Tom,
I see hints of a belief in Peak Oil in your post. I like Gar's reply
but would add this:
The singular focus on SUPPLY of energy is what leads to Business As Usual (BAU)
with clean energy, a frightening prospect.
It is the DEMAND for energy that the left should be discussing, addressing, and
reducing, specifically demand by the affluent, North and South.
Gene
On Jan 15, 2013, at 2:31 PM, Gar Lipow wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Tom Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Although I can't eliminate uncertainty and won't try, I suspect there is
>> indeed a "fundamental and unsolvable" problem with so-called renewable
>> energy sources that arises from the nature of "embodied energy."
>>
>> Currently, the cost of wind and solar infrastructure depends on cheap inputs
>> of fossil fuels in their manufacture and construction. Wind and solar built
>> by wind and solar would be much more expensive than wind and solar built by
>> coal and petroleum. However, if that problem was solved it would give rise
>> to yet another problem: the low cost of renewable energy inputs would then
>> be available to subsidize unconventional fossil fuel extraction just as
>> today the availability of cheap natural gas makes tar sands oil economically
>> feasible.
>
>
> Wind and Concentrating solar replace the fossil fuels embodied in
> their manufacture and transportation about twelve to eighteen times
> over. Wind, though higher in cost than coal, is not that much higher
> in cost than coal, so if input for renewables was largely wind energy
> the cost of renewables would not be all that much higher. Even if a
> balanced approach with lots of wind and solar, long distance
> transmission, storage, some geothermal some hydro and what have you
> could replace almost all fossil fuels for a cost difference of around
> what the world spends on wars. As to using renewables to subsidize
> fossil fuels - a sane society would choose not to.
>
> That last hints at the real problem. There are close zero technical
> obstacles to phasing out almost all fossil fuels (a few industrial and
> transport processes where they are not currently replacable, though
> the quantity is small enough that biofuel, maybe as a net energy loser
> subsidized by wind electricity, could replace fossil sources and
> possibly be sustainable). But the political and social obstacles are
> overwhelming. It is easy enough to build mental models of a "green"
> social democracy that could create a temporarily sustainable
> capitalism, but really it is hard to picture the changes we need
> happening except as the result of an ecologically aware socialist
> revolution. A revolution that is both red and green. A strawberry
> revolution,
>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 10:20 AM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 7:30 PM, Tom Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The substitution of fuel for labor is cost effective only to the extent
>>>> that fuel is cheaper than labor. Currently, the relative cheapness of fuel
>>>> results from the shifting of the social and environmental costs of
>>>> extracting and burning the shit. Sachs and Kotilikoff discuss the machines
>>>> as if they run on some mysterious unknown substance. Clue: 85% fossil fuels
>>>> at present. Among the words that do not appear in their paper: energy,
>>>> climate, emissions.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> What about the theoretical possibility that fossil fuels are replaced by
>>> wind and/or solar power?
>>>
>>> I am well aware of the many technical difficulties with alternative energy
>>> sources, but is there any reason to think that these difficulties are
>>> somehow fundamental and unsolvable, rather than merely being a limitation of
>>> our current state of knowledge?
>>>
>>> -raghu.
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
>>
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>
>
>
> --
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