Stanford, UCD Researchers Say 100% Renewable Energy Possible By 2050 360
thecarchik writes with news of an analysis published in Energy Policy by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California-Davis. "There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources, said author Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor, saying it is only a question of 'whether we have the societal and political will.' During this decade, the two 'fuels of the future' will be electricity and gasoline. Beyond that, we can't project."
2050 probably won't be good enough.. (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully before crude oil hits $250 a barrel [wordpress.com] (which will happen sometime around 2035 or later) and the world spins out of control. What's especially interesting is looking at the rising food costs and population growth side-by-side with peak oil graphs [inteldaily.com].
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Re:2050 probably won't be good enough.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Gasoline is not the only thing derived from petroleum resources.. You will still depend heavily on OPEC for all of your plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, and thousands of other uses. So OPEC will still continue to be pretty difficult to ignore.
Right, but it's fungible (Score:3, Interesting)
If fuel can be made from petroleum substitutes, this frees up petroleum for petro-chemicals, plastics, fertilizers, etc. I'd be slightly surprised, but only slightly, if US domestic production of oil couldn't satisfy all non-fuel needs in the US. And if can't, then there are all oil exporting non-OPEC nations like Canada, Great Britain, Russia, China, Mexico, Brazil, etc.
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Dunno about the rest, but plastics can be replaced by lignin.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28283260/ [msn.com]
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81% of petroleum goes into fuel production, in the US. If we remove that percentage from common use, we go from approximately 90,000 bbl a day to under 20,000. That's about the production of just the US and Russia combined. Alternatively, the US, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Brazil and the UK would do the same job. That still leaves many other countries whose smaller production can add up to something not all that negligible, and it assumes current levels of production for all countries listed. On top of that, t
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What's especially interesting is looking at the rising food costs and population growth side-by-side with peak oil graphs [inteldaily.com].
Is it really that interesting? My kitchen has fruit from Mexico, cheese from Ireland, beer from Europe and the rest - while in country - is shipped across a continent to get to me.
Of course food prices will go hand in hand with rising energy costs.
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>>Hopefully before crude oil hits $250 a barrel (which will happen sometime around 2035 or later) and the world spins out of control.
Riiiiight. Because there are no other sources for gasoline, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands [wikipedia.org]
At $250 a barrel, it becomes tremendously profitable to convert coal into gasoline. This drives up production, which will drive down
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The main issue is cost of such move. Even if all the humanity decided this is needed and necessary, the raw materials needed to this change would alone like require global mining development investment that would dwarf budget of USA as most of these clean technologies tend to require (really) rare earths and certain chemical compounds that are quite scarce and unlikely to be made much cheaper even by economy of mass production due to natural scarcity in earth crust.
Not to even talk of much bigger bill of co
Overpopulation is a myth (Score:2, Informative)
Overpopulation is a myth
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/ [overpopula...samyth.com]
Please read, learn and revise opinion accordingly.
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Wow, what a horrible site full of misinformation and straw man arguments.
This site was funded by the Bradley Foundation [wikipedia.org], who also funded hard-right "think tank" groups such as PNAC, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Federalist Society. The authors affirm [pop.org] they are a network of "pro-life" groups.
The site begins by linking belief in overpopulation to efforts to kill the poor and promote Chinese abortions, then proceeds with meaningless factoids (all the humans on earth could
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Energy is just *one* of the ways we use petroleum today. Petroleum by-products are in almost everything. If it hits $250 a barrel, we're going to have a LOT more to worry about than our gasoline.
Re:2050 probably won't be good enough.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's more about the money.
Free energy? What else do you need once you have that.
Free energy solves nearly everything. Of course, we might not actually get real renewable energy (100.00%) but if we do...
Then you don't need to pay for light, heating directly. All other supplies can be operated on free energy as well and cost nearly zero.
There's still a lot of other things requiring humans to work (medicine, entertainment, etc)) but all the basic needs could be fulfilled for everyone.
It means, the rich couldn't exploit the poor anymore since the poor could just live on with minimum effort if he wanted to. Which also means things would get more equal. That's not something the rich will want to happen.
Re:2050 probably won't be good enough.. (Score:5, Informative)
Renewable != Free
Wind power is renewable, the "fuel" is completely free, but collecting the wind and turning it into usable power is not free. Turbines have to be built, maintained, replaced at end of lfe, land to site them needs to be bought or rented etc. Overall, wind is often more expensive (and has to be subsidised as a result), at least per unit of electricity generated, than oil/gas at current prices.
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>>Maybe by then we will have figured out that its OK if government does something good for the people just fucking once because it is the right thing to do.
Yes, let's double the people's cost of power! They'll thank us for it, comrade! /sigh...
It *is* possible to have green energy without major subsidies - it's called nuclear power. Wind and solar currently require too large a subsidy to be cost competitive, though I'm certainly taking advantage of it and converting my house to solar next week. Thanks
Re:2050 probably won't be good enough.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with nuclear power is that there is a lot of uncertainty. Solar thermal is too close for comfort, it's in the same order of magnitude now in cost/Watt and a few advances can easily tip the scale. Solar thermal can also be deployed a hell of a lot faster. No matter how much you liberalise the market and ease the regulations, no one is going to invest in nuclear where you can only start making money back after a couple of decades with that hanging over their heads ... not unless government shoulders some of the risk.
Personally if I was the US government though I'd just throw a couple of 100 billion at solar thermal, buy out the patents and fill some deserts with solar thermal plants and build a HVDC network to distribute the electricity ... even if it's more expensive than nuclear it will be online faster, and the odds are good that during building the costs will drop.
Nuclear is slow, messy, unnecessary and would set a terrible example to the rest of the world (nuclear power is always a proliferation risk).
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Um... no
Roughly 70% of the cost of just about anything you buy is labor.
Re:2050 probably won't be good enough.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah. Going to war worked SO well in Somalia. America got very heavily criticized for military interference in Africa's internal affairs. Citation: PBS. "Less than a year after having been welcomed by the Somali people as heroes, American soldiers were ambushed by Somali men, women, and children." [pbs.org] Then, a year later, America didn't use its military to stop the Rwandan genocide, and got the blame for standing by and doing nothing. Don't trust me: listen to PBS. "The Triumph of Evil: How the West Ignored Warnings of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and Turned Its Back on the Victims." [pbs.org]
I read this story somewhere on the net. One day, an African newspaper's headline read: "Three Headless Bodies Found".
The next day: "Three Heads Found".
The third day: "Heads Don't Match Bodies".
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What we need to do, same as with Israel and Palestine and many others, is dump shitloads of weapons on them, let them duke it out fairly and then, when they finally have enough of killing each other, we could sit down and help them build something worthwhile.
You cannot bring peace and you cannot go and end wars. Only the people involved can do that. They need to want to, they need the guts to stand up and try and they need the staying power to see it through. It's social evolution, and we can't do it for th
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>>>let them duke it out fairly and then, when they finally have enough of killing each other, we could sit down and help them build something worthwhile.
>>>
That sounds like the Star Trek TNG solution. Don't interfere, unless they come to you and ASK for peace. But if they want to keep killing each other, then back away and do nothing.
It's also the solution proposed by our first president. Non-interference with world affairs, while our country lives in peace. Only go to war if the US is
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People can't stomach it because of the waste of life and resources, which in the end accomplishes nothing but the installation of another despot.
The latest developments in the Middle East will hopefully be the final nail in the coffin of you war mongers.
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Japan, ROC, HK, Macau, Malaysia/Singapore/India and most of the commonwealth that went independent.
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africa so it could become a major agricultural exporter of grains.
One of the fundamental problems I don't understand how to overcome is modern mass-produce agriculture relies on massive quantities of oil-based fertilizer, tractors constantly going up and down fields planting, spraying and harvesting, then the food being shipped all over the world. Cheap oil is crucial to the availability of cheap mass-produced food. If the price per barrel goes up to the region of $250 and more. Then food is surely going to experience massive price rises too.
With an already precarious foo
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there's no shortage of heat at the equator where you'd want to build solar panels and the heat bleeds back out thanks to the old laws of thermodynamics.
There's plenty left for the rest of the biosphere.
Whether the rays of light hit dead sand or dead solar panel they give exactly as much energy to the biosphere.
Solar would require a stupidly large area but nothing like half the Atlantic. The obvious choice is to stick it on top of somewhere already short on life like deserts.
In most of the ocean life is limi
Re:Only a square 251km a side (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? HVDC does do 1000s of kilometres, these lines are in operation. Now geopolitically this isn't an option for a lot of the world (the EU for instance would need solar thermal power plants in Africa ... and Africa is a shithole). The US however has plenty of deserts with plenty of sundays per year to be able to supply itself at very high uptimes even with limited storage (say one or two days).
If it had the will the US could be energy independent in a couple of decades ... but the powers that be don't want that, no country is allowed any sort of independence any more. It would set a bad example and might prevent the rise of our neofeudalist overlords.
Re:Only a square 251km a side (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia has a link to Siemens which claims otherwise ...
"The most economic solution for long-distance bulk power transmission, due to lower losses, is transmission with High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC). A basic rule of thumb: for every 1,000 kilometres the DC line losses are less than 3% (e.g. for 5,000 MW at a voltage of 800 kV)."
With that you could get energy from the equator to Santa Claus without losing half the power (26% loss over 10000 Kilometre). Within the United States the losses would be negligible.
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When we install anywhere near the capacity needed to get 10% of worldwide energy from renewables, we will have no choice : we will have to make a region the size of a small continent entirely lifeless. For 100% we will absolutely need to "steal" so much energy half the atlantic ocean would no longer contain so much as a s single fish.
Citation needed.
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You clearly have no idea as to what you're talking about nor did you do any math before you made your knee jerk reaction. We would only need a small fraction of the Sun's energy. It would hardly even be a blip on the global scale.
Nor do you propose any alternatives. I'm thinking perhaps you're trolling. At least I hope you are trolling, because the alternative is you're just not very smart.
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Tomorrow's energy cycle: Sun -> using it Sun -> athmospheric pressure differences -> using it
Please add: Sun -> Plants ->Yeast (fermentation) -> Using it (as ethanol)
Re:2050 probably won't be good enough.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Sahara is not a desert because of humans. It's a desert because of the motion of the Earth. The Earth wobbles like a top, it's why your astrological sign doesn't correspond to where the sun rises on the day you were born anymore. They were accurate about 2000 years ago, Leos being born with the sun in the constallation of Leo, and so on, but the precession of the Earth screwed that up. Similarly, the Sahara goes through forest->desert->forest every few thousand years. It's how Neanderthals were able to leave Africa and settle in Europe, but no members of our species were found in Europe until relatively recently. The Sahara dried up after some Neanderthals went through, and after it became a desert, our species was unable to traverse it. Until we got more advanced technology.
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Re:2050 probably won't be good enough.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't know who to blame the most?
Here's a clue: the Khmer Rouge murdered a million or two of their own people. And their numbers were vastly exceeded by the Soviets and the Red Chinese.
Nothing the US or other democracies did can ever compare with the scope of genocides, atrocities, and mass starvations caused by communism in the 20th century.
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Farming subsidies are the real weapons of economic control
Farming subsidies exist so western countries don't have to rely on third world dictators and their enslaved workers for their daily bread. Africa is an entire continent, they should be able to bootstrap their economies by selling to one another. It would need a good unified plan however.
Sahara (Score:3)
Maybe we'll be a few steps closer to being able to cover the Sahara desert with solar panels if more regimes fall. A deal between the EU and the new hopefully democratic governments?
fools of the future (Score:3, Informative)
During this decade, the two 'fuels of the future' will be electricity and gasoline.
Electricty isn't a fuel.
40 years? I'll be dead by then ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... so fuck 'em. My generation had a pain in the ass dealing with all the bullshit that mere existence dished out, so let's just let's just leave nuclear waste, lack of petroleum based fuels, etc, as a problem for forthcoming generations.
Re:40 years? I'll be dead by then ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't thinking like this exactly what got us into the environmental and energy problems we have now?
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Thank you. You just volonteered as fertilizer for the biofuel that those of us who will be alive in 40 years will need.
Here's how we'll do it: (Score:2, Insightful)
We'll just have China make all the composites and fabricate all the solar panels, mine and refine all the nickle and do all the other nasty work to make our 'clean' new 'renewable' energy system work. Install it here in the West and not talk about the contaminants and pollution we've exported to Asian kids.
Yay 'green' energy. When we're done we'll congratulate ourselves and buff moral cred.
Nothing new here (Score:2)
It's called a breeder reactor (Score:2, Interesting)
Breeder reactors are clean and never run out of fuel. Hydro is very dirty from enviromental view and very destructive. Solar is getting better. Wind and wave are also dead ends for total replacement as they dont scale. Geothermal and hydrogen could be viable, too.
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Breeder reactors are relatively efficient. "Never run out of fuel" is a pipe dream. The 1800s perpetual motion machines want to talk to you.
No, we'll really never run out of fuel (Score:3)
Even ignoring thorium for the moment, the uranium supply for breeder reactors is inexhaustible by any sensible definition.
You can extract uranium from seawater, in principle. The only real question is the cost. However, with breeder reactors the fuel cost is essentially irrelevant, so this is no barrier.
Enough uranium is added to the ocean every year (by eroding land dissolving) to more than meet any conceivable level of energy demand, if it was burned in a breeder reactor.
It's not a perpetual motion mach
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Please do explain how "Hydro is very dirty from environmental view and very destructive". Then, if you are able to explain that, try to correlate your beliefs with the fact that damming rivers has a whole lot more to do with regulating floods and managing water supplies than it has to do with power generation.
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Nobody's asking for total replacement. Most likely the energy mixture of the future is going to be a bunch of baseload nuclear plus quite a bit of variable power from solar, wind, tidal, etc.
The advantage of solar and wind is that there's a phenomenal amount of energy in these sources. Either one can provide more than enough power to satisfy all of our needs. The major challenge is
Re:Hydro? (Score:5, Informative)
Reservoir sites usually contain lots of vegetation, and once underwater, the plants naturally decompose and release methane (a greenhouse gas). That's why it's considered "dirty." It's considered destructive because of the effect on migratory patterns, currents, and the overall eco-system surrounding the dam. There have also been reports of increased temperature levels around hydroelectric dams which can have a very harmful effect on surrounding wildlife.
Thermal effects of hydroelectric power stations on the environment [springerlink.com]
The Environmental Literacy Council - Hydroelectric Power [enviroliteracy.org]
Yea right (Score:2)
As if looking one year into the future isn't difficult enough. The whole article is just wishful thinking.
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I'll just put this up there with the perpetual motion machine, because there is always something that breaks any time it comes to energy, nothing is fully renewable. Entropy rules all in the end. I'll believe it when I see it.
Hint: The energy's coming from a very large fusion reactor that will last billions of years. You might be able to spot it if you look out a window during daylight hours.
Re:Yea right (Score:4, Funny)
You didn't because your parents kept voting for the Flintstones.
PR Puff Piece (Score:5, Informative)
This Stanford PR piece has received a lot of "coverage" -- mostly cut and paste.
Here are links to the original papers.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf [stanford.edu]
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf [stanford.edu]
We estimate that 3,800,000 5 MW wind turbines, 49,000 300 MW concentrated solar plants, 40,000 300 MW solar ...
PV power plants, 1.7 billion 3 kWrooftop PV systems, 5350 100 MWgeothermal power plants, 270
new 1300 MWhydroelectric power plants, 720,000 0.75 MWwave devices, and 490,000 1 MWtidal
turbines can power a 2030 WWS world that uses electricity and electrolytic hydrogen for all purposes.
Barriers to the plan are primarily social and political, not technological or economic.
I'm sure everybody will want to study the papers in detail. And hold on to your checkbooks.
Re:PR Puff Piece (Score:4, Interesting)
Niiiiiiice. $19 trillions just for the wind turbines (around 5M each), $100 trillions for the rooftop PV systems (around 60K each), but there is no economic issue. Right.
Only $135 billions for the dams (around 500M each)... if you can find 270 new places in where to put them...
OG.
Re:PR Puff Piece (Score:5, Interesting)
Niiiiiiice. $19 trillions just for the wind turbines (around 5M each), $100 trillions for the rooftop PV systems (around 60K each), but there is no economic issue. Right.
85 million bbl/day oil consumption (2007)
At $100 per bbl that's $8.5 billion per day or, by 2050 $120 trillion, almost exactly the same cost as you've given above.
Oil is less than $100/bbl now but is almost certainly going to be a lot more than $100/bbl by 2050 (unless, of course, we've switched most of our power generation to alternatives so that there's no longer the same demand)
Right now, migrating off oil is looking approximately economically neutral. There's a cashflow issue - if we do it over the next 40 years we're going to need about $3 trillion tied up in building new infrastructure (assuming it takes about 1 year from starting building to bringing something on line - dams are obviously slower, wind farms seem to be quicker). But the longer we leave it the more urgent it's going to become (eventually there will be a time when we have to be off oil) and the more cash we'll have to tie up in order to build the infrastructure more quickly.
Tim.
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A nuclear plant can create cheap steam. If a barel of oil hits $200 then it will be economical to make them oil without nuclear.
We have oil for a century and then some
$119 trillion is not a lot of money (Score:3)
The GDP of the United States is around 14.5 trillion dollars. Taking an average historical growth rate of 3.2% per year, the cumulative GDP of the US from 2011 to 2050 is 1144 trillion dollars.
Therefore, your supposedly preposterous cost represents around 10% of GDP over the period.
In any case, your numbers are an exaggeration even in 2011, and you'd have to be horribly pessimistic to assume the costs of wind turbines and solar energy aren't going to drop over that period. For one thing, the current commo
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You are assuming that all this infrastructure will last for ever. A wind turbine, for example, has a typical design life of twenty years so by 2050 you'd have to spend the cost twice. And you'd still be back where you started.
.... spending what you're spending now, but on clean and renewable energy instead of oil, and keeping the price of energy stable instead of erratic.
sounds like a pretty good deal to me
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Spread out over 20 years, the economy is not really an issue. That works out at about 6 trillions a year for the whole world, that's about 10% of the global GDP.
In reality, probably even less if one considers impacts of mass production and technological improvements.
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Re:PR Puff Piece (Score:4, Insightful)
Barriers to the plan are primarily social and political, not technological or economic.
Not economic, eh? I suppose you can make any economic argument up and buttress it with facts and graphs and sell it to somebody, but if fails the sanity test. Even China who has the closest thing to a command economy on the planet is hell bent on running up coal and nuclear for the short term. We've barely started to bring 300 MW concentrated solar plants on line, much less create 50,000 of them, hydro is pretty much tapped out in most places and is a risky bet when you factor in climate change (hard to move the stupid things if rainfall predictions are wrong). Tidal and mwave are beta technologies at best and damned expensive ones at that. In the event that the authors of the study have missed it, we're in the midst of a generation changing recession with most of the first world countries who would putatively bankroll this non economic problem having major problems making next month's payroll.
And even if the supposition is correct - even if it's 'only social and political' - how the hell do you plan on solving the most intractable issues that the human race has managed to come up with - that of getting along with each other? Politics is the art of the possible, not pixie dust and ponies (that's Steve Job's department).
Some people really need to go outside sometimes.
Re:PR Puff Piece (Score:4, Interesting)
Even China who has the closest thing to a command economy on the planet is hell bent on running up coal and nuclear for the short term.
China is the second largest wind power producer in the world and are quickly climbing the ranks to become #1.
China is actually very heavily investing in wind power and about half of world wide wind power added during the first half of 2010 was in China.
http://www.wwindea.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=21&Itemid=43 [wwindea.org]
Before the end of this year China will be the #1 wind power in the world surpassing USA.
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China will run out of coal before 2050, however.
Source, please.
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The recession ended quite some time ago, in case you missed it. It hasn't changed a generation any more than the past few recessions did.
There has been a brief spurt of economic growth in the current depression. None of the fundamentals have changed, and now inflation is really starting to bite after the government's ill-considered money printing binge. Officially unemployment remains at around 10%, but the real number is north of 17%.
Hold on, the ride gets rougher from here.
An intelligent non-starter, at least (Score:2)
This is written by people who understand the difference between reliable base-load sources and less-predictable renewables like wind and solar. Their plan recognizes the need for energy storage to balance out the erratic sources - that's the "270 new 1300MW hydroelectric power plants", which you need for pumped storage. There's a social and political barrier for you - we have enough trouble in the US running new power lines, and this plan requires the construction of hundreds of new dams!?
I also don't und
Thorium (Score:4, Insightful)
Electricity! (Score:2)
"barriers" (Score:2)
There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources
I didn't read any further than this. If there aren't any economic barriers, then why does it need any sort of public backing or support. If wind and solar actually were an economic alternative to things like coal, then power companies would be switching without any other sort of incentive, simply to save money.
Now, one could certainly make the argument (though he doesn't) that fossil fuels produce negative externalities to society, and correcting for that clean energy is actually more economic in the long
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Sunk costs=inertia (Score:2)
Advice to the authors (Score:2)
.
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or hunting with Dick Cheney.
Possible but unlikely (Score:2)
There are three major issues, two are more technical and one is political:
The technical issues: transportation of goods ( by ship, airplane or trucks) and intensive farming. Both rely practically to 100% on oil-based technology and there is no strategy and no technology in sight how to change this, or change it quickly enough.
The other, perhaps more important issue is political: the only way to have the solutions available when we need them is to start pumping money into them now, or even better, yesterday.
Thanks for putting this in the abstract (Score:2)
QUOTE: During this decade, the two 'fuels of the future' will be electricity and gasoline. Beyond that, we can't project."
Saved me reading time.
been there (Score:2)
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Well duh (Score:2)
Forgot a few (Score:2)
Well, nuclear is one, and fusion is another...even though we are being postponed on these 2 for reasons unknown by the gov., maybe they do not want little nuclear cells the size of a hand running your car engine, so that if you bought 20 cars, you would have enough for a small nuc bomb....and same for fusion, once the fusion has become available enough for reg. joe's to use and have, it wont be long before hackers would break it down to know how it works and tweak it, and therefor become self sustaining, as
Re:Perpetual energy is against the laws of physics (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. If only we had some sort of giant fusion reactor constantly sending us more energy... but what would we CALL it ?
Sustainable would be a better word (Score:2)
Re:Perpetual energy is against the laws of physics (Score:4, Informative)
I'll bite on this troll...
Renewable energy != perpetual energy
Solar power, wind power, hydro power, burning plant matter are all viable renewable energy sources today.
Incidentally all have been in use for the last... oohh 3000 years
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"Renewable" doesn't mean "perpetual", it means "lasts as long as the sun". The sun won't last forever, but probably well over a billion years, while oil will likely be depleted in under 100 years (and maybe far sooner than that).
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The Sun is only through about half of its lifespan. It's got about 5 billion years left, not 1 billion.
Re:Why would we want this? (Score:4, Informative)
Why on earth would anyone want to remove yet another limit to human growth?
Where do you see a correlation between access to energy and population growth?
The countries with greater population countries are Liberia, Burundi, Afghanistan, Western Sahara, East Timor, Niger, Eritrea, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Palestinian territories. Clearly they have too much access to energy.
What we really need is a Chinese-style one child policy, or better yet incentives for no children at all.
Because, not only that doesn't have any moral implications, as it clearly worked in reducing their population [wolframalpha.com].
Don't get me wrong, I agree that having many children with our current population is completely immoral, but I think that approach to dealing with the problem is misguided.
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The countries with greater population countries are
Sorry. "The countries with greater population growth rate are"
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The point is that many developed countries have less than that even without such policies, which lead to a huge number of forced abortions.
Re:Why would we want this? (Score:4, Insightful)
>>We simply need to decrease the surplus population of ravenously resource-hungry bourgeoisie
Yes, comrade! We must destroy the rapacious bourgeoisie that are breeding like rats and... oh, wait, what? All affluent countries are having problems with population *decreases* instead of exponential growth? Damn, I guess all you people stuck in the 1800s with Malthus are wrong, huh?
The only people still undergoing large population expansions are the uneducated poor - and if you make the poor educated and wealthy, they magically stop having as many kids (well, it's maybe birth control instead of magic, but you get my point, comrade).
>>What we really need is a Chinese-style one child policy, or better yet incentives for no children at all.
Lord, you're just a walking stereotype of the tyrannical communist, aren't you? Weren't you supposed to have been purged back in the 40s alongside all your other fellow true believer Stalinists?
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There's more than just earth, you know.
Not for now. Will there be in less than 70 years, when the world's population has doubled from the current 7 billion?
And if you feel so strongly that the population needs to be reduced, that humanity should just let itself fade away, then why don't you lead by example and off yourself?
Stupid dichotomy. I didn't defend that we should disappear. I'm simply saying we shouldn't have many children to reduce the current growth rate to reasonable levels.
If you can't understand the difference, I don't think you'll be of much help getting us out of this rock.
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I'm very, very sorry, I thought you were replying to me. Disregard my previous post. Sorry!
Re:Why would we want this? (Score:4, Funny)
Yep, it is about time we think of protecting those Martians from the destructive colonial powers on Earth. While we're at it, we should declare all life in the solar system, e.g., Jovian, Saturnian, Uranian, Neptumian, Plutonian, etc. sacred and not to be even interacted with. With a bit more legislation, we can protect all life in the Milky Way from the destructive influences of humans. No need to stop there, let's do it as a favor to all life in the Universe. Hell, let's do it for the entire Multiverse. And let's not let time get in the way, let's protect all life past and future from humans.
Everyone will be issued hari-kari knives and asked to do the dirty deed on Dec. 21, 2012. Before we do, we'll paint the Earth to look like a giant bullseye from space. That way, the asteroid Apophis can make doubly sure humans never, ever happen again. Repent! Save humanity! Die today!
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No, probably the most of the world will run on electricity with biogasoline/biodiesel used where electricity is not cost-effective (like, farm machinery, ships, airplanes, etc.)
Re: (Score:2)
Do these people understand money, time and resources are not cheap and infinite?
If (or rather: once) the energy situation gets bad enough money will stop being a consideration and resources will indeed be "infinite" in the sense that they will simply be utilised no matter what, and by force if necessary. So they err not in their assumptions per se but in their timing. It will be a long way to go before the powers that be stop evaluating their options in units of currency. But it will happen. It has to, really.
Re: (Score:3)
>>By 2050 disease and war will have reduced the global population to a fraction of what it is today
I am fascinated with your ability to predict the future and would like to subscribe to your RSS feed.
If anything, though, diseases and war have been trending down in the last 60 years. The only real threats these days is some sort of unknown superbug, or a rogue state engineering a superAIDS virus (or just getting nuclear weapons and dropping it on us).