Jones Beene wrote:
... you say that there isn't enough biomass in the USA. Where did
you come by that information?
That is something I have often quoted, mainly from Pimental, chapter
3. But you can find other sources, or compute a very rough
approximation from first principles. That is, you can look at
U.S.D.A. estimate for crops and land in the U.S., rainfall, and other
factors and compute the average and total amount of biomass in the
U.S. Total energy consumption is easy to remember, at just about 100
quads for the U.S., 400 for the entire world. It was 98.6 a few years
ago. I believe it has reached a fever pitch by now. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/NRELenergyover.pdf
Nick Palmer says this is way too much consumption and that it is
unsustainable. He is quite right, given present day technology. But,
as I pointed out in the book, with cold fusion and some other
improvements (mainly underground roads or automated aircraft) we
could consume 10 or 100 times this level without harming the
ecosystem. Not that I favor grotesque materialism or the buy, buy,
buy ethic. But we do worship material goods in the U.S., and we even
a national holiday devoted to it, which happens to be today: Black
Friday. I thought "Black" it was a sign or mourning or danger, such
as the infamous Black Monday on Wall Street, but today I learned that
it refers to making money -- staying in the black. Without this day
of days, many retail stores would show no profit for the year.
Anyway, if people want to live this way, surrounded by giant
televisions and the like, it is better to find a technical solution
that will allow them to do it without hurting nature than it is try
to persuade them not to consume so much.
What I do not understand is how U.S. consumers can be buying so much
when just about every item in the store is made in China. Talk about
an unsustainable trend!
- Jed
