the duchy of hetkettle trophish

seems a little farther ways off than i thought. well, than i assumed, from the talk. here are a few things from the plan b renewable plan — wait, i’ll show you.

well as you can see they think wind is more ready than anything, which must be why people are actually installing it now, huh. so anyway, what i figure is, assuming it all doesn’t go to hell in the meantime, the energy use growth between 2020 and 2040, as the world’s under-oiled go solar, i assume sometime over a decade from now solar thermal will really be “cheaper than coal” and will be the lead element in the energy growth after, ok, wait.



right, so, the plan, is to apply major efficiency across all areas over the next dozen years, keeping energy use flat or reduced as it is more widely applied. at some point though the easiest efficiency gains give way to increasing application and more supply will be needed. at this point, one would expect solar thermal, deep geothermal, biomass (which they say is more efficiently used for vehicle propulsion through the grid than fermented), and kites and other wind gizmos — they’ll be nearly ready for, ah, wait.

so we can get rid of a lot of fossil fuel use, then grow into newer technologies as we get rid of the fossil stragglers.

ps. make you a deal. one-time offer. i’ll support cogeneration if you install it only in facilities that must (now) burn hydrocarbons, for the high heat. anybody who needs electricity alone gets it from the clean grid or their own clean capacity. as i thought we intended.

pps. are going to have intended. sheesh this is complicated.

scidev.net has a semi-monthly review of south asian science news. here are the most important stories.

a) because of what used to be there

b) riki-tikki-teflon

ps. no more mongoosebots but climate progress has more horrible stories of glacier doom.

bad and worse and worse news this time ’round. where do you start, with the american press’s deeper truer embedding, their blind eyes turned away permanently from the blazing immoderation of their war champion;

or with the refusal to acknowledge hamas;

or with the inability of even progressive sources to imagine putting aside fossil fuels, leading to continuing awkward abstentions over war, in the face of total ruin;

or with the similar desire to overemphasize iranian involvement in iraq, agreeing with key administration propaganda because it fits a narrative about unmanageable occupation;

or another hundred thousand dead because it’s an election year;

or that iranian powers-that-be are maybe throwing sadr’s people to the wolves;

i don’t know.

the war is still wrong, criminal, and terrifyingly distracting.

— like sympathetic video or ehrenreich’s bearing witness — it cuts me — feel a little slice, along some unknown organ, purpose obscure to medical science, that is sensitive to chances missed by good people who need to become great people with plans — and a sense of the situation.

you ask where the energy will come from tomorrow and that’s a fair question, with lots of variables, lots of juggling, lots of opportunity and varieties of grief.

you ask where we’ll get energy the day after tomorrow: not out of the ground.

“ha! you think you have problems…!”

ps. i didn’t say they were a funny joke.

as much as i try for it. it’s too complicated. the question about what to do with cars, how they cost, how they cost — for non-telepaths, the first was do and the second, did — and this is important. depreciation on cars will hurt in ways that would make people fight changing. i think.

to me this is more reason to push local transit, intercity transit, home delivery, and scooter-like things, including electric bicycles. the quick environmental benefits of these are matched by how they help people bridge between the cost of old-fuel travel and their economic ability to either afford new-fuel wheels or make a life change in their car usage. rental or subscription won’t serve many and all such big systems won’t come on line very fast.

it’s much easier to predict a revolt leading to massive wind capacity installation than a similar revolt leading to better transport, at comparably easy prices. the design of our cities and distribution of services weakens that and the class identification and several-layers-deep economic dependency feels crushing.

but still there’s that question. if you can’t sell your current car to anyone, and it’s really not worth converting, how do you make the leap into the new? the obvious answer, to me, which probably means it’s wrong, but, is: you build a class of useful car that costs little more than however much people would have paid from pocket after trade-in or whatever. this vehicle’d probably also need to be developed for poorer countries anyway, so build it to industrial-world standards and it can be handed down from US to mexico, for instance, when mexico was ready to go electric.

i’m reading that many countries are choosing to put fixing personal transportation on the back burner. we’re in a tougher position.

the other idea i had was that the government could be a buyer-of-last-resort for used vehicles.

ps. but i do think we should consider mucho wind and the smart grid to distribute it as the autobahn project of the coming century — the economic anchor — only with better scientific and political credentials.

“we already told you we were going to bring every technology to market that came to market, and that would reduce what was already going to happen by zero, so the global wouldn’t warming how it could be bad for jobs and innovation.

“our second plan was to reduce population by forcing foreign hunger to eat ethanol.

“now we are focusing on carbon intensity and this is the biggest most radical proposal, something very outside the environmental box, the kind of new thinking washington doesn’t try to do every day. our plan is to hire people. by this i mean, we will steal carbon intensity from other countries, by hiring away their geniuses, forcing enemies who shame us at global meetings to burn coal for money, while we burn out their young engineers and real sharp ethanol-fed entrepreneurs who understand the meaning of hard work and a temporary visa.

“this will make us a lot of green which is good because gas prices are higher.

“thank you.”

i see rising population and tightening resources as an irresistible force drawing us together — demanding attention and cooperation, to avoid collapse.

who could see them as reason to bet like crazy that physical limits don’t exist?

ps. see, because, all those bubbles must, only, mean that we are bound for godhood in our time — it’s not some toxic psychotic grab at brass hallucination — if all those people keep reaching for it, that proves the ring is real.

very much the same way we all fell off the edge of the earth and the sky was made of water. very much.

proof.

pps. and more: it they must be reaching for the ring because it’s there, they must be failing to grasp it because they lack true faith in its existence.

something’s definitely being born here!

perhaps a clue to its nature is that it comes from a horse’s ass.

ppps. so, ok, it turned out the sky was made of water, and the blue above and below was related, but the second was a coincidence and the first, like most, a guess that turned out right because this place isn’t a dream, it has rules and regular events, and once upon a time, when we made guesses, they were based on physical experience. or so i’ve heard.

you get me? never again.

Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University, said placing enough carbon filters around the planet could reel the world’s atmosphere back toward the 18th century, like a climatic time machine.

oh. how many’s enough, dr lackner?

He estimates that sucking up the current stream of emissions would require about 67 million boxcar-sized filters at a cost of [$5.6 trillion] a year.

sorry, i must have misheard — did you say “current emissions”? for how much…?

The orchards of filters would have to be powered by complexes of new nuclear plants, dams, solar farms or other clean-energy sources to avoid adding more pollution to the atmosphere.

so, wait. wait.

we’d have to build huge renewable capacity so we could continue to… burn… *

(time passes…)

hoo boy.

does he have the pentagon’s number, or what.

ps. if i’m reading right, the plan-bee people figure less than a trillion bucks a year over the next dozen — less than we spend on “fossil fuel development” — would buy the big “us” a near complete green grid to power everything.

pps. hmm.

The attraction of a technological silver bullet lies in the failure of the world to solve global warming through the obvious solution: reducing emissions.

yeah. it’s time to stop talking about “reduction,” it’s short-circuiting the brains.

“get rid of fossil fuels” is the language. “they’re incredibly dangerous.”

ppps. how many birds you figure 67 million giant vacuum cleaners’d kill?

that’s almost as many vacuums are there are cats, and cats are smaller — but they still kill more than a billion birds a year in this country alone.

and we’ve already established the vacuums are hungry.…

— pepe escobar, talking typically well about asian energy integration as shown by a gas pipeline from iran through pakistan to india.

inter-continental memo

dear sirs and madams of southwest asia,

if you don’t want your stuff blown up, don’t make it a gas pipeline, make it an electricity grid, and give the gift of clean, renewable energy generation to the people who are pissed. this will also keep your glaciers from melting.

you’ll regret buying this before the paint’s dry,
yours truly,
hapa.

ps. so when you say “the world,” you don’t really mean the world. you mean human affairs, slightly off track of the physical.

pps.

to: pepeasia@yahoo.com
re: gas pipelines, carbon, glaciers, and food

hi pepe,

i’m writing in reaction to your real-news piece on the new pipeline. i like you as a teevee star. it works for me.

ah ok, but! this is also a little disaster, isn’t it, because we are talking about three regions with desires to improve their standard of living placing their bets on a fuel source that absolutely has to go away, as we head into a period of maybe financial trouble.

as you said, “this is how the world really works,” but that’s the world of human affairs; the world is about the physical limits of the atmosphere and the ocean and the plants to absorb our carbon pollution. this is placing increasing pressure on fresh water supply in south asia and thus/also on food supply.

to wit:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/global-warming-melting-glaciers-shrinking-harvests.php

if you haven’t read it, i would like very much to recommend lester brown’s full book:
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB3/Contents.htm

and particularly the chapter on future renewable energy capacity for both electricity and heat:
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB3/pb3ch12.pdf

all my thanks,
hapa.

Petition to G8, UN and EU leaders:
We call on you to take immediate action to address the world food crisis by mobilizing emergency funding to prevent starvation, removing perverse incentives to turn food into biofuels and managing financial speculation, and to tackle the underlying causes by ending harmful trade policies and investing massively in sustainable agricultural productivity in developing nations.

yeah, petition, needs signatures, right, but what’s cool is an actual sierra leonian(?) government person talks to you! i imagine someday a campaign site like this having three or four video windows, each with different points of view, and maybe a video chat window with someone so you can discuss before committing to one of the options. maybe even chat with one of the people. or maybe a random person walking by a kiosk in dakar. you could have a little like “wow your french is worse than my english” thing, talk about whether or not that person is hungry, who they know that’s a farmer or works for the UN.

ps. i’m so high tech.