Oil barons really know how to dig holes in the ground. And they need a better place to put their money than trying to confuse the public about how serious global fever has become. I think they are missing a old-fashioned business opportunity, and a giant one at that.
This aphorism by Yogi Berra, the Baseball Hall of Fame philosopher, used to be a funny example of a tangled arrow of time. But now it means that, thanks to global warming and ocean acidification, our kids and grandkids cannot have the kind of future that we had; they can count on a future of high risk, both directly from climate change and from the regional collapse of civilization.
People take sensible precautions when the risk is high. Ask a roomful of people if they have fire insurance. Almost all will raise a hand. Ask how many have had a fire in the last ten years, and almost none will respond. Yet people pay for insurance because, should a fire happen, they could lose everything—and still have to pay off the mortgage.
But uncertainty is another matter. Those with money to loan will worry about ever getting it back, and so loan rates will soar.
I recently stood next to an electrical generator, big enough to power a city the size of Seattle (about 1,000 megawatts, known as a gigawatt). It was surprisingly small, no larger than a classroom with a tall ceiling.
The generator’s spinning shaft could be seen where it connected to the steam turbine, next in line. And backing it up were three more turbines, helping to keep that long shaft spinning at 1,800 revolutions every minute.
The generator doesn’t spin freely because every electrical light and appliance in that gigawatt-sized city is resisting it. It takes a lot of push from the four steam turbines to keep it up to speed. Some power plants create the steam in a boiler heated by burning coal, others by using nuclear fission of uranium-235 to generate the requisite heat. The cleanest method of all is harvesting steam from water sprayed on hot granite a few miles [5 km] underground.
But standing in the electricity half of the power plant, you cannot tell what the heat source is. All you see are the big steam pipes coming in at the far end of the giant hall from an adjacent building. Looking out the big open doors, however, two giant cooling towers are immediately visible. (more…)
The timetable is really 2020? That means that we must truly accelerate efforts on all fronts. What can we do as individuals?
You can’t enjoy the long run unless you do the right things in the short run. We’ve only got a decade to make a big dent in fossil fuel use or deploy new carbon sinks in equivalent numbers. Anything slower means a disaster for today’s students.I don’t think we can advance on all fronts, given our 2020 emergency; we’d be better off spending our money on plug-in hybrids than on new rapid transit, for example. Reforming drivers worldwide takes too long.
A major makeover in a decade requires a lot of people working together, not separately. Individuals cannot do very much, in time for 2020, but they can–and must–persuade politicians to either get moving or retire. (more…)
Please talk about Geothermal or, as you call it Hot Rock Energy.
I find it fascinating and, quite frankly, have not heard much about this source of energy.
It’s because “geothermal” has an image problem rather like electric cars once had. It took the success of a 1997 gasoline-electric hybrid called the Prius to help people think ahead to an all-electric car without defaulting to an image of a golf cart of limited utility, not suitable for the freeways. Hearing geothermal, we often pop up a mental image of a sulfurous hot spring and wrinkle our nose. Too many people think that geothermal is just piping near-surface hot water around to heat some buildings—say, Idaho’s State Capitol buildings in Boise. This in turn makes you think that geothermal electrical power is a special case, nice for Iceland but not more generally. That, however, is your grandfather’s notion of geothermal, badly out of date. See the report put out by a panel of eighteen experts that MIT assembled in 2006 to evaluate Hot Rock Energy as an industrial-strength solution for C-free electricity. The experts said it could yield a thousand times more than our present overall energy use. How polluting? Close to zero. (more…)
11. What do you think about nuclear energy? Is it safe? How can it be utilized to reach your timeline goals?
Nuclear power generation is currently the major C-free energy source. It is over fifty years old, with an excellent safety record. It’s hundreds of times safer than hydro (dams fail) and thousands of times safer than fossil fuels. Unlike the other expandable C-free sources, most of the beginner’s mistakes have already been made. It took three decades before the efficiency doubled.
France has switched to nuclear for 78 percent of its electricity. Hydro gives France another 13 percent. So France is 91 percent clean, 9 percent dirty—and Texas is the exact opposite. Texans now get 91 percent of their electricity from fossil fuels, almost twice the national average. Switzerland is 1 percent dirty and the U.S. is at 60 percent (electricity only; about 85 percent dirty counting transportation energy needs too).
If France and Switzerland switched their vehicles over to electrical power, they would serve as even better C-free energy models for the world. Much as I admire Denmark’s style of distributed cogeneration and the move to renewable wind and solar energy, there simply isn’t time to scale that up around the world before 2020, given how many coal trains and oil tankers need to be retired. (more…)