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green unintended consequences

docblack

I am seeing in the media that biofuel production is effecting world food supplies. Couldn't that have been predicted? What other alternative energy sources are we funding and pursuing that will have similarly unintended consequences?

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Submitted by docblack on Mon, 04/28/2008 - 05:21.

jstack6
jstack6's picture
Re: green unintended consequences

these read like some corporation CEO wote them. They are full of bad information. So many I would take another 6 paragrahgs to refute them.

wind- more birds die on the front of vehicles than all the ind generators. Alss many more on windows of high rises. It's not the wind generators.

food crops for fuel- so what about negative crops like tobacco and sucrose corn surup. They kill us and no one says a peap.

solar- it's cheaper everyday, no pollution, no water use. evergreen solar panels take less than 1 year of energy to pay back. lowest carbon footprint in the world, and American made.

no nukes-brilliant since nuke is the most expensive power ever invcented, used 50% more water than coal and makes deadly pollution for thousands of years. Only renewable are good and safe and healthy yet cost less each year!

etc etc

 

 

solar stacks

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solar stacks


Tue, 05/27/2008 - 22:01

athena
Re: green unintended consequences

Then there's the problem with the energy efficient lightbulb.  We know that we are running out of oil but when everyone converts to electricity there will not be enough to go around, so we try to get people to use energy efficients which make more light, less heat.  We turn off lights to save electricity which makes the buildings colder which causes the boilers to come on more and we end up using more oil.  Maybe use the incandescents in the winter only.

An individual can't make much of a difference.  We need a wholesale change.  How about restricting traffic speeds to 30mph in the city, (now there's a thought) and building a car strictly for city driving, and prevent the big,fast cars from entering the city center?  Our made for the city vehicles would be real cheap, short range electrics which would qualify for low insurance rates and which would get you from the train station to the final destination - the last few miles.  How about a community rental fleet?


Wed, 05/14/2008 - 05:57

Deborah
Re: green unintended consequences

I beg to differ, individuals are making the difference...

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Innisfil, Ontario CANADA

705-294-0598

Eco- friendly, no license, no fuel, 28mph, fitness & fun!!!!

keywestcarriageco@live.com


Tue, 05/27/2008 - 14:50

jstack6
jstack6's picture
Re: green unintended consequences

I guess I'm an eternal optimist. I don't see any downside at all.

In fact when as isse like more expensive food from growing corn for ethanol I see that as a great opportunity to show how growing tobacco and food crops for beer production is the real wase and problem but we don't see it since it has gone on so long.

This also gives us a chance to see how corn is a poor choice, switch grass produces 4 times as much energy with less fertilizer and less pestisides.

When a problem like this comes up we can all TH!NK and talk about it and find the real problems. 

 the solar stacks

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solar stacks


Fri, 05/02/2008 - 22:00

ctyankee
Re: green unintended consequences

So who is going to pay the tobacco growers the same $$$ for growing switch grass that they earn from tobacco?  If you can solve that sticky little problem I'll put up the nomination to the Swedish Academy.

 The U. Q. for switchgrass is the need to develop a new cellulose digesting enzyme, and thinking the world will change it's behavior to suit a new paradigm at a significantly lower standard of living.

That's why we need to continue to sate the  desires of the people while developing a more efficient way to do it. 15% direct energy harvest via concentrating solar-thermal electric v 0.03% biomass yield from a crop that's still considered a weed, and still displaces food crops, and still requires fuel to harvest...

All I can ask is that you consider that betting every horse in the race only benefits the owners of the track.  Win, Place, Show, the rest are losers the moment they started running.


Sat, 05/03/2008 - 15:19

ctyankee
Re: green unintended consequences

Was this one of the starter ideas?  

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=742370


Mon, 04/28/2008 - 14:16

Charley
Re: green unintended consequences

Goodness.  That article is great at picking out very specific negative instances, particularly the Allentown piece.  All wind turbine projects are bad or a failure because of Allentown? Strange logic.  I do have to agree with the Ethanol paragraph though.  There should have been a lot more long-term thought and discusion on the ramifications of moving the focus of growing of crops from food to ethanol.  Anything and everything we do has effects.  The butterfly effect comes to mind at how a micro change can affect a major change.  It's difficult to always know if in the end the right decision is made, but that does not mean that we should sit and become immovable in our choices to better the planet based on our fear of what could happen.  I consider many of these changes "growing pains" in trying to do the right thing.  We'll have snafus, mistakes, missteps, etc., but in the end we'll be moving in the right direction, and where there will be failures it will not be for lack of trying remedy our predicament.

Charley 


Fri, 05/02/2008 - 09:49

ctyankee
Re: green unintended consequences

Hi Charley,

  The butterfly effect, is often misquoted and misapplied.  It doesn't refer to consequences caused by a particular minor event; the butterfly wing.   Rather it refers to the *inability* to trace a major event, i.e. the hurricane, back to the inciting series of events or event.

   So we agree that paralysis out of fear ir ignorance is a bad thing.  However doing something that is unsound e.g. Food to EToH and calling them growing pains doesn't make sense either.

  We need to move boldly toward the direct harnessing of solar energy on a large scale; not a few tens of 100 MW monsters, but many tens of thousands of multi-hundred kW installations.  

  A commercial sized distributed generation model is technically superior because there will always be some portion of it that is collecting sunshine.  Furthermore, the energy can be transported shorter distances from generation to consumption, boosting the service factor of the entire grid.


Fri, 05/02/2008 - 14:28

ctyankee
Re: green unintended consequences

The first consequence will be to increase the price of the formerly cheaper forms of energy.  Basic law of supply & demand is modified by the regulated utilities.  All generators "offer" kW's to the grid, and the ISO's set the floor price that all suppliers are paid for their portion of the power.  These adjustments are made as often as every 15 minutes.

Reassigning millions of acres of food crops to energy crops will have all the nasty ripple effects of any major disruption in the supply chain. Cattle feed goes up, meat & milk go up... demand for meat & milk drops, cattle stocks get dumped because they're too expensive to feed, milk continues to climb, meat plunges temporarily, then returns to earlier pre-slash highs.  But surplus cattle are now gone.

We waste effort looking to convert cellulose to ethanol, but even *if* we find a new super-enzyme and yeast, plants still only capture 0.01% of the sunshine that falls on an acre of land.  In the mean time the government subsidizes the price of food crops and still pays farmers to fallow land.

PV solar is getting more popular, but prices are continuing to rise, and waiting periods are over a year. 

The new thin film solar aka CIGS is still a precision process, Induim is a scarce element, so is Gallium, and Selenium is toxic.  The Copper is a bargain by comparison.  Manufacturers are spouting $1/W for the cells, but even if they make that goal, the panels are still $5-6/W, and the small 1.5 m^2 panels cost a fortune to install.

 Wind power is clean, and when local geographic conditions support the decision, it can be installed and operated effectively...  Living near a wind farm is as noisy as living in the city.  The blades are huge, and even though they rotate slowly, the tip speeds can exceed 100 MPH.  Birders are up in arms because a tiny fraction of the billions of birds collide with a blade, and litter the grounds around the towers.

Hot Geothermal is another strong technology, but again only a few locations are suitable for exploitation.

 The "No Nukes" group almost got their wish... There hasn't been a new US reactor in 25+ years.  Imagine how much less atmospheric CO2 there'd be if the moratorium/curtain hadn't fallen.

On another board I'm participating on an engineering challende for "new" ways to control mosquito populations in the 3rd world.  At one time vector borne diseases were entirely unknown in the US.  Today we have Lyme, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, West Nile,and the oldies are making a resurgence, Malaria, and you can't own a dog without buying heart-worm medication or risk being charged with animal cruelty.  Yes DDT, killed mosquitoes, and other nasties.  It distinguished the US as a safe and evolved civilization from the insect laden images of desperation we now see to elicit sympathy for 3rd world causes.

Decades ago GE dumped PCB's into the rivers in New York, and that's a shame.  Those sediments had become well sequestered in the intervening decades. Two years ago(?) GE was ordered to dredge up the contaminations, at a cost of billions of dollars, to do what? yup... bury them somewhere! They were buried!  Guess what,  new spikes of PCB's in local fishes... Brilliant!

Now some good news. 

They took Lead out of gas.  Modern instruments can detect lower backgrounds, so now it turns up everywhere we look.  Can't take down a painted wall without a hazmat permit.  Poor kids aren't munching paint chips anymore, but their test scores continue to decline... maybe it wasn't the lead? They make union teachers out of lead don't they? Oops!

 We can't be exposed to asbestos anymore either; the lawyers have seen to that.  My favorite abatement, is when the asbestos is sealed in asphalt tile... asphalt is the essence of "stickyness" it keeps the fibers in place so well it was used as a "bonding agent" for asbestos products.  Today we spend ~100/sq ft to abate asphalt asbestos tiles.  I had a toy mineralogy kit that came with a sample of asbestos, and a sheet with projects and ideas...  Even though the company is long gone, perhaps I can sue the companies that made the cardboard box or printed the instructions. Hmmm...

How about another war story... The war on forest fires, because poverty, illiteracy, drugs, hunger, and terror are not enough.  For decades all fires were fought in detection.  This saves millions of acres of chaparral and other "fuel" growths.  Now when a fire starts there is so muck fuel on the ground the fire can actually sinter the earth, sterilizing the land for years, or until the next big erosion event.

Sorry doc, long post for a short question, buy you knew these answers already didn't you?  The problem is picking the pertinent topics from suck a monumental list of unintended consequences.

Some of the criticisms are harsh, I don't think anyone set out to "mess things up" at some future date.  As I pointed out in another thread, sometimes it's better to leave things alone.  We **must** be vigilant at the outset, and stop asserting 'criminal conspiracy' every time a company makes a decision to do something new... But we should SLAM those that scoff responsibility at the starting gate.


Mon, 04/28/2008 - 11:43