Posts by Rocketscience

'Turn to nuclear power to save planetary ecology from renewable BLIGHT'

Renewables are NOT a Blight, stupid thinking is.

I am fully in favor of pursuing safe nuclear energy to divert our course away from fossil fuels but let us not argue nonsense with regard to implementing renewable energy sources. Yes, it will cost lots in money and materials and have an initial substantial negative impact on CO2 levels; implementing any technology to offset the fossil beast will, in the near term. Frankly, I consider the argument being put forward against renewables because of their upfront cost is bad science and bad economics! The cost of doing nothing is even greater with no future benefit whatsoever (unless you are the next species waiting in line to do dumb things to your world). We, above all should not forget that the cost of implementing a fossil fuel economy has put us at this juncture in the first place and that cost is not small, or this would be a moot discussion...

What is most important is to implement technologies at a rate and in a manner where their impact can be OFFSET AS SOON AS POSSIBLE and almost all renewable technologies are capable of this. In fact it is important to note that all of the various technologies, wind, solar, geothermal, bio-energy and even hydro are continuously evolving at a rate far greater then seen in the fossil fuel world. Arguments against efficacy and effectiveness of renewables should account for this trend, not ignore it. Oh, and the fact is that storage technologies are catching up fast too, making renewables even more effective.

And the arguments put forward by many people (engineers and scientists who should know better, shame on them for being so blindsided) regarding the environmental impact of renewables is absurd. Those impacts are NOTHING compared to the impacts of oil, gas and coal on our world today. The simple fact is that all of these renewable technologies can be implemented on the existing footprint of current infrastructure in our cities and on our roads today. We do not need to use one square foot of new wilderness to develop the renewable resources to power tomorrow, we can easily make our current footprint do double (or treble) duty. As a bonus we get rid of some infrastructure that would no longer be needed to transport energy from far away to near at home. The real key is NOT to get locked into one technological solution, so we can evolve and improve continuously, rather than get locked into a singular paradigm, again.

I am beginning to see humanity's major obstacle is between it's ears...

Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers

Does Google know all?

I think the Google experts are missing the point on this one. Every source of energy we use is renewable including nuclear and yes, fossil fuels. Remember that fossil energy was not always here, it established over aeons and in fact this process continues today; peat bogs are a good example. Nuclear energy sources in the form of convertible fissile materials are constantly being created throughout the universe...the Big Bang was only the beginning. Geothermal energy generation, a product of gravity, pressure and radioactive decay is an ongoing process too. From the perspective of humanity and its relatively short place in history, all of these things along with wind, tidal and solar are "renewable". So the real effort should be directed towards effective and efficient use of every source of energy we have at our disposal. One thing is clear to me. We do not have an energy shortage, and never will.

What climate change is telling us to do is change our energy use to a more appropriate form and combination than we currently make use of. The facts are clear that we have become complacent in our use of energy and it is having an impact on the survival of our species, and many others besides.

The argument in favour of conservation should not be about reducing our standard of living but of improving how we achieve it. From my perspective I see that we may have already reached a plateau in energy consumption ( excluding the Internet...but that too will change). We are starting to use less energy per task than in the recent past, witness as an example, the surge in LED lighting, even though the lumen output we require is substantially the same. This incremental, and in some cases revolutionary, improvement can be applied across all activities and technologies. Yes there is a cost to this technology, but there was a cost to the current technology and it was not trivial; if it were the Google paper would be a moot argument.

The cool thing to contemplate is all the opportunity a renewables Renaissance represents...loads of it. Whereas, to yearn for a golden solution or to do nothing in the interim...no opportunity and no salvation exists down that road that I can see. So, you choose your future.