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Merrick 2148 posts |
Jul 14, 2004, 17:04
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>ru going daft on us? Well, as always I'm trying hard not to, but how well I'm succeeding is for others to judge... >i was generalizing about the land of freedom >(america in case u forgot) Ah, well your great economy with words did leave things somewhat ambiguous - some reference to America somewhere might've helped! Glad to have given ya the nudge to clarify a bit
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Merrick 2148 posts |
Jul 14, 2004, 17:06
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> Are there any studies out there on whether we're >self sufficient in doo-doo? No studies I know of, but I would be utterly astonished if it's anything other than a novelty. If there isn't enough land to grow biodiesel for all our vehicles, there's no way there's enough shit to power them.
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grufty jim 1978 posts |
Jul 14, 2004, 17:29
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> > Are there any studies out there > on whether we're self sufficient > in doo-doo? > Yes there are. And no we're not. Well, actually there's no specific "crap study" that I'm aware of, though it wouldn't surprise me if some earnest acolyte of HT Odum is working on an ERoEI analysis right now... Energy Returned on Excrement Invested! (boom-tish) Hey! it's not often you get to make an energy-resources in-joke, you can hardly blame me for taking the opportunity. But I don't want you to think that this message is just for shits and giggles... there's also some droning on about sustainability to be done. Ready? Y'see, you can easily extrapolate from other studies as to the sustainability of converting waste matter into fuel. The energy which is derived from human and farm-animal waste cannot exceed (indeed must - by definition - be less than) the energy which could be derived from the food source which was originally transformed into that waste. Passing a piece of corn through your body, or a chicken's body doesn't actually impart it with extra energy. In fact, it depletes the energy content... the reason we eat the corn in the first place. As it happens, our digestion process reveals (to me at least) an incredibly profound symbiosis between us and the planet we live on. The obviousness of this relationship has been stolen from us by modern sanitation (long may it continue - albeit in a form modified for sustainability). But not only does our body extract much of the energy from the vegetable matter it consumes, it also processes the waste in such a way as to render the remaining energy as a substance considered something of a delicacy to those very vegetables we're consuming. (Bear in mind that - as far as an anthropocentric energy system is concerned, it's all reduced to vegetables... beef is no more than processed grass. A meat process, if you will. Grass, in turn, can be converted into sEJ's - solar eJoules - which is the basic unit in the form of energy analysis which seems to make most sense to me). Aaaaanyways, extricating myself from that tangent... I recently did a *very rough* calculation which suggested that the US civilian automobile fleet (i.e. excluding military, airline, commercial trucking, power generation, etc etc etc etc) would require half of all the arable land in North America planted with sugar cane (probably the best biomass for the job) to fuel it (at current rate). And in that calculation, I constantly erred on the side of biomass. In truth, if you were to actually try to implement a sugar-cane-ethanol-as-motor-fuel policy, it would almost certainly require a lot more than half of America's arable land. And then where will the beef cows graze? Again it returns us to the fundamental point: Those of us at current "developed world" standards of living, are living *way* beyond our means. It's just not sustainable given how many of us there are. And when you factor in the staggering rate of economic growth in China, it is *surely* obvious that things are headed in the wrong direction. And very quickly. Check out Kurt Vonnegut's article here: http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/cold_turkey/ And as much as I respect a lot of what Lula is doing in Brazil, it makes my blood run cold when I read stories like this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/brazil/story/0,12462,1226498,00.html Anyone who doesn't get a chill when they read that is not drawing all the implications.
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grufty jim 1978 posts |
Jul 14, 2004, 17:29
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And to TomBo's earlier question... "but what can we do about it?" I accept that I'm not offering a solution. Unfortunately Tom, I don't have a solution. What I do have are a number of suggestions that might allow some form of controlled economic deceleration, which might - in turn - soften the energy crisis. However, these suggestions require *mass participation*. They require complete social upheaval. And any first step towards that is getting people aware of the problem. Quite a few years ago it was me, Jay Hanson, M. King Hubbert and Colin Campbell. We were the only four people in the world who knew about this impending crisis. And M. King was already dead! (That is - of course - a statement about how it *felt*, not how it *was*, at the time). Today it's getting reported in less and less vague language in the mainstream media. How much of that shift in awareness is because of the people I forced to listen to me (or read my torrent of letters)? Probably none at all. But you get the point, I'm sure. What can individuals do? Get away from cities. Live near the coast. Learn how to grow potatoes, catch fish and get on with your neighbours. Live sustainably. Adopt a couple of kids and raise them in that environment with a respect for nature and other people. Granted; not easy. But the worthwhile things often aren't. I'm not in a position to do that right now. I hope to be, some day in the not too distant future. And until that day I guess I'll just have to continue with the dubious efficacy of my "raise awareness" strategy. With a bit of luck, if enough people wake up in time and first demand, then accept, a reduction in consumer gratification, in return for a reduction in work hours; then I won't have to flee the collapse of civilisation... along with the millions of others who'll be looking for isolated spots by the coast to catch fish and grow potatoes.
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TomBo 1629 posts |
Jul 14, 2004, 17:30
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"Of course, just because something is beyond the fringes now doesn't mean that it won't, one day, become mainstream. But it's hugely improbable." Every single major scientific discovery has come from "beyond the fringes". Yet there's a hostility in science to ideas that are "beyond the fringes". The Wright brothers, for instance, were disbelieved by scientists (and the US army and the New York Herald) for many years even though they had been seen (by members of the public) flying aeroplanes on a regular basis on many occasions. Indeed, the Scientific American wrote the following paragraph more than two years after they'd first flown: "If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face - even if he has to scale a fifteen-story skyscraper to do so - would not have ascertained all about them and published them broadcast long ago?" Or take Thomas Edison. Here's the reaction of Sir William Siemens, England's foremost electrical engineer at the time, to Edison's announcement that he had invented electric light: "Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true purpose." Or take John Logi Baird and television, here's William Fox's (a correspondent with the Press Association) description of Baird's reception from the scientific community: "I'd say they didn't believe it a bit. They thought it was a trick or something equally disreputable. I did hear one fellow say Baird was a mere mountebank, merely after what he could get. Other comments were 'nothing much'; 'absolute swindler'; 'doesn't know what he's talking about'; and one fellow came out very definitely and said; 'well, what's the good of it when you've got it? what useful purpose will it serve?'" I could go on, there's plenty of more examples - like Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Britain's Astronomer Royal, saying that "space travel is bunk" just a fortnight before Sputnik 1 was launched. Science is incredibly conservative, and doesn't like anything that seems to challenge their current model of the universe. I don't know much about cold fusion and so can't say whether it's real or not. But I do know that in 1995 ninety-two groups in ten countries around the world has managed to reproduce Fleischmann/Pons experiment. And also that the Japanese government has spent at least $25 million in cold fusion research (also at least $18m from the Electric Power Research Institute in california, $18m that later had $25 million from five major US utility companies). As I say, I don't know if cold fusion is real: I'm not a scientist. But ninety-two independent tests all confirming the same thing, coupled with all that money from people who would be reluctant to invest in "crank" ideas, coupled with science's notorious hostility to new ideas, suggests to me that there's no smoke without fire, and that there must be some kind of phenomenon here that may, one day, be an accepted source of energy (if it ever gets off the ground in the face of scientific hostility).
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TomBo 1629 posts |
Jul 14, 2004, 17:32
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"has managed to reproduce Fleischmann/Pons experiment" I meant "have managed to reproduce the orinal Fleishmann/Pons cold fusion experiment".
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TomBo 1629 posts |
Jul 14, 2004, 17:33
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"original" sorry, can't type today
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TomBo 1629 posts |
Jul 14, 2004, 17:35
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of course, I should also add that we obviously can't pin all our hopes on cold fusion for the post-oil world. that would be completely silly. but perhaps we shouldn't dismiss it altogether.
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TomBo 1629 posts |
Jul 14, 2004, 17:46
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"a reduction in consumer gratification, in return for a reduction in work hours" That sounds like a recipe for happiness and for a fulfilling life. Tragic that it's going to take such a calamity to bring it about.
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grufty jim 1978 posts |
Jul 14, 2004, 17:57
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Tom, Firstly; we should note that NOT all important scientific discoveries have come from "beyond the fringes". At least not in the same way that cold fusion would be. A great deal - if not most - scientific discoveries were made whilst trying to explain certain behaviours, or apparent behaviours. There's no real evidence that cold fusion is even possible. It doesn't occur in nature, and the theoretical justifications for our being able to create it in a lab are precarious to say the least. The experiments you mentioned have not proved repeatable by the vast majority of those who have attempted verification. And when you talk about the Japanese government spending 25 million dollars on research? Tom, when it comes to scientific research, 25 million dollars worth of grants over 3 years is a *tiny* amount of money. Particularly given the potential rewards. The half billion spent globally on magnetic fusion research two years ago was considered scandalously low by a lot of people. And the pay-off from cold fusion would be immeasurably higher. I don't dismiss cold fusion out of hand. I accept that now and then something really does come in from beyond the fringes. And you can point at a few historical examples. Though I suspect not as many as you'd imagine (even something as "far out" as relativity in 1905 had its ancestry in the work of Mach, Gauss and others... and was developed by Einstein to explain the *observable properties* of light). But just because a handful of apparently crazy ideas have since become scientific "fact", doesn't truly add weight to the thousands of crazy ideas that remain just crazy ideas. If I was a betting man, I'd put money on cold fusion being more likely than, say, zero-point energy. But that's really not saying much. And whilst the seriousness of the energy problem means we must never just dismiss an idea out of hand; that very seriousness also means we can't squander time, resources and faith on every crazy idea that promises to render our profligate consumption sustainable.
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