Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

sendler2112 said:
The USA has a radical new bill that is moving through congress. Studied by Columbia University, HR763 would tax Carbon right where it comes out of the ground domestically (it ideally needs to be a world level law eventually but these types of world level things are still almost impossible). Since it is a USA law, any additional embodied Carbon that comes into the country, whether actual fuel or content embodied in goods or materials , gets taxed at the border to keep an even playing field in the market for local manufacturers...

The EU has similar plans.

It seems to be the best way to protect your own industry if you have a carbon tax and (for example) India has not.

Calculating the CO2 "footprint" of a product is quite difficult though.
 
Punx0r said:
I don't want to live in your dystopian future

It is not "MY" future. It is the future. I am not a "doom monger". I am a truth monger. There is no use in constantly sugar coating everything so that we can all keep our heads in the sand. I have been studying diligently with a systems view for 4 years. PHD's such as Nate Hagens and Richard Heinberg have devoted their life and turned their back on lucrative careers to work for the last 15 and 20 years with experts in all fields to develop the necessary systems view that is required to understand our opportunities and constraints. If we would have started changing everything about the way we organize society 50 years ago when they told us there were limits to growth, we would have been much closer to the efficient living and sustainable energy and food systems that others here still dream about. But Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys" economists have encouraged our world leaders going back to the 70's, and particularly with Reagan and Thatcher, to let free Capitalism run amuck. Which has led us to the market becoming a giant amoeba that just sloughs along looking for the greatest return on investment in the shortest amount of time for any frivolous pursuit. And has totally concentrated wealth at the top. 1% of Americans now owns 40% of the wealth. With all of the billions of poor people in the world that still cook with wood and poop outside in the yard, it is much tighter than the 1%. All based on long term debt which is about to come to the point where the rich families are set up for many lifetimes and the workers cannot pay it back.

You can hardly blame the economists though because all of their modern economic theories were formulated during the current, one time Carbon Carbon energy pulse and in a still empty world with as then seemingly cornucopian, still untapped natural resources and endless natural sinks for our waste. Their view was that whenever a resource or sink became too expensive, that an endless supply of alternatives would rise up one by one to take it's place. But this is not the case any longer. We have used up more than half of all the stuff. The easy half. What is left will be increasingly remote and harder to get.

Learn about our opportunities and constraints as I am trying to help. Think about it and understand it. Talk to others about it. Spread a system understanding with a view of deep time for all living things on a planet that will be in the habitable zone of the Sun for another 200 million years. Speak the truth.

Start with the newest slide show lecture series that Hagens has thrown together to attempt to parse his 150 hour, 1200 slide, class, down to 1 hour, that all incoming freshmen to the Honors College at U. Minnesota are required to view. In order to get your first glimpse. 1 hour is just giving up 1 episode of the latest banal sitcom you would have otherwise watched.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbbfqyJ9elY&list=PLdHV4AV3ixB2GIi8SyuCANgMmBKYRtyJS
 
sendler2112 said:
It is not "MY" future. It is the future. I am not a "doom monger". I am a truth monger...I have been studying diligently with a systems view for 4 years. PHD's such as Nate Hagens and Richard Heinberg

But truth comes from evidence, not from narrow sources of opinion. I would encourage you to read more widely.

Few people would disagree that rampant freemarket capitalism, like we currently know it, is not going to give us the environmentally sustainable future we need. Limitless growth or explooitation of finite natural resources is also an obvious contraction. You'll find little argument there.

But to say humanity will never again equal or better the principle of burning coal (basic and crude as it is) and never recover to this level of size, health of sophistication (as low as these bars are) is frankly rediculous. A return to a Medieval way of life. As fantasy fiction it blows Blade Runner into the dystopian weeds.
 
Punx0r said:
But truth comes from evidence, not from narrow sources of opinion. I would encourage you to read more widely.

I've read 1,000's of hours from 10's of authors who have studied diligently and scientifically for decades with experts in many fields. And post about it all here and everywhere I can for the last 2.5 years. I am very sorry that most people refuse to even spend an hour to learn something so essential and find it so dissonant that they choose to refuse to accept it.
 
Punx0r said:
A return to a Medieval way of life. As fantasy fiction it blows Blade Runner into the dystopian weeds.

Actually, my experts are predicting the coming correction of GDP (10 years left?) to be a drop of 30%. Which takes us back to the 1980's level of world wealth and will feel only slightly harsher than the USA Great Depression of the 1930's. Generally manageable if we can get past selfishness and possible world resource wars. A much softer landing could be accomplished if we started working pro-socially now. Over the next 100's and then 1000's of years, further downward corrections will occur until we are more generally not relying on high tech for our happiness. We are pretty much close to the peak of the StarTrek future right now.
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I hope people can view this information not as depressing. But with motivation and excitement to be alive at this moment. To learn and play a part in the most challenging time human civilization has ever been through.
 
sendler2112 said:
It is not "MY" future. It is the future. I am not a "doom monger". I am a truth monger.
Well, the problem there is that if you pick up along the same vein as doom mongers have followed for the past 300 years or so - with every one being wrong - you're not going to be seen as a truth monger. Imagine someone who came along and said "look, everyone knows that the mob killed JFK, Paul McCartney is dead, Elvis is alive, Bush pulled off 9/11, we never landed on the Moon - and now I have a new theory that is just as correct as all of those!" Would you call that guy a truth monger?

Doom mongers have been predicting the end of humanity/mass starvation and riots/civilization collapse/the apocalypse for at least those 300 years. They've all been wrong. So to take the approach "those people were basically right, and my prediction for complete collapse of the world financial system / riots all over the globe is also right!" is perhaps not the best approach.
If we would have started changing everything about the way we organize society 50 years ago when they told us there were limits to growth, we would have been much closer to the efficient living and sustainable energy and food systems that others here still dream about.
Yep. And the reason they failed? Because their doomsaying never came to pass. Millions did not starve in the 1980's as Erlich said was unavoidable. We are not all wearing gas masks. The ozone layer is not gone. Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me 35 times, shame on me.

So I'd advise you to quit the predictions that are based on the same false assumptions that Erlich's were. If you do that, your (quite valid) points about debt based economies, a paradigm of endless growth, and fossil fuel depletion will be taken more seriously.
Learn about our opportunities and constraints as I am trying to help. Think about it and understand it. Talk to others about it. Spread a system understanding with a view of deep time for all living things on a planet that will be in the habitable zone of the Sun for another 200 million years. Speak the truth.
Good advice. And it applies to you, as well. The issues you raise are good ones. Your predictions are not.
Start with the newest slide show lecture series that Hagens has thrown together to attempt to parse his 150 hour, 1200 slide, class, down to 1 hour, that all incoming freshmen to the Honors College at U. Minnesota are required to view. In order to get your first glimpse. 1 hour is just giving up 1 episode of the latest banal sitcom you would have otherwise watched.
Seen it. He, like you, makes some very good points. He is just as right as Erlich was; keep in mind that Erlich was a brilliant Stanford biologist who was widely acclaimed for his lectures, his intelligence and his foresight.
 
billvon said:
By the way, there are currently riots all over the planet due to the beginning of the end of growth and rampant imperialism and inequity.
Syria was started from human induced weather change famine and water shortage and turned into a never ending world military action due to not having the societal surplus resources to take care of it's people who's riot turned into an unsuccessful civil war.
Venezuela collapsed due to nepotism and corruption into a complete lack of social resources.
Greece and Spain are hanging onto the EU by a thread and Italy is not in good shape.
They are rioting over mandated austerity in Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Lebanon,Egypt.
Soldiers are killing rioting civilians lacking social wellbeing in Iraq and Iran.
Most of Africa is in trouble even though the people want little more than food and water and a roof.
Technology has not risen up to provide adequate water for South Africa.
I'm sure there are more examples that I have forgotten and I can update as we are painfully reminded.
 
For those that for some reason think that video lectures are somehow less relevant than printed papers in peer reviewed publications, Hagens has just published his new paper here. "Beyond The Superorganism."
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067
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sendler2112 said:
By the way, there are currently riots all over the planet due to the beginning of the end of growth and rampant imperialism and inequity.
There are certainly riots out there. There are riots in Hong Kong right now, with protesters holing up in a school there. There are riots in Iran involving thousands of people; reports are that ~100 people have been killed.

Let's compare them to historical riots. In 532, 30,000 people were killed in Constantinople in a riot that started in the Hippodrome. During the Rintfleisch riots in 1298 over 500 Jews were killed in rioting in Germany. In 1863, riots over conscription in the US for the Civil War killed ~1000 people. 1871 - the Paris Commune, a political group in France, started fighting with government troops, and 20,000 were killed. In 1907, a peasant's revolt in Romania turned into a riot and 11,000 people were killed. In 1919, a protest for a free Korea turned deadly; the rioting there killed 3000. In 1947 in Tawian, a woman was arrested and beaten for selling cigarettes. Outraged Taiwanese rioted and 28,000 died.

And most of those riots were due to poverty, imperialism and inequity.

Looks like we're getting better.

Most of Africa is in trouble even though the people want little more than food and water and a roof.
True. And that's been true for roughly . . . all of recorded history.

Technology has not risen up to provide adequate water for South Africa.
Agreed. (True for all of Africa, not just South Africa.) Guess we best develop that technology, eh? Even if some people mock such solutions as a "Star Trek future."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32973591
https://www.voanews.com/africa/water-filter-project-africa-gets-technology-boost
https://phys.org/news/2013-01-students-low-cost-filtering-african-nation.html
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/au/news/slingshot-inventor-dean-kamens-revolutionary-clean-water-machine.html
 
sendler2112 said:
Why post several water filter solutions when the problem is that there is no water of any kind, dirty or clean, to begin with?
?? What do you mean, there's no water of any kind? Where do you get that?
 
sendler2112 said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis

From the website:

"The City of Cape Town implemented significant water restrictions in a bid to curb water usage, and succeeded in reducing its daily water usage by more than half to around 500 million litres (130,000,000 US gal) per day in March 2018."

Having "only" 130 million gallons of drinking water a day to use is the opposite of having no water of any kind. With a population of half a million, that means "only" 260 gallons of water per person per day. Could you live on that?

There are also a half dozen rivers that flow through the city, from the Swartrivier to the Liesbeck River. Again, that is the opposite of having "no water of any kind."

And the entire city is on the Atlantic Ocean. Nuff said.

The above is a good example of what you have to overcome if you want your message to be heard more widely. If you are the guy who is always saying things that are not only untrue - but are easily shown to be so - they won't take you seriously when you say other things that may well be true.
 
I guess you didn't follow the water "day zero story of South Africa the last two years. They were stated to be within a day or two of the taps literally running dry. As far as the filters solving anything, I was more thinking of the villages all over Sub-Sahara Africa where the families choose one of the older children to walk the 3 miles each way to stand in line at the nearest watering hole that still has something in it, with a 5 gallon jug on their head, instead of going to school, in order to carry the household water for the day. I don't think filtering it is their greatest concern.
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This would have a better link to post but the Cape town link was just the first thing I grabbed on the topic without wasting a bunch more time.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/07/07/484793736/millions-of-women-take-a-long-walk-with-a-40-pound-water-can
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This has devolved into one of those nitpick internet arguments and I won't waste your time further since I know you are better than this.
 
sendler2112 said:
I guess you didn't follow the water "day zero story of South Africa the last two years. They were stated to be within a day or two of the taps literally running dry.
You posted the article about that. They avoided it. Which, again, is the opposite of "no water at all."
As far as the filters solving anything, I was more thinking of the villages all over Sub-Sahara Africa where the families choose one of the older children to walk the 3 miles each way to stand in line at the nearest watering hole that still has something in it, with a 5 gallon jug on their head, instead of going to school, in order to carry the household water for the day. I don't think filtering it is their greatest concern.
They walk miles to get safe water. Often wells are abandoned when the water gets too bad to use. While I was in Africa that was the #1 goal of the Peace Corps - getting well casings in place so they could deepen their wells and get below the contamination.
This has devolved into one of those nitpick internet arguments and I won't waste your time further since I know you are better than this.
That's what I thought about you. You started with a good premise (i.e. we can't continue to build a civilization on endless debt and economic growth) and then made some dumb false statements which diluted your original message.

Again, my advice would be to concentrate on your message and not the asinine sort of Internet escalations that lead you to say things like "there is no water of any kind" in Africa. People will assume if you tell one lie, everything you say is a lie.
 
sendler2112 said:
This has devolved into one of those nitpick internet arguments and I won't waste your time further since I know you are better than this.
No he is not. !
Bill specialises in disrupting threads by the introduction of distracting discussions on trivial , barely related , issues. Which add nothing to the original subject.
 
There was another nuclear T.E.A Conference held last October 2019 and some of the talks demoing the nuclear industries latest fancy gen 4 designs are hitting YouTube.

Here is the latest one of Elysium Industries MCSFR gen 4 molten salt reactor.
Compared to other demo talks this guy had done he has managed to shorten it quite well..
He will just say things like "At least 10x times less expensive nuclear fuel costs", but not go into extreme detail/exactly why unlike his old talks, if you want to know the answer then go digging up older/longer videos.
[youtube]_ou_xswB2b0[/youtube]
 
Molten fuel reactors have the advantage of being capable of a design which is 100% walk away safe indefinitely for passive decay heat. Current solid fuel rods in cooling pools require pumps and water. If employees don't show up for work to keep things running, the pools will run dry and burn with radioactive smoke. Molten fuel would be much better if it will ever really happen.
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The Elysium design has advantages of running in the fast spectrum with no degrading graphite moderators to replace like the Thorcon design has. And allows them to burn the reaction poisons rather than reprocessing. And run on various blends of waste and plutonium that could be decommissioned from weapons that I hope one day will be no longer needed. Let's see if they can make the demonstration core work.
 
Nafeez Ahmed has written several good essays this year. He understands the system complexity of our conundrum. Climate change gets all of the attention but there are several converging challenges facing us that will eventually overwhelm the debt based economic system we have been using causing cascading sovereign defaults. Debt is outpacing GDP growth by 3:1, Rampant concentration of wealth to the top, energy is getting more remote, resources are getting more remote, the natural sinks for our waste are saturated, ect. He makes the good observation that the Syrian conflict was not only the result of human induced weather changes causing drought and crop failures. But the other more basic stressor was their national access to produce oil for export tipping past peak. Which resulted in not enough social surplus (wealth) to go around. Energy underpins everything and our energy servants have been asking for a raise. Raw materials are getting more remote as well. One by one, country's economies will fail. It is starting already. We will need a whole new way to share what is left more equitably. "In my own work, I found that the Syrian conflict was not just triggered by climate change, but a range of intersecting factors—Syria’s domestic crude oil production had peaked in the mid-90s, leading state revenues to hemorrhage as oil production and exports declined. When global climate chaos triggered food price spikes, the state had begun slashing domestic fuel and food subsidies, already reeling from the impact of economic mismanagement and corruption resulting in massive debt levels. And so, a large young population overwhelmed with unemployment and emboldened by decades of political repression took to the streets when they could not afford basic bread. Syria has since collapsed into ceaseless civil war."
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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xwygg/the-collapse-of-civilization-may-have-already-begun?fbclid=IwAR0UDzjkBNhQKkSKv-AIyhXhMiAfitJ4KfnMrnl157Ov95NJTqEBkno-vw0
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"The scale of the needed decarbonization is so great and so rapid, according to Tim Garrett, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, that civilization would need to effectively “collapse” its energy consumption to avoid collapsing due to climate catastrophe. In a 2012 paper in Earth System Dynamics, he concluded therefore that “civilization may be in a double-bind.”"
 
"Demand for rare metals is pitched to rise exponentially across the world, and not just due to renewables. Demand is most evident in “consumer electronics, military applications, and other technical equipment in industrial applications. The growth of the global middle class from 1 billion to 3 billion people will only further accelerate this growth.”

But the study did not account for those other industries. This means the actual problem could be far more intractable. In 2017, a study in Nature found that a range of minerals essential for smartphones, laptops, electric cars and even copper wiring could face supply shortages in coming decades."
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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mavb/we-dont-mine-enough-rare-earth-metals-to-replace-fossil-fuels-with-renewable-energy
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sendler2112 said:
Nafeez Ahmed has written several good essays this year. He understands the system complexity of our conundrum.
....., I found that the Syrian conflict was not just triggered by climate change, but a range of intersecting factors—Syria’s domestic crude oil production had peaked in the mid-90s, leading state revenues to hemorrhage as oil production and exports declined. When global climate chaos triggered food price spikes, the state had begun slashing domestic fuel and food subsidies, already reeling from the impact of economic mismanagement and corruption resulting in massive debt levels. And so, a large young population overwhelmed with unemployment and emboldened by decades of political repression took to the streets when they could not afford basic bread. Syria has since collapsed into ceaseless civil war."
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Anyone who thinks the problems in Syria, Iran, or most everywhere in the middle east, is related to “Global Warming” , oil, energy etc etc or anything beyond Religion , and Ethnic culture disputes,... is looking at the region from a western viewpoint and ignoring the obvious
 
? Trouble ‘t mill”. ?………
German online weekly FOCUS here reports how cuts by wind energy giant Enercon will lead to 3,000 layoffs. According to Enercon chief executive Hans-Dieter Kettwig, “politicians have pulled the plug on wind energy.”

Subsidies cut

Once lavished with huge incentives, the German wind industry is being hit hard after the government recently ended the huge subsidies that were once aimed at expanding the installation of wind energy capacity.

Power grid operators had been struggling to keep the grid stable due to erratic feed-in and the subsidized feed-in of wind energy caused German electricity prices to become among the most expensive worldwide.

Fierce opposition from hundreds of protest groups

Moreover, hundreds of citizen protest groups have sprouted and since become a formidable force pushing for the stop of proposed wind projects.

Not only have wind parks scarred the German landscape and destroyed habitats nationwide, but they have also been shown to be a real health hazard to humans living in their proximity through the low-frequency infrasound they emit. Enough is enough, citizens say.

3,000 job cuts in the works

FOCUS reports: “The crisis in the German wind energy industry is worsening. According to the ‘Süddeutsche Zeitung’, hard cuts at the largest German manufacturer Enercon will cost 3,000 jobs.”

Next year Enercon will also cut contracts with suppliers, sending a wave of job losses across the industry. “If supply contracts are terminated as planned, many of these companies are threatened with extinction,” FOCUS reports.
https://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/die-politik-hat-uns-den-stecker-gezogen-windkraft-riese-enercon-streicht-3000-jobs_id_11328472.html?fbclid=IwAR3J3Godo-AzcM-TiXffz8APemVXguPiwh-a0L9Tqi3fxGZ7OE8N2UAaPqo
 
Jordan Greenhall also has an interesting system synthesis view. He also adds toward the end of the interview, the concept of the digital advantage of the burgeoning decentralized collective intelligence.
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The Game A system that currently runs human society, relied on broadcast information dispersal. Very few people with a pulpit speak through an Overton Window, and millions only listen. The Internet allows near instant collaboration of a decentralized collective intelligence. Skilled discernment at each node in series can filter the noise to refine a rough idea into clarity. Game A has peaked in it's access to energy and natural resources and the ability to sink our wastes. Let's work on a de facto Plan B. Learn. Think. Talk. Those that know can be a rock in the river for now. Collecting others and standing ready to redirect the flow.
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https://youtu.be/_j3cCrpXERg?t=2956
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