Not to mention the damage all of this does to the environment. The amount of square footage required to be destroyed for wind-farms and solar arrays (at any scale) is undenialy an ecological disaster, not to mention the duplication of power-transfer infrastructure required to geographically disparate generation stations into major human cities.
[If you need citations for this, try hiking/walking through one of the many wind-farms in the SoCal Desert. Particulalry, the 2012 generation windfarms in th Mojave which are ~double the scale of earlier generations. Then imaging living next to something like this on a global scale. see also> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-th...]
Why would any square footage need to be destroyed? Have we run out of rooftops or deserts? And why do we never hear these arguments when it's about roads or more polluting plants and factories? If we're going to use space, we'd better us it for something that solves a problem than makes it worse.
Why would any square footage need to be destroyed? Have we run out of rooftops or deserts?
What on earth makes you think you are entitled to deface a desert landscape? Go take a look at the 395 corridor and look at what happened to owens valley. What do you think allows people to live in LA? Who the hell is polluting CA and driving 2-3 hours a day in their cars? Same people who destroyed the eastern escarpment. It's amusing listening to so-called "environmentalists" spew out such ignorance.
So it's okay to deface the entire rest of the country, but the desert is sacred? Or is your solution to abandon society, decimate the population, and go back to the caves?
There are good and bad ways to handle this. More pollution is a bad way, more solar is a good way. Nothing is 100% perfect, but continuing down a bad road because a significant improvement doesn't instantly solve all the world's problems, is downright stupid.
No, the people who defaced LA and Defaced the Owens valley now want to deface the Mojave. What is downright stupid is not doing the math on how you connect the dots.
One nit on LA: it was suffering from photochemical smog (I think that's the term) when white men arrived. Local geography and climate + lots of reactive hydrocarbons released by vegetation as a byproduct of photosynthesis.
Reagan wasn't off his rocker when he mentioned the contribution of trees to "pollution", and it's ironic that the easiest way for a lot of cities to meet EPA smog limits (which use an insane measure, not tolerating more than a few days per year of high levels of ozone) would be to cut down a lot of trees.
Heh, any worries the EPA would harass my home town were "solved" by an EF5 tornado in 2011....
Creosote is a form of ground cover, colloquially know as "scrub-brush".
Like many plants, it has active organic chemistry and was one used for medicinal and industrial uses. While creosote has been linked to naturally occuring compounds that "makes smog worse", to equate "chopping down trees" to managing "emissions" is pretty loose logic.
The relationship of man-made pollutants to smog is that the latter are not uniformly benign; local topography weather, and fora combine industrial air-borne pollution more problematic in some areas (LA) than others (eg SF).
In theory, if we paved over LA we could reduce the dust and the creosote and maybe reduce "smog", but again this is not environmentalism, but rather geo-engineering.
The cost isn't the problem (well, it's a problem, obviously, but it's not the main problem). Take a look at this chapter: http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml. The issue is the sheer size of the installations required to provide energy for a modern country. As he says in the book - to provide renewable energy for a country, you need country-sized installations to do so. In his examples, to provide energy for the UK you'd need installations approximately the size of Wales, if I remember correctly.
If you haven't read the book you really should do - it's truly excellent. He's not anti-solar or anti-renewable, in case you got that idea, but he forces the reader to be realistic about what switching to clean sources actually entails.
No, I didn't tell you that, although I suspect that for most of the world it's the only realistic short-term option. What I told you is that you should read that book, because it's an extremely interesting and balanced view on alternative energy, from someone who actually knows what he's talking about. He doesn't push a particular agenda or lead the reader to any particular conclusions, he just lays out what the implications of the various options are.
For example, for solar or wind to play a significant part in the UK's energy requirements would require the aforementioned country-sized installations. Do you think that the British people would be willing to accept 10% of the area of the country being totally dedicated to energy generation? How would they decide which 10% it should be? Do you think that they would accept tidal generators along the entirety of the coast of the UK? That's the order of magnitude that is required.
Additionally, since renewable resources tend to be variable, you need a storage mechanism. You either need a lot of hills to pump water up, or you need your entire population to be using electric cars and to have smart chargers that allow the grid to draw back from when required. Are these things possible? Absolutely they are. However MacKay leaves the reader to ponder how likely they are to happen in our current political environment, and I shall do the same.
Thanks for downvoting me every step of the way, or whoever that was.
If the costs are going down, it probably also means the panels are getting more efficient. Probably don't need to plaster Wales with solar panels. But in England it seems you wouldn't predominantly use primarily solar anyways, unless it got really good, so your example is kind of irrelevant. Wind and water-based renewable would work better.
I didn't downvote you. Did you read the chapter I linked to? I'm guessing not, because it contains answers to your implied questions. In particular, how England might use solar and the fact that the argument above applies equally to wind. I also gave an example from the book for tidal energy. If you took the time to read the book you'd learn that solar panels are actually not that far off their absolute theoretical efficiency, so we're never going to get another order of magnitude from them, or anything like it.
Basically, from here on in I'm just going to be regurgitating arguments from a book that apparently you don't care to read, so I'm just going to leave it there. If you're really interested and not just trolling, the answers are in there.
You're not being downvoted because your views are unpopular. You're being downvoted because your comments in this thread at least are basically content-free, and full of unsubstantiated assertions. You've refused to even look at the resource I provided, and have preferred to argue that things ...probably also mean... and the like with no evidence of any kind. You've attributed things to me that I didn't say. You've also repeatedly failed to address the fact that the main issues facing alternative energies are not technical, but political and social, and those haven't changed in the last 5 years nor are they likely to any time soon.
Basically, it seems like you're more interested in shouting from a soapbox than having any sort of argument, and HN frowns on that.
You don't think that renewable costs per watt plummeting towards coal/nat.gas. price is a significant part of the decision making? Politics get overridden by price at some point. You've failed to acknowledge that maybe a book on renewables from 5 years ago, focusing primarily on the technical side, might have some problems when so much has changed since that time.
My assertions aren't unsubstantiated, I linked to the them in my initial response.
Also, not all nuclear reactors must be of the currently most common (obsolete) design. We should invest more in MSR reactors that could generate power from the waste BWRs and PWRs leave.
Thorium, while no panacea, also should have a larger role in power generation.
The technologies you mentioned are not ready for prime time. A strong political push for nuclear power now will simply result in more of what you consider obsolete designs.
Meanwhile, renewable energy, already quite cheap, will continue to improve by leaps and bounds. Wasting a ton of money on nuclear now would slow the pace of this progress.
But since renewables are getting cheaper every year, market forces will probably make the proper choice anyways, unless lobbying gets out of hand.
Absolutely. To me, fighting over whether coal or nuclear is worse, is like fighting over whether Hitler or Stalin was worse. We need to get rid of both, although coal is definitely a lot more urgent.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/rising-sun
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/opinion/krugman-salvation-...
Not to mention any number of other renewables (wind, wave, tidal, thermal, etc...)