100 Flower Power Maximum

I know Nick is loathe to visit the Daily Kos because of its Liberal Moonbat Wacko Fringoid tendencies, but the fact is (to use a popular Ruppertism) that Markos has assembled a wide range of diarists, commenters, and writers, admittedly from the Left side of the spectrum, but extremely intelligent and often with well-considered experience on any range of topics, as well as a wide range of opinions.

I often link to posts there by Darksyde, because the science content is often inspirational, and well-written, explaining some relatively complex concepts in clear, easily understandable prose.

Last week I linked to a post where Darksyde had described the sheer quantity of energy available from our little yellow sun, falling on the face of the planet; a miniscule percentage of the total output of the sun. Nick chimed in, wanting to modify my analogy (I admit my analogies need work) saying that actually using that energy was not such a straightforward thing.

But as this post by another writer at Kos indicates,sometimes it is. The writer is involved overseas with the development of windfarms, and the article is a very nice overview of the current state of the art and how it compares to other energy sources.

It evaluates the pros and cons, but also makes the point that costs for wind energy currently are roughly equal to the costs for energy from coal and gas (the chart included was created prior to the most recent energy increases).

Although the writer doesn't make the point, it feeds what I believe is the reality of our energy situation: The world is currently overly dependent on a single source of energy, and has ignored alternatives for too long, creating a near-crisis situation. The majority of geotechnical experts believe that we have passed Peak Oil, and analysts of the Middle East are convinced that almost all of the oil producing nations are already working their fields at or near capacity. Ultimately, relying on oil is a dead end, as it is a finite resource no matter what we do, and the increasing scarcity of the resource combined with rapidly increasing demand from China and India are going to create a crisis point sooner rather than later.

This is not a fairy-tale, so there is no 'silver bullet' solution. No single technology will ever provide the amount of energy a highly technical world will require.

Rather, the solution has to come from the intelligent marshalling of all the available factors in a way that maximizes the impact of the energy we do use.

Conservation will be a large component, especially initially. Because it's something we can do now. All the things we did in the 70s are still applicable: buying higher mileage cars, combining trips, carpooling, mass transit, and so on make such a huge difference because of the cumulative effect of hundreds of millions of people doing it.

Alternative and renewable energy sources. Ethanol is currently problematic, and hydrogen is far off, but wind power is available now. As are various sources of passive and active solar energy, that can be incorporated into buildings as well as used separately. Biofuels. Tidal and hydro. Geothermal heating has been used in buildings quite successfully.

In fact, as a construction professional, I can say that there are thousands of little items that can be done from a construction standpoint to save energy. These extend far beyond insulation and high efficiency HVAC. Renewal of existing buildings rather than landfilling the materials through demolition is an immense factor; primarily we take advantage of the huge amounts of energy represented by the existing building materials.

But beyond that, increasing usage of recycled materials, incorporating daylighting and passive solar heating, convective or natural cooling, using local sources of materials to minimize transportation costs, encouraging traditional forms of neighborhoods and urban infill to increase pedestrian-friendly environment and public transportation friendly development, specifying minimal packaging on materials to minimize landfilling (again).... there's a ton of things, and many of them are easy if we just want to do them.

Ultimately, development of new energy technology. Unfortunately, as the article above points out, much of the development and production of the current state of the art in many of these techs is developing outside of the US. Much of the blame for this can be laid directly at the feet of George Bush and his partners in the administration, due to their craven links to the oil industry. They have reduced funding for development of alternative energy in favor of tax cuts for the oil industry, already awash in profits, claiming to be encouraging development of new oil sources. But as I said above, Oil is a finite resource and there's no way we can create more by giving money away to Exxon. It is nigh-criminal behavior to auction our country's energy future to the oil lobby when the rest of the world is quite obviously preparing for a future with reduced oil availability.

wil Wright, who developed the famous game SimCity, did another game some years ago called SimEarth. In it, you developed a planet through geological time, the development of life, and evolution of plants and animals. (Obviously, not a game that appealed to evangelicals). But the goal of the game was to develop the intelligence of one of the animal species to the point where they could invent renewable energy sources and begin to migrate off-planet. The difficulty was that there would be a finite amount of oil and coal available to develop these technologies, and you had to get to them before you ran out of non-renewable energy sources and the social structures collapsed and regressed. You had to select how much energy to devote to various aspects of the society, and one of the worst things you could do was waste energy on war, diverting it from development of science and medicine.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it.