I've been on vacation for the past week (still am, actually) with
limited email connectivity, hence the late response to this
thread. I won't try to address specific comments, except to agree
that no possible solution can preserve the status quo, but I'd
like to refer everyone to a major new contribution on some of the
subjects touched on here -- Tad Patzek's recent paper "How Can We
Outlive Our Way of Life?", which was prepared for the OECD Round
Table of Sustainable Development of Biofuels. Highlights of the
paper were presented at the Triple Crisis conference in DC a few
weeks ago.
Patzek, from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
at U.C. Berkeley, is well known for the articles he's co-authored
with David Pimentel of Cornell on the folly of substituting corn
ethanol for petroleum fuels. The OECD paper is chiefly about the
inadvisability of replacing fossil fuels (in general) with
biofuels (in general), with a specific torpedo for cellulosic
ethanol, but the conclusion relates directly to the subject of the
present thread (note that the paper was written for a European
audience):
To avoid economic and ecological disasters, I recommend to
decrease all automotive fuel use in Europe by up to 6 percent
per year in 8 years, while switching to the increasingly
rechargeable hybrid and all-electric cars, progressively driven
by photovoltaic cells. The actual schedule of the rate of
decrease should also depend on the exigencies of greenhouse gas
abatement. The photovoltaic cell-battery-electric motor system
is some 100 times more efficient than major agrofuel systems.
Patzek's point, basically, is that PV cells are vastly more
effective in turning solar energy into the kind of energy we can
use to drive machinery than any plant process is or ever could be.
The paper, which is notable for its "big picture" viewpoint, can
be found at
http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/Biofuels/OECDSept102007TWPatzek.pdf
A review that may or may not be helpful, and shouldn't be
considered a substitute for the paper itself, appeared in The Oil
Drum:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3033
People who are sold on biofuels as a solution will find a lot here
to consider. I came away with a much clearer understanding of the
need to devote our declining oil reserves to the replacement of
our present fossil-fuel-based transportation system with one based
on electricity.
Jon
_______________________________________________
RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for:
[email protected]
http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins
free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org
