TFian
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Will the internet survive energy contraction?
- Thread starter TFian
- Start date
PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
No it doesn't.Yes it does.
TFian
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How's that sir/ma'am?
PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
You arrived at your conclusion via a logical fallacy.
TFian
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So then, how isn't he an appropriate authority?
PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
I didn't say that, I merely noted that you have failed to demonstrate that he is.
Still, I'd be more interested to learn why you believe that oil is required for the construction, deployment, and/or operation of wind turbines.
After all, it doesn't matter whether you or your sources are recognised authorities of any sort so long as you can provide evidence to support your position.
Still, I'd be more interested to learn why you believe that oil is required for the construction, deployment, and/or operation of wind turbines.
After all, it doesn't matter whether you or your sources are recognised authorities of any sort so long as you can provide evidence to support your position.
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
What evidence is there that he understands those subjects enough to reach valid conclusions?
Any peer reviewed papers, citations in relevant journals?
TFian, your argument basically boils down to this "One person that I consider to be an authority says that industrial civilization will collapse because we are running out of oil and all alternatives have major disadvantages that will cause them to fail, while attempts to improving efficiency through technology will also fail."
On the other hand, most authorities on the subject disagree with him. So, if we find the work of truly understanding the subject to be too much and are forced to only listen to authorities on the subject, we're forced to reject the 21st level Druid simply on that basis.
On the other hand if we go into the issues and look at them specifically we see:
- There is enough fissile material in the ground to support a fission based energy economy for centuries based on breeder reactors, and there is no insurmountable difficulty with breeder reactors, particularly as the price of energy rises and people are forced to make the choice between this and going without.
- There is enough uranium in the ocean, which can be harvested cost effectively, though not competitively with today's energy prices and the cost of mining currently known terrestrial uranium sources, to last for hundreds of thousands of years.
- Solar power can be collected and used, and there is enough of that by itself to power industrial civilization. And while it will be at greater cost, it will still be cost effective for maintaining manufacturing.
- There are still other sources of power, such as hydro and geothermal, wind, etc. which are proven effective. Are they the best solution? No, but they do work, and while relying only on them might mean our civilization would have to contract somewhat, it would certainly prevent the sort of collapse you are talking about.
- Increasing technology means we are able to do more for less. As others have pointed out, modern computers are much more efficient in terms of energy than their predecessors, and those were themselves more efficient than the technologies they replaced (like doing calculations by hand, using human operated switchboards, etc.)
Do you have any answer to any of these problems with your viewpoint, or are you simply going to assert without evidence that computers are less energy efficient that the alternative low tech methods, that all forms of energy generation not based on fossil fuels are not viable, that the uranium in the oceans mysteriously cannot be harvested, etc.?
On the other hand, most authorities on the subject disagree with him. So, if we find the work of truly understanding the subject to be too much and are forced to only listen to authorities on the subject, we're forced to reject the 21st level Druid simply on that basis.
On the other hand if we go into the issues and look at them specifically we see:
- There is enough fissile material in the ground to support a fission based energy economy for centuries based on breeder reactors, and there is no insurmountable difficulty with breeder reactors, particularly as the price of energy rises and people are forced to make the choice between this and going without.
- There is enough uranium in the ocean, which can be harvested cost effectively, though not competitively with today's energy prices and the cost of mining currently known terrestrial uranium sources, to last for hundreds of thousands of years.
- Solar power can be collected and used, and there is enough of that by itself to power industrial civilization. And while it will be at greater cost, it will still be cost effective for maintaining manufacturing.
- There are still other sources of power, such as hydro and geothermal, wind, etc. which are proven effective. Are they the best solution? No, but they do work, and while relying only on them might mean our civilization would have to contract somewhat, it would certainly prevent the sort of collapse you are talking about.
- Increasing technology means we are able to do more for less. As others have pointed out, modern computers are much more efficient in terms of energy than their predecessors, and those were themselves more efficient than the technologies they replaced (like doing calculations by hand, using human operated switchboards, etc.)
Do you have any answer to any of these problems with your viewpoint, or are you simply going to assert without evidence that computers are less energy efficient that the alternative low tech methods, that all forms of energy generation not based on fossil fuels are not viable, that the uranium in the oceans mysteriously cannot be harvested, etc.?
TFian
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All forms of modern technology are petroleum products, something I've been trying to get across here for a while...
Follow the numbers for sources given
It's not just transportation and agriculture that are entirely dependent on abundant, cheap oil. Modern medicine(1), water distribution(2), and national defense(3) are each entirely powered by oil and petroleum derived chemicals.
Automobiles:
The construction of an average car consumes the energy equivalent of approximately 20 barrels (840 gallons) of oil. (4) Ultimately, the construction of a car will consume an amount of fossil fuels equivalent to twice the car’s final weight. (5)
It's also worth nothing that the construction of an average car consumes almost 120,000 gallons of fresh water. (6) Fresh water is also rapidly depleting and happens to be absolutely essential to the petroleum refining process as each gallon of gasoline requires almost two gallons of fresh water for refining. (7)
Computers:
The construction of the average desktop computer consumes ten times its weight in fossil fuels. (8)
Microchips:
The production of one gram of microchips consumes 630 grams of fossil fuels. According to the American Chemical Society, the construction of single 32 megabyte DRAM chip requires 3.5 pounds of fossil fuels in addition to 70.5 pounds of water. (9) The Environmental Literacy Council tells us that due to the "purity and sophistication of materials (needed for) a microchip, . . . the energy used in producing nine or ten computers is enough to produce an automobile." (10) In his book "The Nine Nations of North America", author Joel Garreau explains in graphic detail just how much energy it takes to fashion a typical microprocessor: . . . microchips are not made one by one. They are printed in a batch on a silicon wafer, say, four inches in diameter. Each time a layer of stuff is printed on this silicon wafer, the wafer must be treated so the stuff you've laid on will stay there. This process is achieved through the application of monumental quantities of energy. In effect, as each layer of the circuit is laid on, the whole wafer is "baked" at temperatures sometimes high enough to reach the outer limits of technology (11)
The Internet:
Recent estimates indicate the infrastructure necessary to support the internet consumes 10% of all the electricity produced in the United States. (12) The overwhelming majority of this electricity is produced using coal or natural gas, both of which, as explained momentarily, are also near their global production peaks. (13) (14) (15) (16) (17)
Despite what others have said, solar panels and wind turbines REQUIRE petroleum and petroleum derived resources. When considering the role of oil in the production of modern technology, remember that most alternative systems of energy — including solar panels/solar-nanotechnology, windmills, hydrogen fuel cells, biodiesel production facilities, nuclear power plants, etc. all rely on sophisticated technology and energy-intensive forms of metallurgy.
In fact, all electrical devices make use of silver, copper, aluminum and platinum, each of which is discovered, extracted, and fashioned using oil or natural gas powered machinery. For instance, in his book, The Lean Years: Politics of Scarcity, author Richard J. Barnet writes:
To produce a ton of copper requires 112 million BTU's or the equal of 17.8
barrels of oil. The energy cost component of aluminum is 20 times higher.
Author Joel Garreau, in the same chapter of his book "The Nine Nations of North America" that was cited above, explains how energy-intensive the manufacture of aluminum is: The manufacturing of aluminum requires inexpensive energy as its most important raw material. It takes twelve times as much power to create a pound of aluminum as it does to make a pound of iron. A good sized aluminum plant uses as much power as a city of 175,000 people. (18)
Nuclear energy requires uranium, which is also discovered, extracted, and transported using oil powered machinery.
For more information on metals shortages and energy production, see: (19) (20) (21) (22) (23)
Most of the feedstock (soybeans, corn) for biofuels such as biodiesel and ethanol are grown using the high-tech, oil-powered industrial methods of agriculture.
n short, the so called "alternatives" to oil are actually "derivatives" of oil. Analyst John Michael Greer offers the following rather lucid explanation of this often over-looked relationship: . . . every other energy source currently used in modern societies gets a substantial "energy subsidy" from oil. The energy used in uranium mining and reactor construction, for example, comes from diesel rather than nuclear power, just as sunlight doesn’t make solar panels. What rarely seems to have been noticed is the way these "energy subsidies" intersect with the challenges of declining petroleum production to [preemptievely sabotage] the future of alternative energy production in industrial societies. (24)
Without an affordable supply of oil coupled with healthy and robust financial markets to capitalize the transition, a non-chaotic adaptation phase is unlikely as the raw materials and investment capital necessary to fuel such a large-scale transition will have evaporated.
Sources
1 - http://web.archive.org/web/20070206115842/http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495hz/id19.html
2 - http://www.iags.org/n0813043.htm
3 - http://www.boston.com/news/nation/w...dy_says_oil_reliance_strains_military/?page=2
4 - http://web.archive.org/web/20070102084156/http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Research.html
5 - http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/322.html
7 - http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/091704_beyond_peak.shtml
8 - http://www.alternet.org/water/80444/?page=2
9 - http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=10007&Cr=computer&Cr1=
10 - http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-11/acs-ttp110502.php
11 - http://web.archive.org/web/20050508041508/http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/322.html
12 - http://www.garreau.com/main.cfm?action=chapters&id=44
13 - http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/9/prweb555778.htm
14 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/05/fossilfuels.energy
15 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/05/fossilfuels.mining
16 - http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/179
17 - http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/27/61031/618
18 - http://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr08/peak-coal.html
19 - http://www.garreau.com/main.cfm?action=chapters&id=44
20 - http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/031606_renewables_part4.shtml
21 - http://www.platts.com/Electric Power/Resources/News Features/photovaltaic/silicon.xml
22 - http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199703110
23 - http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19426051.200-earths-natural-wealth-an-audit.html
24 - http://www.financialpost.com/trading_desk/mining/story.html?id=333806
25 - http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/03/paradox-of-production.html
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PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
And failing, because it's completely untrue.
Fail right off the grid.
We use oil as a feedstock for producing medicines and plastics because it is plentiful and cheap. This represents only a small proportion of total oil use and is one of the easiest to switch to alternatives.
And while hospitals use a fair bit of energy, they do not burn oil.
So, TFian, to sum up, oil and other fossil fuels make up a major part of our current energy infrastructure. Developing new energy infrastructure requires energy. Therefore it's impossible to develop non-fossil fuel based energy infrastructure.
Um...
Um...
TFian
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What's the problem? I gave detailed reasons why you can't.
PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
Energy equivalent. Not oil.
This is an interesting one. Obviously, there is no overall shortage of fresh water in the world. One entire continent is covered in it to a depth of a couple of miles. It's also renewable.
However, there are certainly localised shortages, and there are aquifers that are becoming (or have become) depleted.
Solution: Don't build your car plants and oil refineries in a desert.
Wrong link - you mean (9).
That report comes from 2004. Nobody on the planet builds computers like they did in 2004. They quote 24Kg for the mass of the computer; modern computers are typically between a third and a tenth of that, while being much faster and much more energy efficient. A Mac Mini - and the slowest current model is about twice the speed of the fastest PC you could buy in 2004 - masses less than 1.4Kg.
Your links are out of sync.
Anway: That report is from 2002. In 2002 we were just shifting from producing chips at the 130nm node to the 90nm node; that report probably refers to the older 130nm process. We're now producing chips at 32nm. That's sixteen times more efficient, in terms of resources and energy used. And Intel will be shifting to 22nm next year, twice as efficient again, though the rest of the industry is 12-24 months behind.
That page isn't explicitly dated, but it's copyrighted 2002. Again, it's obvious just from the photo of the phone's insides that this is hopelessly out of date. No-one builds mobile phones like that any more.
Again, things are about sixteen times more efficient now. That means that to save enough water to produce all the chips for a mobile phone, you need to cut your shower short by twenty seconds for one day. Next year, ten seconds. By 2018, when current approaches to silicon scaling are expected to run out of steam, approximately one second.
Of course they're not. That would be absurdly inefficient.
In 1970, maybe. These days 12 inches is standard.
Quantify, please.
This is flatly untrue. If the temperatures were ever "high enough to reach the outer limits of technology" the chips would become rapidly expanding plasmas and would be significantly less useful.
Follow your own link (it's actually 13). The study came in for considerable criticism; it overstates the power consumption by a considerable factor because it's based on figures that were eight years old even at the time the report was produced.
This is true.
Don't do that, then.
Nope.
So?
So?
We do NOT use oil to refine aluminium. I hope you at least understand that.
You do understand that we don't use oil to refine aluminium, right? Right?
Because this is cheap and convenient. We can recover, refine and transport uranium without any use of oil whatsoever. Using current, proven technology.
Using corn for producing biofuel is pure idiocy. Don't do that.
Nope.
Because it's cheap and convenient, not because it's necessary.
And returns - this is rather the point - vastly more power than was used in its extraction.
Actually, it does. We call them leaves.
And a false premise allows you to reach any conclusion at all. Doesn't make the conclusion true.
We have oil for the next hundred years, uranium for the next million, and sunlight for a few billion.
No doom for you.
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ThatSoundAgain
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The problem is that you keep asserting that for sectors whose energy has come from fossil fuels in the past, it must come from fossil fuels in the future. It's simply faulty logic.
An example: Sweden exports iron, steel, cars, planes, and other machinery, and things like pharmaceuticals and telecommunications gear. In fact, more of its GDP consists of industry than is the case for the US. And yet this is achieved with an energy mix where fossil fuels are in the minority (~one third).
The long and short of it - the production of computers, methods of transportation, communications equipment etc. etc. is not necessarily dependent on coal and oil.
Yes, we're aware of what you've been trying to get across. Just because you're trying to get something across doesn't mean it's right, which is what we've been trying to get across.
You're simply wrong, as your own sources indicate:
As was already pointed out, this is energy equivalence, which is not the same as oil. Most of the energy used in building cars is electricity, which can come from anywhere. It so happens that oil is a cheap source of energy, which is why oil-fired power plants are common. When oil ceases to be cheap, power plants will change to some other medium -- coal-fired plants are much more common now than they were fifty years ago precisely because coal is cheaper and oil is more expensive. In areas like France that have no oil and no coal, nuclear plants are commonplace.
Similarly, aluminum production happens via electrolysis. You're right that this takes tremendous amounts of energy, but requires no oil whatsoever. You can happily run an aluminum plant off of a hydroelectric generator or a nuclear reactor -- as, indeed, Pechiney does.
What you're not realizing is that goods and services can be substituted for one another, which is why HFCS has largely replaced cane sugar in the United States. It's just as sweet and cheaper. In 1930, the nation's industry relied on railroads to move goods and people around; with the construction of the Interstate highway system, long-distance motoring took off. (The high point of passenger traffic on American railroads was in the 1940s.) Railways appear to be making a comeback now precisely because they are more fuel efficient and can offer a cheaper alternative to driving.
Ultimately, this makes McPherson's argument utterly worthless:
So what? The British developed an entire empire built on wind power, until they found a better and more cost-effective alternative in coal, and then later in oil. The United States developed an industrial civilization based on rail transport, until it proved more cost-effective to use the road network and everyone switched.
People switch.
This is simply wrong. There's a huge "storehouse of cheap, convenient energy" right above your head, shining away morning, noon, and evening. There's another huge storehouse of cheap, convenient energy that covers seven-tenths of the earth's surface. It's simply that these sources are not quite as cheap as oil right now which is why people are using oil today.
And that's part of why we dismiss his claims. Ph.D. or not, he demonstrably doesn't understand the amount of uranium in the ocean. There's no particular reason why he should ("range science" teaches about "wildlife biology; and the conservation of water, soil, and other natural resources. ," not about heavy metal extraction from seawater.
But the people who are relevant experts consider him to be wrong. And more to the point, I can see for myself that he's wrong because he doesn't know the difference between what we are doing and what we could do.
Hindmost
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for information:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/rentrends.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table1.html
It will be interesting to see how long it takes to build the infrastructure for that renewable 7% energy--34% of which is hydro--to cover the 80 plus % of fossil energy the US uses per year. It took 100 years to develop the petroleum industry. The 1% solar will have trouble ramping up.
glenn
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/rentrends.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table1.html
It will be interesting to see how long it takes to build the infrastructure for that renewable 7% energy--34% of which is hydro--to cover the 80 plus % of fossil energy the US uses per year. It took 100 years to develop the petroleum industry. The 1% solar will have trouble ramping up.
glenn
TFian
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Yes, renewables will have a lot of trouble ramping up for our energy needs.
TFian
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1 - How many breeder reactors are out there and working right now?
2 - What are the environmental consequences of mining this uranium?
3 - While there's enough to power civilization when it comes to earth, we've only had very meager success harvesting it for practical applications. Sunshine is dilute, not concentrated, it doesn't have very much usable energy in, and therefore cannot power civilization http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/02/energy-follows-its-bliss.html
4 - Wind, Geothermal, and Hydro make out pretty minuscule energy returns.
5 - Yeah but at what cost? Why do we need so many nifty gizmos? We did fine when we just used human power.
excaza
Illuminator
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Look it up.
Look it up.
This was already shown to be wrong. The ArchKook has no idea what he's talking about.
These are maps of the available solar energy in the US. There's a lot.
Warning: large images.
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_csp_national_hi-res.jpg
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_national_hi-res.jpg
Tell that to Iceland.
These "gizmos" do things orders of magnitude more efficiently than anything human power can ever do.
TFian
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The question was somewhat rhetorical. The point is, very few are in operation, and I wouldn't base any future energy scenarios on it, since they'd essentially be fantasy scenarios.
That only proves how much energy hits the earth, that doesn't disprove it being dilute.
While Iceland does run on almost no petroleum, it's quite luddite compared to the rest of the west.
Like what? A Roaster makes a better alarmclock than any electronic one ever has been.