George Carty said:

I thought that an economy which requires continuous growth just to sustain itself was called a “Ponzi scheme”.

Funny, but not quite. Ponzi schemes are fraud because there is no underlying value to support growth, (Ponzi’s original scheme was to arbitrage postage coupons across national borders, a thin market at best) as long as there is real production, there is real wealth creation, and thus real growth.

        Gordon said:

Anyway, as buzz says, this is tokenism because, for example, Cf light bulbs won’t change lighting. Commercial has been using primarily flourescent for indoor lighting and primarily sodium or mercury for outdoor lighting for decades.

It’s only going to address a tiny area, which all these things tend to address.

When I brought this up on Daily Kos, one user claimed that corporate culture these days is so short-termist (in order to qualify for bonuses) that industry won’t make the investments in greater efficiency, even if they would pay for themselves in the long run.

I thought that an economy which requires continuous growth just to sustain itself was called a “Ponzi scheme”.

My disagreement with the Club of Rome types is that they believe we have already exceeded the limits to growth (setting the stage for an inevitable dieoff), while I believe we are still comfortably below those limits. I do still believe that their are limits though.

I think nuclear fission power can raise the Third World’s standard of living up to the First World level and sustain a population of up to 10 billion without use of fossil fuels, but beyond that point we would need fusion.

        DV82XL said:

This sort of tokenism is what is killing any serious debate on the energy issue. ‘Doing without’, appeals to some sort of subconscious vestigial Calvinism, that seems to be inherent in English speaking cultures.

Yet on one hand, they don’t want to say ‘doing without’ too strongly. It’s a split message. Tell the self-haters that we won’t have light and tell the more mainline ones that we’ll still have light but it will be with flourescent bulbs.

Anyway, as buzz says, this is tokenism because, for example, Cf light bulbs won’t change lighting. Commercial has been using primarily flourescent for indoor lighting and primarily sodium or mercury for outdoor lighting for decades. It’s only going to address a tiny area, which all these things tend to address.

Other point: You can’t do without! That’s bad. An economy needs to increase the standard of living on the top in order to increase it on the bottom. If rich people weren’t buying cars in the 1910’s then there would never have been the infrastructure or technology for the model-T in the 1920’s. Besides that, a healthy economy must grow to accommodate increased population and evolving technology etc. You can’t have a shirking economy. By definition that is a recession.

People seem to think we can go backwards but then somehow stop at a convient point. IE: We won’t regress all the way back to mud huts, but just to modest cottages. No, it does not work that way. You either are moving up or moving down and when you move down you have a recession and everything starts going to hell. You can’t pick and choose what is and what isn’;t based on how necessary it is.

Less money in the flow and that means less upgrades to limousines and ambulances. You can’t legislate that only the ‘lavish’ things stop growing. God, I don’t know why this is so hard to understand! People might think 3G phones are frivelous, but I’ll say two things: 1. That technology may show up in watching videos on your phone, but it also will end up allowing for telemedicine or other extremely beneficial products. 2. When 3G towers need to be upgraded and my company does it, that means I get paid and so do the guys who work on it under me and so do the othere owners of the company. We then use this to feed ourselves, pay our mortgages and to pay our taxes.

Christ. The day people start ‘doing without’ it all goes to hell.

        drbuzz0 said:

People seem to think that energy is being wasted everywhere because nobody cares about efficiency. Absolute bull****.

This sort of tokenism is what is killing any serious debate on the energy issue. ‘Doing without’, appeals to some sort of subconscious vestigial Calvinism, that seems to be inherent in English speaking cultures.

        DV82XL said:

See this is why a background in science is so important. the statement above demonstrates a total failure to grasp scale. Carpooling is not going to do a damned thing to make solar & wind energy more effectual.

More dreaming in color.

There are so many things people don’t understand. For solar and wind to be viable you’d be looking at cutting energy consumption by ridiculous amounts – more than 90% That’s absurd. Even getting energy levels to plateu (much less drop) us unrealistic if we want to have any chance at lifting most of the world out of poverty.

People don’t seem to grasp the fact that energy rationing is a BAD thing. A scarcity-based econemy guarantees poverty and it encourages cheating and regressive class burdening.

The other thing is that there’s not that much room for effective simply with new technology. The most energy intensive industries are also the most effecient – by necessity. Any activity that uses massive amounts of energy has an incentive from the get go to do it as efficiently as possible. For example, something like aluminum manufacturing by its very nature is extremely energy intensive. Because of this. aluminum smelters use the most effecient transformers, the most effecient electrodes and the most effecient processes possible. When your aluminum mill uses 1.25 gigawatts, there’s a huge incentive to cut that to 1 gigawatt if you can do so by using better electrodes, more effecient process control etc.

You don’t have to force airlines to use high bypass turbofans. You don’t have to force railroads to use high compression turbocharged diesel engines.

People seem to think that energy is being wasted everywhere because nobody cares about effeciency. Absolute bull****. You think CF lights are going to improve the effeciency of lighting? Maybe of small residential lighting, but I’ve got some bad news: The places that use very very large amounts of lighting all switched to Metal halide and sodium lamps 30+ years ago and those are more than twice as effecient as CF anyway.

        Pangean said:

The triumph of solar and wind energy is inevitable, but there will have to be considerable efforts at industrial and agricultural efficiency gains, systematic carpooling, and energy rationing to accommodate the energy disruptions brought about by currency collapse, imperialist wars in petro zones, depletion of cheap energy sources, and resistance to pollution-generating power plants.

See this is why a background in science is so important. the statement above demonstrates a total failure to grasp scale. Carpooling is not going to do a damned thing to make solar & wind energy more effectual.

More dreaming in color.

        Jon said:

http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/index.php/digital_tokyo/articles/gasoline_car_converted_to_run_on_solar_power/

It’s an electric car. They replaced the gasoline motor with an electric motor or electric motors. It has a battery. The solar panels may charge the battery, but not nearly enough to drive on them. The energy is negligible compared to the energy used to drive.

An electric car is going to require a certain amount of energy. It can be up to 500 watt hours per mile. For a small car like that, it could be less, maybe as few as 100 watt hours per mile, but it has to be something significant because the car must accelerate over its own inertia and it must also overcome wind resistance and rolling resistance (tire deformation and axle friction).

So there’s only so little energy you can get by with. You can’t shrink it to zero because there will always be air and always be some resistance and nothing is 100% effecient etc. Current batteries can give descent range, not great range, but descent. There are plenty of efforts working on this front and its totally possible to run a car on batteries for a good 50+ miles. That’s no problem.

So for the car to be powered by solar energy, the power provided by the solar panels must be as much or more than the car consumers, understand? If it’s less then the car is just running off batteries and the solar cells only contribute slightly. They may charge the battery if the car is not running, but it could take weeks or months. More likely you’d plug it in.

With me so far?

What I’m saying is if the solar cells don’t provide enough energy to drive the car on their own, then really the car is running on battery power. This make sense?

Okay, so lets look at those panels. They don’t even cover the entire hood of the car. They cover maybe 75% of it. What would you say that is in terms of surface? Maybe a square meter. Maybe one and a half square meters?

Okay, now you can look this up if you don’t believe me, but the amount of energy from the sun per square meter is about 200 watts per square meter on average. For a bright sunny day it can be as high as 1200 watts per square meter.

So if that’s one and a half square meters we could have about 1800 watts of theoretical maximum energy. Almost two kilowatts. That’s the total amount of energy that is coming from the sun and hitting those panels under the best conditions. Still with me?

Okay, now that energy needs to be converted to electricity. There’s a certain effeceicny for this. It runs about like this:

Consumer Solar cells = about 16% = 288 watts
Really high end consumer cells = about 24% max = 432 watts
Exotic Super Effecient Laboratory Bleeding Edge Cells = about 33% = 594 watts

Okay, so if you’re still with me, then we can assume that if those are the best, most exotic, cutting edge, specialty solar cells and if it’s a bright bright perfectly clear day then we might get a bit less than 600 watts. But we will more likely get less than 300 watts if we’re using normal solar cells that can be afforded.

Okay, now my car has about 180 horsepower which is about 130 kilowatts (kilowatts is thousands of watts) so it would never be even a tiny fraction of the power to run my car, even if the motors were 100% effecient.

So how little power could this car have? Well, lets think. about 5 horsepower is a riding lawnmower, and if this car is going to drive on highways and such it’s going to need at least 20 or so horsepower and probably much more, but 20 would be about the bare minimum.

That comes out to about 15 kilowatts or about 15,000 watts. That doesn’t include the air conditioning or windshield wipers or power steering, of course, but clearly we have nowhere near the power required.

So do you believe in math?