Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Bare Knuckled Environmentalism Will Not Work




This is a neat editorial that is well worth reading.  It reminds us that replacing our energy system is not so simple as far to many like to make out in the enviro camp.  I always thought most of those had a death wish.

That we have pieced together a viable option while we wait for fusion is helpful.  That the build out of a complete Wind – Geothermal – Solar network is a solution is good news.  Been chock a block with windmills and transmission lines is not.

We are not presently in position to properly handle an oil crisis except through protracted rationing which could drag on for years.  We should be.  A field collapse is becoming a surety in the near future as the old mega fields are getting their last squeeze.  It also takes far too long to bring new production on stream.

What I find shocking in a way, is that the demand for energy will increase dramatically over the next several decades as the rest of the global population enters the middle class.

 Maybe we need to rename it the developed class, as there really is no other class, because the rich need little more than what everyone else can have anyway in the developed economy.

Because that is true, burning oil is about to simply become far too costly.  The investors already sense all that and even the dinosaurs are changing direction.

They are following the market though at a time when governments need to be aggressively leading the markets on this one issue.


Bare-knuckled environmentalism won't save the planet

A renewable energy breakthrough is, perhaps, decades away. Climate-change activists' calls for lawmakers to hasten the process are wasting our time and money.

Michael Smith
August 10, 2010

"If they can put a man on the moon, they can find something to replace oil."


This trope has been around since Mideast oil producers delivered their first ransom note to the West in the 1970s. It implies that the fuel of the future is perfectly ordinary stuff — like the ingredients of Coca Cola — and we could have it tomorrow if not for shadowy corporate interests that jealously guard the formula.


Such folk wisdom has no currency among those who actually work on alternative energy, who know too well the challenges they face and understand that a breakthrough may be decades away. Unfortunately, some of their friends in the environmental community are less realistic. With his announcement on the Aug. 4 Times Op-Ed page that 350.org's contribution to the project will now be foot-stamping, red-faced anger, Bill McKibben joins that camp.

At the risk of wasting words on someone who says he's ready to get arrested to keep the seas from turning to acid and the planet from melting, I'd like to suggest to McKibben that our long-sought energy revolution may be slow to arrive for reasons other than the obstinacy of politicians. Perhaps it's because Mother Nature — moon shots and Dolly the sheep notwithstanding — is a hard act to follow.


Look at what she accomplished before even vertebrates came along. She spread the tiny carcasses of algae and plankton on the ocean floor, basted them with sediment and let them simmer for millions of years. The result was a highly concentrated, reliable and portable energy source — ideal for brainy bipeds who invented the wheel and eventually wanted to power it with something other than muscle.


Compare her handiwork to mankind's puny efforts to harness the sun, the wind or amber waves of grain. Those energy sources present themselves to us in diluted form. We have to collect them in great quantities, dedicating large areas of land to the process. Nature produced fossil fuels under similar constrictions, but without the problem of locating towering windmills and ugly solar farms, not to mention thousands of miles of transmission lines. Nor did she have to decide whether a bushel of corn would feed people in poor countries or fuel vehicles in rich ones.


Even after the initial energy "harvest," humans must go to great lengths to create a concentrated, usable product. The goal (mandatory, in the case of transportation) is energy density. Nature needed countless millennia to pack it into your $40 fill-up. Is it any wonder we have a tough time matching her? To date, the only thing that comes close is nuclear fission. Unless GM plans to follow its much-heralded Volt with the Chevy Chernobyl, we can probably disregard that idea.


McKibben's idea is to confront a technological problem with political and economic pressure. We must put a "stiff price" on carbon, he says, because otherwise fossil fuel won't go away.


Aside from the fact that most people wouldn't want it to go away until a viable substitute is found, I doubt that coercion of any kind will help scientists think harder or faster. Man's first moon landing came 66 years after Kitty Hawk. Could we have gotten there sooner by imposing a tax on any manned flight that involved a propeller?


Here's an idea for scaring up revenue in lieu of a carbon tax: Let's stop paying organizations millions of dollars to "prove" anthropogenic global warming. The only practical purpose of such research is to tell us we need alternatives to fossil fuel. Let's put our money toward developing those alternatives, as well as making existing technologies cleaner and greener. While we wait for the revolution, we may as well produce something more useful than collective guilt.


Michael Smith lives in Cynthiana, Ky.

3 comments:

photinacook said...

My hero name: Lady Life Grows
My legal name: Esther M. Cook

I am a biological scientist. I have been angry for years at the lies told about fossil fuels and their most beneficial product--carbon dioxide. Energy is the second most beneficial product, but carbon dioxide has done even more to extend our lifespans and provide food. Recently, I did a literature search to find out what results have been gotten on animals similar to the thousands of studies proving the obvious--carbon dioxide increase causes increased plant growth. There are zero studies showing the effects of doubling or tripling CO2 on animal well-being other than bugs. The average rodent burrow has 50 times the CO2 present in air, and chicken eggs hatch faster in 50X enriched CO2 as well. Preemie human babies are often incubated with 7% CO2 so their lungs mature faster.

If the fuss were really about the environment, not tax and control, then there would be hundreds of studies on terrestrial vertebrates.

I have seen horrifying contortions as biological scientist argue that increasing animals would raise their risk of extinction (college class, Summer 2010) and wild speculations on how increased temps would harm critters. The actual science is that increasing temps raise primary production and that is the biggest single factor in biodiversity. That is why higher average temps used to be called "climate optimum" before Algore's and others' screaming about AGW.

Harry Braun said...

Many so-called energy experts continue to report fossil fuel industry myths that ripping the tops off of mountains in order to provide a few days of coal, or drilling for toxic oil and natural gas must continue because there is simply no other energy option available. However, the technology to extract hydrogen from water with electricity generated by the wind was developed by scientists and engineers in the 1800s, but oil and gas industry lobbyists made sure their very profitable but highly-toxic products would continue to be used and needlessly contaminate virtually every person and animal worldwide.

As bad as the 200 million gallon Gulf oil spill is, according to a “Oil in the Sea” report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), over 1.3 trillion gallons of oil is released each year into the oceans worldwide not from accidental spills, but from hundreds of millions of people who use oil-based fuels like gasoline to power their vehicles and lubricate their engines, most of which ends up in rivers and eventually the oceans.

Moreover, the NAS scientists have documented that the oil spills are only the tip of the iceberg of profound problems that are caused by the production, transportation and use of oil and other fossil fuels, which now generate over 3 billion pounds of atmospheric carbon dioxide every day in the U.S. alone. This is why NAS scientists have warned that humanity is in the final stages of making the Earth itself uninhabitable -- and none of this needed to happen.

The first hydrogen-fuelled automobile, which is pictured on our PhoenixProjectFoundation.US website, was developed in 1807 in Switzerland, and by 1892, Poul la Cour, a Danish scientist, produced the first wind powered “electrolytic” hydrogen production system. Professor J.S.B. Haldane proposed at Cambridge University that coal and other fossil fuels could and should be replaced with hydrogen made from the wind and water, and in the 1970s, the International Association for Hydrogen Energy (IAHE.org) was established, which now has over 2,000 distinguished scientists and engineers from over 45 countries who are involved in every aspect of hydrogen production, storage, transmission and end use as a fuel or chemical feedstock that is needed to make everything from gasoline to semiconductors.

I have been an Advisory Board Member of the IAHE for the past 30 years, and in 1984 I first proposed to the national news media a “Phoenix Project” plan for the U.S. to rise from the ashes of non-renewable fossil and nuclear fuels to a Solar Hydrogen Economy with wartime-speed in my Congressional campaign against John McCain.

Less than 2 million 5 MW wind systems would be needed to displace all of the fossil and nuclear fuels now used in the USA, which means approximately 8 million systems would displace the use all fossil and nuclear fuels worldwide. The cost of the 2 million units for the USA is estimated to be $10 trillion, and given the USA now spends approximately $1.5 trillion for fossil and nuclear fuels, the wind systems would pay for themselves in less than 7 years by producing hydrogen from water, which is both pollution-free and inexhaustible. The only question is whether the trillions of dollars that will flow essentially forever from this solar hydrogen macro engineering project should primarily to private companies like Exxon or BP, which have no responsibility for the public welfare, or to the U.S. Treasury, so the U.S. government could actually pay for government services while also paying down the national debt each year.

Thus to suggest that some new renewable energy source needs to be discovered is absurd. Any biological scientist should know that photosynthetic bacteria and plants have been successfully extracting hydrogen from water with solar energy on a global scale with no pollution for over 3 billion years.

Harry Braun said...

Many so-called energy experts continue to report fossil fuel industry myths that ripping the tops off of mountains in order to provide a few days of coal, or drilling for toxic oil and natural gas must continue because there is simply no other energy option available. However, the technology to extract hydrogen from water with electricity generated by the wind was developed by scientists and engineers in the 1800s, but oil and gas industry lobbyists made sure their very profitable but highly-toxic products would continue to be used and needlessly contaminate virtually every person and animal worldwide.

As bad as the 200 million gallon Gulf oil spill is, according to a “Oil in the Sea” report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), over 1.3 trillion gallons of oil is released each year into the oceans worldwide not from accidental spills, but from hundreds of millions of people who use oil-based fuels like gasoline to power their vehicles and lubricate their engines, most of which ends up in rivers and eventually the oceans.

Moreover, the NAS scientists have documented that the oil spills are only the tip of the iceberg of profound problems that are caused by the production, transportation and use of oil and other fossil fuels, which now generate over 3 billion pounds of atmospheric carbon dioxide every day in the U.S. alone. This is why NAS scientists have warned that humanity is in the final stages of making the Earth itself uninhabitable -- and none of this needed to happen.

The first hydrogen-fuelled automobile, which is pictured on our PhoenixProjectFoundation.US website, was developed in 1807 in Switzerland, and by 1892, Poul la Cour, a Danish scientist, produced the first wind powered “electrolytic” hydrogen production system. Professor J.S.B. Haldane proposed at Cambridge University that coal and other fossil fuels could and should be replaced with hydrogen made from the wind and water, and in the 1970s, the International Association for Hydrogen Energy (IAHE.org) was established, which now has over 2,000 distinguished scientists and engineers from over 45 countries who are involved in every aspect of hydrogen production, storage, transmission and end use as a fuel or chemical feedstock that is needed to make everything from gasoline to semiconductors.

I have been an Advisory Board Member of the IAHE for the past 30 years, and in 1984 I first proposed to the national news media a “Phoenix Project” plan for the U.S. to rise from the ashes of non-renewable fossil and nuclear fuels to a Solar Hydrogen Economy with wartime-speed in my Congressional campaign against John McCain.

Less than 2 million 5 MW wind systems would be needed to displace all of the fossil and nuclear fuels now used in the USA, which means approximately 8 million systems would displace the use all fossil and nuclear fuels worldwide. The cost of the 2 million units for the USA is estimated to be $10 trillion, and given the USA now spends approximately $1.5 trillion for fossil and nuclear fuels, the wind systems would pay for themselves in less than 7 years by producing hydrogen from water, which is both pollution-free and inexhaustible. The only question is whether the trillions of dollars that will flow essentially forever from this solar hydrogen macro engineering project should primarily to private companies like Exxon or BP, which have no responsibility for the public welfare, or to the U.S. Treasury, so the U.S. government could actually pay for government services while also paying down the national debt each year.

Thus to suggest that some new renewable energy source needs to be discovered is absurd. Any biological scientist should know that photosynthetic bacteria and plants have been successfully extracting hydrogen from water with solar energy on a global scale with no pollution for over 3 billion years.