Collapse of Industrial Civilization in the 21st Century

[macdoc]

We can't really have Peak Oil(tm) if we keep moving it, can we?

was not really expected to be moved but as ever new tech changed the game.
I reality likely for the better.

 

[DC]

Just like all the other times.

such as?

 

[a_unique_person]

I'm cutting it there because that was my entire point - while various collapses and declines have happened before, none of them are useful comparisons because the world today is so different. It doesn't mean that collapse can't happen, but it does mean that cries of "it's happening again" are nonsense because nothing similar has ever had the chance to happen before. Any collapse of modern civilisation will be completely different from any past collapses.

Secondly, you haven't addressed the other, equally important, point I made - those previous collapses generally had little or nothing to do with running out of basic resources. As I said, the (western) Roman empire did not collapse because it ran out of wood. The world has never been forced to return to the power sources of previous ages due to running out of modern ones. A scenario in which we run out of (cheap enough) oil and coal has absolutely nothing to do with any previous case in which a country declined due to any number of economic and social reasons.



Ah, I thought you were talking about green as in energy. Farming and such isn't really something I know enough about. However, it's worth pointing out that alternate power sources are just as viable here as anywhere else.



Absolutely. Trying to implement this sort of change in a short time as an emergency measure would be extremely difficult, but we don't need to worry too much about that because we're already implementing it right now. There are already several different electric cars on sale to consumers, and fuel cells are powering quite a variety of things, although not quite in general consumer usage yet.

Again, whether everything gets done in time is still very much open to question, but the claims inevitability just don't stand up.



It's still queued up and ready to go. Nuclear power hasn't gone anywhere, and the more it looks like power could become a problem, the more attractive it's going to look.



The problem on this front is really with the "can't" and "inevitable" claims. If we absolutely had to, we could build enough nuclear power to power most of the world within a few years. It's simply a question of money, and the political will to actually do it. As for how much effort is being put into saying we can build replacement sources, maybe things are different where you are, but around here the government never stops saying that. The connection between mouth and money is a little lacking at times, but even companies like BP go to great lengths to advertise that oil isn't all they do. In contrast, other than in discussions like this I can't recall anyone ever saying that oil isn't going to be a problem, although admittedly the focus tends to be on price and security of supply rather than simply running out.



No, it really isn't. The entire argument presented by you in both threads consists of anecdotal claims that things are going to be terrible. "Here" is the Science section, and I'm pointing out that there seems to be distinct lack of it backing up the claims of doom.



From my point of view, those two claims are pretty much indistinguishable. Certainly the latter has nothing to do with the experiences of anyone I know. Which is exactly the point I am making about anecdotal claims. You say one thing based on your experience, I don't believe it. Without actual evidence, there just isn't an argument to be made.



It's generally best to establish that claims are based on peer reviewed studies first. Citing "basic statistics" is about one step removed from "common sense".



So? Bubbles mean you don't have monotonically increasing growth. I have yet to see anything connecting that to the claimed impending collapse.



I have no idea. Is there a reason I should care?



Not that difficult at all.



Um, no, not "that coal article". Did you actually read it? The word "coal" only appears in the first couple of lines, and hardly has anything to do with the article as a whole, other than using a particularly stupid claim about it as a jumping off point to talk about how important it is to actually know what you're talking about before claiming we're about to run out of things. It actually focusses far more on various metal resources.



It's hardly a secret that it's currently cheaper to import coal than to mine it in Britain. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether we are actually going to run out any time soon. And given how much detail the article goes into to support its points, with numerous numbers and citations that you seem to have somehow missed, dismissing it as "glib reassurance" really doesn't help you make a case here, especially given the pronounced lack of said numbers and citations backing up your own claims.



Given that out of three examples you've given, one (the price of tickets) has nothing to do with efficiency and one (bicycles) is just flat out wrong, I don't really see any need to go looking for counterexamples. It's just more anecdotes that don't hold up, but no real evidence.



I definitely agree here. Far too many people think that because a solution is possible, there's no point in worrying about it at all. For any problem really, not just the one under discussion here. Even worse are those who think that because we've often come up with new technology to solve a problem in the past, that means we must always do so in the future so there's never any point worrying about anything.

But there are two important points here. Firstly, the people who generally hold that sort of attitude are mostly just the general public. The people with relevant expertise in positions to actually deal with these problems generally have very different attitudes, and their opinions are far more important. Secondly, as I've previously noted, the idea of actually doing something gets more and more attractive the worse things look. Nuclear is unpopular now largely because there's no immediate need. See how long that attitude lasts once we start getting brownouts due to lack of power. Will it be too late to save things by that point? Maybe, but I'm far from convinced of that so far.

People are just as smart now as they were then.
Except for those caused by environmental issues, from a technological point of view, there was no reason why the collapses had to happen.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

All of them.

Evidence? Just saying it doesn't make it so.

Do you not think that someone during the Plague might have thought that the fate of mankind hung in the balance?

No. The Plague or Black Death was generally only seen as a regional problem. Nobody was expecting it to kill every person in the world, and at its worst it only reduced world population by about 20%.

Just last century we have the threat of nuclear annihilation. Have we forgotten that already?

That's one. Only 99 more to go!

But I will be more than generous, and concede the point if you can provide just 5 other centuries that people of the day were calling "a critical time in the history of our species".

 

[Myriad]

I'm cutting it there because that was my entire point - while various collapses and declines have happened before, none of them are useful comparisons because the world today is so different. It doesn't mean that collapse can't happen, but it does mean that cries of "it's happening again" are nonsense because nothing similar has ever had the chance to happen before. Any collapse of modern civilisation will be completely different from any past collapses.

Secondly, you haven't addressed the other, equally important, point I made - those previous collapses generally had little or nothing to do with running out of basic resources. As I said, the (western) Roman empire did not collapse because it ran out of wood. The world has never been forced to return to the power sources of previous ages due to running out of modern ones. A scenario in which we run out of (cheap enough) oil and coal has absolutely nothing to do with any previous case in which a country declined due to any number of economic and social reasons.

Of course Rome is a different case. Every case is different. But it's analogous. What the Roman Empire ran out of is what their empire ran on at the time: easily obtainable slaves and tribute from outside their borders. As those borders lengthened and became more distant from the center, the cost of defending them increased.

In theory, an equilibrium might have been reached where tribute and internal production balanced with expenses and defense costs, but they over-expanded instead. (Conquer Gaul now, to gain ten million denarii right away and incur a quarter million net cost per year thenceforth defending it. But the Emperor wants to build temples and colosseums now. What to do? Figures made up for illustrative purposes but that's the basic issue, and human nature hasn't changed since then.)

Of course, we'd never be that stupid, to choose the easier solutions to problems now, knowing they'll cause even greater problems later. So there's no comparison, right?

Ah, I thought you were talking about green as in energy. Farming and such isn't really something I know enough about. However, it's worth pointing out that alternate power sources are just as viable here as anywhere else.

Granted. Although it's also worth pointing out that many agricultural practices are unsustainable in other ways. Herbicide and pesticide resistance, aquifer depletion, and soil degradation are also growing problems. Those compete with alternative energy in demanding capital to address.

Absolutely. Trying to implement this sort of change in a short time as an emergency measure would be extremely difficult, but we don't need to worry too much about that because we're already implementing it right now. There are already several different electric cars on sale to consumers, and fuel cells are powering quite a variety of things, although not quite in general consumer usage yet.

When you say petroleum, most people think of cars, when they should be thinking of food (harvesters, semi trucks, cargo ships). Electric cars are very nice, we'll still be able to drive to the supermarket, but I'd rather walk and find something on the shelves when I get there. Fuel cells might be promising in the long run for industrial vehicles, but even those need fuel.

Again, whether everything gets done in time is still very much open to question, but the claims inevitability just don't stand up.

I don't think I've claimed inevitability. I have talked about people who do claim inevitability, and discussed their arguments, so I have no problem with your disagreement with that. Somewhere between impossible and inevitable is "likely enough for concern," which would be my position right now except that "concern" is useless. So, "likely enough to act toward personal mitigation" is where I'm standing.

It's still queued up and ready to go. Nuclear power hasn't gone anywhere, and the more it looks like power could become a problem, the more attractive it's going to look.

The problem on this front is really with the "can't" and "inevitable" claims. If we absolutely had to, we could build enough nuclear power to power most of the world within a few years. It's simply a question of money, and the political will to actually do it. As for how much effort is being put into saying we can build replacement sources, maybe things are different where you are, but around here the government never stops saying that. The connection between mouth and money is a little lacking at times, but even companies like BP go to great lengths to advertise that oil isn't all they do. In contrast, other than in discussions like this I can't recall anyone ever saying that oil isn't going to be a problem, although admittedly the focus tends to be on price and security of supply rather than simply running out.

"We" could do this, we could do that. Nuclear power hasn't gone anywhere but it also hasn't, well, gone anywhere, despite decades of improvements in materials science, automation, and control systems that should make it work better and easier. You can say it's simply a question of money and political will, but what help is that if the political will isn't there? (A sinking ship is "simply a question of buoyancy.") Maybe the political will will arise at some point, but by then, will the money still be there? I don't know.

No, it really isn't. The entire argument presented by you in both threads consists of anecdotal claims that things are going to be terrible. "Here" is the Science section, and I'm pointing out that there seems to be distinct lack of it backing up the claims of doom.

From my point of view, those two claims are pretty much indistinguishable. Certainly the latter has nothing to do with the experiences of anyone I know. Which is exactly the point I am making about anecdotal claims. You say one thing based on your experience, I don't believe it. Without actual evidence, there just isn't an argument to be made.

As I said in the other thread, deciding which section to start this thread in was a bit of a crap shoot, because the discussion is likely to run unpredictably between technology, history, social issues, conspiracy theories, economics, and politics. I wrongly guessed that there would be more discussion of The Limits to Growth and the validity of World3 and other models. The outcomes of models are evidence that can be raised and discussed, as are vast amounts of economic records, but I can't do everything myself at once. I'll get to it.

Meanwhile, please explain what your comment that some people making pessimistic predictions are old contributes to the science. If they were predominantly black or female would you harp on that in the same way?

So? Bubbles mean you don't have monotonically increasing growth. I have yet to see anything connecting that to the claimed impending collapse.

I have no idea. Is there a reason I should care?

I was just pointing out your error in logic. I mentioned the claim that bubbles are symptoms of economic stagnation and the resulting lack of profitable productive investment opportunities, which in turn is a symptom of increasing resource scarcity. You said that bubbles are not a new phenomenon, as if that refuted the claim. It does not. A symptom is not required to be unique to one cause, to be a symptom. Coughing is a symptom of tuberculosis, even though people have been known to cough for other reasons.

A more sound refutation would be pointing out all the profitable productive investment opportunities out there. That's why I asked.

Not that difficult at all.

Not that difficult to answer a much easier question: how much energy is currently used to build a wind turbine? You asked how much energy does it take? (For instance, are there other ways to perform some or all of those steps using less energy, if the price of energy were to rise considerably?)

Huh, I said that pretty clearly last time. Were you too eager for a "gotcha" to read it?

Here's an article that highlights the difficulty of making wind turbines using sustainable power sources. Nothing in that article says it's physically impossible, but the amount of retooling required (especially for concrete production, steel production, and transport) would be vast.

Um, no, not "that coal article". Did you actually read it? The word "coal" only appears in the first couple of lines, and hardly has anything to do with the article as a whole, other than using a particularly stupid claim about it as a jumping off point to talk about how important it is to actually know what you're talking about before claiming we're about to run out of things. It actually focusses far more on various metal resources.

The rest of the article was irrelevant. I haven't talked about metal resources, and metal resources figure little if at all in the "converging crises" narratives of slow collapse doomers. I had already explained why metal resources are less critical, in my response to Dinwar:

Energy extraction or acquisition has a unique constraint. If we were talking about, for example, gold, then no matter how dilute the remaining gold ores of the world become, there is always some price of gold that would make it worth obtaining. Even if that meant extracting it from sea water or, at the ultimate extreme, synthesizing it with particle accelerators. So, saying that the supply of gold (or tungsten, chromium, etc.) is limited or will run out really is inaccurate.

But extracting or otherwise producing energy does have such a limit. If the energy required to extract or exploit a source of energy exceeds or equals the amount of energy produced, there is no point in producing it. You cannot make a profit or accomplish anything useful by doing so, no matter how high the price or value of energy is.

So, if you want coal to make jewelry or paperweights out of, you can mine all you want as long as you can afford it. But if you want it for energy, you eventually run into hard limits. For instance (this is just to show the principle, not specify the actual limits), when you strip mine buried coal, it takes some energy to lift the overlying rock off of it. At around a depth of 8 or 9 kilometers (given: a coal seam 3m thick of coal with density 1,250 kg/m^3, yielding 24 MJ/kg, under rock beds of uniform density 2,500 kg/m^3), it takes more energy just to lift that overlying rock to uncover a given amount of coal than you get in heat from burning the coal. That's ridiculously deep, but the strip mining process actually requires many times more energy than that (you also have to fracture the overlying rock to be able to lift it, move it somewhere, excavate much wider than a vertical-walled pit, transport the coal, pump water, etc. with machinery that is itself less than perfectly efficient) so the actual limit is much shallower. Yes, you can use shaft mining instead, but that has its own limits.

It's hardly a secret that it's currently cheaper to import coal than to mine it in Britain. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether we are actually going to run out any time soon. And given how much detail the article goes into to support its points, with numerous numbers and citations that you seem to have somehow missed, dismissing it as "glib reassurance" really doesn't help you make a case here, especially given the pronounced lack of said numbers and citations backing up your own claims.

Since the figures about metals are irrelevant, the glib reassurance about coal was the only part of the article that is relevant. And that was made with no data, whereas I linked to a graph of actual historical production to make my point.

Given that out of three examples you've given, one (the price of tickets) has nothing to do with efficiency and one (bicycles) is just flat out wrong, I don't really see any need to go looking for counterexamples. It's just more anecdotes that don't hold up, but no real evidence.

Of course the price of tickets has to do with efficiency. Buying a discount ticket is more efficient (less money for the same trip). But the same factors that make discount tickets cheap (buying well in advance, non-refundibility, agreeing to restrictions) make it "brittle," more likely to fail you if something unexpected happens to your plans.

As for bicycles, I haven't looked at new ones for a long time, so I had no idea that the most power-efficient ones (lightest weight, least aerodynamic resistance) were more durable (or at least equally durable) compared to thicker-framed heavier ones. Do you have a source for that?

I definitely agree here. Far too many people think that because a solution is possible, there's no point in worrying about it at all. For any problem really, not just the one under discussion here. Even worse are those who think that because we've often come up with new technology to solve a problem in the past, that means we must always do so in the future so there's never any point worrying about anything.

But there are two important points here. Firstly, the people who generally hold that sort of attitude are mostly just the general public. The people with relevant expertise in positions to actually deal with these problems generally have very different attitudes, and their opinions are far more important. Secondly, as I've previously noted, the idea of actually doing something gets more and more attractive the worse things look. Nuclear is unpopular now largely because there's no immediate need. See how long that attitude lasts once we start getting brownouts due to lack of power. Will it be too late to save things by that point? Maybe, but I'm far from convinced of that so far.

Reasonable enough, although I'm less confident that the opinions of people with actual relevant expertise are treated as more important. The opinions of people with money appear to have the edge. On that score the U.S., at least, might as well be the office Dilbert works in.

 

[macdoc]

Myriad you are really stuck inside North America...the world is moving on.

Nuclear is not stagnant - there are dozens of nuclear reactors being built. More than two dozen in China alone.
There is enough power sitting unused in the holding ponds to be extracted by current technology to power the planet for 400 years without mining anymore uranium. Right now it's cheaper to mine new...does not mean the existing reserves cannot be used and then there is thorium which is abundant and both China and India are pursuing.
Japan is restarting it's nuclear fleet as it's getting killed by fossil fuel costs not to mention emission issues.
Japan is one to watch for transition.

Solar steam can power anything that a regular power plant can and IS powering at an industrial level.

Huge solar-thermal plant opens near Nevada-California ...
www.reviewjournal.com/.../huge-solar-thermal-plant-opens-near-nevada...
Feb 13, 2014 - The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, sprawling across roughly ... is used to heat water in the boilers' tubes and make steam, which in .

You talk of wind but not solar yet solar is far and away the growth industry world wide and in the US which installed more solar last year than it did in the preceding 30 years.

In addition we have almost untapped geo-thermal.

Geothermal energy in the United States generated a record 16.792 million megawatt-hours in 2012, narrowly beating the previous record of 16.789 set in 1993.[1] In 2012, the United States led the world in geothermal electricity production with 3,386 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity;[2][3] the largest group of geothermal power plants in the world is located at The Geysers, a geothermal field in California.[4] The United States generates an average of 15 billion kilowatt hours of geothermal power per year, comparable to burning some 25 million barrels (4,000,000 m3) of oil or 6 million short tons of coal per year.[5] In the twelve months through April 2013, geothermal energy generated 16.9 million megawatt-hours, 0.41% of total US electricity.[1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy_in_the_United_States

The world still gets a huge amount of power from the existing nuclear fleet with France leading at 80% with a tiny carbon foot print by comparison with the US.
There are untapped hydro reserves in Northern Quebec in particular.

I have yet to see you acknowledge gains in efficiency yet there were 9 million more people in the US in the past couple of years yet the nation used less electricity than the previous years.

You keep focusing on "money" - the fnancial system is bust - does not mean the resources are not there...on a war footing the resources are there and to some degree for climate is could use a war footing.

And all of this is near term let alone 80 years out.
We do not have the tools to predict that far in terms of technology.

There is lots of energy about...it's the distribution of resources and food that is a serious problem and could and is leading to social unrest even in North America.
That's a risk but not to the whole of civlization.

 

[Dinwar]

Of course Rome is a different case. Every case is different. But it's analogous.

Potentially. However, this misses the point of examining the past: even if the situation is different, it can provide some insight. Collapses share certain common traits, otherwise they'd be impossible to group together. Thus, we should be able to define broad traits of collapses. Once we understand those, we can define narrower types of collapses, based on in-group similarity and between-group differences. All of which assists in assessing the potential for collapse by helping us zero in on root causes of the various types.

We can't really have Peak Oil(tm) if we keep moving it, can we?

Well.....kinda. There's a finite amount of oil in the ground. More may be being made, but at sufficient rates to matter. There's only so much we can take out of the ground, and once we reach the peak of that, it's global peak oil (local peaks are possible as well). We may be able to develop synthetics, such as biodesiel, or alternative energy sources, such as solar or geothermal or nuclear, which prevent us from ever reaching it. New ways of extracting oil don't impact the existence of peak oil, they merely impact when we'll hit it and what it'll look like.

Solar steam can power anything that a regular power plant can and IS powering at an industrial level.

Yeah....you may want to look more closely at that. Here's another worth looking at before advocating industrial-scale solar (link is to the Bright Source Energy company's website description of a nearby solar project). I can't go into too much detale (this forum is NOT worth losing my job over), but I can tell you that industrial-scale solar plants have some fairly tremendous regulatory and cultural hurdles to overcome before it's truly viable.

Geothermal is more viable than people realize. Particularly for heating/cooling of living spaces. True geothermal energy is notoriously difficult to deal with (it's only viable in a few places, maintenance is a nightmare, etc), but below the frost layer temperatures in the ground are constant (in Ohio it's somewhere in the mid-50 F range). Put some pipes in the ground, let the water/oil/whatever equalize in temperature, pump it back up, and you've got summertime cooling and winter heating with the same system. It's not going to be shockingly cold in the summer or toasty warm in the winter, but it certainly helps. I know of a few buildings where that's done, ranging in size from homes to schools.

 

[macdoc]

Yeah....you may want to look more closely at that. Here's another worth looking at before advocating industrial-scale solar (link is to the Bright Source Energy company's website description of a nearby solar project). I can't go into too much detale (this forum is NOT worth losing my job over), but I can tell you that industrial-scale solar plants have some fairly tremendous regulatory and cultural hurdles to overcome before it's truly viable.

Immaterial to the thread and specific to California. There are Nimby's everywhere...mostly irrelevant.
Solar steam is not looked on that way in Australia where they just moved into supercritical
http://www.solarserver.com/solar-ma...set-world-solar-steam-temperature-record.html
The reference to solar steam was to counter an objection about industrial levels of power available....solar steam is old boiler tech dressed up in a new power source.
Needs better storage and I hear they are out to 5 hours now just with a thermal approach.

 

[Dinwar]

For those who think it's just me saying that understanding past ecological collapse is important to understanding future collapse, here is an interesting paper saying the same thing. (Link is to the Berkely website, and should open as a .pdf) It systematically analyzes the late Quaternary extinction, and demonstrates how such data can be used to predict future events.

Immaterial to the thread and specific to California.

Issues that demonstrably halt development of a technology are immaterial? Guess you and I have different definitions of the term.

The issue is, if we can't build them they won't generate power. A pretty simple concept. And it's not just the lunies out in California (I lived there for four years and worked in the environmental sector; trust me, I know what I'm talking about!) aren't the only factors. Solar farms are HUGE. We're talking square MILES of territory. And they use rather precious resources, such as water (to wash the panels). That's without getting into the amount of fuel necessary to construct one of those things, or the process of manufacturing and shipping panels, reflectors, etc. This isn't an easy task, and the viability of this technology remains to be seen.

 

[macdoc]

Keep the context in view and stop stooping to a specific.
IS the technology available to provide energy post fossil fuel ( either imposed or run out ).

The answer is yes and solar steam is one of them.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

[Several snips so I can just address things I have some knowledge and experience]

Of course, we'd never be that stupid, to choose the easier solutions to problems now, knowing they'll cause even greater problems later. So there's no comparison, right?




Granted. Although it's also worth pointing out that many agricultural practices are unsustainable in other ways. Herbicide and pesticide resistance, aquifer depletion, and soil degradation are also growing problems. Those compete with alternative energy in demanding capital to address.




When you say petroleum, most people think of cars, when they should be thinking of food (harvesters, semi trucks, cargo ships). Electric cars are very nice, we'll still be able to drive to the supermarket, but I'd rather walk and find something on the shelves when I get there. Fuel cells might be promising in the long run for industrial vehicles, but even those need fuel.


Reasonable enough, although I'm less confident that the opinions of people with actual relevant expertise are treated as more important. The opinions of people with money appear to have the edge. On that score the U.S., at least, might as well be the office Dilbert works in.

You are absolutely spot on to recognise preemptive addressing of potential future problems is very important. Some simple solutions we have now could be too little too late if we wait.

For example: Your concern over many unsustainable agricultural practices is with merit. Although if we actually change those models now, the competition with alternative energy in demanding capital to make those changes is minimal and will likely yield a net surplus. That's in part what makes them unsustainable by definition. They compete for ever more scarce inputs. Whereas sustainable relies more on onsite and local regenerating resources. So you may have a small initial capital investment requirement up front, it is nothing compared to the investment required in the current models. Compare the capital investment of building just 1 industrial hen house, 1 hog barn, 1 cattle stockyard, and the grain silos, tractors and combines to harvest soy and corn, trailers, building and maintaining waste lagoons, transportation equipment cost and energy use, etc etc etc.... to the capital investment of some lightweight portable electric fencing and a few small mostly portable shelters etc... to pasture raise those same animals. The sustainable models are orders of magnitude cheaper. When you start combining efforts, like charging the fencing with solar, then it gets even better. There is some capital "competition", but much less than the current industrial models.

As far as your "walking to the supermarket" example. Why not grow your own food? You don't have to grow all of it. But you can make a significant difference. And your back yard is much closer!

 

[Dinwar]

IS the technology available to provide energy post fossil fuel ( either imposed or run out ).

The answer is yes and solar steam is one of them.

...provided we ignore some pretty serious, demonstrable issues.

 

[Myriad]

Myriad you are really stuck inside North America...the world is moving on.

It's quite possible that I'm missing important developments in Asia due to over focus on the US/EU/Japan part of the picture. There's a lot of information to process, to try to keep up with everything.

Nuclear is not stagnant - there are dozens of nuclear reactors being built. More than two dozen in China alone.

That's a start. If each of those reactors China is building puts out 2 GW (far bigger than the average reactor in the U.S.) and they could somehow complete a dozen of those per year, adding 210TWh per year (assuming zero downtime) to their total generating capacity, that could just about offset their recent mean annual increases (not the amounts, just the increases) in fossil fuel use for electric power generation.

Japan is restarting it's nuclear fleet as it's getting killed by fossil fuel costs not to mention emission issues.
Japan is one to watch for transition.

Yes indeed.

Solar steam can power anything that a regular power plant can and IS powering at an industrial level.

Yep. It's a promising technology. In fact, I remember reading Popular Science articles about how promising a technology it is. That was, let's see, the mid to late 1970s. Deployment rate, unfortunately, matters.

You talk of wind but not solar yet solar is far and away the growth industry world wide and in the US which installed more solar last year than it did in the preceding 30 years.

I only mentioned wind because Cuddles asked about wind turbines. I agree that solar has taken a huge lead, so much so that it doesn't even make sense to lump them together ("wind and solar") any more. If we manage to have a smooth transition, it'll be primarily because of solar. That includes off-grid home solar for those who can learn how to deal with power as something that has to be managed (like VCR recordings and food in the pantry and other old-fashioned things) instead of something that's always there on demand.

In addition we have almost untapped geo-thermal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy_in_the_United_States

There is potential there. But again, it's not about how much untapped potential exists ("our boat is sinking, but no problem, think of all the untapped buoyancy in the air around us"), it's what it will take to tap it and whether that will happen.

The world still gets a huge amount of power from the existing nuclear fleet with France leading at 80% with a tiny carbon foot print by comparison with the US.

True. There are some concerns about the age of that fleet, relative to its original designed lifetime. The best case there is that the technologies developed for extending those lifetimes prove indefinitely successful. The worst case is half-assed attempts to keep them going at all costs that result in disasters. The actual case will be in between those extremes, so we'll see increased downtime and more frequent decommissioning among the existing fleet.

There are untapped hydro reserves in Northern Quebec in particular.

Cool. I'll have to look into those. If the climage keeps changing, damming those rivers might become necessary anyhow, to prevent destructive winter floods.

I have yet to see you acknowledge gains in efficiency yet there were 9 million more people in the US in the past couple of years yet the nation used less electricity than the previous years.

I think that's mostly due to the economic recession. Although some could also be due to gains in efficiency; it would be interesting to try to tease those two factors apart.

You keep focusing on "money" - the fnancial system is bust - does not mean the resources are not there...on a war footing the resources are there and to some degree for climate is could use a war footing.

When I talk of money that way, it's just shorthand for resources available for capital investment (whether in private, market-funded, or government-funded projects). I agree that financial crashes don't take away actual valuable resources.

The war footing is a key point, also relating to the "political will" that's been brought up. Let me attempt to clarify what political will and war footing actually mean in this case. It means the government, faced with e.g. economic problems that cause people to lose jobs, ration gasoline, go without heat, and so forth, being able and willing to make things worse in the short term by diverting resources into longer-term solutions, and also being able to stay in power while doing so.

In a true war footing, governments (even the U.S. government) can do so and have done so. But whenever the government is talking about "relief" or "easing" or "stimulus" or anything else intended to make things better immediately, they're doing the opposite of what they do on a war footing. In doomer parlance that's "kicking the can down the road," temporarily putting off difficult solutions to maintain a few more quarters of "BAU" (business as usual).

And all of this is near term let alone 80 years out.
We do not have the tools to predict that far in terms of technology.

If serious problems hold off for another 80 years, then I've got nothing to worry about anyhow. But I think it's more likely that severe consequences of resource limits, if they're not already affecting us now as some believe, will do so in much less time, within a decade. (In fact, if by three years from now the nonconventional petroleum business is still running smoothly and no significant economic shocks have occurred due to petroleum production issues, I'll have to rethink my whole outlook.) On that time scale, new technologies that are in the prototype or conceptual stages aren't likely to make much difference.

There is lots of energy about...it's the distribution of resources and food that is a serious problem and could and is leading to social unrest even in North America.
That's a risk but not to the whole of civlization.

That's an important topic, but too big for me to get into very much at this point.

Excellent comments overall. Thanks!

 

[Myriad]

As far as your "walking to the supermarket" example. Why not grow your own food? You don't have to grow all of it. But you can make a significant difference. And your back yard is much closer!

My back yard, and my front yard, are full of 100+ foot tall trees. I have a deal with them: I don't try to cut them down, and they don't topple onto my house and crush me in my sleep. (I'm hoping they live up to their end of the bargain.)

Actually, they'd cost a small fortune (or put my own life and limbs at considerable risk) to remove, and even then my quarter acre would still have only about half of normal insolation because the surroundings are similarly wooded.

I'm going to be moving in the next few years, so gardening will become a more practical option. Until then, I'm doing what I can to get practice by helping out with gardening at other sites. (Those are farther away than the supermarket, though. )

It's a bit odd, I admit. Being in the transition scene without being a dedicated permaculturist is a bit like being in a hot rod club without having a driver's license.

 

[Brian-M]

One idea for renewable power generation that I like (but has not yet been implemented) is harnessing the power of upper-atmosphere wind.

Because the wind never stops blowing (caused by the rotation of the earth rather than weather) it' a continuous source of power, so you wouldn't need to have extra capacity standing by in fossil-fuel power plants to fire-up on days when it's not windy, like we currently do with windmills.

The idea is that you take something shaped a bit like an aeroplane, tether it to the ground, and lift it into the upper atmosphere. It's kept up by the wind, like a kite. Instead of propellers or jet-engines, you have wind-turbines that power a generator, and use the tethers as power lines.

But I admit there are some pretty big downsides to doing this.

It'd be incredibly expensive to set up, you couldn't let aeroplanes fly through the area (there's a huge risk of collision with the tethers), maintenance will be tricky, and you don't want them near inhabited areas because if a tether breaks or something snaps off you end up with huge chunks of metal raining down from 10km up in the sky.

Plus environmentalists will probably complain that it's slowing down the rotation of the earth. (Although the effect would be much smaller than what the tides are already doing anyway.)

 

[Belz...]

Plus environmentalists will probably complain that it's slowing down the rotation of the earth.

People who champion an ideology are always going to find a reason to maintain it. In this case, bitching about people hurting the environment.

 

[Dinwar]

Plus environmentalists will probably complain that it's slowing down the rotation of the earth.

Well, that tips the scales for me--I'm now fully 100% in favor of this. It gives me an excuse to go on long rants about coral growth patterns through time and the ever-changing rotational speed of the Earth! The brief version is, corals deposit a certain amount of calcite in daily, monthly, and annual cycles (there may be a few more cycles, I'd have to check, but those are hte important ones). This allows us to count the days in a year at any time when we have corals. Turns out the Earth has been slowing down for a long time.

The risks don't seem too bad to me. If we put these where we put normal wind farms and solar farms (ie, out in the Mojave), we don't need to worry about failure as much. And as far as re-routing air traffic goes, if you put a few of them in a relatively (but still functional) cluster you could route all traffic around that easily enough.

 

[Cuddles]

Forgive me if this has already been answered, but I believe there are at least two such instances. First, Easter Island ran out of pretty much all their resources, causing a fairly catastrophic societal collaps. Second, the Mayas (I believe....it may have been another group) engaged in massive deforestation, which as I understand it (my knowledge of Meso- and South American archaeology is not very good, I will admit) contributed to their demise.

Yes, Easter Island and the Mayans are the exact two I thought of that led me to say "most" rather than all. Although I think it's still up for debate just how important the using up of resources was compared to other factors (more so for the Mayans than Easter Island).

The administrative hurddles that would need to be cleared are tremendous. The technology is mature, for hte most part (new technologies are constantly being devised, but we can build Davis-Bessy type plants right now), but the permitting is a NIGHTMARE. I've been involved in preliminary stages of some of this, years ago, and it's only gotten worse. Second, we don't have a good way to deal with the waste. Right now, it's largely stored at the reactors, as I understand it.

Sure, but administrative hurdles are an entirely artificial construct that are not inherent to nuclear power. If people actually decide they want nuclear power, those hurdles can easily be removed. As I said, start throwing brownouts at people and see how long they continue to oppose building new power plants. As for waste, I won't get into it too much here since there are already several previous threads on the topic, but suffice to say that it's much less of a problem than many people seem to think.

Huh, I said that pretty clearly last time. Were you too eager for a "gotcha" to read it?

I was starting to type out yet another long reply, but frankly if this is the sort of attitude your going to take I really can't be bothered. Interesting that you haven't been finishing your posts here with the usual "respectfully, Myriad". Perhaps this has something to do with your previous complaint that people didn't seem interested in discussing the topic with you?

 

[Dinwar]

As for waste, I won't get into it too much here since there are already several previous threads on the topic, but suffice to say that it's much less of a problem than many people seem to think.

Just for clarification, I don't go by what many people think in these determinations. I understand why you would assume I do (it's a very good starting assumption to make), but in my case it's an erronious assumption. I'm actually basing my opinion off a few tasks my company has worked on, including a major nuclear waste clean-up job that I turned down (partially due to the horrific conditions, partially because I had a much better job I was already scheduled to do; regardless, I got a good hard look at the Health and Safety Plan). I say that not to toot my own horn, but to demonstrate that I have some experience in this area.

 

[macdoc]

Myriad

Quote:
Solar steam can power anything that a regular power plant can and IS powering at an industrial level.

Yep. It's a promising technology. In fact, I remember reading Popular Science articles about how promising a technology it is. That was, let's see, the mid to late 1970s. Deployment rate, unfortunately, matters.

But they are in deployment.

Solar thermal power stations include the
354 megawatt (MW) Solar Energy Generating Systems power installation in the USA,

Solnova Solar Power Station (Spain, 150 MW),
Andasol solar power station (Spain, 150 MW)
and the first part of Shams solar power station (United Arab Emirates, 100 MW).
The 370 MW Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, located in California's Mojave Desert, is the world’s largest solar thermal power plant project currently under construction.
The Solana Generating Station is a 280 MW solar power plant which is under construction about 70 miles (110 km) southwest of Phoenix, Arizona. There are plans to build many other large solar thermal plants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

and a bit of creative use..

The Worlds Largest Solar Cooking System, where 73 solar dishes capture energy from the Sun and use it to cook food for 100,000 pilgrims who visit this temple daily.
The Para's raise the temperature of water to up to 650 degree Celsius, generating steam which is used to cook food.

The World's largest solar steam system installed in Shirdi's "Sai Prasadalaya" by the Sai Sansthan, has been designed for cooking meals for 20,000 devotees daily, an official release said.
On Thursday, 30th July`2009 the Solar Steam cooking system, costing Rs 1.33 crore,
was Inaugurated by the New & Renewable Energy Minister Farooq Abdullah.

and Areva of French Nuclear fame is moving into other energy sources as well including solar steam

OPERATIONS
Mining
Front End
Reactors and services
Back End
Renewable Energy
OVERVIEW
ACTIVITIES IN DETAIL
Wind power
Bioenergy
Solar power
Hydrogen
THE RENEWABLE ENERGY FACILITIES WORLDWIDE
AREVA'S RENEWABLE ENERGY ACTIVITIES IN THE WORLD
Man at the Alpha Ventus wind farm site
The Renewable Energies Business Group is at the heart of AREVA's industrial strategy. It currently covers four areas: wind energy, bioenergy, solar power and hydrogen power, as well as energy storage. This diversified portfolio places the group well ahead in the development of CO2 free electricity production solutions. It enables trends to be followed in a market in which clients are demanding greater diversification.

http://www.areva.com/EN/operations-...ergy-storage-renewable-energy-operations.html

Once more...there is lots of energy - grid issues are a looming problem as to do a smart grid to replace the major grids in NA and Europe is a huge bill.

3/4 Trillion for North America alone. The fact that Germany got 74% of it's energy from renewables that one day without crashing the grid helps.

and quebec is constructing another 900 lb gorilla

Power Generation Projects
Romaine Complex

At a Glance
Status: Under construction
Region: Moyenne-Côte-Nord
Type: Hydroelectric
Owner: Hydro-Québec Production
Project supervision: Hydro-Québec Équipement et services partagés
Documents
En bref : Janvier 2008 [PDF] [In French only]
Volume 3 : Printemps 2007 [PDF] [In French only]
Volume 2 : Automne 2005 [PDF] [In French only]
Volume 1 : Printemps 2005 [PDF] [In French only]
General information [PDF]
Rivière Romaine
Rivière Romaine

Hydro-Québec Production obtained the necessary approvals to build a 1,550-MW hydroelectric complex on the Rivière Romaine, north of the municipality of Havre-Saint-Pierre on the north shore of the St. Lawrence. The complex will consist of four hydropower generating stations with average annual output of 8.0 TWh.

Construction of the Romaine-2 development began in 2009 and commissioing is planned for 2014. Work on the Romaine-1 and Romaine 3 developments, which will be operational in 2016 and 2018, respectively, is also under way.

The Romaine project will generate substantial economic spinoffs—approximately $3.5 billion for Québec as a whole and $1.3 billion for the Côte-Nord region, and create an average of 975 jobs each year while the project is being carried out.

This persuaded Ontario to forgo doubling the reactors at one of the sites.

A good chunk of this is going to the North Eastern US as well as the complex is designed entirely for export to US and Ontario.

8 TW....big number. Good stuff.