Actions from doug.blairMovable Type Pro 5.22012-11-09T13:39:12Zhttp://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=feed&_type=actions&blog_id=1&id=1289Commented on 2512 in Charlie's Diarytag:www.antipope.org,2012:/charlie/blog-static//1.3521#10657332012-11-09T13:39:12Zdoug.blair
@dirk.bruere: While the specifics of your post have some problems -- energy transportation is a big deal, 10x current world electricity production is not enough to sustain everybody at first-world levels, etc -- I'll accept the general point that the sun provides plenty of energy. That's not the problem. The problem is that building the systems to harness that is a civilization-scale -- or at least superpower nation scale -- task. Carbon energy is as cheap as it is ever going to be right now. As prices go up and economies start to complain about the cost of energy (and the general state of the economy), how do we get the political and financial resources lined up to build the infrastructure we need to survive?
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Commented on 2512 in Charlie's Diarytag:www.antipope.org,2012:/charlie/blog-static//1.3521#10656982012-11-09T12:40:13Zdoug.blair
Coal supplies are likely vastly overstated:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5256
And oil shale supplies are very uncertain:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9569
The pessimist in me thinks this is just enough carbon to fully cook us, and not enough to power us into something better.
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Commented on 2512 in Charlie's Diarytag:www.antipope.org,2012:/charlie/blog-static//1.3521#10656832012-11-09T12:21:47Zdoug.blair
I think energy scarcity is likely to be a larger problem than this (thoughtful) suggests. We've backed ourselves into a corner wrt energy supply; we don't have that much carbon left to burn (compared to our appetites), and replacement technologies will take decades to mature sufficiently to be applied at large scale. Given the economic crunch that will occur as carbon fuels dry up (cf various Arab/OPEC oil embargoes and the us economy), we're not going to have a lot of spare change around for the massive engineering needed to deploy civilization-scale energy systems.
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