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The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.
I'm more interested in reality than you are, obviously.
I'm more interested in reality than you are, obviously.
That's why you fantasize so much about it? Some people don't mind becoming engineered products residing in an engineered environment for as long as there is a Frankenstein burger on a chemical bun, well, windmills are on the wish list for some folks too.
So what you are saying is that if we capture as little solar energy as would equal 7X the total energy we now use from all sources combined, that could be a problem. That's good to know. Totally irrelevent to the discussion at hand, and to the need to solve current problems, but good to know.
You sound like an economist from this link: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/...ets-physicist/ Economist: I don’t think energy will ever be a limiting factor to economic growth. Sure, conventional fossil fuels are finite. But we can substitute non-conventional resources like tar sands, oil shale, shale gas, etc. By the time these run out, we’ll likely have built up a renewable infrastructure of wind, solar, and geothermal energy—plus next-generation nuclear fission and potentially nuclear fusion. And there are likely energy technologies we cannot yet fathom in the farther future.
Energy consumption (total and per capita) grows exponentially. If we are to extrapolate energy use in the future (using current trends) we don't have to worry about CO2 and stuff, we'll screw ourselves without CO2. Our total energy consumption will become significant on the solar radiation scale in 100 years or less. It doesn't really matter how you produce that energy, fossils or solar, nuclear or fusion. Capturing significant % of the solar radiation to be converted to work will trigger a catastrophic climate change, equally releasing that much energy using fusion reactors will be just as devastating.
More from the link above: Second, thermodynamic limits impose a cap to energy growth lest we cook ourselves. I’m not talking about global warming, CO2 build-up, etc. I’m talking about radiating the spent energy into space. I assume you’re happy to confine our conversation to Earth, foregoing the spectre of an exodus to space, colonizing planets, living the Star Trek life, etc.
Economist: More than happy to keep our discussion grounded to Earth.
Physicist: [sigh of relief: not a space cadet] Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.
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I'm more interested in reality than you are, obviously.
You gave me more than one reason to seriously doubt that.
Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.
That was an entertaining and thought provoking piece, thank you.
A couple of things not considered in his little dialog...
It is not inevitable that human growth will continue to grow exponentially. The more developed a country gets, the more downward pressure there is on the birth rate, for a wide variety of reasons. The much ballyhooed Population Bomb of the last century did not explode and kill us all. The State of California passed a milestone a year or so ago when the birth rate first fell below the death rate. Many analysts believe that Russia's falling birth rate is what's behind the recent crackdown on gay sex. Modern contraception methods make family planning practical on a wide scale from a medical standpoint. The next step is all social.
It is not inevitable either that energy use will continue to grow exponentially, and we have the potential to reverse the trend by improving the efficiency of our energy use. A gasoline powered car flat out wastes something like 85% of the energy it uses. Incandescent lightbulbs turn a bit of energy into a small amount of light and a large amount of heat, while LED lighting produces the same amount of light using only 15% of the energy. Electric motors and computers and video displays are all becoming more energy efficient. It's an essential part of the Green Energy movement to reduce energy use.
I don't believe that anything is infinite about the closed ecological system we live in, no, and we've certainly pushed the limits on many aspects of that already. For example, it's totally predictable that we will exhaust fossil fuels within a foreseeable future if we continue our present use. That's why we need to develop alternatives now, while we still have some time.
100% of the solar energy that reaches our planet is eventually radiated back into space. Some is absorbed by the atmosphere, some bounces off, some is absorbed by the land and seas, but all of it eventually radiates back into space, along with all the heat generated from the interior of the globe. It's a process that is normally in balance, or the planet would get hotter, or colder. We've disturbed that balance, not by using energy for work, but by releasing gases from our use of fossil fuels that have unbalanced the ability of the atmosphere and the oceans to moderate our mean temperatures. Utilizing solar energy instead will allow us to slow, and perhaps someday stop the accumulation of pollution which is causing that imbalance. Converting sunlight into energy forms we can do work with, and then using it, will release heat energy, of course, but if we do it wisely, it will simply all radiate back out into space again, just as it would if we were not here at all.
Good sir if solar power was harmless, we wouldn't be having this debate. We all know the limitations and risks solar power has and can produce. I have already listed toxic waste as one, expense is another, and land usage is a third, and there are still many more. You made a rebuttal and said they are making technology where waste wont be an issue. I said until they make that technology, you have no points to make. You are refuting with a possibility and not an actuality. The actuality is there is no technology that exist which makes solar power perfect, nor harmless. Until then you are only a fundraising agent raising funds for non-existing technology to be built based off of theories which to many are unrealistic.
When that technology does arrive, please check back in to tell us how it functions and then we can properly continue this conversation.
Good sir if solar power was harmless, we wouldn't be having this debate. We all know the limitations and risks solar power has and can produce. I have already listed toxic waste as one, expense is another, and land usage is a third, and there are still many more. You made a rebuttal and said they are making technology where waste wont be an issue.
I don't believe I did, but it is hard to understand whatever point you are trying to make. Go back and reread posts # 23 and #29 and then tell me if you have a better solution than moving ahead right now with solar energy?
Here is a biased site that could be used to counter all of your renewable energy claims. It doesn't have a disclaimer and stands 100% by what is published on its webpages. Things Worse Than Nuclear Power
OK. I finally had some time to read all that. Thanks. It pretty much says the same things I've been saying, since long before i came to this particular discussion... there is no one single technology that we can use to get us out of the current ecological deadend created by using fossil fuels, but there are several promising technologies that can each provide a "wedge"... what I've been calling a fraction... of an overall solution. And yes, I see that they allot a double size wedge to conservation, which I support, I just don't know if it can realistically earn that big a slice of the pie.
Starting with the last, I believe that technological advances that support energy conservation work best, such as the conversion from incandescent lightbulbs to LED lights that run on 15% of the energy of tungsten filaments. That's a method that can work. But telling people not to take so many plane trips because we need to conserve energy, that doesn't work. Sharply raising the price of gasoline causes an immediate reduction in the use of gasoline, so that works. Telling people to ride a bike to the grocery store, rather than driving, that doesn't work because it produces almost unmeasurably small results, much more a symbolic win than a practical one.
Make a refrigerator twice as energy efficient, that will work. Telling a modern soccer mom to get a refrigerator half as big, that won't work. Sociological changes are far harder to engineer than hardware changes.
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Radioactive decay is not nuclear fission. But nuclear fission is radioactive decay. Glad we cleared that up. Uranium and every other heavy unstable nuclide breaks down the same way. 99.9999% of the time. Like clockwork. Regardless of it being forced (nuclear fission) or when it decays naturally without man's interference. All energy sources have risks to life. Can you name the dangerous toxic by-products produced by nuclear fission?
Are you serious? There are hundreds. Radioisotopes of iodine, cesium, strontium are the first that come to mind. And some of those byproducts can remain toxic for many thousands of years, even in small concentrations. That's why the approximately 1,000 square miles in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone will remain hazardous to life for many generations to come.
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The cancerous causing radiation is the same being produced by the sun and is blocked by our atmosphere. Claiming that is uncontrollably dangerous is like admitting you don't know anything about sunblock.
Sorry? You seem confused. Are you saying that cleanup workers at the destroyed nuclear reactor at Fukushima only need to wear sunblock and they'll be safe?
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I'm going to attempt this conservation of energy thing again, it went completely over your head. The law of conservation of energy states that energy may neither be created nor destroyed. Therefore the sum of all the energies in the system is a constant. That last part. Constant. You seem to not grasp that we are not using renewable or green energy.
Apparently it is you who does not understand "this conservation of energy thing." Essentially all the solar energy that falls on earth is eventually radiated back out to space except what gets stored in growing plants. When we burn those plants to liberate heat energy to do work, or burn their fossilized ancestors to do the same, that energy also winds up radiating out into space.
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We are still taking away from the environment without putting back in. Which is the question asked of this thread Solar, wind, hyrdo, geothermal, whatever the waste generated, for lack of a better term, is not placed back into the system.
This is why I don't think you understand what conservation of energy means. We're not "taking away" anything, because we can't. All we can do is use a portion of it to do work, after which the resulting heat energy radiates away.
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It's a feel good term as we have no current way to convert the waste from our energy sources back into the system. Once it's used up for all intensive purposes it's gone.
Yep, you are definitely confused. You can't use up energy, you can only change its form. And there's no "waste" to wind power, or solar power, or geothermal power. Although there is a finite limit to how much solar energy we can ever use today, there will be the same amount again tomorrow, and the day after that, so we use the terms "renewable," and "inexhaustible" to describe them.
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Fusion is the only way to accomplish renewable energy in the purest definition of the term.
But it is not renewable. That's the point. There is a finite amount of fissionable material we can access, but when it's gone it's gone. There won't be any more made. Just like fossil fuels.
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Until then reducing our carbon footprint, i.e. consuming less is really the only answer.
Like the MIT folks said you referenced said, conservation is a wedge, not the whole answer. Important, yes, but not the entire answer at all.
But thanks for the reading materials. It's nice to get the validation.
Green is an invented ideology that leads to a form of control. That is the end game for those who control the political systems of the world.
They will control every aspect of our lives in the not so far future and we have seen but a glimpse of it to date.
If you don't believe so ask why we have no choice in the type of gasoline we can put into our cars. Why is government mandated healthcare being forced upon us? There are lots of examples out there you see in your everyday lives...think about them.
BRAVO!
Being "green" is nothing more than getting you to do without what those with extreme wealth do with. The less resources you use, the longer they have access to them.
People are being shepherded into a single energy source system. All the electric car nonsense revolving around using alternative energy to charge your car. How long did it take the utility companies to get approval to charge people with roof top solar a fee to transmit electric back into the gird? California is now doing it.
At least with gasoline, you can decide not to drive today and if you cut way back on driving if you can, the price of gas has little effect on your daily life. Speed ahead to where the "green" movement wants you to go. The utility company is now also what charges your car. When they raise the rates, it isn't just for the car charger, it is for your:
Refrigerator
Microwave
TV
Computer
Heater
Hot water
Lights
and everything else running on electric even if you don't drive that electric car one mile a week.
Solar energy? They are building out panel farms. Anyone think of the life span of those panels and what happens in 20 short years? They are NOT up-gradable, they have to be replaced and if some new technology to improve the efficiency rate comes along, what happens to billions of solar panels, recycle them? No one has thought this through.
Then we hear big news stories about sewer problems. Use gray water! So, after much of the population starts using gray water and sends very little back through the sewers, how do they stay usable and not clogged up? You need a large amount of water going through those return systems to keep them clear and sending only black waste through them isn't going to work. Who will end up paying for that? You.
Recycle. Uh huh. A great idea until the government and waste management teams get together. Now you have to sort your trash so they can sell it. There is a name for that: unpaid employee.
Don't get me wrong, the conservation of resources is a good thing. Alternative energy systems are a good thing right until you are mandated to use it and pay for it because you, the individual will never have a say in what those costs become. Once you become dependent upon a single entity provider (where have we heard that before?) you are screwed, all in the name of being "green"
The term "green" is a joke anyway. Ever look at pictures of the earth which were taken from high altitudes or space?
It is mostly blue, not green. "Green" is what those getting you to step in line see when they drop off the recycle bin and then attach a note saying it is against the ______ ordinance not to recycle and doing it yourself for you own benefit doesn't qualify.
It isn't that alternative energy sources aren't needed, they are, just as solutions to power cars and all the other conveniences we've come to depend upon. The problem with alternative energy is that like the current dependencies we've created, there is no foresight into what happens when we get there. Trading one dependency for another, controlled by the relatively few is like trading one drug for another so long as they are made by the same company.
"Green" is no different than "Security". In the name of either, people will give up their independence, rights, liberties and money.
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