At 15:24 01/10/2010 +0200, Chris wrote:
Ed wrote:
> Kieth, you may be right about there being no new consumers goods to lead
> the charge of economic growth.
Considering his past as an "environmentalist", it's surprising that Keith
doesn't see the obvious innovation that could "lead the charge of economic
growth": Energy-saving technologies and renewables.
Yes, I very much see this as the essential to any decent, sustainable
society in the future. (I was an environmentalist campaigner 40 years ago
when it was eccentric to do so. I don't call myself an environmentalist
these days -- even though I feel the same about the preciousness of the
natural world -- because many of those who say they are environmentalists
are saying and doing the silliest things.)
[CR] They could even
generate business in already over-saturated markets (by replacing the
energy-wasting appliances, cars and houses with energy-saving ones).
But instead, the billionaires keep investing in the same old fossil dirt,
because they're insatiable greedheads, not philanthropists.
Without going into detail* about any of the alternative energy technologies
which have been proposed so far, none of them show any efficiency
improvement over burning coal, oil and gas (and producing basic organic
feedstock as a bonus). So there's no hope of any of them coming into
large-scale play yet (without government subsidy). I don't think that
billionaires are any more "insatiable greedheads" than most of the rest of
us, but they're certainly not philanthropists. (Indeed, I am more wary of
the motives of some philanthropists than I am of some businessmen.)
Keith
*[Afterthought] I didn't want to write about these details because I have
written draft after draft ad nauseam in my new book [A Species in the
Making] to be published in India in a couple of months. So it's occurred to
me to add some of the relevant pages here.
---------
(This is excerpted about halfway through an early chapter. The partial
section immediately below is included only to explain where the later
section heading -- "A 2,500-fold gain" -- comes from.)
Energy-in and energy-out
To summarize baldly, the predominant energy inputs into the
hunter-gatherer, agricultural and industrial economic systems have been
solar, solar and solar respectively. More specifically, ecological solar
(contemporary sunlight), agricultural solar (contemporary sunlight) and
industrial solar (fossilized sunlight). On the human side, the energy
inputs have been human muscles, human muscles plus animal muscles, and
human muscles plus machinery.
In terms of the energy gains compared with the energy inputs the ratios in
the three eras have been 1:1, 50:1 and 2,500:1 respectively.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
2,500-fold gain
Yet another 50-fold gain -- at least -- in energy availability was gained
by coal mining, oil pumping and natural gas, thus making an overall
2,500-fold (50 x 50) gain in energy inputs per capita since hunter-gatherer
times. Suffice it to say that no other species that has ever lived has been
given so much scope for expansion in its activities, except perhaps some of
the earliest unicellular organisms four billion years ago.
Paradoxically, although agricultural production went up steeply in the
industrial epoch, agricultural productivity in strictly energy terms went
down just as steeply. Because nitrogenous fertilizer has been made so
cheaply in the last few decades then an absurd situation has been arrived
at. The amount of energy used in the manufacture of nitrogenous fertilizer
is now greater than the amount of biological energy gained from the
harvested grain. Until relatively recently, energy has been cheap relative
to the cost of food. Modern intensive agriculture makes sense in currency
terms but not in energy terms. It is the energy equation which will
increasingly come into play as fossil fuels start to become expensive
relative to food. Both will then go up in lockstep.
But the gains from cheap energy for agriculture were minor compared with
all the vast cornucopia of producer goods and consumer goods that have been
able to be manufactured during the industrial era. This is the 'pull'
aspect behind the vast migration of people from the undeveloped world into
the advanced countries. This is probably greater than the emigration 'push'
of land enclosure and mechanization in their original countries.
It makes economic sense at present -- for the advanced countries -- to put
more energy into the growing of food than can be derived from it but, as
energy prices rise, the currency balance will gradually switch around to be
increasingly in line with the energy equation. In short, food will start to
become expensive and a much larger part of an individual's expenditure will
be necessary to buy food even in the advanced countries. Because at least a
billion of the present world population lives on the edge of starvation
already then there can be little hope of an overall solution until the
population decreases substantially over many generations and agriculture
become more organic.
Alternative energy technologies?
Just as man was still making and using stone tools for hundreds of years
after being able to make copper and then bronze tools, so we will probably
start to enter a new economic era long before fossil fuel resources become
too uneconomic to exploit. From now onwards, energy will start to become
very expensive. A sequence of new technologies will undoubtedly come on
stream as conventional drilling for oil and gas starts to decline. These
will principally involve mining surface tar sands to separate the bitumen
and refining it, together with a variety of further methods of extracting
oil from subterranean tar sands and oil shales, such as by steam injection.
These new methods will require considerable energy inputs, however, and the
energy gain will only be relatively modest. (3,4)
The fallacy of nuclear power
Several alternative technologies are currently being suggested. Let us
consider them briefly, taking nuclear power first. This has major problems.
At the present time there are about 400 nuclear power stations in the world
supplying about 10% of its electricity. Note that this produces electricity
only. Important though electricity is, nuclear power is not directly
translatable into chemical feedstock such as hydrogen, nitrogenous
fertilizer, transport fuels and other organic precursors for drugs and
plastics production that, at present can be made cheaply from fossil fuels.
All of these products would be prohibitively expensive by a factor of at
least 20 than if they were made via electricity only.
Advanced governments want to have a certain number of nuclear powers
stations for strategic reasons in order to have a minimal level of
electricity generation available in case of sudden cessations of fossil
fuel imports. Also, for political reasons, some advanced governments want
to be able to make at least a few nuclear weapons. But otherwise, the costs
and dangers of building thousands of nuclear power plants in the advanced
countries of the world in order to take the place of electricity generated
by fossil fuels -- never mind in developing countries -- are simply too
great to be considered as a meaningful strategy.
Even now, when nuclear power stations are relatively few in number, no
private insurance company in the world will insure them. Only governments
can take on the financial risk of some sort of serious accident such as
happened at Chernobyl in 1986. As regards recruitment of scientists and
appropriately trained engineers, this is becoming difficult. Few who are
sufficiently qualified want to take on the responsibility of running
nuclear power stations on a daily basis. In case of accidents it is their
heads which will be on the chopping block, not those of the board of
directors -- which, incidentally, rarely contain any scientists at all.
In the UK, the government's own nuclear inspectorate can't recruit enough
qualified personnel even to supervise the few power stations that we
already have. Finally, even after 50 years of nuclear power, the UK
government -- and no government anywhere else -- has yet solved the problem
of long-term storage of radioactive waste, or have yet successfully
decommissioned a nuclear reactor other than quarantining them.
In the 1980s the UK Department of Energy conceived of the idea of the
government making a fortune by taking in spent fuels -- highly radioactive
wastes -- from other advanced countries, refining them into radioactive
plutonium for re-export and burying the rest in long-term storage sites.
This has never happened. No suitable deep sites have been found. Finally,
after much negotiation with Japan, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the
Netherlands, their spent fuels are now being returned. France, which has
over 50 nuclear power stations supplying 80% of its electricity, originally
scorned the British proposal saying that they would treat and dispose their
own wastes. But France also failed and is now sending thousands of tons of
its own wastes to Russia where, it is understood, it lies in open-air dumps
in far-off regions of Siberia.(5)
As for nuclear fusion, the case for any major contribution is even more
pie-in-the-sky because research scientists haven't been to sustain any sort
of hydrogen fusion process for more than a few milliseconds after 50 years
of intensive efforts. Despite considerable research funding into tokamak
reactors and other systems of high temperature plasma containment, no
research team in the world is any further forward now than then. (6)
To carry out the same sort of fusion reaction that occurs so effortlessly
in the sun would require nuclear fusion reactors of immense size. Not only
this, but the neutron flux would be so great that the reactor would have to
be automatically controlled. Once a fusion reactor starts operations, the
radioactivity of all the equipment would become too great for any further
close approach by humans, never mind maintenance work.
'Green' alternatives
And then it is frequently suggested that there is a whole bunch of
alternative technologies deriving energy more or less directly from the sun
-- wind turbines, tidal barriers, wave machines, solar panels, etc -- which
can take over from fossil fuels. The basic problem with all these is that
they are themselves manufactured and maintained using the conventional
technologies of the industrial era which involve substantial use of fossil
fuel energy. Whereas a normal coal-powered or oil-fired electricity
generating station can pay for itself within a decade, a wind turbine farm,
for example, could never pay for itself in energy terms for several decades
-- if at all when future maintenance costs, as yet unquantified, are taken
into account.
When full energy costs for manufacture, maintenance and then end-disposal
of any of the usual 'green alternatives' are calculated, they turn out to
be more than the energy derived from their lifetime use. The EROEI ratio
(Energy Returned On Energy Invested) is negative. They can only be usedas
wind turbines and solar power stations are nowwith massive governmental
subsidies. Governments are only really subsidizing wind turbines for
strategic reasons of electricity supply, as with support for nuclear power.
The only analysis that I have been able to find after years of searching
that takes all these energy costs into account considers that no
combination of alternative energy systems can possibly replace fossil
fuels. (7)
What is even more eloquent evidence is that the major oil companies, having
dipped their toes into alternative energy research for a number of years,
are now turning back to the one sure source they know -- fossil fuels, this
time from coal fields, tar sands and oil shales. Even as I write this
chapter, Exxon Mobil have just spent $41 billion -- a sum higher than the
national budgets of most countries -- in acquiring XTO Energy, a company
that specializes in pumping steam deep into underground oil shale
formations and pumping out "tight gas" -- methane.(8)
In any case, all the non-nuclear alternative energy technologies mentioned
above only achieve about 20% energy conversion from natural power or
sunlight into electricity when transmission costs are taken into account,
even when energy investment and energy decommission costs are ignored.
The only possible new energy technology which could achieve more efficiency
than this is the manufacture of hydrogen by bacterial methods directly from
sunlight. This could supply a non-polluting, transportable fuel as well as
being the raw material for electricity generation. This has not yet been
achieved but, when it is, its efficiency is more than likely to be nearer
the efficiency of other biological systems that we are already aware of.
For example, the chlorophyllic conversion of solar energy in the green
leaves of land plants and green algae is in the region of 80% to 90%. The
possibility of this technology will be discussed in more detail in chapter 10.
If a new era were to begin even while the industrial era is still existent,
but declining, then what might a future historian say will be its
start-date? My suggestion is that just as we could date the practical
beginnings of the Industrial Revolution as 1698 -- when Thomas Savery
invented the first crude steam enginea future historian might date the new
era either as the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, or perhaps the
preliminary findings of the Human Genome Project in 2003.
--------------
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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