[orz]

This thread has evolved into a "don't rain on my parade with reality" rant.

I agree completely.

[Dezakin]

Overshoot is not just a function of not enough energy. Carrying capacity is determined by the least abundant necessity. Liebig's Law.

Unlimited energy in a finite world still has limits.

No it doesnt. Unlimited energy means you're not living in a finite world anymore, as everything becomes a function of energy.

Maybe I should start the worse "post of the week"?

Okay then, you go right ahead.

[MonteQuest]

No it doesnt. Unlimited energy means you're not living in a finite world anymore, as everything becomes a function of energy.

Carrying capacity: the tradition and
policy implications of limits
Link

[EnergySpin]

This poll simply makes no sense.

If the results were reversed I bet you wouldn't say that.
[/quote]
I answered more than one in Tanada's post. Unlike the people who recite the litany to the nuclear fear from the 60s-70s some of us prefer to do the numbers. And the numbers say ... nuclear+renewables (constant or intermittent)+research on anything that reduces transmissions loses and enables storage. If 50 years down the road someone comes up with a technology that enables a world wide grid of renewables then nuclear might make no sense. And they (humans alive 50 yrs from now) kiss nuclear goodbye. But someone has to provide an alternative that provides us with the benefits of nuclear (massive amoutns of energy, dispatchability, reactors of various sizes for different applications before I dismiss it. Do you have any such working prototype in your basement?

Reading the rest of your posts ... it is evident that you have some kind of psychological/ideological hang-up with energy in general. Sorry monte but this attitude is strictly confined to what I call enviro-fossils; people who have not looked seriously in the world (nature+technology+humans) since the 60s.

Your attitude is that we need to have less energy in order to be in harmony with nature because we will never behave in an ethical manner. Wasn't this the main thrust for the Prohibition?
Connect the dots ... did Prohibition work? One cannot make people behave ethically by illegalizing/wiping out our "vices". It did not work with booze, it clearly does not work with drugs and it will not work with energy.

[bobcousins]

There are no limits to our growth given a large and long-lived enough energy source.

And pigs could fly given a large enough source of lift. This line of reasoning is absurd. It is just begging the question. "Enough" is a trick word, it is a way of hiding the premise in the conclusion.

No energy source will be infinite, certainly not fusion. A fusion reactor takes space, time and resources. If any of these are non-zero, there is a limit. The best you could say is that it produces abundant energy (we don't know yet), but it is certainly not infinite. Equally, transmutation of elements has a cost, and may be possible but will also be limited.

Scientists may discover a way to extract energy from the quantum vacuum (ZPE). But this will certainly be expensive to produce in scale.

The problem is that you can increase the amount of energy obtained, at the expense of capital cost. The energy/cost ratio will never be zero. There is a point where a diminishing return is reached. It does not matter how much the energy source produces, if it requires more resources than we have available.

We have lived in a time where increased technology has produced increased benefits, almost in a linear fashion. But there is no theoretical reason which says that linear progression will continue. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that it won't.

History shows that civilisations that relentlessly pursue the factor that made them great end up collapsing. Technology is like the Roman army, pyramids or Moai - what makes a culture great can also be its downfall if pursued beyond the limit of diminishing return.

If and when we find an "infinite" energy source, then we can contemplate infinite growth. Until then, we must live sustainably with what we have got.

[Ludi]

EnergySpin, I can't believe you still aren't able to understand what Monte is saying, but you're still attacking him for having a "hang-up" about technology.

Can you try to understand what I'm writing, if you won't try to understand Monte?

The issue isn't about "prohibiting" or "illegalizing" energy. I've not seen Monte say anything about making power plants illegal. He's talking about a mindset, a worldview, which accepts limits. A worldview which says "enough." If you look at what we've done with the bonus energy from fossil fuels, we've exceeded the planet's biological carrying capacity for humans. We know this to be the case because we are driving many other species extinct, as well as depleting our own portion of the ecosphere. The issue with continuing using bonus energy, rather than relying on the energy from the sun, is that because of our culture's track record with previous bonus energy, it is extremely likely we will continue to damage the Earth's life support systems which sustain us. There's no evidence that we will stop doing this simply because we know we should. We're not stopping now, even though we know we are damaging the systems which we depend on for our existence.

Monte and some of the rest of us are advocating that we stop, not produce more bonus energy, but gradually return to a life based on current solar energy, for the sake of our future as a species.

If you don't understand where this attitude comes from, if you think it comes from hatred of technology, you simply don't understand it. I don't know how to encourage you to research more into the issue of our destruction of the Earth's life systems. Being a life scientist yourself, I would think you'd be interested in this. I just wish you could get past your obvious prejudice and learn more about this issue. Because it's getting really frustrating to see you again and again and again make ad hominem attacks rather than try to understand another point of view.

[Doly]

Environmentalists and ecologists do not trust energy sources that add supplemental energy to human endeavours since humans act like all other critters and just multiply using this supplemental energy.

I can see the logic here. But there is a problem with the concept: what is supplemental energy? To put a clear example, if fusion was developed, it would be extracting energy from stuff that is plentyful and I don't think it could be exhausted easily.

Even fission is something I'm not quite sure if it could be called "supplemental". Breeder reactors look like they could be working for a long, long time. Perhaps enough to bridge until fusion is developed.

[Daryl]

There's more places to live in this universe than "Mother Gaia" if one has sufficient energy to build the tools to get there and inhabit the area.

You lost me there. Certainly there are no planets in our solar system that are habitable. The closest star. Alph Centauri, is 4 light years away and it has no planets. The distances involved are more mind-boggling than geologic time frames. I'm afraid Mother Gaia is our end game.

And in any case you seem to still be running under the faulty assumption of infinite exponential population growth, which simply isn't the only(or even most likely) scenario.

Now that I'll agree with. Monte's philosophic musing not so much about energy as it is about population growth. It is a fact that population cannot continue to grow exponentially. Monte is arguing that Peak Oil represents the end of growth and the initiation of a phase of global population reduction. It is hard to imagine how this can happen in any kind of orderly or pleasant fashion.

I find Monte's scenario (if I've described it somewhat accurately) entirely plausible. However, there are other viable scenarios. Nuclear and renewables could extend the growth phase indefinitey. Likewise, it is not absurd to posit that population growth could halt or reverse at some point, perhaps for natural reasons, perhaps mandated from government. On a micro level, aren't the Europeans depopulating? Apologies to Starvid, but isn't there an active lobby to put the Swede on the endangered species list? I think it was Spengler in 1915 who predicted Europe's biggest problem moving forward would be depopulation. He used Rome as a model for Europe's future. Birth rates fell and Rome depopulated too at the end. I know this has been more than made up for by the "barbarian" (Toynbee's "external proletariat") increase in birthrate , but who's to say their turn isn't next? Does Tainter address this, Monte?

[Ibon]

Your attitude is that we need to have less energy in order to be in harmony with nature because we will never behave in an ethical manner. Wasn't this the main thrust for the Prohibition?
Connect the dots ... did Prohibition work? One cannot make people behave ethically by illegalizing/wiping out our "vices". It did not work with booze, it clearly does not work with drugs and it will not work with energy.

Thank you for acknowledging that energy is a potentail vice. I find your analogy very compelling concerning drugs, alcohol and energy. They all have great benefits for health and recreation and can easily be abused. That is the reason they are regulated and we have a whole moral legal system that addresses the issue of their abuse. Isn't that exactly what we are saying here in regards to our usage of energy? That is anything but some outdated 60's eco philosophy. I do agree with you that completely discarding nuclear as an option is perhaps an extreme position as in prohibition. But holding ourselves to the highest "moral" standard in regards to energy would certainly be the goal of renewables meeting our energy needs. And our history of abuse and not holding ourselves to limits certainly justifies the question if we need to develop an energy source that will allow us unrestrained growth. It is exactly the potential "high" of nuclear that makes one caution.

To follow your analogy one step further. Ramping up renewables as we decline with fossil fuels is like alcohol and pot, soft drugs. Nuclear can play on the environment like heroin. It is highly addictive in giving humanity a rush toward ramping up their population and consumption. We do control these highly addictive substances that we cant seem to manage. That is a form of prohibition as you say. For good reason.

[Daryl]

Your attitude is that we need to have less energy in order to be in harmony with nature because we will never behave in an ethical manner. Wasn't this the main thrust for the Prohibition?
Connect the dots ... did Prohibition work? One cannot make people behave ethically by illegalizing/wiping out our "vices". It did not work with booze, it clearly does not work with drugs and it will not work with energy.

Thank you for acknowledging that energy is a potentail vice. I find your analogy very compelling concerning drugs, alcohol and energy. They all have great benefits for health and recreation and can easily be abused. That is the reason they are regulated and we have a whole moral legal system that addresses the issue of their abuse. Isn't that exactly what we are saying here in regards to our usage of energy? That is anything but some outdated 60's eco philosophy. I do agree with you that completely discarding nuclear as an option is perhaps an extreme position as in prohibition. But holding ourselves to the highest "moral" standard in regards to energy would certainly be the goal of renewables meeting our energy needs. And our history of abuse and not holding ourselves to limits certainly justifies the question if we need to develop an energy source that will allow us unrestrained growth. It is exactly the potential "high" of nuclear that makes one caution.

To follow your analogy one step further. Ramping up renewables as we decline with fossil fuels is like alcohol and pot, soft drugs. Nuclear can play on the environment like heroin. It is highly addictive in giving humanity a rush toward ramping up their population and consumption. We do control these highly addictive substances that we cant seem to manage. That is a form of prohibition as you say. For good reason.

I don't think the nuclear advocates on these boards are necessarily starry eyed optimist growth advocates in the Corsi mode. The transition is going to be very difficult. I think energy is going to get expensive and scarce. I doubt nuclear will be able to fuel a new growth boom. It's going to be part of a new era of limits, in the best case. The nuclear advocates on the board are arguing that it has the ability to prevent collapse and die-off, unlike say solar and wind power.

[Ibon]

Environmentalists and ecologists do not trust energy sources that add supplemental energy to human endeavours since humans act like all other critters and just multiply using this supplemental energy.

I can see the logic here. But there is a problem with the concept: what is supplemental energy? To put a clear example, if fusion was developed, it would be extracting energy from stuff that is plentyful and I don't think it could be exhausted easily.

Even fission is something I'm not quite sure if it could be called "supplemental". Breeder reactors look like they could be working for a long, long time. Perhaps enough to bridge until fusion is developed.

Supplemental energy means adding energy above and beyond the base amount that arrives from the sun. Life on our planet evolved for millions of years around this finite amount of energy. When humans gain access to more than this base amount, as in fossil fuels (which is stored solar energy ) or nuclear , than we use that energy for work which in the case of fossil fuels not only allowed us to reach the population we have but also drive around in cars and all the rest. The main idea here is that humans, since we are so smart to harnass supplemental energy, should adapt our lives to a certain quota that maintains harmony and not just exploit the supplemental energy until we create imbalances.

If we had this discipline imbedded in our culture we could even exploit nuclear energy. Annother way of looking at it is that theoretically if we master wind and solar so that we capture more energy than photosynthesis and other natural processes do, than we would actually be adding supplemental energy to the environment with renewables. As Energyspin does point out, it is not ultimately the energy source but the way humans use it. There is nothing holy about renewables. Natural toxins like snake venom is more deadly than many synthetic manmade chemicals. So this is not a discussion simplified to what is natural is good and what is derived by man is bad, as in technology. It seems we are being accused here of some simplified close minded eco-religion.

I thought Ludi's post to Energyspin was a compassionate call for him to acknowledge this point we are making. I am curious to see his response.

[Ibon]

I don't think the nuclear advocates on these boards are necessarily starry eyed optimist growth advocates in the Corsi mode. The transition is going to be very difficult. I think energy is going to get expensive and scarce. I doubt nuclear will be able to fuel a new growth boom. It's going to be part of a new era of limits, in the best case. The nuclear advocates on the board are arguing that it has the ability to prevent collapse and die-off, unlike say solar and wind power.

Mostly I agree with you. That is what Father of Two mentioned in his posts. This is perhaps true. But proponents of growth so far outnumber the more humble alternative of living within the means of a baseline of energy as in the current solar flux (or more poetically. as in what nature provides us) that energy strategy in the future needs to learn from the mistake we have made in how we have handled the oil age. oink oink

[GoIllini]

This thread has evolved into a "don't rain on my parade with reality" rant.

Monte, I know the doom parade is ending, but it's really sad that the malthusians are throwing a temper tantrum.

Thank you for acknowledging that energy is a potentail vice. I find your analogy very compelling concerning drugs, alcohol and energy. They all have great benefits for health and recreation and can easily be abused. That is the reason they are regulated and we have a whole moral legal system that addresses the issue of their abuse. Isn't that exactly what we are saying here in regards to our usage of energy? That is anything but some outdated 60's eco philosophy. I do agree with you that completely discarding nuclear as an option is perhaps an extreme position as in prohibition. But holding ourselves to the highest "moral" standard in regards to energy would certainly be the goal of renewables meeting our energy needs. And our history of abuse and not holding ourselves to limits certainly justifies the question if we need to develop an energy source that will allow us unrestrained growth. It is exactly the potential "high" of nuclear that makes one caution.

To follow your analogy one step further. Ramping up renewables as we decline with fossil fuels is like alcohol and pot, soft drugs. Nuclear can play on the environment like heroin. It is highly addictive in giving humanity a rush toward ramping up their population and consumption. We do control these highly addictive substances that we cant seem to manage. That is a form of prohibition as you say. For good reason.

This is one of the most reasonable and, quite frankly, best arguments against nuclear that I've seen in a while. Rather than fearmongering, you argue that it allows us to exceed the earth's carrying capacity, which is bad.

But my counter-argument is this: We have so much energy in U-238 and Thorium laying around that it isn't even funny. There's enough of the stuff in the first 2 feet of soil in my back yard to power the 20,000 resident town I live in for a decade.

Chances are, the human race will get killed off from a cataclysmic nuclear war, an asteroid, or some sort of doomerish Malthusian problem before we hit Peak Oil. I'm sure you guys will have plenty of stuff to worry about after we switch to nuclear- just as your predecessors have had for the past couple hundred years. But Peak Uranium/Thorium won't be an issue for you guys for a couple thousand years.

Oh, and if we could just "tap" all that energy. However, sustainability is not just about energy. Perhaps we have considered the Big Picture.

We could live beyond sustainable limits even on just the received solar flux. Population, arable land, water, loss of biodiversity, topsoil, etc.

And we've been doing it for a hundred years. The bottom line is that as long as we have the energy, we can do it.

The fact of the matter is that we will have plenty of time to figure out another way to destroy ourselves before we hit peak nuclear, which is likely hundreds, if not thousands of years off.

[FatherOfTwo]

I calculated to replace our fossil fuel plants in Texas with nukes, we'd need to build 21 new reactors, at least.

Where the heck would we build these, I wonder?

I don't see this happening.

Just because it may be impractical to replace current fossil fuel plants with nukes doesn't mean that we have to be replacing it all in the first place.
There is a middle ground.

Would you rather have the carpet ripped out from under your feet or have the floor removed entirely?

[Daryl]

The fact of the matter is that we will have plenty of time to figure out another way to destroy ourselves before we hit peak nuclear, which is likely hundreds, if not thousands of years off.

Sure, we pretty much stamped out TB. It's allowed us to live long enough to get killed by cancer and heart disease.

[FatherOfTwo]

If so, then why on earth do you insist on bashing nuclear? Why are you not seeing the big picture in this case?

I'll answer for myself this question. Is nuclear putting out an immediate fire but planting the seeds of a greater inferno? I don't mean bombs here either.

Nuclear is an energy we can harnass that supplements the energy alreadly falling on the planet from solar flux. Fossil fuels did basically the same thing in that we pulled out of the ground stored solar energy like a battery to supplement the total available energy during the past 150 years. This supplemental energy permits us humans to develop societies that live beyond their carrying capacities since we don't know how to manage or design on our own limits to our growth. This is the bigger picture Father of Two and inherant in the nuclear solution are the seeds of this greater inferno. Using renewable energy sources forces us to live within the sustainable amount of energy that falls on the planet and avoids these imbalances.

I understand and agree wholeheartedly that we must learn to live off only the solar flux.
But we cannot go from where we are now to sustainability in one fell swoop. It isn't doable, and the resultant chaos will be too much to overcome. We must have a bridge to get us there and that bridge is nuclear. We must learn to crawl and walk before we can run.

[Caoimhan]

I understand and agree wholeheartedly that we must learn to live off only the solar flux.
But we cannot go from where we are now to sustainability in one fell swoop. It isn't doable, and the resultant chaos will be too much to overcome. We must have a bridge to get us there and that bridge is nuclear. We must learn to crawl and walk before we can run.

I agree. I also think biofuels is also a good step. In a way, the use of biofuels IS living off of solar flux. Alcohols and esters make good storage media for that energy. And no, I'm not saying biofuels will ever completely replace liquid petroleum based fuels.

[GoIllini]

The fact of the matter is that we will have plenty of time to figure out another way to destroy ourselves before we hit peak nuclear, which is likely hundreds, if not thousands of years off.

Sure, we pretty much stamped out TB. It's allowed us to live long enough to get killed by cancer and heart disease.

Exactly. I'd rather die of a heart attack than die of smallpox or TB. But I'm grateful for the extra 15 years that I get to live because of modern medicine.

[FatherOfTwo]

I'm repeating myself here, but I think it needs repeating.

We must give ourselves the best odds of surviving the transition.
We must give ourselves the best odds of surviving the transition.
We must give ourselves the best odds of surviving the transition.

This to me is the realist's big picture. The utopian big picture is that we somehow go from wild energy orgy, forgo nuclear and learn to live off the solar flux. I’d love for that to be true. Now, how many of you honestly think that is likely?

Does anyone disagree that Problem #1 is surviving the transition? Perhaps you will disagree if you’re of the opinion that humans should be wiped off the face of the planet, be “taught a lesson” for messing with Mother Earth, but other than that, if you want us to survive, learn, gain wisdom, then Peak Oil can’t be such a thorough ass whipping that we are never able to get up off the ground.

Everybody and their dog on this site know that Peak Oil will result in enormous economic hardship. The temptation to resort to resource wars will be strong. Our history is chock full of examples.

So, tell me how we are going to go through all of this and then at the same time tell people, well ya, there is this nuclear technology that we can use to make things “less bad” but we can’t use it because we’ve had such a rip roaring party for the last 100+ years on fossil fuels that now we have to go to the other end of the spectrum. It’s like condemning ourselves to the death penalty instead of 30 years of hard labor.

Fortunately one positive of the current global mindset of never ending growth gives me reason to believe that we’re going to fight like hell (hopefully only figuratively speaking) as we go through this massive transition. Nuclear, coal, everything will be thrown against the wall to see what sticks. Hopefully we’ll be partially successful and not only give ourselves a reprieve from death but also gain some wisdom in the process.

[Ludi]

What I don't understand is why we need MORE power plants. When those of us in the First World already use 5 or so Earth's worth of resources, why do we need to produce MORE energy? What is it FOR? Pardon my allcaps, but I'm just not understanding this. Why, when we're using far more than our share of Earth's energy, do we need to produce MORE ENERGY? When will we say "enough?" How many nuke/coal, whatever plants do we need to build before we say "Stop"?