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Old 03-18-12, 10:16 PM   #21
roflwaffle
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Originally Posted by AlanE View Post
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.

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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.

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Old 03-19-12, 01:04 AM   #22
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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.
AlanE,

Although I put a couple of links to the Hirsch Report inside a response to Xringer, it was actually meant for you to read, as I know that Xringer won't read anything difficult.

I really think that you need to update the base of information you are using. Your thinking was dated, even in 1950's... things are much more serious now.

The Hirsch Report is a good place to start.

Your tax dollars paid for the report, so you might as well read it.

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Old 03-19-12, 01:17 AM   #23
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"Perform a thought experiment". Don't have to. I just watch the news.

If gas gets up to 6 or 8 bucks a gallon, those folks that drive 100 miles
a day back and forth to work, might be in serious trouble.
In the UK, we are already paying $9.20 for petrol and $10 for diesel. Thats why I use waste vegetable oil, otherwise I couldn't afford to go to work. I average 30,000 miles a year, as I am an Electrical Engineer and work mostly in the 200 mile radius of london. At least on wvo, when I do pay for it, it is only $2 a gallon.

Energy prices are astronomical. Typically people spend $3000 per year on electric and gas, and our climate is typically -5C for very short periods, up to 28C in summer.

Lifestyles have changed a lot. We now get pizza from the local store for $5, instead of ordering it in for $40. Get 3 dvds a month from 'lovefilm.com' for $10, instead of 3 visits for 2 people to the cinema at $100.
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Old 03-19-12, 01:59 AM   #24
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It's not faith, just basic logic. We must have a global AE system at some point because fossil fuels are finite.
There's an alternative (pun!) to covering growing global energy needs: Reducing those needs. And I don't mean just increasing efficiency, which should be done anyway. Smaller energy demand = easier to produce/store with what we have at hand. Yes, it will probably mean that the economy will stop growing, or will even shrink, but must the economy always grow? Why? Is that an axiom? Humans have had the bigger, better, faster, more! philosophy since they left the African savannas, and that's what is behind many of today's problems - the need for even more of everything (money, power, people, energy, pollution, etc.).
My rant is getting OT, sorry.
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Old 03-19-12, 02:23 AM   #25
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It's not faith, just basic logic. We must have a global AE system at some point because fossil fuels are finite.
This too is a faith based response but it's dressed up as logic. Religious scholars through out history are very good at doing this and it's entirely legitimate to create a logical argument based on an unquestioned, and unquestionable, axiom.

Your argument doesn't work though because the end point is simply that some alternative to fossil fuels must be in place at the time that fossil fuels become too expensive to use. This conclusion tells us nothing about the need to roll out antiquated and low energy density alternative energy systems as the replacements for fossil fuels. That's just religion talking. It's working from the unquestioned axiom that AE is the road to salvation.

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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.
Your reasoning can be mirrored in many forms. For instance, instead of rolling out bogus AE as a replacement for fossil fuel energy generation, the "need to do something today" could be used to limit the ability of environmentalists to use any electricity generated by fossil fuels and thus keep them off the internet. See, it's easy to concoct irrational schemes based on the need to "do something today."

The problem here, at the core, is that this religious movement is simply a manifestation of groups wanting to exert control over others. I don't see you writing that you and those who think like you should voluntarily deprive yourself of energy generation sourced from fossil fuels, instead I see you and your ilk advocating that the choices you favor should be imposed on everyone else and that everyone else should bear the expense of rolling out these subpar technologies so as to satisfy your religious need to have your cravings satisfied. This is like religious conservatives who advocate that the government needs to "do something" to enforce chastity while many engage in premarital sex or extramarital sex in their own lives. If someone believes in chastity, then they should live their lives according to that creed, similarly, if someone believes that energy from fossil fuels should be avoided then they should conduct their lives so that they consume no energy produced by fossil fuels. The fact that people don't often live their lives according to the standards that they advocate be imposed on everyone tells me that they're more interested in the process of controlling other people's lives than they are in living true to what they preach.

Environmentalism is mostly a means of achieving the leftist desire to control people. This observation isn't uniquely derived by me, many have noticed this and hence the terms "watermelons" was coined - Green on the outside, Red on the inside. All of the "solutions" coincidently interject government control deeper into societies and all seem to redistribute wealth in one fashion or another. Green is just the tool to achieve the aims of the Reds.

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The externalized costs of fossil fuels for example are very high.
I agree with you. My suggestion to you is that you and your fellow travelers, abandon your current strategy of selling snake-oil designed to increase government control of people and instead focus on schemes which change the pricing models so that the externalized costs become internalized to the product and that government control is not expanded over people's freedoms as a result.

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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.
Sunk costs are a bogeyman. Sunk costs are immaterial to the decision that anyone faces. Lobbying is immaterial for that implies that there are subsidies or favors that are granted as a result of lobbying and that's clearly not the case with respect to any specific legislation or regulations in comparison to the alternative energy lobby, when it is quite clear that without lobbying and special favors from government (robbing Peter to pay Paul) that there would hardly be any alternative energy industry because it's product is not competitive in the market.

If you wish to make a case that the lobbying in question has nothing to do with legislation and is instead focused on foreign policy and our heavy involvement in the Middle East hellhole, then you have a very strong case. Those costs should be quantified and attached to the price of oil or alternatively we should completely reject any military involvement in the region and thus save hundreds of billions of dollars and allow the price of oil to reflect the cost of geopolitical uncertainty.

Do you see the difference in approach between you and me? You want to impose your vision on everyone but I'm willing to let the chips fall where they may by stripping geopolitical stability, bought with US taxpayer's dollars (and capital borrowed in the name of US taxpayers) from Middle Eastern oil and then allowing people (mighty big of me to allow people to make their own choices, huh?) to react to the new market conditions in the energy sector.
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Old 03-19-12, 02:35 AM   #26
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AlanE,

Although I put a couple of links to the Hirsch Report inside a response to Xringer, it was actually meant for you to read, as I know that Xringer won't read anything difficult.

I really think that you need to update the base of information you are using. Your thinking was dated, even in 1950's... things are much more serious now.

The Hirsch Report is a good place to start.

Your tax dollars paid for the report, so you might as well read it.

-AC_Hacker
I'm a big advocate of the scientific method, so you'll understand, I hope, that GIGO reports don't really float my boat. Hirsh made a prediction - peak oil will arrive before 2015, that is, aggregate oil production will peak in that year and thereafter decline. That's a testable prediction.

What Hirsch is doing is replaying the famous Simon-Ehrlich bet from the 80s.
Julian L. Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered in a famous wager in 1980, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. Simon had Ehrlich choose five commodity metals. Copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten were chosen and Simon bet that their prices would decrease, while Ehrlich bet they would increase.[note 1] Ehrlich ultimately lost the bet, and all five commodities that were selected as the basis for the wager continued to trend downward during the wager period.
Simon allowed Ehrlich to choose the commodities, he gave him free license to stack the bet in his favor and yet Simon prevailed.

Hirsch suffers from the same limitations on mental modeling that afflicted Ehrlich. Garbage-In ---> Garbage-Out reports do not carry any authoritative voice, they're just opinions. I can walk up to any drunk hobo on the street and ask him his opinion on subjects and they'd carry just as much authority as Hirsch's opinion on the future.

Now if Hirsch has accurately predicted a peak oil scenario for 2015, then his report gains some credibility and I'll give it attention because it has satisfied a key measure of the scientific method, it made a prediction based on a hypothesis and the prediction was tested and validated.
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Old 03-19-12, 02:40 AM   #27
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Tar sand bitumen is proof we have passed peak oil. Case closed.
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Old 03-19-12, 02:51 AM   #28
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There's an alternative (pun!) to covering growing global energy needs: Reducing those needs.
Exactly right. The MUST condition being invoked is just a furtherance of a particular religious viewpoint for there are other alternatives which invalidate the MUST condition.

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And I don't mean just increasing efficiency, which should be done anyway.
Do you travel anywhere for vacation or recreation? Are those valid reasons for using energy? Look, there is nothing holy about being energy efficient. There are reasons to be energy efficient but as with everything in life, there are trade-offs. Saving energy is not some holy gesture in and of itself. If saving energy was a holy effort then you and everyone else would never be permitted to squander energy by driving to visit a relative, by taking a train to go to the ocean shore, by going on a plane to visit a far off land for vacation or business, by eating oranges and bananas if one lived in Europe, for it takes energy to transport those fruits to people in Europe and for what, dietary variety, which isn't a matter of survival but rather is an activity which enhances quality of life, and thus not NECESSARY. There are trade-offs involved between using energy and saving energy. Being energy efficient is usually synonymous with spending more money to save energy. Sometimes there are better uses for people's money. Sometimes the future benefits, when discounted to the present, don't make the investment worthwhile. There is no universal answer here.

The best strategy is to make energy efficiency more cost effective than energy wastefulness. This dynamic is self-regulating in an environment of rising energy costs. People will act in their own self interest, rather than acting to advance an ideological position regarding the need to conserve energy simply for the sake of conserving energy.

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Yes, it will probably mean that the economy will stop growing, or will even shrink, but must the economy always grow?
You're a new parent, if I recall correctly, so what do you propose that your children do when they become adults in a world where the economy has not grown since they were born? To answer your question, no the economy doesn't always have to grow - we all saw what happens when economies around the world contract. People generally don't like to live through economic recessions and depressions.
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Old 03-19-12, 08:32 AM   #29
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I just looked at this mornings emails from EcoRenovator, and we are wasting out time on half-baked postings about whether energy alternatives and energy reductions are required when we know full well that they are, and essentially no postings on how we are developing our own alternatives and reductions.

The zombies are draining our creative energies.

Ignore zombies.

-AC
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Old 03-19-12, 05:31 PM   #30
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The zombies are draining our creative energies.

Ignore zombies.

-AC
Is that the same things as Savonarola screaming "Burn the heretics"?

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