On Jan 11, 2008 10:01 AM, Shane Mage <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jan 11, 2008, at 12:19 PM, Doyle Saylor wrote: > > > Greetings Economists, > > Scientific American online has this article here: > > http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan > > > > That suggests a plan for 480 billion (in increments from now to 2050) > > to completely go over to solar energy in the U.S. economy. Any > > thoughts from renewable economics perspective on this idea? Secondly, > > they suggest in this article that it would not lower the current > > standard of living to adapt this regime. Which seems to indicate a > > means for other countries to follow and develop upon. > > If it projects $480b over 43 years there's nothing "grand" about it. > If the US > can afford an Iraq occupation costing over $100b a year it could just as > easily afford $4,800b over that period. A serious plan to convert the > whole > US economy to solar (including both its radiative and aeolian forms) > could > be accomplished in a much shorter time even with present technology (and > the technology is improving rapidly). Start with enormous wind farms > in the > northern plains, dedicated to production of hydrogen by hydrolysis, > while > constructing dedicated pipelines to supply every present filling > station with > the hydrogen for fuel-cell cars. Add solar farms in the southwestern > deserts connected to centers of use by DC transmission lines. Require > all > new construction to be roofed with solar panels. > > This, of course, requires a huge dose of government enterprise and > economic planning. Which is why US (and British) monopoly capitalism > cannot even think of such a project. Its solution (embraced, alas by > some despairing radicals) is to invest more and ever more resources in > the > construction of dangerous and technologically dead-end (but privately > owned, of course) nuclear power plants. > > Shane Mage > > "Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to > be called Zeus." > > Herakleitos of Ephesos >
I'm with Shane on the money. 480 billion sounds more like an annual budget than a multi-decades budget. However don't count on hydrogen as a storage or transmission media. Really efficient Plugin hybrids with a 100+ mile electric range could reduce emissions by as much or more than a hydrogen car. Pure electric cars with a ~200 mile range could meet all the needs of a great many people. And in terms of future technology, we are a lot closer to massive improvement in battery technology than we are to economical hydrogen. (Bear in mind also, that most hydrogen advocates support deriving hydrogen from natural gas or coal during the "transition".) However he is right in advocating putting huge money into decarbonizing the grid - deploying massive amounts of wind, solar and other renewable technology , along with solar for low temp needs like space heating almost everywhere. We should also put large amounts of money into mass transit also driven by renewable electricity. (I would also add to this tough, enforced efficiency standards for buildings, vehicles, and appliances.) When it comes to industrial technology, neither regulation nor public works can do as much as we'd like to phase out fossil fuels. I mean given the tens of thousands of differing technologies, and deployments, and alternative goods that provide similar services, how do you measure? Emissions per what? This is what ultimately convinced me that you also have to put a price on carbon. Elasticity is low, but not zero. And since you have too many problems of leakage if you try to put that price on just one sector, that means putting a price on all carbon. (Any way the best place to put a price on carbon is upstream - when fossil fuels are extracted, imported or refined.) You can compensate for the regressive nature of such carbon pricing by refunding the revenue directly to the people - cutting checks on an equal per capita basis. Doyle, I think this may be a better issue for left organizing than you think. Global warming, and environmental problems in general are a fundamental problem with highly inegalitarian systems. (Yes I know former communist nations had many of the same problems. They were inegalitarian in their own way -- more economically equal, but with extreme political inequality. There are many ways extreme inequality leads to environmental damage. One is that whether that inequality is of the type we have in the U.S. or the type they had in the former Soviet Union, it allows decisions makers to impose costs of their decisions broadly, while reserving most of the benefits for themselves and their allies. Another is that keeping a large part of your workforce down, keeping them under control, also undercuts many of the types of communications that could compensate for the atomization that is required by specialization. We can't avoid specialization; nobody can know how to do everything. But there are all sorts of means of compensating for the problems that come with specialization, of making information internal to organizations widely available throughout those organization, encouraging whole systems thinking. Under either capitalism, or dictatorships that may or may not be socialist (depending on how you define socialism) there is tendency to discourage too much communication, over and above that required by short term job performance. There are fads, like the TQM that existed a decade ago, that try to compensate for it -- but various policing methods that exist to keep the people on top on top, prevent them from being very effective on a large scale. (And yes there are small exceptions. This is a tendency, not some sort of iron law.)
