National Academy of Sciences: Now We're Cookin' 22
matroid writes: "Today the National Academy of Sciences released their review of the IPCC's global warming diatribe finding that, except for the tremendously alarmist language in the document, the report is accurate. "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." An article in the NYTimes is here. Maybe I shouldn't have bought that coal-based UPS after all ..."
Re:Local warming not Global warming (Score:1)
Re:Local warming not Global warming (Score:1)
But the more immediate problems can be address by cutting demand and using solar and wind generation. Demand can be cut dramatically, without lowering standard of living. For a baseline, consider that people who go off-grid typically reduce their electricity consumption by 80 or 90%, without upsetting their lifestyle. It's all about being aware of where your energy is going, using efficient appliances, and using the right energy source for the right job.
More people have electric water heaters than watt-hour meters. It's crazy.
Right now California's energy woes revolve around natural gas prices. Meanwhile we're all burning it in our gas water heaters, while we run 100 watt attic fans all day because that pesky sun keeps overheating our attics. Putting panels on the roof eliminates both of these.
This gross waste of energy is typical across the US.
Re:Reminds me of a definition (Score:1)
The growth in demand has been documented many places. Look it up. The Economist had graphs of the supply and demand a month or two ago. (Unfortunately the rest of their article was complete fiction). The growth in demand is exponentially growing. That it hit the supply limit first in California is incidental. The fact remains that no amount of plant building is going to keep up with this growth. Stopping the growth is the only solution.
Our energy use could be dropping every year, instead of growing, because we're currently wasting so much of it. This is by far the cleanest, cheapest, and easiest solution.
Regarding solar and wind, energy demand is much, much lower in the evening, so you don't really need that much storage.
I absolutely agree that getting the consumer price of energy to accurately reflect its true cost is critical. Solar and wind would be viable today if the price of fossil fuels weren't artificially low.
The new California rebates make PV fairly viable in the short-term, though.
Re:Reminds me of a definition (Score:1)
For the last few weeks I've been measuring energy usage with a digital watt-hour meter, and comparing energy usage in different households. A conservative estimate of energy waste in American households is perhaps 50%. It's probably higher than that, and American businesses are worse.
It makes no sense at all to talk about building new plants when were wasting energy at this rate. It's just absurd.
If you've kicked the bottom out of your bucket, having a bigger hose isn't going to help you fill it.
Re:Reminds me of a definition (Score:1)
U.S. demand has been growing exponentially around 5% a year. There is no supply-side solution that can keep this up forever, or even for very long. A ten-fold increase in generating capacity will roughly double the time until demand exceeds supply. Then we'd have to fix the demand problem. This isn't "silly", it's just the math of this situation. We can fix the demand problem later, and have huge investment and environmental costs of making thousands of new plants. Or we can fix the demand problem now, and not have those costs.
Whatever the impact of the internet boom, people are still using nearly all of their energy for space and water heating -- things that are easily done with solar.
So once the demand problem is fixed, the plants won't be need. We'll have thousands of nuclear plants sitting around. Thousands of acres of land covered with useless generating plants.
And no, it's not wrong that demand is much, much lower in the evening. That's why evening prices are so much lower. Solar homes are usually spec'd to have a week of storage. For grid-tied solutions we don't need that much. We just need to get the majority of homes through the night. I'm not claiming we could completely eliminate all power generation except solar and wind. With conservation and solar, most homes could meet nearly all of their energy demands. The remainder, in non-sunlight hours, could be met by modest storage systems, and modest use of conventional generating technologies.
Regarding cutting demand for coal, the only way demand is going to be cut is for the price to accurately reflect how much the fuel costs us. That means letting the consumer price go up, and perhaps taxing it for the environmental cost.
Re:We can do this all week (Score:1)
Yep, and that's not a long-term solution. That's 50 years of investment to end up where we are today, only with a lot more pollution. Approaching from the demand side, we don't end up back here in 50 years, and we don't have the pollution. What's your point?
The 5% may be off by a couple. I've seen different figures, from 2 to 5. The basic picture is still this: We're wasting most of the power we produce. Most of the power we're not wasting goes to space and water heating that can be done with solar. Solar scales with the number of building we build -- generating plants are nearly irrelevant to this growth when using solar. We have to implement this at some point, because we can't sustain the growth indefinately. It make more sense to do it now than to make a mess trying to delay it a few years.
> We will need huge amounts, or huge changes in the way energy is consumed.
The way energy is consumed is this: not very much is consumed at night. Thus the low rates. Thus all the schemes like pumping water back up dams during the night.
Re:Science has weighed in, now for the POLICY. (Score:2)
So, the bottom line is that we need alternative energy sources and we need them now. Biofuels dont even come close (Literally all of the farmable land on the Earth would have to be deditcated to corn just to produce the current world energy need.) Solar, Wind and Geothermal just dont make enough juice. Fusion is too far out. What is left.
Well Nuclear stands a chance, but people are too much of a bunch of pussies to use it. So I'll tell you what the solution will be. Let the fucking sealevels rise. I want my car. I want my heat. I want my oil. We went to Kuwate with a couple of Aircraft carrieries and dropped more explosives on that psycho in Iraq than we used in all of WWII. Do you think we will just turn off our cars. Shut off the lights? No, we'll keep them on. And so will the Chineese. Millions will die as a result. But Millions would die if you shut the power off too. So either come up will a new source of power, or buy some land on a hilltop.
Re:You want a policy? (Score:2)
Re:You want a policy? (Score:3)
The real problem is that we are incredibly dependant on fossil fuels. To claim, that conservation by restraint (or frankly even by efficeincy) will reverse the problem in the atmosphere is without basis (unless drastic, draconian measures were taken, i.e. 65-70% global reductions). Even with the Kyoto agreement, C02 levels would be expected to double the levels of 1995 between 2050-2070. Cars only produce 1/3 of the C02. Even if we could move all cars and trucks to electric-hybrids, the resulting CO2 levels would only be about 15%. That would still get us on track for a C02 doubling this century.
I agree with you that our leadership lacks the political balls to really address this issue. It would take a benevolant dictator I think to really address this issue. The first issue that needs to be addressed is the nuclear power issue. What is more dangerous? Radioactive Waste or a 10 foot sea level increase. Nuclear of course is no where close to a complete answer. It is expensive, and not appropriate for the third world. We need a massive (manhattan project + Apollo + WWII + Genome) international collition of scientists. Yank all of those engineers in Russia and the US working on the space program, all those engineers working on free software, all of the engineers working on whatever, and get them in a room to work this issue out. We spend 6% of the US government's budget on an orbiting vegitable garden (US international space station). The US gov spends less than 0.01% researching alternative energies. Time to let that bucket of useless crap fall into the ocean and put all of those people to work doing something productive (except for their budget managers who are fired).
Re:Local warming not Global warming (Score:2)
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Re:Local warming not Global warming (Score:1)
So, I presume you are building one in your backyard as we speak, complete with long term waste containment facility...
_O_
well DUH (Score:1)
Local warming not Global warming (Score:1)
Let's look for ways to reduce our total pollution, not for ways to beat up unliked industries. Nuclear powerplants suffer from the NIMBY effect, but the only viable alternative to nuke is fossil fuels. If people would get their luddite heads out of the sand and take an impartial look at the solutions to our energy problems, major headway could be made. But until "environmentalist" groups stop fighting the nuclear bogeyman there won't be any headway.
Dancin Santa
Re:Local warming not Global warming (Score:1)
The problem lies on both sides of supply and demand. However, the long term solution is to find supplies that won't run out in the near future nor cause too much environmental pollution. The only viable source of energy that supports those two criteria is nuclear.
Dancin Santa
US versus Europe (Score:1)
If the US started to build apliances that saves energy (not to mention building cars that don't burn a gallon evry 10 miles) a lot of energy and CO2 could be saved).
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Science has weighed in, now for the POLICY. (Score:2)
Guess what? It's a million times neater than the sausage-grinding work of making law.
The National Academy of Sciences has essentially said that the question of what we should do is settled. Great. Who's going to say how we should do it? This is the messy, ugly issue. Dozens of different interest groups are going to get involved, from the western economic interests who make their money from coal mining to the environmentalists who want strip-mining and mountaintop removal ended, to the natural gas interests who are salivating over the increase in their potential market (because gas has so much less carbon per unit of energy than coal or even oil), to the social-justice types who don't want limits placed on the emissions of "developing nations" because that won't promote any transfer of wealth from the USA and Europe, to the electric utilities who are worried that all their coal-fired generators might be priced out of the market, to the nuclear plant operators who are looking at a huge surge in the value of their plants, to the auto companies and SUV drivers who like the status quo but won't be able to have it... it goes on and on.
What kind of mess is going to come out of these competing interests when they go into make the law that tries to limit greenhouse gas emissions?
This should be simple. There ought to be a straight tax on greenhouse-gas emissions, based on their heat-trapping efficiency. That will let the market sort things out in the most efficient manner possible (where there is a market to do the job). Instead what we are probably going to get is a set of caps, taxes, preference, exemptions, and more that makes an unholy legal and regulatory mess on top of the environmental mess; you can bet that it'll be chock-full of errors, oversights and perverse incentives. You can just hear the cash registers of the Washington lobbyists going CHA-CHING, and the accountants and regulators and lawyers for decades to come.
Ye gods, I hate it already. Why the hell can't we have the climate scientists and economists write the law, and get the pols and lobbyists the heck out of it? We would probably get a better result cheaper and with a lot less pain.
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Reminds me of a definition (Score:2)
Of all the alternatives to fossil fuels, I can't think of a single one that works most everywhere and doesn't require submerging lots of land, clear-cutting or repetitively mowing large tracts and taking most of their net biological productivity and burning it, or forcing you to deal with a very intermittent supply. Except nuclear, that is.
Solar and wind have their place, but there's a problem: we don't have the infrastructure and consuming patterns which can deal with large parts of the electrical generating capacity going off-line overnight or even for days at a time. We can promote these sources by making everyone buy electricity at the hour-by-hour spot rate, so that it becomes economically reasonable to charge your batteries or make ice when power is cheap and then consume the power or air-conditioning later. But:
- This won't happen until people are paying the true cost of the power they use according to exactly when they use it, and
- we'll still need base-load generating capacity to supply the things which cannot shut down.
Ergo, nuclear. Then why is the crisis aspect only affecting the part of the country which has had severe restrictions on additions to generating capacity for over a decade, and a drought? Not true. If we are going to meet even the tiny Kyoto CO2 reductions, we are going to have to make large cuts in coal consumption. The bulk of coal is used to make electricity, and the electric powerplant fuel which makes the least CO2 happens to be uranium.--
You want a policy? (Score:2)
Already in places like India it's cheaper to get a solar panel, a battery and a fluorescent lamp than it is to buy lamp oil. Conservation makes dollars-and-cents sense in more places and uses all the time. Greenhouse-emission taxes increase the incentives, and you can bet that the market will do things and find solutions under the profit motive that would be impossible for government mandates to accomplish.
The thing that bothers me is that I might have to buy land on a hilltop despite my best efforts to avoid the environmental problems, because there were no fiscal incentives for others to avoid doing the damage.
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Re:Reminds me of a definition (Score:2)
California has been trying to export all its generation capacity for some time; look at where the power from the Four Corners plant (accused of hazing up the vistas over the Grand Canyon) is going. California is outsourcing generation all the way across Nevada from Utah, and from as far north as British Columbia.
So has the sag in demand (and real-estate prices, and a bunch of other things) after the defense cutbacks around 1990. California has been running a boom-bust-boom cycle for a while. The problem is that California didn't do anything to future-proof the state's infrastructure before the problems struck full force. For instance, in 1995 and even earlier there was a lot of work going on at PG&E and elsewhere on electronically readable and controllable electric meters. Would there be problems with rolling blackouts if individual customers could be cut off if they didn't turn their usage down at critical times, and all electric water heaters could be shut off by the power company? Would there be a shortage of natural gas if everyone's first source of heat for hot water was a solar collector and gas or electricity was only a backup? How about if compact fluorescents were mandatory? You could have said the same thing back in 1930... and you'd have been just as wrong (I had to quote this because it's silly). It's quite possible to build enough plants to satisfy just about any foreseeable level of demand. Whether it's wise to do so instead of modifying consumption patterns is a different matter, and I do agree in advance that serious changes are warranted, desirable and will happen (especially if market prices remain at or above the US$0.15/KWH level). This is also just wrong. In many parts of the country, wind energy is associated mostly with the passage of fronts. You get significant amounts of wind energy about two days out of seven. This places a very large premium on either storage systems or backups, and if you are trying to use less fossil fuel you want those backups to run as little as possible.Also folding in my response to #12...
Coal is cheap to dig, and currently running at a fraction of the per-BTU cost of oil or gas. What's going to cut demand as long as oil and gas prices are high? (Carbon taxes are one answer, but they require some kind of action other than market forces in the current environment.)--
We can do this all week (Score:2)
If there's anything to be learned from the furor in California, it's that you can't just take care of the majority. You have to supply everyone, or else all hell breaks loose. You also have to degrade gracefully; rolling blackouts are not graceful. Since the system is not designed to discriminate between priorities of uses, such as traffic lights, elevators and desk computers (priority 1), overhead lights (priority 2), climate control and air conditioning (priority 3) and water heating (priority 4), the only way to manage demand and avoid a grid collapse is to shut off blocks of users. That's a system design flaw that needs to be fixed, badly.
I'd pick your argument apart some more, but I've got someone waiting for me.
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Re:You want a policy? (Score:2)
You have to draw a distinction between reducing energy and changing to a less-comfortable lifestyle. The two are different.
Don't presume to lecture me. I have been saying this, under various nomes de plume, since before the WWW was a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye. I've been claiming loudly that the California ZEV mandate is a ridiculous boondoggle because batteries suck as an automotive energy supply, and castigated the nitwits at CARB for not allowing hybrid-electrics to meet at least part of the requirement. This is all because gasoline is such an incredibly dense, handy and usable way to store energy.That said, you can still do some amazing things with batteries. Stick some batteries on a car and you can reduce its gasoline consumption by what looks like around 40%, by recycling the braking energy. If you used tricks like sophisticated energy management to drain the battery just as you got to your destination and then recharged it from the grid, you could replace even more gasoline. All this takes is off-the-shelf parts and smart software; in other words, we should have a major push to have test vehicles on the road tomorrow and things in production by 2003.
Now this, I agree with. <politics> This is why neither major-party candidate for President was a good choice on this issue. Gore (and Nader) would have signed the protocol, and left China and India to wreak havoc without any consequences. Bush was trying to scuttle it altogether, making the problem worse. Ironically, Bush may have no alternative but to go for the protocol after negotiating India and China under its umbrella; from the worst candidate, to possibly the best outcome. </politics>--
Time to unplug from the enviro Matrix (Score:1)
"During the past 2 years, more than 17,100 basic and applied American scientists, two-thirds with advanced degrees, have signed the Global Warming Petition. Signers of this petition so far include 2,660 physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, and environmental scientists (select this link for a listing of these individuals) who are especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth's atmosphere and climate.
Signers of this petition also include 5,017 scientists whose fields of specialization in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and other life sciences (select this link for a listing of these individuals) make them especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide upon the Earth's plant and animal life."
Kyoto is the greatest exercise in propganda ever. Why does the truth get no traction even on Slashdot?