Jesse how much oil is embedded in European renewables? Calculate the energy budget along the entire pipeline form the original mining of raw materials all the way through final disposal of obsolete windmills/panels etc. How much of this energy is fossil in nature?
Believe me I am all for renewables and am just as much a proponent of building green and in general increasing energy efficiency, but the fact remains that there is a huge fossil input into the renewable energy industrial supply chain. For example the production of polysilicon is very energy intensive. If Europe outsources its pollution to places like China - a big supplier of PV to Europe - it still counts as pollution and to the extent that the supply chain of renewables depends on fossil inputs these sectors will remain tied to whatever supply/demand curves drive the global fossil energy market. As fossil energy prices skyrocket - because energy is very inelastic demand - what affect will this have on the global renewable energy supply chain? Everything is inextricably bound up with all these massive global spanning systems and extricating ourselves from the mess we have made of things on this earth will not be as easy as I think many hope it will be. Just as the resource limits - especially fossil energy (including uranium) - begin to drive an unrelenting global economic contraction the world is also going to have to begin dealing with the tailpipe consequences of a hundred years of really dumping our shit into the biosphere. Look at any metric you choose: global human population explosion; collapsing marine and terrestrial ecologies; global annual rates of desertification and deforestation; global mean moving average temperature rising; mass extinction going on (amphibian species disappearing very rapidly); Fukushima; peak oil; loss of natural organic fertility in soils globally; eutrophication of lakes and waterways and growing dead zones; mono-crop petro-chemical dependent industrial scale profit driven agriculture. the list could go on. Put all of this together and then focus all of these effects into the small period of say fifty years - the fifty years ahead of us - I am not as sanguine as some here that our species will be able to ride the buffeting compounding effects (at every phase in the supply chain) that all of these global trends will begin and already are having. I certainly hope we can make a transition to a wiser way of living, but am not so sure we will do it based on what I see going on all around me in this earth I inhabit. For the earth it matters less & less what Europe or the USA does and increasingly global ecological and resource availability outcomes will be driven by what China and India decide to do over the next thirty years - IMO. Cheers [even though it is a less than cheerful subject, wish it were different] -Chris From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Richard Ruquist Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2013 10:00 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Is Earth F**ked? I think a solar flare will end it first On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Jesse Mazer <[email protected]> wrote: I think there's a strong chance climate change will end technological civilization, but I also think the situation is not hopeless, there are reasonably plausible scenarios I can imagine where we would avoid this fate. Chris, you mention "disruptive technologies on the energy front" but if you are talking about major technological innovations I don't think that's actually necessary, if the political will is there to transition away from carbon, it's possible to make up the energy with other existing technologies like solar, wind, and possibly nuclear (though I think that has the problem of a large time to build each plant). The E.U. has a plan to get their energy nearly 100% from renewables by 2050, and they're well on track to meet their Kyoto goal of 20% of their energy from renewables by 2020 (see http://ec.europa.eu/clima/news/articles/news_2013100901_en.htm and http://www.wwf.eu/?207523/New-policy-can-put-the-EU-on-track-to-reach-100-re newable-energy ). The U.S. could start to follow suit although they're obviously behind--I think younger generations are more in favor of taking action to cut carbon, and demographic changes are making the U.S. more liberal overall (sad that saving the world from climate disaster has become identified as a specifically "liberal" cause in the U.S., but that's how it is), so there may be the votes to sign on to a similar plan within the next decade. Even if there's more of a global effort to cut carbon soon there's still the issue that temperature lags behind carbon in the atmosphere, and that carbon takes a long time to get cycled out...I'm not sure what the latest projections are for the temperature increase by 2100 if there is a worldwide drop-off soon, it may still be at a civilization-destroying level. So my other hope is that technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere artificially will be developed alongside emissions cuts--there are already prototype "artificial trees" which remove carbon 1000 times faster than real trees, but currently the technology is fairly expensive (see http://io9.com/5950271/could-artificial-trees-solve-the-global-warming-crisi s and http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/01/22/reverse-emissions/ for some links). As with solar and other technologies it's plausible the cost will go down though. I also hope that as automated manufacturing technologies develop, we will eventually reach a point where we have something approaching a self-replicating robot factory, or perhaps just a sophisticated 3D printer, that can build and assemble all the parts needed to make another factory/printer, and another etc. At that point I expect the cost of all goods that could be manufactured by such a factory/printer would tend to drop pretty dramatically, and having them churn out massive numbers of carbon-removal devices (along with other helpful things like solar panels) might not cost much more than the price of the raw materials and energy that they need to be "fed" with. I don't have much of a sense of a timescale for how many decades it would take to reach this point of fully automated self-replicating machines, but I suspect it could be done before 2100 if civilization doesn't fall apart in the meantime. For those of us who favor the multiverse idea, I suppose the stoic attitude would be to accept that some possible futures from this point will see civilization being destroyed by climate change, while others will avoid it, and all we can do is make whatever little contribution we can towards efforts which increase the proportion of survivors... Jesse On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:01 AM, Chris de Morsella <[email protected]> wrote: Will we be around in 100 years? That is an open question. Some will point to the fact that we did not blow ourselves up during the cold war, and we didn't, but times change and the planetary resource equations have also changes, and dramatically so in some cases. During the cold war both the Soviet Union and the USA were for the most part resource rich and energy independent. The world has become on one hand more unipolar with a twenty year era of American ascendance, but also increasingly multi-polar as well with the rise of powers such as China and India and to a lesser extent Brazil. The other thing that has changed is that both the USA and Russia are not nearly as rich in resources as they once were. No new super mega fields have been discovered in Russia and the eastern Siberian mega fields are in depletion now. The Russians seem to pin their hopes and dreams on global warming melting the polar ice cap and them seizing control of hypothetical super mega fields that some think may exist in that basin. The Americans meanwhile are in full blown bubble fever with the shale play - America the new Saudi Arabia and all that glossy PR BS. To see how unsustainable this boom is one only has to look at the depletion rates of drilled wells. Fracking will open up a flow of gas and in shale oil bearing rock an oil like tar that can be made to flow if sweated out of the rock with a witches brew of chemicals and heat. But it is sucking the water tables dry and the wells after only a few years begin to deplete at a rate that is much higher than the typical depletion rates of gas and oil wells that have been assumed in the costing and financial statements that have formed the bases for funding. In order to sustain this boom an ever increasing number of well will need to be sunk and the fever pace of drilling sustained just in order to stay abreast of the depletion rates. This is not just a matter of return on capital invested, which as the impact of rapid depletion on a projects lifetime costing estimates and revenue projections etc. begins to fall back down to earth, will be huge, but also in terms or EROI (or ERoEI) - or energy returned on energy invested. During the 1930s-1960s in the epic supermega fields, such as Gawar the EROI was even above 100X in some cases. Now it is down way down and as the overall energy costs of say developing the Bakken formations becomes apparent as the sector matures it will sink in that the energy payback is getting down towards marginality. While I certainly hope we can manage our energy and resource availability decline with grace I fear we are more likely to go out instead in some existential desperate energy war - and the US military has a strategy in place since 1973 called Last Man Standing that I think pretty well sums up the kind of strategic thinking (insanity perhaps) going on in these circles. It's not just the US that is eying the last places on earth that have oil (and other strategic resources as well) - as the downward pressure of depletion begins to really put the squeeze on the world's industrial and military powers the last remaining places that have oil will become flash points of wars that will become central for the survival or not of large powers. Look - I am saddened by these thoughts and wish it could be otherwise, perhaps it will. I have hope in our better nature, not much though. When millions of people in the former well off areas of the world - in the US & Europe & Japan - within decades find their worlds falling down around them as energy starvation leads to chronic contraction of the economy and a massive social dislocation as people get shed en mass and increasingly left to fend for themselves. Imagine the potential for the rise of fascist demagogues who fire up masses of angry confused people with easy answers and easy enemies (internal and foreign) In times of rapidly falling living standards there is upheaval. Now look at the Asian powers. at China & India - which cling to a social contract premised on an unachievable materialist dream. What happens when hundreds of millions of people in these countries realize they, nor their children will ever climb out from under grinding poverty and that the future that had been promised them will never materialize for them. for the 1% sure, but not for them. I just cannot see happy stable societies thriving in this kind of world. I also do not see any disruptive technologies on the energy front that will allow us to side step the planets looming fossil energy bottleneck. I hope our world can transition to a lower energy and more resource frugal life style versus pedal to the metal straight over the cliff, which is our current trajectory, but the momentum of current systems and powerful psychological/behavioral drivers in us such as greed, short term thinking. -Chris From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of LizR Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 4:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Is Earth F**ked? On 31 October 2013 12:13, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: Of course if there are 7 billion people it's more likely there will be survivors than if there are only few million. But an asteroid strike could easily be big enough to wipe-out all terrestrial life bigger than bacteria. We have the concept now, but we don't have any ability to do anything about it and we probably still won't fifty years from now. But we might in 100 years, or 200, if we continue to advance technologically, which still gives us a good chance of averting any impending impacts. Whereas if we revert to, say, a Medieval level of technology, we'll have no chance whatsoever. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected] <mailto:everything-list%[email protected]> . To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. 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