Al Gore & Guy Dauncey's Energy Challenge to the World

Our "pub" where you can post about things completely Off Topic or about non-silent PC issues.

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aristide1
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Post by aristide1 » Tue Aug 12, 2008 3:22 pm

Careful jaganath, you're about to be labeled a bleeding heart liberal.

Bluefront
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Post by Bluefront » Wed Aug 13, 2008 3:09 am

Neil...it's quite obvious the entire earth will run out of all resources in the future, if population growth continues almost un-checked. Hoping that an increased standard of living will limit growth is a stretch.

Hell...a big part of our population won't even use birth control of any sort, due to their particular religion. What good would un-limited energy be, when there is not enough land left to grow enough food for the population. You can see this in parts of the world right now....people starving, not enough land to grow food.

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Post by Tzupy » Wed Aug 13, 2008 4:09 am

Here is an interesting development on noise reduction and wind power, although I personally don't believe in wind power as a major alternative:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=12641

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Wed Aug 13, 2008 4:14 am

Hi,

The discovery of new oil fields peaked in 1961.

Oil production peaked around 1980.

All countries with high standards of living have greatly reduced birthrates -- without draconian measures! If we used renewable resources, we could raise everybody's standard of living.

Oil and natural gas, and even coal -- are finite. They all will run out. They all pollute our world. Uranium is finite, too. We have to use a lot of energy mining and processing uranium, and a lot of energy building a nuclear plant, and a lot of energy decommissioning the plant, and still more energy storing the waste -- the poisonous, radioactive waste.

Folks, anything with "waste" is not renewable!

We use oil and natural gas to produce our food. Food is organic, and organic methods do not depend on oil and gas -- gee I wonder what we should do? BTW, if all farmers around the world used organic methods, the food production would go up (w/o new land) to over 4,000 calories per person per day.

Renewable energy is, for all intents and purposes, infinite, unlimited, and it will never run out.

We know we must make the change. We know how to do it. Let's start now!

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Post by blackworx » Wed Aug 13, 2008 4:25 am

Bluefront wrote:people starving, not enough land to grow food.
If only those starving countries had government-subsidised, highly efficient mechanised farming.

Why, they'd have more food than they'd know what to do with.

Tzupy
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Post by Tzupy » Wed Aug 13, 2008 4:59 am

@NeilBlanchard: Your statement that, quoting: 'Renewable energy is, for all intents and purposes, infinite, unlimited, and it will never run out' is simply wrong.
Nothing is infinite, unlimited, etc. Everything is impermanent. Those with some insight into impermanence would understand.
If you wouldn't have written in bold the 'infinite, unlimited, and it will never run out' I wouldn't have protested.
But that statement written in bold tells me that you strongly support the wrong view of permanence.
And I can't stand that, for your own good, and for the good of other readers. I don't expect you to understand now, but maybe later.

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Wed Aug 13, 2008 5:10 am

Hi,

I said "for all intents and purposes". This means that as long as Earth exists, there will be renewable energy. I understand completely that no energy is in fact literally infinite. (I took physics in college.) For the purposes of this discussion, oil and natural gas and coal are finite, and renewable energy will be around at least as long as the human race -- so as far as we need to worry about; it is unlimited.

The only permanent thing is change. We humans simply must change our attitudes.

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Post by Bluefront » Wed Aug 13, 2008 3:40 pm

Neil...you have yet to address unchecked population growth, which obviously would over-whelm our limited resources, even if we managed to solve our energy crisis. What will happen when we start tripping over each other? Mass starvation, followed by the thing you hate worse....wars.

Gore wants to fix the energy crisis.....and ignores the very thing that caused it, the people crisis. Others ignore it also.....

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Wed Aug 13, 2008 4:15 pm

Hi Carl,

I didn't ignore it:
I wrote:All countries with high standards of living have greatly reduced birthrates -- without draconian measures! If we used renewable resources, we could raise everybody's standard of living.

[snippage]

We use oil and natural gas to produce our food. Food is organic, and organic methods do not depend on oil and gas -- gee I wonder what we should do? BTW, if all farmers around the world used organic methods, the food production would go up (w/o new land) to over 4,000 calories per person per day.
On the food front, it would help (a lot) if the meat we eat was raised the old fashioned way, and if we consumed most of our protein from plants directly. Feeding corn and wheat and soy beans to cows and pigs is pretty horribly inefficient.
Last edited by NeilBlanchard on Thu Aug 14, 2008 8:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

jaganath
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Post by jaganath » Thu Aug 14, 2008 2:58 am

All countries with high standards of living have greatly reduced birthrates
there is still some debate as to whether this is a chicken-and-egg situation, ie did the reduced birthrates cause the prosperity or vice versa? it's certainly true that most developed countries have birthrates that are below replacement level or only just above.
BTW, if all farmers around the world used organic methods, the food production would go up (w/o new land)
I find this pretty hard to believe. do you have an authoritative source for this claim?
Feeding corn and wheat and soy beans to cows and pigs is pretty horribly inefficient.
I can believe that. IIRC corn & other crops are only about 1% efficient at turning sunlight into stored chemical energy, and animals only extract about 15% of the energy in their food, so only 0.15% of the original energy ends up in the food, under the best possible assumptions.

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Post by Bluefront » Thu Aug 14, 2008 3:32 am

Neil, you're still ignoring the real cause of all our problems.....too many people competing for too few resources (energy and otherwise). The band-aid patches you suggest are a short-term fix.....and will do nothing for the future problems we will face when the world population increases past the danger point.

Humm....my lights are always on because of my solar panel, but my refrigerator is empty. Thanks for the lights Gore.....but no thanks.

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Post by Tzupy » Thu Aug 14, 2008 6:58 am

Study Finds Health Problems from Wind Farms, at DailyTech:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=12667

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Thu Aug 14, 2008 8:42 am

Hi James,
jaganath wrote:
BTW, if all farmers around the world used organic methods, the food production would go up (w/o new land)
I find this pretty hard to believe. do you have an authoritative source for this claim?
Feeding corn and wheat and soy beans to cows and pigs is pretty horribly inefficient.
I can believe that. IIRC corn & other crops are only about 1% efficient at turning sunlight into stored chemical energy, and animals only extract about 15% of the energy in their food, so only 0.15% of the original energy ends up in the food, under the best possible assumptions.
This is something that Guy Dauncey mentions in "The Great Energy Revolution" DVD that I saw: he bases the calculation on a 20% reduction in productivity in countries that use chemical fertilizers, and a 93% increase in productivity in countries that do not. Also, if we humans eat plant proteins directly, rather than feeding it to animal (which reduces the amount of protein and calories by at least 80%) -- and instead the animals eat their natural food sources. So, cows eat grass, and pigs eat slops and root around in harvested fields, etc., and chickens eat bugs and weeds, and so on.

So, animal proteins come from "outside" of the crops that we eat directly, and overall, the productivity of farmers worldwide goes up a lot. And we certainly would not be making fuels from food crops. Combining the productivity increase with humans eating more plant proteins, and growing all food locally (or at least regionally), he calculates that there would be 4,300+ calories per day per person -- so there could be more than enough food.

Again, I encourage you all to read the books by Guy Dauncey, and/or watch the DVD I mentioned. Food is one part of the overall solution -- and the main point that he makes is we need to used parts of all the available renewable energies, for the purposes that they each fit best.

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Post by Tzupy » Mon Aug 18, 2008 4:00 am

New world efficiency record for solar cells:
http://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2008/625.html

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