On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 06:45:45PM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: > >It will be interesting to see if the oil-based > >infrastructure will crumble in the coming decade
That would be a very good thing -- in case it happens slowly enough to adopt sustainable alternatives. I.e. Germany has officialy commited to obtain 20% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Less official sources assume that goal could be reached by 2012, and 2020 could see a 50%. > >in the northern US as the oil supply dwindles and > >Asian giants consume more and more of it. > > http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633 Not a very good article, but not entirely incorrect, either. Oil (especially sweet crude) is sure limited, as is uranium (excluding breeders, which are nasty, and ditto fuel recycling). Coal, methane (especially from clathrates) and oil shale (kerogen) and thorium would last effectively forever. All these are non-renewable. Methane is the energy carrier with the least carbon content/J of output, so it's the most important to develop. Hydro, wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and tidal are all renewable. Hydro has been cost-effective since forever, but is also mostly saturated. Wind has become cost-effective relatively recently, in specific regions. Solar (PV) is rapidly approaching crossover (it has first reached crossover in realtime large scale electricity markets in the summer 2006 in Germany). Such niches where crossover already happened will only grow, until they blanket everything. The hydrogen economy is by no means a hoax (but bioethanol sure is), but methanol and electricity economies are as viable, and have their specific niches. Breeders and thorium could become an option, though I hope not. There is really no need for them, but perhaps politically. Transformation to a fully sustainable regime could happen within 20-30 years -- if we really want it, and are prepared to invest large fractions of our GNP into infrastructure. Doing things short-term is impossible, regardless of how much money you have at your disposal -- of course, there is not that much of it available, especially on short notice. War economies are never happy economies. Some things are dead easy, and can be done simply by regulations. Price ratchet for fossils via tax, all gains directly piped into renewable budget, check. Cap on CO2 emitted/km for cars, check. Mandate all new ICEs can do M90, check. Mandate insulation for all new houses and retrofitting old ones, check. Mandate thermal solar collectors and/or PV facades and roofs, check. There dozens of such simple laws that would create entire new markets. There are of course lots of relatively easy R&D to do, which would need an increase of GNP fraction and budget reallocation. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
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