Quote:
Originally Posted by AlanE
This is a religious statement. It simply takes an article of faith as given, we MUST have a global AE system, and then dispenses with any examination of WHY this must be so. God exists. Don't bother me with questions on whether God exists, for those questions are immaterial. One must live his life so that God is happy with one's conduct.
|
It's not faith, just basic logic. We must have a global AE system at some point because fossil fuels are finite. You could argue that we don't need something at this point, but the way oil and coal prices have increased over the past decade indicates that at least starting a global AE system would be a good idea.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AlanE
I know what you're trying to say but you're missing the mark. There is no Excess Energy in the world. All the energy that is produced is consumed. There is Excess Capacity to produce energy so that when energy is needed it can be made available. Secondly, it's not really capacity that drives society forward, it's the cost of energy. Perform a thought experiment - if energy prices were 600% higher than today but there were no shortages, how would the economy cope compared to a time when energy costs were only 20% of the costs of energy today? Your family budget would have to allocate 6x more for heating and transportation than you do today, so that money would have to be taken from other uses. The same with commerce, industry, and research - money spent on energy means that the money can't be spent elsewhere. Energy is a component in everything we use, so when the price of energy increases so too does the cost of everything we use. If you're a diabetic, the cost of your insulin and needles and cotton swabs and alcohol disinfectant will increase, so too will your cost to get yourself to the doctor, so too will your doctor's bills for he has to heat his office, drive to work, pay his nurses more, etc.
High energy costs depress economic activity and make life worse for people.
|
That's very true. The externalized costs of fossil fuels for example are very high. The impacts on health alone run into the
hundreds of billions. The externalized costs of securing middle east oil supplies puts those costs in the trillion dollar range. Who knows what the total costs of GCC will be decades from now.
Ideally we would be using whatever mix of energy sources has the lowest total cost, but because fossil fuels have established themselves, both in terms of sunk costs in infrastructure and sunk costs in terms of lobbying, we are overpaying for their externalized costs even if their up front costs are lower than AE sources.