Yin and Yang
Save the Planet. You know, I think it’s absurd and extremely big-headed of us to think that ‘we’ can save the planet. Anyone who’s read James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Theory’ will know that the Earth will do whatever it can to survive. The Earth will save itself. It might wipe us out in the process, but the fact remains that Nature will continue irrespective of whether we are here to ’save’ it or not.
So what, exactly, are we trying to “save” when we talk about Saving the Planet? The trees, the plants, the animals? The planet as a whole? Do Humans get a look in anywhere?
Look out at the night sky. Look at all of those pinpricks of light. Many of them are stars just like ours. Many of them are galaxies containing billions upon billions of stars. Around many of those stars are planets… billions upon billions of planets. More planets than we could ever count. Planets are ten a penny.
Humans are the special ones.
The reason we should want to Save the Planet is only so that we Humans can continue to thrive. Forcing Humans to ‘Conserve Energy’ is as ridiculous as trying to get Plants to ‘Conserve Energy’. You can do an experiment with one of your houseplants to try and make it use less energy. Take one of them off the window sill and stick it in a room that hardly gets any light, leave it there for a while and see what happens. No matter how much you tell it to conserve energy, the fact is, it will slowly wither and eventually die.
Insisting that the only way we Humans can Save the Planet is by ‘Conserving Energy’ will be the end of our civilisation. We are hardwired to grow and bloom, move forward and never willingly choose to cut ourselves back. We are scattered across the globe living in extremes of climate- in the deserts, the Arctic tundra, the rainforests, the inner cities. We are adaptable and hardy. But if our energy sources are hindered or cut back we will start to wither. In order for us as a society to continue to develop we need to continue to use more and more energy.
Yes, we need to cut carbon emissions, yes, we need to cut down on pollution, yes, we need to help developing nations do the same thing… but “conserve” energy? Nope. Not for one second.
The problem isn’t the energy usage, the problem is the waste produced from the production of that energy.
If we decide to only use ‘renewable’ energy sources - hydro, solar, wind- we will, no question about it, have to conserve massive amounts of energy in order to even have a chance of making that work. None of those energy production methods produce anywhere near the amount of energy we need to continue to thrive as a society. Even if 50% of our energy usage comes from renewables, we still need to get the rest from somewhere.
No one has given me any reason to think that nuclear should not be part of the energy production mix. Equally, no one has given me any reason to think that ‘renewables’ should not be part of the mix. Both, together, will hopefully allow us to advance as a species and keep the planet’s balance.
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July 10th, 2006 @ 11:58 pm
Renewable energy is available at very high rates, up to several petawatts, even if the collectors are all on this planet’s surface.
Token renewables such as wind turbines and solar photovoltaics are the darlings of fossil fuel tax beneficiaries. But even they would quickly become offensive to that interest group — ungreen, by the definition I proposed earlier — if effective six-month storage became available. (Although I suppose even free storage wouldn’t make PV look very good, if it otherwise performed no better than now.)
— G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: fuel for solar cars
July 11th, 2006 @ 2:20 am
Well said!
July 11th, 2006 @ 8:19 pm
“None of those energy production methods produce anywhere near the amount of energy we need to continue to thrive as a society.”
Neither did oil 150 years ago, or nuclear 50 years ago. The earth receives 100,000 terawatts continously from the sun, and humans use the equivalent of 4.5 terawatts on average. Doesn’t this mean that renewables can produce all the energy we need?
July 12th, 2006 @ 6:21 am
Renewables should not be part of the future energy mix. They are not needed. Nuclear fission can do the whole job without their complications. Building renewable systems such as windmills and dams is a waste of effort. And they are terribly destructive. Say goodbye to birds if we build windmills. Say goodbye to villages, cities, and billions of animals if we build dams. The dams silt up, and the windmills are far away and turn at the wrong times. The variable power produced by renewables complicates the distribution system to such a degree that it will not be able to energize urban life. No one will ever know when the train will leave the station. All this death, pain, and destruction to build machines that we know will not work - madness!
July 12th, 2006 @ 9:47 am
Randall,
Whereas I don’t find Wind Farms an ugly blight, from everything I’ve read, I, too, don’t think they are worth the bother.
I do, however, think there is some room for renewables, but on a much smaller and more localised level. Small, personal wind turbines to *contribute* to the energy used in ones home, public buildings with solar panels and/or small wind turbines to *contribute* to the energy used there. Solar powered street lighting perhaps…? Stationary bikes in gyms used to power their television sets…?
Little things. Seemingly inconsequential things. But added together would “help” and, most importantly, make people feel like they are helping.
July 13th, 2006 @ 1:01 am
Gia:
Making people “feel” good does little to solve real problems. My issue with renewables is that people talk about them as making it possible to do without nuclear power, but all they end up doing is allowing the fossil fuel industry to continue to dominate the world’s decision making processes.
A friend of mine described how a factory near his home in the Netherlands has a large windmill in the parking lot, which happens to be next to a major highway. The impression given is that the windmill is supplying energy to the factory, but the actual fact is that the site is a very poor wind site. The company ensured that their renewables “billboard” did not harm their reputation by powering the windmill so that it is always turning. The total energy supplied to make that happen each year is larger than the amount of energy that the windmill produces when the wind does blow.
IMHO that is about what small, localized windmills will do. Because of the nature of wind, the amount of power that they will produce is a function of the area cut by the blades, reduce the blade length by a factor of 2 and you reduce the power produced by a factor of 4. If the wind speed is half of the speed for the rated output, the power produced will be reduced by a factor of 8 since power is a function of the cube of wind velocity.
The only small windmills that make any sense at all are those put on yachts in harbors; they produce enough to keep batteries charged and anchor lights operating. However, the bearings must be carefully maintained or they become a huge nuisance because of the noise that they produce.
Rod Adams
August 6th, 2006 @ 1:19 am
The United States Energy Information Agency predicts that power supplied by wind farms will grow faster than power supplied by nuclear reactors… for every year for the next 25 years. After that they aren’t making predictions.
It’s all very well for pro-nuclear folks to compare 1000 megawatt nuke plants to 3 (really 1) megawatt wind turbines and complain that they can’t be made in enough numbers. But the plain fact is that they ARE being made in sufficient numbers to beat nuclear. Even when the EIA looks ahead ten years to when new nukes will once again be licensed in the U.S., it sees more wind than nuclear.
Let us hope the EIA is very wrong. I sure hope a lot more nuclear gets built. But I just as fervently hope that more wind gets built than they predict. Because just like you all like to point out, we need *many* tens of gigawatts of new, clean, domestic sources if we are going to trim our natural gas imports and CO2 production.
Heck, we need to divert all the natural gas we’re currently burning to refineries where it can be used to hydrocrack the heavier crudes we’re going to be seeing two decades from now.