Some lengthy thoughts and suggestions from Steve Hayward. I particularly liked this:
The climate campaign’s monomania for near-term suppression of greenhouse gas emissions through cap and trade or carbon taxes or similar means is the single largest environmental policy mistake of the last generation. The way to reduce carbon emissions is not to make carbon-based energy more expensive, but rather make low- and non-carbon energy cheaper at a large scale, so the whole world can adopt it, not just rich nations. This is a massive innovation problem, but you can’t promote energy innovation by economically ruinous taxes and regulation. We didn’t get the railroad by making horse-drawn wagons more expensive; we didn’t get the automobile by taxing the railroads; we didn’t get the desktop computer revolution by taxing typewriters, slide-rules, and file cabinets. It is time to stop ending the charade that we can enact shell game policies like cap and trade that will do nothing to actually solve the problem, but only increase the price of energy and slow down our already strangled economy. I support sensible efforts for government to promote energy technology breakthroughs, but am against subsidizing uncompetitive technologies.
Bjorn Lombog’s Cool It is a good source of common sense on this as well.
= thorium test reactor program.
++ to K.
And use military bases to remove it from DoE’s jurisdiction if need be.
No, we got railroads by governments giving the railroad companies land and loans to build railroads. Cars went from a novelty to a necessity because we built free hard-surface roads with taxpayer money. We’re having this conversation on a network designed and built by the Federal government.
Well, Gerrib, the power lines are already built, but thanks for playing.
Actually, government involvement nearly aborted America’s first railroad, as the city and state appointed directors were in direct conflict with the directors elected by the 20,000 shareholders who’d put up $5 million for the project. Due to government interference it took years to turn a profit and start paying dividends.
“policies like cap and trade that will do nothing to actually solve the problem”
There isn’t any problem to solve, the Earth is doing what it’s done for billions of years.
Your a loony, Chris. Railroads were built with private investment capital, which is how bankers like JP Morgan got rich. They were certainly invented privately, inasmuch as the British Crown was at the time interested in subsidizing canals as the transportation tech of the future and had no interest in the phantasmagorical iron horse.
Hard-surfaced roads were generally built to accomodate foot and horse-drawn traffic long before automobiles came along. You’ll recall, perhaps, that even the Romans built hard-surfaced roads? If you refer to the Interstate Highway System, you’ll note that this was built in the 50s through 70s, a tad after the demise of the horse-drawn carriage, and that it was built entirely with taxes on gasoline, not general tax revenue. (If you want to subsidize solar cell research with a tax on solar cells, be my guest.)
Finally, the primary enabler of our conversation here is certainly not the Internet backbone and its protocols, which is about all you can argue the Feds paid for. Otherwise we could have had this conversation in 1970 or 1980, when those things already existed.
The first real enabler of our conversation is cheap desktop computers, the result of much private entrepreneurship from, e.g. the folks who founded Intel, Motorola, and Microsoft, so cheap that we can now each afford to have his own small computer to use as a communications terminal (a ludicrous underuse of its capabilities), instead of having to go to the central computing facility to hand in a bunch of punched cards and wait a week for output.
If the only computers around were still $40,000 workstations and $150,000 minicomputers, then this conversation wouldn’t be happening, Internet or no Internet.
The second important enabler of our conversation is cheap local access, which is in turn the result of the telcos laying copper and fiber to our door, and the cable TV companies laying coax to the same place. The government most certainly neither designed nor built those essential elements of the net, and if they hadn’t been there already, we could only have this conversation when all of us were at some major research university or Fortune 500 company big enough to have its own dedicated phone lines laid to the backbone.
Cars went from a novelty to a necessity because we built free hard-surface roads with taxpayer money.
And Gerrib contradicts himself in the same sentence. In doing so, he (inadvertantly) illustrates this point: goods and services are not “free.” The question is the mechanism by which they are paid for.
The Interstate Highway System was a dual-use DoD/interstate commerce program, with the emphasis on DoD. It was designed first and foremost to provide a huge array of landing strips for our Air National Guard aircraft (and during the Cold War, deployments took place), and next to allow troop and supply movements around the U.S. in case of warfare on this continent. Eisenhower, for all his faults, knew from his WWII experience what would benefit defenders of the United States.
Commercial and private uses were secondary and fortuitous.
@Dave Cooper (quoting Chris G.): “‘Cars went from a novelty to a necessity because we built free hard-surface roads with taxpayer money.'”
But to liberals, “taxpayer money” = “free.”
Historical ignorance abounds. The US Congress created the Union Pacific Railway company and funded it with 30-year bonds to build the transcontinental railway.
If you read the history of the first auto to drive across the United States (in 1903) you’ll find that less than 150 miles (240 kilometers) of paved roads between coasts. Federal, state and local taxpayers built free (as opposed to toll) roads with taxpayer money to support the use of the automobile.
“Historical ignorance abounds. The US Congress created the
Union Pacific Railway companyCorporation for Public Broadcasting andfundedfunds it with 30-year bonds for $422 million a year to buildthe transcontinental railwaySesame Street.”FIFY, but still don’t know what point you are trying to make. Are you suggesting television didn’t exist or wouldn’t have expanded without the government?
Leland – no, what I am stating as fact is that railroads and automobiles recieved huge government subsidies. Those subsidies were critical in making them widely-used modes of transport. No subsidies, much slower growth of either mode of transport.
Some forms of technology need large subsidies (direct or indirect) to get off the ground. These are typically those with high capital costs and high infrastructure needs. A car’s not very useful if you have no roads to drive it on, and building roads isn’t a profitable thing to do.
Changing modes of energy is a technology with high capital costs and high infrastructure needs. Television isn’t, assuming one has an electrical grid to support it.
Chris, the transcontinental rail tie was widely recognized, even at the time, as a mere publicity stunt. The Apollo 11 of the 1860s, so to speak. The actual important widespread development of railroads was entirely in private hands (although it’s worth noting the immense value of rail transport was usefully demonstrated by the Civil War). You need to stop confusing Great Pyramid projects with genuine civil engineering.
Same thing with your cross-country drive. If you are going to be hugely impressed with the fact that governments paved existing roads when the total traffic became high enough to make ruts in the mud there’s not much help for you. Even today, you don’t pave roads just because they’re used by cars. Thousands of miles of Western roads are still dirt or gravel, because the traffic just isn’t high enough. By the same token, streets in Beacon Hill in Boston were paved in the 1820s, and not because they anticipated the horseless carriage 100 years later, but just because the traffic, in that case strictly foot and horse, justifies it.
The only clear historical case of government directly causing the construction of transportation systems for use by cars in particular is the Interstate Highway System.
Some forms of technology need large subsidies (direct or indirect) to get off the ground.
Now all you need to do is make the case why government has to provide the capital instead of voluntary organizations of individuals. Remember, the only difference between government and private firms is government can use force — the power of the gun and prison.
It is certainly not the case that only government can accumulate large amounts of capital (assuming it is given voluntarily), as is proved by the development and deployment of the cell phone system, the wired phone system that preceded it, the electrical generation and transmission system, satellite phone systems, the routine construction of $mutilbillion ocean liners, skyscrapers, ocean oil drilling platforms, and so on and so forth.
Indeed, why focus on roads as the sine qua non of widespread use of the automobile? What about the fuel recovery, refinement, and distribution system? What good is a car without gasoline to burn in it? Plus regularly-spaced gas stations that will let you refuel at your whim? (The experience of electric and fuel-cell car drivers should be illuminating.) And yet the entire oil discovery, extraction, refinement, and gasoline distribution system was built without a speck of government pump-priming.
You need to make the case why you need the power of the gun and prison to get new and obviously beneficial technology off the ground.
building roads isn’t a profitable thing to do.
Toll Roads existed long before the automobile or even the US. They are not usually profitable as a private entity when in competition against a freeway provided by the government.
Further, most early cars didn’t drive on paved roads. In fact, there are large areas in the United States in which roads are not paved. That’s not to say that paved roads are not better, but usually they are paved exactly because it is a more profitable thing to do.
Oh, and what Carl said.
The transcontinental railroad was but one example of many of government subsidies. The Federal government as well as state and local governments provided subsidies to rail for years before and after, including nationalizing the whole industry twice (WW1 and Conrail).
Nor did the government just pave existing roads – the whole concept of national highways (before WWII) was to build roads where none existed. Finally, in most places, unpaved roads are impassible in spring (mud) and winter (snow). Very few people buy a car to use half the time. The broader point about roads (rail or concrete) is that a positive feedback loop occurs. Build a road, get more traffic, more people want to use the road.
I used roads in my example because that’s what the article Rand cited used. We have subsidized other industries. The electric industry got subsidized (rural electrification, the TVA, Hoover Dam, nuclear power development) and rural telephone service piggybacked on that effort.
Satellite phones, like satellites in general, benefited from huge subsidies in the form of government paying for the development of rockets and related technology.
There is a consistent thread in where we give subsidies, namely, where incremental development won’t happen. Using the fuel example, we didn’t need to subsidize the development of gas stations because there was a cheap incremental path. Gas stations started out as hardware stores which had a barrel of gas out back – gas delivered by rail boxcar. Then, as more and more cars came into the area (driving on those newly-built and all-weather roads) selling gas and fixing cars became more of a business focus.
Rural electrification came about because, while it wasn’t profitable to run wires out into the country, selling the electricity was.
So why should government subsidize non-carbon energy? Because 1) the widespread infrastructure developments needed aren’t profitable and 2) the environmental costs of carbon-based energy aren’t factored into the price.
The Federal government as well as state and local governments provided subsidies to rail for years before and after, including nationalizing the whole industry twice (WW1 and Conrail).
Lessons (to be) Learned pull quote:
After World War II, the decline of railroads, especially in the Northeastern sector of U.S., was accelerated due to an increase in transport competition (mostly from trucking), excessive regulation and changing economic conditions. Competing modes of transportation received regular financial support from public funds, while railroads received larger doses of regulation. For example, public funds were used to construct the interstate highway system, airports and support facilities, and to improve inland waterways. But at the same time, railroads experienced increased competition and were still burdened by having to pay the entire cost of building, maintaining and replacing equipment and facilities, and having a regulatory price structure that prevented full cost recovery.
(read it all)
You can almost write a distopian novel about what happened. Government finances an interstate system of freeways that promotes an otherwise uneconomical mode of transporting goods. This results in a push to use more petroleum in inefficient manner. Decades later, instead of the government learning the lessons of messing with a free economy; we instead have a government trying to “right the wrong” by subsidizing… (cut to the chase)
High Speed Rail
Shorter Leland: “That airplane crashed. Therefore, we shouldn’t have airplanes.”
I have a better idea – let’s reverse the wrong of subsidizing energy-inefficient cars and subsidize energy-efficient trains.
This is all a long way from the initial point, which was trains and cars didn’t just spring forth but did get substancial government help.
No, a shorter Leland would be “Airplanes built from concrete and powered by gerbils never get off the ground, no matter how many times we redesign the struts and gearing — let’s reconsider the basic concept.”
Your problem, Chris, is you cannot point to a single clear example of pure government technological pump-priming that succeeded. Not one. Ever. Whereas it is possible to point to thousands and millions of cases where technology has been invented and widely adopted without government assistance, and in many cases in spite of government obstruction.
Please to name the massive programs of Federal and state subsidies for rail in the early 19th century, when the technology was developing, hmm? Subsidies for Amtrak or Conrail in the 20th century are in no sense subsidies to a developing industry (but rather to a senescent industry).
You won’t be able to, because at the time the steam locomotive was invented and got going, in the early 1800s, government was fixated on canals as the wonder tech of the future. Same problem with cars. When cars were being invented (in the 1880s) government was focussed on rail.
We can always count on government to be focussed like a laser on yesterday’s good ideas — after all, here in the era of air travel government is still focussed on passenger rail, and in the era of 4G wireless Internet and smartphones on broadband over power lines and other such mid-90s tech — and we can always count on its apologists (yourself) to look backward later and take credit for whatever happened coincidentally at the same time as government fiddled with this and that. You’re like a medieval doctor: Look! The patient got well after I bled him! Leeches must be good medicine!
Cause and effect, Chris. We need more than random coincidence. You need to show that all these modern technological wonders we have would not have ever arisen had the mighty and far-seeing government not stepped in. Good luck with that.
I suspect the real logic underlying your position is that, gee, tech X, which I think is purely brilliant, would get cheaper and better if money were thrown at it, and unfortunately not enough other people agree, so money isn’t being thrown at it voluntarily. We need government to make my God-damned short-sighted doofus neighbors throw some of their money at it. Why you think that should gather broad support I do not know. Because your idiot neighbors are too stupid to know your plan would take money for them to support ventures they, by definition, would not support voluntarily?
“Why you
thinkfeel that should gather broad support I do not know.”That might help Carl.
Carl – you’ve built a strawman and knocked him down quite convincingly. The argument is not inventing non-carbon energy, but making it broadly used. We have the alternative energy technology, be it nuclear or solar.
This is why the rail and road arguments are exactly on-point. Once private industry has produced a promising product, government steps in and provides the infrastructure to make that product widely used.
The simpilest way to make all of these existing technologies happen is to tax carbon-based energy. Then we let the market figure out which energy sources (and it will be different for different users) makes economic sense.
That’s silly, Chris. Your “alternative energy” technology is in no serious sense awaiting mere broad use. It needs some serious invention, at best, and at worst is indeed the equivalent of trying to build ariplanes out of concrete — simply stupid from the get-go.
Let’s run a few points by you:
(1) The bulk of the oil the US burns is consumed in transportation — to power cars, trucks, locomotives and airplanes — for the simple reason that when you are powering a mobile vehicle, stored energy-to-mass ratio is king, and the only way we know to store large amounts of energy in a small amount of mass is hydrocarbons. Batteries just don’t cut it, and aren’t likely to cut it within the next century, barring some miracle invention. The reason is exceedingly simple: batteries store energy via reversible electrochemical reaction of metals, and metals are heavy. That’s all there is to it. The lightest metal that exists is lithium, and we’ve already developed lithium batteries, and they’re not nearly good enough. Game over.
(2) It’s true we burn a lot of coal and natural gas to make electricity, and in principle some of that could be replaced by, say, nukes, just as the French do and the Chinese are starting to do. So what’s the hold up? Why, government interference, as it turns out: half a century of absurdly paranoid safety and liability standards. If a coal-fired plant were held to the same liability standards as a nuke — responsible for the lung cancer deaths traceable to fly ash, say, or acid-rain damage, or deaths of coal miners — they, too, would cost $40 billion apiece and take 40 years to build. So thanks for yet another example where well-meaning government action turns out to screw things up in actual application.
(3) Solar is a joke, except in niche applications in certain unusual climates. The current technology is ludicrously expensive. You might as well advocate for replacing a municipal water supply system with solid gold rain-catching buckets in everyone’s back yard. The rain is free, after all! Yes, but the bucket is very expensive. Collecting photons with ultrapure silicon wafers and complex electronics is crazy, the kind of thing you do on spacecraft or in Antarctica or Mars, where you have no other option.
If you really want to collect solar photons economically, use the original “solar cell” — the green leaf. Very cheap! Very efficient. And, conveniently, it stashes all the energy it collects in a handy-dandy liquifiable, safe, high energy-density storage medium which you already know how to exploit: hydrocarbons.
The simpilest way to make all of these existing technologies happen is to tax carbon-based energy.
Simple, yes. Also stupid. Because you are assuming you know the correct final answer: no combustion. But that’s completely brainless. Look around you. Are you not aware that every living thing on the planet is powered by combustion? You are powered by combustion: you burn glucose. Every animal and plant on the planet does, too. And the amount of CO2 emitted by this “natural” combustion completely dwarfs the amount emitted by coal-fired plants and cars.
So why isn’t it a problem? Because it’s a closed cycle, of course. The biosphere absorbs almost exactly as much CO2 as it emits, and the net change to atmospheric CO2 is zip to several decimal places.
Don’t you think it might be a lot smarter to learn from what Mother Nature has optimized over 600 million years of adaptation? If net CO2 rise bothers you, close the cycle. Pull more CO2 out of the atmosphere. But your short-sighted “carbon tax” policy would kill the possibilities there before any are explored. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
It’s as if you worked at McDonald’s flipping burgers and took a look at your monthly budget and noted it was going into the red and concluded the best choice was to reduce expenditure alone. Holy cow! Better stop spending money on shoes for the kids, move out of the house and into a cardboard box! Instead of thinking about getting a better job.
And this is all assuming arguendo CO2 rise is a serious, nay, existential threat, which in fact I find doubtful.
As usual, what Carl said (and Curt), and to add:
The argument is not inventing non-carbon energy, but making it broadly used. We have the alternative energy technology, be it nuclear
And you think the lack of more nuclear power plants is because:
A) As problems in the Middle East began to rise in the 1960’s and 1970’s, corporations found ever increasing oil prices to be cheaper than the nuclear plants they had designed and began building?
or
B) Leftist protestors made trumped up claims that use of nuclear energy would be extremely dangerous and therefore needed excessive regulation, which in turn drove up the price of building and operating nuclear power plants, making them economically unfeasible for corporations to invest?
Oh and shorter Leland: Government intervention in markets causes adverse affects. The only value is to award special interest at the cost of taxpayers. Government should have a role in prosecuting fraud and companies that create and don’t control hazards to employees and communities. Government shouldn’t be in the role of picking winners and losers in the market.
Carl Pham – the majority of carbon emissions are from power plants, not transportation. Solar includes wind (winds blow due to temperature differences) and your data is out of date – solar panel costs are falling through the floor.
Carl and Leland – bitching about what leftists did in the 1960s is all fine and dandy. How about considering what this “leftist” and the current “leftist” President want to do, namely open up nuclear?
and the current “leftist” President want to do, namely open up nuclear?
False. Two pieces in today’s wsj here and here. Kimberly Strassel is, as usual, excellent. Both behind paywall so (unless our host objects) I will post Ms. Strassel’s here:
“The Obama administration has shown a certain ruthless streak when it comes to getting what it wants. For its latest in brass-knuckle tactics, consider the ongoing fight over the proposed Yucca nuclear waste facility.
This tale begins in 2008, when candidate Obama was determined to win Nevada, a crucial electoral state. Catering to locals, Mr. Obama promised to kill plans—approved by Congress—to make the state’s Yucca Mountain the repository for spent nuclear fuel. He was backed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevadan who has made Yucca’s demise an overriding priority.
Shortly after inauguration, Messrs. Obama and Reid teamed up to elevate Gregory Jaczko to chair the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nation’s independent regulator. Mr. Jaczko was anything but a neutral designee, having served for years on the staffs of both Mr. Reid and Massachusetts’ antinuke Rep. Edward Markey. As a Reid adviser, Mr. Jaczko headed up opposition to Yucca. The clear intent in making him chairman was to ensure Yucca’s demise.
Toward that end, the Obama Department of Energy quickly filed a formal request with the NRC to revoke the license application for Yucca. A coalition of states and industry groups—drowning in spent fuel—then petitioned to prevent the department from doing so. The issue was thrown to a panel of NRC administrative judges. Much to the administration’s frustration, they ruled unanimously in June of last year that the Energy Department lacked the authority to “singlehandedly derail” a policy that had been directed by Congress.
Enter the brass knuckles.
The panel’s decision was appealed to the five-member NRC board. This was Mr. Jaczko’s moment to finally tank Yucca, only he ran into problems. While the board officially contains three Democrats and two Republicans, it has tended toward nonpartisanship and has in the past proved unwilling to overturn panel rulings. Worse for Mr. Jaczko, one of the board’s Democrats recused himself from the vote. A 2-2 board decision is not enough to override the judges’ verdict.
All four commissioners had voted by September of last year. Yet in an unprecedented display of political partisanship, Mr. Jaczko ultimately withdrew his vote, held open the process, and didn’t revote until just before the November election. Why? The chairman had obviously lost the vote and didn’t want the bad news hitting his former boss, Mr. Reid, before the polls closed in his hard-fought Nevada re-election. To this day, Mr. Jaczko has refused to close out the process and release the votes.
This latest foot-dragging appears related to the fact that the term of one of the Republicans on the board, William Ostendorff, expires in just a few weeks. Mr. Ostendorff has been renominated and boasts bipartisan support. Then again, should his term just happen to expire, Mr. Jaczko can hold a revote and potentially win on Yucca. And guess who gets to decide when Mr. Ostendorff’s nomination comes up for full Senate approval? Mr. Reid.
The Yucca vote is hardly the only place Mr. Jaczko has been abusing his “independent” authority on behalf of the president and Mr. Reid. NRC staff have for years been working on a critical Yucca safety report, which includes conclusions on whether Yucca can safely hold radioactive waste for up to a million years. Environmentalists have used the million-year unknown as their main argument against the site, and the findings are crucial.
The documents are finished, yet Mr. Jaczko has used every means to keep them secret. When the agency finally answered a Freedom of Information request to release the documents, it blacked out all the staff’s findings and conclusions on long-term safety.
Mr. Jazcko has been unilaterally closing down agency work on Yucca, even as the Energy Department’s actions remain in adjudication. He’s overridden fellow commissioners on Yucca decisions. He recently gave himself extraordinary emergency powers in the wake of the Japanese nuclear incident—without informing fellow commissioners or Congress. Mr. Jaczko has yet to make clear whether those powers are ongoing, when they will cease, or what actions he’s taken with them.
All of this has inspired a revolt among agency staff and commissioners, and it’s undermining the body’s other work. Only this week, the NRC’s inspector general finished an investigation into the chairman’s actions. Mr. Jaczko claims the report vindicates him (though he refuses to release the report). House Energy and Commerce Republicans have their own copy (which they intend to release), and they’ll be telling a starkly different story come Tuesday, when they hold a hearing on the report’s gory details.
Mr. Obama has every right to try to convince the legislative branch to change the directives of past bipartisan Congresses on Yucca. Instead, he and Mr. Reid have teamed up to install a regulator whose only mission is to abuse his independent agency’s authority and bypass Congress to accomplish a partisan political promise.”
the majority of carbon emissions are from power plants, not transportation.
Not quite. Let’s take a look at Table ES-3 of the executive summary of the EPA report here. Of the 5.2 Pg of US CO2 emission in 2009, the EPA estimates 58% came from combustion, and 57% of that was transportation. Electricity generation accounted for 41% of CO2 emission, which only modestly tops the 33% attributed to transportation combusion.
So you’re certainly right that electricity generation accounts for a bit more CO2 emission than transportation. But not much more. And if you’re trying to make a serious change in CO2 emission, you’re going to have to cope with transportation, and you’re screwed. Unless you want to return to a massively more inefficient economy, where there’s a lot less transportation, because it’s a lot more expensive. And that would be stupid, because a less efficient economy has far more per-capita CO2 emission.
(Then there’s the problem the hybrid/electric car people haven’t much touched on, which is transportation and storage of all this electric power with which they want to replace gasoline combustion. A single gas tanker truck can deliver about 1.05 TJ or 292,000 kWh of energy. There are thousands on the road. With what are you going to replace them? Giant transmission lines? You need to double the electricity distribution capacity of the country. Imagine the infrastructure (and environmental) costs. Then take a typical gas station, which stores 2-5 TJ of energy in its tanks. To store that much electricity you’d need 13,000+ tons of lead-acid batteries. Where will you get the lead? Imagine the recycling problem, and/or the toxicology problem. Existing mechanisms work only so long as the number of people driving hybrids or EVs remains miniscule.)
Basically without adding CO2 consumption to the mix, this is a problem without a solution, and the longer you go on deluding yourself otherwise, the harsher will be the final reckoning.
Solar includes wind (winds blow due to temperature differences) and your data is out of date – solar panel costs are falling through the floor.
Sorry, no. You’re just wrong. No plausible drop, now or in the future, in the cost of photovoltaics will make them competitive with combustion of hydrocarbons. How could it? You make photovoltaics the same way you make computer chips, more or less. In what fantasy world would it ever not cost a fortune to collect solar energy by laying out a giant area of ultrapure semiconductor? And wind is competitive with natural gas in very few places, and it doesn’t do squat to help with transportation. Plus once again we have a staggering storage and distribution problem.
You’re talking changes to very tiny sectors of the energy economy, and extrapolating them wildly. You need to look at the big picture, where energy really comes from, and the basic thermodynamic constraints on where it can come from, be stored, and distributed. Your outlook is just innumerate at this stage. It’s not a serious business plan. The fact that supposedly serious politicians nevertheless espouse it tells you more about the seriousness and honesty of politicians than anything about your actual energy-consuming future.
And I might add, what politicians have told you about the future price of housing, the outlook for employment and inflation, and the history of their accounting practices for Social Security and Medicare ought to have made you profoundly skeptical about what they say about energy and CO2 flux already.
Mr. Gerrib – You are quite right in that wind power is essentially solar. But that statement is not helping your case at all, because wind is even more expensive and unreliable than solar – here meaning ground solar.
Solar doesn’t work when it’s dark – doh! But wind doesn’t work when there is no wind. And it also doesn’t work when the wind is really strong, because strong winds break wind turbines so one has to shut them down. And for the watermelons amongst us, wind power is also environmentally disastrous – killing thousands of migratory birds and also bats.
I’ve said it before and will no doubt say it again: Assuming that government spending on energy is necessary at all, for Gaia’s sake spend the money on things that either will work or have a good chance of working. Tidal and wave power, algae biofuel, district heat and power, Polywell and focus fusion, OTEC. Stop spending cash on fuel ethanol, wind, ground solar and tokamak fusion. And start doing some serious work on the biggest grandaddy of them all, SPS.
Carl, just one thing: You are quite right about current-tech solar cells. However, as usual (not just for you) this is a failure-of-imagination problem. Cheap and reliable solar power generation is possible, using different tech – probably nanotech. For a proof-of-concept, if you have a garden look at it.
And if you don’t believe nanotech can work – consider the concept of a replicating swarm of nanoassemblers, working together, of which some replicate regularly as part of the swarm’s dynamics. Sounds impossible? Well, I can show you a working example. Try looking in the mirror.
Fletch, I mentioned that way above. The obvious solar collector is a genetically-engineer leaf. Or algae cell. The beauty of it — I mean, beyond the fact that they assemble themselves, as you put it, from dirt and water — is that they already stash the accumulated energy in hydrocarbons, which we already know how to transport, store and use very efficiently.
All we need to do is close the cycle, and teach green plants how to directly synthesize our gasoline from the air, instead of having to have it buried underground for 300 million years to slowly convert.
Carl, we already know that one too – if you are willing to use a diesel equivalent instead of gasoline. IIRC, some of the blue-green algae are something like 40% fatty acids by weight – and converting fats to diesel fuel is extremely cheap and simple. At a pinch, it is possible to use plant oils directly in a diesel engine (for a while) with no processing at all except filtering impurities.
This leads to one of the minor possibilities for saving on oil and on net CO2. Quite large amounts of liquid plant oils are used in industrial frying processes, and could be used as fuel – possibly with nothing more than filtering to remove solid impurities. A fair number of fish&chip shop owners in the UK are already doing it.
Strangely enough (or perhaps not strangely at all) one of the reasons for not doing it more is that it is actually illegal – because diesel fuel in the UK carries duty and using used chip fat is deemed to be evasion of customs duty. And unfortunately, it’s also easily detectable – the smell of burning chip fat is quite different from the reek of burning diesel.
Bureaucrats – don’t you love ’em?
Once again, it’s good to have you back, CP.