Addressing Post-Scarcity Pitfalls
Nathan Cravens
So a question, a major pitfall that's occupied that attention-span, and one I believe has a compelling answer while writing this message is: "How are abundant goods traded to attain scarce goods?" One answer is pretty obvious: "abundant goods cannot be traded for scarce goods--HOWEVER!--abundant goods produced in a region can be transferred in exchange (or not) for another region's abundantly produced goods. Without these links both items would otherwise remain scarce goods. This solution creates "a distributed network of abundance" that make otherwise scarce conditions in each, abundant." (!!!!) This answer extends the economic theory of 'comparative advantage' for a post-scarcity context, where its more efficient for one region to produce one type of good than another, while the other region produces a different good to make the exchange between these two areas of more common value than if both goods were produced in the same area.
What anyone in the world has yet to explain very well is how scarcity fails or why the scarce economy (known to most as "the economy") has collapsed. Richard Wolff's attractively simple 'Capitalism Hits the Fan' thesis is probably the closest I've read to explaining the failure of the economic system itself. I've determined there is no single point that determines the problem, but rather a variety of factors that contributed to that present downturn. I look forward to getting with those of you that like to address these matters by placing each notable link failure into a package called the "Tragedy of the Scarcity Commons." Hi Joseph! ;)
I'm making an as yet uncommonly held assumption here: that value was developing in a non-monetizable commons for sometime, whether marked by lower wages in foreign countries to produce or open source methods that however funded required less money on average. A few accelerations during the 1970s in the U.S. (and other countries with the same model?) are most visually identified in the history of financial debt. I suspect the acceleration of debt is also followed by the rate of outsourcing to peripheral saturated labor markets? This debt growth will continue and remain enforced for as long as scarcity based exchanges are unable to maintain scarce conditions more or less equally among participants. The most glaring forthcoming issue with maintaining a 'scarce-exchange' model is when observing the increases in aging populations in Industrial countries rapidly unable to participate in the already saturated labor markets. Japan is the hottest target.
From what I understand, the majority of members on this list believe the growth of scarcity generally is over. When this is accepted, a new general problem arises: the issue of resource management when conditions are not both mostly scarce or mostly abundant, beginning in areas that matter most. The answer to the "semi-scarce problem" as expressed of having abundantly produced goods in one area but not others is solved by transferring abundant goods to other parts of the world in exchange (or not) for other abundantly produced goods.
We need to rapidly manage affairs within the local or global community level or risk fatally violent measures taken by the state and its scarcity driven supporters. We all take a risk if we do not persist in establishing our open cafes, hackerspaces, or a place for community space generally to create or strengthen local and global community ties essential to our well being. If the state and its corporate sponsors are able to affectively influence the harm of others for 'scarce-dependent' gain, violence will persist without an observably practiced alternative.
Its the members of communities that form and develop hackerspaces and other community efforts and the work groups that continue to develop programs like Google Wave (more than "lion's share of the code," please!) and Wolfram Alpha (I insist an open source!) as vital tools to form an aggregated communications media to come that filters out and embodies the best of our applied intelligence where it really matters. We all must more than hope and insist by making while the existing scarcity model crumbles by placing an abundant link (based on your interest area) before the scarce link fails. If an abundance link is not bridged before the scarcity link fails, difficulty increases to produce that needed abundant link.
--
Nathan Cravens
Effortless Economy
OPEN SOURCE >> AGGREGATE >> INTEREST >> DISCUSSION >> DESIGN OUTLINE >> DESIGN >> FABRICATE PROTOTYPE >> OPTIMIZE
Open Systems Design for Peer Producing Anything
http://www.appropedia.org/Open_Systems_Design_for_Peer_Producing_Anything
Michel Bauwens
If you don't mind, I will reproduce your contribution on our blog,
In the meantime, I do think that the end of scarcity hypothesis is wildly optimistic.
Below, 2 crucial contributions to the energy trap, which every abundance proponent should answer and address
After presentation of a good summary by John Robb, see in particular the in depth treatment of the issue by Jeff Vail, in 4 installments,
Michel
A core change to our fundamental economic and social model that substitutes physically moving products globally to virtually moving information about products. Where virtual presence is substituted for actual visitation and nothing is made that isn’t bought.
Like any shift in fundamental substrates, this a process of creative annihilation (as opposed to the much milder form of Schumpeter’s creative destruction we see in free markets).
The following is a very important issue that is usually not understood by those who have a naive belief in technological progress: there is a serious problem of timing in the substitution of depleted fossil fuels by renewable energy alternatives.
The problem is well explained by John Robb.
1. The problem
“One of the long term trends that now seems inexorable is that fossil fuels (stored solar) will be expensive from here on out (see my earlier attempt at this topic with “Crossing the Energy Chasm”). Demand will continuously outstrip our increasingly depleted and difficult to obtain sources of supply. Prices will rise when demand increases, and when prices rise too much, demand will be destroyed (with demand destruction starting first at the low end, as we saw with sub-prime borrowers in the US). In other words, every time we attempt to grow economically within the current model, we will bump into energy that is too expensive to support that growth.
However, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Since we live in an adaptive system (much less adaptive than it could be due to deep structural and conceptual problems) alternatives will be found. The common assumption is that these alternatives will be in the form of direct substitutes, or new forms of inexpensive energy (presumably, fossil alternatives or solar power) that can power the existing model of the global economy. That’s likely a false assumption.
Why?
The substitutes for energy that are available, aren’t available in the quantity demanded nor at a price point necessary to serve as direct substitutes for existing sources at their historical (low) prices. Most particularly, solar power (the only source with the theoretically achievable scale to serve as a true substitute for fossil fuels) won’t be inexpensive enough to serve as a true substitute for decades.
2. The issue with solar
The reason for this is that the Moore’s law equivalent for solar power appears to be a halving underlying costs every 10.5 years (not two, like we see in the computing industry). Moore’s law has been powering productivity improvements in other industries (like biotech) at rates approaching the underlying rate of semiconductor improvement. This due to the high levels of information processing in those industries (directly addressable by improvement in computational capacity) relative to the level of improvements needed to advance the materials used. In contrast, manufacturing more efficient solar cells reverses that ratio: less information manipulation in the design and much more in terms of fundamental improvements in capacity of the materials utilized (new breakthroughs). Therefore, the rate of improvement in solar efficiency occurs much slower, even when it uses much of the same equipment used by the semi-conductor industry.
As a result, on the current doubling rate of improvement, we can’t expect to reach grid equivalence at the current prices in any reasonable scenario (sooner than 20 years). In contrast, grid equivalence at higher prices, say 10 times current prices (of electricity, which is already a premium energy source), may be achievable in the 2025 time frame. Sure, we can accelerate the share of solar energy production through the use of government subsidies and mandates (as we are currently doing), but that only shifts costs and doesn’t scale (particularly given the red ink induced pallor of our finances).
So, what does this mean?
We will likely adapt, but not in the way anticipated. The most likely adaption will come in the form of a substrate shift. A shift in the underlying model of the global economy to one that is much, much more energy efficient.
It’s a global judo move that flips everything on its back. A core change to our fundamental economic and social model that substitutes physically moving products globally to virtually moving information about products. Where virtual presence is substituted for actual visitation and nothing is made that isn’t bought.
In conclusion:
It’s a place where you telecommute to work if you sell goods and services globally. Where all production is increasingly and inexorably local, from food to energy to consumer products. It’s a place were physical travel is a premium event, reserved only for those objects and occurrences that are the most valuable. In short, localization into resilient communities (the only term I know to describe it) drives orders of magnitude improvement (10x to 100x) in the use of energy, time, space, matter, and information over the old model of globalization.
This is a must read additional but pessimistic read to the above.
Jeff Vail has a series of investigative entries on this issue as well:
Renewable energy requires an up-front investment of energy, and this may dramatically impact our ability to transition to a renewable-energy economy because the transition effort will initially exacerbate the very energy scarcity that is its impetus.
--
Employment profile: http://www.espach.salford.ac.uk/politics/staff/moore.php
Capital and Class special issue 2009 on Peer to Peer Production:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/parallel-visions-of-peer-production/2009/03/13
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/category/cognitive-capitalism
Manchester Film Cooperative: http://www.manchesterfilm.coop/
--
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net - http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN, http://www.shiftn.com/
Paul D. Fernhout
> Dear Nathan,
>
> If you don't mind, I will reproduce your contribution on our blog,
>
> In the meantime, I do think that the end of scarcity hypothesis is wildly
> optimistic.
I'm with Nathan on that. And it is a great essay, I agree.
> Below, 2 crucial contributions to the energy trap, which every abundance
> proponent should answer and address [snip]
> The problem is well explained by John Robb
>http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/05/energy-moores-law-and-substitution.html
> [snip]
> This <http://www.energybulletin.net/node/48990> is a must read additional
> but pessimistic read to the above.
>
> *Jeff Vail* has a series of investigative entries on this issue as well:
>
> Renewable energy requires an up-front investment of energy, and this may
> dramatically impact our ability to transition to a renewable-energy economy
> because the transition effort will initially exacerbate the very energy
> scarcity that is its impetus.
>
> Read his contributions here:
> intro<http://www.jeffvail.net/2009/05/renewables-hump-introduction.html>,
> 2 <http://www.jeffvail.net/2009/05/renewables-hump-digging-out-of-hole.html>,
> 3 <http://www.jeffvail.net/2009/06/renewables-hump-3-target.html>,
> 4<http://www.jeffvail.net/2009/06/renewables-hump-4-eroei-issues.html>
>
Germany almost conquered the world in the 1940s powered by coal (including
converting it to liquid fuels) using 1930s-1940s technology. Now, seventy
years later, you're suggesting even just Germany *alone* could not use
better technology to help the rest of the world transition to sustainability
using coal or better stuff?
But look what was being said in Germany in 1919, twenty years before Germany
used coal to almost take over the world:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9905E6DC1F3BEE3ABC4A52DFB7678382609EDE
"""
GERMAN COAL CRISIS IS STILL ACUTE; Many Locomotives Lack Fuel Despite
Stopping of Passenger Traffic. RUHR OUTPUT INCREASES With 106,000 Cars at
Their Disposal, Mines Rush Coal to South Germany.
By GEORGE RENWICK.
Copyright, 1919, by The New York Times Company.
Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
November 12, 1919, Wednesday
Page 2, 548 words
BERLIN, Nov. 10.--Despite the stoppage of passenger traffic on the railways
throughout Germany to allow the coal reserves to be increased at important
centres and food supplies to be transported more abundantly, the situation
appears to be growing worse than ever. ...
"""
Twenty years later, the world cowers in fear from the power unleashed from
German coal by very smart but misguided people.
Granted, Germany itself is getting out of coal a century later:
http://www.kommersant.com/p794837/Coal_export_Germany/
"German government has approved the bill to close all coal mines and phase
out the heavily subsidised coal mining industry by 2018, Deutsche Welle
reported Friday. "
But I'd suggest that is because Germany is moving on to bigger and better
things than coal:
"No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’ "
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html
"DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the
stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with
wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing
drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There
are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the
furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace. ..."
Germany has grown up in a way that the USA still has yet to do.
It didn't help that the USA imported many of the worst people and ideologies
from the old WWII German political and scientific leadership, but the USA's
gain was Germany's loss(?), or rather, Germany's loss was the USA's gain,
and our gain was our loss, or something like that. :-)
"How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
"The CIA's Worst-Kept Secret: Newly Declassified Files Confirm United
States Collaboration with Nazis"
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0508-05.htm
"The CIA reports show that U.S. officials knew they were subsidizing
numerous Third Reich veterans who had committed horrible crimes against
humanity, but these atrocities were overlooked as the anti-Communist crusade
acquired its own momentum. For Nazis who would otherwise have been charged
with war crimes, signing on with American intelligence enabled them to avoid
a prison term. "The real winners of the Cold War were Nazi war criminals,
many of whom were able to escape justice because the East and West became so
rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other," says Eli
Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations and America's chief Nazi hunter. Rosenbaum serves on a
Clinton-appointed Interagency Working Group committee of U.S. scholars,
public officials, and former intelligence officers who helped prepare the
CIA records for declassification. Many Nazi criminals "received light
punishment, no punishment at all, or received compensation because Western
spy agencies considered them useful assets in the Cold War," the IWG team
stated after releasing 18,000 pages of redacted CIA material. (More
installments are pending.)"
US employment of ex-Nazis may have given us a super-powered Lyme epidemic, too:
http://www.rense.com/general67/plumislandlyme.htm
"In the mid-1970's Lyme Disease broke out in Connecticut and it has since
spread through much of the United States. This program examines the
possibility that Lyme Disease may have spread as a result of clandestine
experimentation on biological warfare on Plum Island-a Department of
Agriculture facility that doubled as an Army BW research facility. Dedicated
to the study of animal diseases, Plum Island appears to have been the site
of experiments with disease-infected ticks conducted by Nazi scientists
brought into the United States under Project Paperclip. One of the Nazi
scientists who appears to have been involved with Plum Island was Dr. Erich
Traub, who was in charge of the Third Reich's virological and
bacteriological warfare program in World War II. Was Traub involved with
experiments that led to the spread of Lyme Disease?"
Lyme disease is something I've had to struggle with personally. Another
resurt of post-scarcity technology (biotech) in the hands of
scarcity-preoccupied minds.
And, Germany might have even won WWII if it hadn't imported this idea from
the USA, so Germany's gain was Germany's loss, there:
"Was Nazi eugenics created in the US? War Against the Weak: Eugenics and
America's Campaign to Create A Master Race"
http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v5/n5/full/7400158.html
"The author's central thesis is that Nazi racial hygiene and its ultimate
manifestations in the Holocaust were imported lock, stock and barrel from
the USA, and that, indeed, it was US ruling elites who hatched the idea of
creating a master Aryan race by selective breeding and then passed it along
to the Nazis. More specifically, Black argues that the Rockefeller
Foundation (RF) and the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) funded much
of the American-based movement, both at home and abroad, and so sat in the
driver's seat guiding Nazi racial hygienists along their fateful path."
That's an example of post-scarcity foundation dollars wielded by
scarcity-minded foundation managers, destroying Germany and much of the
Jewish population.
Imagine Einstein and other Jews staying on the German side of WWII, against
a USA full of (and still brimming with) overt racism from a legacy of
slavery that Germany had long moved past. Instead of scarcity-oriented
German cries of "Lebensraum" (living space) the world might have heard cries
of "Liebensraum" (loving space) -- except for those post-scarcity dollars in
the hands of scarcity preoccupied foundation managers. (Ones who also did
not understand that much of human genetic diversity has to deal with
resisting parasites, and also that one should not judge the content of
someone's character either by the color of their skin *or* by how much work
they can produce that some arbitrary authority deems useful.)
There is also a reason "classrooms" are called *class* rooms in schools.
They were designed that way in part for eugenic breeding purposes according
to John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/13o.htm
"According to Thorndike, the aim of a teacher is to "produce and prevent
certain responses," and the purpose of education is to promote "adjustment."
In Elementary Principles of Education (1929), he urged the deconstruction of
emphasis on "intellectual resources" for the young, advice that was largely
taken. It was bad advice in light of modern brain research suggesting direct
ties between the size and complexity of the brain and strenuous thought
grappled with early on. Thorndike said intelligence was virtually set at
birth — real change was impossible — a scientific pronouncement which helped
to justify putting the brakes on ambitious curricula. But in the vitally
important behavioral area — in beliefs, attitudes, and loyalties — Thorndike
did not disappoint the empty-child crowd. In those areas so important to
corporate and government health, children were to be as malleable as anyone
could want them. An early ranking of school kids by intelligence would allow
them to be separated into tracks for behavioral processing. Thorndike soon
became a driving force in the growth of national testing, a new institution
which would have consigned Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie to reform
school and Edison to Special Education. Even before we got the actual test,
Thorndike became a significant political ally of the semicovert
sterilization campaign taking place in America. That pioneering eugenic
program seemed socially beneficial to those casually aware of it, and it was
enthusiastically championed by some genuine American legends like Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr. But if you find yourself nodding in agreement that morons
have no business with babies, you might want to consider that according to
Thorndike’s fellow psychologist H.H. Goddard at Princeton, 83 percent of all
Jews and 79 percent of all Italians were in the mental defective class. The
real difficulty with scientific psychology or other scientific social
science is that it seems to be able to produce proof of anything on command,
convincing proof, too, delivered by sincere men and women just trying to get
along by going along."
So, we have post-scarcity educational processes deployed in a way to create
a scarcity of genetic diversity, by people obsessesed with a scarcity of
smart productive easily-labeled workers (even though education in its truest
sense could be a wonderful thing for humanity). These were people who could
not see that the brain is like a muscle, if you use it, it will get stronger.
Even the core Prussian schooling idea was about taking a society, unifying
it, but then, using everyone as soldiers to fight over scarcity?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
Is it really a big surprise we saw huge pointless wars after Prussian
schooling became widespread?
Just think what, where I live in New York State, US$20,000 a year spent per
child per year could do if devoted in other ways than a failed eugenics
program intended to track children for non-existent factory jobs and for a
view of compliant unimaginative soldiering that the military has moved
beyond in many respects. Imagine what a family of four, getting US$80,000 a
year could do for their children, instead of sending the kids to "school"
to, likely as not in New York, not even graduate from High School,
http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?measure=23
while the parents do other jobs they may well care less about. What a waste
of post-scarcity government dollars, to prop up that failed eugenics scheme
based on scarcity-ideology, with origins so long ago most people have
forgotten them.
I write all that to try to help shake up your mental paradigm. Obviously, I
don't think Germany conquering the world in the 1940s for any reason (even
"Liebensraum" instead of "Lebensraum") would have been a good idea, same as
the USA claiming to go into Iraq for democracy. That was another crazy
scarcity-oriented project of the USA, to spend about three trillion US
dollars (before it will be over) on a war where that much money could have
remade the USA (and Iraq) into a paradise by investing it in developing
renewable energy.
But that is the kind of scarcity-oriented thinking that has caused much
suffering in the world. Normally it does not hurt as much on a small local
scale. But Germany with its impressive post-scarcity 1940s coal technology
and the USA with its impressive 2000s post-scarcity technology of various
sorts have been run by scarcity-preoccupied ideologues (elected by a
scarcity-preoccupied electorate), who rather than use that post-scarcity
technology to build a post-scarcity world either locally or globally,
unleashed it on the world in misguided ways out of scarcity fears.
In any case, Peak Oil is an inconvenience, not a show stopper. How people
look at Peak Oil is also a reflection of the prevalence of scarcity versus
post-scarcity thinking. Michael Ruppert, for example, is very scarcity
oriented it seems. I don't blame him, but that's the way he writes and what
he advocates (predicting collapse of society from the Peak Oil issue).
The fact is, we've got several decades to several centuries of coal, even if
we used coal exclusively for all our current energy needs (which would never
happen, an alternatives are plentiful). And twenty more years of pollution
of coal burning is awful, but most of us humans would still be around. From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#World_coal_reserves
"At the end of 2006 the recoverable coal reserves amounted around 800 or 900
gigatons. The United States Energy Information Administration gives world
reserves as 998 billion short tons (equal to 905 gigatons), approximately
half of it being hard coal. At the current production rate, this would last
164 years. At the current global total energy consumption of 15 terawatt,
there is enough coal to provide the entire planet with all of its energy for
57 years."
We could even put nuclear power plants in every town, and even if one melts
down once per week costing 1000 lives and injuring 10000 other people, that
is about as many people die and are injured in motor vehicle accidents is
the USA. People in the USA still get into their cars, In general I'm
anti-nuclear-power for a few reasons (including centralization risks and
external costs), just as I am pro-alternative-transit, but those sorts of
numbers are a fact of the kind of risks we already accept every day in our
society (for the benefits of easy personal transport).
Those other comments in the links on solar are IMHO in a bit of denial of
even present day reality. :-)
Just look at Nansolar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosolar
They are shipping as many solar panels as they can produce and claiming to
be approaching grip parity cost right now. Even if they are completely
lying, where will they be in ten years with that much production volume
right now and continued innovation?
And that is just one of many such ventures. Right now.
Wind power is another successful grid parity technology in many areas.
Iceland runs on a lot of geothermal. Etc. Plenty of alternatives, if we
implement them.
But let's assume the article was accurate -- that grid comparable solar is
twenty years or more away. So what? We have plenty of coal until then, even
if we fueled *everything* from coal. And we can see the end of that
pollution from coal as we transition to solar or other alternatives, even
though I would rather see it end sooner, and even if using less energy right
now through voluntary simplicity produces less external costs (given we have
not yet achieved cradle-to-cradle manufacturing).
So, what exactly is not abundant that really matters?
Well, think about what ruined Germany (importing US scarcity ideology. :-)
Think about what ruined the US economy of the first decade of the 21st
century (again, US scarcity ideology).
This is IMHO the most essential thing that is not abundant enough: an
understanding that the greatest threat humanity faces is powerful
post-scarcity technology (robotics, AI, internet, nuclear, biotech,
chemtech, nanotech, etc.) wielded by scarcity-preoccupied minds.
So, in that sense, many of my Jewish relatives were killed by US
post-scarcity technology (foundation dollars), misguided into eugenics
programs that Germany picked up on. My mother also suffered for those
post-scarcity dollars when Rotterdam was firebombed, because a bunch of
post-scarcity empowered people thought they wanted Lebensraum instead of
Liebensraum, because there ideology had not caught up with the even then
promise of their technology. We could turn the Earth into a paradise with
just 1940s era technology. But the Nazis chose not to do that. Why? What was
the central mistake? I'd suggest, it was to not realize their own potential,
their own strengths. It was to act out of fear of scarcity instead of
confidence in abundance. And so, between the Germans and the rest of the
world with its post-scarcity technology capable of churning out vast amounts
of technological goods (in terms of armaments), a world was left in ruins. I
don't want to see that happen again, only worse. Because we have much worse
weapons incidentally now that we've had another sixty years to improve
post-scarcity technology.
Obviously, one of those post-scarcity technologies is also advertising and
propaganda and media, misguidedly used to convince people, like with the TV
show "24", that torture is a good thing. See:
"Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11 "
http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick04272009.html
"US Military Tells Jack Bauer: Cut Out the Torture Scenes ... or Else!"
http://www.truthout.org/article/us-military-tells-24-cut-out-torture-scenes-or-else
"The United States Military Academy at West Point yesterday confirmed that
Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan recently travelled to California to meet
producers of the show, broadcast on the Fox channel. He told them that
promoting illegal behaviour in the series - apparently hugely popular among
the US military - was having a damaging effect on young troops."
So, I'd suggest we are long past the time where we have enough technological
know how. More would be nice, and it will make the social transformation
easier, but at the heart of the problem is, as Einstein said, something that
is in the human heart: "The release of atom power has changed everything
except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart
of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. --Albert
Einstein"
The more that understanding spreads, and spreads about more things than
nuclear power, but about robotics, and AI, and nanotech, and media, and
education, and foundation dollars, and so on, the more we will remake our
society along post-scarcity lines of abundance for all.
Obviously, I'm not the right person to popularize it. But there are a lot of
very creative people who could get this idea out if they tried and tried and
learned and failed and tried again until they succeeded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_marketing
"Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional system of promotions that relies
on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget.
Typically, guerrilla marketing tactics are unexpected and unconventional;
consumers are targeted in unexpected places, which can make the idea that's
being marketed memorable, generate buzz, and even spread virally. The term
was coined and defined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book Guerrilla
Marketing. The term has since entered the popular vocabulary and marketing
textbooks."
And a lot of people are doing related things. Although often near misses --
like the Story of Stuff, which was great in a lot of ways, but missed this
big post-scarcity picture. The Greens could get this message out, but again,
they have missed the post-scarcity picture as a movement so far, asking
people more to shrink than to grow.
OK, so I'm a little nervous about Helium supplies and scarcity. :-(
"Helium Supplies Endangered, Threatening Science And Technology"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080102093943.htm
"The element that lifts things like balloons, spirits and voice ranges is
being depleted so rapidly in the world's largest reserve, outside of
Amarillo, Texas, that supplies are expected to be depleted there within the
next eight years ... "Helium is non-renewable and irreplaceable. Its
properties are unique and unlike hydrocarbon fuels (natural gas or oil),
there are no biosynthetic ways to make an alternative to helium. All should
make better efforts to recycle it.""
That may be a rapidly unfolding crisis in the next few years, "out of the
blue".
Still, that's a great reason for a space program to collect Helium and to
develop fusion energy to produce Helium as a byproduct. Though those are
long term approaches to that problem, and they will not be available in time
to deal with the crisis.
Anyway, so I think, respectfully, the scarcities are different than energy.
They are mainly scarcities of post-scarcity ideology. :-)
Though I agree that a big challenge is building a bridge between a society
that has built a physical and economic infrastructure assuming scarcity and
a society that assumes post-scarcity abundance and acts on that assumption
to build an infrastructure and economics that reflects abundance.
And as individuals and communities, it is hard to see our individual roles
in that, and how to survive economically in such a transition with changing
ethics. For example, selling proprietary software and content through
artificial scarcity is based in part on an assumption of progress through
the free market; just giving software and content away under free and open
licenses is based on the assumption of progress through community and
sharing. There is a conflict there, depending on your assumptions about
likely societal and personal abundance.
--Paul Fernhout
Michel Bauwens
If you want, feel free to post the below to our blog,
but why do you think centralized production is more efficient?
doesn't the sun shine everywhere, and so doesn't it make sense to have solar panels, augmented by neighborhood utilities, supplemented by a centralized infrastructure for peak needs?
is nothing being lost by transportation?
I'm not an expert, but I heard the losses of transmission are huge, over 16% for power lines, and that is just one aspect,
Thanks for clarifyign and proving me wrong,
Michel
Michel:First, let me agree with every point you make below.With regard to energy, I'd like to make a few comments based on my own research:A significant portion of my free time is given over to thinking about energy--specifically solar energy trapped in ocean water--ocean thermal energy. It's an old topic--a physicist in France actually developed the concept (and bankrupted himself trying to commercialize it) from about 1885-1915. Its time has finally come I think.The trouble with energy is that centralized production with distribution is cheaper than distributed production. That is, economies of scale apply rather harshly to modes of production. Further, that is unlikely to change. Therefore, modes of production that concentrate power at one location are most most efficient. Even with wind and solar, central facilities are significantly more efficient than distributed ones by any logical measure.My own work and research on OTEC has lead me to believe the long-term non-carbon answer needs to be a simple molecular fuel that can transport energy. Carbon-based fuels are obviously problematic. Other complex sugars, and so forth, require significant inputs to create the fuel. Simple molecules must be the answer.The simplest and most obvious is hydrogen, but it isn't the only possible answer. Ammonia is also a possibility and there are others. Fully 1.5% (one point five percent) of the world's total power is now expended to make ammonia--most of it goes to grow our food. By contrast, the current production of the sea (in all forms of commercial power) is under 20 MW. To put that in perspective, the tiny Cayman Islands with a population of 60,000 uses 104 MW at peak. A medium to large sized US utility may have 30,000 MW under management. The island of Jamaica consumes about 600 MW for 4 million people. What's more, the sea is 5/6 of the planet.My conclusion: Make power from the sea, or you will die by land-based carbon. There is only one system for centralized power development at sea--OTEC. Further, wind, tide and current systems are variable with conditions.
If I had to bet now, the future of power involves making large amounts of hydrogen in geo and ocean thermal production sites and then distributing energy to land-based hydro plants as they are building in Finland. These are efficient, relatively small, and can drive consistent electrical production at the scales necessary to have an electrically rich world with 8-9 billion people. They can also be used to make and transport the necessary ammonia to fuel such an economy with food.The question is one of here to there. I don't know the answer to that, but I'd bet it involves public/corporate partnerships. It would be nice to see open modes of research and understanding used, but that will only occur if civil society gets involved rapidly and protectively to assure that developing nations have access to OTEC. My own view is that the nations that control OTEC/hydrogen/Ammonia will be the Arabia's of the future.[Michel, I'd prefer these ideas not be blogged without significant editing]Ryan Lanham
Capital and Class special issue 2009 on Peer to Peer Production:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/parallel-visions-of-peer-production/2009/03/13
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/category/cognitive-capitalism
Manchester Film Cooperative: http://www.manchesterfilm.coop/
--
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net - http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN, http://www.shiftn.com/
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Michel Bauwens
Let's focus on renewables and not be sidetracked,
Michel
Michel:The US is a fair model of a future world:Transportation will decrease, but it will not remain carbon-based. The only serious alternative is electric. Hydrogen will be a chunk, but not much. Hybrid is a transition technology.Local consumers in most places cannot access wind or solar in reasonable quantities to make personal production realistic or economical.I think small solar is a 3% at best sort of solution. Centralized solar turning turbines with hot air, etc. is more realistic. Centralized power is needed for industry and transportation and those aren't going away. Yes, there will be efficiencies and savings, but there will also be growth. People in the undeveloped world are not going to agree to be poor while the West gets to be rich with lights, heat/AC, mobility, shipping, intensive mining and mineral use, etc.Nuclear has a huge future role. It has to. People who argue otherwise are simply hurting the planet--killing it. We need power. Nuclear is going to be the main source (period.) We should fight to minimize it wherever we can, but it is the main source.We need mostly decentralized medium scale distribution grids with medium scale production resources that are sustainable and non-carbon. That means hydrogen to me. Ocean energy can aid, but it isn't a real answer so far. OTEC is the obvious vehicle to hydrogen--as is geo-thermal. Iceland will be rich one day when it uses its geo-thermal assets to make liquid hydrogen and ship it around the world to hydro plants that fuel small and medium sized coastal developments. Everyone can be rich by building and deploying deep ocean OTEC. The Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, Nigeria, Ethiopia/Somalia, India, Central America, the Caribbean--all obvious winners with OTEC/hydrogen.It has been positively criminal that hydrogen and means of production haven't been pushed forward more vigorously. Solar I see as a non-starter that will be a minor player--it is too small to produce hydrogen and it is too variable to be a realistic developed power source on its own. The sun is the answer, but you need energy storage--warm water gives you that...and we've got plenty of it.Ryan
Stan Rhodes
All modern reactors use a passively safe fuel setup, for obvious reasons. Here's a bit about the IFR project, and how they ran a coolant test before Chernobyl had a cooling catastrophe:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Loans are not subsidies, but as with any lobby, there's plenty of chance for sweet deals. All industries are hyping themselves to get loans. At least nuclear has shown itself to be viable. Quite recently, "renewable" energy industries, along with nuclear, all came together to ask Obama to speed up loans: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/renewable-industries-ask-obama-to-speed-loan-guarantees/
Companies have been attempting to navigate the fear and red tape to find smaller solutions, too:
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/06/10/10greenwire-company-calls-new-small-nuclear-reactor-a-game-45123.html
The "40 years of uranium left" Tomas mentioned may be a fair guess (I honestly don't know--I've read similar numbers), but obviously there are a lot of variables. For example: are the countries with the reactors legally allowed to reprocess and use the U-235 fuel in question? If not, you throw away a lot of potential energy as waste. In the US, we don't reprocess fuel. Obviously, we should (the other nuclear powers do). 40 years reliable and powerful emission-free generation is wonderful compared to all other power sources right now.
Ryan's energy summary seems fair. I don't share Ryan's enthusiasm about OTEC, part because I only know the basics about it, and part because land is a much gentler mistress than sea. Regardless, unreasonable fear about nuclear power certainly qualifies as a pitfall of the past and the present, but I hope that pitfall does not remain.
-- Stan
Michel Bauwens
A buildup of nuclear plants could cost taxpayers billions of dollars and create more high-level atomic waste, said environmentalist Brent Blackwelder and Robert Alvarez, a former U.S. Energy Department official.
Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, said the U.S. already has enough trouble disposing of the highly toxic waste generated at nuclear plants.
He and Alvarez traveled from Washington to speak at USC as the debate over climate change heats up.
"The idea that this somehow might be a clean solution to global warming" is a misconception, Blackwelder said of nuclear energy. "They're going to have insurmountable problems with the waste. If you can't handle it now, how can you possibly launch forward like this?"
It's quicker to launch energy efficiency programs and develop alternative energy sources than to try to build a nuclear power plant, which can take years to receive environmental approvals, he told about 75 people at a forum at USC's Learning Center for Sustainable Futures.
With pollution from coal-fired power plants a major contributor to global climate change, utilities such as SCE&G and Duke Energy are studying whether to build more nuclear plants.
The South Carolina-owned Santee Cooper power company has been criticized heavily for attempting to build a new coal-burning plant in Florence County. Coal's impact on climate change has prompted some environmentalists to say they'll listen to arguments in favor of nuclear power.
But Blackwelder said South Carolina and other states could learn from aggressive efficiency programs that have made a difference in California. California residents use only about half the electricity per person, on average, that other Americans do, he said.
Changing light bulbs
Switching from a traditional light bulb to a compact fluorescent bulb can cut 70 percent of the electricity needed for the light, he said.
Utility company spokespeople say they're trying to be more efficient and find alternative energy sources, but it's hard to realize enough energy savings to offset the country's growing power demands.
"Absolutely these things help, but they won't get us where we need to go," said Theresa Pugh, director of environmental services for the American Public Power Association.
Nuclear, coal and hydro-power are the only proven sources to supply major amounts of electricity, some industry officials say.
Alvarez, a former senior Energy Department official, said the agency is wrongly pushing a plan to recycle used fuel to serve existing commercial nuclear reactors and new ones that would be built.
The program will produce dangerous amounts of radioactive cesium and strontium and cost as much as $500 billion, said Alvarez, who authored a study on reprocessing earlier this year. Two sites near Aiken and Barnwell are under consideration for a nuclear recycling plant.
"This shouldn't (use) a penny of taxpayer dollars," said Alvarez, who assessed the recycling program in a report earlier this year.
(http://a4nr.org/library/nuclearrenaissance/07.19.2007-thecolumbiastate)
Michel Bauwens
- http://www.stormsmith.nl/publications/secureenergy.pdf
- http://www.stormsmith.nl/publications/storm_Van_Leeuwen_presentation.pdf
rebuttal of the 'tobacco science' of the world nuclear industry: http://www.stormsmith.nl/report20050803/Rebuttal_WNA.pdf
Michel Bauwens
An excellent article on why nuclear energy is not the solution to
global warming OR the coming world energy crisis – from the Australian
Financial Review!
http://afr.com/articles/2005/06/23/1119321845502.html
Apparently the author of the article has a book coming out:
David Fleming's - "The Lean Economy"
Full reproduction at http://act-peakoil.org/pipermail/peakoil-announce/2005-June/000032.html
Eugen Leitl
>
> Stan, sorry, criticism of the nuclear industry is not ill-informed,
> and widely shared:
> A buildup of nuclear plants could cost taxpayers billions of dollars
> and create more high-level atomic waste, said environmentalist Brent
> Blackwelder and Robert Alvarez, a former U.S. Energy Department
> official.
Folks, please go easier on all that top-posting. I'm looking particularly
at Gmail users here.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style for what top-posting is
and why it's not a good idea. Trimming down posts when citing is also
de rigeur.
Nathan Cravens
The redesign of towns and cities can eliminate existing scarcities.
Agriculture
Abandoned bank buildings in large cities can be converted to indoor CSAs.
http://sweetwater-organic.com/blog/
http://www.csail.mit.edu/feature9
Just-in-time Instruction
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Ownership without Property
So if we assume markets will no longer exist, including for land, how then can individuals not become tyrannized by "the mob?"
Choose an endless variety of templates and design and build your house wherever space is available. Ecological consideration is a given. You can stay at your place for as long as you want as privately as you want.
--
Nathan Cravens
Effortless Economy
Stan Rhodes
The question facing the world: what current technology can replace existing fossil fuel electricity generation WITH similar production capacity AND fuel cost BUT with a lower life cycle emission of CO2?
In certain situations, geothermal, or hydroelectric, or OTEC can do this. In most cases they can't, and fossil fuels are used. Nuclear was never claimed to be a flawless solution, but is superior to all existing solutions for MWe generation because it can match the capacity and cost of fossil fuels, but beat the emissions.
Whether people like it or not, that's the reality of power consumption and needs: it boils down to fossil fuels vs nuclear for the majority of the world's power generation.
Solid waste is a consideration too: radioactive solid waste created by a nuclear plant producing 1k MWe is less than a natural gas, oil, or coal plant of the same output. Compare: natural gas, at 200k tons, nuclear at about 850 tons. 30 of those tons are spent fuel, and highly radioactive, but can be reprocessed.
Even if we couldn't reprocess that fuel, nuclear still wins the comparison with fossil fuels. Arguments about the dangers of waste miss the point: we only need something better than fossil fuels, and there is no other contender. Thankfully, the safety record of nuclear is so much better than fossil fuels, there's no argument there anyway. I'm all for nuclear watchdogs, standards, and individuals looking out for safety. Industries need precisely that sort of thing to help keep them honest and safe, but pro-safety is not the same as anti-nuclear. As a side note, the "where to bury waste" has always been a false dilemma. Why not create a few research facilities to monitor the waste while pursuing better disposal options?
As Ryan said, ruling out nuclear is impossible. I don't know what he means by "minimize," because right now, if the world doesn't get the power from nuclear, it will use fossil fuels. Until we develop a replacement for nuclear that fits the criteria previously mentioned, we must use it.
To clarify my position on a few points without being exhaustive, I offer the following:
1) Research into other technologies should be continued;
2) OTEC seems to be a solid choice for most islands near the equator (after a bit more research, I'm impressed by it);
3) Wind is lousy because of highly variable generation capacity (like solar), and the huge concrete foundations that must be sunk for the towers.
4) Where heat capture can be used, it should be, such as homes (in the north, at least) with south-facing windows, supplemental solar hot-water heating, etc;
5) Small-scale solar is the only viable option I know of to empower "low watt" poor, and is useful in other low watt applications.
-- Stan
Paul D. Fernhout
"The need for better analysis tools (was Re: Addressing Post-Scarcity Pitfalls)"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/5840a32197ad64a4?hl=en#
IHMO, we need some sort of better software tool than email that you and
Michel and others could use to have this sort of discussion in a structured
way to make progress on it. We need something which can capture all the
"reality" details, all the assumptions, all the values, all the
perspectives, and let everyone get some sort of overview of the flow of the
debate (ideally, in a variety of ways including 3D graphics flyovers). It
still might not lead people to agree (because of differing values or
assumptions, as I mentioned in the other post), but it would at least allow
us to get more out of the energy put into such discussions, and to identify
key points of disagreement in a structured way.
I feel that if we looked at the details of manufacturing aspects of such
arguments for different paths to sustainability, across all sorts of issues,
we could do better than this already good result for structured arguments
from 1995:
"The impact of a structured-argument approach on group problem formulation"
http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Business-general/The-impact-of-a-structured-argument-approach-on-group-problem-formulation.html
"""
A study was conducted to compare two group problem formulation
methodologies. The structured argument approach involves formal reasoning
while the group process approach requires private idea generation before
public sharing and idea evaluation. Results showed that the use of the
structured argument approach was more time-consuming and did not result in
more information search and equivocality reduction in a group setting.
However, it improved coverage of critical issues and consensus on the issues
discussed. Moreover, the structured approach technique led to higher
satisfaction regarding problem definition and commitment to implementation.
"""
In the other post I mention NIST is starting work in this direction:
"NIST Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing"
http://www.nist.gov/mel/msid/dpg/slim.cfm
--Paul Fernhout
Stan Rhodes
Lovins establishes fossil fuels--particularly coal--as the fuel to beat at the very beginning of the interview. That may be the only valid point in the interview. He then claims that "efficiency" and "micropower" have been "whalloping" nuclear in the marketplace. Fortunately, I don't have to write much on this: these strange claims have already been debunked. The most well-known and well-researched criticism of Lovins' claims about nuclear and "micropower" is here:
http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2008/07/amory-lovins-and-his-nuclear-illusion.html
While that blog is decidedly and obviously pro-nuclear, Bradish's meticulous research in dissecting Lovins and Sheikh speaks for itself. If you want a "liberal-leaning" source, compare Bradish to NNadir at DailyKos, who has expert-level knowledge as well, but is far more snarky. You're better off with Bradish.
That's the long answer to your question. The short answer is, and always should be, "facts."
I don't share Ryan's sentiments about Lovins--I became more and more disappointed by Lovins' research as I dug into it and attempted to follow his reasoning and citations. He had no credibility after I finished Natural Capitalism, which I read upon recommendation, and wanted to like. The more I learned of economics, the worse I found the book, but questioning the material taught me a lot (as questioning usually does).
I agree with Ryan's response otherwise. When he says passive solar provides no energy, I believe he meant electricity (versus heat).
-- Stan
p.s. although I am part of the openmanufacturing googlegroup, the emails are not set to come to my box.
On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Nick Taylor <nick...@googlemail.com> wrote:
Whether people like it or not, that's the reality of power consumption and needs: it boils down to fossil fuels vs nuclear for the majority of the world's power generation.
Still, Amory Lovins appears to think otherwise
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WxreFrUHho
Any particular reason why the "reality of power consumption" that exists in your head is any more credible than that which exists in his?
Amory Lovins is a great man. One of the truly great energy minds. I think the reality of his statements are very much long term. In the short run, it is fossil versus nuclear. So pick your poison. One had better know clearly which to prefer. If you know and understand the issues...it isn't close. Nuclear is vastly superior.
Stan R
cross-posting but keep getting dragged into it. Time to kick myself--
repeatedly. Sorry folks.
-- Stan
On Jun 12, 5:37 am, "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernh...@kurtz-fernhout.com>
wrote:
Paul D. Fernhout
Stan-
At the risk of stirring up the debate again, here is something I wrote to
James P. Hogan (very pro-nuclear) on this issue in 2004. Essentially I was
raising the notion that nuclear energy is a post-scarcity technology, but it
is being wielded by people obsessed with scarcity (who are profit-driven or
political-power-driven or military-driven). Again, Einstein's quote: "The
release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...
the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had
known, I should have become a watchmaker."
My comments in 2004 (Chironia or Kronia are mythical post-scarcity
civilizations Hogan has written about):
========
"""
I don't want to alienate you, so I'm certainly willing to agree to disagree
(having read "Know Nukes" etc.); still, because I know you are an open
minded guy, here is why I disagree on the nuclear issue (in this social system).
At the start, I'd say I am a bit of an environmentalist (with an M.A.
[consulation prize] in Ecology/Evolution), although I'd certainly entertain
some seemingly off-the-wall notions like disposing of nuclear waste by
spreading it throughout environmentally sensitive areas -- given it would
keep the tourists out and the animals and plants and other creatures there
overall might do OK anyway. That approach seems to be working for areas
around nuclear facilities which, because of lack of hunting and habitat
destruction, are generally doing quite well biologically -- since for most
animal species habitat destruction is far worse problem than an increased
risk of cancer etc.. I knew someone who studied turtles around a nuclear
facility with some contamination over a decade ago and he thought they were
doing well IIRC. Still, for people, cancer risk might be evaluated quite
differently (although I read some rumblings now that elevated death rates
around Chernobyl might have more to do with stress than radiation); but
clearly there is an extent to which more radiation is good for you as the
body needs a certain level of challenge for optimal health. And certainly
there are many other cancer and health risks we gloss over in the USA (like
the US obesity epidemic or car crashes), so the radiation risk needs to be
compared to those.
If we were living in Chironia or Kronia, with personal responsibility and
organizational transparency, then I think nuclear power would probably be an
OK thing and not be too concerned about it (i.e. it was a risk but a well
managed one, like flying in an airplane). A decision on how to generate
power for various situations still might be subject perhaps to various
tradeoffs nuclear material handling risks vs. renewable risks (people
falling off roofs, etc.), considering in totality how the rest of the system
was set up. I would undoubtedly in that situation have a lot of faith in the
people doing that work. I would expect them to be very proud of their safety
record.
But, the issue is we are not yet there as a society. Today's nuclear
industry has a very specific track record of lies, deceit, safety
violations, murder of whistle blowers, government subsidies (direct and
through indemnification/insurance), corruption, close links to secretive
organizations, and insufficient attention to security against attacks. So, I
think any suggestion that could entail expanding the nuclear industry
as-it-actually-is is very problematical, because of these social problems.
Note, I am not saying the nuclear industry could not hypothetically be made
better technically (which I think is implicit in your arguments) especially
if it became more automated and used vastly better designs. My first big
science fair project decades ago was (intended as) a robotic radioactive
material transporter. I've also hung around Red Whittaker's robot lab which
made robots that went into Three Mile Island, and helped with one tiny
mockup of one (Workhorse, which became Rosie)
http://www.redzone.com/index.cfm?method=page.display&pagename=custom_Rosie
which helped get the contract as the TMI staff pushed the mockup around the
scale model they have of TMI to see everything it could reach.
Compare the use of robotics with using human "jumpers"; a family friend who
was a plumber was a jumper, working only a short time to fix a leaking pipe
spewing radioactive water, and he died of cancer (no proof they are
connected; but he is the only jumper I ever knew, and he made a big deal of
being sent home in a paper suit). I also knew a fellow student who
accidentally got a (likely) sterilizing dose of radiation in his late teens
around a nuclear facility (he was having kids by choice in part because of
risk of birth defects). So, the promise is there, but the practice is far
from it. Granted anecdotes don't build an airtight case; but all the
statistics and other stories I read about what actually happens to nuclear
workers sound fairly bad too. Often the nuclear industry is the only major
employer in a remote area which is just about a company town; the pressure
on workers to just go along with dangerous practices is enormous.
If you were to try to overhaul the nuclear industry so it worked socially
(as opposed to technically), I would feel it likely that by the time you are
through with it and worked out all the other implications to our society
(like doing things the long-term right way, not the shopkeeper short-term
cheapest way), such an effort would probably need to take us most of the way
to a Chironian/Kronian way of life.
So, on a practical basis, I think photovoltaics, superinsulation, and solar
hot water heating as they exist now (or soon) win out over nuclear power as
it exists now (or soon), because such renewable technology can pretty much
be more easily fitted into the existing way of life, and yet they still also
move us towards a more efficient and decentralized society. Overall, these
soft technologies just don't require the level of vigilance or trust or
centralization or security that hard nuclear does.
Just look at this web site (especially the news pages) to see the excitement
and momentum building day by day for PV especially:
http://www.solarbuzz.com/
That stuff isn't just hype -- look at the news there -- people are putting
in system after system all over the world (many subsidized it's true,
although oil and nukes are also subsidized), and the economics just keeps
getting better. Right now, state after state in the US and city after city
are all clamoring to become the leaders in producing renewable energy
technology (and are mostly all being surpassed by companies in Germany,
China, Japan, etc.).
Still, overall, nuclear materials most likely will prove less dangerous to
handle than advanced robotics, self-replicating nanotechnology, AIs, biotech
(like designer viruses for therapy), and so on for a variety of other
non-energy technologies. So if we can't as a society handle such materials
properly, then it does not bode well for handling any of these other issues
either. Or, in another's words:
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0629-09.htm
"Clearly, the history of nuclear energy — not just in the United States but
worldwide — demonstrates that the human race has not yet learned how to deal
with this incredible power and the waste it produces. We have left death and
destruction behind us every step of the way, from the mining of raw uranium,
to the manufacture of plutonium, to the assembly of weapons and reactors, to
the operation of the reactors, to the disposal of the waste they create. If
we humans had to pass a test, had to prove to some rational outside observer
that we deserve to be able to continue working with nuclear power, we would
fail utterly."
But I know you like to be optimistic, so let's hope we as a society can fix
the deeper problem of which all this is just a symptom.
"""
========
So again, the biggest issue is having post-scarcity technologies like
nuclear energy, biotech, robotics, AI, nanotech, and even bureaucracy, but
having them in the hands of people obsessed with scarcity. That is the core
problem. If you can solve that, then any sort of power generation might
work. But I have never once heard nuclear advocates (at least recently, now
that "too cheap to meter" is no longer mentioned) suggesting that to use
nuclear power safely we need to change our mindset about life and economics
and manufacturing and society and obligation to a post-scarcity model (broad
transparency in how decisions are mode, transcending the arms race to a
focus on global mutual security instead of national security through
dominance, basic income for everyone, a focus on pride in work rather than
profit, etc.).
But it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. If we had cheap power, then
many other aspects of our society would change. As I said above, I feel
solar and other renewables will get us much further down that path at lower
overall risk given where we are as a society, although eventually there may
be all sorts of reasons a post-scarcity society may (safely) use nuclear
processes. And nuclear processes are used routinely fairly safely in
medicine right now.
Although, even on that, we can see the US medical industry failing from a
scarcity mindset and how it approaches nuclear processes:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1264625&cid=28289379
"So now what we have is a system where it costs two weeks worth of pay for
the average American to get a single f---ing X-ray that department stores
were doing for free in the 60s. Of course I expect the expert opinion of the
doctor to cost some money, but its ridiculous. And one of the reasons is
because of this never ending war between doctors, lawsuits, and insurance
companies."
I was really surprised by that point, even though I had known about such
systems but not thought about it in this context, but it is true. X-ray
machines used to do things like look at foot bones to size shoes. Although
it was more the 1930s through 1950s:
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluor/shoe.htm
You might examine the history of those devices in getting a sense of how
risky radiation exposure was in real life (more a threat to the operator it
seems), although that still does not deal with the other (weapons, dirty
bombs, terrorism) aspects of the nuclear energy cycle, or related government
spin as scarcity obsessed people in the government or military suppress key
information:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=three+mile+island+cover+up
http://www.ncwarn.org/Programs/ReactorSafety/25YearsAfterThreeMileIsland.htm
One can even wonder how those shoe fitting devices relate to today's cancer
rates?
Still, more of today's cancer is no doubt from a post-scarcity food
production system being used by our scarcity-preoccupied metabolisms that
are still craving what once was rare (salt, fat, sugar, meat) instead of
what once was abundant (vegetables) but now makes up less and less of our diets.
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health &
Happiness"
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
But even there, profit-driven forces conspire to mislead the public about
key information (like "four food groups" or a "food pyramid" designed as
profit-making propaganda). For an alternative:
"Honest Food Guide"
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/
"""
The Honest Food Guide (HFG) is now available for downloading free of charge
and is:
* Free from the corruption and influence of various food industries
(dairy, beef, junk foods, etc.)
* Designed to benefit you, not Big Business
* Offers genuine nutritional information, not watered-down information
designed to boost the sale of milk, beef and grains
"""
Anyway, same as with saying we need better software tools to have these
discussions productively, I'm suggesting we need a better social
consciousness to use post-scarcity technologies safely and wisely and to
produce abundance for all. Nuclear energy has been a test case of
post-scarcity technology in use by our society, and so far, the results have
been very mixed.
I'm reminded of a visit my father and I went on to a Brookhaven National
Laboratories "Open House" when I was young in the late 1970s or so. There,
as a kid, I stared into a reactor cooling pool and saw the blue glow (and
wondered what would happen if someone jumped the short chain fence and went
swimming in it :-), and I saw a teleoperated robot arm used for handling
nuclear materials in a hot cell, and saw a lunar lander game played with a
joystick hooked up to a minicomputer (or mainframe?) with an oscilloscope
for output. So, I saw my future there in the 1970s. :-) I'm really sad that
nuclear power, for social reasons, has turned out to be such a downer.
In any case, we need to fix the social reasons, but that seems to be a
harder problem than the technical ones.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nuclear+battery
Even "treehugger" said this about nuclear batteries:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/05/betabatt.php
"Here is yet another new battery that has interesting possibilities and a
lot of possible problems: The beta-batt. Its developers combine radioactive
tritium with a porous silicon diode- the silicon semiconductor generates
electricity by absorbing the electrons generated by beta decay , just like a
solar cell generating electricity from incoming photons. The upside- a D
battery that lasts 20 years. Tritium emits only low energy beta particles
that cannot penetrate a piece of paper, let alone the battery casing. The
downside- it's made in nuclear reactors and someday will have to be disposed
of. Betabatt's website says its "Green and Safe- No harmful radiation,
leaching, or contamination". Green? that's a bit of a stretch. Safe? Maybe
we just have to think of it like we do about the polonium in our smoke
detector- The usefulness of the device outweighs our trepidation. "
And:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050514205902.htm
"The technology is geared toward applications where power is needed in
inaccessible places or under extreme conditions. Since the battery should be
able to run reliably for more than 10 years without recharge or replacement,
it would be perfect for medical devices like pacemakers, implanted
defibrillators, or other implanted devices that would otherwise require
surgery to replace or repair. Likewise, deep-space probes or deep-sea
sensors, which are beyond the reach of repair, also would benefit from such
technology."
Anyway, only now do I see the problem with nuclear is more social than
technological, because much of our technologies and how we use them flow
from our social assumptions about scarcity and abundance.
But we will face that challenge with all sorts of technologies:
"Researchers uncover how nanoparticles may damage lungs"
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/t344637-us-medicine-nanotechnology/
So, a common purpose you (Stan) and Michel can work together on is changing
the default assumption in our society from scarcity to abundance. If we do
that, all sorts of things become possible, and likely to happen in a safer
and happier way.
And, just to begin with, "open manufacturing" is part of the kind of social
transparency one would expect in a post-scarcity society. In that sense,
"open manufacturing" is mainly not about technology, it is more about
society. And that social focus remains true even if we talk about
alternative technologies or future technologies here too, or software
systems that might facilitate social transparency and cooperation in
relation to technology. In the end, it is the social transformation, the
change in the human heart that Einstein referenced, that will make all the
difference, and from that will flow the directed effort by a society to
remake itself in some new way with abundance for all in a variety of ways.
--Paul Fernhout
Vinay Gupta
Vinay Gupta
I agree, we should minimize nuclear. Ruling it out seems improbably...quite possibly impossible. I agree with Stan it is safe but I also agree accidents will likely happen. Waste is a major issue. There are no easy outs on this one.I think it is good for the radicals to protest and for the corporations to produce and self-regulate in the absence of government wisdom.I find hydroelectric extremely problematic as I do nuclear. I see no way around either of them. If the world drops in total joules produces, that drop will come with huge human suffering and much social collapse. It is not a time for theatrics left or right. Of course that is exactly when we get the most theatrics both left and right.Ryan Lanham
Vinay Gupta
Highly unlikely. I think something like .50 cents a kilowatt hour is more likely-and that would be cheap. The price is obviously set against the standard of nuclear which is almost universally given as 11 cents / kW-h. Coal is generally set a 5 cents.
The film plastics are going to have all sorts of problems--getting rid of them is one. Making them in scale is another. They will require glues and epoxies everywhere to be set down. More chemicals. More run off risks.
Anything under 25 cents a kW-h is attractive. So far, solar isn't close.
Nuclear would be about 3 cents a kW-h except for extremely high regulatory costs.
The simple truth is that all forms of solar decay in the sun. Plastic will decay too. Efficiencies will drop and radiation will play havoc with electronics. Solar isn't a very smart idea for large scale applications and it will wear out far too quickly for economical small scale applications. Plus you need weird chemicals.
Ryan
Vinay Gupta
Vinay:
Thanks, you are probably right that my solar data is 2-3 years old--the last time I had a real hard look.But I've also learned to not believe the marketing hype. I have a number of questions...1. MTBF (Mean time between failure)2. Lifecycle costs on a significant-sized installation -- say, 75 KWe.I'd also like to know how they are holding the films down, with what, and what they do with them when they are finished.Glad you are on it. I'd love to be a fan of active solar. As I said, the last I looked, it wasn't very exciting. Very small scale in very sunny places--probably yes. Else, not so much.Do please keep us informed of the data as it evolves.
Ryan
Paul D. Fernhout
> Normal solar panel manufacturing cost is $2.30 a watt.
>
> Nanosolar claim $0.30 a watt (and are retailing for $1 a watt in
> $1,000,000 quantities they say.)
>
> Konarka is claiming $0.10 a watt this year or next year.
>
> Dropping the price of solar seven to twenty times changes everything.
> Anybody who's interested in the future owes it to themselves to get
> oriented to this - it's the most important technological development
> since the invention of the transistor, really. It means that in the
> future - within one generation - electricity is going to be as
> information is now.
>
> Isn't that great news?
OK, here's my rant. :-)
Could not anybody who knew how to use a logarithmic slipstick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule
(or what are those modern things called, calculators? computers?) see this
price drop for solar coming, or seen it just even after scratching some
figures on the back of an envelope? Granted, you'd have to make some
assumptions -- or read "Home Power" magazine. :-)
http://www.homepower.com/home/
When we are talking about energy planning by our society over the next few
decades, and what should be related government policy, why should be let
people off the hook just because solar is an exponentially progressive
trend? "Oh, sorry about all the concrete we poured and the irradiated steam
turbines and the radioactive slag, and the centralization of political
power, and absorbing all the fiat dollar capital that could have gone to
other things..." People were saying this stuff about solar a decade ago (and
much longer before that). And a major investment in R&D would have made it
happen sooner, like Jimmy Carter started thirty years ago, and the Reagan
Revolution dismantled. (Granted, some of Carter's ideas were misguided.) But
instead, we have major wars over oil. And much money is still pouring into
subsidizing fossil fuel use and nuclear power (like the government
indemnification of current nuclear power plants, an insurance subsidy worth
many billions of US dollars annually).
I'm serious here -- should not most of the DOE energy analysts be asked to
take other jobs given the success of Nanosolar, just like most economists
should be asked to teach history given their missing the economic meltdown?
Or at least, should not the long term solar advocates be promoted? Instead,
the existing energy establishment just gets more political power because
energy is in turmoil. Same as all the bankers who helped cause the recent
economic crisis are being promoted as advisers to the current
administration. Where is the accountability?
Without assuming ill will or conflict-of-interest on the part of anyone
sincerely promoting a technology, here is one reason that such estimates are
often off. From Kurzweil:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0020.html
"""
Careful consideration of the pace of technology shows that the rate of
progress is not constant, but it is human nature to simply adapt to the
changing pace, so the intuitive view is that the pace will continue at the
current rate. Even for those of us who have lived through a sufficiently
long period of technological progress to experience how the pace increases
over time, our unexamined intuition nonetheless provides the impression that
progress changes at the rate that we have recently experienced. One reason
for this is that an exponential curve approximates a straight line when
viewed for a brief duration. So even though the rate of progress in the very
recent past (i.e., this past year) is far greater than it was 10 years ago
(let alone 100 or 1,000 years ago), our memories are nonetheless dominated
by our very recent experience. It is typical, therefore, that even
sophisticated commentators, when considering the future, extrapolate the
current pace of change over the next 10 years or 100 years to determine
their expectations. This is why I call this way of looking at the future the
"intuitive linear" view. But any serious consideration of the history of
technology shows that technological change is at least exponential, not
linear. There are a great many examples of this, of which the exponential
growth of computing is just one. One can examine data on a wide variety of
technologies, and on many different time scales, and see (at least) double
exponential growth described by what I call the "law of accelerating
returns." This observation does not rely on an assumption of the
continuation of Moore's Law, but is based on a rich model of diverse
technological processes. What it clearly shows is that technology advances
(at least) exponentially and has been doing so since the advent of evolution
on Earth. Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this "historical
exponential view" of technological progress and assume instead the
"intuitive linear view." That is why people tend to overestimate what can be
achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details),
but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because we ignore
the fact of exponential growth). This observation also applies to paradigm
shift rates, which are currently doubling (approximately) every decade. So,
technological progress in the 21st century will be equivalent to what would
require (at today's rate of progress) on the order of 20,000 years. In terms
of the growth of computing, the comparison is even more dramatic.
"""
I don't agree with everything Kurzweil says, even in there, but as a big
picture, there is a lot of truth to what he says there.
Now, with that said, nuclear energy is also progressing along the same
exponential curve that solar is. :-) Thus, we are seeing hints of things
like ever better "nuclear batteries" or community-scale nuclear reactors
that are claimed to work for many years with no maintenance.
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
"Who would have thought that the benefits of generating electricity from
huge nuclear power plants could ever be provided in a small, compact, energy
module that can be transported by truck, rail or ship to remote locations
wherever reliable electricity and heat for communities and industry is
needed? Now it is! Introducing the Hyperion Power Module (HPM)"
Again though, there is my caveat that nuclear power requires a post-scarcity
mindset to use without destroying ourselves.
But, to an extent, so does even solar power (to manage production and
recycling cleanly, and to use the power to life-affirming ends).
http://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Mirrors/Tzetzes.html
"When Marcellus withdrew them [his ships] a bow-shot, the old man
[Archimedes] constructed a kind of hexagonal mirror, and at an interval
proportionate to the size of the mirror he set similar small mirrors with
four edges, moved by links and by a form of hinge, and made it the centre of
the sun's beams--its noon-tide beam, whether in summer or in mid-winter.
Afterwards, when the beams were reflected in the mirror, a fearful kindling
of fire was raised in the ships, and at the distance of a bow-shot he turned
them into ashes. In this way did the old man prevail over Marcellus with his
weapons. "
Anyway, I still think we need better analysis tools to see the pros and cons
for different situations and given different values and priorities.
--Paul Fernhout
Michel Bauwens
I don't recall your exact words, but it boiled down to ''being misinformed', so I'm simply sending material that shows that eminent researchers, environmentalists and climate change researchers are quite in agreement and opposed to derailing progress towards renewable energy by using inefficient, uneconomical, and long term damaging nuclear energy (even more so than carbon).
Yours is a policy option that some people agree on, and others oppose, that is all I want to restore in this debate.
I don't have time to really explore the energy debate, when I did so years ago, nuclear was a very bad option; there are now new attempts to restore it as an option, but I don't really see what has changed to warrant this.
For me you need to do a lot more than:
- make us choose between the pest and the cholera
- replace the short term danger with a longer term danger (nuclear waste)
- acknowledging it needs huge subsidies in order to be economical
Apart from that, I remain open-minded, but sceptical.
The onus is on those that want to poison our planet for tens of thousands of years, and delay the transition to renewables by misguided investments in inefficient nuclear,
Michel
Kevin Carson
> Local consumers in most places cannot access wind or solar in reasonable
> quantities to make personal production realistic or economical.
>
> I think small solar is a 3% at best sort of solution. Centralized solar
> turning turbines with hot air, etc. is more realistic. Centralized power is
> needed for industry and transportation and those aren't going away. Yes,
> there will be efficiencies and savings, but there will also be growth.
> People in the undeveloped world are not going to agree to be poor while the
> West gets to be rich with lights, heat/AC, mobility, shipping, intensive
> mining and mineral use, etc.
>
> Nuclear has a huge future role. It has to. People who argue otherwise are
> simply hurting the planet--killing it. We need power. Nuclear is going to
> be the main source (period.) We should fight to minimize it wherever we
> can, but it is the main source.
I think far more important than the question of what energy sources
will replace fossil fuels as the primary means for supplying energy
demand, is the fact that energy demand itself doesn't have to be
constant. Far more important than either solar or nuclear, as a
source of "new" energy, is reduced demand. With relocalization of
most industrial logistic chains, the widespread use of passive solar
heating and cooling design, cogeneration with industrial waste heat,
and a return to walkable communities and public transit, we could
easily reduce total energy consumption by 80%.
--
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Bryan Bishop
Thanks Eugen. Here are some links that others can use to get up to
speed on posting style:
http://www.css-discuss.org/policies.html#policies
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
Nathan Cravens
Yet, it can be seen as a virtue when compared to the brick and mortar method.
However, I don't recall people at the post office spending hours on end in front of the mailbox.
With one addition.
Nathan
./.
Paul D. Fernhout
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Ryan Lanham<rlanh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Local consumers in most places cannot access wind or solar in reasonable
>> quantities to make personal production realistic or economical.
>>
>> I think small solar is a 3% at best sort of solution. Centralized solar
>> turning turbines with hot air, etc. is more realistic. Centralized power is
>> needed for industry and transportation and those aren't going away. Yes,
>> there will be efficiencies and savings, but there will also be growth.
>> People in the undeveloped world are not going to agree to be poor while the
>> West gets to be rich with lights, heat/AC, mobility, shipping, intensive
>> mining and mineral use, etc.
>>
>> Nuclear has a huge future role. It has to. People who argue otherwise are
>> simply hurting the planet--killing it. We need power. Nuclear is going to
>> be the main source (period.) We should fight to minimize it wherever we
>> can, but it is the main source.
>
> I think far more important than the question of what energy sources
> will replace fossil fuels as the primary means for supplying energy
> demand, is the fact that energy demand itself doesn't have to be
> constant. Far more important than either solar or nuclear, as a
> source of "new" energy, is reduced demand. With relocalization of
> most industrial logistic chains, the widespread use of passive solar
> heating and cooling design, cogeneration with industrial waste heat,
> and a return to walkable communities and public transit, we could
> easily reduce total energy consumption by 80%.
Kevin-
I agree with that idea. A lot. And there is also energy efficiency,
including reducing idle power consumption of devices. And then it goes
further if we had less advertising to convince us we need stuff we don't
really need (including voluntary simplicity, like by not having a TV to
advertise to you).
What I also find interesting is to see this thread and Ryan's comment in the
context of the one I just posted here about:
"Slashdot | Switching To Solar Power, One Year Later"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/dcaed2a0e486276d?hl=en
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/06/23/191230/Switching-To-Solar-Power-One-Year-Later
where just about everybody is agreeing that you can put solar panels on your
house to supply all your power and you more or less break even financially
in about ten or twenty years even *today* in many regions of the USA, and
here is someone who did it. Yet, we still have people spreading doom and
gloom about solar energy not being good enough, and thus we need nuclear
power, etc.. What will it take to convince people to look at what is
happening with solar? Though it is true that industrial process power is
generally cheaper than home power, but solar continues to drop in cost...
If even with an uneven playing field with fossil fuels and nuclear energy
receiving huge subsidies every year like tax preferences and military
research subsidies (or interventions) and government indemnification
insurance and having huge infrastructures with sunk costs to produce cheap
results, if even with all that, solar is starting to win economically at the
home level, what does that say about solar as a better solution? (Or about
other renewables like wind?)
Actually, at some point, local solar will cost less than maintaining the
grid to homes (one third to half the total cost of an electric bill in many
cases), and at that point, the local grid-based delivery system to homes
will be obsolete and unsupportable economically, even if centrally produced
power was *free*. That is the single biggest reason centralized nuclear
power may never be economical -- you might be able to make it cheap, but
maintaining the grid will always take a lot of effort (at least, as long as
much of it is above ground with trees falling on it and so on, and people do
the maintenance). Of course, even as solar power improves, so do aspects of
nuclear power, so there are changes on both sides. But I still feel solar is
a safer way to transition given our current scarcity-based political
ideologies that use post-scarcity technology to fight over scarcity issues.
--Paul Fernhout
Eugen Leitl
>
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Ryan Lanham<rlanh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Local consumers in most places cannot access wind or solar in reasonable
> > quantities to make personal production realistic or economical.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Wind doesn't scale well to small
installations. Solar collectors do very well in small installations,
and PV does very well across the entire scale. Wind is hypervariable,
solar is moderately to low variable. You still need to buffer for
diurnal occlusion as long as you don't have a global grid, or solar
power satellites in line of sight.
> > I think small solar is a 3% at best sort of solution. Centralized solar
Even current systems can easily produce excess, potentially considerable
excess for suburbia-like density in most locales.
> > turning turbines with hot air, etc. is more realistic. Centralized power is
Carnot is never a good idea.
> > needed for industry and transportation and those aren't going away. Yes,
Personal transportation is already included in residential PV, the needs
are negligible. Industry transportation and industry needs is industry's
own problem. They can buy power from small scale producers or large scale
producers, or build own facilities.
> > there will be efficiencies and savings, but there will also be growth.
> > People in the undeveloped world are not going to agree to be poor while the
> > West gets to be rich with lights, heat/AC, mobility, shipping, intensive
> > mining and mineral use, etc.
No disagreement there.
> > Nuclear has a huge future role. It has to. People who argue otherwise are
> > simply hurting the planet--killing it. We need power. Nuclear is going to
I disagree. There are multiple reasons why we should phase out old installations,
limit new installations until considerable R&D is sunk into novel reactor types
(unenrichened uranium and thorium in-situ breeders, in-situ fuel processing like
molten salt, etc). Even then, you would limit these to process heat and baseload,
and its fraction would asymptotically approach zero.
Meanwhile, we've got a bad case of zero-sum budget, and time is of essence. Frankly,
we no longer have time to fuck around. We've blown it in 1970s, now we need it yesteryear.
> > be the main source (period.) We should fight to minimize it wherever we
> > can, but it is the main source.
>
> I think far more important than the question of what energy sources
> will replace fossil fuels as the primary means for supplying energy
> demand, is the fact that energy demand itself doesn't have to be
> constant. Far more important than either solar or nuclear, as a
It can shrink considerably short-term, but it will grow long-term.
As a transhumanist, I think in terms of 4 MT/s matterenergy flux as
our mid-term limit to growth.
> source of "new" energy, is reduced demand. With relocalization of
> most industrial logistic chains, the widespread use of passive solar
> heating and cooling design, cogeneration with industrial waste heat,
> and a return to walkable communities and public transit, we could
> easily reduce total energy consumption by 80%.
That is very true. We can and must compensate a log of megawatts with negawatts.
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Smári McCarthy
Hash: SHA1
I prefer top-posting as this coincides with the way I read e-mail, which
is to say, from the top down. The beef should be at the top. When I have
to scroll down several pages in order to get to anything worthwhile, I'm
wasting my time, especially when, as is often the case, the thing you've
just scrolled down to is meaningless pith.
Also, top-posting makes it easier to do e-mail on the move, i.e. via
cellphone, as I often do. My e-mail related productivity is closely tied
to my use of public transport systems.
Bottom-posting is old fashioned and annoying, especially since threaded
e-mail allows context to be preserved by the software rather than by the
editor.
This is my final word on this subject, I shall not bother people with my
views on this again, granted that they show me the same decency.
- Smári
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Stan Rhodes
1) Negawatts are effectively nonsense because of the Jevons paradox. Bradish challenged Lovins to offer evidence against the Jevons paradox for power use, and it's never appeared. The same challenge goes for anyone mentioning negawatts. Increasing efficiency lowers relative cost but tends to increase consumption (rebound effect). It happens with coal, gasoline, and electricity, to name a few.
2) Your claims of current PV viability "across the scale" included no supporting data, and, having looked at the data for solar, I do not believe them. Solar cannot be used for baseload power, generally stated to be 30-40% of consumption over the year. Seems reasonable given use graphs I've seen. Solar generates very little power per sq km, and efficiency gains in the technology cannot make up for variable weather, which is a ceiling the technology can never break. Storage options attempt to get around this, but are incredibly expensive. The same applies to wind, although wind can produce more power per footprint (carbon or land) than solar.
3) Kevin's point on industry power stands. Industry power needs are everyone's problem. They're a part of the global socioeconomic system, and I see no evidence suggesting that will change in the years ahead.
Kevin:
Reduced demand cannot be achieved through efficiency. See above regarding negawatts. Crunch the numbers, look at the literature, particularly more recent discussions of the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate. Energy economists are trying to figure out what the hell to do without having efforts politically hamstrung.
Lately you've made increasingly extraordinary claims, which require extraordinary evidence. Where are the data supporting efficiency gains of 80%? Surely you can understand my skepticism, particularly when the statement is so general. Renovating cities isn't free: consider the power cost to do so in diesel alone. Even if the Jevons paradox somehow didn't apply, how much energy would be required to renovate US infrastructure to reduce consumption by 80%? Now consider material and labor costs. Now consider transaction costs of renegotiating property laws and rights, municipality by municipality.
The only solution direction I see is an increasing transition to taxing resource use, built into the socioeconomic system, and thus most of my research since mid-2008 has focused on mapping that concept space with the insights of behavioral economics. Governance structures must include mechanisms to adjust for these externalities, but when they do, they're likely to be out-competed by entities that ignore those mechanisms.
-- Stan
Vinay Gupta
Eugen Leitl
Ryan, please try to not top-post.
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 08:18:52PM -0500, Ryan Lanham wrote:
>
> I agree with Stan's research in principle. I would say that the
Unfortunately I missed Stan's email, because I killfiled him due
to deliberate top-posting.
> single greatest action humans could take to reduce power use is
> probably in the area of insulation.
In practice, there's a very large spread of insulation across the
industrial countries. Especially Japan and Germany lead here. The
real issue is ROI and EROI(E)I, which is a function of energy price,
culture, availability (zero-energy houses require special parts and
expertise), etc.
> The Jevons paradox, I think, can be overcome by public policy given
> sufficient education. People can choose to use less natural resources
In practice high, monotonously rising energy prices as well as taxation
and subsidies can be a powerful motivator.
> even though they have more transportation technology, for instance,
> because they understand the moral value of reallocation. Of course
> pressures to drill drill drill notwithstanding.
> I've never much believed in economic "laws." People can decide their
> fate and change their patterns--Jared Diamond's depressing research
> notwithstanding. If they cannot, discussions are pointless.
> I otherwise agree.
> Ryan
>
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Stan Rhodes
> <[1]stanle...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Eugen, three points:
> 1) Negawatts are effectively nonsense because of the Jevons
> paradox. Bradish challenged Lovins to offer evidence against the
Stan, your objection is effectively nonsense because energy saving measures
are quite popular in many countries, and objectively provide a saving
in comparison to those countries that don't. This is more than compensated
by the growth elsewhere, which I see as our challenge, duty and opportunity
to address.
If faced with peak resource, and especially rapidly falling ERO(E)I
the question is not how many extravagances we can afford, but just to stop
us from sliding into the past. Because we do, and our time to switch
to effectively infinite (~4 MT/s as compared to ~0.2 g/s matterenergy flux
we currently use) energy resources is rapidly running out.
> Jevons paradox for power use, and it's never appeared. The same
> challenge goes for anyone mentioning negawatts. Increasing
> efficiency lowers relative cost but tends to increase consumption
> (rebound effect). It happens with coal, gasoline, and electricity,
> to name a few.
Fossil are a limited resource, electrons are 100% recyclable.
> 2) Your claims of current PV viability "across the scale" included
> no supporting data, and, having looked at the data for solar, I do
Given some 0.2 harvest factor of Wp and panel prices of 1 USD/Wp and falling
I'm sure you can do the math.
> not believe them. Solar cannot be used for baseload power,
Terrestrial solar can't, in absence of buffers.
> generally stated to be 30-40% of consumption over the year. Seems
Baseline is some half to one third of daytime peak. Here's an incentive to
further lower it by dynamic electricity pricing.
> reasonable given use graphs I've seen. Solar generates very little
> power per sq km, and efficiency gains in the technology cannot make
Thermal collectors have an efficiency of >80%, or even >90%. They are readily
bufferable over diurnal cycles, and with enough ballast even seasonal cycles.
The solar constant is 1.4 kW/m^2. If this is little power to you, be my guest.
Current commercial PV has about 15-20% efficiency, which is a factor of 2-3
from crossover of residential electricity. Existing roofs alone can provide an
effective excess in residential areas. The question is of scaling existing
technology and introducing novel thin-film and power electronics to lower
the price.
> up for variable weather, which is a ceiling the technology can
The sun never stops shining. Above the clouds, or somewhere else.
> never break. Storage options attempt to get around this, but are
> incredibly expensive. The same applies to wind, although wind can
You see a problem, I see a challenge and a business opportunity.
> produce more power per footprint (carbon or land) than solar.
Wind (which is quite big where I sit) is a hypervariable resource,
and complementary in location and duration to PV and solar thermal.
> 3) Kevin's point on industry power stands. Industry power needs
> are everyone's problem. They're a part of the global socioeconomic
> system, and I see no evidence suggesting that will change in the
> years ahead.
If you see no evidence that the status quo will never change (the past
has proven you wrong already) I guess we'll just wait and see.
> Kevin:
> Reduced demand cannot be achieved through efficiency. See above
> regarding negawatts. Crunch the numbers, look at the literature,
> particularly more recent discussions of the Khazzoom-Brookes
> postulate. Energy economists are trying to figure out what the
> hell to do without having efforts politically hamstrung.
All energy saving in Germany has been driven by legislation and regulation.
If it doesn't work where you sit you must be doing something wrong.
> Lately you've made increasingly extraordinary claims, which require
> extraordinary evidence. Where are the data supporting efficiency
> gains of 80%? Surely you can understand my skepticism,
Solar thermal absorbers are 80-90%. Current top of the line PV is approaching
50%, and rectennas scaled into VIS/NIR range might reach 80%.
However, it's a red herring, since the issue is of ERO(E)I and ROI over
lifetime, installation grain cost, resource base and recycling rate.
The efficiency isn't really part of the equation. Plants do it quite
nicely with 0.5%-1% efficiency, and they manage to self-replicate
and suffer being harvested.
> particularly when the statement is so general. Renovating cities
> isn't free: consider the power cost to do so in diesel alone. Even
Legislation for new installations (roof alignment, inclination, solar thermal
designed-in) is effectively cost-free. If you're looking at diesel, then you
already know what you're doing wrong.
> if the Jevons paradox somehow didn't apply, how much energy would
> be required to renovate US infrastructure to reduce consumption by
US is not that important in the long run, so we should focus on new installations.
> 80%? Now consider material and labor costs. Now consider
Efficiency gains are only suitable until you start running into diminishing
returns. Clearly you must both conserve energy and move to renewable base.
> transaction costs of renegotiating property laws and rights,
> municipality by municipality.
Why should this be necessary? Zoning laws can be readily overruled.
> The only solution direction I see is an increasing transition to
> taxing resource use, built into the socioeconomic system, and thus
Some of us have been doing it for a long time. It really works.
> most of my research since mid-2008 has focused on mapping that
> concept space with the insights of behavioral economics.
> Governance structures must include mechanisms to adjust for these
> externalities, but when they do, they're likely to be out-competed
> by entities that ignore those mechanisms.
We're clearly already observing that process in action.
Smári McCarthy
Hash: SHA1
Eugen Leitl wrote:
> Unfortunately I missed Stan's email, because I killfiled him due
> to deliberate top-posting.
How unfortunate that you should miss part of the conversation because
you're not willing to get over yourself.
While you're busy killfiling people that you've deemed unworthy, the
conversation will continue.
- Smári
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Jordan Applewhite
> Unfortunately I missed Stan's email, because I killfiled him due
> to deliberate top-posting.
>>How unfortunate that you should miss part of the conversation because
>>you're not willing to get over yourself.
>>While you're busy killfiling people that you've deemed unworthy, the
>>conversation will continue.
One thing you all agree on: alternative energy sources matter.
There was a short post somewhere (sorry, can't remember the source) about how Americans, at least, prefer technological revolution to political revolution. Politicians react, technologists anticipate. It seems like this thread is arguing over the anticipated consequences of different types alt-energy approaches. Anticipating the behavior of populations is fuzzy science at best.
Instead of advocating for our favorite technology (even if it is awesome and misunderstood), what are some questions we could ask about the nature of post-scarcity electricity generation and usage?
--What are the merits of grids vs completely autonomous buidlings?
--If grids, what are the advantages and disadvantages of different scales of power grids (block, neighborhood, city, nationwide)?
--What are the advantages/disadvantages of localized power generation on different categories of devices?
Consumer America, at least, is very in tune with the commidification of "greenness" at the moment. If we can design machines or workflows that:
--capitalize on people's desire to be "green",
--are compatible with the existing infrastructure, but subvert it subtly,
--are a pleasure to use...
...then we can contribute concretely to advancement of post-scarcity economics.
I hope I didn't say anything flamey. Also, sorry if the discussion questions I posted have been discussed to death in the archives. I haven't had a chance to dig through them yet. I just want everyone to get along:)