well then civilization is doomed, because non-renewable energy sources are... not renewable, which means they'll run out eventually. By the time that happens, we need to have transitioned to 100% renewables, or else.Green energy advocates refuse to see that attempting to rely just on green energy solutions will never work, due to how little power they produce in real world applications.
. 22 Racing Series .
The problem is the world uses more energy than can be realistically produced "green" .
If you suddenly force change, you will have social breakdown almost instantly. ( No more cars, 85% reduction in home electrical use, no heat, no AC, drastic cuts in commercial energy use ).
Even if you have gradual change, you will never be able to keep up with domestic population growth and the growth of "second world" nations coming into economic power.
I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Well there's eventually going to be a new dark ages unless we can get cold fusion working? Too many people getting rich on oil and gas though at the moment.
...except that we can, eventually.The problem is the world uses more energy than can be realistically produced "green" .
. 22 Racing Series .
The problem is the world uses more energy than can be realistically produced "green" .
Care to cite a source on that?
Hydro-electric potential of North America alone is many times more than the entire globe uses currently or projected to use in the next few centuries. The only real problem with dams is they are generally a harder engineering feat to pull off well than a similar output from a coal or oil station. You can place the fossil fuel station wherever it makes the most sense to based on demand and available land. Hydroelectric however kind of has to be built in a suitable river with little real room to say otherwise.
Um.... The problem I see is that most people seem to forget about the footprint of manufacturing and building of renewable power-sources. As far as I know, effective solar panels are quite expensive. Wind turbines use tons of plastic, etc.
Building dams.... well that's tons of fuel burnt for transportations, tons on energy for moving concrete, tons of steel manufacturing, etc.
Plus dams fuck up environment pretty well. I vote for going back to stone age instead of dams, wind-parks and solar panel parks everywhere in the landscape.
We should and IMHO could cut really tremendously the amount of power consumption. And no, not by unplugging the phone-recharger. But forgetting cars, comfort machines. We should really go back to stone age a bit.
I also have that "humanity is doomed" feeling. Sure, cold fusion would be awesome, but cold fusion power plants would be so easy targets for terrorists, in wars, etc.
Fish ladders? They have no hands or legs!
No kidding, this exists, and you're not getting to construct even a puny 2-3 meter low-head dam here without. And even then, animal-protective hobby fishers (yeah right, repeat that three times...) protest because you allegedly kill their fish.
if you suddenly force change, you will have social breakdown almost instantly. ( No more cars, 85% reduction in home electrical use, no heat, no AC, drastic cuts in commercial energy use ).
Though truth being told, 85% of home electrical use is pure laziness, stupidity, and ignorance. In other words, useless.
As in: "Yeah, I leave the light on when I go out, I don't mind, it's not very expensive" (quote from a friend of mine last year). Another one, a highschool friend of mine is leaving his computer on day and night. No, he is not running a server, he just doesn't want to wait the 10-15 seconds it takes to boot when he uses it twice per day. He has been doing that kind of thing since the early 1990s. Now calculate 100+ watts (not including monitor) times 86400 * 365 * 20. Did I tell you that he, too, doesn't turn off the lights? Of course he has been a student until the age of 30 and jobless ever since (aged 40 now), so money isn't really a concern. If social security pays for your apartment and you don't work for your money, it doesn't matter how much electricity costs.
Same goes for cars. People just give a fuck as long as it isn't too expensive for them to afford. And even then, they'll protest but still not change behavior.
What's cynical is that the greens try to make driving unattractive by imposing stupid 30 km/h speed limits and traffic lights on main access roads that will let through 3 cars at a time. To reduce pollution as they say.
What they don't realize is that the 100,000 people who drive on those main access roads do not drive for fun, but to get to work (in lack of a functional, affordable, or safe-for-life metro system). They don't have a choice but to use the car, and making them drive in the 2nd gear instead of the 4th gear only makes them cause more pollution. Of course a car standing still at a traffic light doesn't produce any pollution at all either. Oh wait...
But the greens are unimpressed, even though the recent particulate matter examinations show that they're achieving exactly the opposite of what they wanted.
Now, having a metro system where going downtown costs 0.50 rather than 4.80 and where you don't risk being robbed would truly be helpful to reduce energy consumption and particular matter exhaust.
But hey, that'd be too easy, wouldn't it.
Plus dams fuck up environment pretty well.
So lakes are bad for the environment? You better not tell Canada or Russia that, seeing as we apparently have something like nearly half the world's accessible fresh water, of which over 80% is in lakes.
Really, the environmental problems caused by dams are caused by poorly planned and managed dams that are overly large and cycled in unfriendly manners. You only get actual issues when you build an overly large reservoir, force the system to have too large of a variance between peak and low flow (one of the problems in several dam systems where they nearly shut off all flow during non-peak power demand times and then open them up too much to produce more power. Causes all sorts of issues just down stream of them.), or provide no reliable means for wildlife to bypass the dam.
A well designed low head dam will pay for itself energy wise in a few months, will use mostly materials taken from on site or near to site for the retaining walls, and will have a usable lifetime of centuries with minimal work to the primary structure.
