Keith Henson wrote:
I am appalled (though not surprised) that people on this list who
"don't have any answers" suggest "it might just require the end of
wasteful materialism" and joke about soylent green.
I agree, how dare they! Except, I don't remember anyone saying that. I
remember some people suggesting alternate energy sources, I remember
someone talking about solar (I don't think that solar is feasible in the
short-term, which is why I support nuclear for the time being), I
remember myself saying Nuclear as it is a very viable, reliable source
of energy that produces 0 greenhouse gases. As far as I remember, no
one suggested "the end of wasteful materialism". I did suggest that we
may have to be a little more efficient about our energy use and make
some compromises (for the sake of humanity and the ecosystem), but I
never said that we must end materialism, and I certainly don't remember
anyone calling for the dying off of the population. *You* posted a link
to an article saying the population is going to die off, and almost
everyone who replied about it responded with skepticism, meaning we
don't believe it is going to happen. Maybe someone else said these
things you say are bing said and I skipped it though, because I don't
have a lot of time to read all this stuff, being employed as a research
assistant and working full time towards my Master's degree. Perhaps you
can quote the person or persons who said these things to refresh my memory?
Energy hungry synthetic nitrogen is the reason for something between
1/3 and 1/2 of crop yield. The ending of famines in Europe was the
result of railroads more than any other factor. This allowed grain to
be shipped from places with good crops to places where the crops had
failed. Railroads allowed cities to grow, and cities do far less
ecological damage than spread out humans.
The wording of this was just ambiguous enough to make me wonder what
exactly you are saying I had to read this several times before I
understood what you were saying. Yes, Ammonium Nitrate is used as a
chemical fertilizers and helps crops to grow. I've heard claims that if
we didn't have chemical fertilizers like Ammonium Nitrate, we would not
have enough food to feed even half the globe's current population. I
won't bother countering with tired old arguments I've used before like
the majority of American crops are used to feed livestock, not people.
What I will say is this: yes, current methods in Ammonium Nitrate
production require lots of energy (specifically producing anhydrous
ammonia for the chemical reaction), but more efficient methods are being
explored and as the production reaction is an exothermic one, methods of
capturing and using that heat energy are being explored. More to the
point though, all this means is that we need energy to produce it.
Nothing says that that energy has to come from coal, it can just as
easily come from nuclear power, solar power, wind power. If we shift
away from fossil fuels and towards another primary power source, that
won't stop the production of Ammonium Nitrate.
The article I wrote for the oil drum,
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5485 got a lot of these comments, so
many that another blog picked up on the discussion:
"If you take a few minutes to read this blog, and again the comments,
you find the dissonance on full display. On the one hand you have a
person saying that there may be an energy answer after fossil fuels.
On the other hand you have lots of people not only saying it is not
possible, but directly arguing that a human die-back is more desirable
than cheap energy."
Nuclear power is just as cheap as coal. Moreover, renewable sources
like wind and solar require large up-front investments, but in the long
term average out to about the same cost as coal because once it is
there, all you have to do is maintain it, you don't need to keep digging
for more fuel for it. If you think so little of the people on this list
as to equate them with typical blog posters, then why are you here?
Learn quickly, straw men arguments don't go well on this list. If I had
to estimate, I would say that the *average* IQ on the list is *at least*
1 standard deviation above the average. We aren't your everyday group
of people, so treating us like we aren't as smart as you:
"I could go into detail including the economic models, but I don't know
if there is anyone on this list who can follow the physics, chemistry
and math."
or setting up straw men to knock down is not going to convince a one of
us. Most of us are in science related fields and almost all are
card-carrying skeptics, and as any good scientist/skeptic knows:
extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You claim that
without exploiting more coal power our entire country will fall into the
crapper and 6/7ths of the worlds population is going to die as a result,
that's a pretty extraordinary claim, prove it with real science, not
blog posts by people willing to use preliminary and overgeneralized data
to back their claims.
Before you mention it again in reply, sorry I didn't ask for a copy of
your 14 page paper. It sounds interesting and I am interested in how a
spaced based solar system can be more economically viable than a ground
based one, and I am very curious about how the system will work at peak
efficiency if it has to direct a beam to a ground based station through
the planet's Ionosphere and Ozone Layer without the majority of the beam
being dispersed or absorbed. IIRC, It is feasible to get around those
problems if you use a low frequency, high-wavelength beam, but that
would be more subject to refraction in the atmosphere and would be
blocked by cloud cover. I haven't done the research that you have and
that isn't my area of expertise, so if there is a way around these
problems, I would love to learn about it. I am busy studying about
performance tuning large scale computing systems so that they perform
faster and more efficiently. If the offer still stands, I may ask for a
copy in May or June when I will have slightly more free time (I'll still
be assisting in research, but I won't be attending classes then).
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