
I too came to this same conclusion in late 2007. (Almost) Free energy is not only potentially dangerous to everyone, but also the entrenched elite's worse nigthmare. Imagine if the technology existed today to bypass energy companies? Not to mention as you pointed out, the expeidtious hurdling TOWARDS the abyss as we maniacally devour whats left of this planets natural resources with hellish mechanical machinations now enabled by limitless and almost free energy. It wouldn't last longer than the final table at the World Series of Poker.
Great article..Thanks!!
The article was incompetent, in addition to adding nothing.
Shale oil and oil shale are not the same thing.
So, we put you in the Lib column?
WTF does shale have to do with thorium?
Folks generally have the politics wrong. Those who are informed on the matter and understand that oil depletion will kill billions are conservatives if they also know the only way to make sure Americans are among the survivors is to broadly and coldly bomb the east coast of China with nuclear weapons.
Depopulation must occur, and the dead must not be Americans, if you are an American, or maybe you're one of those left wing liberals who thinks all humans should be equal and Americans should volunteer to die so that Chinese or Iranians or whoever can live.
I sort of thought you were a left winger.
Americans, Mexicans. In 50 years that's the same no?
heil hitler's US son!
Tere is nothing 'conservative' about your vision. it is a helpless 'giving up', a form of learned helplessness that ventures to war to solve any and all problems. That IS the problem!
We can have an economy that is not oil based. That is, if you and your vicious minions do not destroy the planet first. You are not 'conservative'. There is nothing conservative about nuclear war, ask Ronald Reagan.
Abracadabra
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/
i was thinking the same thing!
NASA = Muslim out reach
Mynhair/ really? no haters here. lets talk #'s
#'s? ok. Instead of NASA figuring out how to launch 1 billion into the sun, they will now be relegated into protecting their tax-exempt status.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=314285
$850 to re-apply. Dam Bush tax cuts!
A suspiciously promising program in the great scheme of things, considering an awful lot of them do seem to like flying things into....
God, they're still wanking on about fusion.
I remember back in the seventies the scientists were promising it was 'just two decades away'
it's just a way for them to get us to pay for their salaries, research grants, and ludicrously expensive toys.
What I wonder is what happens if they throw 7 tons a year of new helium into the environment.
there's a lot less helium available, than you would think.
Helium's great, it can't "build up."
We'll all talk funny?
Fusion - The Power Source of the Future !!!
(and always will be)
like the sign over the bar "free beer tomorrow"
I like your idea! Even the SUN dies eventually. Imortality is over RATED.
Life is and "Always" will BE!
Martenson is looking for you over at his site. You should go there. And stay.
TAR SANDS
Gripped in a Faustian pact with the American energy consumer, the Canadian government is doing everything it can to protect the dirtiest oil project ever known. In the following account, filmmaker Tom Radford describes witnessing a David and Goliath struggle. http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/witness/2011/06/20116227153978324.htmlThis is the second post with the use of "status quo"TM, trademarked. How the hell do you trademark a colloquialism.
Or, maybe I'm just hallucinating?
It is provided for humor.
Well, thanks for pointing that out Einstein, I thought for sure Tyler was finagling a new income stream, but I digress.....
the guy was (helping) YOU! Out of the box.
Amazon must have patented it, right next to "one click".
Gotta run, must patent "one lick" and license it to da hoes.
Off topic, but:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/peru-to-end-bear-creek-silver-mine-proj...
Peru is the world's largest silver producer, the second largest zinc and copper producer, and the fifth largest gold producer.
Bear Creek says the Santa Ana project's proven and probable silver reserves stand at 63.2 million ounces.
That looks like 63.2m ounces of silver that aren't going to make it to market anytime soon. Poor old CRIMEX.
Author needs to do his homework.
Peru is no longer the world's largest silver producer. 2010 figures indicate Peru has fallen to NUMERO DOS.
http://www.silverinstitute.org/production.php
Peruvian president elect Ollanta Humala will nationalize Peru's silver mines. The looters and moochers will destroy Peru's mining in no time.
And....the author places lake Titicaca in "southern Colombia". So much for Harvard degrees.
And....seriously, the author's name is "DOW JONES"???? WTF kinda report is that?
Ollanta Humala has just come out of the NWO closet:
http://en.mercopress.com/2011/06/22/humala-invites-morales-to-consider-t...
The plan to subjugate the free people of the world under one currency has many battlegrounds.
Humala surely wants the title of "Supreme Protector":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peru%E2%80%93Bolivian_Confederation
Does nationalizing resources ALWAYS result in such destruction as you claim (like private "efficient" extraction is a pretty thing)?
Ponder this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Haiti_deforestation.jpg
Note that Dominican Republic President, Joaquín Balaguer "protected" forests during his tenure.
But perhaps I'm not giving "private business" enough time to prove itself, maybe it'll find a clever way to make money off of Haiti's newly-found food source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080130-AP-haiti-eatin.html
Of course. Clearly demonstrated by the fact that all the national parks in the USA are toxic waste dumps unsafe for humans to visit.
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION EMBRACES GE CROPS ON WILDLIFE REFUGES
http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1456
You couldn't find a silver thread to talk on? Or wait til one appeared?
Centralized Power Sucks Ass
centralized power is nothing more than a " PRO Lapsed" Rectal cavity! I'm going to postulate my west coast time , before I hit the jet manana! Eg; take a walk...
Buy the way~ figuratively! +1 RUSTY!!! YEN (dot)
Although I'm planting a 4 wood on a raccoon tonight! Cheaper to replace, and Irons can fill the void!
When I grew up, the average person didn't have air conditioning,hair
dryers, clothes dryers, micro-waves and electric garage door openers.
These so-called necessities now consume so much more energy which
is getting more and more costly not only economically but costly to our
environment. Maybe we should tax excess energy use in the home to
make people more frugal with their energy consumption. 50 years ago
a family was fortunate to own one can and almost every car-pooled or
took public transportation. Just think how much energy that would save
today. I think a return to "the good old days" would be good for the
economy and the environment. A hefty tax on gasoline would help
promote it and the money could be used to pay for SS and Medicare.
The good old days had 3-4 billion ppl on the planet.
Now it's 7B.
Force isn't necessary. It'll all happen in its own time... There will be those who prepared, and those who did not (those who partied on, who bought the BS that "techonology," which is their own enslavement, would save them).
Back then people died from hospitals not being right down the street, with all those high tech gizmos that, you know, just basically eat a lot of electricity and something else... oh yea SAVE people's lives! Want to go back to the fabulous 50's? Just go to a 2nd world country and work as a tradesman. Maybe learning a new language will be as fun as catching the bus to the hospital in the next town.
Thorium Reactors, bitchez. Been trying to tell George Washington that for over a year now. Vindication. Cheap, abundant thorium (a metal) is abundant enough to last the entire planet 10,000 years. No nuclear waste, bombs, or radiation poisoning. New reactor models are smaller and more efficient than the ones that have already been built decades ago. They were scuttled for further developement because of the cheap oil and because they couldn't produce bombs.
Might add: Ultradeep oil wells on land >30,000 ft deep. Russians are doing it already with >310 such wells 30-40K ft deep. Organic material for fossil fuels are not found after 19,000 ft deep -- this is prima facie evidence for abiotic origin of oil, along with the significant presence of Helium found in such oil (lightweight Helium goes up, not down). Abiotic oil origin also implies there is an inexhaustable supply.... mmmm.
Russia's has lots of 20th century scientific literature on abiotic oil already, all ignored by the West. How did Russia recently surpass the Saudis as the world's largest exporter of oil? As head of the KGB under Yeltsin, Putin aggressively prevented Russian oil interests from being tampered with by the West when other assets were being sold off. Putin knew and didn't want to let the cat out of the bag.
Pale Flint: My personal favorite, an adjunct to continued burning cheap fossil fuels to pay for conversion to other fuels in the future.
Pale Flint is a cheap, abundant CO2 sequestration substance found virtually everywhere on the planet's surface that has long been ignored. It not only absorbs CO2, it emits Oxygen in the process! In fact, the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more it expands to absorb more CO2 and emit more O2. Pale Flint = anagram for plant life.
Hey, they didn't call it the Carboniferous Period for nothing!
You calling Rue Paul supporters Carboniferous?
"Cheap, abundant thorium (a metal) is abundant enough to last the entire planet 10,000 years."
Tsk, tsk! Two-dimentional thinking!
Forgot to state at what rate of growth consumption. Jevons Paradox, not to mention reality, would tend to suggest that your number ain't gonna hold...
hey, gwar5!
i am just starting to learn abt these fukers. i found this: Thorium (World Nuclear Assn.) an ok place to start.
i think when you say: thorium = no nuclear waste, you are factually incorrect.
also, the 3+ ton-machine-falling-into-reactor "accident" in japan is in a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), the coolant being liquid sodium, which ignites upon contact with, um,...air. so, they have quite a problem. i think it is a Gen III.
in a Gen IV thorium reactor, the thorium actually "breeds" to U-233, which is fissionable.
if you want to believe these contraptions are safe and sane, go ahead. i'm not even from missouri. don't show me. i've seen enuf for a while...
The devil is always in the details....
We actually need MORE CO2 in the atmosphere, especially if energy production increases. No CO2 means NO FOOD. A 50% CO2 reduction in the atmosphere could result produce a similar reduction in global crop yields.
Another option might be to develop hundreds of new varieties genetically modified frankenstein plants and crops to cover the Earth's surface which don't rely on CO2. However, it might be better to eat the tree huggers (soylent green) than to develop the frankenfruit, as it would have the added societal benefit of reducing energy demand through population reduction.
And what about the NIF??? ITER at the forefront of fusion - bollocks! Poor research.
Ahh... just exactly how do you get the "energy" from fusion? Google Neutronicity and educate yourself a bit....
Ahhh - you're a twat - fuck off.
My what a cunning riposte....
Damn, I just figured out that I am a Carbon based life form, therefore, I am the Beast!
* Carbon-12 = 6 Protons 6 Neutrons 6 Electrons
Helium +1 Yen
The most abundant and available fuel source in the world is shit. It's literally everywhere. Bullshit is good, pig shit is better, chicken shit is even better. Human shit - not so good, but it will do in a pinch.
Anaerobic digesters are cheap and effective. Shit alone can't produce enough energy to produce electricity cost-effectively, but add almost any other organic waste as a co-substrate and you've got cheap energy. Distributed, uninterruptable, local power. 200 kw to 10 MW generators. Cheaper than any other source by far.
Only problem is TPTB can't own the process - shit belongs to the people. Since we're already covered in it, why not use it?
Shit has to be aged like a Fine Wine.
Pelousy? Vintage 287?
You're close, real close.
Take this shit and shove it, I won't eat that hamburger no more.
http://news1.ghananation.com/latest-news/174123-shit-hamburger-japanese-scientists-create-artificial-meat-from-human-feces.html
I remember gasping after reading an article mentioning that the city of San Francisco was going to reclaim dog waste. I mean, how much fucking energy were they going to use to do that? Add up all the necessary infrastructure (recepticles, trucks, people...).
I'm looking into using black soldier flies to feed my chickens (http://blacksoldierflyblog.com/). All fine and good (actually, it's one of the most exciting and [nearly] sustainable things for generating chicken feed on-the-farm that I've run across) until one realizes the limitations- you have to produce the waste for them: and yes, human waste works; at issue is that you're still going to fail to properly account for all the inputs, inputs which, I've discovered, can never equal more than the inputs (cannot create more of one form of energy from than came from the other form of energy). We'll be forced to run to the edge anyways, so better to seek it out earlier than later. We'll get a better understanding of how nature works, up until the point that it tells us that WE no longer work...
To quote a noted Cape Breton philosopher
I've been considering that move, but the biggest hurdle I've got with the tech is that methane can't be compressed unless it is dramatically cooled. Which says to me that you'd either need a gigantic air bladder to store the gas in, or use it as it is produced.
Better than nothing, and essentially free after the start-up costs- but still not a substitute for industrial-grade power. (When applied to a single-family producing on private land, that is- there are some landfills that seem to be using this well enough.)
I'm still in-process with it, but I like the concept of a large digestor and two stirling engines. If you produce enough gas, you could run one stirling conventionally by keeping a portion of the gas lit, and use the flywheel to inject mechanical energy into the other engine, cooling the cylinder enough to compress the gas for storage in existing tanks.
And no, this does not violate the law of thermodynamics. You'd need excess gas to make it work, and that means more organic material in the tanks. The real torn in my paw on this one is that it's not likely to ever happen for me- no extra money for prototyping materials.
Will Tokamak explode like a Tomahawk?
Tomahawks explode?
No, they spread silver to the shorts.
Good
I didnt see natural gas fuel cells which could double or triple the hundred years of natural gas we have.
There are models that are small and almost competitive at current prices for home use electrical generation.
Burning natural gas and using heat to produce electricity is primitive and grossly inefficient. We hardly get 30 percent of the available energy of natural gas that way. Burning is so wasteful.
Fart in a jar technology is a ways away. Unless you like chile.
OK... No shit.
Er, well anyway, true story. Some-whatever-it-would-be-called (nut?) here on the left coast thought that since cattle make so much gas and are one of the biggest sources of bad shit for the planet, and since so many people do like to eat their animal brethren (no, not enough of us will indeed settle for those tofu burgers...sorry folks) that it'd be a good idea to put carbon fart gas capture equipment on cattle, collect the gas, recycle......
So, the idea of farts in a jar has actually been proposed, for the happy cows in California. And it is said that California cows are happy because they get hoof (think feet, standing all day and night) massages from earthquakes. Again, no shit.
What the fuck!?
Haven't those folks ever gone shroom pickin'?
"I didnt see natural gas fuel cells which could double or triple the hundred years of natural gas we have."
Two-dimensional thinking, again!
What's the growth rate of consumption? Jevons Paradox... reality...
One aspect that i would like to add to the article, is that energy extraction is just one half of the equation. The other half is energy consumption.
Humans have a strong tendency, to use up all available ressources (waste/polution is basically a negative ressource), regardless of how much they theoretically need, and regardless of what they want to achieve. When there is a surplus, humans tend to instead waste it, by investing less one-time effort into designing efficient procedures. To explain the phenomenon with an IT-example: "Oh, no need to design this program efficiently - there is more than enough memory and processing capacity anyways" -> and so, the consumer buys a new machine 1 year later, once again.
The above is significant, because the amount of reserves in the above article, are meaningless, if humans just waste surplusses by designing things inefficiently.
Input Supply, Processing Efficiency, Output Demand: Consider all those three things, when thinking about a sustainable ressource economy. As long as people treat demand as a maxime, and processing efficiency a matter of short-term profit, there will never be sustainability.
"The other half is energy consumption"
Thank you for dying. You are Algore, right?
Does he think, that in the equation "a - b = c", both a and b determine c?
If yes, then i do have something in common with him, as well as anyone capable of grasping basic school maths.
Fucking Party Pussy... Grow the fuck up.
I agree. Let's discuss the "SOFT SPOTS" Bunds and 3-7 Treasury Yields?
Call me a dummy
Nothing is sustainable. Sorry... (this will become rather obvious by the time the next ice age rolls around).
Anyway, to help shorten your point you can just refer to Jevons Paradox.
No. There will be no new energy sources.There will be no new ideas. There will be no logic for Creator - to give you guys NEW CHEAP energy sources. For what? For the new wave of greed and power to the financial mafia, for so-called "investors"? Do you really think that Creator is stupid?
Let me explain:
The Apocalypsis, as described in Bible was a "plan A". DrLamer was granted a right to explain the plan "A" and, in a case the US people to ADMIT their sins, DrLamer had power to explain the rest - in order to smooth transition to a new society structure, with much less pain, much less socialism. It was slightly against God's plan "A", but it was decided to give the USA a chance. That was plan "B". DrLamer failed his mission, the plan "B". Dont blame him. There where no phone call from US embassy, no phone calls from CIA, or FBI. Nothing. Only loud laugh on various forum boards.
Now the plan "C" is enforced.
Remember, this is plan "C". It will be the same transition into socialism, but it will have un-predictable un-predetermined splashes of hope.
Next stop - Jesus Christ. Please, allow 50-60 years for preparations.
There is a so far untapped energy source. As soon as all the hamster wheels are built, all Libs will be placed into them.
GW calls them FEMA camps.
And they shouldn't bitch, because they'll be helping the planet. Big on physical fitness, too. Good idea. Efficient utilization of scarce resources.
Thanks for all your positive contributions.
Did you know that Jesus Christ wasn't the only immaculate conception? Borrowed story, which should tip you that perhaps even this OUT ain't gonna be what you were lead to believe.
Allow diversity to unfold, just as nature has been programmed to do (thank God for evolution!).
Lots of power sources that are not mentioned above.
Many Citys are now burning trash to create energy, oil.
There are plants that are recycling tires, plastic to create Oil.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWf9nYbm3ac&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwKSwfsJ73I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCcV0DhkDtk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o63kltnM_NY&feature=fvwrel
Leftover chicken and cattle by products are being used to create Oil.
Sun being used for electricity generation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li7dBPrjzns&NR=1
Geo Thermal to heat and cool houses.
You can make a homemade solar heater for $110. using the sun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTOe2OYSPlw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xefPwEk_aJU&NR=1
Fresco Lens
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KiBdHy8MCc
Cannot find all of my video's but that is a start for your research.
So, many options. Most not being used. Just go to Youtube it is filled with so much more.
dregs, scraping the bottom of the barrel
Drilling to 30,000 feet looking for oil is literally the bottom of the barrel.
Say "Good Night", Knukles.
Good Night Knukles.
"Leftover chicken and cattle by products are being used to create Oil."
That something can be done doesn't meant that it can scale or that it SHOULD be done.
Travel to the Philippines and let me know how much "leftover" chicken and cattle "by-products" you can find.
Listen, I remember people were raving about free waste oil from McDonalds as "fuel." Yeah, that's the solution, have MORE people eat (and work) at McDonalds!
Only from the minds of dumb Americans can shit like this come.
Magnet Motor generates electricity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39UpgjgxuhY
Frenel lens free energy, Sterling engine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39UpgjgxuhY
Frenel lens free energy, Sterling engine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39UpgjgxuhY
Use Soda Cans to make solar pannel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRZvAAqzXIw&NR=1
Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if the best and the brightest worked on energy solutions instead of trading algorithms? What a waste of intellect.
Them quants ain't the best nor the brightest. They be the whorest that's for sure.
And the "lessers" would be working on how to extract and use physical resources?
The equation isn't just energy. Look around, there's a LOT more peaking in productio nthan energy.
The cheapest energy is conservation.
In the line at the store, the cashier told the older woman that plastic
bags weren't good for the environment. The woman apologized to her and
explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day....
That's right, they didn't have the green thing in her day. Back then,
they returned their milk bottles, Coke bottles and beer bottles to the
store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized
and refilled, using the same bottles over and over. So they really were
recycled.
But they didn't have the green thing back her day......
In her day, they walked up stairs, because they didn't have an escalator
in every store and office building. They walked to the grocery store and
didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time they had to go two
blocks.
But she's right. They didn't have the green thing in her day......
Back then, they washed the baby's diapers because they didn't have the
throw-away kind. They dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling
machine burning up 220 volts, "wind and solar power" really did dry the
clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters,
not always brand-new clothing.
But that old lady is right, they didn't have the green thing back in her
day......
Back then, they had one TV, or radio, in the house not a TV in every
room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a pizza dish, not a
screen the size of the state of Montana . In the kitchen, they blended
and stirred by hand because they didn't have electric machines to do
everything for you. When they packaged a fragile item to send in the
mail, they used wadded up newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or
plastic bubble wrap.....
Back then, they didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut
the lawn. They used a push mower that ran on human power. They exercised
by working so they didn't need to go to a health club to run on
treadmills that operate on electricity.
But she's right, they didn't have the green thing back then......
They drank from a fountain when they were thirsty, instead of using a
cup or a plastic bottle every time they had a drink of water. They
refilled pens with ink, instead of buying a new pen, and they replaced
the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor
just because the blade got dull.
But they didn't have the green thing back then......
Back then, people took the streetcar and kids rode their bikes to school
or rode the school bus, instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour
taxi service. They had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire
bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And they didn't need a
computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000
miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint......
But that old lady is right. They didn't have the green thing back in her
day.......
Back in my day, a Coca Cola bottle was worth 1 Silver Dime.
+1
You pretty much described my life today. And yeah, I got that green thing going on.
Excellent post! I often wish my kids would have to experience the lifestyle I had growing up (which you describe). They wouldn't last long. Oh but they've swallowed the climate change bs, hook, line and sinker. Meanwhile, they mock me for re-using plastic bags or telling them to turn off a light or 12 or explaining why fast stops/starts in the car and running the AC full blast might just have a bit of an effect on excessive, wasteful fuel usage. I have forbidden them from mentioning climate change in my house until they really learn how to not be so wasteful.
I'm with billwilson on conservation---the personal, individual kind, not the goobermint forced kind.
Hey, but that was a lower standard of living.
I know I am dating myself but we used to wash diapers. We did not have a clothes dryer and hung everything on a clothes line. We did not have a dishwasher or an air conditioner. We did not have faxes, copy machines (only carbon paper), computers, dvr's, big screen color tv's, no electric answering machines and cordless phones. Manual Typewriters. Most families only had one car because the Woman did not work. A small neighborhood grocery store you could walk to. A street vendor that had a horse and cart to sell vegetables, cantaloupe, watermelon in the alley. Home Milk, egg and donuts home delivery. We did not have electric mixers, electric can openers, electric juicers, etc. Some had electric vacuums but many used carpet sweepers (remember those?). No electric or gas powered hedge trimmers, no electric or gas powered lawn mowers, no electric or gas powered leaf blowers, no electric or gas powered edgers.
I am sure you get the picture and could add quite a few of your own in our evolution over the last 50 years.
Now you are getting somewhere. The great social agenda that keysianism fueled can be put to good use. Before modern medicine, it was pretty well understood that women needed to have children young. It gave them the best chance for a healthy pregnancy, delivery, child and mom after it was over. If women spent thier young adult years in higher education, that dramatically increased thier risk of complicated pregnancy.
No excuse for that now. OBGYN tech can allow women to pursue any curriculum and career they choose, with assurances they can have healthy babies well into thier 30s. Modern mechanism and automation can allow them to participate in apprentiships for trades that normally required the ability to lift 50 lbs over thier heads (look around you, roads, railroads and many other things are designed around the standards set by the roman army. Many real world tasks you complete every day used to be designed around the 40 lb framework of human male physiology)
But we can not have it both ways. As many people are mentioning. Do we need more people to eat at McDonalds so there is more grease to power vehicles to drive to McDonalds everyday?
EDIT: TPTB can not maintain all three legs of the incubus stool they sit on anymore: 1. Stable Prices 2. Full Employment (including women and seniors who are living much longer) 3. Taxation to glue the three together. Like any buerocracy, they grew untill they got too fat too look down gracefully from the elegant perch they designed for themselves.
Long story short. In families with young children or elderly/infirm, we gotta go back to one person "working" outside the home. One person "working" inside the home. It does not matter matter which sex. And with the exception of very specialized people (medical doctors, high end scientists, PhD's in economics hehehe) it should not be lifelong contract/casting. Save that for the circus surrounding "marriage equality".
The problem you are going to have is that there is a whole bunch of people (of all colors, sexes, races, and creeds) who have been trained by the media-academic complex who will either get on board with the changes needed, or fight them to the death to preserve thier jobs.
I know I am dating myself but we used to wash diapers. We did not have a clothes dryer and hung everything on a clothes line. We did not have a dishwasher or an air conditioner. We did not have faxes, copy machines (only carbon paper), computers, dvr's, big screen color tv's, no electric answering machines and cordless phones. Manual Typewriters. Most families only had one car because the Woman did not work. A small neighborhood grocery store you could walk to. A street vendor that had a horse and cart to sell vegetables, cantaloupe, watermelon in the alley. Home Milk, egg and donuts home delivery. We did not have electric mixers, electric can openers, electric juicers, etc. Some had electric vacuums but many used carpet sweepers (remember those?). No electric or gas powered hedge trimmers, no electric or gas powered lawn mowers, no electric or gas powered leaf blowers, no electric or gas powered edgers, weed wackers, no electric or gas powerd power washers, no electric or gas powered snow blowers.
I am sure you get the picture and could add quite a few of your own in our evolution over the last 50 years.
Forget all this recent stuff. As a society where we really went wrong was when we got the brilliant idea we could control fire.
Obviously fire is a gift from the sky gods, and it's hubris on our part to be building it for ourselves. Back in the times when we had to chase smoke for days to find a lingering spark, none of this ever would have happened.
Awesome post.
If only people would break free from the "change for the sake of change"-thing, and the "keeping things as they are, for the sake of keeping stuff", they may get the idea, of combining good things of the past, good things of the current, and throw in some good future ideas.... while aborting all the crap of the past, current and trendy future..... but i guess, that would be utopic.
I think we are only a couple of decades away from cracking methyl hydrates (economically, that is). That will be a huge source of nat gas. Possibly an environmental catastrophe too.
Dilithium crystals, bitchez!
Dilithium crystals are science fiction...Tesla coils are going to save us all, free energy , ya know....
/sarc
Used [ Warp coils for sale} www. white house.com
The surface of a planet is NOT the correct place for an expanding technological civilization. Expand your thinking, folks!
And how are you going to transport all that fancy energy back to the planet, with high efficiency.... without creating something that may as well be called a WMD? And what are the costs/effort of servicing this?
Or did i understand you wrong, and you're proposing the transhumanist agent smith approach: "If we didn't get it right at home, surely we will fix it by expanding further.... bit like keynesian stimulus"?
Completely useless article. 'Complete list' LOL. You'd need about 40 entries.
All this article shows is the big money/mainstream on energy has....nothing to say. Barely able to maintain current supply at an ever-increasing level of cost, and risk.
Nothing is capable of maintaining this - not even the wet "fix it all!"-dream of technologists, nuclear fusion. Once one part of the equation contains infinity, you cannot win.
Tyler you ignored a major source of fuel in India: cow dung. Used in cooking and heating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_dung
We have an infinite supply coming from our politicians and from Manhattan. Who says we don't have enough renewable energy sources.
when the politicians want to get something done, they can call in their buffalo chips.
This is a complete list of alternative energies to oil??!! Allow me to vomit. And all back into nuclear, oil, coal and natural gas. Just more of the same. More of these old corporatocraties dominated energy alternatives. I thought Zero Hedge was a decent web site mate.
Where are the non-polluting renewable alternatives dudes; solar, wind farming, tide harvesting, bio-fuels, etc?? Electricity can be turned into hydrogen and then used in the transport sector. They just disappeared right? Pushed under the rug… How much was PopSci magazine paid that by the oil and nuclear industry in order to publish such a crap?
The post peak oil world will need a complex combination of all these energy alternatives. But it shocks my mind that someone can pretend that the only response to peak oil is to increase nuclear, natural gas, coal and more oil. Where’s the freaking vomit bucket??
Vomit away, but do so out of panic, not disgust. The trouble with alterative energies is the efficiency. And the fact they ofte require more energy input than the produce. Oh, yeah, that's efficiency... I said that. And, they all depend on oil. Where you gona get the iberglass and carbon fiber for a 100foot wind turbine blade? that's right, OIL. You can't make that shit outta wind.
Electricity production is THE most inefficient use of primary energy sources imaginable. Eergy losses approaching 90% are realized. If it weren't for fossil fuels, we wouldm have no electricity. That includes dams. Try building a hydroelecric facility without fossil fuel inputs.
The Russians and Chinese did it. It's called Gulag slavery.
"Some" renewables have *recently* stepped into "efficient" and "cost-effective" territory (i.e., bio-reactors are now up to 25% efficiency, up from 1% a few years earlier), but those technologies are barely 2-3 years old, and therefore:
- Will require many more years to mature and be industrialized..... 8 years minimum.
- Have not reached popular opinion, who may have discounted them in their baby days, because of the horrible efficiency back then
Mind you, this does NOT apply to all renewables, just a few. In any case, those technological advances are far from mass-production ready. They do however now have "production-ready"-dates, that are shorter and more trustworthy than nuclear fusion.... still, no short term solution.
I beseech y'all, junk me into oblivion if you even had a vague understanding of this article. I say 98% have no clue. I am always ragged on for injecting politics, but this shit is where it's at. We need power. Libs have no clue how to provide it, based on their second by second polls. You Europeans need not respond - you've already made your bed, now STFU and lie in it. We in America have a chance to keep the 'c'. The change needed to keep us alive will take several election cycles. You dip Paulistas better figure that out. We need new blood, not same old,same old. Examine, for example, your feelings about Palin. Did the MSM affect you? Do you have any valid objections to her?
Yes, she is not running yet, but think! What about Rue Paul is so great? Do you really want 4 more years of the Squirrel? Think, dammit!
It doesn't happen all at once. Fukking Marxists have been at it for 50 yrs.
No one is gonna junk Ya. You're being REAL. We like that!
Took an hour to compose, and still didn't make all my points. Dam refreshing TAP products!!
get naked! and tell it like it is! Rock on the Asian markets open @ 11:30 my day a head time!
The reason you get junked is because:
a) You post junk that 9/10 times is off-topic and serves your crypto fascist agenda.
b) You have multiple IDs and you use these pseuds to praise your own posts.
c) You think that people on ZH cannot figure out (b).
That's why you get junked. Asshole.
I covered my constant off topic posts in stating that you morons don't accept it is all political, based on your refusal to acknowledge the obvious.
I have no multiple ids.
You are a moron.
Re-elect Odipshit!
Vote Ron Paul!
What's the matter? Afraid Tyler will run an IP address check and find out how many different IDs you are using?
Ill fill those Parens. )( lets talk?
No political change == no use of certain technologies
No adequate technologies == political change cannot result in adoption of adequate tech
No political change == no use of alternative mindsets
No alternative mindsets == political change cannot result in adoption of alternative mindsets
Who's the moron argueing for good old dichotomies?
[ )( ] Who cares? ~ yea that works! SP time!
I'n not gonna junk ya but seriously? Palin? I can't take anyone seriously who takes her seriously. Seriously. Here's one valid objection: She's not smart. I cringe when I hear her speak, feel downright sorry for her at times. And no, I'm not influenced much by the MSM. I don't have a teevee, don't listen to commercial radio and don't read MSM magazines or other publications.
Palin was just an example for the exact knee jerk reaction you exhibited.
Please return to marketwatch, you have become annoying.
Just go.
Kewl, a noob giving me shit.
I'm talking REAL NUMBERS. How do you feel about spx( popping that 40 level?{
How do you like HF trading? Dark pools/ stimulated now? YEN
Mr Party Pussy in all his glory.