Global Warming and Investment Patterns
mra...@willamette.edu
Earth will rise 10 degrees. Obviously that's a gross simplification,
because the Earth is not all one temperature, but lets use it as a
rule of thumb.
Now, given that, what do you think the change in investment patterns
will be because of global warming? Where is the money likely to go?
When will areas that will dry up start to have trouble getting
investment made in them? When will regions that will become the "New
Sunbelt" start to experience booming construction? Are we likely to
see a lot more money invested in water treatment and desalination?
What other areas of technology are likely to see an increase or a
decrease in investment?
--
Mike Ralls
Alfred Montestruc
Too difficult to answer.
One of the other effects that you are neglecting is the one rearing
it's ugly head right now, that being ~ peak oil production or at least
demand for oil getting very, very large with respect to supply, and
prices doing what comes naturally in that situation.
Most of the easy oil fields on land (basically all easy oilfields are
on land, you need to all a lot of production cost per bbl once you
have to move offshore) already at or past peak production. Some that
are really hard and in real pain in the ass to get at places (the
arctic or antarctic for example) are still being developed, and a hell
of a lot waits offshore, but all of that is costly.
I now see a hell of a lot of signs of huge investment in wind power
such as large roller bearings and large planetary gearboxes prices
headed way up and delivery times getting very long.
I would also look for a lot of investment in wave and geothermal
energy.
The places that will get investment in the energy industry are places
with cheap geothermal capability, and reasonably stable law and cheap
labor to manufacture wind turbines, wave power generators, and
geothermal equipment.
Agriculture-wise I think on the long term and net gain or loss, the
human race wins out as Siberia and Northern Canada get opened up to
large scale agriculture. That and higher CO2 levels will punch up
production in places where freshwater supplies do not dry up.
Down side will be the loss of a lot of low laying land that is now
heavily populated, and associated political disruptions may well get a
lot of people killed.
Jack May
"Alfred Montestruc" <monte...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:32bca854-4456-4e50...@e67g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
> On Apr 18, 11:07 am, mra...@willamette.edu wrote:
>
> The places that will get investment in the energy industry are places
> with cheap geothermal capability, and reasonably stable law and cheap
> labor to manufacture wind turbines, wave power generators, and
> geothermal equipment.
The investments seem to be mainly in the direction of converting switch
grass into fuel probably using genetic engineering of microbes with water
and sunlight to produce the fuel. This approach is expected to be highly
competitive per barrel of fuel and will not have the economic destruction of
the present corn fiascos.
The fuel will probably be alcohol and maybe hydrogen.
Bucky tubes look like they will be able to store hydrogen at the pressure of
the center of Saturn with 8% of the total weight of the Bucky tube. This
approach is just in the molecule experiment with chemical simulations.
Alfred Montestruc
> "AlfredMontestruc" <montest...@gmail.com> wrote in message
I am suspicious of that, I have been reading an synthetic fuel
textbook which states that the energy conversion efficiency by
photosynthesis to chemical bonds is never over 3% and can be as low as
0.1%.
If that is indeed the case it may just be more efficient & cheaper to
use photo voltaic cells, their price is dropping like a rock and they
have energy conversion efficiencies of as high as 40% IIRC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#Solar_cell_efficiency_factors
Yes, so it is probably cheaper and more energy efficient to use photo
voltaic cells to make electricity and then convert that to useful
fuels via chemical reactors.
New cheap photo voltaic
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=solar&id=17774&a=
So if we figure that probably you can get 50% efficiency in a chemical
reactor to make some sort of liquid fuel from CO2, and H2O (say
methanol, as a process is known for that) then if you have 40%
efficiency in collection, and say 10% losses in transmission, and 50%
losses in the reactor, you are at .4*.9*.5=0.18 or 18% efficiency and
are about 6 times as energy efficient as the best plants in nature
using photosynthesis.