 | The Bullroarer - Tuesday 1st April 2008 | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | Concentrating On The Important Things - Solar Thermal Power |  |
179 comments on Hansen to Australian PM: stop coal plants now
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Kiashu, The world burns 200 million barrels of fossil fuels a day! Where is all this electricity going to come from? Trains only carry goods part of the way and then trucks take it from there. Do have any idea how many trucks are crisscrossing the US? So just as crude extraction plateau's we are suddenly and with little if any planning going to switch to alternative sources of energy to replace 200 mbd? Wrong. You can dream all you want, but the reality is wind and solar only supply a small percentage of energy and 94% of all transportation runs on oil derived products. Sorry for the dose of reality.
Again there seems to be a lack of knowledge about these two century old inventions, the train and the river barge.
According to the CIA worldfactbook, the US has,
4,165,110 km of paved roads, which includes 75,009 km of expressways
226,612 km of railways
41,009 km of waterways, 19,312 km of which are used for commerce
The UP says
A train also takes physically less space than a truck for the same freight carried, and because it travels on rail, unshared by private transport, it's not subject to traffic jams.
So by converting all freight to rail, you could reduce your freight fuel use by two-thirds, even without electrifying any of your rail, just using diesel trains. In case you wish to object that this doesn't let freight be moved within cities, you might note that there exist in Europe freight trams; they take freight at night along the same tracks as the mass transit use during the day.
It should be borne in mind that in the US in the 1930s, the oil and car companies bought up the streetcar companies and eliminated them. See the Great American Streetcar Scandal. Streetcars were cheap to run, durable, and used little energy; obviously oil and car companies didn't like the competition. If trucks and cars were obviously superior to streetcars, then GM, Standard Oil and the like would not have had to use these dodgy methods to get rid of them, their natural superiority would have won them market share.
Oh, certainly with no planning you'll achieve nothing useful at all.
But to say that if you make no plans at all you'll have difficulty adjusting to changes in the world, that's not exactly a profound insight into the world. Of course if you blindfold yourself and walk around you'll stumble.
I think what Cslater8 is trying to say is that there is a vast chasm between where we are now and where we would need to be if we were to replace CO2-emitting forms of transport. And getting global agreement to make that transition in a timely enough fashion is extremely unlikely because of the realities of our money-delineated global free market economy. Sure, if governments actually took some decisive action on a vast scale, or people started to take this issue seriously, we might get to where we need to be in time. But on current progress that just ain't gonna happen. The required changes are just too vast.
Specifically - electricity - where's it going to come from? Renewables currently produce a small fraction of current consumption, disregarding the probable doubling in demand if we also use if for ground transportation, whether directly or through production of hydrogen. And train and barges could theoretically be part of the solution too, but most of the world's infrastructure has been built around other modes of transport. Adopting more energy-efficient modes will take a very significant amount of time and effort.
It's all theoretically solvable, but who can honestly believe that the solution will be achieved in time? We're running out of that commodity very fast and there are few signs that any of the required changes will take place in anything like the necessary timescale.
This is the reality of the situation, and hope alone won't solve our problems, I'm afraid. We shouldn't abandon hope, but as time goes on the solutions look farther and farther away.
ncollingridge, Just wanted to let you know I agree with your post completely. I work my own business so only have so much time to devote to responses, but do appreciate your elequent version of my somewhat cut and dry response. And just so you know the other reply posts are not for you. Thanks, Cslater8 in California
Well, essentially what you're saying here is that positive change is slow and difficult.
Sure. But we should still give it a go. If we try, maybe things won't improve. If we don't try, definitely they won't improve.
I'll take possible failure over certain failure any day of the week. "Resigned apathy" is not a state of mind I've ever found useful.
Yes, we may fail if we try. But if we don't try we'll definitely fail. May as well give it a go.
What do I do? Well, there's the individual and the general: I work towards a one-tonne CO2 lifestyle as an individual, and for the general each season I sit down and write a letter to each of my local, state and federal representatives.
Maybe they don't listen, but we can't complain they don't listen if we don't speak. And I think they do listen. For the last month in my local newspaper the front page news has been, of all things, the removal of a single Australia Post mailbox. It was only getting six letters a day so AP removed it and told the people to just walk to the next one. But that's 650m further and the little old ladies in the neighbourhood are upset. The state MP has protested to Australia Post, called up the federal Communications Minister, and is going to bring it up in State Parliament as part of a general critique of the (public owned) Australia Post.
The State MP got 25 letters on it. And now it's being brought up in State Parliament, this extraordinarily trivial thing, a single bloody postbox.
So I write to my councillors, and state and federal MPs. Maybe mine will be the letter that, on top of all the rest, makes them bring the issue up in Parliament. It certainly can't do any harm.
Or I could just sit around and cry into my beer and say it's all hopeless. Which would be what they call a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Change your life, and once a season write to your elected representatives about the issues of the day. You've got nothing to lose but your resigned apathy.
Your sleep walking - wake up.
Trucks - don't forget the trucks. Barges etc. will only do so much. Look around you and what do you see? A huge country cris-crossed by highways with trucks transporting goods. How are those huge trucks going to run on a windmill of electric power? You need to stop living in a fishbowl and take a hard good look at reality. 200 million barrels of fossil fuels a day. Don't kid yourself into these other scenarios.
If long-distance transport of goods is moved from road to rail, we won't need so many trucks. How are you going to maintain the highways?
Looking around me, I see a couple trains each day which consist of semi-trailers hooked together on rail dollies (run by Triple Crown Services). I've counted 125 trailers being towed by a single locomotive.
The steps look fairly simple to me:
We've got examples out there, we just have to follow them.
How about we just buy less useles stuff to fill our McMansions with and then we won't need so many trucks, trains, barges. Come to think of it, why don't we stop building McMansions and other forms of wasteful dispersed housing, only live in places where food can be grown close to the mouths that eat it.
More than 10,000 times our current energy consumption is available from the sun. Even wind power could provide 7 times our total energy needs at present. Only a small amount of transport really *needs* liquid fuels (aircraft basically).
I know this dose of reality is inconvenient, but there is more renewable energy out there than we will ever need. Some will choose to harness it, some won't...
Only it's not a dose of reality (at least in terms of where energy for transportation comes from now or in the foreseeable future) but a dose of hope. Unless pretty much everyone chooses to harness it, and soon, it will be too late for all of us.
There's more food in the world (least right now) to feed everyone a healthy diet. But I see millions living with malnutrition.
Go ahead, state that the sun can single-handedly power all our needs. I know this, and I bet most halfway intelligent people do too. But stating a possibility and then saying that's "reality" is hilarious. I guess you missed where all this capital is going to come from and professional personnel and hardware along with the time and social will, worldwide, to bring about what is, right now, totally Utopic in nature.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't be witnessing the entire global economy implode either. Life's shit that way, so forgive me for not breathing a sigh of relief because someone figured a science fiction future is possible if we wish it. [i]Mad Max[/i] is also as valid a science fiction future.
The entire global economy isn't imploding - I can assure you all the resource exporting countries are doing fine right now - and will do so as long as other countries let their economies depend on resource extraction.
The US isn't the world.
Yeah, because I was just talking about the US. Oh wait, I didn't mention the US at all. Perhaps you've not been reading the news lately, but I figure Europe and Asia are the world though, you know, the economies that are also reeling from what started in the US.
It may be a subconscious sign of arrogance to assume I was talking only about the US. I assure you, if you think the matters are simply a few mortgage issues in Stateside, you've missed a whole picture.
Even if this were the case and only the US was being dragged down now, I'm thinking the world's largest economy might have a bit of an impact on the global economy. And none of this counters the point that we don't have the capital, will or time to implement yet another fantastical dream of a world powered by sunshine and compassion. Historical precedent is firmly on my side for the "kicking and screaming" shift to reality.
1. The world's largest economy is the EU, not the US. You are living in the past.
2. Australia isn't in recession. Neither is the EU. Neither is Japan. Neither is China. Neither is India. Neither is Russia. Neither are most other countries in Asia or Latin America. In spite of the unwinding of the housing bubble / credit bubble, the OECD latest estimate is that worldwide growth this year will be just under 2%.
3. I can see plenty of arrogance in your comments - why don't you cut out the personal insults and focus on the facts for a change.
It will when peak oil takes a firm hold of things and then it won't matter how much other resources you've got, they cost to exploit them will make some of it uneconomic. It is also a very big concern that in a resources boom, Australia still has huge trade deficits. The bill for that is coming in the mail. The US has just got theirs and found their wallets were full of only credit card reciepts and not much else.
The idea of resources belong to countries is also a quaint memory but the reality is that resource extraction is now a globalised business which is not always that great for the donor country.
This kind of fact is not particularly useful since it assumes that all of the energy is currently wasted as it isn't being used to support human lifestyles. It also assumes that capturing and harnessing that energy requires no other resource. The facts would need to be modified to show what proportion of that sun, wind, etc, could be diverted for our private use, without damaging our habitat, and what other resources are required to do so.
Actually it demonstrates that if you use less than 0.1% of the available solar energy then you could met all our needs at present.
If you mostly capture this energy in the deserts or on building rooftops, then you'll be unlikely to have a great deal of additional environmental impact - yes, you'll need to keep mining the building materials - but not forever - unlike the present model.
0.1% diversion to our private use couldn't possibly do any harm, could it? Well, we don't know because no-one, so far as I know, has done the research. Small numbers don't necessarily mean no. or small, effects.
At 2% growth, that 0.1% becomes 0.2% in 35 years, 0.4% in 70 years.
Correct, we don't have to mine the sunlight, it just comes to us, but we do have to mine the materials needed to build the generating capacity and infrastructure. That needs maintenance and replacement, from time to time. And the amount of resource increases two fold every 35 years, if we grow energy use at 2% per year.
Actually diverting rooftop heat to solar power might help reduce the urban heat island effect - so it would be a positive thing.
Ditto for desert CSP installations - maybe they could do desalination with some of the power and use it to green the deserts.
Sometimes if you try hard you can make positive changes - not all change is bad...
I don't deny that positive changes can be made but I'm very wary of "solutions" that imply life can go on as "normal". When people talk about the enormous energy provided by the sun and how we can just take a weeny bit of it to do exactly what we're doing now, with no consequences and disregarding any other problems with our lifestyles, then I get worried. At some point our societies will have to change drastically, since we live on a finite planet. In the meantime, let's think very carefully about what we do and stop making assumptions about the effects it will have. Your statements above are "mights" and "coulds". I think, in terms of our use of the earth's resources, including those that come from outside, we needs to be more certain about those uses.
If we can get to a sustainable state, that would be a positive change. I don't think the globe necessarily needs to replace all of the non-renewable energy it uses, in order for its inhabitants to live a satisfying life.
Those other issues weren't part of the discussion - I was just noting (for about the millionth time) that we can (and most likely will) replace our fossil fuel consumption with cleaner alternatives.
Obviously a whole lot of other changes are required, and I will be discussing them at length in various future posts (and have done for years at my personal blog).
We will move to cleaner alternatives, regardless of what is left of societies. However, replacement is probably not on the cards. Powerdown, I think, is inevitable. Hopefully in a managed way but probably not.