Marcus wrote: > > Phil Henshaw wrote: > > The co2/$ ratio for total economic product (economic > > efficiency) can only be reduced toward a positive limit and > not toward > > zero (real 2nd law). > > > If automobiles all used advanced batteries and only electric > motors, and heating/cooling systems used only electricity, and all > electricity came from generation facilities that did not output CO2, > then what's the problem? The fact that improvements greater than required to temporarily compensate for continued economic growth for one part of system does not change the difficulty for providing continual improvements that do that for all parts. Batteries, and electrical power trains, and the conversion process both from one form of energy to another and from one form of industry to another, may well be substantially improved. They all also have non-zero limits to waste reduction, and repeatedly reducing their inefficiencies requires increasing transition costs producing vanishing improvements. Reducing wastes by non-vanishing fractions is invariably temporary and becomes impossible.
Constant fractional reduction of waste without increased work is what's required for maintaining economic growth without growing unwanted impacts. Some portion of activities producing Co2 could be shifted to other things, of course, like generating nuclear waste we don't know what to do with, but to keep total energy delivery side effects constant without economic burdens to be made up elsewhere we need industry-wide energy system improvements equivalent to having 1000 mpg cars by the end of the century, and 32000mpg cars by the end of the next. I think that's unlikely...particularly since we've been working on the problem and our system-wide energy efficiency progress is not speeding up, but actually slowing down. > The issues with accumulated CO2 are > still there no matter what policies for energy use are adopted. > Both stopping the output of huge amounts of CO2 and sequestering > the debt seem reasonable to cast as technology issues. I'm not sure what you're saying here. Yes we have a big mess to clean up, and technologies of many kinds are genuinely needed to help clean up the mess we've made. I think it's of special interest, though, that it appears no technology can be invented that would take care of an ever more rapidly growing mess, and that that is the defacto long range plan for continual economic growth without having growing impacts. Thus it would still appear to me that the plan for fixing global warming violates the 2nd law, and so is either a stop gap measure to allow us to fix the problem another way, or won't work. I guess we'll have to see if this way of connecting familiar 'real categories' with familiar 'abstract categories' for the same physical world things pans out of course... Phil > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
