Bruce Podobnik wrote:
> If this hydrogen was itself produced via solar-powered
> facilities (which is now being done in pilot plants), this would
> provide a large-scale, environmentally-sustainable new energy system
> which could be diffused throughout the world-economy.
>
This may sound harsh, but I too have ploughed through masses of this
IEA, USGS, World Bank stuff on energy and renewables and I have seen
nothing to give me this kind of optimism, on the contrary. The idea that
solar-powered hydrogen plants for example can substitute for
gasoline/diesel powered transportation systems is surely a fantasy; the
numbers do not merely not equate; the orders of magnitude differences
between what can be derived from solar fluxes, and what we now get from
oil and gas, show an incommensurable, unbridgeable gulf between the
present day energy system and anything we might ever hope for, from
renewables. This seems totally misguided. Actually it is a strategy for
wasting what fossil reserves are left on providing energy
cross-subsidies to photovoltaics and similar technologies which have no
chance whatever of being cost competitive or, more importantly, of being
scaled up to meet the huge demand created by impending energy
shortfalls. I know that that people like Amory Lovins have done much to
give currency to the ideas about hybrid and fuel cell engines now being
frenetically touted by the big auto makers, but this seems sheer last
ditchery to me; the world has already wasted tens of billions of dollars
on fission and fusion as alternatives: all that colossal investment was
also a mere waste of existing fossil fuel resources and the net result
is not just zero, it is Chernobyl -- and fantasies about cold fusion.
Now we are chaisng even sillier wild geese, in the form of windmills and
photovoltaics, and meanwhile ignoring the real but deeply uncomfortable
and even shocking alternatives which do exist: the ONLY alternatives.
What actually is necessray, although it surely won't happen in a world
where the big auto makers have announced 15 new model ranges of gas
guzzling 4-wheel drives in the last year alone -- is for the West to
transform NOW and
VOLUNTARILY its industrial base and energy system, while
there is time; and to do so on the basis of a radical redistribution
of resources to the neocolonies/peripheries.
Nothing of the kind will happen, of course: instead the oil companies
will continue to refine their extraction technologies; they already
mount nuclear magnetic resonance scanners on their horizontal drills,
which snake around under the surface sniffing out the last dregs of oil;
production wil climb, all that can be extracted and burnt will be; and
then one day it will all be over. The real and instructive anaology is
with the world fishing industry which also managed to raise catches year
on year using 'advanced' technology, and now the fisheries are
collapsing one by one, almost overnight, starting with the disaster in
Newfoundland.
Overshoot and dieoff is how it will be, unfortunately; the last decade
of deregulation and privatisation, the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the ending of all attempts at prorationing or real conservation/planned
resource use, is what has led to the present glut, but the true price we
shall pay for this glut is that the oil will run out sooner rather than
later, and the world will be totally unprepared for that calamitous day.
Mark Jones