Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup metatuning alternative energy and energy dependence

> One important objective is to prevent a single dictator
> getting control of
> a large proportion of the world's oil. Precisely so we don't
> have to do
> what they say. That was the main reason for getting Saddam
> Hussein out of
> Kuwait (because he wouldn't have stopped there).

Ah, OK then. Wasn't totally sure what all that was
really about since "we have no treaties with Kuwait"
and all that. Hey since you're more up on this than I
maybe you know the answer to this one -- what happened
to Iraq to begin with? I knew many Persians fromboth
sides and before the Iranian revolution my
understanding was that both countries were pretty free
-- Western dress, women could attend universities,
dress as they please and drive. Now I know what
happened in Iran - they had a radical Islamic
revolution. But in Iraq I thought they were still a
democracy of sorts, with Hussein having been elected or
something like that. Before the Gulf War, wasn't Irag
pretty liberal, western and open? Hussein was not the
monarch and people worked in a capitalist economy.
Whereas Kuwait was sort of a despotic monarchy where
only the members of the royal family had any rights and
everyone else was sort of slaves. Wouldn't it have been
a really good thing to just be laissez faire about it
and have let Hussein take over Kuwait? Seems both
countries would have been the better for it. Or have I
got a totally wrong idea about how Iraq and Kuwait were
before the war?

> In fact, no. The UK is a net exporter of oil, the US a large
> importer.

Oh, well I was going to ask you how come the shortage
but I see you answer it a few lines down.

>> Even so we don't have as much as we need for day-to-day and
>> it would take a few months to ramp up production to be
>> self-sufficient.

> You don't have enough, face it. Bush is trying to open up
> Alaska, but it'd mean a fraction of your energy usage. The
> only solution would be to reduce consumption, and switch to
> alternative sources.

Consumption reduction seems *extremely* unlikely.
People just don't care and want to buy the cheapest
thing even if it is inefficient (cars, washing
machines, server farms). A luxury tax on stuff that
uses too much electricity (as they do an gas guzzlers)
might work but would be extremely difficult to push
through. Unfortunately even the environmentalists over
here (most of them) are quite wasteful -- driving old
pollucting inefficient cars all over the place. I do
not fancy myself an environmentalist but I do realize
that I have a lot less impact on the environment than
the environmentalists I have met. For example, living
in a rural area I am responsible for my own trash so I
produce a lot less of it and recycle heavily through
composting and feeding stuff to the chickens and so
forth, as do most people who live in these sorts of
areas (none of whom are environmentalists by philosophy
but most whom are by practice.)

Actually all our electricity here comes from coal which
is 100% domestically produced. I am quite fond of coal
energy - I think its great, though it won't last
forever either.

>> What were the circumstances with the uk being cut off
>> from oil? I never heard about this incident.
>
> The refineries were blockaded as a (peaceful) protest against
> the high tax on petrol.

Oh, I remember that -- I had thought you meant that the
arab states had cut off the uk.

>> Is france exempt from such shenanigans? I heard that almost
>> all of their electric production was nuclear.

> I think they have over 50% nuclear, and we (the UK) import
> some electricity from them.

Oh wow! Had never thought of that but I guess it's
possible to run cables under the channel!

> Coal and natural gas are important here, probably more so
> than oil. We get a lot of gas from the North Sea.

Same here.

> You still have the problem that cars, delivery vehicles and
> farm machinery
> are all built to run on oil derivatives. And a shortage of
> one fuel would
> drive up the price of the others.

Yes.... there are alternatives but none of them are
really practical. Some say grow corn and run machines
off ethanol but growing that much corn requires a huge
amount of fertilizer which is made with natural gas and
when you put it all together you're worse off that when
you started. Similar with solar energy -- the cells
require more energy to produce than they give off in a
lifetime but that is very possible to change. Even so,
solar cells may not ever be much more than a clean
battery. Solar water heaters and geothermal heat pumps
are very desirable and have no drawbacks & government
incentives or subsidies for those sorts of things could
really tremendously reduce our energy consumption. Or
even encouraging passive solar housing design.

>> Until we come up with something else it would seem to
>> be a matter of critical national security that we
>> immediately implement alternative energy sources.
>
> Certainly! Wind, waves, solar and nuclear are all expensive,
> and (except maybe nuclear) can't replace fossil fuels. But
> it's important to have diversity, and you can't switch
> overnight. That's where the oil lobby is dangerous.

I agree with you fully.

As an aside, don't the wave machines slow down the
rotation of the earth slightly?

- Jeff

🔗graham@...

In-Reply-To: <E16tDmQ-0007N9-00@...>
X. J .Scott wrote:

> Ah, OK then. Wasn't totally sure what all that was
> really about since "we have no treaties with Kuwait"
> and all that. Hey since you're more up on this than I
> maybe you know the answer to this one -- what happened
> to Iraq to begin with? I knew many Persians fromboth
> sides and before the Iranian revolution my
> understanding was that both countries were pretty free
> -- Western dress, women could attend universities,
> dress as they please and drive. Now I know what
> happened in Iran - they had a radical Islamic
> revolution. But in Iraq I thought they were still a
> democracy of sorts, with Hussein having been elected or
> something like that. Before the Gulf War, wasn't Irag
> pretty liberal, western and open? Hussein was not the
> monarch and people worked in a capitalist economy.
> Whereas Kuwait was sort of a despotic monarchy where
> only the members of the royal family had any rights and
> everyone else was sort of slaves. Wouldn't it have been
> a really good thing to just be laissez faire about it
> and have let Hussein take over Kuwait? Seems both
> countries would have been the better for it. Or have I
> got a totally wrong idea about how Iraq and Kuwait were
> before the war?

I'm not really *that* up on it. I read newspapers sometimes.

Iraq was certainly a dictatorship before the invasion of Kuwait. Also a
fairly nasty one, as we have proof that nerve gas was used against the
Kurds. I don't know about before the Iran/Iraq war. And I expect they
were capitalist, certainly on "our side" in the cold war.

Kuwait is and was a monarchy.

There may not have been a *specific* treaty, but the UN is founded on the
principle of collective security, so there was every reason to oppose an
attack against a sovereign nation. It followed a row at OPEC, and so was
an attempt to bully the smaller producers into following Iraq's line. As
Saddam was a pan-Arabist, there was the possibility he might go on to
invade Saudi Arabia. We know he had chemical weapons, and was close to
going nuclear. "Laissez faire" could have left him in control of all the
peninsula's oil, and even the simultaneous destruction of Baghdad and Tel
Aviv.

> Consumption reduction seems *extremely* unlikely.
> People just don't care and want to buy the cheapest
> thing even if it is inefficient (cars, washing
> machines, server farms). A luxury tax on stuff that
> uses too much electricity (as they do an gas guzzlers)
> might work but would be extremely difficult to push
> through.

Trivium of the day: the "gas guzzler" tax only applies to cars, as opposed
to small trucks. And SUVs are classed as small trucks.

> Unfortunately even the environmentalists over
> here (most of them) are quite wasteful -- driving old
> pollucting inefficient cars all over the place.

New cars are bad for the environment unless they use recycled steel. When
extracting iron form its ore, you react the iron oxide with coke to get
pure iron and carbon dioxide. Think of the total mass of a car -- more
carbon dioxide than that was given off in its manufacture.

> I do
> not fancy myself an environmentalist but I do realize
> that I have a lot less impact on the environment than
> the environmentalists I have met. For example, living
> in a rural area I am responsible for my own trash so I
> produce a lot less of it and recycle heavily through
> composting and feeding stuff to the chickens and so
> forth, as do most people who live in these sorts of
> areas (none of whom are environmentalists by philosophy
> but most whom are by practice.)

There was a test about this in the New Scientist. It's probably on the
web somewhere. I came out around the European average. One thing I lost
points for was not cycling to work. I don't know if Doctor Marten's boots
are really as environmentally damaging as cars, but they ended up in the
same category.

> Actually all our electricity here comes from coal which
> is 100% domestically produced. I am quite fond of coal
> energy - I think its great, though it won't last
> forever either.

Coal is incredibly bad for the environment. It's full of sulphur
compounds and all sorts of nasties. Even if they get filtered out, it's a
huge emitter of carbon dioxide. Britain's close to it's Kyoto targets for
carbon dioxide emissions, almost exclusively because power generation
switched from coal to gas.

Simple chemistry -- coal is mostly carbon. For every mole of carbon you
burn, you get a mole of carbon dioxide given off. That means more carbon
dioxide released than coal burned. Natural gas is CH_4. You still get
1:1 methane in to carbon dioxide out. But you also get twice as much
water, and that process gives you energy. Water vapour does feed the
greenhouse effect, but it doesn't hang around for long.

> Yes.... there are alternatives but none of them are
> really practical. Some say grow corn and run machines
> off ethanol but growing that much corn requires a huge
> amount of fertilizer which is made with natural gas and
> when you put it all together you're worse off that when
> you started.

The real problem is the energy required to transport and process the
crops.

> Similar with solar energy -- the cells
> require more energy to produce than they give off in a
> lifetime but that is very possible to change. Even so,
> solar cells may not ever be much more than a clean
> battery.

They could be useful for remote villages that aren't on the grid, but the
economics don't work out for large scale electricity generation.

There is one idea I saw where you build a big chimney in the desert. The
sun heats up the air inside which then rises, and so you have a wind
blowing up the chimney. Then you put a turbine in there. It costs a lot
to build, but the running costs are small. They were trying to get one
built in South Africa. I don't know what came of it.

> Solar water heaters and geothermal heat pumps
> are very desirable and have no drawbacks & government
> incentives or subsidies for those sorts of things could
> really tremendously reduce our energy consumption. Or
> even encouraging passive solar housing design.

Certainly, there are huge improvements that can be made in housing, both
for heating and air conditioning.

> As an aside, don't the wave machines slow down the
> rotation of the earth slightly?

No.

Graham

🔗clumma <carl@...>

>>Similar with solar energy -- the cells
>>require more energy to produce than they give off in a
>>lifetime but that is very possible to change. Even so,
>>solar cells may not ever be much more than a clean
>>battery.
>
>They could be useful for remote villages that aren't on
>the grid, but the economics don't work out for large scale
>electricity generation.

The grid itself is one of the worst things. The sound of
power lines? That energy comes off the grid. I'm sure it's
more efficient to run one large generator than many small
ones, but if it pays for the resistance loss on the grid I'd
be surprised. Does anybody know any more about this?

The other thing it does is abstract the act of using power
from the act of making it, which is very bad. Microgenerators
at the end of the block are coming out here soon, which is
great.

Depending on where you live, solar can be all you need.
During the "energy crisis" here, many people in my neighborhood
were turning a handy profit by selling their extra power back
to the grid. The problem is the initial investment. Here's
a spot where the Man could help -- organize a bulk purchase of
solar equipment, and use taxes on dirty energy like oil to help
provide great loans for homeowners to buy it. Do they do this?
No. They organize a huge bond sale so they can get cash to buy
power from neighboring states at a rip-off price. They won't
allow dirty power plants in California, but they'll buy some
dirty power indeed from Montana.

>There is one idea I saw where you build a big chimney in the
>desert. The sun heats up the air inside which then rises, and
>so you have a wind blowing up the chimney. Then you put a
>turbine in there. It costs a lot to build, but the running
>costs are small. They were trying to get one built in South
>Africa. I don't know what came of it.

They were also trying to build one in Australia, and IIRC
they got the go-ahead. But the thing is an eye-sore, has
a large initial cost compared to output it gives, and only
works in, well, deserts.

-Carl

alternative energy and energy dependence

🔗X. J .Scott <xjscott@...>

🔗graham@...

🔗clumma <carl@...>

🔗clumma <carl@...>

🔗X. J .Scott <xjscott@...>

🔗emotionaljourney22 <paul@...>

🔗clumma <carl@...>