The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by sendler

I don't understand how it is thought to be a more efficient use of energy to build out vast amounts of rebuildable energy generation hardware using vast amounts of embodied energy, in order to gather solar and wind energy, transmit it and store it in storage that was built with vast amounts of embodied energy, in order to light up lights that were made and installed into buildings or caves that were made with vast amounts of energy, to light up said lights with said captured rebuildable energy, to grow food for 8 billion people.
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Than to just let the sun shine directly on the food in a field whenever it will.
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Scale for 8 billion people. And embodied energy. Keep things in mind when anyone thinks we will build our way out of diminishing fossil fuel energy currently propping us up at 17 TW. 300 fossil slaves each to maintain a USA standard of living.
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1 barrel of oil at $70 has enough energy in it for the human power equivalent of 4.5 years of steady work. Magic stuff.

Why would civilized people work and save for 50-weeks a year in order to travel to a remote,energy-devoid, backwoods area to live like a third-worlder for two weeks? And be delighted to do it?
If everyone had been exposed to back-packing,they might be able to discern between need and want.Seventeen Terra-Watts might not be a number fixed in cement,in a western world without continuous Hedonic adaptation driven by Madison Avenue?
Again,public education!

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by sendler

I do hear this comment often. " high tech replacements will make oil useless and strand it in the ground". I can assure everyone, oil will leave us long before (never) we are ready to leave it. There is no replacement for fossil fuel density, transportability, storage, and the historical price, which has allowed the human population and GDP to balloon geometrically in the last 150 years. We will struggle immensely without it until the population comes back down to a sustainable level. And we learn to get along.

That's almost directly out of the mouth of Michael Economides.(The Color of Oil,Energy Tribune)

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Who was it who said, "Give me a place to stand and a fulcrum and I can move the world"?

Bet he didn't even know about the Camarinal Sill.

Sounds like Archimides.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Yes, that's exactly the website I was looking for. Looks like it's been subsumed into roadmap to nowhere. I liked the original content better.

Anyhow, there is a discussion on another forum that I wanted to link that site to. Many people seem to think the solution to GW is simple; that if only everyone put solar panels on their roof and drive an EV, the problem would be solved.

It is something climate scientists advocate.You still have your mobility while essentially carbon-free.
Use the liquid hydrocarbons for something more durable than exhaust gases, water vapor and waste heat.

[freebeard]

Sounds like Archimides.

A rhetorical question, but the correct answer.

If everyone had been exposed to back-packing,they might be able to discern between need and want.Seventeen Terra-Watts might not be a number fixed in cement,in a western world without continuous Hedonic adaptation driven by Madison Avenue?
Again,public education!

The hippys were right! Too bad the got seduced into playing the derivatives market instead of making biochar.

Originally Posted by Xist

How many of you say that we need to stop using gas now and only drive electric vehicles?

Me — just as soon as Arcimoto ships my reservation number. I'll be insufferable.

I found something on Bjorn Lomborg that was only eight minutes, well within my attention span, so I watched it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3vhm2HGnUw

Nothing short of an Ice Age will preserve the current paradigm.

edit:
Maybe humankind won't go down without a fight. In Iceland:

BBC news:Turning carbon dioxide into rock - forever

The Hellisheidi power station, 25km (15 miles) outside Reykjavik, is Iceland's main geothermal plant, and is one of the largest in the world.

Since experiments began in 2014, it's been scaled up from a pilot project to a permanent solution, cleaning up a third of the plant's carbon emissions.

I'm not sure how much CO2 a geothermal plant puts out, but that's where the science is happening.

Porous rock

The breath-taking Icelandic landscape - with its hot springs, geysers and black beaches - is mainly made of basalt, a dark-grey porous rock formed from cooling of lava.

And basalt is "carbon's best friend", because it contains high amounts of calcium, magnesium and iron, which bind with the pumped CO2 to help it solidify into a mineral.

Sandra Snaebjornsdottir, a geologist working for CarbFix, ... says. "Fresh basalts are like sponges, with plenty of cavities that are filled with the CO2.

"Iceland is particularly favourable for this type of CCS simply because of the amount of basalt it's got".

Last year, 10,000 tonnes of CO2 were "digested" by CarbFix.

Yet this is tiny fraction - less than the yearly emissions of 650 Brits or 2,200 American cars.

And it becomes even more insignificant against the 30-40 gigatonnes of CO2 (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes) that modern humans pour into the atmosphere annually.

Despite its relatively small scale, experts anticipate CarbFix could be easy to repeat - thanks to the ubiquity of basalt around the world.

"Basalt is actually the most common rock type on Earth, it covers most of the oceanic floors and around 10% of the continents. Wherever there's basalt and water, this model would work", says Sandra Snaebjornsdottir.

Large basaltic areas are found in Siberia, Western India, Saudi Arabia and the Pacific Northwest.

Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth."

Also, e. coli, what can't it do?

Sandia Labs News Releases:Riding bacterium to the bank

Sandia researchers tailor E. coli to convert plants into renewable chemicals

[sendler]

Originally Posted by aerohead

The thing that strikes me so strongly though,is the conviction among climate scientists,that we're flirting with disaster if we do business as usual.
Agribusiness is such a small fraction of overall energy use,and the equipment would run on biofuels.It would be one of the smartest candidates for these liquid fuels,as it would still be net-zero carbon.
Ethanol corn could go towards farms instead of E10 gasoline/ICE automobiles.
If little Barbie needs to get to her ballet lesson,Barbie doesn't need to drive her there on fossil fuels.

Agribusiniss consumes 15% of primary energy. So about 2.5 TeraWatt? There is no feasible way to convert this much energy to biofuel. And even if we did find enough land and equipment to use this, the very poor ER/ EI of biofuel compared with the 20:1 we are currently getting from oil would increase the cost of goods 4X and wreck the economy.
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[sendler]

Originally Posted by aerohead

Sure! No one is going to transform the energy market overnight.
However,if we're going to 'end' fossil fuel combustion,as climatologists recommend we do,then the sooner we get started,the better we'll be poised to be pro-active about what's going to happen to us,rather than reactive after the sky has fallen.
If Earth is unimportant,then we'll just keep on keeping on.

Scale. Building out 17 TW of rebuildable hardware and keeping it repaired and operating with no cheap fossil fuel to build and repair it is impossible. Run the numbers. It is not just a matter of choice. Why do people think the world has failed repeatedly in living up to all of the various carbon agreements. The current socio-economic system for 7.5 billion humans was built on, and is completely reliant on cheap fossil energy to keep from crashing.
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Exponential Population explosion/ GDP/ and energy consumption have been highly correlated 1:1:1 since 1850. And have led us to overpopulate the planet beyond the carrying capacity of normal energy flows. Fossil fuels are so dense that we will have a big shortfall of energy availablilty when they leave us. And they are so cheap (we pay almost nothing for any of the actual raw materials we pull out of the Earth. Only for the cost of extraction.) that their diminishing output will force us to abandon everything we now take for granted in the way our economy works. We would need to completely revamp the distribution of wealth. And rich people are not going to give it up willingly. Like they did last time when FDR reminded them that the hungry hoards would be coming with pointy sticks to take it if they didn't. 78% of world wealth went to 1% of the population in 2016.
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100 years from now, people will have to grow their own food and firewood with muscle power and will be lucky to keep enough industry going to have an internet of knowledge running and have some lighting and e-bikes to get around on.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by aerohead

I can't go to India to vet the information.Like everyone else I'm at the mercy of the internet.
What was reported,was that a Finnish company was providing solar-derived electrical power,at 2.44-cents/kW-h.India's filthiest,cheapest coal-fired power plants could not provide power any cheaper than 3.1-cents/kW-h.
India was cancelling all new coal-fired power plant construction.They didn't parse it out an any more detail.

As I said, We need to realize that there are many things to consider beyond the quote of a cheap wholesale price from solar somewhere. There are huge govenment rebates and tax incentives and huge feed in tariffs available to solar that contribute to these news stories. And then there is also the fact that the solar installs are not held responsible for the cost of guaranteeing their supply to avoid blackouts. Every area with a high percentage of rebuildable energy adoption has seen electricty prices increase. Solar can be really good for daytime cooling peaks with smart grid control of thermostats but still requires high tech thermal storage to time shift by 6 hours to get through the evening. But it absolutley can't replace a baseload grid.
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EIAA projects India to be burning 2.4X more coal in 2050 than 2010.
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China has enough coal gerneration with slowing growth and is downwind from it's own pollution so it's companies have taken their engineering to the world market to build out coal in other countries.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/c...te-change.html
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1600 new coal plants are planned world wide. I'm not rooting for coal. But energy growth is economic growth. And underdeveloped countires want to join us in standard of living. Refuse to be left behind. And rebuildables are expensive and can't provide a baseload.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by aerohead

If climate change is still the topic

We have a much bigger problem than climate change which will bite us much harder and sooner. We have developed a fractional/ creationist banking system where loans create money out of thin air with nothing taken out of circulation to balance it. The new money anilhilates itself as it is paid back but the interest is real and can only be paid back with growth. And economic growth equals energy growth at almost 1:1. We are headed toward the end of energy growth in the next 30 years. The curent debt based/ growth based economic model will no longer be viable as energy ER/ EI slips away.

Originally Posted by aerohead

Your Case, New Holland,Massey,or John Deere will run fine on energy-dense bio-fuels.So will mining equipment.
Trains can be electrified and run on catenary lines.Trams.Buses are already being electrified.18-Wheelers.
Air travel is the filthiest way to get around.Perhaps there will be some patriots to step forward and fall on their sword.
Thirty years ago we might have had the luxury of some more options.It's a dicey situation.

Again, operating the agroindustry on biofuel is completely impossible due to the scale of consumption to feed 7.5 billion people and the very poor ER/ EI of bio fuels.
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Please try to be more aware of the scale of our consumption.
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We would use up all of our land and equipment time to grow fuel at 3:1. To put in the tractors in order to grow more fuel to put in the tractors to grow more fuel. And the price of whatever goods we could produce will increase 4X (or much more if supply is very short as it will be).
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Electric trains is something we should go all in on. And develop an economy that allows us to move and work when the energy is available, and not have to do anything when it is not.
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Electric semis are a pipe dream as we are already having a battery crunch and we haven't even gotten started with transportation and grid storage.
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Personal transportaion will be very fortunate to have a 500Wh e-bike 100 years from now for 10 billion people.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by aerohead

Why would civilized people work and save for 50-weeks a year in order to travel to a remote,energy-devoid, backwoods area to live like a third-worlder for two weeks? And be delighted to do it?
If everyone had been exposed to back-packing,they might be able to discern between need and want.Seventeen Terra-Watts might not be a number fixed in cement,in a western world without continuous Hedonic adaptation driven by Madison Avenue?
Again,public education!

This is very true. Civilization will be much smaller and simpler after the age of fossil fuel when we will be generally relegated back to muscle and firewood.
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