Run, Run, as Fast as you Can! You Can't Catch Me, I'm the Technology Man!

Get out your crystal ball:

In the long, long, long, long-run we'll all be

a) fat and happy.
b) barely surviving.
c) none of the above.

For hundreds of years, people have worried that resource constraints would eventually lead to declining living standards, but so far technology has overcome these gloomy predictions. Can it go on forever?:

What to Do When the Oil (or the Innovation) Is Gone?, by Daniel Altman, Economic View, NY Times: With global economic growth near its fastest pace in decades, is there a chance that we'll finally run out of the resources we need? ...

In the last few years, rapid growth in China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies has coincided, not surprisingly, with an upward trend in the prices of commodities like oil. In the short term, there's not enough time for suppliers to cope with ballooning demand; that's part of why prices rise. But market dynamics in the long term are likely to be more significant.

It's simple mathematics. Even though the world's population may peak sometime in this century, the global economy is likely to keep growing. Yet the planet is, for now, a closed system: we have finite amounts of every single raw material. At some point, surely, we'll use them up.

Or will we? This sort of thing has already happened. "There was a time when whales were being hunted to get oil for lamps," said Jorge E. Montepeque... "The number of whales started to decline. The price for it started to increase and, at some point, new technology kicked in."

Rather than paying higher prices for whale oil, people found new ways to light their homes — kerosene, propane and even electricity. Crude oil, however, may present more of a conundrum.

"Is there any source of energy that will be cheaper, for example, than Saudi oil?" asked Robert U. Ayres... In his opinion, even with conservation and innovation, the answer is no. Professor Ayres said companies and homeowners would eventually have to pay a higher price for their energy. He also said that other commodities were in danger of scarcity, sooner rather than later. ...

Technology and innovation are still likely to find a way around shortages, though, argued Dale W. Jorgenson, a university professor at Harvard. "This debate occurred before," he said. "The very rapid growth of the 1970's, which was fully as impressive as the current growth that we're experiencing now, didn't result in any increase in the price of oil or other commodities, and isn't likely to do so this time, either."

The supply of crude oil will benefit from technological improvements, Professor Jorgenson predicted. "People figure out clever ways to explore for oil, to produce it and transport it," he said. "All of that goes in the other direction."

There is also the chance that a burst of innovation will lay low the entire market. Imagine, for instance, what would happen if scientists finally developed a portable nuclear fusion reactor — the kind that could power a house...

There are a couple of areas, however, where scarcity is more predictable. "The long-run scarcities are for human labor and land," said Peter H. Lindert, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. He said their value, in terms of goods and services, would continue to rise forever.

Professor Lindert said the market for low-skilled labor, in particular, was likely to tighten in the coming decades. In the case of high-skilled labor, there are moderating factors.

"Low fertility won't hurt us in that respect, because you will get probably a slight improvement in development per kid by having so few," he said. "The family puts more resources and parental time into each kid, schools are less crowded and so forth."

The competition for talent is already intensifying, Professor Jorgenson said. ... "There is going to be a labor shortage, I don't think there's any doubt about that."

In Europe and Japan, populations are shrinking already — a trend that Professor Jorgenson attributes to hostility to immigration. As this occurs, he said, wages will begin to rise as each worker in the thinning labor force gains access to more capital....

Economic growth will also slow, Professor Jorgenson added, since you can't keep substituting capital for labor forever. "The question is, when do you encounter those diminishing returns?" ...

Comments

[finnsense]

"In Europe and Japan, populations are shrinking already — a trend that Professor Jorgenson attributes to hostility to immigration."

So people in Europe and Japan having less children has nothing to do with it then?

[sunlight]

I hate to argue with someone as eminent as Professor Jorgenson. Yet as someone who has followed the energy debate for some time, I am struck by the difference between the optimism of economists and the pessimism of oil industry personnel who work in exploration and production. For example, Matthew Simmons, whose eponymous firm has financed many of the technological advances that comprise "enhanced oil recovery," stated in his book, "Twilight in the Desert," that enhanced oil recovery has only served to pump oil reservoirs faster, but not to expand the amount ultimately recoverable. In fact, Simmons points out, EOR can sometimes damage a reservoir and decrease total production over its lifecycle when the oil is lifted too quickly.

Prof. Jorgenson's optimism about higher prices leading to stepped up exploration activity leads in the same direction. With more intense exploration activity we may discover more oil sooner rather than later but we will NOT add to the amount that now exists in the earth's crust. And anyone with any familiarity with oil production knows this: oilfield discoveries peaked 40 years ago, and have been declining ever since as most of the world's sedimentary basins (the formations that potentially hold oil bearing rock) have long been identified and mapped. While increasing oil prices militate for more exploration, these have been swamped by the declining marginal utility of exploration.

One might also note: when the world shifted from whale oil to mineral oil, its human population had just passed the 1 billion mark. There were fewer of us to feed, we stressed our environmental support system less and in general there was greater margin for error. While substitution effects will be important in encouraging an eventual transition to renewable energy, any historical analogy pointing to a seamless and painless transistion is suspect, unless the Professor backs it with empirical research.

[Ninjaplease]

Technology has enabled 2 things:

1) more efficient use of existing resources

2) more efficient means for extracting / processing / creating / finding resources.

One could argue that it also facilitates resource usage among the masses.

Unfortunately economics, rather than environmental sustainability is what fuels energy research. It's going to take %7.50 - $10/gallon of gasoline and the trippling - quadrupling of heating oil or natural gas prices before more money is put into researching alternative means for building climate controls & for vehicle fuel. Both would benefit greatly from more efficient batteries, however, Li-Ion batteries would be perfect if they would be produced in mass quantities to drop their huge price---albeit except for the toxicity of Lithium, and the habbit of li-ion batteries to explode under impact---not something you really want in an automobile.

[Bruce Webb]

"The long-run scarcities are for human labor and land," said Peter H. Lindert,

Lindert needs to take a plane flight from New York to Seattle, or for that matter from Moscow to Vladivostok. You could drop a city the size of New York into Montana and barely see it on a top view from Google Earth, and we already have freeway and rail connections already built in. And last I heard they were still having babies in the third world.

We have the land, add water and power (oil shale anyone?) and (shudder) brown people and we have room in the United States to accommodate hundreds of millions more people. And if designed correctly (think Amsterdam density rather than LA sprawl) could still accomplish much of the dream of the Buffalo Commons besides.

Anyone who thinks our problem is too little land needs to rent a car from Avis and drive through those areas of this country where we see highway signs reading "Next Gas 90 miles". Provide the jobs and 'they will come'. And find some pretty fine fishing besides.

It is extraordinarly odd to find economists and others lamenting future shortages in labor while we are having raging battles about shutting down the borders. Which is it? Is Social Security at risk because we will have too few covered workers to support retirees in the future? Or are American jobs at risk because of too many immigrants? You really cannot have it both ways.

Jorgenson admits as much

"In Europe and Japan, populations are shrinking already — a trend that Professor Jorgenson attributes to hostility to immigration. As this occurs, he said, wages will begin to rise as each worker in the thinning labor force gains access to more capital"

The possibility that Europe and Japan will react to this shrinkage as Europe already, grudgingly is, by admitting more immigrants seems absent from this argument. The notion that the First World nations are going to become hollowed out demographic shells seems to be more centered on race than economics. Neither the United States, Europe or Japan is threatened by a worker shortage going forwards, each just has to confront the likelyhood that the cable guy will have the name Martinez, Singh, or Park.

I spent much of my early childhood in Hawaii at a time that haoles (whites) were a distinct minority, I spent much of my adult life in cities (Berkeley, Oakland) that were majority minority and multi-ethnic besides. Once you relax and accept the reality you realize that the main threat is the fact that 'their' favorite foods are more tasty than Mom's meatloaf.

To return to the point, if you took a demographic model of the world and juxtaposed it to available highway and train capacity you would find a gaping hole stretching from North Texas to Alberta with counties that are actually shedding population over time.

[Bruce Wilder]

"Technology" as a magic wand?

Professor Jorgenson's economics is fundamentally misguided, by its abstract theory of production. It is not just a matter of allocating land, labor and capital against an advancing technological frontier. Energy and waste are also inherent and fundamental aspects of production.

It is energy and waste, with which human civilization must cope successfully, or collapse. We are constrained in the very long run to what the sun will supply us, and what we can mine from the earth; and we are constrained, as well, in our capacity to cope with the consequent entropy (waste).

It is not the dimensions of space, which constrain human population, and discourage us from plopping a New York City into Montana: it is the effect on the environment -- in a few words, the sheer quantity of trash, garbage, carbon dioxide, methane and shit, which humans generate -- a quantity that increases apace with population and the population's production and consumption of goods and services -- constrains us.

The earth's population is commonly projected to peak at around 10 billion. The earth cannot support 10 billion people living decent lives, for the simple reason that the earth cannot survive the implied rate of entropy.

The response of reactionary conservatives to global warming -- Exxon paying "think tanks" and pseudo-scientists to cloud the debate, and the claims of Republicans that reducing pollution retards economic growth -- reflects an unwillingness to cope with the most fundamental economic trade-off, one that classical economics never modeled adequately, even in the work of the estimable Malthus.

Energy and entropy constrain us. The Industrial Revolution's advances in productivity and per capita living standards were partly a matter of technological advance, but, mostly, they were a matter of exploiting fossil fuels to substitute their energy for human and animal muscle. We are now up against a real constraint on that expansion.

It is wrong to think that it is a simple matter of "running out". That's an incomplete model of the situation. Energy and entropy go together, inextricably. We are also constrained by the waste or entropy, which accompanies energy consumption.

"Peak oil" is an entropy constraint. The physical quantity of fossil fuels available in the earth continues to be vast, especially if you throw in to the calculation shale oil, and coal, etc. What "peak oil" is about is the same phenomenon as "global warming". It is the same problem, the same constraint, considered abstractly.

"Peak oil" means that we are running out of the cheapest, cleanest oil very rapidly. Recent "rises" in the price of oil have been increases in the price of the sweetest, lightest crude oil grades relative to the heavy sour grades. From here on, extracting fossil fuels from the earth will require more and more energy per unit of useful energy produced, and, not coincidentally, produce more and more pollution (entropy) per unit of useful energy produced.

[Bruce Wilder]

It is Newtonian physics, really. Our commonplace expressions are wrong. We do not "consume energy"; neither mass nor energy can be created or destroyed in a strict sense; whatever we do to increase organization also serves to increase entropy, which is an abstract way of saying that whenever we produce something, we also make a mess.

[Dick fitzgerald]

The article is one of that whole genre of mindless technological optimism. Facts don't matter to these people, technological optimism plus the market will always win out, blah-blah.

[cm]

Bruce Wilder: There has been, perhaps always, a fundamental disconnect of those who are "trained" to reason in abstract economic terms, and the facts/science of "physical logistics". By way of how infrastructure is designed, those living and working in "better off" areas and "knowledge professions" have hardly ever experienced (seeing and smelling wise) a sewage "treatment" facility or a garbage dump, or for that matter heavy-duty industry or warehousing/trucking installations.

In a way I can understand how somebody can come to a reasoning framework where everything is a matter of writing a check or issuing a bit more currency, and everything can be achieved, just by redirecting the flows of money.

That you can conveniently plug your fridge in a wall socket (and even that is probably done by the delivery people), flush your toilet, and have the garbage magically disappear on garbage collection day certainly is a great help.

[dryfly]

The earth's population is commonly projected to peak at around 10 billion. The earth cannot support 10 billion people living decent lives, for the simple reason that the earth cannot survive the implied rate of entropy

The population will never hit 10B... won't even get close. If we don't blow each other to nuclear winter & back then some microbe will do it for us. Even worse than a bird flu like bug that kills millions of us would be a bug that kills our crops - like the potato famine.

I was talking with an agronomist once in Iowa... we carry over precious little excess food from one season to the next on a comprehensive world wide basis. Something like enough to feed the world for two months in a good year... sometimes its only weeks in a bad year.

And now we want to 'grow energy' too.

It can all be done but there are risks. Roll the dice often enough with bad odds & high risks and eventually you lose and lose big. We are rolling the dice like crazy.

If we had a crop failure in one major growing region (say the US bread basket or Brazil-Argentina)... the world would squeak through by diverting grain away from animals to humans (we'd eat the corn instead of the steaks that ate the corn). But if we had a crop failure in two or more growing regions simultaneously - we'd see billions die. Think about it - where would YOU get food if the Supermarket to the World had none to deliver to YOUR supermarket?

Don't think it can't happen either. I live in farm country & have friends in the seed business (own a seed corn company). The collective genome is getting tighter & less diverse every year... if a disease evolves to take advantage of this 'domesticity' - if you wonder what I mean by 'domesticity' compare a poodle with a wolf - it will likely rip through all varieties because from a biological perspective they increasingly look like 'clones'.

I fully expect this to happen either in my lifetime or my childrens... certainly within a hundred years... it will be the global equivalent of the Irish potato famine but we won't have anywhere to go to escape it.

I also fully expect these BIG drops in population to happen more than once... like other constrained preditor-prey relationships. The earth's population will likely find itself in some kind of a 'trading range' over the milleniums to come... don't know what the 'top' will be but my guess is it will never make 10B.

[dryfly]

Now after that cheerie post on famine above... I am NOT 100% pessimistic.

I think there are going to be periods of very hard times in the future for sure... but we all KNEW we'd never get out of this life alive... and even if you die in your bed its still dying so why the surprise it might happen in droves from time-to-time.

The thing to focus on is living & the living can be very good in a material & energy constrained world if we let it be good - chose our definitions carefully.

Once you get beyond the necessary stuff (food shelter security)... consumption of 'more stuff' is mostly for prestige & social rank. So find other ways to 'keep score' other than how much fossil you can burn & crap you can fit into a mini-mcmansion.

I think this is the key to 'substitutional' economics... we don't need new materials that do exactly what the other stuff did (like the swap of mineral oil for whale oil)... Mostly we need "new materials" that allow us to peacefully sort ourselves out in social strata... we can do that in some future labor based service economy just as easily as the current one based on excessive consumer raw material & energy consumption. But only as long as the 'basics' are covered (food, shelter, etc)... When those occasionally run out then all bets are off until the population re-balances with existing production.

[Sam Chahal]

The future fuel would be inexpensive hydrogen gas from the ocean. In the USA the north east coast has prevailing winds most of the day. The floating wind mills in 1000 sq. mile area in the ocean can produce enough electricity to produce hydrogen and oxygen gases from ocean water for the whole world.Practically each nation can produce its own hydrogen fuel using wind mills from lakes, rivers and underground water wells. The liquified hydrogen gas can be used for all types of automobiles.The hydrogen gas can be used for cooking and heating. The hydrogen run electricity plants can provide enough electricity world wide. And the world industry would run smoothly with out any smog.The world would not run out of clean fuel ever. There would be new economic wave based on hydrogen industry. There is a great future for the world.The petroleum industry would not participate in this venture because they have invested so much money in the existing petroleum infrastructure. The Bill Gates of the world might be able to make it happen.

[Bruce Wilder]

I intend no insult to Sam Chahal, whom I do not know.

The energy released by burning hydrogen is the energy from combining hydrogen with oxygen to create water. You cannot produce hydrogen from water, except by reversing that reaction, which is to say, by using energy to break apart the hydrogen from the oxygen. Hydrogen can never be a source of ultimate power generation. We might well use wind or other solar sources of power to generate hydrogen as a way of storing power for other uses, particularly for remote, portable and mobile uses. It would never be sensible, though, to use hydrogen as a basis for an electric utility's large-scale generation of electricity.

As clean as wind and hydrogen may sound, there will still be inevitable costs. Whether you conceive of them as opportunity costs or as externalities or entropy, they are inevitable aspects of reality. Accepting them is to reject the easy out of faith in magic, but accepting them is also the path to realistic hope of achievement in the world.

[dryfly]

Hydrogen can work but as B Wilder said you need an initial 'input' to drive the reaction in reverse. If my 30 year ago P Chem is right creating H2 via electrolysis is not very efficient... there is A LOT of work needed (mostly practical & proprietary not so much theoretical) to get the yield anywhere close to where we need it to be to 'save us'.

In general B Wilder is right in that there will be no easy painless fix IF we define prosperity as being able to consume X barrels of oil & Y megawatts of electricity per day.

In short we need to rethink the inputs & outputs... outputs are what makes us happy and inputs are what's the stuff we consume to generate those outputs. There is NO REASON we can't generate more & better outputs with far less inputs if we do thing more wisely.

Example - gasoline. If we all drove vehicles with twice the mileage and drove half as much we would consume a quarter of what we now use.

Sounds like a challenge but isn't so hard when you look at it. Most Americans drive pretty big vehicles... get something like 25 mpg average. Plus a lot of us live pretty far from work, school, shopping & play. If we each drove a vehicle that got 50 mpg (available now) and lived closer to where we work, shop, play (or stay where we are and change our choices of where we work, shop, play, etc.)... so that we drove half as much... then we could cut our personal gasoline usage by 75% (previous usage divide by 2 then divide by 2 again).

Same logic could apply with companies - source their suppliers & services closer to production & locate production closer to customers... cut fuel consumption a lot.

Would this make us 'unhappy'? I suppose it will if you derive happiness from sitting in traffic.

But for most people this would be an easy 'substitution' that requires almost 'zero' technology... just requires basic understanding & follow through.

There are a whole lot of low hanging fruit like this out there... way more than we realize.

[Sam Chahal]

Every science student knows how to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water via electrolysis. The windmills would provide enough electricity for electrolysis infrastructure day and night from ocean water once the initial windmill infrastructure is placed by investing $10 Billion. Enough hydrogen and oxygen can be produced by using wind and water sources. The liquified natural gas (LNG) is being used for trucks, buses, cars etc in India and other parts of the world. The LNG is also used for electricity plants to produce electricity.Nasa is using liquified hydrogen gas for space rockets. The liquified hydrogen gas can also be used for automobiles.Our engineers and scientists can work out safety issues. If the electrical plants can be run using atomic energey with all the safety precautions, the modren science can devise methods to use hydrogen gas to run electrical plants also.

[dryfly]

Every science student knows how to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water via electrolysis.

Yes but it isn't 'efficient' yet... high input of energy to generate a very amount of H2... the yields are terrible using existing 'technology' from what I understand. There would have to be an awful lot of work on catalysts & electron transfers through salt solution to make this practical.

If it does become practical - solar power to electricity to H2 might even prove more promising.

But there is a whole lotta work going from the level of understanding of most 'science students' to the process engineering level understanding required to design, build & operate a fully functioning profitable plant... especially one that actually makes a product people can afford.

I *think* it is possible to do electrolysis economically some day but don't *know* that. What I do know is that it isn't economically feasible today even if 'science students' can do electrolysis in their HS chem labs.

Here's a summary of some of the issues...

http://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/progress04/iif6_porter.pdf

Large-scale commercial hydrogen production required for vehicle fueling poses significant challenges for water electrolysis considering the state of the technology today. The cost and generation capacity of today’s fielded electrolysis systems do not meet the requirements of a commercial vehicle fueling station. The Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and Infrastructure Technologies Program Multi-Year R,D&D Plan outlines the issues to be addressed in the technical barriers and technical targets sections. Starting at the top level and working down to the component level, the electrolysis-based fueling station design can be optimized to overcome the barriers while meeting the technical and cost targets.

Having been a chemical engineer all I can say is they have a lot of work to do.

[Sam Chahal]

It took several years and enormous investment to set up petroleum service infrastructure for automobile industry. The service stations receive fuel from the refinery by tanker trucks. The LNG is also supplied to service stations via tanker trucks. The windmill floating farmes covering 1000 to 5000 sr.mile area in the ocean would produce large enough amounts of hydrogen and oxygen supplies via electrolysis method. Salt water is ideal for electrolysis pure water is not.
The hydrogen and oxygen gases can be transported via pipelines to land. The plants to compress hydrogen gas can be set up in near by areas.Using railroad tankers and tanker trucks liquified hydrogen gas can be supplied to all the existing service stations storage tanks. The new type of automobiles with safe hydrogen feul tanks can run on clean feul.

[dryfly]

Sam the biggest bottleneck is electrolysis itself... the yields & rates suck. Energy (wind electricity) in vs energy (pure H2) out not good and the production rate per cell is slow. That's the problem and always has been - that's why most H2 produced today - and quite a lot of it is produced for industrial applications - is by stripping it off hydrocarbons. If it was cheap & easy to produce H2 via hydrolysis they'd already be doing it because they'd also get O2 as a valuable by product.

And salt vs fresh water isn't the problem... you can start with a 'salt bath' electrolysis cell and after you hit the switch feed fresh water in as fast as the O2 & H2 come off - the salt stays . The problem with today's technology is that the rates are pathetically slow even if the power is there.

The transportation & infrastructure part is not the drop dead problem either - that's basic civil engineering - something we know how to do. What ever 'new fuel' we use in the future will require some of this change over so H2 isn't all that unreasonable there.

Its the basic electrolysis that's the problem... making it economical has proven to be no easy feat.

[Sam Chahal]

It is understood that there is not enough electricity to produce hydrogen using electrolysis and yield is considerably low. But it does not mean it can not be improved if we spend enough on R&D. There is no dearth of good engineers who can not solve this bottleneck problem. One Billion dollars spent on R&D can solve this problem. I am professional engineer that is what we do to solve problems. It is feasible. We are facing economic crisis because of high feul prices. It is time we become serious to come up with clean feul from water. Here is proposal to produce electricity from windmills in large scale and clean hydrogen feul from water, which is plentiful.

[calmo]

No mention of nanotubes. Thanks be to Jesus.
Thanks for bringing up the tightness of the food supply dryfly. We have no idea that a significant portion of the global population spend their entire lives scavenging for their next meal. [Saints we aren't.] No fancy wind mills for them. But clean water might be an attraction --the H2 less so, no?
No. Countless more will perish from lack of food and water while engineering details are worked out for the portable nuclear fusion reactor that replaces oil as the energy source that drives the increasing load of air conditioners.

[jm]

Wind generating capacity worldwide is now about 100 terawatt-hours. World energy consumption is about 380 quadrillion (10^15) BTUs/year, which at 0.293 watt-hours per BTU comes to 111,000 terawatt-hours/year. Since average output from a wind generator is around 25% of nominal capacity, and the world's largest wind turbine has a capacity of 6 megawatts, about 9 million such 180+ meter-tall generators would be required. Since 1000 square miles is only 640,000 acres, those behemoths would be rather crowded at about 1400 per acre. Perhaps Sam Chahal meant a square 1000 miles on side ...

Perhaps I've misplaced a decimal point. But a reference on the web puts the total wind generating capability of the five best states, ND, SD, TX, KS and MT at just 5520 terawatt-hours/year -- a 20th of the required output.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine

[dryfly]

It is understood that there is not enough electricity to produce hydrogen using electrolysis and yield is considerably low. But it does not mean it can not be improved if we spend enough on R&D.

I see no harm in that.

Perhaps I've misplaced a decimal point. But a reference on the web puts the total wind generating capability of the five best states, ND, SD, TX, KS and MT at just 5520 terawatt-hours/year -- a 20th of the required output.

I have no idea if the numbers are right jm but I do live on the edge of that wind belt and see the mega-towers everywhere. One thing to understand though is that there is a lot of development going on with these products too.

While some are getting 'bigger' like that 6MW unit you mentioned another strategy is to go smaller & vertical... instead of a few huge wind mill like machines on tall towers with propellers facing horizontally, imagine a 'corkscrew column' design kinda like a weather vane reaching up into the sky (mega-tubules for calmo)... the shaft going straight up with the generator on the ground easy to maintain.

I haven't seen any of these but are told they are coming - designs on the board now.

Another thing folks need to realize is there probably isn't going to be one magic bullet to our energy future - more likely a lot of solutions with the largest one being 'more conservation'.

[NinjaPlease]

Hello,

Electronics Engineer chiming in here:

#1 Converting water to H2 + O takes energy.

#2 Hydrogen is not what you want in a car. If you've ever seen a video of a carbomb going off, imagine that only a lot worse.

#3 The thing we need is probably a much cheaper way to make H2O2 (hydrogen Peroxide) and a safe engine to run off of it.

That 2nd oxygen atom takes very little energy to break out of this compound (that's why H2O2 bottles are not clear, because even sunlight can cause the second Oxygen atom to break off,)

When you compare the power to weight & size ratio of an average internal combustion engine system to ANY system based off of chemical storage batteries, it becomes pretty clear that EV's aren't going to catch up (in terms of size & weight) for quite sometime.

A more efficient system for heating & cooling buildings would be as revolutionary as practical hydrogen fuelcells.

[dryfly]

Hey ninja - thanks for chiming in! Nerd of the chemicals & materials sort here... some points to your points...

1) We knew H2 production required input - that was where the 'wind farm' bit came from.

2) Peroxide is difficult & nasty stuff too. Given H2 vs H2O2 I'd take H2 (and I've worked in process plants with some nasty stuff). Neither are 'easy' to handle/process like say 'biofuels' or 'synfuels' though.

3) I agree with the battery issue - we need to get those materials engineers off their ass and give us some more energy density!

4) The building issue is one close to my heart - I'm a huge fan of passive solar & earth sheltered designs that need little heating or cooling when designed well. Obviously these designs are not always appropriate - hard to build 'high rises' using earth sheltered technology. But for residences & small offices they could reduce heating & cooling loads a whole lot.

Having said that I live in a 90 year old stick frame house on the prairie where if any place was appropriate for solar-earth shelter it would be here. Hot summers, cold winters and lotsa sunshine. I'm a fan of these strange looking things and even I don't live in them.

Its just going to take time to 'make' people change. But the markets are patient - they will keep beating us until we take the hint.

[reason]

I think Bruce Wilder's original post highlighted the key concept here. We have solved problems in the past by using more cheap energy. It is a different issue when cheap energy itself is the problem.

To me it has been clear all along that incentives built in to our economic system are not sustainable. Use of resources is treated as free, pollution is treated as external to the system and most taxes fall on labour inputs. Is this what we really want? Its time that environmental costs (both from extraction and pollution) got counted. One thing I am for, for instance, is that when we buy goods, the cost of disposal is included in the cost of the product. Then all garbage recycling should be free - paid already at purchase time. This would encourage recyclability and discourage excess packaging for instance, and cut down on illegal dumping.

[Ninjaplease]

Re: Dryfly,

There's got to be a way to make an efficient self powered & long lived heating & cooling system that's not expensive, or one that will pay for itself over time.

I'd love to see a solar powered hydronic system that uses a very large water container to create potable hot water, heat a residential structure, and cool a residential structure all in the same system:

(maybe, the solar panels power a non conductive or electrically insulated heating element wrapped & pump to circulate hot water all around baseboards with heatsink fins (like a hydronic system with a boiler does,) but the system would also contain a phase-change compressor and invert the function of the heatsinks into heat absorbers

Of course then the system couldn't use water, but perhaps mineral oil with a low temperature viscosity modifier.

I'm fascinated by heat batteries like superinsulated, to the point of being calorimeters, containers storing oil with heating elements inside them that would heatup to a fairly high temperature all day, then be used to transfer the stored heat to a residential structure all night during the winter months.

And then have a way to reverse the process to absorb the heat in a residential structure in the summer months.

This way the only electrical chemical storage batteries needed would be to support the pumps / motors / compressors / actuators, etc of the system, not giant resistive heaters.

If a leak occurs, it would be mineral oil which isn't toxic, it's fairly cheap and readily available.

[gordon]

So things we need are going to get more expensive in the future. Wow, that's bad! We better work hard to get rich right now, so we can afford them. To hell with the environment, to hell with ethical standards, this is a fight for survival! But if we act like that, things we need will be even more scarce and expensive in the future, and harder to guard, too. Wow, that's bad! We better work even harder to get rich now...

[reason]

Ninjaplease,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1785713,00.html

[NinjaPlease]

"Part of the problem is that since their profession was deregulated, many of them are involved in a standing conflict of interest"

But Reason, the freemarket will solve all your problems, eventually...