The scale of the US renewable electricity industry.

[NNadir]

We are often presented with the claim that renewable energy alone is a credible approach to arresting the global climate crisis which is now underway and is killing people as I write.

I think that it is cogent to point out how large this industry is, using data supplied by DOE for 2001. (Note that the DOE considers burning tires as "renewable energy." I don't but they do.)

In 2001 the renewables industry produced 262,549,676 thousand kilowatt-hours of electricity, the vast bulk of it, 213,749,295 thousand kilowatt-hours, from hydroelectric dams.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/rea_data/tablec1.html

Generally people speak in terms of billions of kilowatt hours, when speaking of energy on a national scale, but as we know, the renewables industry depends on hype - making numbers look bigger than they actually are - in order to keep up funding for their promises.

In 2003, US electrical demand was 3,481 billion kilowatt hours.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity.html

Diving the thousand kilowatt-hour numbers above by one million to render them into billion kilowatt-hour numbers, we see that the total renewable fraction of US electrical generation demand was 263/3481 = 0.0755 or 7.55%. Removing the proven hydroelectric portion from this calculation to leave the more magical fragments, we see that (263-214)/3481 = 0.0143 or 1.43% came from other renewable fuels. Dropping geothermal from the equation we have (263-214-13)/3481 = 0.0106 or 1.06% from all other renewable sources, including the burning tires. The actual fraction provided by magical solar power is 0.54/3481 = 0.000155 or 0.0155%.

[papau]

1. Yet Brazil does well without oil!

:-)

bio-fuel (alcohol via sugar cane) seems to work just fine!

[DBoon]

3. I'll drink to that!

a rum-fueled economy sounds fine to me

[mom cat]

4. And they are destroying the Amazon in order to boost the agricultural

production.We need drastic cutbacks in consumption and reproduction. The party is over.

[Oerdin]

18. If you knew about Brazil...

Then you'd know that a very large share of Brazil's power comes from hydroelectric dams. That's a safe and proven energy source which does indeed compare well to other energy sources though it does involve an enviromental impact.

Ethinol mixes in gasoline also save oil and act as an import substitution for big agricultural producers like Brazil but they're not a solution in and of themselves. Our real choices for the bulk of our power continue to be a choice between fossil fuels, hydro, nuclear, or geothermal. Hydro and Geothermal are great if you live in geographical areas where they will work but most areas don't have the specific geographic and geological features needed. That means for the bulk of our energy our choice is between nuclear or fossil fuels.

[amandabeech]

30. According to a fairly recent discussion on the Yahoo list EnergyResources,

processing sugar cane in Brazil for ethanol is much, much more energy efficient than doing the same in the U.S. with corn.

The best EROEI for corn to ethanol here is 1.6:1. In Brazil, it is something like 3:1 if the cane is grown organically.

Another thing to remember with ethanol is that it cannot be sent through our oil and oil products pipelines. Therefore, it must be transported by truck or rail from the plant to a local distribution system. Since most crop ethanol is made in the midwest, ethanol might make some sense there as a fuel extender, but shipping this to other parts of the country would drop the EROEI even further, to the point that it might even be a net energy loser.

The ethanol business here right now is a a price support for corn producers. But with the price of nitrogen fertilizer going up and up since it is made with natural gas, farmers may plant much less corn this year and maybe next making ethanol much more expensive in dollar terms and probably meaning that the corn will be sold for animal feed.

To my mind, in the midwest and some other places, switchgrass looks better in the long run.

[Oerdin]

34. Duh!

It has nothing to do with organic or not organic and it has everything to do with the sugar content of the crop. Do you honestly not understand that sugarcane has more sugar then corn?

[dcfirefighter]

36. Organic typically has fewer energy inputs. n/t

[skids]

2. Well, that's what you reap...

...when you underinvest in a resource.

[NNadir]

17. Well there is the matter of return on investment.

Between the 1973-2002, the US invested 14.2 billion dollars in renewable energy research and 11 billion dollars on energy efficiency.

http://www.acore.org/pdfs/04policy_summary_10_7.pdf

In the same period the nuclear industry received 49.1 dollars in research R&D, a portion of which I would guess, was actually for war related matters having little to do with commercial nuclear power. Thus the ratio has been 3.5 to 1 in favor of nuclear.

When one looks at the return on investment however, one immediately sees that the ratio of nuclear energy actually produced to the amount of renewable energy actually produced is much greater than 3.5 to 1.

As noted in the opening post, the return on production has not matched the relative proportions of investment. In fact, most of the renewable energy on the planet is simply hydro power, something that was available well before 1973. Even including burning garbage, including tires, as renewable energy, the renewable industry cannot claim to have produced between 1/3 and 1/4 of what nuclear energy produces. It is not even close. The entire US output of the US wind energy capacity barely equals the output of one or two large sized nuclear plants.

It would be more inspiring to throw good money at the renewable game if it was throwing good money after good money. But the question still remains, even though renewable energy is still perceived to be as sexy and as cool as it was in 1975, is throwing money at renewables going to ever produce anything substantial? There is no evidence that throwing any more money will result in any more result. In fact it is easy to make the argument that it's throwing good money after bad money.

I hear this glib bit about investment all the time, but like most solar hype it's just an excuse for poor performance, a sleight of hand. Fourteen billion dollars is NOT zero.

Now personally I would rather have the 200 billion dollars being spent in Iraq spent on energy infrastructure. However, just as the war in Iraq is producing no results, I am not sure that 200 billion dollars spent on renewables would be particularly more successful than the war. It might be less odious, but that's not the same as claiming that it would be more productive. If I had two hundred billion to spend on energy, I would simply build 100 more nuclear power plants. They work.

If the renewables industry had a record of producing with what it's already been given it would not have to beg for investment. On the contrary, you'd have trouble keeping the money out of the industry.

[skids]

20. R&D != serious investment.

You can throw all the money at University professors that you want, it doesn't make their work into an industry. That's not "investment." Investment is money down for plant builds, including subsidies from the government both directly and through externalities.

[glitch]

5. rarely does anyone propose "renewable energy alone" as a solution

to our energy needs. It's most often linked with other measures, including reducing consumption by improving efficiency through out the consumption cycle.

[NNadir]

6. I disagree.

People have a very magical outlook on the subject of renewable energy. Many people read about this or that renewable scheme and feel unduly confortable, thinking that if just a little money were thrown in the direction of the cited scheme, all would be well. I have more than passing familiarity with this mindset.

Granted, there is a mindset that is even worse, the "head in the sand mindset" that likes to make blithering generalizations like "nuclear is bad," (usually number 1) and when pressed will also state that "coal is bad" or "oil is bad" while at the same time refusing to acknowledge the existence of any viable alternatives. This is what I call, for lack of a better term, "progressive thinking" in which in a kind of outrageous doublethink and doublespeak, the claimant to this kind of thinking identifies himself or herself as a "progressive," concerned with "progress."

I note that conservation alone is also relatively modest in what it can achieve in the matter of global climate change.

Note too that I am only speaking of electricity here.

The crisis is not easily addressed. Were it so, it would not be a crisis. If the crisis has a solution, and it's not clear that it does, it will require making difficult choices and taking measurable risks. These risks will not only be technical, but they will be ethical and political as well. The last issue, political, is the most depressing. If there is anything we are short of these days, political courage would be most glaring.

[papau]

7. True - but plug-in hybrid cars makes for huge conservation

If we really want to save the planet....

and the economy

Hybrid by itself does little - but moving energy source back to efficient huge plants via "plug in hybrid" does solve a lot of problems.

[glitch]

12. We agree to disagree.

I think it is important to look at the full cost of each energy alternative, from cradle to grave.

Conservation can have many source points, improving the efficiency of energy production and consumption (and disposal of any waste from the process) is only one, but it can be a very big one.

Give Amory Lovins a look, he is an energy physicist, so perhaps you'll respect his opinion.

[Village Idiot]

8. Read "The Emperor Wears No Clothes" by Jack Herer

It shows the enormous lenghts the governmental and corporate elite will go to to stifle the energy generating potential of HEMP as both biomass and ethanol energy...

Oil and Gas...BOO!
HEMP..........YAY!

[Massacure]

15. Hemp is not a great energy source.

Paper and cloth, yes, energy, no.

Algae is much more efficient than hemp.

[skids]

21. It entirely depends...

...on how much paper and cloth you need. As a byproduct, it's more efficient than algae. As a straight energy crop, yeah the bio-oil algae ponds do seem an attractive prospect.

[dcfirefighter]

9. I am a huge fan of conservation

but read it this way:
Even if we could somehow reduce our consumption by HALF (a huge undertaking), we'd only be able to supply 2.12% of our needs through renewable sources. (I support the exclusion of Hydro from this list, as the hydro resources are generally tapped out - there just aren't many steepwalled canyons with appreciable rivers in them anymore)

[phantom power]

10. external hydro costs are huge, too.

They do incredible damage to the surrounding ecosystem, and for that matter the ecosystems upstream and downstream.

And they aren't even renewable. All rervoirs silt in eventually, making the dam unuseable and unsafe, for either power, irrigation or flood control.

[Oerdin]

22. Yes and no

Sloucing Dams like the three gorges dam would last three times as long as a regular dam before silting would become a problem. That means some where between 300-500 years of a useful life span. The problem in the US is, as already pointed out, we have used most of our good hydro locations and no one is going to pull down existing dams and replace them with sloucing dams. There are maybe a dozen good locations left to build big dams in the US and most of them are either to romote (in Alaska) or have local people who don't want the enviromental impact a new dam would cause (there are several such locations left in Arizona).

Of the available choices I think hydro is the best because even with the negative enviromental impacts it is still net better then fossil fuels or nuclear. Since increasing hydro isn't a real option I'd go with nuclear over fossil fuels since it doesn't contribute to global warming.

[skids]

11. Half isn't aggressive enough.

We're in trouble if even progressives think a 50% reduction in energy use is implausible. Someday we'll realize just how much we waste.

[dcfirefighter]

13. Actually, I believe Europeans use half the energy that Americans do

So half should be feasible without trying very hard.
I think it's roughly 1 part each:
Residential, Industrial, Commercial, & Transport.

It's quite easy to drop Residential use by more than half, we've discussed it several times here. Commercial use could be dropped using the same techniques.

Transport energy reduction can be done three general ways: reducing the weight shipped, reducing the distance shipped, and increasing the efficiency of transport. All of these will occur with higher energy prices. Reductions could occur faster, and to greater extent, with a change in consumption and land use patterns. The idea that an orange shipped from Australia is the cheapest one I can find, is ridiculous.

I'd like to point out that Coal represents the largest share of ton-miles shipped in the US per year. Grain comes second - aren't too many farms in and around our population centers.

[skids]

14. Commercial has a higher lighting budget.

Contrary to what one might expect, commercial sectors use a LOT of power on lighting. Poor architectural design. But yeah, basically the same measures as residential with the addition of natural light pipes.

Industrial isn't a sector I've looked much into. It's more complicated.

Transport is easy -- hybrids give a 30% reduction for personal autos and even S.U.V.s, the two largest users. Waste heat recovery could give another 10-20% boost. Of course the failure of telecommuting and the seeming insatiable appetite of CEOs for centralizing offices hasn't helped matters.

[NNadir]

16. What do you imagine the environmental cost of replacing every car

with a hybrid would be.

It is "easy" to deal with transportation with hand waving. It is far more difficult in actualy practice, especially given that the global climate change crisis is NOW. The fact is that replacing hundreds of millions of cars with hybrids would be a very expensive proposition, both in an economic and environmental sense. The cost of replacing 100 million cars with hybrids, even if they were $20,000 each - which they're not, would be 2 trillion dollars. Moreover one would have to simultaneously manage the disposal of 100 million cars. Moreover, billions of tons of lead would have to be mined, transported, used in manufacturing, whatever, just to make the batteries. Billions of tons of coal would need to be burned for the manufacture. Billions of tons of oil would be required to transport these vehicles to the consumers.

Similarly the capture of waste heat involves massive infrastructure changes. In fact, the notion of "throw it away" and get one that works better is a consumerist notion, not an environmentalist notion.

I fully concede that the per capita use of energy in the United States is too high. We are at 8 tons of oil equivalent per person while Japan is at half that. But it's not like Japan is is non contributor to global climate change - they are working on it by expanding their nuclear capacity and other measures, but energy there is not free nor is it without environmental consequence.

As I often report, the per capita electrical consumption of Nigeria is 8 watts, but I don't think that most people on the planet subscribe to the notion that Nigeria is a country that their own country should emulate.

There are more than 6.5 billion people on the planet. We can of course "conserve" many of these people to death, but genocide aside, it is NOT possible to provide for these people with a decent standard of living without energy. One billion hybrids, never mind 100 million hybrids, will not make this problem go away - hybrids still use gasoline.

To say that "transportation is easy" is simply to state that one has no idea of the magnitude of the problem, that one is taking refuge in platitudes as opposed to making difficult serious choices.

Here is a reference giving the per capita energy use of some nations of the world:

http://thesius.sourceoecd.org/vl=11872806/cl=24/nw=1/rpsv/factbook/07-02-02-t01.xls

Note that 1 ton equivalent oil (toe) is equal to 41,868,000,000 joules. In per capita energy consumption for 2003 the United States is the third highest after the countries listed, after Iceland and Luxembourg with 7.90 ton oil equivalent per capita. Mexico on the other hand has a relatively benign 1.63 toe per capita rate.

Germany, which has been ruled up until recently by a coalition including the so called "Green" party - a country that subsidizes solar energy by providing that anyone who produces solar electricity can charge consumers more than 10 times as much as they would ordinarily pay - has a per capita toe of 4.03.

But let's not claim that people do not require to live like Germans, much less like Americans, that Mexico is "good enough," even though if you've been to Mexico, there are many places where the poverty is far below what could be called "crushing poverty." Let's imagine that we make an international enforceable law whereby everyone is only allowed to consume 1.63 toe.

Let's calculate.

1.63 toe is equivalent to 68.2 billion joules per person. The world population is nearly 6.5 billion people. Thus, if Mexico is "good enough" we see that it would require 444 exajoules (1 exajoule = 10^18 joules) for everybody to live as well as Mexicans do. As it happens, not everybody does live as well as Mexicans. The total world energy demand was about 425 exajoules in the year 2000.

http://www.open.ac.uk/T206/3longtour.htm

This gives a realistic estimate of how much energy can be obtained by conservation, if one accepts the notion that it is immoral not to raise living standards of most of the people on the planet to at least the level of Mexicans. One would actually have to increase the energy supply by 19 exajoules to provide for as much energy as Mexicans consume.

Here is where energy comes from today:



It is very clear that there is no renewable energy system on the planet that is prepared in the short term to even allow everyone to live as well as Mexicans do, and let's face it, unlike the people of Iceland, the Mexicans enjoy a warm climate - they certainly don't need the same energy as a North Dakotan might. Finally there is the fact that there are great many people on the planet, most of them in developed countries to be sure, who would rather not live as the Mexicans do. One might attempt to declare that all of these people must buy hybrids, or whatever, but some how I think the declaration might prove difficult to enforce.

I repeat. There is no glib easy solution to this crisis.

[skids]

19. Heheh.

You lost me at "lead for the batteries." :rofl:

People replace cars anyway.

[Oerdin]

23. You do know...

That virtually every automotive battery is lead-acid, right?

[skids]

24. You do know...

...that virtually every hybrid High-voltage battery is not lead-acid, right?

You also do know that lead-acid batteries are recycled 93.3% of the time, right?

[NNadir]

25. You do know the LD 50 for lead don't you?

You do know that some people don't replace cars every year, don't you? And you have maybe some awareness, that global climate change isn't waiting for the next consumer fad in hybrid vehicles, but that it's actually happening now, don't you?

And you do know that a car requires more energy than what is put in the gas tank, don't you, specifically the energy it takes to manufacture it. You do know that there's a lot of aluminum in those cars, don't you?

You do know that the global manufacturing capacity for hybrids is only now ramping up and that therefore it will impossible to sell only hybrids for at least a decade? You do know that access to these batteries is controlled pretty much, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, by a single company, now 80% owned by Toyota, don't you?

And you do know that replacing all the world's lead batteries with nickel hydride batteries will have some effect on the lead battery recycling rate, don't you?

Now tell me again why it is "easy" to solve the transportation part of the energy equation?

[skids]

26. The simple fact...

The easy comes from the simple fact that as supply dwindles, people conserve and discard equipment that has become less than economical.

If you have any ideas for making it happen faster, please do tell. Oh wait, let me guess, we should all run our cars on electricity from nuclear reactors, right? Oh wait, that would require batteries...

[NNadir]

38. Actually no. Running cars on nuclear energy would not require batteries.

It is well understood, and under development in China and being readily studied in Japan - as I have reported many times - that thermochemical hydrogen can be produced via the use of High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactors (HTGR). The first commercial reactor of this type will come on line in 2010. (The pilot should start running in a few months.)

The hydrogen so produced can then be used to synthesize dimethyl ether, DME, which is a fuel that is superior to natural gas in its physical properties (it is easily liquifiable, with a critical temperature higher than the temperature of boiling water), and can be burned in both fuel cells and in diesel engines as well as in any application now using natural gas. It produces zero particulates, having no carbon-carbon bonds, is already an industrial compound (it's hair spray propellant), is non toxic, and is easily removed from water in cases of spills simply by passing air through it. Japan is planning on DME as a motor fuel. It's atmospheric lifetime is about 5 days (compared to 12 years for natural gas).

Many synthetic techniques and catalysts are known which produce DME, from hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

DME is also usuable as a refrigerant, the caveat being that it is of course flammable if it leaks.

All of the technology to manufacture DME is well understood. Most of it will be running at industrial scale by the end of this decade, the last bit being the Chinese reactor.

Much of the existing diesel fleet, and all of the existing natural gas burning could be fueled via DME.

[skids]

39. Should I bother.

...to point out that all the above arguments you made about replacing a vehicle fleet also apply to switching gasoline ICEs also apply to switching the fleet, which is mostly gasoline based, to diesel?

Nah, you wouldn't care. After all, the argument only matters if it supports your agenda. If it doesn't, then it's impertinant.

(Though personally I think diesel hybrids would be superior of course to gas hybrids.)

[NNadir]

40. You have a point. But the original point is that transportation is NOT

an "easy," matter to solve.

I note that we all support our own agenda and all of us act if those who question us are impertinent. One of the more annoying things that one does in an argument is to accuse one's adversary of doing what one is doing oneself. As you point out, I can justifiably be reprimanded on that score and so, score one for you.

Although there are millions of diesels in the world, outfitting them to run on DME would require both significant investment and enviromental costs. Also it is worth noting DME can and will be made by very dirty means. The Chinese plants being built to manufacture DME fuel will use a coal source. Their nuclear source of of hydrogen, which will be available next decade, will probably not be used to manufacture DME, but some other products that use hydrogen intermediates.

I note that my agenda is not "easy" either. To supply 100% of the world's energy by nuclear means would require about 4000 new nuclear plants, or an increase in capacity by close to 1000%. This would require an investment of 8 trillion dollars, which is close to the US GNP for any given year. There will be nothing easy about that.

I note also that such an event is unlikely to happen. Currently about 23 new nuclear plants are under construction world wide and about 39 more have been ordered and 98 are in various stages of proposal. The required capacity for the world to go nuclear in 20 years, which would be a good idea, would require 200 plants per year. Clearly there is a huge shortfall and this does not bode well for the global climate crisis.

My real agenda is simply to say that being cute doesn't make it in the world of energy and the environmental crisis of global climate change. I'm not the one who has claimed that anything is an "easy choice." This situation is a crisis simply because there are no easy choices. I resent very much, because I have children, the implication that the situation is otherwise.

I do note that people get very annoyed with me when I point the difficulties of the solar nirvana. I am aware of these difficulties mostly because I used to be a believer but now I'm an older and wiser man.

[AZCat]

27. It's going down.

I just went to a seminar for Standard 90.1-2004, the commercial building energy standard adopted by many code jurisdictions in the US. The allowed Watts/sqft is down (on average) by about 25% from the previous version (Standard 90.1-2001) to around 1.2 W/sqft. Previously it was common to see 2-3 W/sqft installed in commercial buildings, especially retail. Unfortunately this only governs commercial new construction and renovation projects - buildings that aren't going to be modified can still use as much lighting as they have installed without restriction.

[Dogmudgeon]

28. Residential in the USA is roughly 12%

I don't have the URL handy, but I got the figure from a DoE publication that tracks energy use. That figure has been steady for several years.

You're right, we can drop that figure quite a bit, as well as transport. But Commercial and Industrial energy use is less elastic, and Industrial requires an enormous capital investment in re-tooling and new technology. That investment itself involves energy, and that's the tiger we're riding.

Coal and Grain show promise, but they're also major carbon sources, and could easily exacerbate climate change.

It wouldn't be too difficult for America to generate enough energy for the needs of its population, but the financial system indirectly depends on a certain amount of energy use. If that input crashes, so does the system. That's where NNadir's arguments really hit home, because nuclear energy is the only energy source that can currently provide the power to prevent a financial disaster and world-wide superdepression. We need about 550 EJ (exajoules) this year; in ten years, we'll need close to 800 EJ. And yet, the peak of oil production is due between a month from now and 2010. The gap between what the world demands and what can be provided is a rough measure of what portion of Humanity is in jeopardy of death by exposure, disease, and most of all, by starvation.

The market will increase efficiencies, as you write, but without energy to be subject to efficient use, collapse occurs. The collapse of the modern financial world will probably not kill too many Americans outright, but anywhere "Green Revolution" crops are used, mass starvation will be less than two years away from the last seed contract Con-Agra can fulfil.

It may be possible to do what needs to be done without nuclear power. I am not optimistic about it, though, because the "real world" and the marketplace are inefficient in their own ways. We really need to get working on both non-nuclear and nuclear energy sources, or we will soon enter an age of mass poverty and death. And without nuclear energy sources, I believe the chances for survival of a modern economic system (and about 90% of the world's population) are less than 50:50.

--p!

[dcfirefighter]

29. I believe residential is higher

Take a look at this chart: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0201a.html It lists residential total energy use at 21,200 TBtu of a total US energy use of 99,740 TBtu, or 21.3%. I believe the difference is due to transmission losses: dispersed housing (and rural electrification) generally mean you'll be spending electricity heating ground and air along transmission lines. I could be wrong though, take a look at the footnotes.

Regardless, for the most part, we KNOW how to use less energy - it's just got to be economically viable to do so. A partial solution would be to lower taxes on capital - namely buildings and building components that would lower energy use, transportation capital, and industrial capital.

[skids]

32. Disagree on commercial.

Commercial is perhaps the single most elastic of all the sectors (because it is the most wasteful.)



Industrial is a tough nut though.

[Dogmudgeon]

33. Thanks for those corrections

And to DCFirefighter, as well.

I was probably thinking of commercial=industrial; from the looks of it, commercial energy use could be shrunk drastically. A major work-at-home push could cut the size of that sphere of energy use, AND eliminate waste energy where the house sits empty all day while the couple is working and the kids are at daycare.

I also overestimated the energy needs of the world. I cited 550 EJ from memory; I think 450 EJ is more the correct value, from the graphic NNadir posted. Anyway, my big-picture arguments are unchanged: within a decade, maybe a decade-and-a-half if we're lucky, we're going to hit an energy resources gap like Wile E. Coyote stepping out over the cliff. But unlike the cartoons, our drop will end in a very painful crash.

The other numerical assumptions I made were based on a 2% per annum rate of population growth, the necessity of maintaining a 2.5% per annum rate of energy demand growth to prevent depression and financial collapse, and the "Rule of 70" (also see the Six Billion Game web page for several discussions of the implications of human population growth) for determining doubling time from a percentage. (E.g., 2% growth produces a doubling time of 70/2 , or 35, years.) So, the fundamental problem is the old Malthusian one of population vs. resources.

First, we probably need to go nuclear. Even so, it will be difficult, it will require giving a lot of political power over to industrialists who have had lousy reputations for civic responsibility, and it will entail significant risks from potential radioisotope leakage due to plain old human stupidity. And there is no guarantee that we will be able to build enough nukes in time to bridge the energy resources gap. But compared to the deaths of 5 to 6 billion people, the risks are not terrible.

Second, we possibly could get all the energy we need from non-nuclear technology, BUT it will be much more difficult to do than to go nuclear, which itself is not a sure thing. We should develop non-nuclear energy technologies anyway, but without taking nuclear power into consideration, we'd only be hobbling ourselves..

Third, we have no idea how climate change will complicate matters, but any additional burden will require more energy production. Mass migrations use up a lot of gasoline. Even if we force the starving refugees to walk, all that precious movable capital is going to need lots of automobiles and trucks.

Anti-nuke proponents, believe me, I did not come to my decision lightly. NNadir isn't slipping me cash for being pro-nuke. But we've wasted close to half a century, and now all we're left with is the possibility that a mad dash to nuclear energy could maybe save our collective bacon. We have about ten years left to get the plans in motion.

If there is a way to avoid going nuclear without sacrificing billions of people, let me know. Perhaps it is simply a matter of my own lack of imagination. But right now, it appears to be a lot easier to protect nuclear power plants from damage and strictly regulate their operation than it would be to allow a most of the human race to die.

At this point, any scenario may be hopeless. But it's absurd to think that way. I prefer the absurdity of believing that we can survive.

--p!

[dcfirefighter]

37. Malthus

I'm not so sure it was a correction, as I wasn't completely sure I was reading the table correctly, but thanks.

Malthus was wrong.

Without fail, developed civilizations experience a decline in birth rates and a stabilization of population.

Regardless, each additional person brings more potential demand for goods and services. In fact you can pretty much assume that each person has a limitless potential demand, while bringing a relatively fixed amount of labor.

With labor and natural resources (Land), we can create Capital. Labor keeps growing, Land remains constant, or even decreases as we deplete it. With increasing Labor, and improving technology, we can continually improve our supply of Capital.

With increasing Labor and Capital, and relatively fixed Land, we can also continually improve our supply of Wealth. The catch is to find some measure of justice in the distribution of Wealth.

It would meet my definition of justice if each human had a relatively equal share in the natural wealth of the planet. Of course dividing up the world into parcels and distributing them is problematic: different areas certainly have a different value per area; the number of parcels would have to vary constantly with population, making planning for production difficult at least.

However, with the simplest of Capital (Shovels, seeds, simple tools, appropriate knowledge) AND access to Land, most people could provide for their nutritional needs with less than 20% of their Labor.

With similar Capital and Land, a small fraction of their Labor can provide for their fiber and building material needs; another fraction, coupled with slightly more complicated Capital can produce their clothing, homes, and buildings.

With their basic physiological needs taken care of with well less than half of their labor, more than half of their labor can be used to meet their more esoteric needs: health, safety, entertainment, actualization.

Big Pharma notwithstanding, the largest portion of healthcare & medicine is knowledge (a form of Capital), which is certainly not limited by natural resources.

In summary: Labor and Capital are virtually unlimited; they at least CAN grow over time. Land is the limiting factor, however it is much less of a limit than is commonly posited here. Some 80% of the world's land area receives more than 10" of (relatively) clean rain each year. According to the UN, there are 5 billion Ha of agricultural land. According to Ecology Action, complete nutrition for one person can be sustainably grown on 5000 s.f. of land, with relatively little rainfall, and almost no off-farm inputs. Even if they are off by a factor of 4, there is more than enough planetary resources to grow food for 27 Billion people.

The limiting factor isn't Land the planet, its people's ability to share it.

[Kolesar]

31. Californians use 60% of the energy that other Americans use

According to that republican congressman from the panhandle of Maryland who does those "special order" speeches on Peak Oil every few months. Watch for him on cspan.

[Oerdin]

35. As a Californian...

I can tell you exactly why we use 40% less then the rest of you poor bastards. I live in San Diego and th yearly temperatures average between 75-65 degrees and an average high low basis. Heating? I can count the number of days I use my heater on my fingers. AC? Nope, I don't need it since I live in La Jolla and cool ocean breezes are the norm. Most of the coastal regions up to 20 miles inland have the same coastal cooling effect.

The fact that we don't need big heating or cooling expenses is a huge bonus now add in that most Californian major cities have light rail and even when there isn't light rail Californians tend to buy more energy efficent cars over the guzzling SUVs the red staters love. Sure, we have SUV driving fucktards but as a percentage of sales they are much lower. The rest of the country ccould get into more energy efficent cars if they wanted to but most of the country will never have the great climate which means Californians don't have to expend energy on heating and cooling.