Why Small-Scale Biomass Energy Projects Aren't a Solution To Climate Change 178
Lasrick writes "Roberto Bissio has an excellent piece in a roundtable on biomass energy, pointing out that small scale biomass energy projects designed for people in poor countries aren't really a solution to climate change. After pointing out that patent protections could impede wide-spread adoption, Bissio adds that the people in these countries aren't really contributing to climate change in the first place: 'Why? Because poor people, whose carbon emissions these technologies would reduce, produce very little carbon in the first place. As I mentioned in Round One, the planet's poorest 1 billion people are responsible for only 3 percent of global carbon emissions. The 1.26 billion people whose countries belong to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development account for 42 percent of emissions. The rich, if they reduced their emissions by just 8 percent, could achieve more climate mitigation than the poor could achieve by reducing their emissions to zero. The rich could manage this 8 percent reduction by altering their lifestyles in barely noticeable ways. For the poor, a reduction of 100 percent would imply permanent misery.'"
Madagascar (Score:5, Insightful)
Poor people may not have much of a carbon footprint, but if there is no alternative to deforesting your island home, then the impact on the environment would be larger than just how much CO2 you produce.
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See also: Haiti.
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8520/8578860427_9cb7a29b78_o.jpg [staticflickr.com]
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I'm not the OP, but yup - that's it.
Wikipedia has a macro-scale image.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Haiti [wikipedia.org]
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Is that the border between Haïti and the Dominican Republic, by any chance? I read about that in one of Jared Diamond's books.
The policy of having a brutal dictator who considers the country his fiefdom and applies a shoot-to-kill anti-deforestation policy has few virtues; but the contrast along that particular border does illustrate one of them...
Re: Madagascar (Score:2)
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It isn't the guy who earns less in a year than a teak shower seat costs (and at Lowes, we aren't talking the luxury stuff here) who is 'responsible' for the illegal timber market in any serious way, he couldn't afford to drive the destruction of much of anything.
However, if he were incrementally less poor and powerless, he'd probably be a much more useful ally for protec
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And the main post also assumes that CO2 is the only driver in global warming. I have seen studies that suggest that soot from poor people's cooking stoves are just as much to blame. (Soot is very dark so is absorbs a lot of the sun's rays. Glaciers are shinny so they tend to reflect heat back into space. When soot lands on glaciers it darkens the glacier, causing them to shrink. A good example of a positive feedback loop. )
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Positive in the negative sense ;)
Having better cooking facilities can improve the lot of people in poor countries in lots of other ways. More efficiency => less time spent gathering fuel. Less smoke and soot => fewer health problems. Etc. etc.
Re:Madagascar (Score:4, Informative)
The economic equation is fairly simple, spend the next 50yrs replacing the vast bulk of the dirty energy infrastructure built over the last 50yrs with clean infrastructure solar/wind/nuke/tidal/geothermal/did I leave someone's pet project out?). By mid-century we are no longer changing the climate, by the end of the century the climate has reached a new stable thermal equilibrium, which, all things being equal will slowly cool down to pre-industrial temps in a millennia or two by absorbing the extra carbon into the Earth's crust.
The ability of the Earth's crust to absorb the extra carbon would be severely curtailed if the oceans became too acidic for shellfish to grows shells, but at that point the Earth's surface will look like an overworked goat farm and it will make little difference to the goat herders who survive the rapidly accelerating "sixth great extinction" we are experiencing today.
Sure it will cost a gazillion dollars to replace that infrastructure but we've already spent that building the current infrastructure, and since coal plants don't last forever we will be doing it all over again in the next 50yrs anyway. Civilization has outgrown coal like we outgrew the horse and cart, it's time to push the luddites, vested interests and useful idiots back into the political wilderness where they belong. It's time to put engineers in the driver's seat, preferably arrogant showmen like Edison, Jobs, Gates, who can assemble other people's inventions into a viable industry.
My personal favourite is hydrogen fuel cells for most portable energy needs such as cars, you could also use you car to supply several homes with electricity, or just build a fuel cell generator into the home, we can get rid of a lot of the fragile wiring that blocks out the modern sky, no more wide area blackouts every time the wind changes direction. But there's not much point doing that unless you can produce bulk hydrogen cleanly cheaper than you can produce it the dirty way. Doing it with sunlight or wind is a great example of a closed loop. H2O + energy => H2 + O2 => H20, the troposphere is more or less chemically saturated with H2O so it simply falls back into the ocean within a week or two. So if we are really lucky the 22nd century will be warm and damp and the mass migrations inland will have ceased.
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Well, maybe. The impacts of various items on climate change are not well understood. Each year something new is figured out and models have to be updated.
According to your chart aerosols are a major factor in cooling – not warming. It's 8 years on and scientific opinion is now it is believed to be a minor factor.
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21587194-researchers-are-beginning-understand-aerosols-and-clouds-better-result [economist.com]
As for the increase in warm in oceans, don't worry about the
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I have seen studies that suggest that soot from poor people's cooking stoves are just as much to blame.
Soot in general has non-negligible impact, yes. Food from poor people's cooking stoves, on the other hand, has not. First, it's a small amount, compared to industrial and other sources. And secondly, since it comes from small fires without much updraft and without high chimneys, it mostly settles locally. Not too many poor people live close to large glaciers.
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Poor people may not have much of a carbon footprint, but if there is no alternative to deforesting your island home, then the impact on the environment would be larger than just how much CO2 you produce.
You are allowed to complain about them deforesting when we move everyone out of the suburbs and reforest our own country to what it was.
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Considering that there is now more forest in North America today than when Europeans first arrived, I am not sure what your point is.
Suburbs are great for trees. Every house has 2 or 3. Owners actively planting them. Most cities have a urban forestry division, If you want a obvious example just look at any great plain city with satellite imagery. There should be no trees there yet that is all that you see. We can debate about old growth, the biodiversity, and habitat but the number of trees has grown.
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Prior to the arrival of European-Americans about one half of the United States land area was forest, about 4,000,000 square kilometres (990,000,000 acres) in 1600, yet today it is only about 3,000,000 square kilometres (740,000,000 acres). Nearly all of this deforestation took place prior to 1910, and the forest resources of the United States have remained relatively constant through the entire 20th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
You're just flat out wrong.
And this doesn't even take into account the heavy deforestation caused by Native Americans prior to Europe's arrival. There is significant evidence of terrible ecological problems caused by large populations of Native Americans and their changes to the environment.
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And, considering that the area would be semi-desert without water being brought in from hundreds of miles away, those trees couldn't survive without human intervention.
Ah, so pumping millions of gallons of water out of rapidly diminishing aquifers is now good for the environment, is it?
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If you think 2 or 3 trees on an American-sized plot of land makes a forest? Have you ever seen a forest?
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Poor people may not have much of a carbon footprint, but if there is no alternative to deforesting your island home, then the impact on the environment would be larger than just how much CO2 you produce.
That's what confused me about this piece: I don't think that I've ever heard anybody sell one of the various 'new, improved, not-dreadful, biomass heat/power device' ideas as being about CO2 emission. It's (1) generally the case that biomass is treated as 'carbon neutral' for accounting purposes, since its fuels all pulled their carbon out of the air, mostly within a few decades or less (indeed, some first-world burning of sawdust and other low-quality woody stuff in otherwise fairly conventional power plan
Dependence (Score:2)
And there is also the issue of dependence from imports.
The Rich (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, the rich. That is EVERYONE reading this.
The poorest 1 billion people on this planet do not have computers to read slash dot. As such they will not be taking part in the following discussion.
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you are almost certainly one of them (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you live in India or China? If not, you're probably in that top 20%. I see you have a computer or mobile device , so that almost guarantees you're in the richest few hundred million.
I make at least $50K, so I'm in the top 0.5% and I'm on Slashdot.
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Do you live in India or China? If not, you're probably in that top 20%. I see you have a computer or mobile device , so that almost guarantees you're in the richest few hundred million.
I make at least $50K, so I'm in the top 0.5% and I'm on Slashdot.
So basically what you're saying here is that measuring personal wealth as a percentage of global finances is pointlessly asinine.
I recall that industrial operations are responsible for somewhere between 60-80% of global greenhouse gas emissions; let's start there.
14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68% (Score:5, Insightful)
The EPA says industry accounts for 14% .
Electricity is 38% and automobiles are 31%.
You can reduce the emissions by cars primarily by increasing the production of electricity, while at the same time increasing other pollutants, so there's not much benefit working with cars until you have clean electricity.
You can get about 8% of your electricity cleanly through hydro and wind. That does mean you'll have to put up with windmills in your backyard.
Massachusetts had a big problem there - they wanted wind power, but refused to have windmills.
So where are you going to get the other 92% of your energy? Natural gas is cleanER.
Nuclear is really scary to the uninformed, but by FAR the cleanest. It produces an incredibly tiny amount of really nasty stuff and small amount of safe stuff that's scary because like our own bodies, it's "radioactive". Sun light is a billion times more radioactive, but for decades the "green" PR was so anti-nuclear that they are having a hell of time turning that around.
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the real problem with nuclear is the spent fuel needs to be cooled to store it.that place in japan has 12,000 rods being cooled in holding tanks. it needs to be reprocessed into new fuel rods by breeding while the rest is stored as slag with other metals creating a stable alloy that doesn't need cooled storage.
8 X 5 meter pool of water vs. millions of pounds (Score:2)
Nuclear:
Requires a 8X5 meter pool of water to store the used fuel for a few years.
Coal / biomass / ethanol:
Belches millions of pounds of noxious fumes into the air.
A hard choice?
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Nuclear: Requires a 8X5 meter pool of water to store the used fuel for a few years.
Coal / biomass / ethanol: Belches millions of pounds of noxious fumes into the air.
A hard choice?
That's assuming you do it right.
Chernobyl irradiated half of Europe, and generation after generation will suffer higher incidence of birth defects and cancer because of it. Fukushima has proven that we didn't learn our lesson. Even if the doomsayers are wrong about the material leaking out into the Pacific, that would mean they're only wrong this time.
I'm not afraid of nuclear power -- I'm afraid of middle managers and accountants.
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Electricity is easy to clean up. It's fuel neutral, ie you can produce it any of a hundred different ways. Centrally run it's efficiency can approach theoretical limits. Because of it's massive point source it's easier to install scrubbing to clean the emissions and dramatically reduce the pollution. And it doesn't even have to be carbon based.
Cars on the other hand are hugely inefficient, you have a fuel stock that's being used primary to generate waste heat with very little kinetic energy output (as a per
cars burning just as much gas plus ethanol too (Score:2)
We're actually using more gasoline today than we were ten years ago, when it cost half as much. That's even though so many of us are unemployed.
We're using alot more fuel than we were ten years ago - 10-15% of that fuel used to be food, that's the only change. We're burning a lot of ethanol and slightly more gasoline. Overall fuel usage is right about on trend. It's just more expensive fuel is all.
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Cars on the other hand are hugely inefficient, you have a fuel stock that's being used primary to generate waste heat with very little kinetic energy output (as a percentage of stored chemical energy in the gasoline). If we switched all our cars to electric and used the gasoline to generate electricity we would need about half as much.
{{Citation needed}}.
As far as I've been told, chemical batteries are massively inefficient and generate heat in use, particularly during the recharge cycle. Then there's transmission losses within the electricity grid. Unless you use microgeneration, but that introduces new inefficiencies in terms of spin-up and spin-down cycles. The spin-up/down is less of an issue in gas turbines, but the overall efficiency of a gas turbine is lower than that of a traditional steam turbine, which is why steam turbines sti
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Lithium batteries generate no heat during charging (unless there's a problem with them). NiCd and NiMH did, but no one uses those for motive power any more.
Diesel submarines use diesel because of the tremendous energy density of the diesel. This is compounded by most diesel submarines being built when lead acid batteries were the best batteries we had for motive power. Lead-acid is cheap but it's not at all energy dense, therefore to carry enough fuel to operate for the duration of the mission they need the
In someone's imagination. France has cheap nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
France sells billions of dollars of power they generate to other countries. Their energy cost is among the lowest in the industrialized world, and it's nuclear.
The infographic you linked where someone is imagining what-if scenarios is nice and all, but in the real world, the actual cost that is really paid is low for nuclear.
France has been doing nuclear in a big way for almost 40 years, they aren't imagining what they think it might cost.
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they're building 3 more nuke plants, mdsolar (Score:2)
I can understand you want to promote your business, mdsolar, but be intellectually honest. France is currently building three more reactors and designing the next generation. Electricity is their third largest export because they generate it at a muchlower cost than their neighbors.
Far from moving away from solar, they are thoroughly enjoying it's benefits and building more.
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yeah yeah but obama gave free cell phones to food stamp recipients. so that doesn't fly. also rich enough to afford a computer or a phone could reflect previous work prior to being sacked and unable to find work.
i know a few hobos and at least one of them also loved video games especially grand theft auto. also the internet boom is global now.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm [internetworldstats.com]
kinda like a cucumber (Score:2)
My health insurance just went from $430 / month to $950 / month. It feels kind of like a cucumber being shoved ...
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The problem is, the rich always like to kid ourselves on that the poor people are the problem. We're "clean", they're "dirty", so we like to hear about ways they can make themselves "cleaner".
Ironic then that our daily shower in electrically-heated water is pretty dirty in ecological terms.
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The voters and consumers themselves are also trying to convince themselves it's not real, so lobbyists and politicia
where rich $5K / year (Score:3)
It should be noted that TFS uses "rich" in the global context. Here, "the rich" very much includes US beneficiaries of taxpayer subsidies such as aid to families and dependant children. If you're reading this on your phone, you are the 1%.
Why it doesn't matter that OP is right (Score:3)
I do not think there is a single answer to global energy needs. We need many answers, not just one magic answer. If this technology helps some people, then it is absolutely worthwhile. We need every bit of help we can get. If it's only a small fraction of a percent, that is fine; the technology is helping people and helping the earth. The least you could do is support it.
Dismissing ideas because they won't replace fossil fuels is foolish. Replacing fossil fuels is going to take a combination of ideas, probably in combination with production decentralization.
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People always seem to forget the ultimate renewable resource: the human mind. (Insight courtesy of Julian Simon)
Based on what I've seen come out of some human minds, it might be more environmentally friendly to feed the biomass digester than the humans carrying the minds.
(No, I don't actually encourage starving people with whom I disagree)
ideological blinders (Score:5, Insightful)
Same with energy solutions and climate change. Some folks think batteries are going to save us because apparently their thinking about energy generation stops at the electric plug.
One reason the cost of solar has yet to catch up to the cost of oil is because every time the price of oil goes up, there is more oil available. When the cost goes up, it is profitable to drill deeper and to keep marginal wells and refineries open longer. Basic economics.
We need affordable energy today. I think giving the poor people who need energy today a cheap and hopefully sustainable solution is addressing the issue (instead of increasing it by giving them oil wells and SUVs) but it doesn't address the big sunk costs of dams which are silting up or transmission wires which are growing old or energy generating plants which last for 40 or 60 years.
Same old same old. Most of the folks who present solutions can't even accurately describe the problem and the current situation.
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Future growth (Score:2)
The reason gas prices are so high isn't because of low supply, it's because of high demand, from emerging markets (China and India in particular). While the amount of greenhouse gas used now by low-income countries isn't high, improving their electric grid and using renewable resources will not only decrease the rate of growth in CO2, but it will also be a good test bed for building a new grid. Eventually these new areas will ramp up demand and there will need to be something there.
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While the amount of greenhouse gas used now by low-income countries isn't high, improving their electric grid and using renewable resources will not only decrease the rate of growth in CO2, but it will also be a good test bed for building a new grid. Eventually these new areas will ramp up demand and there will need to be something there.
This. The issue is not how little they produce today, but how can we tell them "no" when they want to produce more tomorrow? They won't want to wait for the zero-carbon final solution in a decade, they want to join the developed world today. Any attempt to tell them how bad it will be for the globe if they do would be viewed with the same disdain population control discussions are.
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Dude, if you call it "gas", the cost of it is ludicrously low where you live. Move somewhere where they call it "petrol" for a while, and wince at what high prices really mean.
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That high cost in other countries is primarily due to taxes. Maybe I should have said oil rather than gas.
not targeting climate change (Score:2)
another but.... (Score:3)
> 'Why? Because poor people, whose carbon emissions these technologies would reduce, produce
> very little carbon in the first place. "
So far, haven't poor, third world countries, which were ramping up their industrial capacity, been among some of the larger sources of Carbon? I mean, its clear that we wealthy nations produce the lions share but.... isn't looking for ways to decentralize and get the poor of today thinking about green development.... isn't that part of getting ahead of easily predicted future compounding of the problem?
I mean, is it really fair to say to them "hey you know what...we need to cut our emissions so much that you....you can't have new technology"? Is it realistic to assume that those who have no carbon footprint today, will be happy continuing that way tomorow?
Is this a solution? No likely not, but, I don't think there is going to be A solution aside from embracing the power of "AND".
Barely noticeable ways? (Score:2)
What ways are that? The article gives no details, just a statement. I'm sure if the suggestions were 'barely noticeable' more people would do them.
You can't have that, it might reduce your CO2 (Score:2)
Sorry, poor people, that tech potentially mitigates climate change. No sustainable rural development for you. Buy our industrial ethanol. Or perhaps you'd like a nice molten salt solar reactor.
Carbon? (Score:4, Insightful)
Getting free Biogas for cooking, lighting or produce electricity plus a better fertilizer is nothing to sneeze at.
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Basic falacy (Score:3)
However focusing _solely_ on quick fixes to the immediate problem is exactly how we got into this problem in the first place. If we focus only on reducing the carbon output of the rich, then by the time we've got that under control we'll find that those poorer nations have developed the same kind of ecologically unfriendly economies that the rich nations have now, and we'll have to go through the whole fight against the same entrenched interests all over again.
Unless of course he's proposing that the poor nations should not or can not become economically developed, which i just don't believe to be the case. (If we want any kind of long term peace and stability on this planet we're going to have to bring everyone up to about the same economic level, but that's an argument for another post.)
He's making the same mistake that many a slashdotter does when a story comes up about someone spending time and money on the "wrong" thing. (Most frequently "on space" rather than "fixing stuff here on Earth.") We are not in some giant 4x game where we have to focus all our research and all our industry on a single project at a time. We can invest on improving the efficiency of developed nations while at the same time improving the capacity of poor nations in an ecologically friendly way.
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Of course, the most effective short tern effort would be to slap a 200% tax on gas in the US, and add a huge carbon levy on electricity and natural gas.
You could make it budget neutral by subsidising fuel-efficient cars, public transport, and home insulation.
Sadly, that's never going to happen.
Disagree (Score:3)
That's an incredibly short-sighted and static viewpoint. Which two countries increased their greenhouse gas emissions the most in the past few years? China and India - both developing countries. Unless you intend to keep these poor countries poor for the foreseeable future, they're going to modernize at some point. The logical way to proceed is to get them hooked on clean energy from the onset is to prevent growth in carbon emissions in the future. If you just say they don't pollute enough to matter, you're eventually going to arrive at a state where the rich nations drop their carbon emissions to near zero but global emissions are still increasing because those formerly-poor nations are now burning coal.
There's a tremendous opportunity here in developing nations. Like many of them skipped landline phone networks and jumped straight to cellular, they can skip the coal and oil plants and jump straight to hydro, nuclear, wind, and eventually solar.
Shouldn't the title be... (Score:2)
Not so fast, fella (Score:3)
Why are we even discussing this before we have sufficient evidence that reducing carbon emissions is the optimal strategy?
The rich have fewer children (Score:2)
In fact, the fertility rates in the developed world are much less than in poor regions. The fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa are more than twice that of the developed world. Therefore a poor person's carbon footprint is much higher. http://www.econ.yale.edu/~pschultz/cdp925.pdf [yale.edu]
Answer (Score:2)
Because climate change doesn't require a solution.
That is, until we know enough to define at least what is actually bad about the climate change that will occur over the next 100 years.
You should try to solve a problem that you truly understand virtually nothing about. It just leads to bad and worse solutions, piled on top of each other as your understanding shifts.
What climate change? (Score:2)
There's evidence for this at last? Really?
[citation required]
Biiig problem since the last ice age. Seems to have slowed down now. When was the last time YOU actually checked?
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Supposedly he buys carbon offsets to bring his footprint down to zero.
Yes, what a great message he could send the less-well-off among us: Don't Pollute... unless you can afford to.
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Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle (Score:4, Interesting)
he buys offsets to bring that number down to zero so that he can claim that he's not actually polluting.
TFTFY. The accounting on carbon offsets is totally bogus.
A windmill should not be able to credit any offsets until its manufacturing and operation costs are netted out, which can be 15 years of operation or more. Solar panels have only gone over unity in the past few years. etc.
People are getting credits for growing forests *that they were going to grow anyway*. No new behaviors are being created in these cases.
The primary value of carbon credits at this point are as an essential ingredient in greenwashing solutions. An honest market in carbon credits could exist (and there are probably a few small extant examples of this), but their primary purpose, currently, is not fulfilled by honest accounting.
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The energy payback of a wind turbine is 3-6 months *not* 15 years. A solar panel will pay back in 6 years or less.
The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of a wind turbine is about 18:1 (conservative, other sources say 25:1), the EROEI on a solar panel is about 6:1. By comparison the shale oil in the US only has an EROEI of 5:1.
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a) citation please
b) that seems unlikely, since dividends or capital gains would be more tax efficient
c) Climate change deniers wouldn't recognize logic if it spat them in the face.
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If you want to see something really interesting compare the following groups and see what they charge to plant a tree:
1) Arbor Day Foundation
2) TREE AID
3) A carbon offset company, like Al Gores.
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If the offsets don't do what they advertise, it isn't Al Gore's fault that they don't.
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If the offsets don't do what they advertise, it isn't Al Gore's fault that they don't.
When it is his company he's buying them from, it is.
Generation Investment Management [generationim.com] is a multi-national (offices in New York and London) investment strategy company. In other words, they exist to make a profit off of investing in ... whatever they can make a profit from investing in.
The "About Us" page claims there are 55 people who "represent[s] 16 countries and speaks 21 languages." The only financial disclosure I can find at that site lists [generationim.com] "Investment Management" remuneration at a total of GPB19,742
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Carbon offsets are the papal indulgence of the twenty-first century. The only thing they actually achieve is allowing affluent people to manage their guilt.
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Don't forget hot showers. The carbon footprint of manufacturing solar hot water panels is even too high.
Cold water showers can get a person clean, at least if he cares about Mother Earth.
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And cold showers help you suppress those dirty, dirty thoughts!! You shouldn't care about anyone but mother earth! :)
Seriously, though, there are lots of ways of saving energy without forsaking hot showers forever. And solar hot water panels are such basic technology that I'd be very surprised if their energy footprint outweighed their benefits.
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Don't forget hot showers. The carbon footprint of manufacturing solar hot water panels is even too high.
Is it the second hand central heating radiator that's the problem, or the black paint?
welcome to /., where the 1% complain about the 1% (Score:2)
You must be new here. Welcome.
One of our favorite things to do is sit around and whine about the 1%, pretending that's not us.
Most of us make over $30K, so we're one-percenters, but we like to engage in class warfare anyway.
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to Americans the "1%" means in the USA, that is $394,000 and above annual income.
On planet earth that's $34K and above
that's accounted for, elegantly (Score:2)
This is the exact same statement, with different locations:
Someone living on 5th Avenue will need a lot more money to sustain himself than someone living on 8 Mile.
That is accounted for in an elegant way. The guy in London chooses to spend money to buy something - the London life. He does NOT have to spend any more to sustain himself because he could go live in India. If you can afford to buy the uptown lifestyle, you are more wealthy than someone who can't.
It even works for things like taxes. Taxes make
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You must be new here. Welcome.
Wait.
What?
Uh, thanks.
I think.
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Just built those damn thorium reactors or solar cells on the moon.... the later would get us to the moon and who knows...
Couple points:
A) it's l-a-t-t-e-r [LAH-ter], not l-a-t-e-r [LAY-ter].
B) the latter would be solar cells on the moon; I assume by "would get us to the moon" you mean as in, "would get us to the moon to install them?" Or did you mean to say the former, thorium reactors, would "get us to the moon?"
Interesting ideas, but your sentence structure and grammatical quirks make it difficult to derive just what exactly you're trying to say here.
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I'm all for cool long term research projects, but they're expensive and the outcome is uncertain. Otherwise it wouldn't be research.
Wouldn't it be more practical to start with things that we know work and are cheap to do?
* Stop wasting electricity on AC. Long term, you want to build self-cooling houses; short term, paint roofs white.
* photovoltaics. Proven. Works.
* Traffic.
** Stop using 2+ tonne hunks of metal to transport one person a few miles each day
** If you insist on usin
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Building houses suited for more northerly climates in Central Florida and then using vast amounts of power to cool them is bloody stupid.
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The US does have a massively subsidised public transport infrastructure: they are called the airlines.
they can afford 10 years income for solar? (Score:2)
> Even poor people can afford 1Kw home solar systems.
> 3rd world businesses can too, enough to run a welder, or a mill
At the average installed cost of $0.90 / watt, a 1 Kw solar system costs as much as most people in the world make in 10 years. Poor, globally, is under $1,500 / year.
A welder?!?! A little welder for auto repair is 200 amp @ 120V - 240V, or at least 24,00 watts. That's $21,600 of solar panels to run that welder.
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Check your math and facts: 1Kwatt*.9$/watt=$900. My home MIG runs on 120V30amps. 3600watts. $3240@.9$/watt. Good enough to weld 3/16. Plenty for sheet metal.
Your 'little welder' is a monster good for welding pipelines.
Assuming you're right, still ROFL (Score:2)
Let's assume you and the commenter above you are both correct. 3600 X $3.50 =$12,600 USD.
10% of countries have a GNI less than $1,200 / year. So for the bottom 10% of countries, that's still ten years of income for the solar power.
Since the system lasts about ten years before it needs to be replaced, 100% of all their income, every penny they make, would be spent on solar power, leaving $0 for food, etc.
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Ssssh! You'll just confuse him with numbers and science!
Joking aside, I think PV has great potential in the sunnier parts of the world. Possibly not for energy intensive businesses like welding, but lighting (hugely important!), internet access, computing are easier to supply via PV. And even relatively (for a small business) projects can be financed via microfinance lenders - e.g. kiva.org. Go and check it out!
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Look to 3rd world for the future. Not to the west, still driving around in hungry 4wd petrol trucks to work.
Still pushing the Noble Savage [wikipedia.org] concept?
Re: False premise. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think that Ayn Rand is philosophy, and that having read Ms Rand makes you "very well read in philosophy", we can only hope for your sake that you're only 15 and you'll grow up in a few years time.
In the meantime, you seem to be using an awful lot of words that don't mean what you think they mean. "Liberal", "censoring", the aforementioned "philosophy", and "fuck". Oh, and "statist".
You may want to politely enquire with your English teacher about the possibility of borrowing a dictionary; if it's not to "statist" or "liberal" for you, your local library may have one.
Now get the hell off my lawn!
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Typical response to someone who is incapable of supporting their argument with facts and so must resort to the default position of argument ad hominem.
FTFY.
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Rand's works are not philosophy so much as they're extremist pseudo-intellectual quasi-anti-Bolshevik shit-fits.
She basically tried to do with political philosophy what Aleister Crowley tried to do with religion.
It also bears noting that Rand died poor and virtually friendless after screwing over most of her own inner circle in one way or another over the previous couple of decades.
Notice: (Score:2)
As the one who started a thread-war about Ayn Rand yesterday, I just want to state I have no connection to this guy.
.
Carry on.
Re: (Score:2)
Now that's a remarkably asinine response from a self-proclaimed scholar of philosophy.
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It's all beneficial, but asking someone in the third world to burn less wood to cook their food while you happily burn gallons of gas to drive yourself to the mall is ever so slightly hypocritical.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Carbon emissions do not make you happy.
In order to light to contemporary standards a home would take several tons of wax candles.
Even conventional light-bulbs are _way_ more efficient. LED ones enormously so.
My new (larger) monitor that uses half the power my old one did is not in any way inferior.
A well insulated and designed home that uses less power to heat or cool is not any less livable.
Some devices may actually have negative carbon emissions.
Consider the Ipad (or nexus 7, or ...).
They will use several