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snousleThe Atlantic has an excellent article about the future of energy. The one-word summary: coal.
If I were a famous author who could actually get such things published, this is the article I'd have written myself. If you were to read just one article about energy this year, it should be this one. What I like about it is that it includes a lot of numbers, and seriously engages with their meaning. It points out that, while we have become used to "miraculous" advances in many technologies, energy technology hardly changes at all. In the same period that computers get a thousand times faster, you're lucky to squeeze even a few percent more efficiency out of electricity generation.
Reading this, it really hit home: the reason Americans don't think realistically about energy is because they expect miracles where there are none to be had.
The figure that jumped out at me was that the average American generates, in the course of daily life, twenty five tons of CO2 emissions per year. Coincidentally, one day's worth of those emissions is about my own body weight. I like imagining a copy of myself, sculpted in dry ice, evaporating into the air each and every day... LOL. That's a whole lot of carbon, and illustrates how dependent we are on fossil fuels.
As for its influence on climate change, this passage shows the extent to which this "controversy" is entirely manufactured, and has almost no traction in the scientific and engineering communities:
...in any case, all parties to the negotiations I’m describing, including the heads of the major coal-mining and electric-power utilities in the United States and China, accept as settled fact that greenhouse-gas emissions are an emergency they must confront, because of the likely disruptive effects on the world’s climate. At a U.S.-China environmental conference this summer in San Francisco, I heard one utility-company official after another testify, confession-meeting style, about the vast extent of their current emissions and their need to reform.
Pretty much reflects my own experience. Yes, there are individual scientists who disagree. I also once worked in a carbon-dating lab with a young-earth creationist - scientists aren't immune to breathtaking irrationality. As I mentioned earlier, the rate of climate change denial in the scientific community is about the same as the rate of outright mental illness. My guess is that the chi-squared statistics on that particular contingency table would reject the hypothesis that these are independent factors... :-P
The article isn't all doom and gloom, though - on the contrary, it's one of the few that offers genuinely constructive ideas about the world's energy future. Some people might be surprised at the small role for alternative/renewable energy and the very, very large role for coal - personally, this doesn't surprise me one bit. If you seriously consider the constraints of politics and the pressures of modern life, the idea that we will all live in some sort of conscientious wind-powered eco-utopia is kind of implausible.
I feel fortunate that, despite the inconveniences that will be imposed by the dwindling reserves of oil, the availability of coal will remain high throughout my own lifetime. Once coal runs out, then... ? Not a pretty picture, but fortunately one I will never have to deal with.
If I were a famous author who could actually get such things published, this is the article I'd have written myself. If you were to read just one article about energy this year, it should be this one. What I like about it is that it includes a lot of numbers, and seriously engages with their meaning. It points out that, while we have become used to "miraculous" advances in many technologies, energy technology hardly changes at all. In the same period that computers get a thousand times faster, you're lucky to squeeze even a few percent more efficiency out of electricity generation.
Reading this, it really hit home: the reason Americans don't think realistically about energy is because they expect miracles where there are none to be had.
The figure that jumped out at me was that the average American generates, in the course of daily life, twenty five tons of CO2 emissions per year. Coincidentally, one day's worth of those emissions is about my own body weight. I like imagining a copy of myself, sculpted in dry ice, evaporating into the air each and every day... LOL. That's a whole lot of carbon, and illustrates how dependent we are on fossil fuels.
As for its influence on climate change, this passage shows the extent to which this "controversy" is entirely manufactured, and has almost no traction in the scientific and engineering communities:
...in any case, all parties to the negotiations I’m describing, including the heads of the major coal-mining and electric-power utilities in the United States and China, accept as settled fact that greenhouse-gas emissions are an emergency they must confront, because of the likely disruptive effects on the world’s climate. At a U.S.-China environmental conference this summer in San Francisco, I heard one utility-company official after another testify, confession-meeting style, about the vast extent of their current emissions and their need to reform.
Pretty much reflects my own experience. Yes, there are individual scientists who disagree. I also once worked in a carbon-dating lab with a young-earth creationist - scientists aren't immune to breathtaking irrationality. As I mentioned earlier, the rate of climate change denial in the scientific community is about the same as the rate of outright mental illness. My guess is that the chi-squared statistics on that particular contingency table would reject the hypothesis that these are independent factors... :-P
The article isn't all doom and gloom, though - on the contrary, it's one of the few that offers genuinely constructive ideas about the world's energy future. Some people might be surprised at the small role for alternative/renewable energy and the very, very large role for coal - personally, this doesn't surprise me one bit. If you seriously consider the constraints of politics and the pressures of modern life, the idea that we will all live in some sort of conscientious wind-powered eco-utopia is kind of implausible.
I feel fortunate that, despite the inconveniences that will be imposed by the dwindling reserves of oil, the availability of coal will remain high throughout my own lifetime. Once coal runs out, then... ? Not a pretty picture, but fortunately one I will never have to deal with.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-11 07:45 am (UTC)China (a "communist" country)
Date: 2010-11-11 09:33 am (UTC)Chuck
Re: China (a "communist" country)
Date: 2010-11-11 09:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-12 01:15 pm (UTC)